The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Before the farms there was the tall grass, and before that the boundless wind and whipsawing climates, and before that mile-thick blankets of ice. "A prairie never rests for long, nor does it permit anything else to rest," wrote John Madson in his book Where the Sky Began, an eloquent evocation of the changing heartland and its people. "Those first Europeans had no basis for even imagining wild fields through which a horseman might ride westward for a month or more." The land enlarged their spirits and made them prosper.

Today, Madson looks out over the frozen horizon from his home near the Illinois bluff by the Mississippi River with a sense of foreboding. "I don't think the farm culture will pass," he says. "Farmers want to farm. They will keep on until all is gone."

But an elemental struggle it is, as old, in Madson's eyes, as the land itself. "It was a land of excesses--of blazing light and great weathers where a man stood exposed," Madson wrote about the grasslands as they were a century ago. "The wealth of the tall prairie was its undoing." Covetous men subdued it with the steel plow. Odd how history is now repeating itself. Wealth once again is the undoing of the heartland.

Don Muhm's grandfather came from Germany after the Civil War and lived in a cave in Hancock County, Iowa, and built himself a farm. Muhm's father farmed and his brother does today. In the century they saw all the vicissitudes the "land of excesses" could throw at them and they survived. "The difference now," says Muhm, who is farm editor of the Des Moines Register, "is that land values have dropped so much." Always before land held its value relative to the rest of the economy. Farmers wanted more. Now land is a burden that is destroying them.

It is eerie how Madson several years ago seemed to prophesy events when he wrote about earlier eras: "For this was alien land, not only in physical appearance but in its harsh rejection of familiar custom; it forced people into new ways of looking at the land and themselves and changed them forever." Sometimes it seems to Madson that the prairie is throwing off the predatory creatures who have filled it and damaged it. That could be the ultimate irony. The U.S. is exhausting its topsoil and a few decades down the road could suffer from food shortages, not surpluses.

But much more than food and wealth is at stake now. In the great farm century a way of life was established that profoundly shaped the nation. The heartland became, in Madson's view, "a repository of traditional attitudes that are metered out through the root system in subtle but powerful ways. It is a region whose soil base has lent the freedom and stability that men need to reach free and stable conclusions."

You could hear that message echo in the Congress last week from another Illinois man--Ronald Reagan. His State of the Union message was a hymn to freedom. Reagan has taken notice of the farm plight and so has Washington, and there will be a mighty bureaucratic effort to hold on to this portion of our national heritage. But deep, painful change is coming no matter what Ronald Reagan does.

Men of the farmlands know that. The land is a force beyond man's ken. In the 1920s Novelist Sherwood Anderson wrote of North Dakota: "Mystery whispered in the grass, was caught and blown across the American Line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies. I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formerly at work among our people." That mysticism lives on.