The Brothers GeorgeAn Akron Instance of Second-Generation Assimilation John D. Fair (bio) The second generation of the immigrant may share fully in our memories, but practically all that we can ask of the foreign-born is participation in our ideals, our wishes, and our common enterprise. —Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology Since the dawn of the civil rights era in the 1950s, much scholarship has focused on the inclusion of diverse racial minorities into American mainstream culture.1 It was preceded, in the early twentieth century, by an emphasis on the amalgamation of ethnic groups, largely from Eastern and Southern Europe, an image often dubbed "the melting pot." It was a compelling story of how largely second-generation immigrants found their way to assimilation and acceptance in American society. "In popular accounts," note Richard Alba and Nancy Foner, "it is a tale of rags to riches, as the second generation moved out of tenements and sweatshops to leafy middle-class suburbs and professional office suites."2 Likewise, academic literature portrays the offspring of immigrants as aspirational. "Children of European [End Page 70] immigrants learnt English, gradually abandoned their parents' language and culture, and clawed their ways through schools and entrepreneurship into economic affluence," write Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut. "Historical events such as World War II and the post-war economic boom facilitated their economic and social integration."3 Robert Park and Ernest Burgess provided an early paradigm of this assimilation process in their 1921 survey of sociology, asserting that subjects were "typically unconscious" of their incorporation into the common life of the group or the circumstances leading up to it. "As social contact initiates interaction, assimilation is its final perfect product," they argue.4 Most often, however, the final product was not perfect. This conceptual limitation is illuminated in the seminal 1964 work of Milton Gordon, who distinguished between culture and structure as respective measures of the assimilation process. While the former includes traits and patterns of behavior drawn from an ethnic group's heritage, the latter embraces a total acceptance of the mainstream culture, even to the extent of intermarriage. Once structural assimilation has occurred, according to Gordon, 'all other types of assimilation will naturally follow.' . . . Structural assimilation, then, rather than acculturation, is seen to be the keystone of the arch of assimilation. The price of such assimilation, however, is the disappearance of the ethnic group as a separate entity and the evaporation of its distinctive values. Gordon views it as a "gradual process" that leads, at least in some degree, to Anglo-conformity. Pluralism prevailed, but it was structural rather than cultural pluralism that was "the major key to the understanding of the ethnic makeup of American society." Within this process the "children of the uprooted" were "overwhelmingly triumphant."5 But it was by no means a monolithic or inevitable outcome. [End Page 71] In Remaking the American Mainstream, Richard Alba and Victor Nee also reject the notion that assimilation was one-dimensional, that immigrants adapted to the expectations of the majority "whose role was limited to accepting or rejecting the minority 'petitioning' to be allowed into the mainstream." Their inclusion was contextualized by the expansion of higher education, greater middle-class employment, and growth of suburban communities in postwar America. Yet Alba and Nee do not discount individual motivation. Immigrant inclusion is "in general the cumulative by-product of choices made by individuals seeking to take advantage of opportunities to improve their life chances and wellbeing through purposive action."6 The George brothers of Akron, Ohio—Pete, Jim, and George—provide a unique example of purposive action, or what is often termed "human capital." The sport of weightlifting furnished a pathway to success for these sons of Bulgarian immigrants, who took advantage of educational, professional, and residential opportunities not readily available to the previous generation. The extent to which their assimilation was cultural or structural serves as a platform for this article. A Bulgarian Descent Testimonies from George and Pete recount the circumstances surrounding their parents' migration, as ethnic Bulgarians, from Bitola, North Macedonia, in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire. The date their...
