A stop in Rock County, Minnesota, reignites memories of a dynamic war-time reporter that comes with a twist

Al Cross

During a trip to the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors conference, Al Cross stopped to pay tribute to the late Al McIntosh, a World War II reporter and local newspaper publisher. The trip yielded some surprising connections.

Luverne, Minnesota, is in Rock County, the southwest corner of Minnesota, just east of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. When I saw Sioux Falls consumed one day’s itinerary of the annual conference of the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors, which recently elected me to its board of directors, I planned a side trip to Luverne – for reasons that started out esoteric but turned out to be quite meaningful.

I was interested in Luverne and its newspaper because Ken Burns and Tom Hanks had told me a lot about them – in Burns’ 2007 documentary “The War,” about the American home front during World War II. Burns focused on four towns: Mobile, Ala., Waterbury, Conn.; Sacramento, Calif.; and Luverne, a county-seat town of 5,000 on the Rock River (the one in the Missouri River basin).

The unexpected star of the documentary, at least for me, was Al McIntosh. He was editor of the Rock County Star Herald before, during and after the war. He chronicled the home front in such compelling detail that Burns said his team’s discovery of the newspaper’s carefully stored bound volumes (dating to 1873) was “in some ways . . . the single greatest archival find that we have ever made.” Hanks, who voiced McIntosh’s writings for the documentary, was so taken by them that he pushed Burns to use more of them, and Burns did.

“He had this task of explaining the unexplainable to his fellow neighbors,” Burns said. “He did so magnificently, and wrote as beautifully as any editor I’ve ever come across."

Al McIntosh at his desk (PBS website photo)

McIntosh started his war journalism even before the U.S. entered the fight, with a piece about a woman who had survived the blitz of London and was visiting her brother in Rock County: “She has had her best friends killed. Looking out at the peaceful countryside from the Thompson porch, she said it was hard to believe the rest of the world was at war.” That was in the first written quotation of the show, which introduced McIntosh as a North Dakotan who “had turned down big-city jobs to run his own small-town paper. He would soon find himself trying to explain the unexplainable to his new neighbors.” 

When the documentary premiered on PBS, I wrote a short story for The Rural Blog, a publication of the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Rural Journalism, which I ran at the time. As I watched the show and heard Hanks read McIntosh’s evocative writings, I got choked up. Here, in what most Americans might call the middle of nowhere, a weekly newspaper editor was capturing the courage, loss, sacrifice, resolution, pathos and daily grind of being a small-town American in our most demanding war.

So, if I was going to Sioux Falls, I was going to Luverne, at least to pay my respects at the grave of Al McIntosh, who died in 1979. When I looked it up on Findagrave.com, a wonderful resource, I found something flabbergasting. McIntosh’s obituary, posted on the site, revealed that he was the author of an editorial column that formed the basis for the first speech I ever gave, in 1965, when I was 11 years old. 

Desperate for a topic for the 4-H speech contest, I saw the headline “I Am a Tired American” in one of the many newspapers that reprinted the editorial, originally titled “A Tired American Gets Angry.” A few weeks after I gave the speech, I became the official scorer for the local baseball leagues, which included writing them up for the weekly Clinton County News, where I got my first byline.

Al McIntosh’s editorial was a reactionary screed against a host of things that he thought were wrong with the country and its critics (mostly the latter), and young Al Cross parroted most of the complaints. My meager effort earned me third place in the contest, but the experience gave me enough confidence to enter and win the following year, then become a color commentator on baseball games, which led to me becoming a licensed radio announcer at the age of 13. (In those days you had to get a license, by passing a test.) I kept my hand in journalism, and edited and managed weekly papers before spending 26½ years as a reporter at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, the last 15½ as political writer and columnist, then 20 years at the University of Kentucky.

I still write occasional political columns for the Northern Kentucky Tribune and other news outlets. As a political observer, I see McIntosh’s most-published piece as a harbinger of today’s tribulation. “I am a tired American,” he wrote, “choked up to here on this business of trying to intimidate our government by placard, picket line and sit-in by the hordes of the dirty unwashed who rush to man the barricades against the forces of order, law and decency.” 

But he also was “sickened by the slack-jawed bigots who wrap themselves in bedsheets in the dead of night and roam the countryside looking for innocent victims.” And he said he was “real tired of those who are trying to sell me the belief that America is not the greatest nation in all the world, a generous-hearted nation, a nation dedicated to trying to help the 'have nots' achieve some of the good things that our system of free enterprise brought about.”

In Al McIntosh’s day, it was not unusual for weekly editors to editorialize about state, national and international questions. Now most papers, even weeklies, are owned by chains, most of which think too much opinion is bad for business. Even many independent papers shy away from publishing letters and columns about President Donald Trump, for fear of having to play referee in a mudball contest. So we don’t read much in weekly papers about national protest campaigns, racial issues, foreign aid and the like.

McIntosh has had some fine successors, including Michelle Erpenbach, who runs a major nonprofit in Sioux Falls, and Lori Sorenson, a Rock County native who has been at the family-owned paper for 33 years. She told me that she delves into national issues from time to time.

“Where appropriate and if it has bearing on our readers in Rock County, I will use our opinion page to voice concern about national issues,” Sorenson said in an email. “Rock County is a very RED and very religious county, and many are eagerly lapping up the disinformation that circulates on social media. I have written more than one editorial encouraging readers to be judicious about their ‘news’ sources and to remember that we are ‘community first’ despite occasional disagreements about national issues.”

Good for her. If we are to overcome the partisan and cultural divides that are bedeviling this country, I think it will most likely start in small towns like Luverne, where people know each other as neighbors and are still mostly willing to listen to each other, and agree to disagree.

