The screen saver on Stephen G. Bloom’s iPhone displays a typical Iowa scene: a golden cornfield in late summer, flanked by a grain silo with a rainbow overhead.
“I happen to like Iowa,” says Mr. Bloom, a professor of journalism at the University of Iowa, as he shows off the photo.
But the landscape, located about 20 miles north of his home, in Iowa City, is nothing like the unflattering portrait he painted of Iowa in a controversial piece he wrote for The Atlantic in December. The article, critics say, reveals him to be mean-spirited and contemptuous of people in the state where he has lived and worked for nearly two decades.
Mr. Bloom’s point was that Iowa—which he described as remote and desolate, swarming with meth addicts, alcohol-swilling hunters, and retrograde hicks—is not representative of America and has no business being first to cast votes for presidential candidates every four years. His timing was exquisite: The article appeared just before the state’s political caucuses in January. The professor sees himself as a truth-teller whose role as a journalist with tenure gives him a unique ability to say things that he acknowledges are difficult for people to hear.
The Atlantic article, “Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life,” has prompted mocking YouTube videos and fake Twitter feeds, reams of scathing online comments, and death threats, including a picture of an empty noose that someone faxed to Iowa’s journalism school with a note that called Mr. Bloom a Marxist and said, “Death to All Marxists.” The school notified the campus police.
At Iowa’s flagship university, the president has distanced herself and the institution from the essay, and some of Mr. Bloom’s colleagues have taken the unusual step of publicly criticizing his work, saying it was “riddled with inaccuracies and factual errors.”
One former professor with whom Mr. Bloom has collaborated now says he wishes he could remove Mr. Bloom’s name from their earlier project.
When told about Mr. Bloom’s article during a telephone town hall meeting with Iowans, Newt Gingrich, the Republican presidential candidate, said Mr. Bloom’s piece was “a pretty good argument for getting rid of him.”
Mr. Bloom is on leave this academic year as a visiting professor here at the University of Michigan. Will Iowa welcome him back next fall, and will Mr. Bloom be comfortable returning? The professor offers a hard-line answer: “Yeah, get used to it,” he says. “I will be back.”
Whether the people he writes about like his work “means nothing to me,” he says. “I know Iowa really well. It is my laboratory.”
Still, the virulent reaction to the story has clearly shaken him, and a small part of him wonders whether he will shy away from other articles about Iowa that are so hard-hitting. “The next time I embark on a project like this,” he says, “will I really want to follow through after all of this blowback?”
Career in Newspapers
Mr. Bloom, who is 60, moved to the University of Iowa from San Francisco with his wife and 2-year-old son in 1993. He had spent his career in the newspaper business, working for The Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, and The Sacramento Bee‘s San Francisco bureau. He was a feature-story writer who focused on unusual or overlooked characters, such as a Little League umpire and a down-on-their-luck Texas couple who were found dead in their car as a result of a murder-suicide.
“I never really looked at myself as an academic, and I still don’t,” says Mr. Bloom, whose highest degree is a bachelor’s in English from the University of California at Berkeley.
Before he accepted the position at Iowa, his only teaching experience was a year spent as a part-time journalism instructor at California State University’s campus in Hayward. Most professors in Iowa’s journalism school hold Ph.D.'s, but the university hired Mr. Bloom because of his extensive experience as a journalist. That gives him an “insider/outsider” perspective, he says, both in academe and as a reporter in Iowa.
Mr. Bloom earned tenure at the end of his fourth year and and in 2009 the School of Journalism and Mass Communication gave him a three-year award to recognize his professional work. Last year the students voted him the journalism school’s outstanding faculty member. But he doesn’t fit with what he calls “the arcane world of university professors.” Nor does he feel comfortable with “the blue-collar locals,” he has written.
His Judaism also makes him stand out. “Iowa is such a vast Christian kingdom that they don’t realize there is someone among their midst who doesn’t share their belief,” says the professor, who has lectured his students to say “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas.”
He considers himself an old-fashioned newspaper junkie. “The job of a journalist is to shine a light in dark places,” says Mr. Bloom, using a penlight to peer into the corners of his office at Michigan, just as he does in the classroom at the beginning of each semester. “You want to see if there’s dirt: cockroaches, mice, and rats. The essence of journalism is negative.”
