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By Root 1350 0

place on earth. The view from the sleeping porch through the big broad window at the foot of the bed was across empty dark fields to a town called Swedesburg, named for the nationality of its founders, and known more informally as Snooseville from the pinches of tobacco that the locals used to pack into their mouths as they went about their business. Snoose was a homemade mixture of tobacco and salt which was kept embedded between cheek and gum where the nicotine could be slowly and steadily absorbed. It was topped up hourly and kept in permanently. Some people, my father told me, even put in a fresh wad at bedtime.

I had never been to Swedesburg. There was no reason to go—it was just a small collection of houses—but at night in winter with its distant lights it was like a ship far out at sea. I found it peaceful and somehow comforting to see their lights, to think that all the citizens of Snooseville were snug in their homes and perhaps looking over at us in Winfield and deriving comfort in turn. My father told me that when he was a boy the people of Snooseville still spoke Swedish at home. Some of them could barely speak English at all. I loved that, too—the idea that it was a little outpost of Sweden over there, that they were all sitting around eating herring and black bread and saying, “Oh, ja!” and just being happily Swedish in the middle of the American continent. When my dad was young if you drove across Iowa you would regularly come upon towns or villages where all the inhabitants spoke German or Dutch or Czech or Danish or almost any other tongue from northern and central Europe.

But those days had long since passed. In 1916, as the shadow of the Great War made English-speaking people suspicious of loyalties, a governor of Iowa named William L. Harding decreed that henceforth it would be a crime to speak any foreign language in schools, at church, or even over the telephone in the great state of Iowa. There were howls that people would have to give up church services in their own languages, but Harding was not to be moved. “There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English,” he responded. “God is listening only to the English tongue.”

One by one the little linguistic outposts faded away. By the 1950s they were pretty much gone altogether. No one would have guessed it at the time, but the small towns and family farms were soon to become likewise imperiled.

In 1950, America had nearly six million farms. In half a century almost two-thirds of them vanished. More than half the American landscape was farmed when I was a boy; today, thanks to the spread of concrete, only 40 percent is—a severe decline in a single lifetime.

I was born into a state that had two hundred thousand farms. Today the number is much less than half that and falling. Of the 750,000 people who lived on farms in the state in my boyhood, half a million—two in every three—have gone. The process has been relentless. Iowa’s farm population fell by 25 percent in the 1970s and by 35 percent more in the 1980s. Another hundred thousand people were skimmed away in the 1990s. And the people left behind are old. In 1988, Iowa had more people who were seventy-five or older than five or younger. Thirty-seven counties out of ninety-nine—getting on for half—recorded more deaths than births.

It’s an inevitable consequence of greater efficiency and continuous amalgamation. Increasingly the old farms clump together into superfarms of three thousand acres or more. By the middle of the present century, it is thought, the number of farms in Iowa could drop to as low as ten thousand.

Without a critical mass of farmers, most small towns in Iowa have pretty well died. Drive anywhere in the state these days and what you see are empty towns, empty roads, collapsing barns, boarded farmhouses. Everywhere you go it looks as if you have just missed a terrible contagion, which in a sense I suppose you have. It’s the same story in Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri, and even worse in Nebraska and the Dakotas. Wherever there were once small towns,