Journalist Lauren Kephart Soth: Iowa Time Machine October 2, 1910

Iowa Time Machine ⏰: Journalist Lauren Kephart Soth was born on October 2, 1910,in Sibley. Decades later, his editorial in the Des Moines Register helped spark an agricultural exchange and earned him the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing.

Soth grew up in several small Iowa towns, where his father worked as a school superintendent and took part in local journalism. Soth learned newspaper work young and developed an interest in farming through jobs with local farmers. At Iowa State College, he studied journalism and agricultural economics, then taught there before joining the Register in 1947.

On February 10, 1955, he wrote that Iowa would gladly show a Soviet delegation how its farmers raised livestock and produced feed. “We promise to hide none of our ‘secrets,’” the editorial declared. He even proposed that Iowa agricultural specialists visit the Soviet Union. Delegations traveled in both directions that summer, and Soth joined the Americans who toured Soviet agriculture.

Soth’s concerns extended well beyond that exchange. He argued for family farms, rural development, and conservation, and questioned the growing concentration of food processing in large corporations. Those issues still give his writing a modern edge: who benefits from agricultural progress, and what happens to rural communities when production grows more concentrated? His papers at Iowa State University preserve the work of an editor who treated farm policy as a matter of public life. #Iowa #OTD #History #Pulitzer #Reporting