aRecognized between 1880 and 1910 by its trademark label Iowa's Pride, John Morrell and Company is best known for contributing one of the most important local unions to the progressive United Packinghouse Workers of America. During the 1930s and 1940s, its members pursued a militant brand of unionism. By the early 1950s, the local's militancy became a source of contention among the membership. By explaining the effect of Morrell-Ottumwa's union leaders on local and state Democratic politics, especially in the development of the Congress of Industrial Organizations' Iowa State Industrial Union Council and the AFL-CIO's Iowa Federation of Labor, Wilson Warren makes an important contribution to the literature on labor's involvement in the Democratic party's ascendancy across much of the industrial North following World War II. This history of Ottumwa's meatpacking workers provides insights into the development of several forms of labor relations, including the evangelical Christian paternalism, welfare capitalism, and unionism that were distinctive to one blue-collar community but that also reflected workers' experiences in many other rural midwestern industrial communities. By carefully analyzing all relevant labor and industrial sources and by revealing the deeply held aspirations and concerns expressed by both workers and managers, Warren constructs a window through which Iowa's industrial and labor history over the past 120 years can be viewed."
The poignant rise and fall of an idealistic immigrant who, as CEO of a major conglomerate, tried to change the way America did business before he himself was swallowed up by corporate corruption. At 8 a.m. on February 3, 1975, Eli Black leapt to his death from the 44th floor of Manhattan’s Pan Am building. The immigrant-turned-CEO of United Brands—formerly United Fruit, now Chiquita—Black seemed an embodiment of the American dream. United Brands was transformed under his leadership—from the “octopus,” a nickname that captured the corrupt power the company had held over Latin American governments, to “the most socially conscious company in the hemisphere,” according to a well-placed commentator. How did it all go wrong? Eli and the Octopus traces the rise and fall of an enigmatic business leader and his influence on the nascent project of corporate social responsibility. Born Menashe Elihu Blachowitz in Lublin, Poland, Black arrived in New York at the age of three and became a rabbi before entering the business world. Driven by the moral tenets of his faith, he charted a new course in industries known for poor treatment of workers, partnering with labor leaders like Cesar Chavez to improve conditions. But risky investments, economic recession, and a costly wave of natural disasters led Black away from the path of reform and toward corrupt backroom dealing. Now, two decades after Google’s embrace of “Don’t be evil” as its unofficial motto, debates about “ethical capitalism” are more heated than ever. Matt Garcia presents an unvarnished portrait of Black’s complicated legacy. Exploring the limits of corporate social responsibility on American life, Eli and the Octopus offers pointed lessons for those who hope to do good while doing business.
Ambitious in its historical scope and its broad range of topics, Tied to the Great Packing Machine tells the dramatic story of meatpacking’s enormous effects on the economics, culture, and environment of the Midwest over the past century and a half. Wilson Warren situates the history of the industry in both its urban and its rural settings—moving from the huge stockyards of Chicago and Kansas City to today’s smaller meatpacking communities—and thus presents a complete portrayal of meatpacking’s place within the larger agro-industrial landscape. Writing from the vantage point of twenty-five years of extensive research, Warren analyzes the evolution of the packing industry from its early period, dominated by the big terminal markets, through the development of new marketing and technical innovations that transformed the ways animals were gathered, slaughtered, and processed and the final products were distributed. In addition, he concentrates on such cultural impacts as ethnic and racial variations, labor unions, gender issues, and changes in Americans’ attitudes toward the ethics of animal slaughter and patterns of meat consumption and such environmental problems as site-point pollution and microbe contamination, ending with a stimulating discussion of the future of American meatpacking. Providing an excellent and well-referenced analysis within a regional and temporal framework that ensures a fresh perspective, Tied to the Great Packing Machine is a dynamic narrative that contributes to a fuller understanding of the historical context and contemporary concerns of an extremely important industry.
