Sun, Dec 20, 1942: Stille Nacht

"I wonder if a person dares to say 'Fröhliche Weihnachten' or sing 'Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht' this year. 
"I hope I may get to see you during your vacation. Ours is a very brief one.  May your Christmas be a happy one.  - Fräulein Larner.”

-- Christmas card from Ella Larner, Augusta, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, December 20, 1942.  (“'Fröhliche Weihnachten” means “Merry Christmas.” “Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht” means “Silent Night, Holy Night.”  Ella Larner was my father’s high school Latin teacher at Augusta High School.  Madelyn Payne (Barack Obama’s grandmother) happened to have been my father’s classmate in Ella Larner’s Latin I class in 1937-38.  Ella Larner, as well as my father, are mentioned in David Maraniss’s new biography of Barack Obama’s childhood and youth Barack Obama: The Making of the Man.)

German Americans suffered nothing like the prejudice and discrimination directed at Japanese Americans in World War II.  Yet, as this quote suggests, the wartime climate led to suspicion of German culture, of Germans and German Americans.  During 1942, the United States was engaged in a naval war with Germany in the Atlantic.  German submarines were torpedoing American vessels within sight of the Virginia and Florida shore.  Some suspected the German military was aided by Germans within the United States, although there is no evidence of such aid.  These concerns led to the internment of many Germans and German Americans (although a tiny percentage of their total U.S. population).  In all, the United States detained 11,507 Germans and German Americans, including immigrants to the United States and travellers stranded by the war.

Unlike with Japanese Americans, there was no internment of all people of German ancestry (or all people of Italian ancestry) in specific areas of the country.  Nor was there even internment of all German or Italian nationals without U.S. citizenship from specific areas.  Rather, specific persons deemed dangerous, sometimes based on membership in suspect organizations, were interned.  Detainees had only limited due process and no access to lawyers; but many were able to appeal their internment and be released.   Both German citizens and a small number of German Americans were interned.  German Americans had suffered much more in World War I (although again nothing on the scale of Japanese Americans in World War II).  During that war, in some place, icons of German culture like Bach and Beethoven were banned, German books were burned, and Germans changed their names to hide their ancestry.

The public’s and officials’ racial atittudes, as well as population numbers, were important in determining the very different fates of Germans, Italians, and Japanese within the United States.  Few Americans perceived a threat from Italians.  There was greater suspicion of Germans.  However, despite some consideration of mass incarcerations, Congress, the Justice Department, and the president never supported such efforts.   The size of the German population also made mass incarceration unlikely (as it precluded the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry in Hawai’i).  In 1940, 1.2 million people born in Germany lived in the United States.  If one includes the number of people with at least one parent born in Germany, the number of Germans in the United States came to 6 million.

Japanese and Japanese Americans suffered a very different fate from Germans and German Americans, because of their race.  Facing unfounded rumors of sabotage efforts by Japanese Americans and racist outcries against them, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order No. 9066 on February 19, 1942.  The order lead to the incarceration of all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast (whether U.S. citizens or not).  In all, 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated in ten concentration camps, far from their homes.

Source: Tetsuden Kashima, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 284-87, 291; Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 131-36; David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Making of the Man, (Simon & Schuster, 2012), 27.

Thu, Dec 10, 1942: badly disgusted

"...They had a teacher's meeting at Augusta and decided to give the school just two days vacation Dec. 24 and 25.  Barbara felt pretty badly disgusted so did Louise M.  Lee Lenz said he was rather glad.  The idea was to give the boys and girls a chance to help with the spring work a week earlier than otherwise...."

--Letter from my grandmother, on the farm at Bloomington, Kans., to my father, a college sophomore at Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Thursday, December 10,1942.  

       The high school that my aunt Barbara, like my father before her, attended was in the town of Augusta (population 3,821 in 1940).  The high school drew students from farmlands surrounding the city, including my family’s community of Bloomington 13 miles to the southeast.  It set its schedule in part to accommodate farmwork by children.  My aunt Barbara (age 14) and her friend Louise Myers (also 14) were “pretty badly disgusted” at the idea.  For some reason, my father’s good friend, Lee Lenz, 18, was “rather glad” he’d have a short vacation and the chance to help on the farm in the spring.  (Source: 1940 census population schedule and published statistics).

