Iowa Republicans Are Erasing the State’s History

Sixty percent of the historical society archives are being trashed with no transparency

Suzan Erem July 24, 2025

Your house has been robbed. You can’t quite remember if there was an heirloom statue on that shelf or a treasured photo on that bookcase. You know you’ve lost something. You feel violated. And it’s too late to do anything about it.

That’s what’s happening right now with Iowa’s history.

In 2023, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed Senate File 514, which cut the number of cabinet-level departments from 37 to 16 and introduced Iowa’s new “brand,” with the tagline “Freedom to Flourish.” She placed the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) under the auspices of the Department of Administrative Services (DAS), because, well, she could.

In 2024, she instituted tax cuts and budget balancing.

Then in June of this year, claiming staffing shortages, DAS announced it was ending publication of the Historical Society’s 163-year-old Annals of Iowa, the one-stop shop for all Iowa history in print form. For generations, this quarterly journal has been a treasured resource for every high school student doing an Iowa history project and the go-to for college students wanting to see themselves in Iowa’s past.

Because of the money? No. The journal actually paid for itself.

“There seems to be a lot of people these days who are afraid of history,” says Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, an Iowa State University professor of rural and agricultural history who’s been affiliated with the Annals for 30 years. “This journal that’s existed for so long is not political. Sometimes it does touch on issues that are controversial, but that’s what you’re going to find in history.”

She fears the worst. “There are so few outlets for telling the history of this state. If we lose [the Annals] Iowa history is simply going to disappear.”

The hatchet job has continued. This year, the Historical Society received half of the funding it requested. The feds cut off more. Then the state pawned off maintenance of the Historical Society’s Centennial Building in Iowa City, its original home that later served as the Eastern Iowa research center once the State Historical Building was built in Des Moines in 1987.

In 1960, when the Centennial Building was dedicated, the head of the Historical Society called it the “most significant event in the society’s 103-year history.” Now it’s a nail in the society’s coffin. But it’s also a lightning rod for the community.

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At a June 26 SHSI trustees meeting in Des Moines, SHSI administrator Valerie Van Kooten justified the closure by claiming duplication between Des Moines and Iowa City, a charge that archivists passionately contest.

“The archival materials there absolutely do not duplicate anything in Des Moines,” says Mary Bennett, who worked at an archivist in the Centennial Building for 50 years. Bennett participated in organizing and parsing out the archives when the new building opened in Des Moines. She named the few archives duplicated so that University of Iowa students could have easy access to them.

Reynolds appointee Adam Steen, the director of DAS, never consulted the trustees but took questions at the meeting about shutting down the 37,500-square-foot facility in Iowa City. He admitted that only 40% of the Iowa City archive would survive the move.  

Bennett was seething.

“When the group of people got together in 1857 in Iowa City and created this organization, it was to create a permanent record for Iowa, not one that would be dispersed 166 years later,” she told administrators. “We were the Library of Congress for the state of Iowa. What business is it of yours to destroy what we built as our legacy, as our history, my ancestors’ history?”

Rebecca Conard, an Iowa historian who has worked with the SHSI in various capacities for nearly 50 years, was clearly unimpressed with Steen or his wingman Tony Jahn, a former Target executive who is the state’s “Library and Archives Bureau Chief.”

“State Archivist Tony Jahn tried to reassure folks that his staff would evaluate which collections had ‘statewide interest,’ whatever that means, and would go to Des Moines and which would be de-accessioned and go elsewhere or possibly be destroyed,” Conard wrote in an Iowa City Press-Citizen opinion piece.

A group called the Save Iowa History Coalition has launched a petition drive on Change.org. To date, it has gathered nearly 1,900 signatures.

Future historians will feel the loss along with Iowans across half of the state.

“Closing the State Historical Society of Iowa facility in Iowa City is going to do irreparable harm to Iowans’ access to their own history in ways that many people in the state may only become aware of in the months and years to come,” says Shel Stromquist, history professor emeritus at the University of Iowa. “The collections of church records, diaries of Civil War soldiers, family genealogies, farm families’ financial records, union and fraternal society records and countless more are priceless.”

What could be lost

For less than $1 million per year of a $9.4 billion budget, Eastern Iowans will lose 60% of their historical documents. Which 60%? We may never know.

