American Sabbatical 016: 9/18/96

9/18...Cedar Rapids

Our feet were on fire and our eyes were steaming when we hit Cedar Rapids. And Why Cedar Rapids? you might ask. First because Peggy’s great-grandfather opened a seed store there in the 1880’s, and second because the Art Museum has a big collection of local boy Grant Wood, and the more we looked at Iowa, the more we realized his genius. But, we hadn’t realized that Quaker Oats has a big mill hard by the banks of the Cedar, so we discovered another shrine to visit. Our morning camp ritual begins with Quaker Oats, and now we’ve seen before the beginning.

Back in 1964, when I hitch-hiked to New Orleans at spring break (actually got to Shreveport and some lake in Texas), I ended up walking through Richmond, Virginia, in a sultry noontime. Those days I was smoking Lucky Strikes, and Lo, there was the Lucky Strike factory. I went up and kissed the wall. It seemed right. (And tasted about the way the memory of all those butts does now.) In Cedar Rapids I stood a bit farther back and kissed the oat elevators with watercolors.

Watching the transformation of Grant Wood’s paintings from his early days, you see how a sense of place can be reflected in a style. Wood was no slouch as a French-influenced stylist. His early work was very much in tune with the modern movement, but after his commitment to Iowa (is that an artistic incarceration?), his surfaces flattened, his patterning mimicked the quilted landscape, even his portraits mirrored the openfaced planes of Iowa. The dialogue between place and style informs the outsider. After viewing a couple of rooms of Wood, the Iowa countryside pulls together into a seamless mosaic. In fact, eastern Iowa is very beautiful, once you acquire the vocabulary.

Iowans aren’t crazy to live in Cedar Rapids, either. These small Midwestern burgs are as hospitable as Bath, Maine, and about as unhurried. Sparkling clean, courteous, industrious, and in this case full of civic amenities and architectural charm, oats elevators notwithstanding. Nobody seemed to mind when locomotives stopped downtown traffic to shift oats wagons around. Maybe that was because the railroad sidings were greenways with solid plantings of flowers along brick walkways. Suited deskjockeys stopped and chatted amiably while the Great Northwestern did its thing. Peggy lingered to dig out the ancestral Foggs at the Hist. Soc. and the Pub. Lib. while I hung out with the Quakers.

Iowa is Grant Wood land.. literally. Driving the side roads we came to appreciate his technical expertise in rendering the complex crazy quilt of plowed and planted fields, the hills and hollows, the subtle variations of beige and gold and green. He also caught the way the land at the edges of sight seems to curve, as though you were looking through a fisheye lens. Traveling Iowa makes me think Grant Wood was a skilled painter who captured a specific landscape accurately, not the naive realist or the simple illustrator his critics claim he was.

The museum’s large Wood collection destroyed several of my preconceptions. Grant Wood did not simply paint flat landscapes and stark portraits; he was adept as a fauve, impressionist, expressionist. He was not a self-educated provincial primitive, but a well-traveled artist who toured Europe, studying and miming the great painters of Europe. A stark portrait of his mother holding a houseplant was a conscious attempt to combine Renaissance portraiture (for example, a distant background and formal pose) with elements of the Midwest (a specific houseplant to symbolize the toughness and hardiness of the region). We saw oils and pastels and lithographs in a variety of styles from different periods in his life. We saw soft French landscapes and bold animal studies and scenes of Iowa farm life.

What's the role of the artist in his community? Grant Wood started and led an Iowa art summer colony. He also donated many of his paintings to schools, believing that children everywhere should have access to art. Schoolchildren from “his” schools get into the museum free. Grant Wood’s region is richer for regional art.

9/18..continued.

Maybe it was a Cropside Happening. Cars driving round and round dusty roads staring at cornfields.. looking for ART? Don’t know, but that’s what we saw. The sheer giddiness of our staring at all this al fresco Grant Woodiness, hoping to find THE BIG EVENT, was too much.

Cheek to fender with the olde Amana quaint goods was the location of the biggest farm implement fair in North America, only in the first stages of setting up, unfortunately. But it was fascinating to see crews heisting harvesters to the top of towers, and performing other feats of showmanship with agricultural devices. But we had to move on. The West was calling.

Picture Freeport, Maine, teeming with tourists. There are shops selling a variety of goods, but all with reference to an extinct communal society in Freeport. Descendants of the sect members staff all the shops and museums, and the commune’s buildings are all still there stuffed with knickknacks and retail goods produced in Freeport. This is much what I found at Amana, Iowa. Or, rather, the Amanas.

Southwest of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, are seven villages founded by a group of German immigrants of the Church of the True Inspiration or Amana colony. The sect formed in Germany and over 800 members were lead to America by a charismatic preacher (Christian Metz) to escape religious persecution. They settled first near Buffalo, New York, and then moved to Iowa in 1855 for better, cheaper land with varied resources. Also to escape temptation.

They created a communal society on 26,000 acres of bottomland along the Iowa River where all goods were commonly owned, money was unknown, tasks were performed for the good of the community, often by an assigned group. Every family had a yearly credit allotment at the village store. Every man owed one day of labor to the group at harvest time. They remained German speaking with education and church services in German. German customs and food and crafts and architecture were maintained. The villages were agricultural with all land and equipment held and used in common. The villages typically had barns at one end, mills at the other, with brick family houses along the streets.

The Amanas were ruled first by Christian Metz, then by the Brudderrat (a Council of Elders elected by the people). This group made many decisions that in the wider American society were made by the individual: what your work would be, for example.

The Amanas allowed for individual choice with supervision. Young people could choose their own spouses, but the decision had to be approved by the leaders. I saw no information on what happened to those who could not or would not follow the Amana way. Did they simply leave? Or was coercion used?

Unlike many utopian societies, the Amana proved to be pragmatic at business, willing to interact with the wider society. When the trains crossed Iowa, the Amanas built a station. The Amanas also launched small enterprises to produce goods for the outside world and bring in cash. Amana woolen good were woven in the villages, cottons were intricately dyed and patterned, both for the world market.

This society grew to seven villages and survived until 1932 when, in an extraordinary action called the “Great Change”, the Amanas voted to become non-communal, capitalistic, money oriented Americans, partners in a profit-sharing corporation.

What really remains of Amana? Memories, curios, a few customs, the buildings, museums. The 7 village churches are still there, with two Sunday services, one in German and one in English. Descendants still live in the houses and the items produced by the commune are now made in privately owned firms.

The villages in another sense are an ethnic mall. Dozens of small village shops hawk Amana goods, traditional bread and rootbeer, furniture and ironmongery and woolens. Amana restaurants sell Amana food, but there are also ice cream parlors and banks. Scores of visitors in shorts and t-shirts walked the streets. The villages host over a million tourists a year. They are the biggest tourist attraction in Iowa.

America spawned scores of communes in the 1800s and continues to create more (for example, The Farm, in Tennessee, which survives from the 1960s). Partly this is due to the difficulty many Americans have with unbridled individualism and materialism. Idealists search for true brotherhood and equality. There is also the perennial problem of balancing the needs of the group with the needs of the individual. Among the best known American utopias are Brook Farm, Oneida, New Harmony, the Shakers, Zoar, Cedar Vale. We hope to visit the sites of extinct communes and living communes.