Tom Harkin & Prairie Populism for the People
Great leaders are interested in what’s best for the rest.
It has been over a decade since Tom Harkin retired from Congress. Born and raised in the tiny town of Cumming, Iowa, Harkin attended high school for a year in Dexter, then for his remaining three years at Dowling in Des Moines. After graduating from Iowa State University in 1962 on a Navy ROTC scholarship with degrees in government and economics, he entered the U.S. Navy. He was a Naval aircraft pilot from 1962 until 1967. While working on the staff of Democratic Congress member Neal Smith, he attended law school at the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America, attaining his J.D. in 1972.
Harkin was the Democratic Party nominee for what was then Iowa’s 5th Congressional District in 1972 and lost to the incumbent, William Scherle. In a rematch two years later, Harkin won the contest and remained a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 10 years until he ran for and won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1984 by defeating the incumbent, Roger Jepsen. He chose not to have his name on the ballot in 2014 after serving in both houses of Congress for 40 years.
In 2013, Senator Harkin announced the formation of the Harkin Center for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement with Drake University. The Center’s emphases reflect Harkin’s interests as a member of Congress: people with disabilities, retirement security, and wellness, nutrition, water. (The Center is currently funding a study in part focused on effects of industrial agricultural on Iowa’s waters and those who live here.)
In keeping with the policies emphasized by the Center and with his long service on both the House and then the Senate Agriculture Committees, Tom Harkin emphasized six issues in a recent interview at the Harkin Center: the decline of rural communities; the effects of the current attempts to severely cut the Medicaid budget and what that says about Republican lawmakers; reflections on health care and the missed opportunities regarding health insurance; the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act, about which he acted as a primary sponsor and advocate; his advocacy of nutritious foods for children; and the potential of more vegetable and fruit production in Iowa.
Stop Rerouting Rural Life
Harkin said he’s seen many changes to rural Iowa: “The landscape is a lot different. My initial Congressional District took southwest Iowa and a lot of southern Iowa, all along the Missouri border over to Wayne County. When I was a kid, my cousin was a parish priest in Leon, and every once in a while we would go down to see him. There were a lot of sheep in that area…. It was all pasture land.
“You go there now and it’s all row crop. It’s all corn and beans. There’s still some hay ground…. The other day I drove from Onawa to Harlan. I always loved that road. I hadn’t been on it in 15 years. It goes through the Loess Hills. It’s just a beautiful drive.
“It’s still a beautiful drive, but you go up those hills and it’s now corn, up and down these steep hills. I didn’t see much terracing until I got down into Shelby County. North and west of there I didn’t see much terracing. The changes that I have seen in the use of farmland [since the 1970s and the 1980s] include that cow-calf herds were prominent at that time in western and southern Iowa. Hogs. I did work days on farms with hogs on an open pig lot….
“I used to visit vibrant small towns. Now, many are dead. The banks are gone. There’s not even a cafe any more. No grocery store. Schools are closed. And all this has happened in the last 40 to 50 years. Consolidated school districts have students riding school buses a long way. The schools are gone, so they don’t bring people together for attending school or school board meetings. Rural life has changed, and not for the better.”
Medicaid Makes Us All Better
Harkin spoke about the recent mass firings of federal employees and significant cuts to federal agencies and programs. He mentioned a phone conversation which he had recently with a woman who runs a business that assists employers in hiring people with a variety of disabilities.
“She said that all of these cuts that are going through now and people being fired, that the people being hurt the worst are people with disabilities,” said Harkin. “Because a lot of them work for a nonprofit organization and that nonprofit is, in some way or another, funded by a federal funding stream. People with disabilities are being laid off right and left. And no one’s reporting this. It’s a real-life consequence.”
He went on to talk about the effect of cuts to Medicaid. Harkin said that the supporters of these cuts claim that they want to save Medicaid for the ‘most vulnerable.’ “Just define for me who is ‘the most vulnerable,’” he said. “Where’s that line? Tell me, then I’ll know what you mean. Who are ‘the most vulnerable’? How about just ‘the vulnerable’? [These policymakers] just don’t understand what the real-life consequences of their actions are. It’s either that or it’s just meanness. People are just mean.”
When asked about the outcomes of significant Medicaid cuts, he responded with the question: “How are [Medicaid enrollees] going to obtain their drugs, and who’s going to pay for that? Secondly, how about the local nurses, nurse practitioners, doctors who are their [medical] caregivers? What do they do when they can’t get paid?
“[Medicaid enrollees] still need medical help. They still need to see a doctor or a nurse practitioner…just to keep from going to an emergency room. You know what emergency rooms cost. That’s a cost to the rest of society. It’s in the best interest of all of society that we make sure that people who don’t have the wherewithal to have good health insurance [continue to have access]…. We already have a problem with the unhoused. We’re gonna have more? We’re gonna have more people out there like that?”