Memorializing AgencyLinguistic Analyses of Ohio's Memorials at Historic Conflict Sites Involving American Indians Roger W. Anderson (bio) Introduction: My Initial Interest in Memorials to American Indians In one northeast Ohio public park called South Chagrin Reservation, a hiking trail leads to "Squaw Rock."1 Growing up nearby, I loved strolling through the woods and descending stone stairs to the shore of the Chagrin River to see this rock. There, the shape of a woman carved into a bolder becomes visible. Naked and surrounded by a serpentine figure, the woman's supine body appears vulnerable. The date 1885 is etched into the rock. What was the story of Squaw Rock, and who carved it? Only as an adult, through return trips to northeast Ohio, did I learn that Henry Church carved the figure of a woman into stone by candlelight, entitling his creation, "The Rape of the Indians by the White Man." Historic injustices done to American Indians2 inspired his artistic creation near a popular picnic location. Utilitarian, the rock served as the pulpit from which he "preach[ed] sermons on the spirits of the thousands of natives the settlers had massacred."3 I also noticed that signage referencing "Squaw Rock" had been replaced with "Church Rock." [End Page 7] Having relocated elsewhere in Ohio, I was absent for local discussions over whether or not the rock's name was considered culturally offensive.4 Church Rock sits on land owned by the Cleveland Metroparks, not by the federal government. Nonetheless, clear and authoritative guidance came through the US Department of the Interior, which classified "squaw" as a derogatory term. In 2022, the department ordered that all federal lands remove "squaw," now written "sq___."5 The federal government's newfound sensitivity to such language is the direct result of greater inclusion of historically marginalized peoples—given that the Department of the Interior, under the Biden administration, is being led by an administrator of American Indian heritage for the first time in history.6 As a fifth-generation Ohioan, European-American, and son of a history teacher, I have always been intrigued by the beautiful, curious site that is at Church Rock and fascinated by local history. Today, I am an assistant professor of international languages and cultures at a public university in Ohio. I am committed to developing students' intercultural competence and linguistic proficiencies. Beyond mere cultural competence, intercultural competence is the development of attitudes (respect, curiosity, openness, etc.) about others' cultures—which in turn spurs discovery of knowledge about one's own culture.7 My study of international languages and cultures has reinvigorated my curiosity about the history of my own corner of the universe: Ohio. As such, when I visit Church Rock today, I do so as an applied linguist who depends upon historians' work to understand my own place in the universe—as well as those places and cultures I teach about. Any appreciation of Ohio's cultural history must begin with the native peoples. Unlike my European ancestors, indigenous peoples had inhabited this land since the prehistoric era. To those of us privileged to be living in Ohio today, it is necessary to know—with some specificity—the history of their violent removal from the lands we now call home. Furthermore, students of world history must also recognize how the genocide against American Indians, led by successive [End Page 8] generations of Europeans and European-Americans in North America, inspired the mass murder of other people overseas. "The immense inner strength of the United States came from ruthless but necessary act of murdering native people and herding the rest into 'cages,'" Adolf Hitler proclaimed, taking inspiration from the American example. This "necessary act" created lebensraum, or living space, for "Nordic-Germanic" peoples of the United States, whom he perceived as the superior race.8 Toward the same goal, he implemented unprecedented mass murder in Europe, the likes of which, God willing, we will never see again. A duty to know, to understand, the history of the peoples who once populated Ohio motivated me to explore historic sites. Over the past two decades, I drove thousands of miles around the state—to the detriment of...
