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the character of a state is determined by the character of the people who inhabit it. Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. Of course, the creators of a biographical dictionary for any state in the Union could likely make the same claim. And yet. . . . John Schacht, one of our contributors, has made a serious argument that Iowa’s cultural climate , at least in the last half of the nineteenth century, might have made it more than coincidental that “a disproportionate share of the influential people of the 1930s came from Iowa.” In an article in the Palimpsest in 1982, he gives a long list of influential people in various areas, but focuses on four: Herbert Hoover, John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Harry Hopkins. “Aside from the towering figure of FDR himself,” Schacht notes, “it would be difficult to name four people as important in national affairs between 1930 and 1940.” Iowa’s influence, of course, was not limited to the 1930s. In an earlier time, national political figures such as William Boyd Allison and David B. Henderson carried considerable weight. Nor are significant Iowans limited to those who served in the political realm. Some were among the first Euro-Americans to explore the land that became Iowa (Allen, Kearny, Marquette). Others were among the Natives who were here when those explorers arrived (Black Hawk, Keokuk, Poweshiek) and lent their names to places that developed in their wake. Yet others developed some of those places (Burrows, Grinnell, Scholte). Some invented products that improved our lives (Atanasoff, Froelich, Tokheim). Some made significant contributions to fields of scholarship (Calvin, Seashore, Benjamin Shambaugh ). Others wrote literature, performed music, or created art that inspired our imaginations (Engle, Aldrich, Beiderbecke, Wood). Some advocated causes that changed society (Catt, Griffin, Wittenmyer). This being Iowa, many were noted educators (Sabin, May, Samuelson). We do not want to claim, with Thomas Carlyle, that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” But we do agree with the writer Samuel Johnson that “biography is, of the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is most eagerly read and most easily applied to the purposes of life.” We have gathered biographical sketches from a large number of contributors on as many Iowans who made significant contributions to the public life of the state and the nation as we could fit in one affordable volume . We culled these more than 400 names from a much longer list of over 2,000 names, almost all of whom could justifiably claim a place in this volume. Many of the names we include will be instantly recognizable to most Iowans; others are largely forgotten but deserve to be remembered. We are fully aware that a different set of names would result from the deliberations of any other group of people. (Even we, at a different time, would undoubtedly end up with a somewhat different list.) We were guided by a set of criteria that we established at the outset: Anyone born in Iowa or who spent at least 20 years in Iowa was eligible for consideration . We also included a few people who did not meet either of these criteria but whose contribution to Iowa was significant enough to make an exception (Marquette, Lucas, Atanasoff). We excluded, however, anyone who was still alive after December 31, 2000. This, of course, eliminates many people—Norman Borlaug, Louise Noun, and Robert Ray, for example—whom users might reasonably expect to find in such a volume, but it is a ix introduction common practice in biographical dictionaries such as this to include only persons who are deceased as a means of ensuring a full assessment of each subject’s entire life and impact. Except for those still alive after December 31, 2000, we included all Iowa governors, U.S. senators, and U.S. Supreme Court justices (Samuel Freeman Miller is the only one in this last category; Wiley Rutledge, whom some would include, did not meet our other criteria as an Iowan). We gave preference to people who made significant contributions to Iowa, the nation, or the international community, and within that consideration we gave further preference to those whose significant contributions were either specifically to Iowa or, if to the nation or the world, were made from a base in Iowa. There are certainly exceptions included here. We included quite a few writers who left Iowa...

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