American Chronicles: The Pitchfork of History

Beyond the myth of rural America.

- By Daniel Immerwahr

Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us cant help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States. The painting was also decidedly enigmatic. Was it biting satire? Grim realism? Proud patriotism? In the words of the late Thomas Hoving, a longtime director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the image served as a Rorschach test for the character of the nation.”

For Wood, however, the meaning was clear. Although he faced "a storm of protest from Iowa farm wives’—one threatened to "smash my head,” he recalled— he had painted "American Gothic” with sympathy. Cities dominated culture, he wrote, yet they were far less typically American” than the rural places "whose power they usurped.” In 1935, Wood, who was born on an Iowa farm forty-four years earlier, published the manifesto "Revolt Against the City.”

In decrying urban dominance, Wood had a point. The 1920 census marked the first time that urbanites made up a majority of the nation’s population, and city dwellers weren't humble about their ascendance. New magazines like H. L. Mencken’s