Reviewed by: The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education by David Komline Brian R. Corbin, Edd The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education. David Komline. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. ISBN: 978-0190085155. 312 pp., hardcover, $110.00. The junior high school's dismissal bell rings earlier than usual each Wednesday, and a noticeable percentage of Catholic students exit the public school to receive religious instruction at a local parish. In this mostly French-Catholic town in Central Maine, Protestant students are left behind to participate in their own Christian formation. This weekly ritual is not occurring in the 1800s, but in the mid-1970s. The US Supreme Court decision, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (21-418, June 2022), ruled in favor of a high school football coach who prayed in the middle of the field after each game, inviting student-athletes to join him. Some parents asked what religious tradition the coach was promoting and questioned whether or not his actions pressured their children-athletes—who may not share such religious beliefs—to participate. These two examples might seem disconnected, but the history of public education weaves them together. Disagreements over prayer and Bible use in schools, and in athletics, continue to require Supreme Court adjudication. These issues have their roots in the Common School Awakening movement, which began in the early 1800s. The King James Version, of course, provided that formational glue between various Christian leaders seeking governmental support for the education of the masses as they organized public funding of schools and established school boards and superintendents of education. This Awakening firmly held that one can form students in Christianity without sectarianism. That coalition unraveled, according to Komline, in the 1840s. The religious politics of the common school in Ohio provided a moment of success followed by rapid failure for this grand coalition. We learn from Komline how William Holmes McGuffey of the Western Reserve and Harriet Beecher Stowe's husband, Calvin Stowe, led a movement in Ohio to form common [End Page 96] schools. In response, Bishop John Baptiste Purcell of Cincinnati fought hard for public financing for these schools, but he insisted on the removal of anti-Catholic textbooks and the allowance for proper Catholic formation. That compromise never occurred, thus requiring the Catholic community, along with many German immigrants, to withdraw support for a common school and fight for separate accommodations for denominational formation. Coalitions that supported religiously formed teacher education via state-funded normal schools unraveled due to these anti-Catholic reactions. Later controversies surrounding the weekly Wednesday dividing bell in Central Maine, or over which Bible or God a coach is praying to, have their roots in this Ohio battle, which effectively ended the Common School Awakening. Komline's extensive book provides rich analysis of the religious politics of the formation of the common school in Ohio and other states. He argues, quite successfully, that the foundations of the public school do not necessarily rest on economic factors like industrialization and immigration alone. Komline persuades that the deeper roots of the public school emerged from a nuanced and highly volatile Common School Awakening coalition of mainline Christian religious leaders aimed at achieving two outcomes: 1) teachers would be professionalized and schools would be systematized, and 2) students and teachers alike would be formed in Christianity beyond sectarian doctrines. Komline traces how these two outcomes blossomed from two influences that drove debates in general assemblies for at least 40 years in the early 1800s. Komline demonstrates in detail how transatlantic dialogues and visits enthralled American educational reformers to look to European practices as normative for our own development. The English Lancasterian movement, along with the Prussian and French quest for the systemization of schools and the professionalization of teachers, provided the first pillar for the Common School Awakening coalition and inspired the reformers' vision for public school systems and trained teachers. The Prussian system, through excised reporting about its actual practice, proved lasting, even today, in its quest for professional development and system thinking. The second pillar regards the nondenominational Christian collaboration around the consensus that education required moral and...
