State of Iowa

Iowa is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America lying between the Mississippi and the Missouri, bounded by Minnesota to the north, Wisconsin and Illinois across the Mississippi to the east, Missouri to the south, and Nebraska and the Dakotas across the Missouri and the Big Sioux to the west. Des Moines is the capital and the largest city. The population is approximately 3.2 million, and Iowa returns four members to the federal House of Commons.

Iowa has the best arable land in the Realm and possibly in the world. Something between a quarter and a third of the grade-one agricultural soil on earth lies within its boundaries, deposited by ice and by ten thousand years of tallgrass prairie, and the State’s whole history is the history of what has been done with it and to it.

What Iowa does not have is a city. Des Moines and its suburbs hold about seven hundred thousand people, which makes Iowa the only polity of the Realm with more than three million residents and no metropolitan area above a million. There is no Chicago here, no St. Louis, no Omaha. What Iowa has instead is nine hundred incorporated towns, most of them small, laid out in the nineteenth century at intervals a horse could manage, and the central fact of the polity’s last seventy years is that most of them are emptying. Sixty-eight of the ninety-nine counties have fewer people now than they had in 1900. The State as a whole has grown in every decade; almost all of the growth has happened in six counties.

Iowa is also, and inconsistently with almost everything else about it, the polity whose courts moved earliest and furthest on the law of personal freedom. In 1839 the territorial court refused to return a man to slavery, eighteen years before the Realm’s own settlement of the question. In 1868 it struck down a segregated school, and in 1873 a segregated steamboat. And in 1976 an Iowa household and an Iowa water utility persuaded the Royal American Supreme Court that the American Rights Act contains a household water minimum, which it does not say anywhere and has been held to mean ever since.

History

Before the State

The country between the rivers was prairie and oak savanna, grazed by bison and burned deliberately for as long as anyone can reconstruct, and it was held at contact by the Ioway, who gave it the name, and by the Otoe, the Omaha, the Missouria, and in the north-west the Yankton and the Santee. The Sauk and the Meskwaki came west into the eastern river country during the eighteenth century under pressure from the Great Lakes.

Iowa was part of the territory the Realm acquired from France, and was administered from a succession of distant offices before being organised as the Iowa Territory in 1838.

The Black Hawk Purchase

Iowa was opened to survey by the cession that followed the Black Hawk War of 1832, which the Register records, in the article on Illinois, as having ended in the pursuit and killing of retreating Sauk and Meskwaki families with non-combatants among them, and which the Commonwealth’s own official histories describe as a massacre rather than a battle.

The cession is called the Black Hawk Purchase and Iowa’s schools still call it that. It transferred a strip about eighty kilometres wide along the whole western bank of the Mississippi, roughly six million acres, and it was signed six weeks after the killing at the Bad Axe by a delegation negotiating under the guns of the people who had done it. The word purchase is doing work in that name that the transaction does not support, and the State’s own historical commission said so in a report of 1988 which the Legislature received and did not act on.

Further cessions followed in 1837, 1842 and 1851 until nothing was left. The Sauk and most of the Meskwaki were removed to Kansas.

The Meskwaki came back and bought the land

In 1857 the Meskwaki bought Iowa back, in small pieces, with their own money.

Families who had refused removal or who had walked back from Kansas pooled what they had, in coin, from the sale of ponies and furs and from wage labour, and purchased eighty acres in Tama County from a willing seller at the going rate. They then bought more, and went on buying: about three thousand acres by 1900 and something over eight thousand now.

The legal position this created has no close parallel in the Realm. The Meskwaki Settlement is not a reservation. It was not set aside by treaty, it was not granted, it is not held in trust by anyone, and it cannot be diminished by an Act of Parliament because Parliament never conveyed it. It is freehold land, bought and paid for, held by a nation.

Iowa’s government did not know what to do about this for a long time and mostly settled on pretending it had not happened. The Settlement paid the county’s property tax for forty years. It was refused a school. Its children were taken to boarding schools like everyone else’s. The purchase protected the land and did nothing whatever for the people on it, which is the point Meskwaki historians make when Iowans describe 1857 as a happy story, and they are right to make it.

Settlement

Iowa filled fast, between about 1840 and 1880, and it filled with people who had chosen it.

Germans came in the largest numbers and went everywhere, and the Realm’s long alliance with the German states meant that nobody ever seriously tried to make them stop being German; the language was taught in Iowa schools without controversy through two general wars, which is not what a suspect language ordinarily survives. Czechs settled Cedar Rapids and are still there, with the institutions, the halls and the bakeries intact, and Cedar Rapids remains the most Czech city in the Realm. Dutch Calvinists founded Pella in 1847 and Orange City later, and both remain conspicuous, orderly and religiously serious in a way that visitors find either admirable or unnerving. Norwegians and Danes took the north-east, around Decorah, where the folk museum and the college between them hold the largest Norwegian-American collection anywhere.

