Getting Ready to Party Like It’s Women’s History Month
This isn’t really a blog post. It’s an announcement of coming attractions.
In case you missed the memo, March is Women’s History Month in the United States.
Like most of the people I know who work in and around women’s history, I have mixed feelings about it. I love the fact that libraries, schools, community groups and mainstream media are inspired to celebrate the achievements of women: the famous, the infamous, the forgotten, the erased. (There is even an official government website devoted to it. https://womenshistorymonth.gov/) I hate the fact that as a culture we still see women’s history as something apart rather than simply history.
But the realities being what they are, we’re going to celebrate Women’s History Month here in the Margins the same way we’ve celebrated for the last two years, with a series of mini-interviews with people who write about or otherwise work with women’s history. Unlike the rest of the year, there will be new posts Monday through Friday. (If you want to rev yourself up, you can read all the previous interviews here.)
I’ve got a great mix of people lined up to talk about a wide range women, from queens to con artists. First up on Monday: English professor Etta Madden, talking about American women in Italy in the nineteenth century and the challenges of writing about someone best known as the “wife of”.
Pull out your party hats and noisemakers and get ready to read! We’re going to have Big Fun.
Civilian Internment Camps in World War I (Not a Typo)
Until recently, I thought of internment camps only in terms of the shameful removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans by the United States government, which saw concentrated populations of people of Japanese descent as a security risk, based on no evidence what so ever.* Several years ago, thanks to the excellent BBC mystery series Foyle’s War, my vision of World War II internment camps expanded to include the British internment of German nationals as “enemy aliens “ for much the same reasons. But I still thought of internment camps for civilians as something that happened in World War II.
To my surprise, it turns out that the internment of enemy aliens was a thing in World War I as well.** Together, combatant nations on both sides of the war, including the United States, interned more than 400,000 civilians of enemy nationality over the course of the war. Unlike the Japanese interment in World War II, most of the interned civilians were men.***
The United States was a relatively small player in the internment game, but it was definitely a player.
America’s entry into the war was accompanied by an outbreak of nativism and xenophobia directed at German immigrants and Americans of German dissent. (I suspect it had been simmering under the surface for a long time. Germans were the largest non-English speaking population and the most successful immigrant population at the time.) German books were removed from public library shelves. German classes were abruptly dropped from public schools.**** Citizens of German descent were subjected to vigilante action and in at least once case a German immigrant was lynched by a drunken mob.
Soon after the United States entered the war, Woodrow Wilson used the 1798 Alien Enemy Act to impose a series of restriction on German nationals. They were banned from entering “forbidden zones”, required to register with the police or the local postmaster, and forbidden to own radios or firearms. The restrictions were soon extended to included citizens of the Austro-Hungarian empire and all female enemy aliens. German residents were kept under surveillance for violations of these restrictions, by their neighbors as well as by the authorities, and police round-ups were common. Over the course of the war, more than 10,000 German residents were arrested. Most were released after a brief investigation, but about 2,300 German and Austrian nationals were held in internment camps, including twenty-nine musicians from the Boston symphony orchestra. About ten percent were wealthy German born immigrants suspected of financing pro-German propaganda. Fifteen were women suspected of “aiding the enemy”—a phrase that I assume means spying in this context. Most were working class men who had been involved in radical politics or labor unrest.
A majority of the internees were released in June 1919, but some remained in custody as late as April 1920. (Just a reminder: the war ended in November, 1918.)
The internment camps of World War I differed significantly from those of World War II, but both were based on the belief that national descent or ethnicity could define loyalty. That belief–expanded to include religion–has been a common thread in our national defense policy ever since. *sigh*
* In the course of digging around on the subject of enemy internment I learned that two Japanese internment camps were located in southeastern Arkansas—which definitely didn’t fit into my understanding of this ugly piece of American history. Arkansas State University has created a museum and memorial on the site of one of the camps. (Check it out here: https://rohwer.astate.edu/ )When things open up again, we’re heading out on more road trips through history. This is now on the list.