Reform under PressureCincinnati Foster Care in the 1930s Brandon Borgemenke (bio) During a 1933 meeting of the Woman's City Club of Cincinnati, Miss Maria Glanzberg considered the dire straits facing dependent children because of the economic tumult of the Great Depression. Social agencies and services throughout the city were being stretched to their limits trying to care for so many children in need. Miss Glanzberg stated her conclusion to the other women of the Woman's City Club of Cincinnati, "We as a community need to step up and take care of our own; we can no longer rely on the goodwill of others because times are hard."1 Glanzberg spoke about the inability of public agencies and private charities to meet the demands for assistance supporting dependent children in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, Glanzberg, like other philanthropic leaders in Cincinnati, felt a greater sense of obligation to care for the needs of dependent children in her community. In the decades following the first White House Conference on Children in 1909, where professional social workers denounced institutional care for children, political leaders in state governments and local municipalities across the country had begun to chart a course independent of one another toward achieving the conference's goals. For many cities and states, the outlined objectives were twofold. First, through implementation of modern social work, cities and states were to put an end to institutional care of [End Page 58] dependent children in orphanages and replace that care with placements in foster homes within the context of families. Second, through effective social policy and efficient government programs, cities and states were to reduce the root causes that led families to require out-of-home placements for their children. Until the 1930s, the reason most often cited for children falling into the care of child-welfare social agencies had been neglect.2 Understanding and having a standard definition of what neglect entailed in place became increasingly important in the 1930s as the cases of perceived neglect rose during the Depression years. Combating child neglect as opposed to poverty or desertion was made more difficult by the fact that its recognition was not always an easy task in times of economic depression. At the 1933 White House Conference on Children, neglect was defined as a situation, "when, through the culpable neglect of their parents, children are suffering from hunger, insufficient clothing, improper housing and sleeping conditions, or living in the midst of filth and squalor."3 To enforce the standard introduced at the 1933 White House Conference on Children, social workers had to be able to determine whether or not parents were negligent in the discharge of their responsibilities toward their children. That was a high bar to meet given neglect's vague definition. In situations where parents experienced poverty, they might not have had the resources to properly feed, clothe, or house their children. By 1933, for example, more than 40 percent of Cincinnati's factory workers and 67 percent of its construction workers were unemployed.4 In 1932, Cincinnati's unemployment rate for all residents reached 37.3 percent.5 If parents lacked clear motivation to actively thrust the consequences of poverty onto their children, it became difficult to claim neglect had taken place.6 The possibility of being unable to justify removal of a child from a home setting in light of clear human suffering due to a household's economic distress begged an important question: were poverty and material suffering enough to warrant foster-care intervention? Many leaders in the field of child welfare would vehemently disagree with this idea. To separate children from their families for no other reason than poverty was to make a mockery of the tenets of child welfare as they were established during [End Page 59] the Progressive Era, which rejected that practice.7 To do so would only serve to diminish the value of professional casework. This article will discuss the ways in which the Great Depression strained the meager foster-care services that existed in Cincinnati in the 1930s, while also highlighting the development of a nascent welfare state at the federal, state, and local levels. Many social...
Emily NashDisease and Death in Nineteenth-Century Geauga County Molly Sergi (bio) Background In 1812, a young Emily Nash traveled by wagon train with her family from Plainfield, Massachusetts, to Burton, Geauga County, Ohio. Nash kept a personal journal beginning in 1812 and ending shortly before her death in 1888. Emily's parents, John and Polly (Thayer) Nash, longed for land in the newly developing frontier of the Western Reserve in Ohio. Exchanging their land in Massachusetts for territory in Ohio, the Nash family began the arduous journey west. Along with her parents, siblings, and a cousin, Emily's family were some of the first pioneers to settle in Geauga County by 1813. Emily's father, a Revolutionary War veteran, eagerly sought a promising life in "the West" for his growing family. A fifth-generation New Englander, Emily Nash Patchin Halkins Pike, for brevity's sake known as Emily Nash, could trace her heritage to passengers on the Mayflower and a soldier in King Philip's War in 1675. Her parents married in 1798 and raised 11 children. Even as a child, Emily recognized the valuable role women played on the frontier and their indispensable contributions to the household and community. Burton, Ohio, bloomed into a regular community with help from the Nash family. Emily Nash's preoccupation for keeping a personal journal over the next seven decades proved to be a priceless decision as she described early settlement in Ohio, birth records, marriages, and deaths. She gives a female perspective of nineteenth-century sociocultural mourning behavior. Her unique