Thu, Dec 10, 1942: enough gas

"...Daddy is still intending to go down after you on Dec. 18th and will probably be there so you can get started home fairly early as that is the night of the program at Bloomington. 
"We seem to be having enough gas so far but don't know whether or not we will run out toward the end of the period for which the stamps are issued...."

-- Letter from my grandmother, on the farm at Bloomington, Kans., to my father, a college sophomore at Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Thursday, December 10, 1942.  On December 1, the government had put in place gasoline rationing, a ban on pleasure driving, and a nationwide 35-mile-an-hour speed limit.  (On rationing, see my earlier post “Thu, May 7, 1942: Ration Book”).

Thu, Dec 10, 1942: couldn’t wait

"...We were so glad to get your letter this week.  In fact, Barbara wasn't coming home the evening we received it and I couldn't wait until she came so read it anyhow......I am still counting on you to sing and play at my Christmas program which will be Dec. 24th. Also Ella was asking for you to sing at the church program on Sun. eve. Dec 20th." 
--Letter from my grandmother, Jessie Maybelle (Berger) Brown,on the farm at Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Sidney DeVere Brown, a college sophomore at Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Thursday, December 10, 1942.

Tue, Nov 16, 1942: exemplary character

“...Mr. Brown is a young man of excellent appearance, apparently sound physical health, pleasing manners, fine personality, exemplary character, and the highest ideals of loyalty, patriotism, and devotion to duty.
“Mr. Brown is an excellent student, keenly intellectual, a very hard worker, practical, efficient, and capable in all that he undertakes to do.  He is never satisfied with ‘good enough’, but always aims and plans to do his best in whatever he undertakes....”
--Letter of recommendation from Leroy Allen, professor of religion, Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., dated Tuesday, November 16, 1942, in reference to my father’s application to enlist in the U.S. Navy.
          My father chose to enlist in the Navy, knowing that he would soon be drafted in any case.  He enlisted on November 17, 1942, and would begin his military service in July 1943.  He would later write, “More than high patriotism, my youthful signing was a maneuver to avoid being drafted into the infantry when I turned eighteen.”  I obtained this letter by ordering my father’s military service records from the National Archives (www.archives.gov).  You can order military records of a deceased veteran, if you are immediate kin.  If the veteran separated from the service more than 62 years ago, anyone can order their military record.  (Source: Letter from my father to Elliott Nickell, March 18, 2001).

Tues, Nov 10, 1942: inspection

"...We had a 'shake-down' inspection Monday morning.  It was quite an ordeal for we had to lay all our equiptment on our bunks for a check up. An officer checked every item that we were issued.  If we were short any thing it was charged against us and too if there was too much, we either had to hide it or turn it back to the supply room....”

--Letter from Dale Sooter, my Dad's cousin, an Army private, Wilmington, Calif., to my father, a college sophomore at Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Tuesday, November 10, 1942.

Sun, Nov 8, 1942: new pony

“...Lois and Billy Mitchell are married.

"Billy Alley has a new pony.  It is sorrel and has a white strip down its head.

"I hope you get good grades.  Please tell me your grads.

"Yours truly,

"Stanley”

--Letter from my uncle Stanley, age 9, on the farm, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, 17, a sophomore at Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, November 8,1942.

Sun, Nov 8, 1942: Homecoming (complete letter)

                          Nov. 8, 1942

                          Winfield, Kans.

Dear Barbara:

     I've finally got around to writing you folks to let you know that Joyce and I arrived in Winfield safely last Sunday Evening.  I didn't get time last week, because it was about the busiest we've had since school began.  Besides having mid-semester examinations, I had to get some papers in for Social and Economic Problems, prepare a debate, and it was Homecoming Week.

     I think I did fairly well on some of the examinations, I got all of the problems right in Algebra for a perfect paper.  Our grades will come out next week, but I already know that I got an A - in Health Education (3 hours).

