Internment of German Americans in the U.S. Heartland

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/german-american-internment-in-the-u-s-heartland/)

I became interested in internment experiences of German Americans during the two World Wars when I found out that roughly 11,000 German Americans were, in fact, interned – a history few of us know. While none of my German-American ancestors were interned, one of my great-grandfathers, a German Methodist minister born in Germany, could well have been interned during World War I had flames of xenophobia had been whipped up more than they were, since everyone born in Germany were targets of suspicion. Over time, the xenophobia underlying the internments didn’t go away, but rather shifted to other groups, today principally Mexicans, Central Americans, and Muslims. Ironically, many people with German ancestry, unaware of our own history, participate in today’s xenophobia. This is why I believe that Critical Family History is, well, critically important.

So I was excited to discover Heartland: A Historical Drama about the Internment of German-Americans in the United States during World War II. Heartland, published by Sense Publishers in 2014, was written by playwright, dramaturg, and journalist Lojo Simon  and political activist and playwright Anita Simons. The play has won several awards, including Dayton Playhouse FutureFest 2008, and Long Beach Playhouse New Works Festival 2008. Sense Publishers recently released it as a book that can be read easily and used readily in schools.

The play tells a story of a German-born widow and her three children, living on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Before he died, the widow’s husband had applied to employ prisoners of war through the U.S. War Manpower Commission. When the play opens in 1941, the family is notified that his application has been approved, and two German prisoners of war are on their way. The widow is thrilled, as she and the children cannot manage the dairy farm by themselves. As the story unfolds, the family gradually develops a friendship with the two German prisoners, partly because they share a language, and also because the two young men are good workers. But non-German townspeople begin to worry that the widow may be a traitor – she has become too close to the German prisoners of war, and speaks with them in German rather than English. She is arrested, then sent to an internment camp. She never recovers from the trauma of what she is put through.

The authors explain that they became interested in writing this play in 2005 after viewing a TV documentary about the internment of German prisoners of war, paralleling imprisonment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo. They began researching German POW camps in the U.S., which led them unexpectedly to accounts of imprisonment of German-American citizens under the Alien Enemies Act, signed into law in 1798. The authors tracked down stories of German Americans who had been imprisoned, which they used to create Heartland.

Readers and family historians who want to know more about the interment of German Americans can consult the German American Internee Coalition, formed in 2005 for German-American and German Latin-American citizens and legal residents who were interned, and their descendants. There, you will learn, for example, where camps existed throughout the US and Central America that detained mixtures of German Americans, German Latin Americans, Italian Americans, and Japanese Americans.

If you are a teacher, there is much you can draw on. Heartland itself can be used in classrooms from high school on up. It is fairly short, and reads easily (although there is a fair amount of German dialog with translation available). The German American Internee Coalition provides curriculum guides for teachers. They are mapped against California's History-Social Science Framework, but could be used anywhere. The curriculum guide consists of seventeen lesson plans and three one-act plays. The lesson plans deal with issues such as the Alien Enemies Act, motives behind imprisonment, black lists, and stories of prisoners.

I believe this is a piece of U.S. history that all of us should know. To me, it demonstrates that none of us is safe from xenophobia, but also that our collective memory of imprisoning U.S. citizens continues to be eradicated, even when it's part of our own family stories. Perhaps if we knew our history better, we would be less likely to repeat it.

A New Zealander's Story of Italian Family Roots

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/italian-family-roots/)


A couple of years ago while I was in New Zealand, a friend who knew of my interest in family history gave me a copy of Tessa Duder’s book In Search of Elisa Marchetti: A Writer’s Search for her Italian Family. My friend’s grandmother was a sister of Duder’s grandmother. Tessa Duder is a prolific and well-known New Zealand author of children’s books (as well as a medaled swimmer and a pianist). Her lively writing contributes to this being a very readable, interesting chronicle of her attempt to connect with distant relatives in Livorno, Italy. The book also reveals her growing understanding of why family history matters, and how to go about researching it.

Duder’s quest was influenced by Maori people (the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand), for whom whakapapa (a rough translation is genealogy) is very important. Duder explains that, “Maori children are better served by their culture’s emphasis on whakapapa. Taught little history at school, Pakeha [New Zealand European] children are craving it in their families and in an understanding from the past of what it means to be a New Zealander now” (p. 25-26). In her own family, her adult children wanted to know more about who they were: “Why was I here, why were my adult children eager to know more about their antecedents at a time when the prevailing poplar culture says history is of no account, it’s boring, who cares, let’s live it up in the here and now? The Maori had a good word for it, I said, whanau, which having deeper resonances than simply family, had passed into general use in New Zealand” (p. 91).