** Perhaps this is something everyone knows and I was reading a book about something else in the back of American history class the day we covered it. (Thanks to alphabetical order I often sat in a back corner of the room, which made it easy to hold an open book on my lap when things were dull. I’m not naming any names, but this was true all too often in my American history class even though I was predisposed to be interested. )
***This did not mean that women and children were unaffected. Left behind when their male relatives were interned, they suffered financially from the loss of a primary bread-winner and from the social stigma attached to being “dangerous” foreigners. Not to mention the emotional trauma of having a father, son or brother taken away. The assumption that war is experienced only by men is built on a narrow definition of war.
****It wasn’t restored in my hometown school system until my junior year of high school. Hatred has a long, invisible tail.
From the Archives: Was Prof. Bhaer a ’48-er?
Today’s blog post just blew up in my face. It happens. Instead of scrambling to put something together, or simply not posting, I decided to run an updated version of a post from 2015 that relates to some of the issues I was thinking about. There will be new stuff next week,I promise. And an entire month of Women’s History Month’s posts in March.
* * *
Unlike most of the women I know who grew up reading Little Women, I was never indignant that Jo March married Professor Bhaer instead of the adolescent golden boy, Laurie. That kiss in the rain under the umbrella defined romance for me. I was always firmly on Team Professor. And now I think I know why.* I suspect Professor Bhaer, Fritz to his friends, was a 48-er.**
As is so often the case with me, it’s been a multi-step epiphany, spread over several years.
I took my first step toward this realization four or five years ago when My Own True Love and I visited my hometown Civil War battlefield, Wilson’s Creek. Walking the self-guided tour at Wilson’s Creek was a regular part of my childhood and adolescence, so I didn’t expect to learn anything new. Silly me. In that visit I realized for the first time how many Germans took part in the battle. Not German-Americans. German immigrants. In fact, at least one unit was made up entirely of Germans who spoke no English. They had marched south from St. Louis into the sauna of a mid-South summer to fight with patriotic fervor for their adopted country. Interesting, I thought, then my attention was diverted by George Caleb Bingham’s Order #11. The question of Germans in the Civil War slid into a back pocket in my brain.
Germans in the Civil War grabbed my attention again a couple of years later, when I was working on a book on the history of socialism and plunged into the revolutions of 1848–something I had only been peripherally aware of before. Sometimes called the “revolution of the intellectuals, the movement began on January 2, 1848, when Palermo, in Sicily, rose up against its ruler. Over the next four months, more than armed rebellions occurred across Europe, in France, Austria, Prussia and most of the smaller German and Italian states. There was no single revolutionary organization or movement. No coordination across national boundaries. In state after state, socialists, intellectuals, middle class professionals, the urban poor and the peasants united against absolutism and the remains of feudal privilege. In state after state, the revolutions failed, put down with varying levels of brutality by governments with no interest in participatory government. By 1849, not only had the revolutionary impulse been crushed, but the political situation in many countries was more repressive than it had been before the revolts.
Thousands of German revolutionaries fled to the United States in the last half of 1848. Most of them settled in the newly industrializing cities of the Midwest, where they profoundly shaped the culture of Milwaukee, Cincinnati and Ohio. A substantial minority settled in the Texas hill country. Others found work in the textile mills of New England. They opened small manufactories, established newspapers, and formed mutual-aid societies. As a group, they fit in well with the “benevolent empire” of reform associations dedicated to temperance, asylum and penal reform, women’s rights, education, and, most important of all, abolition that stretched across the northern United States in the years before the civil war. Having lost their own fight for greater freedom in their home countries, they were for the most part fervent abolitionists. When the Civil War came they enlisted in disproportionate numbers to fight in what to their eyes was a simple fight for freedom.
And what, you may ask, does all that have to do with Professor Bhaer? Patience, children.
A few years later, while I was working on Heroines of Mercy Street, I had the opportunity to read not only the description of the home life of one of the 48-ers who immigrated to America, but his letters to the woman he married. They paint an appealing picture of a domesticated revolutionary: a little house lovingly kept and simple pleasures shared with friends. The tone of the letters was sweet, playful–and very familiar. They nagged at me for a couple of days and then I got it–Professor Bhaer! Gustav von Olnhausen sounded exactly like Professor Bhaer! I was gobsmacked.
*To all my male readers who are glaring at their screen or giving baffled shrugs, trust me. History is about to begin.
**Not to be confused with the ’49-ers of the California Gold Rush. Though now that I think about, I wonder if the United States was affected by the Hungry ’40s in ways other than the flood of new immigrants? Anyone?