RAGBRAI After the Caucuses. Biking across a Red State in an Election Year (Part 3)
RAGBRAI After the Caucuses. Biking across a Red State in an Election Year (Part 3)
What happens when people vote against their interests? Town to town, it's evident in Iowa
We are pausing our regularly scheduled programming for a special election essay. In addition to voting, after canvassing the state of Iowa in July 2024 for the (Des Moines) Register’s Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI), I penned a 10,000-word essay on the reasons a vote for Trump is a vote against American and international interests, as I saw it across Iowa. It was not published by anyone, so here it is in digestible bits. Please read. Please read if you are undecided. Everything in Europe is not perfect, but Americans have fooled themselves if they think a Trump presidency and deregulation will solve its problems, as Iowa illustrates.
Day Three, Winterset to Knoxville: Immigration
All over Iowa — just like Germany, from which many Iowans originally hail — immigrants are moving, starting franchises of chain hotels, restaurants, and convenience stores. It’s a very American invention, the franchise, although globalized by Raymond Kroc in 1954 when he took over and expanded a local burger stand run by the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, California. Since then, franchises have fattened up people around the world with French fries, fried chicken, greasy pizza and lots of sugary condiments. At the Comfort Inn and Suites in Des Moines, — a Choice Hotel’s Comfort brand (including Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, and Comfort Inn & Suites) franchise owned by the daughters of Indian expats — serviced us with few questions and practically zero comments, their families putting up a million dollars in liquid capital, paying a fee up to $60,000, and giving a royalty fee of up to six percent to Choice Hotels.
As we searched for a food option, we found the only place open was called the Buck Snort American Restaurant, another chain of franchises serving mostly meat and fried food that was owned and operated by local Iowans, but serviced and cleaned by Latinos. As I picked at my Iceberg lettuce, grated cheese, and bottled Italian dressing salad, I watched a local Latino woman sweep up after Happy Hour. “If they let in some more immigrants, at least we could possibly have some better food options — they could start authentic restaurants,” I said to no one in particular, referring to the immigration crisis raging on the Southern Border. Then I turned my attention to Dad, suffering from gout and a heart condition, and watched him wolf down chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and fried okra — his “vegetable of choice.” He seemed slightly offended, as if the kind of homestyle cooking my grandmother once proffered wasn’t good enough for me anymore.
It seemed, like most everywhere, that people from the more highly educated countries who came to America on the visa lottery — countries like India and China and even Bangladesh — somehow found their way into the business service industry, while those from war-torn countries, such as Somalia, Venezuela, Syria, and Honduras, have taken the jobs that most Americans no longer want. But I also wondered how many immigrants from Mexico, as well as South and Central America, were now calling Iowa home. As it turned out, in the last two decades, Hispanics or Latinos have become the largest immigrant group in Iowa, comprising seven percent of Iowa’s population, or 221,805 people up from less than twenty thousand in 1970. They were the ones who turned up, despite the 2006 cocktail-reception “Come back to Iowa, please” by then-governor, Tom Vilsack — directed at young Iowans who had moved away — to fill a shrinking, aging workforce. Vilsack asserted that Iowa offered more than “hogs, acres of corn, and old people,” but the campaign eventually fizzled out and Iowa’s rural industries brought in migrants to slaughter pigs, milk cows, collect eggs, and build houses and schools. I recalled in 2014 Des Moines Register headlines splashed across the front page about immigrant children landing parentless in Iowa. Those children would be high-schoolers now, and likely working in a CAFO job. Ten years later, at our nightly hotel room stops, television pundits who weren’t freaking out about the ascendancy of Kamala Harris to the presidential election were absolutely losing their minds over brown people — both legally and illegally — entering the United States. As I drove through deserted roads, up-and-down rolling hills with nothing but a few barns and miles and miles of corn stalks in sight, I wondered, didn’t this state have enough room for everyone?