Having grown up with fictionalized family myths (such as the idea that the name Ferrari in the family tree was connected with Ferrari cars), Duder finally decided to investigate. So, with only a photo of her great-grandmother and a life-long awareness of Italian ancestry (for instance, her grandmother had loved to sing Italian songs), she decided to seek out long-lost relatives in Livorno, Italy, starting with the Lenzinis (Elisa Marchetti’s married name, less common in Italy than Marchetti).

Duder did her research backwards. As she explains, first she should have gone to the Auckland library, rather than to Italy. But she had no idea of the resources available in the library and online (such as census data, marriage records, death records, and books about researching Italian family history). So she arrived in Livorno without a game plan, other than attempting to contact all the Lenzinis. Much of the book reads like a travelogue of Tuscany, since she spent considerable time sightseeing while awaiting responses (she got very few, none useful). In the Livorno archives, however, she struck gold with a scholarly essay published in 1938 about the emigration of 300 Livornese to New Zealand, twenty years earlier than she had been aware of any such emigration.

When she returned to New Zealand, using resources available in the Auckland Central Library, Duder found reference this wave of Italian immigration, as well as records that allowed her to piece together her own family’s story (a process that was complicated by her great-grandparents emigrating under the names of other family members). For readers of Italian ancestry, this book may offer some useful resources (particularly its appendix of resources). For all readers interested in family history, I see it as providing two important insights.

First, the histories of poor people as well as women tend to be neglected, which distorts what we know. Duder shows that the history of her Italian immigrant ancestors, who were very poor (her great-grandfather worked as a sand-shoveller at the time of emigration), shed important light on New Zealand immigrant history. During the 1870s, the New Zealand colonial government had sought skilled workers in specific trades, contracting with Italy, since immigration from Germany had slowed; the New Zealand government agreed to pay costs of transportation and lodging on arrival. In Livorno, the man who took the job of recruiting was contracted to send a target number of people. Since he couldn't get enough volunteers with the specific skills New Zealand wanted, he began to accept anyone, which turned into disaster for the recruits. The immigration process itself required a long train ride to Hamburg, then four months at sea to New Zealand (the ship’s surgeon’s records, available through the library in Auckland, gave an extraordinarily detailed account of the voyage). On arrival in Wellington, the lack of fit between the immigrants’ skills and those the New Zealand government expected became obvious. The New Zealand government tried unsuccessfully to resettle them in different locations where they might be able to find work. Eventually, those who remained in New Zealand (some went to Australia, some returned to Italy) were brought back to Wellington where they survived as best they could, given limited work options and strong local resentment.

Writing about the invisibility of women in history, Duder commented: “As a wife and a foreigner and a Roman Catholic in a land where the white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon male and all his values reigned supreme, she [Eliza Lentini] was trebly invisible” (p. 195). Yet the women are usually the ones who hold families together in adverse circumstances. Duder describes the self-reliance and strength of Eliza and her daughters that she discovered from knowing some of them, and hearing stories about them.

The second significant insight has to do with who we are culturally. Although we learn culture from our parents and grandparents, we do not inherit culture in the same sense that we inherit genetic material. At the outset, Duder imagined arriving in Italy and basking in an Italian culture shared with long-lost family members. Indeed, she had learned some Italian culture at home, particularly her grandmother’s love of Italian music and art. But culturally, she was Kiwi New Zealand, which is evident in her descriptions of frustration she experienced in Italy as she came face-to-face with cultural differences in how things are done in everyday life. Time, for example, does not follow the same rhythms in Italy as it does in New Zealand, and her own sense of time was not Italian. Culturally, we are members of the world we live in today. Family history, rather than being a celebration of imagined cultural roots, can be better understood as knowing something of the lives one’s own life rests on.

I thank Duder for an enjoyable and informative read, and my friend in New Zealand for passing the book on to me.

Becoming White: Reinterpreting a Family Story by Putting Race Back into the Picture

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/becoming-white/)

I grew up hearing stories about a great-great-grandmother who immigrated from Switzerland to the U.S. by way of New Orleans. According to stories, she was a linguist who spoke four or five languages fluently, an accomplished seamstress, and a medium. (My siblings and I loved the idea of a New Orleans fortune-teller in the family tree.) Stories we heard suggested that she was a strong and talented woman who worked hard and lived life well. But it turns out that the stories, having filtered out race, allowed us to miss understanding how she came to identify as white and work to affirm white privilege. What I learned, described below, is developed in much more detail in an article I published in Race Ethnicity & Education in 2011 (volume 14, issue #3), and uses tools in this blog, starting with the Context Questions Framework.