And in 1855 the Community of True Inspiration, a German pietist sect that had been moving since Hesse, bought twenty-six thousand acres on the Iowa River and built seven villages called Amana. They held everything in common, assigned work by the elders, ate in communal kitchens and did so for seventy-seven years. In 1932, in the depths of the agricultural depression, the members voted to end the communal economy and reorganise as a joint stock corporation while keeping the church separate. Iowans call this the Great Change, and the Amana Society still exists, still farms, and still sends its members to a church that no longer runs their lives.

Admission, and the capital

Iowa was admitted in 1846, without drama and without a slavery crisis, having been organised as free territory and having attracted almost no proslavery settlement.

Its first capital was Iowa City, and in 1857 the seat moved to Des Moines on the argument that the government should sit near the middle of the polity rather than at its eastern edge. The move was contested, and Iowa City was compensated with the university, which turned out over the following century to have been the better half of the bargain.

The courts that got there first

Iowa’s proudest possession is a line of judgments, and the pride is earned.

In 1839, before Iowa was a State, the territorial court decided In re Ralph. Ralph Montgomery had bought his own freedom from a Missouri owner on an instalment contract, moved to the Dubuque lead diggings, and failed to keep up the payments; his former owner sent men to take him back. The court refused. It held that a man who had been brought to free soil with his owner’s consent could not be reduced to property again by a failure to pay a debt, and that no writ of the court would be issued to help. The Realm did not settle the same question for another twenty-six years.

In 1868, in Clark v the Board of Directors of the Muscatine Schools, the court held that a school district could not exclude Susan Clark, aged twelve, from the school nearest her house because she was Black. The judgment is eighty-one years earlier than the Realm’s own desegregation judgment, and it is unqualified: the board had offered a separate school and the court did not care.

In 1873, in Coger v the North Western Union Packet Company, it held that Emma Coger was entitled to eat at the dining table of a Mississippi steamboat on the same terms as anyone else who had paid the fare.

None of this was made by Iowa’s electorate. The same polity had a Black exclusion law on its statute book from 1851, refused Black men the vote until a referendum in 1868 that only just carried, and did not repeal the exclusion law until 1880 when it had long been a dead letter. Iowa’s courts were ahead of Iowa, and Iowa’s modern account of itself, which is genuinely proud of the judgments, has learned to say both things.

Temperance

Iowa took prohibition further and held it longer than any of its neighbours. The polity went dry by statute in 1855, was pulled back and forth by amendment and referendum for fifty years, adopted a rigid prohibition in 1916 ahead of the Realm, and did not permit ordinary retail sale of spirits by private licence until 1963, retaining the polity liquor monopoly for a further quarter-century after that.

The politics of this ran along a line that has never quite gone away: dry Protestant countryside against wet German, Czech and Irish river towns, with Dubuque and the Amanas exempted in practice by an enforcement that knew better than to try.

The farm economy, and its first crash

Iowa’s agriculture was built between 1870 and 1920 on maize, hogs and the railway, and by the end of that period the polity was rich, the land was expensive, and almost everyone in Iowa was in debt against land values that had trebled in twenty years.

The prices collapsed in 1921 and did not recover. Iowa spent the whole of the 1920s in an agricultural depression that the rest of the Realm did not enter until 1929, lost about a third of its farms to foreclosure across the two decades, and produced in 1932 and 1933 the Farmers’ Holiday blockades, in which farmers stopped milk lorries on the roads into Sioux City and Des Moines and poured the milk into the ditch. A judge at Le Mars was dragged from his court and threatened with a rope for signing foreclosure orders, and the Governor proclaimed martial law in six counties.

That is worth stating because it is the rehearsal for what happened fifty years later, and because it is the reason older Iowans in the 1980s knew exactly what they were looking at.

1980, and what it did

The farm crisis of the 1980s is the single most consequential event in modern Iowa.

The 1970s had been the best decade Iowa ever had. Export demand was enormous, credit was cheap in real terms, land prices trebled again, and the federal and polity agricultural departments told farmers, in terms, to plant every acre and borrow against the appreciation. Iowa did. Then interest rates went to double figures, the export markets closed, and land fell by sixty per cent in five years.

What followed was not a recession. It was the removal of a third of the farming households of Iowa inside eight years. Farms that had been in one family since the 1870s were sold at the courthouse door. Implement dealers, feed stores, seed merchants, small-town banks and the businesses on every main street went with them, because a farm economy’s town is not diversified and cannot be.

The article states the human cost because Iowa does. Suicides among Iowa farmers ran at between two and three times the polity rate for most of the decade and were undercounted, because a man crushed under his own tractor is recorded as a farm accident. Rural clergy and extension officers were the people who noticed first. A crisis telephone line opened at Ames in 1984 handled fifty thousand calls in four years. There were killings: a farmer at Ruthton shot two bankers in 1983, and Iowa’s own worst instance was a farmer near Lone Tree in 1985 who killed his wife, his neighbour, the president of his bank and himself.

The Realm’s response is part of the story. The federal ministry had the instruments and used them late and narrowly: credit was restructured for institutions rather than for households, the moratorium came in 1987 when most of the foreclosures had already happened, and the parliamentary inquiry of 1989 found that the department had known the scale of the exposure in 1982 and had reported it upward in terms that nobody in the Cabinet read as urgent. Iowa’s settled view is that the Realm chose the creditors, and the inquiry does not contradict it.