The professor brought a framed poster from Iowa to his office at Michigan of the 1976 Watergate movie All the Presidents Men that features the actors Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (who portray Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein).
“These are my idols,” says Mr. Bloom, who adds Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe to the list. “My academic colleagues are interested in qualitative and quantitative analysis. I’m into the sheer beauty of telling a good story.”
Mr. Bloom left newspapers for academe, he says, because it allowed him to teach—something he found he enjoys—and still keep writing. And unlike his newspaper jobs, where editors often told him, “Give us a story on X,” he says, Iowa told him he could write about anything he wanted.
Since he took the job, much of his journalism has come to center on Iowa, a convenient subject where his insider/outsider role gives him a unique perspective. “I look at Iowa as just full of great stories,” he says. “Journalism is stuff that’s under people’s noses that they haven’t seen before.”
His piece in The Atlantic was so shocking to Iowans because, he says, newspapers there rarely take a critical look at the state. “Much of Iowa journalism is: Hey, let’s feel good about where we live,” he says. It was time that someone questioned Iowa’s prominence in the country’s presidential-election process.
“I had the temerity to raise a not-nice question but a fundamental question to American democracy: What is Iowa representative of?”
He also says he wanted to point out some of the state’s ills, including rural poverty and what he characterizes as the polluted and “crime-infested” towns on the Mississippi River.
But rather than highlighting problems so they might be fixed, Mr. Bloom’s colleagues say the professor simply attacked the victims. “There were some truths in his essay. Iowa does suffer from poverty, meth addiction, urban blight,” says Meenakshi G. Durham, an associate professor of journalism at Iowa. “To me, good journalism would not mock those who suffer from these problems. It would get to the root of them, their causes and reasons, and perhaps even point to solutions.”
Ms. Durham was one of four of Mr. Bloom’s colleagues who criticized his work in a statement published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.
A Professional Frontier
Despite the portrait he paints in The Atlantic, Mr. Bloom has flourished in Iowa. Unlike some academics with degrees from major research universities on either coast who would consider it professional suicide to spend a career in the Midwest, Mr. Bloom thought of going there as an adventure. “Iowa was like a frontier to me,” he says. “We went out there because it was an opportunity.”
And Iowa has always presented him with great material, he says. His first book, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Harcourt, 2000), details the struggle between native Iowans and ultra-Orthodox Jews who moved to small-town Postville in 1987 to open a kosher slaughterhouse.
Mr. Bloom’s book The Oxford Project was published by Welcome Books in 2008. His collaborator, Peter Feldstein, a former art professor at Iowa, photographed most of the 600-some residents of Oxford, Iowa, while Mr. Bloom interviewed 100 of them, creating first-person narratives. (Mr. Feldstein is so upset at how Mr. Bloom portrayed Iowans in The Atlantic that he says he now wishes he could take Mr. Bloom’s name off their book.)
While The Oxford Project was aimed at giving a voice to rural Iowans, in his other work Mr. Bloom hasn’t hesitated to poke fun at people of the state. He has mocked his university colleagues and even his personal friends. In an essay he wrote a few years ago for the Web site Inside Higher Ed, he castigated an anonymous junior faculty colleague who, he said, had “sneered,” “snarled,” and was almost “spitting” during a meeting at which professors disagreed about which journalistic luminaries should be invited to speak on the campus. The young professor, wrote Mr. Bloom, suggested inviting “Sy Hershman,” bungling the name of the famous investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh.
In a written response to Mr. Bloom’s piece, the young professor—Sasha Waters Freyer, who is now an associate professor of cinema and comparative literature at Iowa, said the way Mr. Bloom described her behavior simply belied his own elitism and male chauvinism. Mr. Bloom’s other colleagues have complained that he never told anyone he’d be writing about the meeting, and that despite using quotation marks in his piece, he hadn’t taken notes.
In Postville, Mr. Bloom takes lots of shots: at Iowans (“Never in my life, except at Disney World,” he writes, “had I seen such large and such white people”), at his academic colleagues (whom he portrays as being helplessly inept at using chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant during his job interview), and at an Iowa couple with whom Mr. Bloom and his wife frequently socialized. In the book, he renames them Joe and Rita Williams. He portrays Rita as the earnest daughter of a minister, who never misses a chance to bring up Judaism—PBS shows, the Holocaust Museum, Schindler’s List.
