From the Archives–Word with a Past: Gerrymander
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Next up, a post from July 2018:
If Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814) had played his cards right, he could have been a minor but respected figure in American history. He signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Bill of Rights, served two terms in Congress, and was the fifth Vice President of the United States. His contemporaries thought him intelligent, gentlemanly, quirky, and a bit of a hot-head.
Instead his name is permanently linked to the practice of re-drawing political districts for partisan advantage. In 1812, Gerry was a member of the Democratic-Republican party and the governor of Massachusetts. Although he had called for an end to partisan bickering in his inaugural address in 1810, he came to believe that the Federalist party was too close to the British and wanted to restore the monarchy. Gerry went on a partisan power binge. He removed Federalists from state government jobs and replaced them with Democratic-Republicans. He had his attorney-general prosecute Federalist newspapers editors for libel. He even seized control of the Federalist-dominated Harvard College board–presumably recognizing the college as the source of future American political leaders. (Though he may have just gotten carried away. Power is an addictive and intoxicating beverage.)
To put the cherry on the partisan sundae, his fellow Democratic-Republicans, who controlled the legislature, redrew the state’s Senate districts in a way that would benefit their party. Previously, Massachusetts’ senatorial districts followed country boundaries. The new senate map twisted and turned in irrational patterns to insure a Democratic-Republican victory. Gerry may not have been responsible for the map’s design, but he signed it into law in February, 1812.
The Federalist controlled Boston Gazette ran an illustration of the district map in the form of a salamander-like monster and ran it with the title “The Gerry-Mander,” claiming it had been born of “many fiery ebullitions of party spirit, many explosions of democratic wrath and fulminations of gubernatorial vengeance within the year past.”
There are better ways to have your name live on in the language: public toilets for example.
Gerrymander: To manipulate the boundaries of an electoral constituency so as to favor one party or class.
From the Archives: Driving Through Iowa
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Next up, a post from October, 2017:
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The state of Iowa offers the road-tripper princely rest stops, complete with grand historical markers. For instance, the rest stop near Iowa City–home to the University of Iowa , the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the legendary Prairies Lights bookstore–is dedicated to the history of education in Iowa. I was delighted with the bookish decorations, which included giant alphabet blocks set along the wall. (S is for soybeans.)
Even a rest stop of modest scale and amenities had a long marker telling the history of the Amana Colonies.
At yet another stop, I was reminded of the quintessentially Iowan story of Henry A. Wallace, Roswell Garst, and the agricultural revolution they launched.
Wallace and Garst met in 1926 in Des Moines, Iowa, where Wallace edited his family’s newspapers and Garst sold real estate. In his free time, Wallace experimented with creating corn hybrids.* At the time, farmers saved the best-looking ears of corn from each crop for seed, selecting them based on uniformity and size. By the time he was fifteen, Wallace had already proved these factors did not necessarily predict which ears would produce the best crop the next year. Now, in his late thirties, he was trying to crossbreed plants to produce higher yields.*
Wallace invented hybrid corn and the concept of hybrid vigor. Garst, an Iowa farmer turned salesman, recognized their importance and demonstrated their value in practical ways that small farmers could understand.
Garst was so fascinated by the possibilities of hybrid corn that he bought several bushels of the seed from Wallace to use on his home farm. After several years of watching the performanceof Wallace’s high-yield, strong-stalked hybrid in his own fields, Garst asked Wallace for a franchise to sell the virtually unknown product in northeastern Iowa.
It was a literal case of betting the farm. Even in good times it would have been hard to convince farmers to buy expensive, genetically modified seeds** instead of using the open-pollinated kernels from their own fields. During the Depression it was virtually impossible. Garst had to come up with ways to prove that his advertising slogan, “An Astonishing Product–Produces Astonishing Results,” was the simple truth. His most successful tactic was the “half the increase” trial, in which a farmer planted both types of seeds. If the farmers’ seeds produced a typical yield (usually 25 bushels to the acre) and Garst’s seeds produced 45 bushels, Garst would get half the increase. Growing both Pioneer hybrid corn and their own seed corn gave farmers a graphic demonstration of the new corn’s value. In the worst drought in America’s history, Wallace and Garst’s hybrid corn not only grew, it flourished. In fewer than ten years, more than half the fields in America’s Corn Belt were planted with the new high-yield corn.
The green revolution that began with Pioneer hybrid corn had a dark side, including the effects of farm chemicals on the environment and loss of biodiversity. But for a country coming out of the lean years of the Depression, it was a miracle.
*Wallace came by his interest in scientific agriculture naturally. His grandfather and father, both also named Henry Wallace (a potential source of confusion for the careless reader), founded the influential farm journal that they imaginatively named Wallace’s Farmer. His grandfather was a former Presbyterian minister who who went on to teach the gospel of scientific farming. His father was Secretary of Agriculture under Warren Harding. Our Wallace, having spent some time as a boy with agronomist George Washington Carver, was experimenting with plant breeding in a small garden plot by the time he was ten. He later studied agriculture at Iowa State. Wallace went on to become Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture from 1933-1940 and his vice-president from 1941-1945.
**Not necessarily a dirty word. Humans have been fiddling with plant genetics to make bigger/tastier/more digestible/higher yielding plants since the first unknown innovator discovered the power of planting a seed in the earth in ancient Palestine. Says the woman who loves her heirloom tomatoes and apples.
From the Archives: Moscow Nights
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from September and October in years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Next up, a post from October, 2016:
In 1958 the Cold War was at its height–or perhaps its depths. Think Sputnik, Krushchev’s overthrow of Stalin, backyard bomb shelters, and bomb drills in schools.* Not to mention Elvis Presley’s induction into the army–a Cold War weapon of a different kind.
Culture was as much of a battlefield as space. In April, Soviet Russia hosted the first Tchaikovsky Competition: an international music competition designed to demonstrate Russia’s cultural preeminence to the West. The competition was rigged. The Soviets had identified the Russian winners of the violin and piano competitions before the foreign contestants arrived. To everyone’s amazement, a twenty-three year old pianist from Texas named Van Cliburn won over Russian audiences and Soviet judges with a lush playing style and a love of classical Russian music that rivaled their own. Popular pressure from Russian audiences in favor of Van Cliburn forced the Soviet judges—with Nikita Khrushchev’s blessing—to award first prize to the Texas prodigy.
In Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story—How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War, historian Nigel Cliff brings to life Van Cliburn’s unexpected triumph and its continuing implications for Soviet-American relations through the end of the Cold War.** Cliff sets the story of the competition firmly in its historical context of political paranoia on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and both Russian and American use of culture as a diplomatic weapon. At the same time, he never loses sight of the musician and the music at its heart: Cliff’s Van Cliburn is eccentric, driven, politically innocent, big-hearted, and and wholly charming.
Moscow Nights is an engaging account of an extraordinary historical moment, best read with Van Cliburn’s recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 playing in the background.
*By the time I reached grade school, we were carrying our chairs to the all purpose room to watch rocket launches and enduring occasional tornado drills based on the same principles as bomb drills. Good times.
**A scene in the Reagan White House brought me close to tears.
The guts of this review first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.