Nothing since has restored the households. The land is farmed, the yields are higher than they have ever been, and there are a third fewer people on it.

Vondracek, 1976

The other event that made modern Iowa is a lawsuit, and it happened four years before the crisis.

Iowa’s soil is drained. Beneath most of the northern half of the polity runs a network of clay and plastic tile laid from the 1880s onward, which turned wet prairie into the most productive arable land on earth by carrying the water off it quickly. It also carries nitrate, from fertiliser and from manure, straight into the rivers, and the rivers are what the towns drink.

By the early 1970s the water at Des Moines exceeded every published safe limit for nitrate for weeks at a stretch every spring, and infants in the city were being treated for methaemoglobinaemia, which is what nitrate does to a baby. The utility could remove it and the removal cost more than the utility could raise.

Marta Vondracek was a Des Moines mother whose second child had been in hospital twice. She brought proceedings under the American Rights Act against the trustees of three upstream drainage districts, and the Des Moines Water Works joined her.

The case was hopeless on its face. The Act contains no right to water. Part V, its social and economic Part, was in 1976 a list of four enacted sections covering education, labour, health care and provision in old age, and none of them mentions supply of any kind. The drainage districts said, correctly, that they had built nothing and polluted nothing: they drained land, and the nitrate came from farms they did not own.

The Royal American Supreme Court held for Vondracek in 1976, on two steps.

The first was that a drainage district is a public authority. The Extension Act of 1962 had replaced the old definition with a list of named bodies, and drainage districts were on the list, because in 1962 somebody drafting a schedule had included every body with power to levy a rate. It had almost certainly not been thought about.

The second was the one that mattered. The Court held that section 36, the right to such health care as is necessary, is not a right to treatment alone; that a right to be treated for a poisoning which the public authority’s own works deliver to the tap is a right of no value; and that where a public authority operates works that carry a contaminant into a public supply, the Act imposes on it a duty to abate that contaminant to a level at which the supply is fit to drink.

That duty is the household water minimum. It is not a section of the Act. It has never been enacted, it appears in no schedule, and it is now among the most heavily used obligations in the Realm’s domestic law, invoked in the March of Arizona, in the Black Belt of Alabama, in the coalfields and on the reserves. Alliance 90/Green Realm describes it as the single most useful instrument in its programme, which it is.

The remedy in 1976 was a bare declaration, because the supervisory jurisdiction did not yet exist. It arrived two years later, when the Act of 1978 inserted section 39.2 and section 40.1 and gave the courts power to require a plan and to retain the proceeding to supervise it. From 1979 the Iowa districts were back before the Court under the new machinery, and Iowa agriculture has been under a compliance regime, in one form or another, ever since.

Iowa’s relationship with all of this is complicated and not much like pride. The judgment came out of Des Moines, it is Iowa’s second great contribution to the Realm’s law of personal freedom, and a large part of Iowa has spent fifty years paying for it.

Geography

Iowa is the only polity of the Realm bounded on both sides by navigable water. The Mississippi runs the whole eastern edge and the Missouri and Big Sioux the whole western, and the boundaries north and south are survey lines, which gives the polity its almost rectangular shape and its habit of thinking of itself as an interior rather than a frontier.

The land between is not flat, though it is described that way by people crossing it. The north-central counties are the Des Moines lobe, the last ice sheet’s floor, young and level and badly drained until the tile went in. The north-east corner was never glaciated at all: the Driftless country around Decorah and Dubuque is steep, wooded, cut by trout streams and limestone bluffs, and looks nothing like the rest of the polity. The south is older glacial ground, rolling and eroded, with thinner soil and smaller farms. The west is loess, wind-blown silt piled in bluffs above the Missouri, which stand in places sixty metres high and exist in that form in only one other place on earth.

The soil is the point. Iowa’s mollisols were made by prairie: by grasses that put most of their mass underground and died back into it every year for ten millennia. About a quarter of the world’s grade-one arable land is in Iowa, and the polity has approximately eighty-five per cent of its surface under cultivation, the highest proportion of any comparable territory anywhere. Less than one tenth of one per cent of the original tallgrass prairie survives, in fragments, mostly in old cemeteries and along railway lines where the plough never went.

The climate is continental and violent at both ends: winters that reach minus thirty, summers that are hot and extremely humid because a hundred million maize plants per county transpire into the air, and a tornado season that is among the Realm’s most active.

The towns

Iowa was laid out in the expectation that people would walk or drive a team, and so it was given towns every ten or twelve kilometres, each with a school, a church or four, an implement dealer, a bank, a grain elevator, a newspaper and a main street. There are about nine hundred and fifty incorporated places in Iowa and roughly six hundred of them have fewer than a thousand people.

Most of them are dying, and the article is direct about why, because Iowa is.