Iowa certainly had plenty of room when immigrants from Germany responded to the “pull” of reports of the fertile prairies back in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1850 Iowa census reported 20,969 foreign-born Iowa residents; twenty years later, the number of foreign-born had risen to 304,692, reaching its peak in 1890 when 324,069 people landed in the port of New Orleans, Louisiana and made their way up the Mississippi River to find those who had gone before them. Tired of the Kaiser’s wars, my own great-grandparents left their homesteads in Westphalia, then Prussia, and came over in 1876 and 1890. My great-grandfather’s family left behind a seven-hundred-year-old town doing a fair trade as a Catholic pilgrimage site for Saint Ida — a cousin of Charlemagne who devoted her life to the poor after her royal husband died — where elders had built a basilica and an albergue. But his family also left a dead brother and multiple cousins who had fought in World Wars I and II. Their names are now inscribed on the St. Ida Basilica walls. My great-grandmother, the daughter of a wealthy farmer, had more to lose. Half of her immediate family left for Iowa, while the other half stayed, married off and became hoteliers, restaurateurs, bookbinders, and soldiers in the Boer War, as well as the two World Wars.
My great-grandparents didn’t have to walk hundreds of mines across deserts or pay thousands of dollars for a “mule” to package them in tractor trailers or busted boats to get by border police, but they did endure an arduous journey. Aiming to maximise their profits, ship-company owners oversold, leaving poor immigrant passengers —many of them carrying lice or other diseases — cramped in close quarters and sleeping in dank clothing and on infested hay. When they did finally reach Iowa, they found bustling train depots in Fort Madison and Burlington, rich farmland just waiting to be tilled, Catholic communities building brand-new churches and relative peace — until President Woodrow Wilson entered World War I, at least. Social support was not abundant back then, but many had family members who had gone before them — almost an essential component if one planned on staying. But if clans had enough wealth, they pooled it to start banks, equipment dealerships, and seeding and fertilizer operations. Those who didn’t, worked for someone else or joined the military — just like home in Germany — if they hadn’t already aged out before World War II. But Iowa became a central repository for German POWs, where prisoners made friends with the expats and crafted nativity scenes and other devotionals to sell at the local fairs.
The attitude is much different now. Earlier this year, the state legislature — amid a push by Trump and Republican-led states to take over enforcement of immigration from the federal government — passed a state law allowing police to charge people suspected of being in the country illegally. A federal judge temporarily blocked SF 2340, known as the “illegal re-entry” law, signed by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds in April, which also made it an offense for people to enter Iowa after being deported from or denied entry to the U.S., or failing to depart when ordered. Storm Lake, one of the small cities in the Northwestern part of Iowa and on the 2023 RAGBRAI, has been one of the most affected by the “illegal re-entry.” From its founding, an overwhelmingly white, unionized workforce staffed the Storm Lake’s meatpacking plants, but when new owners of one particular pork plant busted the union in the early 1980s, they slashed pay and brought in immigrant laborers. Refugees from war-ravaged parts of Southeast Asia worked there first, then people from Mexico and others from Latin America. “Storm Lake is a much more interesting place today than it was in 1975 when I graduated from high school, but it’s relatively poorer than it was and that’s not the immigrants’ fault,” Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot, told The Guardian. “Everybody wants to blame the immigrant rather than blame the man.”
Before leaving Winterset, I stopped by a place not originally on my list: the John Wayne Museum. Built adjacent to the house where Marion Robert Morrison was born in 1907 — just three years before my Grandfather Brune in West Point — Morrison (who renamed himself John Wayne when he started appearing on the silver screen) was the son of a pharmacist and a homemaker who lost his American football scholarship to the University of Southern California, but found work immediately as a prop boy and then a muse to director John Ford. Wayne was Ford’s ultimate American hero — the man who oozed cowboy grit and who never left his woman, his God, or his country. And in fact, throughout most of his life, Wayne was a vocally prominent conservative Republican in Hollywood. He helped create the conservative Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944 before being elected its president in 1949. Wayne supported the Vietnam War, white supremacy (until the Blacks are “educated to a point of responsibility”), welfare-to-work, Americans’ right to take land from the Native Americans, Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, J. Edgar Hoover and his good friend, Ronald Reagan for president. The gift shop, stocked with every John Wayne movie, reproduction posters, miniature John Waynes standing inside glass baubles and even some authentic props (for a small fortune), still did a bustling trade more than forty-five years after his death.
