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Volume 30, Number 4
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| Khrushchev in Iowa |
Coon Rapids, Iowa, was crawling with spies.
It was September 23, 1959, the day that Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev came to town to visit his friend, seed corn salesman Roswell Garst, and to witness cutting-edge American agricultural technology. The event drew hundreds of reporters and thousands of curiosity-seekers eager to catch a glimpse of the world’s leading Communist.
“The father of a friend of mine said that everyone I saw around Coon Rapids wearing a tie who I didn’t know was a spy,” says Liz Garst, Roswell’s granddaughter who was eight years old at the time. “I spent a lot of time checking out the cool spies on Main Street.”
Fifty years later, Liz and her sister Rachel are helping to remember that day with a three-day celebration titled “Khrushchev in Iowa.” William Taubman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, kicks off the event with a talk on August 27 at Drake University in Des Moines. Following is a conference at the Hotel Fort Des Moines the next day, and a number of activities in Coon Rapids on Sunday, August 29. It’s a chance to commemorate what some historians see as the first thaw in the Cold War. If so, some credit must go to Roswell Garst, a man who, Liz says, “made the world very interesting.”
“My grandfather thought he could do anything he wanted,” Liz said. “He was the sort of guy who would write the Pope letters or get on the train to yell at the secretary of agriculture. He thought that what he said could influence things.” His big chance came through an unusual combination of factors.
in 1959 (Roswell Garst, center; Khrushchev, third
from right).
A series of exchanges between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were arranged. Garst ended up showing the head of one Soviet delegation his farm and seed company in Coon Rapids, and in return was asked to visit the Soviet Union. During the trip, he and Khrushchev met and hit it off.
“Not only did Khrushchev learn much from Garst about growing corn, he liked him to no end as a person,” says Taubman. “Both men loved to gab. Khrushchev relished Garst’s cantankerousness, especially when it justified his own, such as when Garst bawled out Soviet farmers for sowing corn without fertilizing the soil.”
Some Americans criticized Garst for trading with the enemy, and some claimed he was a Communist. Liz says her grandfather was simply a good capitalist who was doing what was right for business.
The Khrushchevs landed in the United States on September 15, 1959. Their twelve-day trip included stops in New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Camp David. Garst was the only individual the premier met with besides President Eisenhower.
Press coverage of the trip stirred excitement among the Soviet people, including Humanities Iowa board president Valentina Fominykh, who, as a child in Kazakhstan, remembered the pictures of Iowa cornfields as being “spectacular. ” But Khrushchev was never able to replicate those cornfields back home.
Perhaps a greater legacy is the power of the individual to make a difference. “Roswell represented the first thaw in the Cold War,” Liz says. “He did it through the force of his will. We’re hoping that focusing on this anniversary will help young people to hear that message.”
| Time Travels |
Some thirteen thousand years ago, when most archaeologists agree that humans first populated North America, a Paleo-Indian tribe left a cache of stone weapons in southern Iowa, maybe to be finished and used later against ice-age mammoths. The cache is one of only a handful on the continent from that period, and it is now being carefully studied at Iowa State University. It is also the subject of an archaeology presentation featured in this summer’s weeklong RAGBRAI tour—the (Des Moines) Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa, now in its thirty-seventh year.
“Iowans may know about the Egyptians and their ancient history, but most are very surprised to find out that there are 23,000 recorded archaeological sites in Iowa,” says Lynn M. Alex, director of education and outreach for the University of Iowa’s Office of the State Archaeologist. “They are surprised by the number of tribes who lived here and by the depth of antiquity.”
Like other riders, the archaeologists will form a team and join 8,500 cyclists on the road, discussing the state’s sites and history informally along the way. More formal outreach will involve coordinating speakers and making presentations in the communities that host the riders overnight.
Archaeology presentations will focus on sites south of I-80, the highway that cuts across Iowa from east to west and roughly divides it in half. The southern route begins in Loess Hills, where archaeologists will show off their new tools, recently used to completely map a nine-hundred-year-old village without lifting a shovel. The tour ends near Fort Madison, the only battlefield west of the Mississippi in the War of 1812. Alex is particularly excited about the geophysical survey techniques used to reveal the houses and fortification of an early Native-American village. Developments in ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers allow archaeologists to see what lies beneath without disturbing the land or the remains: “We are always improving our ability to learn more.”
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