American Exceptionalism

Kenny was a kid, he told me--too young to go to war, but not too young to work. In Sioux City, Perry Creek had swollen into a torrent right then, wreaked havoc on more than a thousand houses on the city's west side. Mud roared into a thousand basements.

It was July, 1944, a month after D-Day, and hosts of able-bodied Siouxland men were off to war in Europe and the South Pacific, where hundreds were dying and casualty numbers were soaring. Of what importance, really, was a little creek in Sioux City, a flood that killed no one, even though it inconvenienced hundreds?

Kenny told me he signed up to be part of a church work group from Sioux Center, a few farmers, a bunch of high school guys, and a score of women and girls, all of whom volunteered to do flood relief.

There's only one way to get river muck out of a clogged basement: you get hold of the biggest pail you can lift, scoop it full of wet dirt, and carry it, a pailful at a time, up the basement stairs and outside, where you dump it. It's tedious and terribly hard work.

So sometime during the days Ken's church group was working, a couple dozen Italian prisoners of war--they all wore shirts with PW printed on the back--showed up out of nowhere, buckets in hand, and joined the help. Kenny was 16. He couldn't help but notice that these guys knew how to work. Not only that, the whole blame job was going to get done much faster because there were forty of them in all, from the Army's 7th Service Command in Omaha. One of those prisoners told him they spent their nights on cots at West Junior High.

What was clear is that they were pure blessing, Kenny said. But he told me that he himself, just a kid, had some growing up to do because at first it was a chore to be friendly when he knew these men had brothers somewhere in Italy who still put GIs in their crosshairs. These guys were the enemy, after all.

They didn't talk much, he said, didn't really establish a friendship; but when you spend a couple days doing all that grunt work together what eventually grows is a kind of respect that doesn't require chattiness. Years later, Ken told me that on that church work crew he'd come to realize, doing really crappy work, that beneath that PW on their backs there were men with a beating hearts and maybe even teenage sons they'd come to miss dearly.

All too often, people who talk about "American exceptionalism" are those who like to believe that God Almighty smiles more broadly when he looks over the fabled American landscape, that we are "the city on the hill" John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan said we were--and are. For some, talk of American exceptionalism is just another way of waving the stars-and-striped in the face of the rest of the world.

They could do better by reading up on the way the U. S. of A. treated its German, Irish, and Japanese prisoners of war, because the difference between the muddy basements of Perry Creek and railroad stations of Auschwitz and Buchenwald cannot be measured.

When the war ended, the men with PW on their backs changed into shirts that said nothing about them. Many of them wanted to stay. None could--the law required them to return; but not a few eventually did, some to live, others, nostalgically, to remember a time--well, look again at that picture at the top of the page.

The truth? It comes down, simply, to this: we treated our prisoners of war as if they were human beings; we treated them as we would have liked to be treated. 

That, I think, is "American exceptionalism."