Capitol Ideas: A Hook To The Past

DES MOINES — High on a wall of the ground floor in the Iowa Capitol building is an unlikely historical marker that mostly goes unnoticed by tourists and Statehouse regulars alike. It is a metal hook embedded in the wall bearing witness to the fact that FDR was once here.In the throes of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to the Capitol in September 1936 for a historic meeting with elected officials from drought-affected states — including his 1936 Republican presidential rival Kansas Gov.