The farms got bigger, and that was chosen. An Iowa farm in 1935 averaged about sixty hectares and supported a household; the same ground now runs in units of four hundred to a thousand hectares with one operator, hired seasonal help and a great deal of machinery. That change was not natural and it was not simply technological. Credit policy, tax treatment of machinery, commodity programmes that paid on volume, and the extension services’ own advice all rewarded scale continuously for eighty years. The result is that the same acres that carried ten households carry one.

The 1980s took a generation out at once. The households that left between 1980 and 1988 were disproportionately young, and their children did not grow up in Iowa. The demographic hole is still visible in the age structure of the rural counties, forty years on.

When the school closes, the town is finished. This is the mechanism Iowans name first and it is the one that is actually decisive. Iowa had over four thousand five hundred school districts in 1950 and has under three hundred now. A town that loses its school loses the teachers, who were the salaried households; loses the reason for young families to buy a house there; loses the Friday night that was the town’s only collective event; and thereafter loses its grocery, because the grocery lived on people who were already in town. The consolidation was sensible in every individual case and catastrophic in aggregate, and Iowa has never worked out what to do about that, because the alternative was schools of forty pupils that could not teach chemistry.

Everything that grows, grows at Des Moines. Polk County and its neighbours have taken almost the whole of Iowa’s net growth since 1970. A young Iowan who stays in Iowa moves to Des Moines, and Iowans in the small towns know this and say it without much bitterness, because their own children did it.

And some towns are growing, on immigrant labour, and Iowa cannot agree whether that counts. The meatpacking plants moved out of the cities to the feedlots from the 1960s, taking their wages down as they went, and the towns that got them, Storm Lake, Denison, Marshalltown, West Liberty, Columbus Junction, are the only small towns in Iowa whose population is rising. Their schools are full. Their main streets have shops on them. They are also, now, between a third and two thirds foreign-born or the children of foreign-born, from Mexico, Guatemala, Laos, Sudan, the Congo and Burma.

The rest of Iowa is genuinely divided about this, and the division does not run where an outsider would expect. The towns concerned are on the whole reconciled to it, having watched the alternative twenty kilometres away. The counties around them, which are not growing and are not receiving anyone, are the ones that vote against it. This is one of the two or three arguments that decide Iowa elections, and it is discussed below.

Constitutional system

Iowa is governed under the Constitution of Iowa of 1857, adopted at the same convention that moved the capital, deposited under the Polity Instruments Act 1889, and amended fifty-four times. It replaced an instrument of 1846 which had lasted eleven years and which the convention thought too restrictive of banking, that being the great question of the day.

The instrument is short, plain and unremarkable in its structure, and its distinguishing feature is Article I, a declaration of rights whose second section provides that all political power is inherent in the people and whose first is the source of the polity motto. Iowa’s courts have treated Article I as an independent guarantee capable of going further than the Realm’s own, and that is the constitutional habit which produced 1839, 1868 and 1873 and which the polity has never lost.

The Governor

The Crown is represented in Iowa by a Governor, appointed on the advice of the ministers of the Realm after consultation with the Premier, holding office for five years. The incumbent is Ingrid Halvorsen, a former president of Luther College at Decorah, appointed in 2023.

The office in Iowa is unusually low-key even by the standards of the Realm’s quieter polities. No Governor of Iowa has withheld assent, no Governor has dismissed a ministry, and no Governor has been the subject of a serious political controversy since 1933, when Governor Clyde Herring proclaimed martial law in six counties during the Farmers’ Holiday and was criticised in the Commons for having done it too slowly rather than too readily.

What the modern office does is the county fair, the flood, the tornado and the funeral. Iowa is the polity where a Crown representative can reasonably expect to visit every one of ninety-nine county seats in a five-year term, and Governors are judged on whether they do.

The Premier

The head of government is the Premier of Iowa, holding office on the confidence of the House of Representatives and governing from Des Moines. The office has been held since 2026 by Harlan Petersen, Liberal Federal Democrat, at the head of a minority ministry sustained by the four members of Alliance 90/Green Realm.

That arrangement is uncomfortable in a way particular to Iowa. The Greens’ most valuable instrument in the whole of the Realm is the household water minimum; the household water minimum came out of Des Moines; and the compliance regime it produced is the thing a large part of Iowa’s electorate most resents. Petersen’s ministry therefore rests on the votes of a party whose signature achievement his own farming counties regard as an attack on them, and he is asked about it constantly.

Iowa’s politics are genuinely marginal and have been for forty years. Six of the last nine general elections have been decided by margins under two per cent, the premiership has changed hands five times since 1990, and the polity has been governed at various points by each of the three large parties and twice by coalitions.

The Legislature

The Iowa Legislature is bicameral: a House of Representatives of one hundred members elected for two years, and a Senate of fifty elected for four, half retiring every two.

The two-year House term is an inheritance from 1857 that Iowa has voted four times not to change, on the argument that a member who must face the voters every second year cannot become a stranger to them. The practical effect is a legislature in permanent contact with its constituencies and a session calendar built around the farming year: the Assembly convenes in January and is expected to rise by the end of April, before planting.

