How Minnesota Saved Civilization
150 years—and 31 ways that we changed modern life
Written by Tim Brady, Elizabeth Dehn, Joel Hoekstra, David Mahoney, Andrew Putz, and Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl
Photo by Robin Eley (Illustrations)
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(8) WE SHOWED THE WORLD HOW TO SAY GRACE
In 1918, a photographer in Bovey named Eric Enstrom asked a door-to-door salesman to pose for a picture. Maybe Enstrom saw the deeply pious humility in Charles Wilden; maybe he coaxed it out of the old man. Whatever: It’s there in the photograph that Enstrom snapped. Call it Grace, as Enstrom did, or kitsch, as art mavens do—in either case, this picture of Wilden, with head bowed, hands clasped, and elbows resting on a dinner table, is probably the most famous image to ever come from Minnesota.
(9) WE INVENTED MODERN LITERATURE
It’s hard to conceive of today, but the 19th-century America that Minnesotans Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) were born into had no bloggers. Not a one. It barely even had a middle class. What it did have was a lot of rural poor folk, a lot of urban poor folk, and on top of them a scattering of super-rich robber barons and a handful of Brahmin writers like Henry James and Edith Wharton who did what they could to explain us to the Europeans, or, as they were called at the time, the Only People Who Mattered.Fitzgerald and Lewis changed all that. Lewis made everyday small-town American characters into villains powerful enough to be deserving of satire, and Fitzgerald showed that middle-class Americans held within them the capacity to soar with melodic grandiosity and crash with the deepest possible tragedy. In short, Lewis, America’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Fitzgerald, America’s most potent producer of tragedies, remade American letters into something about us.
Without those two Minnesota writers there could never have been John O’Hara, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Sylvia Plath, John Updike, or American literature as we know it. And without American middle-class, confessional literature as we know it, there could have been no blogs. And without blogs, of course, we would actually have the time to read Lewis and Fitzgerald, but that’s not their fault.
(10) WE KEPT SUPPER FROM SPOILING
Question: How did the chicken on your dinner plate cross the country?Answer: Probably aboard a truck or train, in a cooled compartment invented by Fred McKinley Jones. Before the Minnesota engineer built the first refrigerated trailer in 1938, spoilage was the food industry’s archenemy: Florida oranges, New York strip, iceberg lettuce from California—all of it was likely to wilt or rot during shipping without tons of ice, and hauling fresh or frozen goods to market in the summer heat was a race against time. When a Twin Cities businessman lamented the loss of a truckload of fresh chickens, Jones, a veteran tinkerer who had built a sound-system for the movie house in Hallock a few years earlier, rose to the challenge: His Frigidaire on wheels became the prototype for the kind of refrigerated shipping containers that now carry kiwi fruit, mahi mahi, and Argentine beef around the world. Jones’s name eventually graced more than 60 patents (including one that made shipping refrigerated medical supplies possible during World War II), but the African American inventor’s achievements weren’t fully recognized until long after his death, by President George H. W. Bush, in 1991. Think about that as you chew your steak tonight.
