Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930) is one of the best-known and most-parodied of "great art" paintings. To many it faithfully represents my home state of Iowa. Well into our 21st century people tend to think it's how Iowa and Iowans looked then, look now, and always will look. That thinking is mostly wrong, although folks whose style and look are American Gothic can still be found on the American prairie lands.
In 1922 one of Wood's fellow Iowans, John Herbert Quick, published Vandemark's Folly. Quick had been born a generation earlier than Wood (1861 vs. 1891), but Vandemark's Folly precedes American Gothic by only eight years. It is the first of three historical novels Quick would write to tell the story of pioneer experience in 19th-century Iowa. Vandemark's Folly is commonly regarded as the best of the three, although the second, The Hawkeye, is often cited as worth reading.
Grant Wood's portrait of an Iowa farmer and his daughter probably depicts an Iowa two or three decades after the time in which Vandemark's Folly is set. The picture of my home state and its settled farmers that Grant Wood puts on canvas in American Gothic (and in many other paintings) seems to me to continue the story Herbert Quick commits to paper in Vandemark’s Folly. Both represent the passive, yet persistent character trait that Meredith Willson later identified in The Music Man as “Iowa stubborn.”
Quick had been born in Steamboat Rock, Iowa, near the line separating Grundy County from Hardin County to its west. He grew up on a farm in Grundy County. Vandemark’s Folly's importance culturally and historically is that it tells the story of first settlers from the perspective of one very close to being a first-person witness.
Like Herbert Quick I grew up in Grundy County, although I was not born there. And the town I call my home town, Grundy Center, claims Herbert Quick as one of its native sons. For decades the Herbert Quick Schoolhouse, where Quick taught early in his life, has stood on the north side of Highway 14 and 175 as it heads west out of town, across the road from the Park Place Restaurant and the swimming pool. It's a little white building that looks exactly like, well, a little white country school house. It is well-marked, so anyone who has spent any time in Grundy Center knows where it is. You might even notice it just passing through town on the way to somewhere else.
From his modest beginnings, Quick went on to live quite a cosmopolitan life, traveling as far as Vladivostok, Russia, in service to the Red Cross. He contributed to the American progressive political and social movements of the early 20th Century. He married, and he and his wife had a son and a daughter. Toward the end of his life he built a large and elegant mansion nearly Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, but looks from its pictures to be in need of repairs. Compared to the "little shanty" in which he said he had been born, and the school house where he taught, “Coolfont” is a clear sign of Quick's upward mobility.
If what I’ve shared about Herbert Quick has piqued your interest, you can find more about him online. Google around a bit.
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You may think that the people of Grundy Center are proud of and know more than a little about a man whose name is so prominently displayed in their town. Maybe they do now, but if they paid much attention to Herbert Quick back in the 1950's when I was growing up there, I missed most of it. About all I remember is that, during my short career in the Boy Scouts, our troop met in the Herbert Quick Schoolhouse. Even in the years since, despite frequent trips back home to visit my family, I knew little about Herbert Quick beyond the fact that he was a man who wrote books, Vandemark's Folly being one I could somehow recall, though I'd never read it and didn't know anyone who had.
Last time I was home I learned that volunteers now give tours of the Herbert Quick Schoolhouse. Hearing about those guides caused me to confess I'd never read anything by Quick, which lead my mother to produce her copy of Vandemark's Folly (published in 1987 by the University of Iowa Press, with introduction by Allan G. Bogue). I have just read it for the first time. Fifty years after moving away from Grundy County, I’ve not only read Vandemark’s Folly but I have also learned a bit about Quick himself. I hope the local population knows at least as much the man and his life as I do now.
Quick’s novel is set in 1850’s Iowa. It is about Americans from "back east" and first-generation European immigrants moving onto and settling that land. The story is told by Jacobus Teunis Vandemark (also known as J. T., Jacob, etc.), who through a series of deeply-personal events receives title to a quarter-section of land in Monterey County, Iowa, the county seat of which is eventually to be the town of Monterey Center. His farm occupies the lowest and therefore the wettest plot of ground in the county, which is the reason his place is called “Vandemark’s Folly.” But J. T. Vandemark works hard and prospers, turning his folly into treasure.
Many of the place names Quick uses are still on the map or at least remembered by local residents. But there is no Monterey County in Iowa today, nor is there a town named Monterey Center. Though Quick mentions Grundy County on one page in Vandemark's Folly as if it is another location, I am confident he means "Monterey" to represent “Grundy.”
(Side bar: What if my home town had been Monterey Center, not Grundy Center? I'd have received a lot less ribbing in my journeys beyond Iowa if my home town's name had conjured images of an exotic locale on the California coast.)
I am not going to summarize Vandemark's Folly further. Several editions are available from Amazon, and you can even downloaded a free version of it from the internet.
