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New volume gives personal voice to Iowa history

By Loren Keller

Zachary Michael Jack says he’s always been a packrat, a saver and an informal scrapbooker.

Those qualities came in handy when he was compiling Iowa: the Definitive Collection — Classic & Contemporary Readings by Iowans, About Iowa.

The 542-page volume, set for release this week, is a sort of browsable bird’s nest of Iowa history, literature and lore that weaves together mostly first-hand accounts written between 1871 and 2007.

“I looked at this project as a documentary history of the state as if it were a living, breathing person that’s been alive for 150-some years,” Jack says. “If Iowa was a person, how would I document this person’s life from the very beginning — all the way back to Black Hawk, before statehood — to now?”

Beginning with an 1831 speech delivered by the Sauk warrior on his forced move west to Iowa, the book draws its 100-plus selections from printed material of nearly every kind, including campaign platforms, creeds, diaries, editorials, ethnographic studies, fictions, government documents, history, humor, journalism, legal opinions, letters, memoirs, pamphlets, speeches and travel narratives.

Writers including Carrie Chapman Catt, Bob Feller, Susan Glaspell, Herbert Hoover, Ted Kooser, Glenn Miller, Wallace Stegner and Henry Wallace are represented in the book as well as many lesser-known voices. Nearly every piece in the volume has been previously published, Jack says, though most of them “quickly entered the dustbin of history.”

Among Jack’s favorite pieces in the book is an excerpt from Grant Wood’s 1935 book Revolt Against the City, in which the famous painter explores the Iowa literary and artistic renaissance of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Jack sees a parallel between Wood’s piece and modern-day Iowa.

“It was written in the Depression, and it’s Grant Wood articulating his manifesto for why Iowa of all places has the great makings of native art and how the artists of the future will recognize what’s here and paint it and write it,” Jack says.  “At the same time he’s encouraging young people, just like Gov. Vilsack did, to come back. Writing from the midst of the Great Depression – and now we find ourselves in the middle of what some people say is a close echo of the Great Depression – and it’s the same story all over again.

“Mark Twain always said that history doesn’t repeat itself but history rhymes. I think what I’m really trying to do with this book is show the rhymes as they occur across all these years.”

Jack, who divides his time living on a farm in Jones County and teaching courses on writing, history and place studies at North Central College in Naperville, Ill., is the author and editor of several books including Letters to a Young Iowan and Uncle Henry Wallace: Letters to Farm Families.

In the introduction of his book, which he will read from at 7 p.m. Friday at Iowa City’s Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., he writes that the volume is aimed at filling a void that “arises from a conscious cultural deficit — the collective forgetting of the best our homeland has produced.”

Jack, 35, says his own education included just a single unit of Iowa history he was taught in the fifth grade.

“It was a one-and-done kind of deal,” he says. “But I think the state of Iowa history, the future of it, is really quite bright. Iowa has always been so modest and so humble, to the extent that it’s been sometimes ashamed or reluctant to brag on its history, or to even hold its own history up as equal to the history of the more storied parts of the country — the south and the east.”

Given the country’s economic recession, and the resulting effect of people traveling less and sticking closer to home, Jack says the time is ripe for Iowa to enjoy a regional renaissance in which the state recognizes the value of its own history.

“I think we are entering a new period of regionalism, like we’re already seeing in Europe,” he says. “On the one hand there is the European Union and things are more standardized and there are more franchises and multinational conglomerates. But at the same time the force that rises to push back against those things are states and localism. That’s what this book is all about.”

Jack also sees some similarities between the Iowa’s literary output and its resurgent wine industry.

“There’s a real interest in things that are made in Iowa or distilled from things that are quintessentially Iowan,” he says.

That’s the main idea behind Tall Corn Books, a new imprint by the North Liberty-based Ice Cube Books & Press. Iowa: The Definitive Collection is the first volume of the series.

Publisher Steve Semken says the imprint will release Corn Country, a collection of writings by Homer Croy in the early 20th century, next year.

“People are always asking me why I’m calling it Ice Cube Press, and then over time I realized it doesn’t really match what I’m trying to do, actually — I’m not trying to fight global warming and I don’t do rap songs,” he says. “Even though most of what I’ve done has been regional, this is a new effort to make it clear to libraries or readers that these are books with a much more local, historical and place-based emphasis.”