It begs the question, however: if Wayne was born anywhere else but this tiny town, would he have a museum? In fact, Wayne spent most of his childhood in Glendale, California. For someone so revered at a point in American history, few Gen-Xers, even fewer Millennials and probably zero members of Generation-Y have seen a John Wayne movie — they probably couldn’t name one, either. Still, Winterset — on the highway to Des Moines — fared better than Eldon, Iowa, another town with a famous site: the house where Grant Wood made “American Gothic” his seminal painting. While Winterset seems as if it could survive with the Wayne Museum, a couple of taverns, a few antique shops and one particular store that buys estate furniture from elderly grandmothers and restores it for someone’s “shabby chic” apartment, Eldon had lost the deurbanization battle and was well on its way to a ghost town.
I once knew Eldon well. In the 1980s and 90s, my uncle who owned the fertilizer company, lived there with his family. Just up the street from the American Gothic house, which was occupied by impoverished renters and in great disrepair until the early 1990s, stood Roseanne & Tom’s Big Food Diner, the “loose meat sandwich” restaurant started by Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold when they decided to build a $16 million, 28,000-square-foot mansion — set to be the largest single family home in the state of Iowa. The restaurant nonetheless reignited interest in Eldon. The Gothic House was bought and restored, replete with a visitor center and another gift shop. People came and ate, maybe caught a glimpse of Tom or Roseanne, then posed in the American Gothic farm couple cutouts before picking up and traveling to their ultimate destination. But Tom and Roseanne famously broke up in 1994 and closed the diner, which had become the town’s largest employer. My uncle sold to the multinational company and Grant Wood’s moment came and went. On this last trip, nothing was open — not even the American Gothic Visitor Center. To me, all of these places seemed ripe for investment and renovation and even a bit of revolution. But the people in Iowa love Donald Trump because they don’t like or appreciate anyone telling them how to run their lives and their businesses. Tom Arnold, a loud, outspoken Democrat, moved back to Los Angeles. Probably no museum for him.
Day Four, Knoxville to Ottumwa: Cannabis Deregulation
One of the deregulations in Iowa that most people want is the access to medical cannabis and edible hemp products across the state — in fact eighty-eight percent of Americans say marijuana should be legal for medical or recreational use, according to the Pew Research Center. Ten years ago in April, Iowa policymakers made it legal to use marijuana for certain medical treatment, but since then, the same legislators who cracked the door, keep opening and shutting it, trying to regulate a drug that has been — at one point or another in its history — a key crop for the United States grown by its first president, George Washington, an 1850s pharmacy staple, classified as an illegal narcotic, and only distributed as a controlled substance. Unlike thirty-one other states, Iowa continues to arrest individuals for possessing small amounts of actual marijuana without a medical license, while neighboring Illinois, Minnesota, and Missouri has legalized all cannabis for adults. The consumable that is totally legal in Iowa? Hemp.
It makes for an incredibly confusing situation.
Hemp plants and marijuana plants look the same, smell the same, feel the same and are the same species. But hemp ( remember the rope sandals and the Grateful Dead pullovers?) is defined as a cannabis plant that contains point-three percent or less THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol — the principal psychoactive constituent of cannabis) while marijuana is a cannabis plant that contains more than point-three percent THC. Iowa legalized the sale of hemp products without necessarily specifying the amount of THC allowed, and would-be businessmen nonetheless jumped in and started producing gummies, drinks, vapes and other forms of consumables, sometimes using more than four milligrams of THC in each of their products. But in early July, the Iowa legislature passed a law that bans the sale of consumables to people under age twenty-one and requires hemp products to limit THC amounts to four milligrams per serving. Since then, hemp and head shops have proliferated across places like Knoxville, Iowa, the sprint car racing capital of the world and an overnight stop on RAGBRAI: in the strip malls next to the big box stores, in the town center next to the quilting boutiques, and adjoined to its gas stations and convenience stores.