journal is an [End Page 37] invaluable resource documenting the Age of the Beautiful Death not only in rural Geauga County but across America. Although she began her journal in 1812, she likely added information over the years, reflecting on her family's migration and settlement of the county. Later entries in the 1820s demonstrate a maturing young lady and provide details of historical events and vital statistics. By the time she was a teenager, Nash described additional families living in the county, focusing especially on births, marriages, and deaths. Her first death notice was written the summer of 1813. The entry would resemble a pattern in future death notices she'd write. Emily always recorded how the person died—ailment, disease, or accident—and a characterization of the decedent. One of her most valuable contributions was the historical documentation of vital statistics about births, deaths, and sequences of events in the county, including the presence of disease. Few primary sources from Ohio hold the same value and significance as Nash's journal. Additionally, in childhood, Emily's parents trained her how to prepare bodies for burial and lay out the dead, a task she'd continue do for the rest of her life. Her journal provides details of the deceased's life and death and vividly reveals the actions of a professional mourner and layer of the dead. This article explains the role of a professional mourner and layperson, by using her voluminous journal, which recorded births, marriages, historical events, and funerals in the county. This article contends that women provided valuable labor to their individual households and larger communities in rural, nineteenth-century Ohio. Nash's unique occupation contributes to our knowledge of disease and depicts how women were trained to address, diagnose, and treat most illnesses. Part of traditional domestic duties included caring for the sick and dying and preparing bodies for burial. The Second Great Awakening, its origins, and its impact on Geauga County, played a significant role in Emily's perception of death and larger nineteenthcentury attitudes toward the Age of the Beautiful Death. Nash's journal, written over seven decades, contains valuable information on nineteenth-century mourning and funerary behavior, viewed by a professional mourner and witness to death. Contemporary scholarly studies exclude women layers of the dead, or only marginally credit their service. This article fills an important gap in the historiography of a female professional mourner and layer of the dead, documentation of disease and illness in the county, and the changes in funerary and mourning behavior over the entire century. [End Page 38] Women on the Frontier: Gender Roles and Expectations...
Edited Letters Between Michael Hillegas and Jacob Kriebel1822–1840 Sally K Francis (bio), Dale E. Schmolinsky (bio), Benedikt Schreiner (bio), and L. Allen Viehmeyer (bio) This local history examines the struggles and triumphs of two nineteenth-century American families as described in 12 letters written between 1822 and 1840 and exchanged between Michael Hillegas and Jacob Kriebel, situating them as second-generation German immigrants and Ohio pioneers within the socioeconomic conditions of rural nineteenth-century Ohio and Pennsylvania. Land ownership and successful harvests were a focal point of each letter, attesting to the importance of location in these new lands. Topics of discussion found throughout the letters include: weather conditions, crops, livestock, family health, births, deaths, and religious issues. Additionally, some historical information is provided in each letter, such as canal construction and the presence of disease, namely cholera. Similar to many people who immigrated to North America in the early eighteenth century, the Kriebel and Yeakel (or Jäkel) ancestors of two of the authors of this article fled their homelands in Harpersdorf, Silesia (now Poland), and went to the estate of Count von Zinzendorf in Saxony, Germany. They were in search of religious freedom that had eluded them since the Protestant Reformation. In his 1904 memoirs, Adm. Winfield Schley observed, “The first [End Page 26] instinct for individual independence the world over has usually taken form in a defense of primitive faith, of right to pray in our own hearts in our own way.”1 The Yeakels followed the teachings of Caspar Schwenckfeld, a Silesian nobleman and radical reformer, who was born about 1489 and was thus a contemporary of Martin Luther who had been born six years earlier in 1483. Schwenckfeld was especially concerned about the interpretation of the Eucharist. Denying the real presence of Jesus in the bread and wine, he advocated a spiritual understanding of communion. In 1526 he suggested a cessation of the sacrament of communion until all reformers agreed on its interpretation and practice. Schwenckfeld was declared a heretic and spent the remainder of his life hiding in exile. In the 1720s, several hundred followers of Schwenckfeld still lived in Silesia (formerly Germany, now Poland). Under pressure to convert to Catholicism, they petitioned the emperor for religious tolerance but were unsuccessful. First, they fled to Saxony on foot, leaving behind most