American stories

I'm sure there are those who will shrug their shoulders. After all, "history is bunk," right? James G. Whitman's new book, Hitler's American Model, is, after all, little more than a footnote, a story from long, long ago of use primarily to history profs and their obliging undergrad students.

The story Whitman explores--or so says a review in the Atlantic--is a trip taken by a goodly number of Nazi theorists and legal experts who, in 1935, traveled here, to the land of the free to study how America had canonized its systemic racism, its legal discrimination against people of color. Third Reich officials came here, to the U. S. of A. because they were greatly taken by the manner by which this country had been able to keep races separate.

Whether they used American models to construct their own racial laws or whether they found those laws simply to be helpful in carrying out racist designs they'd already fashioned and would soon implement isn't clear; but it's really shocking, at least to me, that they would look for help and guidance and direction from us, here, in "America the Beautiful."

For the record, history records the lynchings of 117 black men during the 1930s, although it seems quite fair to presume history doesn't record them all. What Whitman explains--and what the German officials must have known--was that no other country, not even South Africa, had such a fortified legal system of racial discrimination. 

In the late 1890s, when the first white folks put down roots here where I live, making one's way was just about all one could do. The deep economic crisis of the era was as devastating as the Great Depression would eventually prove itself to be. People here, right here along the Floyd River and throughout the region, simply had nothing.

Charles Dyke, in the History of Sioux County, tells the story of VerSteeg family, immigrant Dutch, whose stove gave out, mid-winter, in horrifying cold. Mr. VerSteeg took his sleigh to the Hospers store for a new one. The Dyke brothers, who ran the place, knew very well that the family had to stay warm, had to cook food, but they also knew that the VerSteegs had no money--zero, not a dollar to their name. 

Cold winter weeks pass, and the VerSteegs, like their other customers, still can't pay their bills--not because they're lazy crooks but because they simply have no money. The brothers determine they can't continue to exist without income, so Brother Charlie is given the thankless job of going out here to the farmsteads where their customers live and trying to collect something, anything. 

When he gets to the VerSteegs, the family seems to be thriving. "How do you do it?" he asks, and Mr. VerSteeg says they've got vegetables canned, and, blessedly, they eat all kinds of rabbits, trapping 'em, then pan-frying or baking them. 

It's an absolutely charming story of perseverance and determined human will to make do. Eventually, VerSteegs got some egg money or something to pay the bill for that stove (Dyke says he paid it off faster than he needed to). Eventually the wooden-shoes made it. Those children, raised on pan-fried rabbit, made good--became doctors and lawyers and veterinarians. It's a story that cheers the heart.

It's also a story we want to remember, a story of how we made our way in times so desperate they would otherwise beg to be forgotten. It's part of our mythology, our identity; it creates the images of how we see ourselves. It's an American story of an immigrant family whose persistent determination to succeed brings them the dream they were certain they'd find in America.

But there's other stories that belong in the American canon. One of them, sad to say, is of thoughtful Nazi theorists visiting here in order to understand just exactly how it was that we Americans could so neatly codify racism. They came here for a model of hate. 

Both those stories are ours.  Choosing to believe either one but not the other means living on half-truth, which is never the whole truth, so help me God.