Establishing and celebrating a regional identity

By Brad Wilson

I applaud The Gazette's ongoing work to raise issues of our regional cultural identity, in editorials on Iowa 2010, “branding” and “Grant Wood's Legacy.” Where else are we brought together in this way. This newspaper is indispensable.

Wood is known to us as a “favorite son” painter of our region, one who became famous internationally. What is less well known is Wood's broader role as, according to E. Bradford Burns in “Kinship with the Land,” one of two major leaders of the regionalist movement in Iowa, 1894-1942. Wood's job with President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration, and a neat philosophical essay, “Revolt Against the City” (which some claim Wood didn't write), are keys to this other legacy.

In literature as in painting, soft-spoken regionalist critiques of industrial culture, some a century or more old, seem naive next to the massive concentration and corporate domination smashing across rural and urban America today.

It wasn't until the 1980s farm crisis that many Iowans sensed that, as farm women said on the Donahue show in 1985, “a tidal wave,” a “farm crisis” turned “food crisis,” is “coming your way whether you want to know it or not.” Food movement leaders today still misunderstand those core issues.

Wood's favorite son status has grown. As we saw in the state quarter debate, however, American Gothic clashes starkly against today's branding!

We see similar themes, so relevant to the branding question, in Iowa 2010, especially in the promotional piece included in volume II. Iowa was to build a major urban corporate power complex on one side (“life sciences capital of the world”) but one servicing Iowa's down-home, family farm businesses on the other. Masses of public comments, seen in vol. II, opposed this model up front as exploitative.

In 2008, John Ikerd, Missouri professor of agricultural economics, summarized 59 studies, finding that both “social and economic quality of life” have been hurt as agribusiness has consolidated its domination of our rural communities.

The Gazette has yet to acknowledge facts of this nature. Oran Love's column on confined animal feeding operations, and editorials on local grain processing, farm subsidies, branding and Iowa 2010 miss the key rural issues that could pragmatically empower us to advance, economically and socially, thus undergirding our regional identity and revitalizing our regional magnetism.

Clearly, the regionalism of the past must be substantially renewed, synergically expanded and radically empowered to be objectively relevant to Iowans today.

Regionalism must boldly ground itself in post-mega industrial social philosophy, leading the charge against old fashioned “modern,” “industrial” agriculture and mega-subsidized input and output agribusiness complexes, for example, and for post-civilized sustainability. We must tear down corporate junk science.

Today we must transcend Grant Wood. I'm working toward this end, drawing out rural themes from the work of the world-renowned philosopher of technology, regionalism, urbanism, history, architecture and art - Lewis Mumford.

Mumford can give us what Wood could not - a transformative, yet accessible framework for powerfully renewing our regional identity (including our debt to Wood) for the 21st century.

It takes a region: Farm, town and city folks, elders and youth, artists and business leaders. We must become regional renaissance citizens, whose holism and humanism reconciles postmodern science, technology, ecology, advocacy and the humanities, with regional values of economy, community, faith, justice, folk art and citizenship.

Brad Wilson of Springville, a former farm policy specialist for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, is a freelance writer and manages his family farm. Comments: fireweed@netins.net