Bennett describes one man’s 50,000 photos taken during the Great Depression that document an Iowa family finally getting a paved driveway or another getting their first cook stove. Those photos became a PBS documentary and a book called Bountiful Harvest.

She says an oral history of Northwest Iowa Century Farm owners documents the transition of family-scale farms to industrial farms in the simple telling of individual stories.

“I don’t think they could’ve captured that in any other way,” she says.

Among the other irreplaceable archives that could be disappeared:

  • The cherished autographed Bob “the Heater from Van Meter, [IOWA]” Feller baseball card could be sold to the highest bidder.
  • A 160-year-old Civil War hymnal.
  • The history of Native American women who were the first corn farmers in Iowa.  
  • Historical documents of how banks advised farmers to go into extreme debt in the late 1970’s, then how those same farmers got blamed for the ensuing farm crisis
  • The history of the federal government’s key role in the establishment of Granger, now a posh suburb of Des Moines. Granger Homesteads were publicly-funded new homes with plots of land large enough for a few cows and chickens. They were designed for low-income people to combine agriculture to support themselves as they toiled as industrial laborers.
  • The story of how the State of Iowa declared martial law on Cedar County farmers—all Iowa Farmers Union members—when they wouldn’t let Iowa State University veterinarians onto their farms to test their cows for tuberculosis.

Let’s be clear: This isn’t about budget shortfalls or priorities. This is an ideological attack on Iowa’s collective good, one that promotes first the idea that government should be run like a business and second, that the CEO gets to decide everything with no transparency or accountability to the public.

The death by a thousand cuts of the State Historical Society seems in line with the anti-historical agenda of Gov. Kim Reynolds and her fellow Christian Nationalists who control the Iowa House and Senate.

On May 15, 2024, Iowa passed a law detailing how social studies must be taught in Iowa’s public schools. Mandatory subjects include “the discovery of the Western hemisphere through the present” (teaching of Native history is not required), “the United States federal and republican form of government,” and “the secular and religious ideals and institutions of liberty” in “Western Civilization, the United States and Iowa.” In keeping with Christian Nationalist ideology, the word “democracy” is not mentioned once.

Add to that Reynolds’ anti-government ideology. As she told Congress earlier this year, Iowa was “doing DOGE before DOGE was a thing.”

Mary Bennett watched it happen.

“We’ve had hatchet men and women in charge for 10 years or more,” she told the trustees. “This [closure] is because we have starved this organization slowly over decades, and we’ve abandoned programs that were essential to that history.”

Short-sighted bean counters

Steen admitted his own radical rightwing politics at the June 26 SHSI trustees meeting.

“Money comes in, money goes out, and if more money is going out than coming in, we have a problem with sustainability,” he said.

There’s no room for public good in this approach. There’s no room for the unemployed, independent family farmers, immigrants, people of color, working people, students, single parents, people with disabilities or crime victims. There’s no room for state parks or clean water for that matter. In fact, public good is frowned upon. Yet public good is the government’s job.

Imagine demanding our local police bring in more money than they spend fighting crime. Or fire departments or ambulance services expecting 50% up front before services are rendered. We might say the same of the courts, but offenders are now charged court fees over $1,200—more than most rural Iowans can pull together in a pinch—for the dubious honor of being declared guilty. Public schools are nickel and diming parents with activity and materials fees for what? The self-serving decision to have children?

The privateers have taken over. They’ve decided they can toss out whatever parts of government they don’t like, including whatever parts of Iowa’s history don’t fit their story.

Resistance to the closure still has fuel. The State Historical Society Inc. of Iowa, a nonprofit formed in 1983, owns and controls the trust fund that preserves archives prior to 1974. It is meeting this week to determine how it can impact the state’s decision. Archivists and historians are planning new protests. A legal fight may be in the works. The petition continues to grow.

In today’s environment, appeals to morality seldom make a difference. That doesn’t stop Bennett from trying.

“Shame on all of you for not speaking up for academia in Iowa, for the school child that does History Day,” she told the trustees and administration representatives. “And I’m sorry, but this is erasing our history.”

Erasing our history is exactly the point. Just wait until they start to redraw it in their own image.

Suzan Erem is a fruit and nut farmer, working writer and community organizer in rural Cedar County, Iowa. Her Substack is Postcards from the Heartland. Her farm can be found at DracoHill.org.

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