Herbert Quick, Grant Wood, and Iowa: A Personal Essay

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.

Thoughts and Prayers and Anger

Another day, another shooting in a public place. Maybe more than one such shooting: the day isn't over yet.

What I am thinking is so obvious that I shouldn't have to say it, but lots of folks don't get it, so here goes: the more the crazies in the gun lobby have gained control over our politicians, the more vulnerable the rest of us have become. In the eyes of gun nuts and political nuts alike we ordinary citizens are expendable–sacrificial lambs upon the altar of erroneous readings of the Second Amendment. It's our very own home-grown form of terrorism, carried out (often) by suicide shooters.

Guns, by themselves, don't kill people. People kill people, and Americans with guns kill lots of people. Limiting the number of people is problematical; limiting the number and availability of guns is a matter of political smarts and will. We can do that, and we must.

My thoughts and prayers are with the victims of today's violence. My anger is with those who stonewall against doing anything to reduce the likelihood such violence will continue to plague us.

Religious, But Not Confidently Spiritual

           Unlike many Americans, I consider myself to be religious but not confidently spiritual. This, in a time when many like to claim they are "spiritual, but not religious." My position, as is often the case, is not "trending."

         Any pastor who has ever talked with idealistic couples seeking to get married in church for aesthetic or cultural or family reasons alone knows what I mean. When asked, they often claim to be "spiritual, not religious,” even though they are wanting something done for them by the epitome of religious authority (a clergy person) in a place reeking of religious materiality (a sanctuary).

For some reason the clergy person is supposed to be impressed by such an expression of faith. He or she has every right to feel insulted. I submit the “spiritual but not religious” claim is often meaningless, pandering to what the claimants think they need to say to get what they want out of someone for whom they have little or no real regard.

Best I can tell, the "spiritual but not religious" person entertains vague notions that there is someone or something immaterial out there or in here someplace who or which is accessible by means other than our usual senses…and that, somehow, this whole package of vagueness matters. Makes you feel better, more in touch with the universe, more universal yourself, capable of loving all humankind, and (here's the kicker) not needing anyone or anything physical or material to sustain all those self-generated convictions and yearnings. It's the fantasy that you don't need to devote real time or energy to finding a reality beyond that we know through ordinary perception.

The important part of the above description of the "spiritual but not religious” person is the part about access. In order to be "spiritual," such a person, unlike most "spiritual" people, does not need messy material and physical relationships and practices and symbols. He or she is above all that turmoil, blithely able to know and have a relationship with the "spiritual" based upon...upon...upon...what? Simply hoping it is so?

God knows (seriously), I've tried to enter into the realm of the spiritual, or to allow it to enter into me, with as little physicality involved as possible. Trouble is, I have–I am–a body, and despite my particular body's failures and foibles, I get all the information I get about myself and my world via my physical senses. That includes, I firmly believe, any insights into myself I discover, any emotions or feelings I have, and any understanding of the physical and/or "quantum" nature of the universe. Everything I know about any of that comes via my sense organs and my brain. I don't know how I could access anything "in here" or "out there" apart from my physical apparatus.

I've tried to sit quietly and breathe deeply and recite mantras in an attempt to get in touch with the non-material through as pure a non-material connection as I can create, but it just doesn't work for me. My senses always interfere.

(This failure of mine doesn't have to be my fault, because as a Calvinist I credit the absence of the grace of spirituality in me to predestination. Apparently God has graced many Americans with a gift he or she has chosen to withhold from me. To which I can only say, Praise God!)

It's not that I don't have feelings, emotions, etc., though sometimes I think people wonder if I do. I love classical music, for example; I get tingling and perhaps even "spiritual" from my pointy head to my pained toes when the chorus starts singing in the final movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. It's even better when I am part of that chorus. "I do think I see the heavens open before me,” as I believe Handel is reported to have said about writing the Hallelujah Chorus.

But the music that makes me feel that way comes from vibrating strings setting sound waves in motion through the air until they vibrate my ear drums and somehow become an electrical impulse I can "hear." Just because I don't fully understand all the steps involved is no sign there's anything "spiritual" about the music or the process by which I hear it. It's actually a marvel of "things" working together. And I love how it feels.

I humbly claim to be a "religious, but not confidently spiritual" because any perception of God that I have and try to hold to and respond to is founded in things affecting things in ways that can be understood mechanically, physically, even metaphysically. It's why I go to worship even when I am not sure who or what I am supposed to be worshipping during them. The art and architecture, the words, the prayers, the music, the leadership of someone from whom I can learn something, the sense of community with others who can support and correct me as needed...all those physical, material, mechanical things impact my senses and are processed in my brain and gut. Hopefully, taken together, it makes me a more authentic and just and loving human being. That is, after all, the only valid justification for religious practice. And it's the only reason I can think of for anyone wanting to be "spiritual." Why does anyone think they can become spiritual without being somehow religious?

I am not against "the spiritual," or "spiritual direction," or "spirituality." There is something to it all, though I am not always entirely clear exactly what it is. Whatever the nature of what or who is “out there”, nothing worthy of the word "spiritual" can be known or accessed apart from real life connections and commitments and practices. And religion is all about real life connections, commitments, and practices.

