The 75 persons who attended Liz Garst’s program “Peace Through Corn” at the Greene County Historical Museum in Jefferson Sunday were reminded how entertaining a history lesson can be.
Liz Garst is the daughter of Steve and Mary Garst and the granddaughter of Roswell and Elizabeth Garst of Coon Rapids, the Iowa farmers who hosted Nikita and Nina Khrushchev Sept. 23, 1959. Her presentation was hosted by the Greene County Historical Society and sponsored by Humanities Iowa.
With a generous sprinkling of humor, Liz provided Garst family history starting when brothers Warren and Edward Garst opened the first general store in Coon Rapids in 1869. Edward was Roswell Garst’s father. In with the genealogy, she told of the close relationship of Roswell Garst and Henry A. Wallace, secretary of agriculture, vice president, and secretary of commerce for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the originator of the hybrid seed corn industry.
With quick fire facts and easy explanations Garst traced the history of the hybrid seed corn industry, Roswell Garst’s role in marketing and taking hybrids to the fields of Iowa, and the changes hybrids made in agriculture.
Roswell Garst also introduced farmers to nitrogen as a fertilizer, and later to feeding corn cellulose to cattle, allowing Iowa to develop a cattle industry of its own not reliant on calves from the Western plains.
Roswell Garst was “very colorful, flamboyant, and had very original ideas,” Garst said about her grandfather . “He was a really well known agricultural innovator before the Khrushchev story starts.”
In the same storytelling mode, Garst recapped the history of the Soviet Union, saying that Stalin “raped agriculture” as he promoted the military and industrial growth with no attention given to food production.
Khrushchev had grown up in the more agrarian Ukraine. When he rose to power in 1955, “he inherited a catastrophe. His country was really hungry,” Garst said. “When he came to power he cared more about food production than the arms race, and that’s saying a lot. He believed that you have to have a strong food economy before you can have a strong country.”
Shortly after coming to power, Khrushchev made an off-handed comment in the world press that the U.S had good agriculture and that the Soviet Union needed an “Iowa Corn Belt.” That led Lauren Soth of the Des Moines Register to write an op-ed piece inviting a Soviet delegation to Iowa, calling on the Soviets to compete with the US economically, not militarily. Soviet spies picked it up, and Khrushchev accepted the invitation. He sent a delegation to Iowa in the summer of 1955. The delegation flew directly from Moscow to Des Moines out of security concerns.
Garst told how Roswell met the Soviets at a dinner hosted by his cousin Warren Garst in Jefferson, and then “crashed” the tour itinerary designed by Iowa State University and the Iowa Farm Bureau and took the delegation to his Coon Rapids farm.
(The official visit in Jefferson included time at the Jefferson Public Library, where Jefferson youngsters posed for a picture with them. Clockwise from bottom left are Judy Harper, Mike Kidder, Bobby “Cat” Anderson, Colleen O’Brien, Jim Grandt, Cat’s younger sister, Ann Seiler, Denise O’Brien, Karen Anderson and Geoffrey Kidder. Photo courtesy of Denise O’Brien Van)
In the fall of 1955, Khrushchev invited Roswell Garst to the Soviet Union to sell seed corn. The two met and became friends. “They were a lot alike. They were both storytellers, both country boys, and both a little bit on the crude side,” Liz Garst said.
Roswell returned to the Soviet Union in 1956. Another invitation in 1958 included Elizabeth Garst, and the official functions included Nina Khrushchev. It was Elizabeth Garst who reciprocated with an invitation to visit them in Coon Rapids.
Nikita and Nina Khrushchev were in Des Moines Sept. 22, 1959, and at the Garst farm the next day. Elizabeth Garst served them an Iowa style lunch under a circus tent in the yard. Liz Garst was 8 years old. She shared her personal recollection of the day, of being required to dress much more feminine than she wanted, of high spirited play and sitting on Nina Khrushchev’s lap. She remembers being kissed by Nikita Khrushchev, and she remembers his laugh. “He had a loud, big-bellied laugh, a lot like my grandpa,” she said.
Garst defended her grandfather against critics who said he sympathized with Communists. “Roswell was no Commie sympathizer. He was such a capitalist he’d sell to anyone, even the Communists,” she said.
Roswell Garst died in 1977; Elizabeth died in 1996. Liz Garst has stayed in touch with Sergei Khrushchev, son of Nikita and Nina. Sergei is now a US citizen preparing to retire from a career at Brown University in Providence, RI.
Prior to the Garst’s program, incoming Historical Society president Ces Brunow announced the next two programs, a Feb. 16 event inviting all residents – Society members and non-members – to spend a bit of time volunteering for or at the museum, and a Barbie Birthday Bash March 9. Also, the Society’s 2014 membership drive is in progress.
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GreeneCountyNewsOnline contributor Denise O’Brien Van shared the following after Garst’s presentation Sunday:
Dear Elizabeth Garst: I enjoyed your talk at the Greene County Historical Museum this afternoon…very much!
As a former DM Register reporter, I do have some info for you:
Lauren Soth was not the editor of the Register in 1956, when he won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1955 editorial inviting Russians to Iowa. He was the editorial page editor, a position he held when I was a Register feature writer from 1969 to 1973, and until he retired in 1975.
The editor of the Register was Kenneth McDonald, who lived to be 98, a farm boy who grew up near Jefferson and was graduated from Jefferson High School, sometime in the 1920s.
Your presentation was so cogent…You did a superb job of putting all the pieces together for your audience, many of whom lived the history you talked about.
Thanks….from Denise O’Brien Van
