‘Carnival in Countryside’: A new view from the midway aimed at fairgoers

Today it seems there is nothing controversial about the Iowa State Fair. What's scandalous about a butter cow, 4-H exhibits, and fine food on sticks? But when the fair began some 150 years ago it was rife with controversy, from discerning the true 'purpose” of the fair to determining who was qualified to judge the 'scientific baby health contest.”

It's a fascinating history and Chris Rasmussen's account of it, 'Carnival in the Countryside,” just out from University of Iowa Press, is worth throwing in your car for the journey out to Des Moines. By the time you get to the gates, you'll never look at the midway quite the same again.

Rasmussen begins when the fair is born: October, 1854, in Fairfield, and provides a detailed account of the ups and downs of the event through World War II. Most notable are his depictions of rural life before the turn of the 20th century, and how many women went mad from isolation and exhaustion.

The fair, then, was a rare excursion for a family, and early leaders prided themselves on providing 'educational” exhibits to help make farm life more pleasant and efficient.

But since its founding the fair has also offered entertainment - 'a tonic for the state's hardworking farm families” - often to the chagrin of some fair leaders. This division between education and entertainment serves as the backbone of Rasmussen's history, and provides great insight into the current layout of today's fair:

'As Iowans debated the respective place of agriculture and entertainments at the fair ... they were often implicitly discussing the future of their state ... To many agriculturists, amusements represented the opposite of everything that the fair officially existed to promote. Instead of productive labor and scientific agriculture, shows and games represented frivolity, consumption, even outright fraud.”

And while Rasmussen's work is important and interesting (who knew erupting volcanos were a staple of the fair?), this academic work may prove too dry for most readers. For example: while the first three chapters are careful to include the stories of individuals to both accent and break up the research, the final two chapters move away from this model, resulting in long, dense passages about the history of the midway and fine art contests at the fair.

But historians are the intended audience for this work, not general readers. And Rasmussen has done all Iowans a favor in tackling the remarkable - and remarkably controversial - history of the state fair. Let's raise a corn dog to him in appreciation.