of their wealth such as looms, livestock, and homes because the journey was about 18 hours long. They remained on Count von Zinzendorf ’s estate in the village of Berthelsdorf, Saxony, for eight years, until they were forced out in the spring of 1734. Then they crossed the Atlantic Ocean on the St. Andrew and landed at the Philadelphia dock on September 22, 1734. Although they intended to settle together, they settled individually or in very small groups throughout what is now Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Today, three Schwenkfelder churches survive. David Yeakel, a Schwenkfelder, and his son Hans Heinrich arrived in Philadelphia on the St. Andrew along with 40 other Schwenkfelder families2 as exiles from Silesia seeking religious freedom.3 In about 1798, David Yeakel’s great-granddaughter, Anna Yeakel, married Michael Hillegas.4 [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Anna Yeakel Hillegas’s pedigree chart (Chart developed by Sally Francis at Rootsmagic.com) The Hillegas family was likely to have been French Huguenot; they were members of the Reformed Church.5 The Huguenots had been permitted freedom of worship by the Edict of Nantes in 1598, which also admitted them to public employment and gave their children access to schools. When the edict was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, hundreds of thousands of Huguenots fled to Switzerland, the Palatinate, Germany, the Netherlands, and ultimately to America to escape further persecution. The Hillegas family had been residents of the Franco-German Alsace province prior to going to the Palatinate of Germany.6 After fleeing the Palatinate, Johann Friedrich Hillegas, his wife, Elisabetha [End Page 28] Barbara Triegels, and several of their children arrived in Philadelphia on the William and Sarah on September 12, 1727,7 and settled in the Goshenhoppen Valley soon thereafter. On the same ship were his sister Barbara and his...
Reviewed by: On the Plains in ’65: The 6th West Virginia Volunteer Cavalry in the West by George H. Holliday. ed. by Glenn V. Longacre Wesley Moody On the Plains in ’65: The 6th West Virginia Volunteer Cavalry in the West. George H. Holliday. Edited by Glenn V. Longacre. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-82142428-5. 258 pp., hardcover, $49.95. George H. Holliday enlisted in the Union Army in August 1863. The 15-year-old lied about his age to join. Except for a short time guarding the capital, Holliday spent his Civil War career in his home state of West Virginia. In 1864, Holliday reenlisted in the 6th West Virginia Cavalry for the duration of the war. All the men were volunteers and veterans. In the vagaries of army bureaucracy, these men found themselves not going home to farms and families in April 1865 but west to the Great Plains. Inspired to describe this post–Civil War service, George Holliday put pen to paper in 1883. Historian Glenn V. Longacre has edited Holliday’s work and brought it to the modern reader. Longacre gives a short biography of Holliday and puts both his Civil War and western service into perspective. He also provides the reader with a history of the document itself. This, of course, is important if the journal is going to be helpful to a professional historian. Longacre has also provided extensive pages of exceptionally well-researched explanatory notes. I would have preferred these as footnotes instead of endnotes, but that is only a personal preference. At the end of the Civil War, the US Army was nearly one million men. With the Confederacy defeated, most of these men were ready to return home to their prewar lives. The army still had obligations. They were ordered to continue occupying the South, and Reconstruction would demand many soldiers over the next decade. The situation with the Plains Indians was inching closer toward war. Not everyone who wanted to go home could. Holliday and the 6th West Virginia were assigned one year in the West. If that was not bad enough for men ready to return home, the unit that had served the entire war in West Virginia was being sent to the far West. This led to desertions and even a mutiny in Kansas. Civil War memoirs usually end with the [End Page 112] war’s conclusion. This view of the troubles and chaos of demobilization is rare and informative. Holliday was still young and didn’t have a wife or children who were struggling to maintain the farm. He was excited about the potential adventures and experiences to be found on the frontier. Holliday’s motivation in writing was not to justify his or his country’s actions or claim his spot in history. He was trying to tell a good story, which he did. There are humorous and exciting stories about his fellow cavalrymen and their officers. He describes his first meetings with Native Americans, both peaceful and hostile. His impressions of the Native Americans are informative if not comfortable for contemporary sensibilities. He shows us the difficulty of frontier army life. Holliday and Longacre have given us an entertaining and enlightening work. Any historian of the American West would be well served to have On The Plains in ’65 on their shelf. Wesley Moody Florida State College at Jacksonville Copyright © 2023 The Kent State University Press