“It was as though Rita needed to purge any latent guilt she still carried because of her fifth-generation German-Iowa heritage,” he writes. “It was akin to white people from Georgia socializing with blacks, feeling guilty about George Wallace, and dropping names like Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Ella Fitzgerald.”
Bill Casey, publisher of The Daily Iowan, the student newspaper at the University of Iowa, says in an interview that his wife, Carol, recognized herself immediately in the Postville caricature of “Rita.” She was so upset that the couple ended their friendship with the Blooms. “He lacks any normal loyalty,” says Mr. Casey. “I don’t think he ever understood why she should be upset. To him, this is what he does.”
Kembrew McLeod, an associate professor of communication studies at Iowa, agrees. “He basically slandered the people of Iowa,” says Mr. McLeod, who was so incensed by The Atlantic piece that he wrote an obscenity on Mr. Bloom’s Facebook wall and called him a “smug, self important jerk.”
‘Truths’ or Errors
Mr. Bloom says his goal, as a journalist, is to reveal “unspoken truths.” But colleagues say his Atlantic piece made numerous errors. For one thing, it would have readers believe that most Iowans live on farms in isolated rural areas when, in fact, half of the state’s three million people live in just 10 of its 99 counties, near cities like Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, says Stephen Berry, an associate professor of journalism at Iowa.
Mr. Bloom also misfired on several other details: The very first sentence of The Atlantic piece says Iowa has 1,784 caucuses when there are 1,774. And he describes the 1994 Easter Sunday edition of The Gazette, in Cedar Rapids, as carrying the front-page headline: “He Is Risen.” The newspaper’s current editor searched the archives and found no such thing, but said the paper had run a boxed Bible verse on Page 1 that included the words “he is risen.”
Mr. Bloom ended his piece by writing about how when he walks his yellow Labrador retriever in Iowa City, it isn’t unusual for someone in a pickup truck to pull over and say: “Bet she hunts well.” Frank D. Durham, an associate professor of journalism at Iowa, finds that hard to believe: “We live in a historic district in Iowa City, and my house is right across from his. Everybody is a faculty member or an architect or a lawyer. That plaid-shirt lore that Steve is trying to pass on just doesn’t fly.”
Like Mr. Bloom, Mr. Berry was a longtime reporter before taking the university job. “If you are going to say the people of Iowa are backward and too old, unambitious, and part of a cultural wasteland, then that’s pretty serious stuff,” he says in an interview. “I could never, ever in any newspaper I worked for get those kind of allegations into print unless I had the evidence to back it up. He simply didn’t have his facts straight.” (The Atlantic ran several corrections, something that Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor there, calls unusual.)
Mr. Bloom is defensive about the complaints. “It’s 6,000 words,” he says. “I’m sorry there were some mistakes.” It was an opinion essay, he adds, not a news story. He especially bristles at the charge that he may have fabricated the story about his dog. “Trust me, I would have been caught a long time ago if I made things up,” he says, likening the accusations against him to the Salem witch trials. “Let’s suspend all rationality because we need to get this guy.”
He says he has received more than 100 e-mails from people, including former Iowa students, who say his portrait of the state was right on target.
Iowa newspaper reporters filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act to get copies of e-mails that Sally Mason, the university president, received about Mr. Bloom’s article, and the university released about a dozen from Iowa residents and university graduates. Several call on Mr. Bloom to be fired, and a few from current students and recent graduates express concern that his characterizations of Iowans will hurt their chances on the job market. Reporters have also requested e-mails that Mr. Bloom sent from his university account around the time The Atlantic article appeared.
Ms. Mason hasn’t made any move to fire Mr. Bloom, and she declined to talk with The Chronicle about him. But in a statement published in The Atlantic, she wrote, “I disagree strongly with and was offended by Professor Bloom’s portrayal of Iowa and Iowans. Please know that he does not speak for the University of Iowa.”
Gregory F. Scholtz, director of the American Association of University Professors’ department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, lived in rural Iowa for 20 years and says Mr. Bloom’s article doesn’t much resemble the Iowa he remembers. But he thinks the university’s president may have fallen short in her response.