Iowa’s redistricting is done by a non-partisan legislative services agency which draws maps to county lines and population equality without reference to voting history or to where members live, and which has produced maps the Assembly may accept or reject but may not amend until the third attempt. It was adopted in 1980 and it is the only such arrangement in the Realm. The Assembly has rejected a first map twice and a second map never. Iowa is very pleased with this and mentions it at every opportunity.

Counties and local government

Iowa has ninety-nine counties, laid out between 1834 and 1857 on the same principle as the towns, and it has never merged one.

Where Alabama grants its counties almost nothing and legislates for them one at a time, Iowa did the opposite and did it early. The home rule amendments of 1968 and 1972 gave counties and cities general power to act in local affairs unless the Legislature has forbidden it, reversing the older rule that a local body could do only what it had been authorised to do. Iowa’s counties may tax, borrow, zone, contract, form joint agencies and reorganise their own offices without asking anyone.

It has not saved a single town. This is the comparison the Register draws and it is the honest one. Two polities took opposite constitutional decisions about local power. Alabama’s Black Belt counties are poor and powerless; Iowa’s rural counties are poor and sovereign; and the outcomes for the people in them are not as different as either constitutional theory would predict, because the thing the counties needed was not authority but households, and no grant of power supplies those.

What home rule has produced is a great deal of cooperation, since a county of four thousand people with full authority to run a public health department very quickly discovers it would rather run one jointly with its neighbours. Iowa has more inter-county joint agencies than any polity of the Realm: shared assessors, shared emergency management, shared landfills, shared ambulances, and in eleven cases a shared county attorney.

Merger itself is proposed in every decade and has never once succeeded. Twelve counties have fewer than seven thousand residents and all twelve maintain a courthouse, a sheriff, an auditor, a recorder, a treasurer and a board of supervisors. Every study since 1963 has recommended consolidation and every referendum has failed, in some cases by margins above eighty per cent. The counties will not merge because the county seat is the last institution the town has left, and Iowans understand perfectly well that this is what they are voting for.

Below the counties Iowa retains townships, which now do essentially two things, fire protection and the maintenance of cemeteries, and which have survived four attempts at abolition since 1970. Nobody defends them in the abstract. Everybody defends their own.

Law and the courts

The Supreme Court of Iowa has seven justices. They are appointed by the Governor on the advice of the Premier from a list of three settled by a judicial nominating commission of lawyers and lay members, and they hold to seventy-two.

Iowa adopted the commission system in 1962, earlier than most of the Realm, after two decades in which contested judicial elections had produced a bench that the polity bar regarded as competent and the polity press regarded as bought. Iowa has never gone back, and the argument that the court’s independence is the reason for the judgments of 1839, 1868 and 1873 is made by every Iowa lawyer who has ever spoken at a bar dinner, notwithstanding that all three were decided by elected judges.

Below the Supreme Court sit a Court of Appeals and a unified district court operating in eight judicial districts across all ninety-nine counties, with magistrates sitting in the smaller seats.

Two things distinguish the modern practice.

The first is the volume of Article I litigation. Iowa’s courts read the polity’s own declaration of rights as capable of exceeding the Rights Act rather than merely tracking it, and they say so explicitly, which is unusual: most polity courts in the Realm treat their own instruments as coextensive with the Act and save themselves the argument. Iowa’s position is that a declaration of 1857 which the Act of 1866 did not repeal remains a source of law, and the Realm’s courts have never disturbed it.

The second is that Iowa is the polity where the household water minimum is enforced against people rather than merely declared. The compliance machinery that runs out of Vondracek and the 1978 amendments is administered here in a form that exists nowhere else: drainage districts and county conservation boards operate under standing plans supervised by the district court at Des Moines, filed annually, and enforceable by contempt. Roughly a hundred and forty districts are currently under plan.

Economy

Iowa’s economy is the twenty-eighth largest of the Realm’s polities and is more concentrated than any other on a single sector and its derivatives.

Agriculture. Iowa is first in the Realm in maize, first in soya beans, first in eggs, and first in hogs by a very large margin: something close to a third of the Realm’s pigs are in Iowa, roughly seven of them for every human resident. Cattle, dairy and small grains are minor. The polity’s arable output alone exceeds the entire economic product of several of the Realm’s smaller polities.

Food processing is the manufacturing base: killing floors, wet and dry maize milling, soya crushing, feed, and the largest concentration of egg-breaking capacity in the world. It employs about a tenth of the workforce, and it is the sector that made the immigrant towns.

Ethanol takes about a third of Iowa’s maize crop and burns it, because a federal statute requires the Realm’s motor fuel to contain it. Iowa has forty-two plants. The mandate has been worth an enormous amount to Iowa land values and is defended by every Iowa member of every party without exception, and its long-term future is the largest unhedged risk in the polity’s economy, discussed below.

Wind. Iowa generates a larger share of its own electricity from wind than any polity of the Realm, above sixty per cent in a good year and occasionally above eighty for days at a time. The turbines went up fast between 2005 and 2020 because Iowa had the wind resource, the flat interconnection and, decisively, home-rule counties that could permit them without waiting for the Assembly. Lease payments are now a significant and very evenly distributed source of rural income, which is the only new money the small counties have had in fifty years.

