Iowa Pulitzer-winning editor defends immigrants and tries to bring his small community together
STORM LAKE, Iowa — For 14 years, Iowans in the state’s 4th Congressional District have overwhelmingly chosen Steve King to represent them. His seat is considered safe, in spite of — or because of — comments like this:
“For every one who’s a valedictorian,” King said of Mexican migrants in 2013, “there’s another hundred out there (who) weigh 130 pounds, and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
Smack in the middle of King’s deep-red district, one that voted 61 percent for Donald Trump, is a pesky 3,000circulation newspaper, the Storm Lake Times, led by a sarcastic editor with Mark Twain’s hair and Sam Elliott’s eyebrows who regularly takes aim at King.
Art Cullen, 59, acknowledges his editorials may be mere grapeshot to King’s bombast. Still, he hopes it stings.
Like many pockets of Iowa, Storm Lake is a historically white farm town, but the demographics began to shift dramatically in the 1990s when meatpacking plants began recruiting for workers in Mexico. Today, 21 percent of the population is Latino.
Other Iowa towns also saw their minority populations grow, but Storm Lake opened its arms wide and proclaimed itself a refuge, first for the so-called boat people who arrived from Southeast Asia via religious charities in the 1970s, and later to the burgeoning Latino population.
Today, some street signs are in English and Spanish; the police force has a push on to find more bilingual officers.
Cullen is only one of many in town now who celebrate the community’s diversity and rail against King’s vision for America.
But he’s the one with access to a printing press.
Reveling in the ethnic diversity of the high school football team, Cullen opined last fall: “How about those Tornadoes! The roster had all the colors of the rainbow, all races and creeds pulling together for the good of the team. Steve King wants to deport them because of their big cantaloupe calves, at least the Mexican ones.”
In another part of King’s district, such editorials might put a newspaper out of business. But in Storm Lake, the elementary school student body is nearly 90 percent children of color, and they speak 19 languages and dialects. The immigrant community here has come to feel a sense of protection that finds its clearest expression in the twice-weekly newspaper.
Cullen took on King again last month when the congressman asserted that America “can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” a comment widely interpreted to mean the U.S. needs more children of Western European extraction. Cullen highlighted King’s college attendance — and failure to graduate.
“King said Monday that he is about defending Western civilization,” he wrote. “You remember that class in school? Neither does anyone else. King wasn’t at Northwest Missouri long enough to take it, I bet.”
That kind of straight talk won Cullen a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for editorial writing, with the award committee praising editorials “fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.”
Though his topic was big ag, even then Cullen couldn’t resist a swipe at King, writing before Trump was elected president that “Trump and Rep. Steve King are kindred spirits when it comes to slandering brown people.”
The newspaper is a family affair. Cullen runs the editorial pages, edits copy and writes photo captions. His wife, Dolores, and their son, Tom, byline most of the news stories.
“Art doesn’t do well with bosses,” said Dolores, on her way back from an assignment — the high school received a new grand piano and she was there to cover it. “Typical what you would call alpha male.”
The white-walled, flag-bedecked newspaper office also has a receptionist, sports writer, photographer and a desk where Cullen’s brother, John, runs the business side of the paper they founded in the early 1990s to compete with the local daily, the Storm Lake Pilot-Tribune. The town of 14,000 was once the smallest in the nation with two daily print newspapers before the Times switched to publishing only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
In King’s district, Storm Lake is the outlier. King’s latest challenger, Democrat Kim Weaver, lost Buena Vista County, 505 votes to 142 votes, but nearly 70 percent of her county votes originated in Storm Lake. King captured just 31 percent of Storm Lake. He won 61 percent of the vote in the district overall.
Though Cullen has repeatedly scolded King — and Trump — for anti-immigrant rhetoric, some Latinos in town think he’s come late to the issue. Andrea, a 20-year-old Storm Lake participant in the government’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, said the paper initially wrote about the program, which shields young people from deportation, as a legal curiosity.
Only after it became clear some Storm Lake residents were DACA recipients did the Storm Lake Times cover the issue with more insight and compassion, said Andrea, who did not want to have her last name published for fear of repercussions from immigration authorities. The paper still could do more, she said, though now it recognizes how DACA affects many in town.
“Now, you see that it’s closer to them, and there are more stories,” she said.