This inspiring collection of accounts from educators and students is “an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system” (Ibram X. Kendi). Since 2016, the Black Lives Matter at School movement has carved a new path for racial justice in education. A growing coalition of educators, students, parents and others have established an annual week of action during the first week of February. This anthology shares vital lessons that have been learned through this important work. In this volume, Bettina Love makes a powerful case for abolitionist teaching, Brian Jones looks at the historical context of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in education, and prominent teacher union leaders discuss the importance of anti-racism in their unions. Black Lives Matter at School includes essays, interviews, poems, resolutions, and more from participants across the country who have been building the movement on the ground.
Imaging Animal Industry focuses on the visual culture of the American meat industry between 1890 and 1960. It describes how, during that period, photographs and other images helped to shape public perceptions of industrial-scale meat production. Although the meat industry today bans most photography at its facilities, in the past this was not always the case: the meat industry not only tolerated but welcomed cameras. Meatpacking companies and industry organizations regarded photographs as useful tools for creating and managing a vision of their activities, their innovations, and their contributions to the march of American economic and industrial progress. Drawing on archival collections across the American Midwest, this book relates a history of the meatpacking industry’s use of images in the early to mid-twentieth century. In the process, it reveals the key role that images, particularly photographs, have played in assisting with the rise of industrial meat production.
Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs. Iowa’s Native Americans, early explorers, inventors, farmers, scholars, baseball players, musicians, artists, writers, politicians, scientists, conservationists, preachers, educators, and activists continue to enrich our lives and inspire our imaginations. Written by an impressive team of more than 150 scholars and writers, the readable narratives include each subject’s name, birth and death dates, place of birth, education, and career and contributions. Many of the names will be instantly recognizable to most Iowans; others are largely forgotten but deserve to be remembered. Beyond the distinctive lives and times captured in the individual biographies, readers of the dictionary will gain an appreciation for how the character of the state has been shaped by the character of the individuals who have inhabited it. From Dudley Warren Adams, fruit grower and Grange leader, to the Younker brothers, founders of one of Iowa’s most successful department stores, The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa is peopled with the rewarding lives of more than four hundred notable citizens of the Hawkeye State. The histories contained in this essential reference work should be eagerly read by anyone who cares about Iowa and its citizens. Entries include Cap Anson, Bix Beiderbecke, Black Hawk, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, William Carpenter, Philip Greeley Clapp, Gardner Cowles Sr., Samuel Ryan Curtis, Jay Norwood Darling, Grenville Dodge, Julien Dubuque, August S. Duesenberg, Paul Engle, Phyllis L. Propp Fowle, George Gallup, Hamlin Garland, Susan Glaspell, Josiah Grinnell, Charles Hearst, Josephine Herbst, Herbert Hoover, Inkpaduta, Louis Jolliet, MacKinlay Kantor, Keokuk, Aldo Leopold, John L. Lewis, Marquette, Elmer Maytag, Christian Metz, Bertha Shambaugh, Ruth Suckow, Billy Sunday, Henry Wallace, and Grant Wood. Excerpt from the entry on: Gallup, George Horace (November 19, 1901–July 26, 1984)—founder of the American Institute of Public Opinion, better known as the Gallup Poll, whose name was synonymous with public opinion polling around the world—was born in Jefferson, Iowa. . . . . A New Yorker article would later speculate that it was Gallup’s background in “utterly normal Iowa” that enabled him to find “nothing odd in the idea that one man might represent, statistically, ten thousand or more of his own kind.” . . . In 1935 Gallup partnered with Harry Anderson to found the American Institute of Public Opinion, based in Princeton, New Jersey, an opinion polling firm that included a syndicated newspaper column called “America Speaks.” The reputation of the organization was made when Gallup publicly challenged the polling techniques of The Literary Digest, the best-known political straw poll of the day. Calculating that the Digest would wrongly predict that Kansas Republican Alf Landon would win the presidential election, Gallup offered newspapers a money-back guarantee if his prediction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would win wasn’t more accurate. Gallup believed that public opinion polls served an important function in a democracy: “If govern¬ment is supposed to be based on the will of the people, somebody ought to go and find what that will is,” Gallup explained.
