Word: plows
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nebraska author Willa Cather made plowing seem poetic, even sensual. "There are few scenes more gratifying than a spring plowing in that country," she wrote, "where the furrows of a single field often lie a mile in length, and the brown earth, with such a strong, clean smell, and such a power of growth and fertility in it, yields itself eagerly to the plow, rolls away from the shear, not even dimming the brightness of the metal, with a soft, deep sigh of happiness...
...prairies were a deep lode of mother earth to be mined by the plow, and the settlers rushed in and onto the Great Plains, once called the great American desert. The Great Plains should never have been plowed, and the size of that tragedy was only fully realized decades later when the drought-dried soil was lifted by angry storms and carried as far east as the Atlantic coast...
...that time the plowman and his instrument were rooted in the American myth, a symbol of hard work, virtue and abundance that fed and freed most other Americans for pursuits beyond the farm. Plows of mounting complexity and size were hooked behind teams of oxen and horses and then to crude steam engines. In 1894 Nebraskan Sterling Morton, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, decreed that the great seal of the Department of Agriculture would no longer have a shock of wheat in the center; it would have a shock of corn -- and a plow...
Iowa painter Grant Wood placed the plow in the foreground of his landscape Fall Plowing, which hangs behind the desk of John Deere president David H. Stowe Jr. The painting has been used in countless texts on art and history and is worth more than $1 million. By 1922 nearly 700,000 moldboard plows were being built by all U.S. manufacturers. Then came the giant rubber-tire tractors that made it possible to link as many as 24 plow bottoms that turned the earth in great rooster tails as if it were water off the bow of a ship...
...1930s farmers had made plowing an art form and were competing in county fairs. Herb Plambeck, an enterprising farm reporter and colleague of Ronald Reagan's at Des Moines' station WHO, brought the contestants together in a national match that thrust plowing into power politics. In 1948 Harry Truman headed for Dexter, Iowa, where 100,000 people had come to witness the meet. Truman gave the 80th Congress hell, delightedly kicked some newly turned clods of earth as if they were Republicans, and came away with a huge grin, convinced that the reception he got from the dirt farmers meant...