Hidden within a feature piece about a retired cop on a personal mission to expose fraud on among Midway games is a deeper look at the history of State Fairs and their role in the âculture warsâ of their heyday:
As historian Chris Rasmussen writes in Carnival in the Countryside, a study of the Iowa State Fair, âthe uneasiness or outright antipathy that some agriculturalists, journalists, and fairgoers felt toward entertainments was not merely a cranky outburst against the prospect that someone might actually have fun at the fair.â Instead, it was about identity and what a community ought to stand for. âAs Iowans debated the respective place of agriculture and entertainments at the fair between the 1850s and the turn of the twentieth century,â Rasmussen writes, âthey were implicitly discussing the future of their state.â