Editor, publisher and politician, Don Lytton Berry (1880-1974) was born in Indianola, Iowa. He graduated from Simpson College in 1903, and joined the staff of the Des Moines Register and Leader. In 1905, he married Bertha Sloan. He left the Register and Leader (1904) to farm full-time, and later bought (1920) the Indianola Record. He remained editor and publisher of the Indianola newspaper for forty years until he retired in 1960.



Berry was a delegate to the 1936 Republican Convention. He served on the Resolutions Committee and as a "State Committeeman" on the Platform Subcommittee on the Farm Plank, in which capacity he was in charge of county hearings in Madison, Marion, and Warren counties. The Iowa Farm Tenancy Committee was a special committee of the Iowa State Planning Board, appointed by the governor. Its purpose was to investigate the "farm tenure problem" (the increase of farms operated by renters, rather than owners). The percentage of rented farms had reached fifty percent by 1935.



In 1939, Berry conducted an editorial campaign against Harrison Spangler' tenure as Republican national committeeman from Iowa. The claim made by Berry (and others) was that Spangler was pro-Hoover, and that his ten years in the East had made him insensitive to the problems of Iowa farmers. A great deal of editorial comment, both for and against Spangler, was generated.



Berry was chairman of the Iowa Postwar Rehabilitation Commission, which was established by the state legislature to "study the economic and social conditions of the state with a view to recommending to the 51st General Assembly such legislationELas may provide work which needs doingELto enable Iowa to reabsorb smoothly the returningELservice personnel and after-war workers". (See December 12, 1944, letter from Berry to Governor Hickenlooper in 6/9).



In 1941, Berry was appointed Executive Secretary of the National Republican Farm Study Committee under the chairmanship of Clifford Hopee, Representative from Kansas.