Neither am I going to critique it, beyond this: it is a fun read, filled with interesting characters, exhibiting flashes of genius, but it is not "great" literature. It’s often embarrassingly melodramatic, and J.T. Vandemark is a bit too good, even when nestled in a haystack with the love of his life. After its initial brief flirtation with commercial success, Vandemark’s Folly has pretty much disappeared. I understand that.
But if you live in or near Grundy County, or if you grew up anywhere in rural Iowa, of if you feel sadly uninformed about the settling of our nation's much-maligned but economically crucial "fly-over" mid-section, you will be glad to have read Vandemark's Folly. As a bonus, the book begins with an extended telling of Vandemark's early days in western New York State working on the Erie Canal, providing a fascinating look into another important, but often overlooked chapter in the western expansion.
Quick’s progressive idealism underlies the story Vandemark's Folly tells. Grundy Center and Grundy County could celebrate him in ways far beyond his late-in-life writing career. It would be interesting to develop a curriculum around Quick's life to teach about how the midwest was settled and about how our nation dealt with some of the challenges it faced at the turn of the last century.
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I will conclude this brief essay with a few quotes from Vandemark's Folly that struck me as particularly apt and illustrative of why he wrote about his native land and what I think you'd get out of reading the book.
Quick's descriptions of the prairie–the tall grass itself, the hills, the waterways, the abundant and incredibly diverse flora and fauna–evoke a world long lost and never to be seen again. This passage particularly moved me (pp. 139ff in the 1987 U. of I edition):
The Canada geese, except for the nesters, had swept on in that marvelous ranked army which ends the migration, spreading from the east to the the west some warm morning when the wind is south, and extending from a hundred feet in the air to ten thousand, all moved by a common impulse like myself and my fellow-migrants, pressing northward though, instead of westward, with the piping of a thousand organs, their wings whirring, their eyes glistening as if with some mysterious hope, their black webbed feet folded and stretched out behind, their necks stretched out eagerly to the north, and held a little high I thought as if to peer over the horizon to catch a glimpse of their promised land of blue lakes, tall reeds, and broad fields of water-celery and wild rice, with dry nests downy with the harvests of their gray breasts; and fluffy goslings swimming in orderly classes after their teachers. And up from the South following these old honkers came the snow geese (we ignorantly called all of them "brants"), with their wild flutings like the high notes of clarinets–and the ponds became specked with teal and coot.
Quick continues by describing prairie chickens' amazing courtship dances, concluding that:
Nobody ever drew from [the deep-toned sounds of the male prairie chicken], and from the howling of the wolves, the honking of the geese, the calls of the ducks, the strange cries of the cranes as they soared with motionless wings high overhead, or rowed their way on with long slow strokes of their great wings, or danced their strange reels and cotillions in the twilight; and from the myriad voices of the curlew, plover, gopher, bob-o-link, meadowlark, dick-cissel, killdeer and the rest–day-sounds and night-sounds, dawn-sounds and dusk-sounds–more inspiration than did the stolid Dutch boy plodding west across Iowa in that spring of 1855, with his fortune in his teams of cows, in the covered wagon they drew, and the deed to his farm in a flat packet of treasures in a little iron-bound trunk–among them a rain-stained letter and a worn-out woman's shoe.
On page 228, Quick employs sexual imagery to describe the breaking of the prairie by the plow, including a cautionary foreshadowing:
The next day was a wedding-day–the marriage morning of the plow and the sod. It marked the beginning of the subdual of that wonderful wild prairie of Vandemark Township and the Vandemark farm. No more fruitful espousal ever took place than that–when the polished steel of my new breaking plow was embraced by the black soil with its lovely fell of greenery. Up to that fateful moment, the prairie of the farm and of the township had been virgin sod; but now it bowed its neck to the yoke of wedlock. Nothing like it takes place any more; for the sod of the meadows and pastures is quite a different thing from the untouched skin of the original earth. Breaking prairie was the most beautiful, the most epochal, and most hopeful, and as I look back at it, in one way the most pathetic thing man ever did, for in it, one of the loveliest things ever created began to come to its predestined end.
A final pair of quotes may be relevant to Iowa farmland today. On page 299 Quick writes about the panic of 1857 when land prices plummeted and everyone was in debt, and Jacob Vandemark offers this warning:
All financial panics come from land speculation. Show me a way to keep land from advancing in value, and I will tell you how to prevent financial panics.
And this final paragraph of the book (p. 420):
The prairies took me, an ignorant, orphaned canal hand, and made me something better. How much better is not for me to say. The best prayer I can utter now is that it may do as well with my children and grandchildren, with the tenants on these rich farms, and the farm-hands that help till them, and with the owners who find that expensive land is just like expensive clothes:–merely something you must have, and must pay heavily for.
Grant Wood, Iowa artist of the next generation, painted the Iowa Herbert Quick described in words. I am grateful for them both.
