Where pride meets fear

If you can make out what's in the background here--hills and woods--you might not believe the old street scene could be right here in northwest Iowa, but it is. That's downtown Peterson, and Peterson's just down the road, Hwy 10, about an hour east. Peterson is much older than most Sioux County burgs, largely because it sits along the Little Sioux River, and, mid-1800s, the rivers were freeways. Besides, everyone needed water. Thus, Peterson, circa 1918. 

Downtown Peterson doesn't look at all like this today, of course. For one thing, there aren't as many cars. The place just seems much smaller. Peterson may not be dying, but neither is it booming. Some of those stores are long gone, most are boarded up. It's been years since downtown was bustling, so long I'm not sure anyone who lives there remembers.

The picture itself is one hundred years old. . .well, 99 to be exact. It's an Armistice Day parade, a day of celebration because the war was over, the "war to end all wars," "the Great War." World War I was history, and the doughboys were coming home, at least those who hadn't died in France. What's in the old photograph is a victory parade. 

And it's led by the KKK. I wasn't surprised to see them here because I remembered reading long ago about the public face of the Ku Klux Klan in northwest Iowa, surprising as that may sound. What was surprising to me was the front-and-center role they played in a big victory parade. It's likely there was no Peterson Chamber of Commerce back then, no Lions Club or Kiwanis. I suppose the only social club for men was the KKK, who thought it only right to lead the celebration downtown, two by two. 

The elderly guy who showed me the picture has it up in a museum, his museum. I told him I couldn't imagine there were any African-Americans in Peterson, Iowa in 1918, and he agreed. "Oh," he said, "they found other people to hate--Catholics and immigrants."

The propensity to fear seems to be in us from the factory--our first utterance is a cry. There's hardly a time in life when we don't cower a bit in the face of something we see that's bigger than we are. Weather will do it out here on the edge of the plains, a beastly sky on a hot summer afternoon, clouds arising out west in brutal fists. 

Change will do it too in small towns especially, change of all kinds, anything to disturb the liturgy we're accustomed to and comfortable with. We cower easily, most of us. And we get handsomely proud of what we've got, what we've built, what we are. Pride comes pretty easily too, strangely enough.

But I'd like to think that hate isn't standard equipment. It rises in darkened hearts, especially when fear and pride commingle. What the orderly march these hoods created demonstrates is a commitment to orthodoxy, to us, to things staying the way they are. What it says is, nothing is going to change without a fight around here. Take note!--we're here to hold back the heathens and keep things pure.

Today in Peterson, there's no one around to lead parades--but then there are no parades either. Today Peterson, Iowa, is a museum, open only by arrangement, and there is no Ku Klux Klan.

Wouldn't it be grand if hate would die its own slow death? 

Dream on. It doesn't. Not here, there, or anywhere. Hate still meets where it always has in the heart of man, at the intersection of pride and fear.

And that intersection is just off Main, never all that far away.