Local newspapers have long been one of the best forums for a community to have a conversation with itself, but in many small towns, papers no longer play a leading civic role, for a host of reasons: they have failed to maintain circulation and household penetration, have owners who don’t want to make anyone mad, have smaller staffs with less time and talent for commentary, or they may even lack a local editor because the chain owner runs several papers as a group. All this has added to a shortage of local news, while news media and social media are dominated by national news, opinion and misinformation.

Every county in America deserves to have a news outlet that can help its audience be better citizens of their state and nation, not just their locality. Our nation would be a lot better off if we had lot more editor-publishers like Al McIntosh. May his example never be forgotten. 

Al Cross lives in Frankfort and Albany, Kentucky, and is on Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, BlueSky and @ruralj. The Minnesota Newspaper Association presents the Al McIntosh Award to those who dedicate themselves to their communities through their reporting, editorials and columns. 

Immigrant farm workers from Mexico once had a clear path to work in the U.S. from the 1940s to the 1960s

Braceros congregating at Rio Vista 
(Library of Congress photo via Offrange)

A look back at American history reveals a significantly different perspective on Mexican immigrants coming to the United States to fill labor shortages. Beginning in the 1940s and stretching into the mid-1960s, the U.S. recruited thousands of Mexican immigrants to work on U.S. farms.

In Texas, the National Historic Landmark "Socorro’s Rio Vista Farm" operated as the "Rio Vista Bracero Reception Center," which was a designated point of entry for thousands of Mexican workers who entered the U.S. as "part of a temporary labor program," reports Marianne Dhenin for Offrange. "The arriving Mexican workers were known as braceros from the Spanish word for arm, brazo, roughly translating to 'one who swings his arms.'"

Mexican farm worker recruits were able to enter the U.S. by signing up for the Bracero Program. "The program was designed to recruit skilled agricultural laborers from Mexico to mitigate labor shortages in the United States resulting from American farm workers enlisting during World War II and, later, the Korean War," Dhenin explains. During World War II, the U.S. government incarcerated thousands of American Japanese farm workers, which increased the need for Mexican labor.

Workers who wanted to join the Bracero Program "applied at intake stations across Mexico," Dhenin writes. These men "made significant sacrifices in pursuit of economic opportunities in the U.S. Many hoped that higher wages across the border would allow them to provide for those they left behind."

Becoming a Bracero wasn't as easy as just signing up. Applicants were required to undergo extensive medical and psychological testing in Mexico before "being invited to make the trip northward through Mexico and across the border," Dhenin reports. Braceros were often transported into the U.S. in cargo trains "without seats, windows, or water stops along the way."

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the "barracks on Socorro’s Rio Vista Farm served as dormitories, offices, and a mess hall to house and process the more than 80,000 braceros who passed through each year," Dhenin explains. "It was one of five long-term bracero reception centers in California, Arizona, and Texas. . . . Over the lifespan of the Bracero Program, more than 4.6 million contracts were issued." A total of 30 states participated in the Bracero program.

Opinion: U.S. farmers helped shape the nation's 'feed the world' programs

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, VP-elect Harry S. Truman and
VP Henry Wallace led the U.S. before, during and after WWII.
(Photo by Abbie Rowe, Truman Library via Barn Raiser)

As the United States ends many of its longstanding international food aid programs, reporter Joel Engleman provides a brief history of American farming as a backdrop for his discussion on the newly released book, Global Heartland: Cultivating the American Century on the Midwestern Farm, by historian Peter Simons. An edited version of Engelman's thoughts and Q&A with Simons are shared below.

The seeds of American "food for the world" were planted after World War I and continued growing through the start of the Cold War. "In that roughly 30-year span, American farmers faced a flu pandemic, a dust bowl, a two-decade-long farm depression and a second global war," Engleman writes. "It was also a time when the federal government took a more active role in rural communities."

U.S supply chains that were created during WWII to provide Europe with machinery and weapons helped "set the stage for larger-scale food processing after the war," Engleman explains. "Technological developments in mass communication, as well as letters from relatives fighting overseas, broadened horizons at home." The shifts made U.S. farmers think about their role in the world.

After World War II, U.S. farmers "demanded a reluctant government act to prevent postwar starvation," Engleman writes. "Conservative Cold Warriors in the Truman administration slowly recognized that addressing global needs could help improve both U.S. national security interests and global opinion. A Cold War consensus to 'feed the world' emerged as farmers were enlisted to demonstrate the values of American exceptionalism through their commodity exports."

Simons offers a fresh view on how U.S. farmers began
"feeding the world." (Images via Barn Raiser)

Question (Engleman): Global Heartland charts this period when Americans in and around agriculture — farmers, farm interest groups like the Farm Bureau and Farmers Union, commodity trade groups and the USDA — are debating about whether to focus on domestic or international markets for their products. What was the nature of that debate?

Answer (Simons): "It’s only when the vast scope of [WWII] becomes clear, and the fact that the state is stepping in to guarantee farm profits, that farmers see an opportunity for trade overseas. After the war, humanitarianism is involved in the argument to stave off a famine in Europe, but there’s clearly a desire to prolong these markets.

"But you can’t just have changes in technology or the market. You also need people to reconceptualize a sense of national responsibility, or Christian responsibility, to the rest of the world. I see it as this complication sparked by World War II that ultimately creates the postwar world and reshapes the agricultural economy."

Q: You write about the international workers who came to work on U.S. farms during World War II. How did these migrant farm workers lay the groundwork for the agricultural system we have today?

A: "During World War II, [existing] networks become more formalized. The federal government sent trains down to Mexico City and, using the USDA and Department of Labor, got as many people as they could to work on farms.

"Ultimately, it's the Bracero program that formalizes predominantly Mexican immigrant work in American farm fields. That establishes a pattern for the way that agriculture works in the United States. It is a system that has lasted. . . until early 2025."