(11) WE PERFECTED THE LATE-NIGHT SNACK
Technically, there had been frozen pizzas before Rose Totino invented “crisp crust,” but these were primitive things, made simply by freezing an unbaked pizza. Once baked, these early pizzas came out gummy, flat, and unappealing. Rose Totino was the one who, working out of her namesake Italian restaurant in northeast Minneapolis, developed and then patented a process of briefly frying pizza crusts (rendering them crisp) and then flash-freezing them (which prevented the slow formation of ice crystals that made crusts flat and gummy.) In short, before Rose Totino, frozen pizzas were almost inedible, but after Rose Totino, frozen pizzas were the cornerstone of the American life we know and love today, allowing children to survive nights with the babysitter, teenagers to survive college, and adults to survive breakups, renovations, and nights when everyone worked late.(12) OUR DOCTORS SAVED MILLIONS
C. Walton Lillehei was a University of Minnesota med-school grad who went off to World War II and earned his stripes in medical units in North Africa and Italy. Young, ambitious, and aggressive, Lillehei returned to Minneapolis after the war to complete a residency in surgery under the tutelage of the eminent Dr. Owen Wangensteen. Lillehei tackled the seemingly intractable problem of open-heart surgery: How do you supply a patient’s body with the pumping and oxygenation functions of a beating heart while performing a lengthy operation on that same organ? In 1954, Lillehei found the answer in a technique called cross-circulation—and the world streamed to Minneapolis to find out how it was done. Lillehei taught 134 cardiothoracic surgeons at the U of M, including Dr. Norman Shumway, who developed the technique for heart-transplant surgery; Dr. Christiaan Barnard, who famously performed that operation for the first time; and Dr. Richard DeWall, who helped develop a simplified heart-lung machine that would eventually make open-heart surgery almost commonplace.(14) WE FIGURED OUT HOW TO FEED THE WORLD
Fact: Norman Borlaug, an Iowan educated at the University of Minnesota, is credited with saving a billion lives since the 1960s as the father of the so-called Green Revolution, in which high-yield, disease-and-insect-resistant crops have been implemented in Third World countries prone to famine. For this work, he has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Congressional Medal of Honor.Fact: Contrary to predictions that the Green Revolution would push the world population past the food supply’s reach, Third World births have dropped considerably since Borlaug’s innovations.
Fact: A good argument can be made—and Borlaug has made it—that higher-yield crops have saved millions of acres from deforestation at the hands of traditional slash-and-burn farmers.
Fact: All this apparently means diddly-squat. How else to explain those who oppose the Green Revolution for its reliance on genetic cross-breeding, which they impugn as everything from a boon for greedy agribusinesses to simply unnatural? Never mind that organic farming, the obvious alternative to Borlaug’s methods, would be hard-pressed to feed the entire world without a dramatic increase in either land use or starvation.
What does Borlaug, now 94, think of these folks? “If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world,” he has said, “as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
Conclusion: That’s a billion people, people. When you’ve figured out a better way to feed them, let us know.
(15) WE CHANGED SHOPPING FOREVER
Looking back through the bifocal lenses of middle age, it’s hard to see Southdale as the beacon of promise it once was. But when the world’s first fully enclosed shopping center opened in 1956, it changed the very nature of social interaction in America.Victor Gruen, the Viennese architect who designed the center for the Dayton Company in the mid-1950s, was a man on a mission. His goal was to bring European sophistication to American suburbia. He saw the commercial strips popping up on the fringes of American cities as “avenues of horror…flanked by the greatest collection of vulgarity—billboards, motels, gas stations, shanties, car lots, miscellaneous industrial equipment, hot dog stands, wayside stores—ever collected by mankind.”
The antidote to this chaos, he proclaimed, were planned developments that would not only supply suburbanites with comfortable places to shop, but would also “fill the vacuum created by the absence of social, cultural, and civic crystallization points in our vast suburban areas.” Southdale’s skylight-domed Garden Court was the linchpin of his scheme. Here was the new town square, complete with fountains, benches, a sidewalk café, a two-story birdcage full of canaries, and a 45-foot-tall abstract bronze sculpture.
Gruen envisioned this space as a bustling center of communal activity comparable in spirit to Paris’s Champs Élysées or Venice’s Piazza San Marco.
The basic elements of Gruen’s design were replicated in malls in suburbs from New York to California, but his vision of the mall as a new town center was, alas, never completely realized. Turns out people didn’t want to socialize or listen to canaries or talk about civic engagement while sitting at a sidewalk café. Mostly, they were just interested in shopping.
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Reader Comments:
Governor Stassen was central to the founding of the United Nations, established one of the first and argueably most successful civil service systems in the county, and in 1941 created what we now call the Iron Range Recovery and Rehabilitation Board, the first public-private partnership created to foster economic and environmental sustainability. He was a giant political leader, not a rogue.