Corn Kings and One-Horse Thieves
Odds & ends
Illinois past and present, as seen by James Krohe Jr.
The Corn Latitudes
"Is Your Flag Showing?"
Downstaters are patriotic. Who knew?
Illinois Times
January 4, 1980
Public television, under constant pressure from Congress to confirm its credentials as actual Americans, likes to occasionally solicit the views of country bumpkins who confirm PBS's stereotypes about us'ns in the Midwest. So it happened during the Iran hostage episode, when PBS asked a smalltown Illinoisan to Washington to share her views, thus sparing PBS having to send a reporter to ask her.
At 6:30 in the evening of December 20, central Illinois viewers who tuned in to watch PBS's "MacNeil-Lehrer Report" were surprised to see Dale Lewis Barker, the editor-publisher of Beardstown's Illinoian-Star, sharing a desk with that program's Washington moderator, Jim Lehrer, and discussing the hostage crisis in Iran. They were surprised because Beardstonians' views on world affairs are not habitually solicited by the Eastern media (including even those forty-five miles to the east in Springfield). But those viewers probably were no more surprised to see Barker on the tube than Barker was to be there. Having safely returned to Illinois and to her newspaper offices—located on Wall Street, by the way, which goes to show you don't need a fancy name to have a fancy address—Barker talked about her startling ascendancy into the ranks of the nation's opinion-makers.
"Let me start at the beginning. Back on November 12, I wrote an editorial. I was pretty hot under the collar, like most Americans, about the Iranian situation. I said that I felt that patriotism had bottomed out in this country during the Vietnam encounter, and I said I thought it was time we woke up and did something about it.
''But what could we do? We could try to get huge numbers of people together and march around Washington, but that wouldn't do any good. We needed something to show those people in Iran that you just can't go pushing around the United States of America like that. Well, I called upon our people to fly the flag. The Fourth of July in this town is usually a red, white, and blue day. So I told people to fly their flag, and if they didn't have a flag, to get one, to do something.
"A day or two later, I got in my car with my camera, and I betcha I spent two hours driving around and taking pictures of flags flying in front of homes and businesses all over town. Finally it hit the AP wire, and that's how they heard about it in Washington. Of course I was surprised when the call came from their Washington office. It was Tuesday afternoon. The advance lady discussed it with me and told me they were attempting to get people from smaller papers from other parts of the country together who could give them the pulse and tell them what the down-home folks were thinking. They wanted to know if I could come to Washington in twenty-four hours. I said yes. I left Thursday morning and made a twenty-four hour trip to Washington and back during holiday traffic—which I wouldn't recommend."
Barker had to overcome an inopportune case of laryngitis and a Washington cabbie who took twenty minutes to make what should have been a five minute trip to the WETA studios (a moonlighting bureaucrat, no doubt) to make her appearance. According to one of the proud hometown viewers, she held her own—not surprising, really, since Barker is a television veteran, having had a dog show on Memphis TV some years back—with journalists from Oakland, California (whose citizens are as down-home as folks get in California), Bangor, Maine, and Greenwood, Mississippi.
"I was a little jangled by one thing. I understood from our original discussion that we would talk about what our towns had done. I took a briefcase full of newspapers to do my homework and jog my memory about some of the things we'd done here. When we got there we found out that the Iran crisis in general was to be discussed. I was a little disturbed. It was an adventure."
Before she left for Washington, Barker had managed to squeeze a plug for her impending appearance in her paper. (Beardstonians watch MacNeil-Lehrer on WILL-TV via the local cable TV system.) It is uncertain how large the audience was, partly because MacNeil-Lehrer is one of those shows people say they watch but never do, partly because, as Barker notes, "It all happened so fast," and Beardstown continues to live by its own, less harried pace. The show was seen, however, as reaction the next few days proved. "We had a lot of comments and letters from people expressing how grateful they were to be represented to the nation. Also, we've gotten letters from all over the country."
Barker likes to say that it wasn't she who was invited to Washington to be on national TV really, but Beardstown, and one of the reasons she was disturbed at the unexpected turn the discussions took in the studio was because Beardstown was and is more important to her than Iran, in ways the people in Washington might not understand. "A week after we got in this thing," she recalls, "there were no flags left to buy anywhere in Beardstown. Well, the Jacksonville Courier has a supply of flags (Barker did not explain why, nor did I ask) and they very graciously let us buy their flags and resell them here at the office for our cost. We've probably sold something like 150 flags since we started. Mind you, we're talking about a town of 6,000 people. It is very much a thrill to drive around our town and see six or eight houses in a row with Old Glory shining. It's very, very touching."
Barker is doing her bit to keep Old Glory shining in Beardstown. On the Illinoian-Star's banner, just above where it says, "Cass County's Largest and Only Daily Newspaper,'' she now prints a flag with an admonition phrased in the form of the question, "Is your flag showing?" "President Carter announced on December 17, I think it was, his National Unity Flag Day. That's a month after we started. I don't know, but I like to think we started the whole thing here in Beardstown. We can't claim Old Glory for ourselves. It just makes me thrilled to think that we paved any kind of road for the nation.
