A couple of years ago, author Dale Maharidge uprooted his life in New York to move to Denison, Iowa, a rural town with about 8,000 residents. Denison is nothing like New York and nothing like Denver. But what is taking place in Denison matters to urbanites.
To Maharidge, the move to Denison contained its own logic. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Maharidge needed to understand the intense desire for inner peace combined with a pervasive societal angst, especially among those who resided in major metropolitan areas. Could a move to rural America satisfy restless Caucasian urbanites, especially when the move coincided with a second wave of change in rural areas, the change from homogen- eity to a mixed population featuring nonwhite immigrants seeking to escape the deadly poverty of Mexico and points south? Could small towns survive the wrenching alterations when so many had seemed so near death for so long because of global economic forces and corporate profiteering, as embodied by Wal-Mart?
Of course, thousands of small towns could have served as Maharidge’s observation post. Why Denison? It started with the state of Iowa. It is in the nation’s center. It seems to exude a neutrality too, divorced from the vivid stereotypes of New York, California, Alabama. “Iowa’s neutrality is why so many fictional stories from popular culture are set in the state,” Maharidge reasoned, referring to “The Music Man,” “The Bridges of Madison County” and “Field of Dreams.”
Another reason: Denison spawned actress Donna Reed, star of her eponymous television series glorifying complacent family life and the actress opposite Jimmy Stewart in the 1946 movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which is also the title adopted by Denison as its municipal motto.
Of all the insights Maharidge developed, the most penetrating is about the torn fabric of a long-time homogeneous community when diversity – racial, ethnic, linguistic and religious – arrives. Denison might have been moribund by 2005 without the influx of Hispanics drawn during the past 20 years by the slaughterhouses for cattle, hogs and sheep.
Before the slaughterhouses opened, the farm economy was declining. Although the soil is still incredibly rich, younger generations of Denisonites wanted no part of the long hours and the uncertainties of weather that can make family farming so brutal. So many small farms morphed into a relatively small number of large farms, unable to support most of the locals.
Denisonites who tried to succeed as merchants occasionally did so, but the pull of Wal-Mart’s low prices doomed many of the enterprises.
That left the slaughterhouses as the main occupation for Denisonites. But, despite the decent pay, the work there is grueling at best, life-threatening at worst. The mostly German Lutheran Caucasians left northwest Iowa, thinking themselves above slaughterhouse employment. The most obvious labor pool? Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal. Would the Denison power structure welcome them? Would the Caucasian laborers outside the power structure welcome them?
As Maharidge found, the answers to those questions transcended a simple yes or no. Some members of the power structure welcomed the Hispanic immigrants with great sincerity and goodwill. Other members of the power structure and even some of the Caucasian laborers were less sincere but masked their hatred with the well-known Iowa politeness that a certain branch of psychology would label “passive-aggressive.” Still other long-time Denisonites were anything but welcoming or polite. Their hatred was palpable.
So, to some extent, Maharidge’s book becomes a narrative catalog of heroes and villains. He changes some of their names to shield the innocent from unwarranted retribution meted out by the haters and to shield the guilty from warranted calumny.
The portraits of the heroes and villains are the next best thing to moving there. This is a book that will remain fresh and important for a long time.
Steve Weinberg writes magazine features and books from Columbia, Mo., where he also teaches part time at the University of Missouri Journalism School.
Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town
By Dale Maharidge
Free Press, 256 pages, $25