Insurance and pensions. Des Moines is the third or fourth insurance centre of the Realm depending on the measure, and has been since the 1860s, when life offices founded to underwrite farm risk discovered that the actuarial talent stayed. Roughly a hundred thousand people in the Des Moines metropolitan area work in insurance, banking, pensions and their supporting professions. This is why the capital has money and the countryside does not, and Iowans put it in exactly those terms.

Land ownership is itself an economic question here. Slightly more than half of Iowa’s farmland is now rented rather than owner-occupied, a third of it is owned by people who do not live in Iowa, and a rising share is held by pension funds, insurance offices and family trusts whose beneficiaries have never seen it. The rent leaves the county. Iowa has debated restricting non-resident and corporate ownership since 1975, has legislated four times, and has watched each statute worked around.

Transport

Iowa is a place people cross, and its transport is built accordingly.

Two of the Realm’s principal east-west road corridors run the full width of the polity and meet the north-south route at Des Moines. Freight rail is heavy and continuous, and the Realm’s grain moves out of Iowa by rail to the lake ports and the Gulf and by barge from the Mississippi terminals at Dubuque, Clinton, Davenport, Muscatine, Burlington and Keokuk. The Missouri carries far less, being shallower and less reliably maintained.

Passenger rail is thin: one long-distance service across the south of the polity, calling at Ottumwa and Osceola, and a persistent unfulfilled proposal to connect Des Moines to Chicago through the Quad Cities, which has been studied since 1996 and funded twice and built never.

Des Moines has the principal airport, Cedar Rapids the second. Neither is a hub and both are priced accordingly, which is a standing complaint of Iowa business and a standing subject of Assembly resolutions that have no effect on anybody.

The road network is the largest per resident in the Realm outside the mountain polities: one hundred and eighteen thousand kilometres of it, most of it rural, most of it carrying almost nothing, and all of it having to be maintained because the farms are at the end of it. Iowa’s counties spend a larger share of their budgets on secondary roads and bridges than on anything else, and about a fifth of the polity’s rural bridges are posted below legal load, which means the grain lorries go the long way.

Welfare, health and education

Education is Iowa’s other point of pride and the pride is older than it is current.

Iowa built a common school system early and funded it well, achieved near-universal literacy before most of the Realm, and produced at Iowa City the instrument by which the Realm measured everybody else: the Iowa Tests, developed from the 1930s at the university and administered to schoolchildren from Nova Scotia to the Gulf for two generations. For most of the twentieth century Iowa’s schools were at or near the top of every published comparison in the Realm and Iowans regarded this as a settled feature of the world.

They are no longer at the top. Iowa is now near the middle on most measures, and the polity’s explanation of this is contested: whether it is that Iowa stood still while others improved, whether it is the funding formula, or whether it is that a system built for a rural polity of homogeneous small districts has adapted badly to consolidation and to towns where a third of the children arrive speaking Spanish, Q’anjob’al or Karen. The Assembly has argued about it continuously since 2011 without changing much.

Higher education is strong and concentrated: the university at Iowa City with the Realm’s foremost medical centre west of the Mississippi, the land-grant institution at Ames whose agricultural research is genuinely world-leading and whose advice in the 1970s Iowa now regards with some bitterness, and the teaching university at Cedar Falls. Thirty-odd small private colleges, most of them founded by denominations, are scattered through towns that would otherwise have nothing, and about a third of them are in financial difficulty.

Health. Iowa’s outcomes are good and its access is not. Life expectancy is above the Realm’s median; the polity has the second-oldest population in the Realm; and thirty-one of its ninety-nine counties have no practising obstetrician, while nine have no hospital at all. Eleven rural hospitals have closed or converted to clinics since 2010. The NHSA guarantee applies here as everywhere, and the deficiency, as in Alabama though for entirely different reasons, is in delivery rather than in entitlement: Alabama’s rural counties cannot afford the service, and Iowa’s cannot find anybody to staff it.

Water is the welfare question that is particular to Iowa, and it is the inversion of Alabama’s. In Alabama the water fails because the counties are too poor to build works. In Iowa the water fails because the farms are too productive, and the polity has a nitrate problem, an ammonia problem and a bacterial problem in most of its surface water and in a rising number of private wells. Between four hundred and six hundred Iowa public supplies are on nitrate treatment at any time. The minimum is met, at cost, because the Court requires it.

Cities

Des Moines

Des Moines is the capital, the largest city, the financial centre and the only part of Iowa that has grown continuously since 1970. The metropolitan area holds about seven hundred and fifty thousand people, roughly a quarter of the polity.

It is a government and insurance town with a river through it, a gold-domed capitol on a hill, and a downtown connected by four kilometres of enclosed skywalks built because the winters are what they are. Its growth is suburban and rapid: West Des Moines, Ankeny, Waukee and Urbandale have between them added more people since 2000 than live in the twenty smallest counties combined.

