The Power of Testimony

THE TIME MOM MET HITLER . . .
Plains circuit- riding Methodist preacher possessed of— it was
said—​a fiery passion. Jeremiah had three brothers who were
ministers too. One of those minister brothers was Isa Eberhart,
who also became a published poet. So when Dad was a young
teenager and the assignment at school was to produce a poem
by the next day, and in an ecstasy of excitement, Dad produced
five poems, the Eberhart family’s explanation was that,
of course, Dad was merely following the lead of his great-​uncle
Isa, the minister- poet.
My father’s father was born in Albion, Iowa, about sixty
miles west-​northwest of Cedar Rapids. His full name was Alpha
LaRue Eberhart, but he was always known by his initials, as
A.L.
During A.L.’s youth, there was virtually nothing in northern
Iowa and southern Minnesota save for acre upon acre of black-​
earth prairie, on which the American Indians had once resided
along with flights of killdeer and herds of buffalo. At first
slowly, and then with greater rapidity, frontier homesteading
farmers arrived, which meant that towns were built, churches
were planted, entrepreneurialism flourished, the law made its
first inroads, and a rough-​and-​ready frontier ethos became the
norm.
In this way, the American prairie was tamed and usefully
transformed— as the nineteenth century would record it— into
the production of wheat, corn, alfalfa, soybeans, and especially
of hogs, steers, and chickens.
There were a lot of hungry mouths in the cities of the East,
and those mouths needed to be fed. That need created a generation
of strong farmers on the Midwest plains, who plowed, and
harrowed, and winnowed, and threshed. It was a time when
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