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I came across this information last night in a book on Iowa history. It struck me so that I wanted to share it here. What makes it really seem out of place is the context. This book is not a scathing report of Iowa's past. If anything, it is a fluff piece meant more to entertain than to inform. Then I came to this section:
"Between Two Rivers" by Allan Carpenter and Randy Lyon, pp 141-142
"When the Luisitania was sunk in 1915 with a loss of almost 100 American lives, Iowa woke up to the fact that a war was raging in Europe. The state was not so easily brought up to feverish war excitement as some of the less solid eastern states. Many Iowans proclaimed the stupidity of mixing in Europe's affairs.
"However, after the country made the plunge April 6, 1917, Iowa went out to win, as she had in former wars. When easterners complained about lack of enthusiasm in the Middle West during the early part of World War I, Iowa pointed to her growing record against the Germans.
"With 2 percent of the population of the country, Iowa had suffered 5 percent of America's deaths in action in the first year of the war. Merle Hay, an Iowa boy, had been one of the first three Americans killed in the war.
...
"While Iowa soldiers were making records on the field of battle, her civilians were fighting the war at home. Prices had gone up by hundreds of percent; rents sky-rocketed. Many personal rights were taken away. There were meatless, sugarless and wheatless days.
"Superpatriots ripped pictures of Kaiser Wilhelm from frames; the study of German was stopped in schools and Iowa's German population was poorly treated.
"Freedom of speech was almost entirely gone. At Davenport, Daniel W. Wallace, president of the League of Humanity, made a speech against the war. He has been terribly wounded as a British soldier and knew war at its worst. For this speech he was sentenced to 20 years in the federal prison at Leavenworth; where he died a broken man.
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"Before the end of the war, Iowans were mourning the state's 3,576 war dead. This was not the great adventure of the Mexican War; it was not a fight to save the union; it was not the volunteer affair of the Spanish-American conflict. Only peace can save democracy, but this was called a war to "make the world safe for democracy."
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This book is in it's second edition, but this particular passage was written as a part of the first edition, copyright 1940.
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