     You may have noticed in the papers that Southwestern was beaten 20-7 by St. Benedict's in the Homecoming Football Game.  Our team started off good, made the first touchdown, and didn't let St. Benedict's make a single first down until near the end of the third quarter, but after that our boys played out or something and they won.  The night before the game, I went to the Campus Player's Homecoming Play 'Out of the Frying Pan,' and then to a big pep rally and bonfire.  After that we went down and worked on the Kappa Rho float for the Parade the next morning.  For the float, we had a great big 1923 Buick all painted up with inscriptions, and a bunch of boys dressed like Arkansawyers chasing with shotgun's Bud Helm dressed up like a Raven (St. Benedict's Ravens).  After that we got our quartet together to serenade some of the girl's dormitories, and finally we studied Health Education for our regular Saturday morning test before going to bed.

     I suppose you heard that Joyce was rejected by the army.  It looks like he may get to be a college graduate yet.

     Be sure to write and tell me what's going on around Augusta and home.  I hope this gasoline rationing coming up November 22 won't interfere with your schooling.

     I'll see you all next Sunday up at Augusta.  Joyce and I plan to see the Wichita U. game on Saturday, stay all night and came over the next day with King's.  Tell Dad that I may be available for a day's work on Monday, is he's got anything to do out on the farm.  I suppose Stanley's mighty busy, and tell him we'll have another aeroplane ride, the next chance we get.  How does Mom like schoolteaching by this time.

                        Sincerely Yours,

                                    DeVere

P.S.- Please have the folks bring my birth certificate into Augusta Sunday.

--Complete letter from my father, a sophomore at Southwestern College, Winfield, Kans., to his sister, Barbara, on the farm in Bloomington, Kans., Sunday, November 8,1942.
      This portrait of my father’s lifestyle as a 17-year-old college sophomore provides quite a contrast with the lives of his friends and relatives that were going off to the military.  For a change, I thought I would post an entire letter, to give you some sense of the documents from which I extract the brief quotes I've been posting.  This three-page letter is a pretty typical length. When my father was in college, most of the letters he and his family sent were about two to five pages.  They also occasionally sent each other postcards.  As with this letter, they typically wrote on Sunday or midweek (Tuesday to Thursday).

Sun, Nov 8, 1942: married

"...We were over at Katherine's for dinner to-day.  Papa, Mamma, and Robert rode over with us.  Flo and Everett and Lois were there too.  We had a lovely dinner.  Lois Arlene and Billy are just announcing that they were married last Feb. 7th.  Guess Flo was the only one who knew it.  Lois intends to finish school this year.  LaVerne cried when she found it out...."
--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, November 8, 1942.  Katherine, Robert, and Flo were my grandmother’s siblings.  Lois Arlene and LaVerne were the children of Flo and her husband Everett.  I'm not sure why Lois and Billy waited nine months to announce their marriage.  The wedding took place two months after the U.S. went to war and was part of a nationwide surge in marriages in the early months of the war (on marriage rates in World War II, see my earlier post “July 15, 1942: married”).

Sun, Oct 11, 1942: plenty of work

"...I plan to start 'spring-toothing' the wheat ground on King tomorrow, I was over there this afternoon and I think the ground is about dry enough.

“Augusta won their football game Friday night, I guess I'll have to quit betting with Lee Lenz.  I see Southwestern won their game Friday night.

"If you want to to [sic] come home next Saturday and stay till Tues, it will be O.K. there is always plenty of work to be done...."

--Letter from my grandfather, Leonard Reeves Brown, on the farm in Bloomington, Kans., Sunday, October 11, 1942 to my father, Sidney DeVere Brown, at college in Winfield, Kans. 
          That Monday, my grandfather was planning to use a spring-tooth harrow to prepare the ground for planting.  (There are youtube videos of spring-toothing, if you're interested).  Farmers in my grandfather’s community planted winter wheat in late October.  It sprouted soon after and then turned brown and dormant with the first frost.  It came back to life in the spring, was golden by late May and the harvest began in June. Wheat helped my grandparents pay for my father's college education and as a college student, my father occasionally took long weekends at home to help with farm work on wheat and other crops.  