My great-great grandmother was probably born in Switzerland around 1832, although census records also mention France and Germany. She and my great-great grandfather, born in France, immigrated to the U.S. during the 1850s, arriving in New Orleans, then relocating to Vicksburg, Mississippi. She was a dressmaker and hat-maker, he was a miller. Very likely, they were recruited from Europe. R. M. Miller explains in a 1981 article “The Fabric of Control”, published in The Business History Review (volume 55, issue 4), that as the Southern cotton industry expanded, slaves were massively relocated from working in mills to the fields, so mill owners began to import workers from Europe, playing European immigrants and slaves off each other to keep immigrants’ wages down.

When my great-great grandparents arrived in the U.S., although initially they would have identified as French or Swiss rather than as white, they entered a context in which everyone was legally classified by race. The census categories were white, free black, free mulatto, or slave. There were no alternatives. About one-third of the population of Vicksburg were enslaved Blacks. Being classified as white conferred full access to the job market, and legal privileges and rights that free Blacks did not have. But my great-great grandmother’s status as white may not have gone unquestioned. According to a description on her 1871 passport application, I learned that she had a dark complexion. Hmm. She may well have learned to assert her status as white. I know that my great-great grandparents came to identify with the Confederacy, since they have their fourth child, born in 1864, the middle name “Jefferson Davis” (a hero to whites in Vicksburg). It is likely they identified with it because ending slavery might end racialized advantages they were using.

In the economic chaos that followed the Civil War, my great-great grandmother continued to claim and use any advantage she could for economic advancement. By Googling her name, I learned that in1868, less than a year after Mississippi passed law enabling bankruptcies, she filed for bankruptcy, claiming that 22 women clients in cities ranging from Vicksburg and Natchez, Mississippi to Richmond, Louisiana owed her the equivalent of $38,500 in 2007 dollars. She was one of a handful of women to immediately make use of this new law.

The family moved to San Francisco sometime during the 1870s, showing up there with a Chinese servant in the 1880 Census, and minus my great-great grandfather who had likely died. They probably left Mississippi because of its ongoing economic chaos, coupled with stories about riches in California. They were aided by completion of transcontinental railroads. But in San Francisco, they countered another racialized conflict over scarce jobs. Completion of the railroads threw Chinese laborers out of work. San Francisco’s population swelled between 1860 and 1900 as people flock in looking for work. While whites were usually more than 90% of the population, in 1880, their proportion dropped to 90.0%, and the Chinese population reached 9.%. As competition for too few jobs fueled tension between whites and Chinese, whites used their power to greatly restrict rights of Chinese people. For example, in 1879, a state-wide referendum was passed overwhelmingly to amend the state constitution to prohibit public entities from employing Chinese. Stories circulated about young white women losing their jobs and turning to prostitution to survive.

In 1882 (the same year the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act), my great-great grandmother and six other white women filed articles of incorporation to establish the Woman’s Protective League of California. According to an article in the July 5, 1882 issue of the Sacramento Bee newspaper (which one my sisters located by Googling our great-great grandmother), the League’s goals were mainly to help young women gain employment, property, education and work training, and fair wages. In pursuit of these goals, part of its mission was “to discourage the employment of Chinese in any capacity whatever by the people of this State.” By specifically seeking to exclude Chinese from employment, the organization promulgated whiteness as a prerequisite for employment and ownership of property. (I assume my great-great grandmother fired her Chinese servant.) But although she learned to claim whiteness as salient to her identity, she apparently did not relinquish her Swiss-French identity, since the family story holds that when her grown daughters used to visit her, all spoke French.
 

Why did this woman from whom I descend become an anti-Chinese activist? I suspect her husband’s experiences in the cotton mill industry taught her about advantages of being classified as white in a racist society, and that her own experiences as a dark-complexioned professional dressmaker taught her to assert a white identity in order not to be confused with free mulattos. She had come to the U.S. to prosper in business rather than to transform society, so even if she questioned the moral basis of racism, she would have seen acting against it as being against her self-interest.

This reinterpreted story makes me reflect on the work of teacher educators trying to prompt teacher candidates to examine themselves as culturally and historically located beings. A good thing to do, I believe. But like the story of my great-great-grandmother, when ancestors’ lives are interpreted within comfortable national narratives that air-brush out the construction of race and racism, students readily interpreted their lives within the narrative of people living in an open system, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.

We cannot revise history, but we can learn from it. In order to do so, however, we need to situate historic events within a context of power relationships. The methodology of critical family history, described and illustrated here, offers a tool for doing so.

Peopling a White Nation

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/peopling-a-white-nation/)

While it is common knowledge that the Founding Fathers envisioned the U.S. to be a white nation, most of us of European descent shy away from situating the history of our own families within an intentional project to do just that. A very common story among white people (not only in the U.S. but also in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) focuses on impoverished European immigrant ancestors who underwent great hardship for a fresh start in a new land.

