So! Where were we? Oh yes, Jess was living on the farm, occasionally using corncobs for toilet paper, trashing the Catholics with the rest of the local Methodists and had just completed a hell of a road trip to New York to visit his grandmother.
February 1918, On the way back from Cattaragus, New York to Silverdale, Kansas
I don't know whether grandmother got sick and tired of so many many people in her house after three months, or whether our parents grew homesick, but I was enjoying myself immensely without a pang of homesickness when we decided to come back home to Kansas. We started home ahead of BM and his family. It was February 1918 when we returned to Silverdale on the train.
There were railroad bridges across the large rivers and I recall one morning when we crossed the Mississippi, Bill and I had gotten up early. Just as the sun was coming up, our train crossed the river, which was frozen over. We ran up and down the train from one end to the next, probably out of control, though nobody seemed to mind. Our parents and Emma were still asleep in the Pullman beds When we arrived back at home, a new school house has been completed which I attended the next four years.
During World War I, there was an increase in KKK activity around Silverdale. Pop didn't believe men should go around, incognito, creating mischief. Furthermore, he heard some ugly talk about the "Huns," a peaceful old German-American couple, of good patriotic inclinations, that lived on the farm next to ours. He still spoke with a German accent and some of the more virulent members of the community were talking about "stringing up old Fred." The KKK didn't have any Blacks or Jews to pick on in our area, but the War provided a group to hate - the people of German extraction.
A meeting was called to lay plans for their evil affair, so Pop put on a sheet and hood and infiltrated the meeting. He wanted to know exactly who the men were, especially the leaders. It worked. He sat around, keeping quiet, listening to the various voices, most of which he identified. Sure enough, they laid their dirty plans. The next day he confronted the leaders, singly, saying he had heard rumors that the KKK was planning to hang Fred, and that he didn't think it was a good idea. Furthermore, should anything happen to Fred, the community was bound to find out who was responsible. Moreover, the man had been a good neighbor for years, had given evidence of being a loyal, patriotic American and he, personally, would hate to see anything bad happen to him. Other than bearing the brunt of the ugly talk, Fred came to no real harm.
There was considerable prejudice in our small community, mostly expressed in terms of ethnic jokes. Irish jokes had Pat and Mike exchanging ignorances, much like the Aggie jokes in Texas today. Polish jokes were employed to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Anglo-dominated society. Catholics were thought to be sinister people, up to no good. Fortunately, none lived in Silverdale -- at least none owned up to that evil faith. Occasionally, books of cheap paper were circulated, reminding us of the horrid things Catholics did.
Scapegoats are sought by insecure people who project their doubts onto other, defenseless people imagined to be inferior. In that community, there was a goodly supply of people barely hanging on economically, religiously and socially, creating fertile grounds for prejudice, I was part of it, immersed in the sub-culture, thinking all those jokes and prejudice were acceptable good humor.
World War I ended in November, 1918, one year and seven months after the United States declared war. The day the Armistice was signed we went into Arkansas City to join in the jubilation. Thousands of people were on the streets celebrating. Some of the celebrants got carried away and hung the Kaiser in effigy.
I came down with the flu in 1918. My father was extremely sick with influenza as was more than half the community. All of our immediate family members caught it and Grandma Harvey came down to the farm and looked after us. This was part of the world wide epidemic which took so many lives that world demographic charts show a sharp mortality blip for that year. It was a pandemic outbreak causing some 20 million deaths. (Wikipedia says that between 50 and 100 million people died; the largest ever natural disaster.)
Several people died in Silverdale. Pop almost did. Nothing like that disaster, in terms of numbers of deaths from pestilence, has happened worldwide again to this day.
I just thought this photo was kind of awesome. No idea who they are, where they are or why. Just some really awesome outfits going on there.
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So, a few thoughts here. I find it interesting that Jess sort of glosses over The Great War. Granted, he was awfully young (about 6 or 7) but it appears that he has no memories of significance regarding the war, people from Silverdale fighting in it, hardship, sacrifice, scarcity, etc. Same with the flu pandemic. It was a HUGE deal and even in retrospect, almost 100 years later it's still stunning to think of that many people dying in a single year.
And yet, he just says a bunch of people got sick, himself included, Pop almost died and then life went on. In fact, the next paragraph is about how his family did laundry.
I think both of these anecdotes (or lack thereof) are really indicitive of the kind of information they had available in rural America in 1918: probably not much. He wrote this book in the early 90's and while he WAS the first person I ever knew to have email, the internet as we know it most certainly did not exist. It's an interesting reminder of the information and news vacuum that people used to live in - happily and effortlessly.
There aren't any stories in his autobiography about listening to the radio, so I can only assume they didn't have one on the farm. I wonder how often Pop read a newspaper? Or maybe most of their news was word of mouth? I have a feeling that the amount of content I consume in a day is more than they saw in a month. Unbelieveable.
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