The microwave popped out of a bunch of refugees

George Foerstner

Imagine 1,500 foreigners showing up in rural Iowa who can’t speak English, are pacifists, refuse to take loyalty oaths, live communally with no pay, and shun social convention.

Arrest them! Then deport them! That’s what you do these days.

Fortunately for coffee drinkers and defrosters, Iowa was not such a backwards place in the long yonder past. A sect of radical Christians who rejected dogma got run out of France and then Germany, bought freedom by purchasing land from the Seneca people near Buffalo, and eventually got elbowed out of New York for their unorthodox ways.

They came to Iowa in 1855 and set up the Amana Colonies where nobody would bother them. The outcasts gave us home-style cooking, quaint trades shops and the microwave oven. Were it not for the Community of True Inspiration (Radical Pietists and theological cousins to the Baptists and E-Free denominations), we would not have had George Foerstner, whose parents were among those pioneers. George grew up in the shop tinkering. Recognizing that the end of Prohibition would create demand for cold beer, he made a fridge. He started Amana Refrigeration, and in 1967 introduced the Radar Range counter-top microwave.

Then there was Fred Maytag, anchor baby among 10 born to German immigrants Amelia and Daniel Maytag, who built washers and dryers that never broke down. Maytag built Newton. Later generations peed it away.

Anchor baby John Vincent Atanasoff was born to Bulgarian immigrants. He earned his undergraduate degree at Iowa State in Ames, and returned with his PhD to teach and invent the computer. Of course we let him and the computer get away from us but we at least have bragging rights.

Our politicians — lookin’ straight atcha, Ashley Hinson — boast about how tough they are on immigration. Just last week Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee was moaning and groaning about birthright tourists who keep dropping babies as citizens. She easily got Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to pledge that he would use every legal tactic to prevent babies from being born here to riffraff like the Foerstners who might otherwise save dying rural communities.

To emphasize the point, federal agents shot dead a young father in Maine who was living here legally but looked Latino. They also took out a 52-year-old construction worker in Houston by shooting through the passenger window of a vehicle. They claimed these legal residents were a threat to public safety.

So was Atanasoff, because if it weren’t for him they wouldn’t be trying to build a data center in the middle of nowhere that you don’t like. Pretty soon you will have Bulgarian electrical engineers living in your neighborhood. It’s all downhill from there. They compute all day long and do Bulgarian dances at night.

An enclave of Prussian draft dodgers started farming around St. Ansgar. Danes who laid in around Newell and Elk Horn founded Grand View College in Des Moines so Danish Lutherans would have a way to propagate their subversion. Protestant reformers who got broomed out of Holland ended up with Mexicans in the milking parlor at Sioux County — Catholics have spread into Orange City.

This is what makes Iowa great: the Germans, Lao, Czechs, Sudanese, Swedes, Danes and Dutch, and even the Irish from Fort Dodge. Fisher Controls in Marshalltown was founded by an immigrant from England. If you haven’t had a burrito in Storm Lake you have not lived.

We’re telling the refugees from Haiti that they must go back. We’re attempting to deport Afghanis who fought for us. Omaha is their sanctuary. If you protest it, you could get shot in the street. If you run away from a man with a gun wearing a mask, you are a terror on society. If you are Brown, you could end up in a detention camp by tonight without a hearing — even if you have papers.

From Houston to LA to Maine to Minneapolis.

As the protests grow, immigration czar Tom Homan called for a respite from traffic stops where ICE tries to ram unsuspecting Latinos who are on their way to work or to pick up their kids. Trump caught wind of weakness and was furious. Traffic stops will continue. So will the shootings.

This is not the sort of place that embraces refugees, where you give Afghanis the bum’s rush. We don’t want to foster a Foerstner anymore.

My ancestors were undesirables. They slipped in during Ireland’s potato famine as indentured servants and as mercenaries hired to kill indigenous people near Dubuque. Maybe they were legal, maybe not. The Community of True Inspiration paid cash and got in. George Foerstner died in 2000, with 3,000 people employed at the time by Amana Appliances across the street from where he lived. Lucky us, in 60 seconds your tea is hot or your damp cigarette is dried out.

Somebody in Storm Lake or Columbus Junction who wants off that kill floor has similar ambitions if we don’t shoot them first.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. His latest book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World, is available from Ice Cube Press. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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