In 1978 historian Joseph Wall wrote that Iowa was “still seeking to assert its own identity. . . . It has no real center where the elite of either power, wealth, or culture may congregate. Iowa, in short, is middle America.” In this collection of well-written and accessible essays, originally published in 1996, seventeen of the Hawkeye State’s most accomplished historians reflect upon the dramatic and not-so-dramatic shifts in the middle land’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marvin Bergman has drawn upon his years of editing the Annals of Iowa to gather contributors who cross disciplines, model the craft of writing a historical essay, cover more than one significant topic, and above all interpret history rather than recite it. In his preface to this new printing, he calls attention to publications that begin to fill the gaps noted in the 1996 edition. Rather than survey the basic facts, the essayists engage readers in the actual making of Iowa’s history by trying to understand the meaning of its past. By providing comprehensive accounts of topics in Iowa history that embrace the broader historiographical issues in American history, such as the nature of Progressivism and Populism, the debate over whether women’s expanded roles in wartime carried over to postwar periods, and the place of quantification in history, the essayists contribute substantially to debates at the national level at the same time that they interpret Iowa’s distinctive culture.
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election there was widespread shock that the Midwest, the Democrats’ so-called blue wall, had been so effectively breached by Donald Trump. But the blue wall, as The Conservative Heartland makes clear, was never quite as secure as so many observers assumed. A deep look at the Midwest’s history of conservative politics, this timely volume reveals how conservative victories in state houses, legislatures, and national elections in the early twenty-first century, far from coming out of nowhere, in fact had extensive roots across decades of political organization in the region. Focusing on nine states, from Iowa and the Dakotas to Indiana and Ohio, the essays in this collection detail the rise of midwestern conservatism after World War II—a trend that coincided with the transformation of the prewar Republican Party into the New Right. This transformation, the authors contend, involved the Midwest and the Sunbelt states. Through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality, their essays explore the development of midwestern conservative politics in light of deindustrialization, environmentalism, second wave feminism, mass incarceration, privatization, and debates over same-sex marriage and abortion, among other issues. Together these essays map the region’s complex patchwork of viable rural and urban areas, variously subject to a wide array of conflicting interests and concerns; the perspective they provide, at once broad and in-depth, offers unique historical insight into the Midwest’s political complexity—and its status as the last real competitive battleground in presidential elections.
At the center of what was once the tallgrass prairie, Iowa has stood out for clearing the land and becoming one of the most productive agricultural states in the nation. But its success is challenged by multiple issues including but not limited to a decline in union representation of meatpacking workers; lack of demographic diversity; the advent of job-replacing mechanization; growing income inequality; negative contributions to and effects of climate change and environmental hazards. To become green, fair, and prosperous, Connerly argues that Iowa must reckon with its past and the fact that its farm economy continues to pollute waterways, while remaining utterly unprepared for climate change. Iowa must recognize ways in which it can bolster its residents’ standard of living and move away from its demographic tradition of whiteness. For development to be sustainable, society must balance it with environmental protection and social justice. Connerly provides a crucial roadmap for how Iowans can move forward and achieve this balance.
In Thunder from the Prairie, Jerry Harrington explores the life of Harold E. Hughes: a man of working-class origins who overcame severe alcoholism to become Iowa governor (1963–1969) and US Senator (1969–1974). As a Democratic governor in traditionally Republican Iowa, Hughes, through his charismatic leadership, helped transform Iowa into a competitive two-party state while modernizing state government to make it more responsive to the contemporary needs of its citizens. Hughes was an outspoken leader against the Vietnam War and the American military as senator, and he exposed covert operations such as the illegal bombings of North Vietnam and Cambodia. Relying upon his experience with alcoholism that nearly cost him his life, Senator Hughes spearheaded the creation of the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which was founded on the principle that alcoholism is a disease, not a personal moral failure. Hughes’s moral compass was guided by his Christian beliefs, steering him to politics left of center. In this way, Hughes was distinctive among other openly Christian politicians of his day, whose theology manifested in conservative politics. Jerry Harrington’s detailed Thunder from the Prairie is the first book-length treatment of Harold E. Hughes. The work fills major gaps in the history of Iowa and Midwestern political history, as well as the history of the “Long Sixties” (from the late 1950s to the early 1970s). Hughes was an impactful actor within the rise of postwar American liberalism, the conflict over the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement, and led the effort to reform the Democratic Party to make it more open to women, minorities, and young people.