I hadn’t heard about the cannabis phenomenon in Iowa full stop since leaving the states — only that New York and Oklahoma had legalized it — and that my father’s law firm had done most of the cannabis shop licensing in Tulsa. So as I drove from Knoxville to Fairfield to Burlington, Iowa — with my anger hitting peak over the election and Trump headlines, all the social ills I had seen, and my father’s backseat driving — I longed for a beer. Luckily, waiting for me on the last days of the ride was “Sky High,” a drink stand selling four-gram THC-infused hemp seltzer drinks for about eight dollars a can. I bought two instantly and then went back for two more. When I disclosed to Corey Coleman, the founder of Sky High, that I was so relieved to have a cannabis beverage — albeit a hemp one — to sip because of all the alcohol around, he told me that he, too, was “California sober,” meaning he was alcohol but not substance free. Corey founded Sky High in 2020 in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with his wife Taylor, and one could say they are possibly the perfect cannabis couple, devout practitioners of natural and legal alternatives for those looking for relief or “just a substitute to alcohol that’s all buzz and no hangover,” Coleman said. Coleman had been a Crohn’s patient and Taylor started her daughter, Evie, on cannabis after she was diagnosed with cancer at age two. They feel frustrated by the state’s waffling over cannabis. “(The state) had continually moved the goalposts,” Coleman said over the new limits. Governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican who aligned with Trump after her man, Ron DeSantis, withdrew from the race following the Iowa caucuses, has voiced concern over the growth of hemp products in Iowa. “I believe marijuana is a gateway drug that leads to other illegal drug use and has a negative effect on our society,” Reynolds said in 2022, while on a visit to the Alcohol & Drug Dependency Services of Southeast Iowa. She believes the burgeoning market for hemp-infused goods has taken advantage of the 2018 Farm Bill — a over-reaching law that distinguished hemp from cannabis and created a licensing and regulatory scheme for its production and sale.
But the honest-to-goodness four-plus grams of THC-laced everything is a welcome alternative to all the booze — a known carcinogen, key cause of accidental deaths, and suspected contributor to Parkinson’s and dementia — consumed everywhere in Iowa. The state department of health released a report in 2023 that found that the state is fourth-highest in the U.S. for binge drinking and sixth-highest for heavy drinking. While the pandemic resulted in record levels of statewide alcohol sales — almost $416 million in 2022 — the state report noted that as far back as 2007 that alcohol is the most frequently used mind-altering substance in Iowa. Fifty-five percent of Iowans twelve years of age or older drank regularly, and alcohol was the most cited substance of choice by people entering treatment.
RAGBRAI is almost as centered around alcohol consumption as it is around tourism. If the teams aren’t devoted to a cause, they are usually named around something beer-related: Team Daydrinkers, Team Donner Party, Team Strangebrew, or simply Team Good Beer. On paper, RAGBRAI recommends not drinking alcohol while riding, because of course, alcohol is a diuretic that also increases body temperature — and even before the climate crisis hit, overweight bodies pedalled along open roads in ninety-degree heat with little to no shade. This resulting in at least one death per year, usually from a heart attack, but also countless accidents from drunk cycling. Despite the website page devoted to healthy alcohol consumption during RAGBRAI, in 2005 a group of craft beer enthusiasts founded Team Good Beer with a mission to promote craft beer along the route. The team now has an international membership and even created a bar guide that would direct RAGBRAI riders to establishments that sold craft beer versus the watered-down lagers popular with farmers. In 2024, the event picked up a beer sponsor, Big Grove Brewery, which created Tailwind Golden Ale for its fiftieth anniversary. Lastly, however, alcohol sales are key to the towns RAGBRAI patronizes. When RAGBRAI passes through any given town, the influx of thousands of cyclists created a surge in demand for food and drinks, with eateries and alcohol vendors particularly benefiting to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars over their average weekly take.
Many researchers have attributed alcohol use in Iowa to the state’s German heritage, and my family certainly fits the consumption profile. In addition to the beers after the ride, my father drank sometimes up to seven scotches if not a bottle or two of wine per night, following in the tradition of my grandmother, who escaped her large family and its obligations with bottles of scotch stashed in the closet. Two of my father’s brothers had drinking problems at one point in their lives with one in-and-out of Alcoholics Anonymous at several points, opting at age seventy to start drinking again about five years after nearly dying from overturning his tractor into a pond, filling his tracheostomy with water and pond scum. He had been topping up on vodka while reaping corn for most of that day. Hayrides during family reunions were often led by uncles drinking mid-morning hairs of the dog; cousins aged fourteen or so sneaked cans of Busch Light to sip behind their parents’ backs and coerced their younger cousins — ages eight, nine, and ten into trying it. One of those cousins visited his mother, my aunt, during our stopover in Knoxville. Since my aunt’s second husband, an avid drinker, smoker, and hunter died of Covid-19 in early 2021, he has visited and cared for her regularly. During this particular visit, he brought a case of Busch Light and drank more than half of it over dinner.
