PHOTOGRAPH BY DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER—VII/REDUX PICTURESlation. That includes many rural counties but also—and
more troubling, says Swenson—the semi-urban ones that
are home to “micropolitans,” the manufacturing-dependent
cities of 10,000 to 50,000 that have been shedding jobs and
now have physical footprints larger than their economies.
It’s a dynamic that plays into the state’s deepening urban
and rural divide, which has been increasingly visible in the
traditionally purple state’s politics. In 2016 and 2020, Iowa
supported Trump, but in 2020, more of that vote was in
rural parts of the state. As is the case across the country,
Iowa’s red communities have gotten redder, and its blue
communities bluer. At a high level, red is winning: Today,
Iowa’s governor, both of its senators, and three of its four
representatives in Congress are Republican.
Going into 2020, Iowa’s overall economy was flat. “It
wasn’t growing at all,” says Swenson. Unemployment spiked
like it did everywhere at the start of the pandemic but has
since fallen to 3.6%. Swenson says that’s less good news
than it appears: Iowa didn’t gain jobs during the year, it
lost workforce. Swenson suspects the dropouts are largely
women shouldering childcare responsibilities or people
who retired early for pandemic-related safety concerns.
Not surprisingly, how Iowans weathered the past year
and all of its unanticipated catastrophes depends on
where you look and whom you ask. And so this accounting
is a mosaic of many different individual stories, told as the
derecho blew, from west to east.
The picture it reveals, while distinctly Iowan in some
ways, is one that, from a distance, looks fundamentally
American in 2021. It reveals a society struggling to grapple
with a series of complex, interlocking issues at once—a novel
coronavirus and climate change; an economy and demogra-
phy in flux; a public bitterly polarized by politics. Sitting as
it does in the geographic middle of the U.S., Iowa functions
naturally as a microcosm of the broader nation. And the
questions it’s wrestling with echo those at the heart of our
current circumstances: How do you balance public health
and the economy? Personal freedom and the greater good?
Fear and science with blind certainty and belief?
In short, what can Iowa show us about our way forward?Like many people, I spent a lot of 2020 wor-
rying. Catastrophizing is something I’ve always been good
at, and so early last year, when the esteemed infectious dis-
ease expert Michael Osterholm told me that he expected a
novel coronavirus in China to spread like the wind, my mind
instantly went to my parents, both of whom are in their
seventies and one a lifelong smoker, in Cedar Rapids.
When I told my colleagues I was worried about my par-
ents getting the virus, they chuckled. In Iowa? That’s the
safest place you could be. This was the frenzied month of
February when we lacked such imagination that the U.S.
government was spending millions to evacuate AmericanScott and Jenni Birker on
their farm near Garrison,
Iowa. The couple were
already struggling with
the pandemic when the
derecho destroyed their
barn and damaged tractors.