This review, incomplete at best, would be unfair to the president of the Iowa Press and Authors Club were it to conclude without mention of the inspiration of her leadership. Mrs. Alice Wilson Weitz began life as a journalist at the Iowa State Capital. In the course of her busy and successful later career as wife, mother and public-spirited citizen, she has somehow found time to write on literary and timely themes. Her latest contribution to the state of her birth is a scenario entitled "The Wild Rose of Iowa" which was to have been produced on the screen in all the cities of the state; but, unfortunately, the film, prepared with great labor and expense, and with the aid of some of the best dramatic talent in Iowa, was destroyed or lost on the way from Chicago to Des Moines. It is to be hoped that this may soon be reproduced, for Mrs. Weitz' scenario admirably presented in symbol the whole story of Iowa's wonderful development from savagery to twentieth-century civilization.
A list of Iowa State University publications—a pamphlet of forty-one pages—includes hundreds of monographs, dissertations, etc., covering a wide range of original research.
It must have become evident from this incomplete review that Iowa is literarily, to say the least, no longer inarticulate. It is equally apparent, to those who really know their Iowa, that, far from being a dead level of uninteresting prosperity, our state is rich in suggestive literary material, ready and waiting for the authors of the future. Topographically, Iowa abounds in surprises. In the midst of her empire of rich rolling prairie are lakes and rivers, rugged cliffs and wooded hills, villages and cities set upon hills overlooking beautiful valleys through which streams wind their way seaward, her east and west borders defended by castellated rocks overlooking our two great rivers. Ethnologically, within these borders are communities of blanket Indians still living in wigwams, surrounded by communities in which are practiced all the arts of an advanced civilization. Sociologically, side by side with her native-born and native-bred citizens, are communities of Christian Socialists, also remnants of a French experiment in Communism, Quakers, Mennonites, anti-polygamous Mormons, and whole regions in which emigrants from Holland, Germany and Scandinavia are slowly and surely acquiring American habits of thought and life. Historically speaking, we have the early and late pioneer period with its rapid adjustment to new conditions, with its multiform perils developing latent heroism, its opportunities for character-building and for public service. Later the heroic period, during which a peace-loving people quit the plow, the workshop, the country store, the office and even the pulpit, to rally to the defence of the Union. Then, the reconstruction and the new-construction period, in which Iowa prospered under the leadership of men—men who knew their duties as well as their rights, men who recognized, and insisted upon recognition of, that "sovereign law, the state's collected will." And now, an epoch of reviving patriotism coupled with a world-embracing passion for democracy, in which the youths and young men of the state are consecrating their strength, their talents and their lives to a great cause.
[ [1] Editor of the "Midland Monthly" and author of "Life of James Harlan," "Iowa—Its History and Its Foremost Citizens," "An Old Man's Idyl," etc.
[ [2] Midland Monthly, March, 1894.
[ [3] Midland Monthly, February, 1894.
[ [4] Midland Monthly, June-July, 1895.
[ [5] Country Life in America, October, 1902.
[ [6] In the Midland Monthly, v. 6, p. 27.