“So you cut Medicaid, you cut the money to local hospitals and nursing homes…. I think that 50% of all the nursing homes in Iowa rely on Medicaid to keep their doors open. What happens when you cut Medicaid by even 10%? What do they do? You can’t operate like that…. I’m hoping that a lot of these senators from rural states like Iowa and others will start to understand this….”
Prioritize People’s Health & Improve Access
These comments about Medicaid led to a question to Senator Harkin about the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and his own support of a different version of that landmark legislation. He was one of the members of the Senate who supported a single-payer system.
“It would be great. Everyone would be eligible for health care. The cost of health care would plummet because you wouldn’t have a lot of money being taken out of health care for wealthy investors and, quite frankly, by a lot of private equity firms that are skimming the system. It all then would go to health care!
“And, if we’d have gone to single payer, we certainly would have put more emphasis on preventative care, keeping people healthy in the first place. At least we should have had a public-option system. And we could have if Obama had fought for it, if he’d really put it on the line, we could have had a public option.
“What that would have meant is that an entity...a state or another public subdivision, could offer the option of private sector insurance or a single-payer plan, a type of public sector health care system. It would be a ‘Medicare for all’ system. If you wanted to join that, you could. If not, if you wanted to go with private, you could go with that.”
On the topic of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the federal law that Senator Harkin is most connected with, he spoke about adapting physical access to buildings. “The Americans with Disabilities Act covers rural America, too,” he said.
He noted that part of the ADA includes tax benefits to help compensate for the cost of retrofitting a building to allow access to those with physical disabilities. He said he’d been told that the entrances to small local businesses aren’t accessible or that they don’t have accessible bathrooms. “The owner can get a tax credit — not a deduction! — for up to 50% of the cost of any improvements to comply with the ADA…. It’s for the simple things like widening a door or putting in an automatic door. This is a tax credit, not a deduction, so it’s right off the top. But a lot of people don’t know about it,” Harkin said.
Who Republican Lawmakers Ignore (and Why)
When asked if he thinks Republican legislators are out of touch with Iowan values, he again pointed to what works best for people: “[Legislators] who are voting for the Trump bill and that reconciliation bill, and had some before — I mean, they’re forgetting the basic people who live here.
“Even those people probably voted for them on the mistaken, I think, idea that these people are going to look out for their best interests.
“[Those legislators have] just become so enamored of the leader, Trump, that they follow the leader rather than thinking about who they really represent. That’s been a problem in the Republican party for a long time.
“I remember John Kennedy once was giving a talk before he was president — I think he was probably running for president. I even know who he was speaking to …the Liberal Party of New York. There was a Democratic Party, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, the Republicans in New York state. And I think he was talking to the Liberal Party that was started by or headed by Eleanor Roosevelt at that time.
“Anyway, he said that the elephant is a true emblem of the Republican party. He said, ‘If you ever go to the circus and you see the elephants in the ring, they always have the big bull elephant, and then every elephant behind him? They put their trunk around the tail, and no matter where that elephant goes, they all follow him around that circle. That’s what Republicans do! They get that person up there, and then wherever they go…’
“He said, ‘Now, the donkey is an apt symbol of the Democratic party. You can’t tell it anything. You’ve got to hit it on the head with a 2 x 4 just to get its attention. And then it’s ornery and goes off and does its own independent thing — this was a John Kennedy thing!
“I’ve often thought about that, and then watching Republicans today just fall in line behind a person who went bankrupt five times, has been convicted of a felony — well, you just go through the whole thing — who never, ever apologized or retracted that full-page ad he took out in The New York Times saying the Central Park Five young men should all be executed.
“As you know, further evidence through the years came out that they weren’t guilty at all. I think one of them is even an elected official today…New York City Council. He’s never retracted that. He’s never said, ‘Well, you know, I was wrong, further evidence shows…’ No! He’s never said he was wrong in that. And that’s our president.
“I think the definition of a dictatorship — is it not — when you have one person, as a leader, who makes decisions, and it’s implemented and carried out, and there’s no checks or balance.
“No one’s checked and balanced. That’s a dictatorship. Well, isn’t that what we have now? Trump makes decisions. ‘Do this. Do that. Do this.’ Everybody falls in line. The Congress won’t stop him. Well, will the courts? We can only hope so. There will be some cases coming to the Supreme Court, maybe this year, that will butt heads, we’ll see what happens.”
School Nutrition: Eat Well Through the Ages
The conversation turned to another topic dear to Harkin: nutrition and health.
“I started a program in 2002, when I was chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee the first time, called the Fresh Fruit and Vegetables Program in schools with an experiment in four states. Iowa was one of them,” he said. This was a demonstration program and was not food served in the school lunchroom. It was to be separate and apart from the day’s lunch.
“We kept it going. I was on the Appropriations Committee, so we kept it going and it became very popular among every school that opted in,” he said. “No one was forced to be in it or they could drop out any time they wanted. Of every school in those first four years, not one dropped out. I visited schools in Ohio, Michigan, and Iowa.”
Following the third year of this demonstration program, Harkin was approached by Senator Thad Cochrane of Mississippi. Cochrane had heard about the program and wanted it for his state. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania (another Republican colleague) sat down with the fellow from Iowa to ask about the availability of these foods.