“I can appreciate the PR problems this must have constituted for President Mason, but it seems to me that as the leader of a major research university, she would have done well to acknowledge Bloom’s right to academic freedom,” he says. Not doing so, he says, may “cause other UI faculty members to think twice about taking controversial positions.”
Mr. Bloom agrees. “Nowhere in Sally Mason’s statement did she mention the university being a marketplace of ideas,” he says. “She allowed this atmosphere of threats and hateful e-mails against me to fester.”
The professor likens his situation to that of Grant Wood, who in 1930 painted “American Gothic” based in part on his Iowa dentist. Mr. Wood was “hounded out” of his job at the University of Iowa, says Mr. Bloom, because Iowans didn’t like the painting, which they believed portrayed them as stern and unwelcoming, and because Mr. Wood’s fellow professors didn’t approve of his artistic style. (Other accounts indicate that the situation was far more complicated.)
No one at the University of Iowa, however, has suggested Mr. Bloom be fired. “I haven’t heard a single faculty member who hasn’t affirmed his academic freedom to say what he wants to say,” says Richard Fumerton, president of the Faculty Senate. “He has his freedom, and people who want to distance themselves have theirs.”
Mr. Bloom has never been one to let rich material go to waste. Just before a Chronicle reporter left his Michigan office after a day and a half of interviews, he mentioned that he planned to write something himself about the reaction to his piece in The Atlantic.
He hadn’t appeared to have been writing anything down during the conversations. But, he informed the reporter for the first time, “I’ve made notes on what you wore and what you ate,” that “you ate the inside of your taco but not the outside.”
“You,” Mr. Bloom says, “will be a major character.”
5 Things Stephen G. Bloom Said About Iowa
Quotations from “Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life,” which appeared in The Atlantic in December.
“On the state’s eastern edge lies the Mississippi River, dotted with towns with splendid names like Keokuk, Toolesboro, Fruitland, Muscatine, Montpelier, Buffalo, Sabula, Davenport, Dubuque, and Guttenberg. Each once was a booming city on the swollen banks of the river that long ago opened the middle of America to expansion, civilization, abundance, and prosperity. Not much travels along the muddy and polluted Mississippi these days except rusty-bucket barges of grain and an occasional kayaker circumnavigating garbage, beer cans, and assorted debris. The majestic river that once defined the United States has been rendered commercially irrelevant these days.”
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“In a perfect world, no way would Iowa ever be considered representative of America, or even a small part of it. Iowa’s not representative of much. There are few minorities, no sizable cities, and the state’s about to lose one of its five seats in the U.S. House because its population is shifting; any growth is negligible. Still, thanks to a host of nonsensical political precedents, whoever wins the Iowa Caucuses in January will very likely have a 50 percent chance of being elected president 11 months later. Go figure.”
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“In this land, deep within America, on Friday nights it’s not unusual to take a date to a Tractor Pull or to a Combine Demolition Derby (“First they were thrashin’, now they’re CRASHIN’!”). There are few billboards along the washboard-bumpy, blacktop roads that slice through the countryside, only hand-drawn signs advertising sweet corn, cattle, lemonade, or boar semen.”
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“The bulk of jobs here are low-income ones most Iowans don’t want. Many have simply packed up and left the state (which helps keep the unemployment rate statewide low). Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated [sic]) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”
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“They speak English in Iowa. You understand the words fine. ... But if you listen closely, though, it’s a wholly different manner of speaking from what folks on either coast are accustomed to. Indoor parking lots are ramps, soda is pop, lollipops are suckers, grocery bags are sacks, weeds are volunteers, miniature golf is putt-putt, supper is never to be confused with dinner, cellars and basements are totally different places, and boys under the age of 16 are commonly referred to as ‘Bud.’ Almost every Iowa house has a mudroom, so you don’t track mud or pig shit into the kitchen or living room, even though the aroma of pig shit is absolutely venerated in Iowa: It’s known to one and all here as ‘the smell of money.’”
Correction: This article originally misstated the nature of a distinction Mr. Bloom received in 2009 from the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is the Bessie Dutton Murray Professional Scholar, which is a three-year award, not an endowed chair. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