Des Moines is also where Vondracek was brought and where the compliance plans are filed, and the rest of Iowa has not entirely forgiven it for either.

Cedar Rapids

Cedar Rapids is the second city, about a hundred and forty thousand in the city and two hundred and seventy thousand in the metropolitan area, and it is the industrial one: maize milling on a scale that scents the whole town on a wet morning, food ingredients, and a large avionics and communications works that is the polity’s principal engineering employer.

It is the most Czech city in the Realm, with the halls, the museum, the church and the language school still operating, and the Czech quarter was rebuilt after the flood of 2008 put three metres of the river through it.

The Quad Cities

Davenport and Bettendorf on the Iowa bank, Rock Island and Moline on the Illinois, form a single metropolitan area of about four hundred thousand divided by a polity boundary and a very large river. It is a farm machinery town above everything else, it has the Realm’s principal Mississippi lock and dam works, and it is the one part of Iowa whose institutions, newspapers and sports allegiances are genuinely shared with another polity.

Sioux City

Sioux City in the far west is the meatpacking capital and the least prosperous of Iowa’s cities, having been hit twice: once when the packing houses left the city for the small towns in the 1960s and again when the stockyards closed. It is the market town for a great deal of country in three polities, it is the most Latino city in Iowa, and it has the loess bluffs on its edge.

Iowa City

Iowa City is the smallest of the five and the one the Realm has heard of. It was the capital until 1857, kept the university as compensation, and has been a university town ever since, with about seventy-five thousand residents and thirty thousand students.

It is the seat of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, founded in 1936, which is the most consequential thing Iowa has given the Realm’s literature and possibly the most consequential thing Iowa has given the Realm at all after the water minimum. The graduate writing programme as an institution was invented here, and it was then copied by some three hundred universities, so that the shape of the Realm’s postwar fiction and poetry, its habits, its virtues and the things critics complain about in it, all descend from a set of decisions taken in a small town on the Iowa River by people who were mostly trying to get teaching posts for their friends.

Demographics

Iowa’s population is approximately 3.2 million and it is old: the median age is above the Realm’s by six years and the polity has the second-highest proportion of residents over seventy-five.

The distribution is the story told above. Six counties hold forty-one per cent of the people. Sixty-eight counties have fewer residents than they had in 1900, and thirty-one have fewer than half.

Ancestry is overwhelmingly northern and central European, German above all, then Irish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech, Danish and Swedish, and the polity was among the least diverse in the Realm until very recently. That has changed fast and unevenly: Iowa is now about nine per cent Hispanic, four per cent Asian and four per cent Black, with the growth concentrated in Des Moines and in a dozen packing towns and almost absent from everywhere else. Iowa’s foreign-born population has quadrupled since 1990 and its native-born rural population has fallen throughout, so the two curves cross in exactly the towns that argue about it.

Religious adherence is high by the Realm’s standards and mainline rather than evangelical: Iowa is Lutheran in the north, Methodist and Presbyterian through the middle, Catholic in the eastern river counties and around Dubuque, Reformed at Pella and Orange City, with Quaker and Mennonite communities of long standing and, at Amana, a church that once ran seven villages and now runs seven congregations.

Society and culture

The state fair, held at Des Moines in August, is the one institution every Iowan participates in. It is agricultural, it is enormous, it runs for eleven days, and it is where the polity conducts a good deal of its politics informally. The butter cow has been sculpted every year since 1911 by five people in succession.

Grant Wood was from Anamosa, taught at Iowa City, and painted American Gothic in 1930 using his sister and his dentist. He is the central figure of Regionalism, the movement that turned away from Paris to paint the middle of the continent, and the Realm’s argument about him has never settled: whether the rolled hills and the tidy shocks are affection or satire, whether Regionalism was a democratic art or a reactionary one, and whether American Gothic is a joke about Iowa or the only serious painting anybody has made of it. Iowa’s own position is that Wood knew exactly what he was doing and declined to say.

Literature. Beyond the Workshop, Iowa has produced or held on to a disproportionate number of the Realm’s writers, and the reason usually given is the Workshop itself, which for ninety years has meant that a young writer anywhere in the Realm had a reason to spend two years in Iowa. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is an Iowa town, and Iowa regards the books about it as the closest thing the polity has to being understood from inside.

Music and sound. Iowa’s contribution is choral, band and church rather than popular: the polity has more amateur choirs and community bands per resident than anywhere in the Realm, an inheritance from the Germans, the Czechs and the Scandinavians together, and the high school marching band is a serious institution.

Sport is the wrestling. Iowa is the wrestling polity of the Realm by a distance nobody disputes, from the small-town high school rooms up through two university programmes that have between them won more national titles than the rest of the Realm combined, and a wrestling town’s relationship to its team is what a football town’s is elsewhere.

Food is pork, sweet maize, the loose-meat sandwich, the breaded tenderloin that overhangs its bun on principle, and the church basement casserole, which is not a joke but an institution with a literature.