          In planting wheat in the ground of his Bloomington farm, my grandfather was relying on the work of two peoples, without whose work there would have been no “wheat ground” in Kansas, at least not in the form it took.  He was relying on the efforts of the people of the Middle East who first domesticated wheat millennia ago.  And he was relying on the efforts of the Osage people and other indigenous people who had maintained the tallgrass prairie free from trees for centuries using fire.  Like all of us, he was indebted to distant people and not-so-distant people in order to make his livelihood in the world -- people who likely rarely crossed his mind.

Transforming Kansas prairies to wheat fields cultivated by whites was only possible, because whites had taken that land from the Osage people in the late nineteenth century.  On their lands in a large region where Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma meet today, Osage cultivated corn, beans, and squash.  They also hunted deer and buffalo.  Like other indigenous groups on the plains, the Osage burned the prairies for a variety of reasons: to create environments that attracted herbivores, to drive animals, to signal other groups, to prepare land for planting.  Thereby, they helped to create and maintain the tallgrass prairies, altering the prevalence of grass species and preventing the encroachment of trees.  In the 1860s, just a few decades before my great-grandfather arrived in Bloomington with my grandfather, his older sister, and younger brother (in 1906), whites had dispossessed Osage people and confined them to a much smaller reservation in Oklahoma, some 45 miles south of my grandparents’ farm.

 People in the Middle East began eating wheat they collected from the wild long before domesticating it and transforming its genome through human selection.  Early archeological evidence of gathering Triticum turgidum (durum wheat) exists near the Sea of Galilee around 17,000 B.C.E.  Early evidence of domesticating these plants comes from near Damascus, around 7800 B.C.E.  Triticum aestivuna (bread wheat) -- the species of wheat making up 90% of wheat cultivated today including the winter wheat my grandfather grew -- evolved from the already domesticated durum wheat.  There is evidence of bread wheat as early as 7,000 B.C.E. near the Caspian Sea.

            As people chose to plant seeds with certain traits, the size of wheat seeds increased.  It also developed a rachis that held its seeds once they were ripe, allowing humans to harvest the grains, rather than having them scatter on the ground.  One factor that made wheat especially suited to domestication is that, unlike most flowering plants, it is self-pollinating.  This allowed farmers to keep their crops genetically separated from their wild cousins and maintain changes in its DNA.  In plants cross-pollinated by bees or other animals, there is no way to keep genes from moving from wild plants to nearby domesticated plants.  The properties of wheat helped shape Middle Eastern and European cooking practices: gluten proteins in wheat allow it to rise when leavened, allowing baking of the leavened bread that is central to Middle Eastern and European diets.

            Spreading from the Middle East into Europe, wheat came to dominate the diet of the Europeans.  Europeans, in turn, brought it with them when they resettled the lands of North America (already settled by American Indians) in the seventeenth century.  Wheat was introduced in Kansas as early as 1839.  Winter wheat specifically was brought there in the 1870s.  It proved to be especially suited to that state, since it could take advantage of the months when Kansas receives most of its precipitation, winter and early spring.

Relying on the work of Middle Easterners and Osage, and their own hard work most days of the year, farmers transformed a fifth of Kansas into wheat fields.   Kansas soon became one of the nation’s leading producers of wheat, as it remains today.  Its license plates proudly proclaimed it the “Wheat State” in the 1940s and 1950s.  More recently, the plates have prominently featured a stalk of wheat.  Kansas land in wheat went from 68,000 acres in 1866, to 4.2 million acres in 1900 to 10.3 million in 1942 – the year described in this letter.  That means that in 1942 about 20% of all the land in the state was planted in wheat, a plant had never grown there before the 1830s.

            (Sources: Sidney DeVere Brown, Kansas Farmboy: A Memoir of Boyhood and Youth [2008], 104-5; Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf, Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The Origin and Spread of Cultivated Plants in West Asia, Europe and the Nile Valley (Oxford University Press, 2000); Julie Courtwright, Prairie Fire: A Great Plains History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 20-31; Garrick A. Bailey, "Osage," in Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 13, Part I, Plains, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie, 476-96; USDA, "Kansas Wheat History," 2011, available at http://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Kansas/Publications/Crops/whthist.pdf); Biennial Report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture, 1922; "Wheat" in Kansapedia, available at http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/wheat/12235)