“By the time that I got the Agriculture Committee back [as chair] in 2007, I took that program [nationally]. We learned from some mistakes…. [E]xpand it to every state in the nation, which we did. And we put a lot of money into it….”
“[Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr.] is saying that he wants to get fresh fruit and vegetables to the public. Well, here’s one place to do it. It’s in every state, but not every school…. The money that we put in [this program] for 10 years was supposed to reach a certain level and be inflation adjusted, but it never got there. The first Trump Administration cut it. We got a little bit more under Biden, but not as much as I wanted.
“And now Trump is back, cutting it again. And yet, his Secretary [of Health and Human Services] is out there saying that we have to get better food to kids in schools. Here is a proven thing that we’re doing and yet they are cutting the budget for it.”
Embrace a Growth State of Mind: Harkin on Farm Subsidies
The reflections on the national school nutrition program led to Harkin’s advocacy of the production of more produce from Iowa farmers and others interested in growing.
“You know, when I was a kid growing up, we always had a garden. We had a lot of fruit trees. We had apple trees, pear trees, cherry trees. We had three or four peach trees, and my mother would can it for the winter. And, we had a huge vegetable garden…all summer, we would have fresh vegetables,” said Harkin.
“If the agriculture subsidy programs were different, if we had just a smidgen of the amount of taxpayer monies that go to corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton farmers of America — just a smidgen of it — we can have a lot of profitable, small farms growing fresh fruits and vegetables, and even animals.
“It’s kind of a dream of mine, as of late, that…well, we’ve seen what immigrants have done positively in a lot of rural towns in Iowa. If it weren’t for them, those towns would be absolutely dead. And there’s one thing that has struck me about all of these immigrants, whether Latino, Latina, Vietnamese, Hmong, Sudanese, wherever. There’s one thing they all know how to do: They know how to grow stuff! And they’re good at it! Haitians…can grow anything! They’re wonderful at it.
“But they don’t have any land. They don’t have any money, but boy, could they ever grow a lot of stuff if we ever gave them the opportunity.
“They could put up greenhouses using electricity from wind turbines or solar panels. We could subsidize them just like the big farmers and get them started, like a beginning-farmer type program. They could put up hoop-type greenhouses for the wintertime.
“We could be growing fresh fruits and vegetables all year round here in Iowa. It could be produced at a price that people could afford. Would it be subsidized? Yes! But look at what we do for people who have 2,000 or 3,000 acres of corn and beans. If we just change that a little bit. Start a program for beginning farmers…beginning fruits, vegetables, organics, eggs, chickens. We really could rejuvenate a lot of rural Iowa.”
Senator Harkin’s final comments had to do with a longheld belief about USDA’s subsidy programs. He related that in 1977, when he was serving his second term in the House of Representatives, he and a colleague, Rick Nolan of Minnesota, made a proposal for the 1977 Farm Bill.
“We were not supportive of the kind of subsidy programs that were going on. We could see it moving to the bigger you were, the more you got,” Harkin said. “You got bigger and got bigger, and you got more government money, and you could buy more land….
“So, we came up with this formula. We turned it on its head. For the first increment of corn or beans or cotton or rice, you received a high support price. For the next increment, you receive a lower support price. The next increment, you got less. We figured out the average annual demand for each commodity. Beyond that, you didn’t get anything. So that meant that the smaller farmers got more and the bigger farmers got less, as a proportion of what they were doing. So, we brought this up to the [Agriculture] Committee. We didn’t get very far. That was our first foray into trying to change the system so that the smaller farmers got more and the bigger farmers got less. Obviously we failed…. So that’s why I say that if we could just turn it around, we could have subsidies for a whole new generation of new farmers.”
Sen. Tom Harkin’s comments were largely reflections on a 40-year career in Congress. But they are also the comments of someone who grew up in what was then a rural community as the son of a coal miner and a woman who put up homegrown fruit. His was hardly a privileged background. His opinions on “the most vulnerable,” access to health care, advocacy for the disabled, nutrition and the public’s health, and turning subsidy programs on their heads demonstrate his origins.
Bob Mulqueen grew up in Council Bluffs. His father’s forebears settled there in 1871, while his mother’s settled in Dubuque in the 1880s. Following graduation from Creighton University with a degree in history (and a stint as a VISTA Volunteer), he worked for two years for U.S. Senator Dick Clark of Iowa. After returning from Washington, D.C., and working for one legislative session in the Iowa Senate, he worked for U.S. Representative Tom Harkin for six years. While on the Harkin staff, he completed work on his Master of Public Administration degree at Iowa State University, then began a 30-year career in the Iowa Statehouse rotunda as a lobbyist for a number of nonprofit organizations, as well as four years with Governor Chet Culver in the Governor’s Office and in the Office of Energy Independence. He later worked for the Iowa Commission on Volunteer Service. He lives in Des Moines with his incredibly patient wife.
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