Political tensions

The compliance regime. Fifty years after Vondracek, the plans are still filed and still supervised, and the argument has not moved. Farming Iowa says the Realm is regulating a livelihood out of existence by holding a drainage district responsible for water that falls out of the sky onto ground it does not own. Urban Iowa says it would like to drink the water. Both are describing the same judgment accurately, which is why neither side can be answered.

Whether to hold the towns up. Iowa spends a great deal of money keeping roads, bridges, water systems, ambulances and courthouses working in places with a declining and ageing population, and it has never had the argument out loud. Every attempt to have it, and there have been several, has ended in the discovery that no member can vote for the proposition that a town is finished, and that the towns concerned have members.

Immigration. The packing towns need the workers, have them, and are being kept alive by them. The counties around, which are not receiving anyone, are the ones voting against. This is a genuinely unresolved argument and the Register does not resolve it, because Iowa has not.

Ethanol. A third of the crop is burnt as motor fuel by federal mandate. If the Realm’s transport decarbonises as its own published plans require, the mandate has no purpose, and the demand it created, roughly a fifth of Iowa’s total farm income once the land value effect is counted, disappears. Every Iowa member of every party defends the mandate. Almost none of them will say what happens next, and the Assembly has commissioned three studies of the question and published one.

Who owns Iowa. More than half the land is rented, a third is owned from outside the polity, and the share held by funds and trusts rises annually. Four statutes have tried to restrict it and four have been worked around. It is the quietest of Iowa’s arguments and the one most likely to matter in fifty years.

The bellwether trap. Iowa’s four seats swing, the Realm’s pollsters watch it accordingly, and both large parties therefore campaign here at a volume out of all proportion to what is at stake. Iowa gets promised a great deal at every general election and gets very little between them, and the polity’s own political scientists have a name for the pattern, which is that a marginal constituency is worth courting and a marginal polity is not worth governing for.

Assessment

Iowa is the Realm’s clearest demonstration that a polity can do almost everything right by its own lights and still lose what it was trying to keep.

It got the law right first, three times in the nineteenth century and once more in 1976, and the fourth of those gave the Realm a social right that half a continent now relies on. It got local government right, granting broad home rule sixty years ago while its southern comparators were still legislating for one county at a time. It got redistricting right and is the only polity where the map is drawn by people with no interest in the answer. It funded its schools when that was unfashionable and built the instrument the rest of the Realm was measured by.

And the towns emptied anyway.

The lesson Iowa draws from this, when it is being honest, is that the constitutional questions it settled well were not the ones that determined the outcome. What determined the outcome was the size of a farm, and the size of a farm was set by credit, by tax treatment, by commodity programmes and by the advice of Iowa’s own agricultural university, none of which any convention ever debated. Home rule gave a county of four thousand people the power to do anything it liked and no means of doing it.

The honest entry on the other side of the ledger is that Iowa is not poor and is not failing. Its agriculture is the most productive on earth, its capital is prosperous, its wind lease payments are the most evenly distributed rural income in the Realm, its health outcomes are above the median, and the towns that immigration reached are alive. What Iowa has lost is not its living but its shape: a polity of nine hundred towns has become a polity of one city, five secondary places and a very large number of addresses.

The water is the sharpest point of all. Iowa gave the Realm the household water minimum, and Iowa is the polity that has the hardest time meeting it, because the thing that contaminates the water is the thing the polity is for. That is not hypocrisy. It is what it looks like when a place is honest enough to sue itself.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag of Iowa is a vertical tricolour of blue, white and red, the white stripe of double width, in the proportion 2:3. It carries no charge of any kind.

The colours are French, and they are on the flag because the ground is. Iowa was part of the territory the Realm acquired from France, and the tricolour is the only acknowledgement any polity of the interior makes of the fact that the country between the rivers was bought rather than settled into. The white stripe is doubled because the original design carried a device on it, and the device was removed.

What was removed is the point. The flag was adopted by an Act of 1921 out of a competition, and the winning entry placed an eagle on the white stripe bearing a streamer in its beak with the polity’s name on it. Iowa carried that flag for forty-eight years. The eagle was struck out by an amending Act of 1969, on the recommendation of a commission which reported that the bird was borrowed, the streamer was a label rather than a symbol, and a flag that has to write its own name across itself has not been designed. The stripes were left exactly as they were.

The result is a flag with nothing on it, which Iowa is unembarrassed about and rather likes. It is the plainest polity flag in the Realm, it is the only one to have been improved by subtraction, and the standard Iowan account of it is that the polity took forty-eight years to work out that the best part of the design was the part nobody had drawn.

The motto, “Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain,” is from the constitution of 1857 and is the only polity motto in the Realm to name rights twice. Iowans quote it in connection with the judgments and, since 1976, in connection with the water, from both sides of that argument.

The State bird is the eastern goldfinch, the State flower the wild prairie rose, and the State tree the oak.

Trivia

See also

• State of Alabama
• State of Nebraska
• State of Missouri
• Commonwealth of Illinois
• American Rights Act
• Alliance 90/Green Realm
• Elections and constituencies
• National Health Service of America