America's North Shore Journal

skippy linked my Days of Yore page [THANKS!] and his post produced a nice comment from one of his frequent commenters. I’m going to post it, and my reply, becuase I think it’s a good discussion to ponder.

Thank you skippy for linking to these–it doesn’t go through Chuck’s usual heavy-on-bandwidth flag waving. Or thank you Chuck for omitting that!

We shouldn’t fall under the dark spell of the reactionaries who think they own history along with everything else, and will pretend that those were the good old days, and they were good because they follwed the quack theories they now claim are “traditional.” In the good old days there were a lot of leftists and radicals around; they took over some of these western and prairie states under the banner of the People’s Party; they supported the Workingman’s Party, Free-Soil, various labor movements including the radical Knights of Labor and the downright revolutionary Wobblies. It took WWI and the jailing of Eugene Debs and other very popular leader under various questionable war powers pretexts to stop the growth of the Socialist Party (and it wasn’t just city workers supporting it either.)

Naturally I know nothing of the politics of Chuck’s lovely wife’s ancestors a century ago. Just saying, because this _was_ America, the nation whose freedom people fought for, there _was_ a lot of freedom, more freedom of thought among many people than is shown today. Immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia were often distinguised by a progressive tradition which corresponded in the latter case to the general progress of their homeland, and in the former to the politics of people who lost out in struggles with the reactionary monarchists and came to America for a second chance at liberalism.

They were interesting people in those days, and they had interesting ideas too; some of the most interesting being those that did not find their way into policy! Karl Rove likes to hark back to the policies and programs in place under the Republicans controlled by boss Mark Hanna a hundred years ago, but this corporate machine was as hated and feared by diverse masses across the nation (in both major and all the minor parties) as Rove is today. Then as now, they ruled without too much regard to popular support, which they claimed, and did not hesitate to wave the flag in dubious causes, to override their opposition.

Mark Foxwell (the old Mark)

My reply:

Nice commentary, Mark, but I think you’re coloring the history a little too much. Norwegians and Germans weren’t fleeing tyranny so much as they were looking for opportunity that was, even then, failing in their European homelands. These were farmers, looking to farm. The anarchists and Reds ended up in the cities.

The folks were staunch Lutherans and Catholics. The photos show what they were proud of, their farms their families, and their livestock. This was a time when you could starve to death in America, or end up in a very real poorhouse.

I suspect that most of their politics was spent on ensuring they got the best price for their crops and that the costs of shipping goods to them were as low as possible. Oddly, no one I spoke to had ever heard of the Grange.

This was a time when everyone worked, and was expected to work. The radicalism that existed for these folks was the notion that a fair price ought to be paid for their crops and the costs of buying from the Sears catalogue ought to be as low as possible. They were at the tail end of a very long supply and demand chain controlled by the railroads. That was their politics.

These folks were very conservative churchgoers, low church style Lutherans and Catholics from the most hardcore Catholic areas of Germany. Their radicalism would today seem rather tame, even backward. The roots of modern liberalism may be found, in part, here but these people would not recognize modern liberalism as a social philosophy they could support. Their core beliefs revolved around the virtues of hard work and obligation. Obligation to family, and to neighbors.