Without diminishing hardships many European ancestors endured, it is important to place European immigration within the context of policies and practices designed to create and people a white nation, not for the purpose of fomenting guilt, but rather to understand how we are part of the historical construction of white privilege. I believe we cannot dismantle white privilege without examining closely how our families have participated in its construction (even if they did not realize that), and benefited from it.

To create a white nation, European colonists and their descendants decimated the indigenous peoples; another blog will look at that process in more detail. People of African descent were recruited, then captured and enslaved, as laborers rather than citizens. At the same time, during the 1700s and 1800s, the U.S. and state governments recruited and welcomed Europeans; there were no restrictions on immigration until 1874.

That much, you probably already know. An interesting question that is discussed much less is this: After the Revolutionary War, how did Europeans know to come to the U.S., trusting there would be land and opportunity for them when they got here? What role did official policies play in the process of getting them here?

I can piece answers to these questions together, but finding clear documentation of intent written in policies is difficult. (I welcome anyone who wishes to elaborate more on what I've been able to find, in the form of a guest blog.) Many histories simply mention that European immigrants were actively recruited, without specifying who recruited them and how this was done. An example is the Agricultural History of North Carolina.

European immigrants were offered land, or recruited for work. The Land Ordinance of 1785 set out the process for surveying land, dividing it into parcels, and selling it. First buyers could get land for a nominal fee, using a homestead process under which a head of household only had to live on the parcel (40 acres was common) and improve it for a given number of years. Subsequent laws, such as the Preemption Act o 1841 and the Homestead Act of 1862, extended this process. The overwhelming majority of homestead land went to white people, a large percentage being European immigrants. (For more information about land policies, see The Great American Grid or Andro Linklater's Measuring America.)

After the Civil War, Black Freedmen, supported by a few white allies such as Thaddeus Stephens, tried to get the same policy of access to land (known as "40 acres and a mule"). Indeed, toward the end of the Civil War about 10,000 newly freed slaves were temporarily granted defeated slaveholders' land, but it was subsequently given back to the former slaveholders, and land for Freedmen never became policy.

Land speculation is another line of inquiry that can be traced. Speculators obtained land from a variety of sources, such as government-issued land warrants in payment for military service, or purchase of large tracts from the U.S. government or state governments. Looking to make a profit, speculators, sometimes working with transportation companies, then recruited potential farmers to buy smaller parcels of land, which had the effect of funneling Europeans and white Americans westward. In the library, using the search term "land speculation" for a history database will yield many articles, usually reporting studies of specific counties during specific points in time.

Many industries recruited European workers. I've been able to do some tracing of industry-based recruitment by identifying the work immigrant ancestors did, then going to the academic library to find out more about that industry during that timeframe and place. For example, on cotton plantations in Mississippi, slaves initially worked both in the fields and in the mills. By the 1850s, however, as plantations expanded, planters increasingly working slaves in the fields, leading to labor shortages in the mills. Looking elsewhere for workers, some mill owners began to import workers from Europe as well as from the North, although, as R. M. Miller explained in "The fabric of control: Slavery in antebellum Southern textile mills" (published in The Business History Review in 1981) mill owners still preferred slave labor over white labor mainly because slaves were cheaper and could be controlled more firmly than whites. This library digging, however, helped me understand how a European ancestral family wound up in Mississippi right before the Civil War, and how their arrival was supported by racism and labor policies.

Some information about advertising to potential European emigrants is available. The poster to the left appears in Houghton-Mifflin social studies material for classroom use. The teachers' guide "The Forgotten Gateway," which details immigration into Texas, features several more great examples of recruitment posters that were used both in the U.S. and in Europe. In addition, individual states worked with transportation companies to recruit immigrants, who often came in a group with a leader. Jonathan Wagner, in his book A History of Migration from Germany to Canada, 1850-1939, briefly notes that German immigrants went mainly to the U.S. rather than Canada because U.S. states worked with transportation companies to publicize, recruit, and create transportation packages, while Canada did not. In some cases, whole villages were recruited from Europe and transplanted to the U.S., such as the German village of Esperke documented by Robert Frizzell in his book Independent Immigrants.

After some of the first European immigrants acquired land, letters they wrote to family and friends in Europe also served as recruitment devices. For example, a widely published German account, Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas, written by Gottfried Duden and published in 1829, eloquently romanticized the bounties and freedoms of farm life in Missouri, encouraging countless Germans to follow in his wake.

What I would like to emphasize here is that most of us who are white descend from people who benefited from explicit policies and practices to recruit Europeans and settle them on land from which indigenous peoples were dispossessed, or give them jobs in industries people of color did not have access to, in order to people a white nation. What European ancestors did after they arrived varies widely -- some prospered, some lived modestly, and some bungled opportunities badly. But there was a policy context that must be taken into account when considering the histories white people inherit because white privilege is a definite part of that inheritance.