Jesus, after all, sweat his body's blood when he prayed. He asked that he be spared really hard things, and then turned his fate over to God. There's no evidence he sat in the lotus position, breathed, felt good about himself, and then went back to managing his portfolio. "Follow me," he commanded. Stand up. On your two feet. Make a move. Do something. Following him is something you do with the body you've got. If something "spiritual" comes from it, fine; just don't forget how you learned to walk.

If I Posted the Title, You'd Read This One for Sure

A F**kin’ Plea

Here’s a real accomplishment: the fantastic English word “f**k” is to be heard no less than 506 times in the 180-minute-long film, “The Wolf of Wall Street.” That, beloved readers and followers, is apparently some kind of a record.

It averages out to 168.6666 times per hour, which is 2.81111 times per minute, which is a f**k every 21.428571 seconds. When a record is to be broken, Hollywood sure knows how to meet the challenge. I am duly impressed.

Want to know what accomplishing that feels like? Set aside three hours, get a watch with a second hand and then, every 20 seconds or less shout, whisper, or breathe (ah, yes, breathe) “f**k.” Now you’ve broken the record, all by yourself. How does that feel?

In case it is not obvious to you, I am joking. But joking about a very serious matter; namely, that I would like to ask people, starting with my friends, to use the word “f**k” with the respect it deserves, or not to use it at all.

I make this modest request because f**k is a really fine word, one of the most explicit and colorful in the English language. Its two spat consonants and what I’d call guttural vowel make it direct, violent,and seductive. It cuts through all lesser words and kills them. In certain situations, it is the only word that will do the job, whatever the job happens to be. So why waste it with lesser responsibilities?

For example, sometimes people share a Facebook page called, "I F**kin’ Love Science." Why is it called that? What does that mean? Do you have to squeeze in a little f**k get people to read the page, perhaps making science sound cool and hip (are those today’s words for what I mean?) to the young and to those who wish they were young? Would it be so bad simply to “really love science,” or if it’s how you feel, to “adore” science? I don’t get it.

A couple of days ago I got a link to a series of habits and attitudes to which the author intends to say “f**k it" in 2014. There are good ideas in the list, behaviors and practices that probably, in most cases, should be resisted. But why not "just say no" to them, or even shout them down if you must? Do they deserve f**king? Is that the only way to deal with them? Educate me, please.

Okay, so I'm old and have lead a protected life of piety in the church and am easily embarrassed. I’ve never worked on Wall Street or as a stevedore or in the White House. I am not in the mafia, do not live on the western frontier, and don’t do rap or hip hop. I shamefully confess to all those cultural and experiential lacks and more, so dismiss me by calling me old-fashioned, narrow-minded, squeamish, Victorian.

Well, here’s what I think of you…but I’m not offended or threatened by you. You’ve got me wrong, but that’s it. At least for the next 20 seconds.

Strange, But (Apparently) True

The march is history often obscures our memories of things so radically that we actually ended of thinking, "No, that didn't really happen...did it?" Garrison Keillor has two examples of this fact in his Writer's Almanac for today, December 28:

1) On this day in 1973, President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law.  (WHAT President? No!)

Keillor's background information further strains credibility: "In 1972, Nixon outlined his environmental agenda to Congress. He said: "This is the environmental awakening. It marks a new sensitivity of the American spirit and a new maturity of American public life. It is working a revolution in values, as commitment to responsible partnership with nature replaces cavalier assumptions that we can play God with our surroundings and survive." (Nixon said THAT?) He specifically asked for a new Endangered Species Act that would provide early identification and protection of threatened species, and treat hunting or capturing endangered species as a federal offense. In 1973, the House and Senate versions were combined. The Senate passed the bill unanimously, and the House by a vote of 355 to 4. (Congress did WHAT?)

2) "It was on this day in 1945 that Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. It was written in 1892 by a minister and Socialist (!) named Francis Bellamy, who was eventually forced out of his position because he preached too many sermons about Jesus and socialism."

Interestingly, the Rev. Bellamy did NOT include the words "under God" in his original. Keillor writes how they came about: "The words "under God" were added in 1954 to make sure it didn't sound like something that would be recited by Communists." (Nor by Socialists, of course. Or Christians?)

My Lord has come

My Lord has come
Will Todd

Shepherds, called by angels,
Called by love and angels;
No place for them but a stable.
My Lord has come.

Sages, searching for stars,
Searching for love in heaven;
No place for them but a stable.
My Lord has come.

His love will hold me,
His love will cherish me,
Love will cradle me.

Lead me, lead me to see him,
Sages and shepherds and angels;
No place for me but a stable.
My Lord has come.


The December 20 "Crossing @ Christmas" concert at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Chestnut Hill, PA, began and ended with Will Todd's, "My Lord has come." Words and music together spoke to me in a particular way on that evening in that beautiful place. The poem is my greeting to you this Christmas, and I invite you to give the few minutes it takes to listen to Tenebrae perform it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m8ryivqefk.

Merry Christmas!

Alternative Narratives

Author Ursula K. Le Guin in Steering the Craft includes a paragraph about story-writing that offers insight into our world and culture today:

"Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing."

While I think conflict usually is to be found in the seven other kinds of behavior Le Guin mentions (I suspect she'd agree), her thought that story-telling and life-living must always center on aggression and competition often seems at the heart of our personal lives and of each day's headlines.  Can we begin to consider other narratives for everything from family relationships to international politics? Dare we afford not to?