"I think a lot of people don't understand small towns," Barker concludes, "and that's really their loss. Every small town has its ups and downs. But it's a hell of a nice thing to know your neighbor. I think we've got a town full of people full of care.'' □
SITES
OF
INTEREST
Essential for anyone interested in Illinois history and literature. Hallwas deservedly won the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society.
One of Illinois’s best, and least-known, writers of his generation. Take note in particular of The Distancers and Road to Nowhere.
See Home Page/Learn/
Resources for a marvelous building database, architecture dictionary, even a city planning graphic novel. Handsome, useful—every Illinois culture website should be so good.
The online version of The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Crammed with thousands of topic entries, biographical sketches, maps and images, it is a reference work unmatched in Illinois.
The Illinois chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2018 selected 200 Great Places in Illinois that illustrate our shared architectural culture across the entire period of human settlement in Illinois.
A nationally accredited, award-winning project of the McLean County Historical Society whose holdings include more than 20,000 objects, more than 15,000 books on local history and genealogy, and boxes and boxes of historical papers and images.
Mr. Lincoln, Route 66, and Other Highlights of Lincoln, Illinois
Every Illinois town ought to have a chronicler like D. Leigh Henson, Ph.D. Not only Lincoln and the Mother road—the author’s curiosity ranges from cattle baron John Dean Gillett to novelist William Maxwell. An Illinois State Historical Society "Best Web Site of the Year."
Created in 2000, the IDA is a repository for the digital collections of the Illinois State Library and other Illinois libraries and cultural institutions. The holdings include photographs, slides, and glass negatives, oral histories, newspapers, maps, and documents from manuscripts and letters to postcards, posters, and videos.
The people's museum is a treasure house of science and the arts. A research institution of national reputation, the museum maintains four facilities across the state. Their collections in anthropology, fine and decorative arts, botany, zoology, geology, and history are described here. A few museum publications can be obtained here.
“Chronicling Illinois” showcases some of the collections—mostly some 6,000 photographs—from the Illinois history holdings of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.
I will leave it to the authors of this interesting site to describe it. "Chicagology is a study of Chicago history with a focus on the period prior to the Second World War. The purpose of the site is to document common and not so common stories about the City of Chicago as they are discovered."
Illinois Labor History Society
The Illinois Labor History Society seeks to encourage the preservation and study of labor history materials of the Illinois region, and to arouse public interest in the profound significance of the past to the present. Offers books reviews, podcasts, research guides, and the like.
Illinois Migration History 1850-2017
The University of Washington’s America’s Great Migrations Project has compiled migration histories (mostly from the published and unpublished work by UW Professor of History James Gregory) for several states, including Illinois. The site also includes maps and charts and essays about the Great Migration of African Americans to the north, in which Illinois figured importantly.
An interesting resource about the history of one of Illinois’s more interesting places, the Fox Valley of Kendall County. History on the Fox is the work of Roger Matile, an amateur historian of the best sort. Matile’s site is a couple of cuts above the typical buff’s blog. (An entry on the French attempt to cash in on the trade in bison pelts runs more than
2,000 words.)
BOOKS
OF INTEREST
Southern Illinois University Press 2017
A work of solid history, entertainingly told.
Michael Burlingame,
author of Abraham
Lincoln: A Life
One of the ten best books on Illinois history I have read in a decade.
Superior Achievement Award citation, ISHS Awards, 2018
A lively and engaging study . . . an enthralling narrative.
James Edstrom
The Annals of Iowa
A book that merits the attention of all Illinois historians
as well as local historians generally.
John Hoffman
Journal of Illinois HIstory
A model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.
Harold Henderson
Midwestern Microhistory
A fine example of a resurgence of Midwest historical scholarship.
Greg Hall
Journal of the Illinois
State Historical Society
Click here
to buy the book
Southern Illinois University Press
SIU Press is one of the four major university publishing houses in Illinois. Its catalog offers much of local interest, including biographies of Illinois political figures, the history (human and natural) and folklore of southern Illinois, the Civil War and Lincoln, and quality reprints in the Shawnee Classics series.
The U of I Press was founded in 1918. A search of the online catalog (Books/Browse by subject/Illinois) will reveal more than 150 Illinois titles, books on history mostly but also butteflies, nature , painting, poetry and fiction, and more. Of particular note are its Prairie State Books, quality new paperback editions of worthy titles about all parts of Illinois, augmented with scholarly introductions.
The U of C publishing operation is the oldest (1891) and largest university press in Illinois. Its reach is international, but it has not neglected its own neighborhood. Any good Illinois library will include dozens of titles about Chicago and Illinois from Fort Dearborn to
Vivian Maier.
Northern Illinois University Press
The newest (1965) and the smallest of the university presses with an interest in Illinois, Northern Illinois University Press gave us important titles such as the standard one-volume history of the state (Biles' Illinois:
A History of the Land and Its People) and contributions to the history of Chicago, Illinois transportation, and the Civil War. Now an imprint of Cornell University Press.
Reviews and significant mentions by James Krohe Jr. of more than 50 Illinois books, arranged in alphabetical order
by book title.
Run by the Illinois State Library, The Center promotes reading, writing and author programs meant to honor the state's rich literary heritage. An affiliate of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book, the site offers award competitions, a directory of Illinois authors, literary landmarks, and reading programs.