Their Entitlement To America, Part Four

“Depression, War & The Pope”

So, by the time of the Great Depression, the neighborhood consisted of many people of German heritage, but with far fewer actual German immigrants. Most of the remaining German immigrants were, by then, all getting on in years. I do remember a friend of mine, a child of German immigrants, * who was born in America, I’d say around 1912, and he told me that on his first day of school, the administrators sent him home with instructions to “teach this boy some English.” This guy later became a very successful businessman, and when I came to know him fairly well, circa 1975, I needed “to teach this guy some German,” as he had forgotten most of it. His success led to his leaving the neighborhood for a nice new house and a fancy car, but he never forgot where he came from, the south side of town, and he never looked down on any of the people still living there. He may have forgotten most of the language, but he never forgot his German beer drinking habits, and he frequented the neighborhood to “quench his thirst” right up until cancer prevented him from getting around, eventually permanently so.

And there was the southern portion of the neighborhood with a mainly Polish population, but with some Ukrainian folks. Of course, even in this area, “Polish Town,” a declining percentage of the people were actual immigrants, as many of their kids were American born, although the children grew up bilingual.

By 1930, there were still a good many of those professional type folks, I mentioned in an earlier part, living in the neighborhood. Keep in mind the difference in the money values from those days compared to now. So if someone had a worth of twenty or thirty thousand dollars, that was a hell of a lot of money in those times, equivalent to several hundred thousand of today’s dollars. Of course so many of the people in the neighborhood were dependent upon the mills in the area, and it had to be very difficult for them during the Depression, when the mills were closed for extensive periods of time. This in turn meant less money for the local merchants, as people didn’t have any money to spend. I certainly believe that it was during this era that the sense of economic populism exploded in the neighborhood. Politically, the neighborhood became very Democratic, but still contained a good many Republicans, my maternal grandfather being a Republican committeeman there for many years. My grandmother was also a Republican, but she voted for Franklin Roosevelt at least once, in 1936; something she never told my grandfather, but only divulged later in her life, and after his death.

So many of the people in the neighborhood were affected by World War Two, as people were in every neighborhood, all over the country, and in much of the world. My dad went into the Army and was sent to the Pacific. His two brothers also served in the war, one in the Merchant Marine, and the other in the Navy. My dad was injured by the concussion from a Japanese artillery shell on the island of Saipan and he had to be sent back to Hawaii. He received a partial disability for the rest of his life. His one brother had his ship sunk by the Japanese, and he couldn’t swim, but he somehow survived.

When I was a kid in the 1950s and 1960s, some of the other kids’ fathers who had served in Europe, brought out their “souvenirs” from Germany; like German helmets, German daggers, a German pistol, and even a Nazi armband and medals. We were all fascinated by these things, especially what we considered “the neat German helmets,” with their odd shape. ** In those days, kids that we were, we had no concept of what these “souvenirs” had originally stood for, just a few short years before, and Hitler was just a funny looking guy with a toothbrush mustache to us.

The war brought full employment, although at a terrible cost, and when it ended, after some time of adjustment, the economy picked up again. The Depression had given rise to many new protections for workers, and the mills and plants hummed along, making various metal products for an increasingly prosperous American public. (That’s what happens when the money gets spread up and down the economic ladder, and it isn’t concentrated primarily at the top. Of course back then, our leaders didn’t spend much of their time concerned with the “plight of billionaires,” and how those “poor” billionaires could make more money off of money.)

Then came 1960. John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic and Irish-American, was elected President of the United States. This was a first. To many of those Americans who tried desperately to prove that they were somehow connected to Plymouth Rock, this was just too much. I remember hearing many a Protestant adult say, “Now we’re going to be run by the Pope!” Or even worse, “Now we’ve got a ‘fish eater’ running the country!” So many people love to spout slogans like, “America is a land of opportunity for everyone,” but that slogan had never really been intended for “certain groups,” like Catholics. It’s amazing how far we’ve come, since back in those days, religion was a very polarizing subject. And in my neighborhood, which was very much split between Protestants and Catholics (and some Ukrainian Catholics), religion was one hot subject that could cause tempers to flare and fists to fly. In the American South, the Ku Klux Klan was not just a group that hated people by race, but also by religion, and Catholics were prime targets. I’m sure such sentiments still linger in some people, but for the most part, the country has moved past religion being so divisive, and we’re a better country for it. It takes time, but ever so gradually Americans overcome the nonsense of bigotry. (A “Word History” is below the notes)

* His parents were not from Germany, but from the German community in what became a part of Yugoslavia, when it was established after World War One. These Germans were collectively called “Donauschwaben” (Danube Swabians), as most of them migrated to that area along and near the Danube (German: Donau) River from Swabia, the general area around Stuttgart, the headquarters of the Mercedes-Benz auto company.

** Of course we no longer consider those helmets “odd,” as our own troops have had similar shaped helmets for a while now, copied from the German example.

“Word History:”
Else-This word goes back to the Indo European base "al," which had the notion of "other," and is also the source of "alias;" that is, "other name." The Germanic offshoot was "aljo," had a genitive adverbial form "aljaz," which also had the meaning of "other, different." This gave Old English "elles," with the same meaning. From what I gather, the forms of the word in the other Germanic languages have died out, although I did see a reference to Swedish "eljest," and Dutch had "els" a few hundred years ago.