Word: madson
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...none with more than 200,000. Crowding is almost nonexistent, and so the attendant evils of crime and hopelessness are minimal. The core of the population also has some link to those people who first halted on the tallgrass prairie and sank their plows. Writes Author John Madson, an eloquent native Iowan: "Grassland of such magnitude was wholly alien to the western European mind. It diminished men's works and revealed them to a vast and critical sky, and forced people into new ways of looking at the land and themselves and changed them forever...
...take the Iowa caucus as an accurate measure more seriously than the New Hampshire primary," insists Writer Madson. Its political system is almost free of corruption. Its kids always score among the top on national exams. "The accident of the caucuses in Iowa is a happy accident," declares Novelist Frank Conroy, a transplanted Easterner...
...wealth of the tall grass prairie was its undoing," writes Author John Madson, of Godfrey, Ill., in Where the Sky Began, his evocative story of the fecund heartland. Nearly a year's production of corn lies unused in bins and warehouses. A quarter of a year of soybeans is stored up. The Western plains are piled with a year's worth of surplus wheat. The harvest of the new wheat crop is almost finished, and it is a whopper: 2.2 billion bu. Providence seems to be pushing us toward some rendezvous with disaster. The Corn Belt is like John Bunyan...
...world. Unlike the pampas of Argentina or the South African veld, the North American prairie was molded in part by continental glaciers, which enriched the earth with a deep base of pulverized rock. "The original prairie soils are fluffy, loamy, aerated, and that contributes to amazing productivity," says John Madson, author of Where the Sky Began, a natural history of the prairie. The Rockies govern the climate, forcing the prevailing winds that blow off the Pacific to give up moisture and continue eastward too dry to nourish much other than the hardiest grasses--short in the dry shadow...
...much more than food and wealth is at stake now. In the great farm century a way of life was established that profoundly shaped the nation. The heartland became, in Madson's view, "a repository of traditional attitudes that are metered out through the root system in subtle but powerful ways. It is a region whose soil base has lent the freedom and stability that men need to reach free and stable conclusions...