Grinnell College is a wonderful place. My brother and sister-in-law went there, as did my hero, Harry Hopkins, FDR's top guy. It's like somebody took an eastern liberal school and dropped it in the middle of nowhere. Incredibly, I think it also has the highest endowment of any liberal arts college in the country.
----------- Yes, indeed. Similar institutions are found across the midwest, wherever migrants from New England and New York settled ca. 1830 - 1860. Wisconsin examples are Beloit, Lawrence, and Ripon. Oberlin, that ultra-PC hell-on-earth, which I think was the first college in the US to admit both women and blacks, could be considered the prototype. An early president of Oberlin was the popular evangelist Charles Grandison Finney, who taught a brand of theology known as "perfectionism," and who advocated a number of reformist causes. Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was founded at around the same time, by folks from the same cultural milieu: the "burnt over district" of central New York State, where causes such as abolition, women's suffrage, and temperance found a wide following. Coe has always been somewhat more conservative than Grinnell--it's a Presbyterian rather than a Congregational foundation, as Grinnell is, and was founded specifically to prepare young men for the ministry. It's also neither as rich nor as selective. Both institutions, however, trace their origins to 19th century social gospelers.
Jacob Conrad
PS Henry A. Wallace, FDR's 3rd term veep, was from Iowa, though he went to Iowa State in Ames.