Article Title: Who Are We? Race & Ethnicity in a …...appeared in Life magazine. Discrimination...

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Article Title: Who Are We? Race & Ethnicity in a 1950s Nebraska Town Full Citation: Deborah Fink, “Who Are We? Race & Ethnicity in a 1950s Nebraska Town,” Nebraska History 88 (2007): 110-125 URL of article: http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/history/full-text/NH2007WhoAreWe.pdf Date: 5/02/2011 Article Summary: Nebraskans, like other Americans, were generally unaware of their specific European connections and identities in the 1950s. Only more recently has ethnicity has come to be recognized as a source of Nebraska beliefs and values.

Cataloging Information: Place Names: Albion, Boone County, Nebraska; Wilber, Nebraska Literary references: “Paul Bunyan’s Great Flapjack Griddle”; Harriett Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse Writers on ethnicity cited in the article: Nell Painter, Mary Ellen Goodman, Ruth Frankenberger, Will Breines, Frederick Jackson Turner, Jon Gjerde, Oscar Handlin, Milton Gordon, Milton Yinger, Louise Pound, Paul Olson, Richard Rodriguez, Mary C Waters Keywords: Albion, Paul Bunyan, Negroes, American Legion magazine, Albion News, Life magazine, civil rights, Martin Luther King, Native Americans, Indian missions, Robert Furnas, English language laws, Wilber, Czech-Americans, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Mari Sandoz Photographs / Images: illustration from The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan (W B Laughead, Red River Lumber Company, 1934); Paul Bunyan stamp issued by the US Postal Service, Folk Hero Commemorative Series, 1996; Elizabeth Eckford taunted by white students at Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School, September 1957 (Will Counts, Arkansas Democrat); two illustrations from Your Town and Mine (Eleanor Thomas, Ginn & Co, 1960; three illustrations from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe, John C Winston, 1897); students in a Nebraska school hallway, 1945; Martin Luther King (Library of Congress); fourth grade class, Bayard, Nebraska, 1952 (private collection); advertisement for pancake mix and illustration of correct way to display the flag from Handbook for Boys, Boy Scouts of America, 1952; students at prom, 1953; child dressed for confirmation; six images of “The Races of Man” (Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language, CG Merriam, 1884)

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http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/history/full-text/NH2007WhoAreWe.pdf

110 • NEBRASKA history

W

Who Are We?

Winter 1957, Albion, Nebraska. I am fidgeting

my way through seventh grade reading class

as we talk over the story “Paul Bunyan’s

Great Flapjack Griddle.”

B Y D E B O R A H F I N K

WINTER 2007 • 111

IT IS SET IN A LUMBER CAMP in the Dakotas,

where, at the request of a senator, Bunyan

and his fabulous axmen are clearing the

countryside of trees. On the level Dakota

land Bunyan can use his three-mile-long crosscut

saw, which cuts down trees the same way a mower

would cut grass in a hay field. After putting in a

hard day’s work, the lumber crew returns to base

camp, where the cook, Sourdough Sam, and his

three hundred helpers have fired up an enormous

flapjack griddle to feed the workers.

This griddle is so big that Sam has Negro “cook-boys” strap whole hams or sides of bacon to theirfeet and skate across the hot surface to grease it.They have to be Negroes, because no white mancould stand the heat of Sam’s mighty flapjack fire.When the batter is ready to flow, a whistle soundsand the “darkey” cook-boys race for the edge ofthe griddle and scramble up the side. Occasionallyone of them doesn’t make it, getting caught in thebatter and turning up as a raisin in a flapjack. Thishappens only two or three times a month.1

The teacher pulls up this passage for a generalchuckle, in case any of us has missed the joke.Darkey raisins in pancakes! Like the crosscut sawthat moves across the land annihilating trees toprepare for the farmers, the huge and efficient flap-jack apparatus sweeps over the surface of the land,eliminating extraneous material and fueling theworkers who matter.

Where is the seventh-grader supposed to placehimself? Or herself? Imagine onlookers chortlingas you race for your life over a slippery surface,get tangled up and maybe fall down, and then get

Race & Ethnicityin a 1950s Nebraska Town

drowned in pancake batter and cooked over ablazing fire. What about all the effort you had putinto getting your life started and building up yourdreams? What would your mother do when shegot the news? What an arbitrary erasure of you.

I am probably not the only seventh-grader topicture myself as a casualty and to pack away thepiercing memory of the sacrificed Negroes to carrywith me over the decades, but none of us bringthis up. We don’t have much confidence in our gutreactions, and we know the story is supposed to befunny, not nightmarish. I am out of line in havingperversely flipped the narrative over, and I need togrow up and think the way I am supposed to. Weseventh-graders are learning to stifle excess sensi-tivity and to adopt the right take on the world. Asyoung Albionites we are learning to be the eaters,not the eaten, and not to stew over it. Imaginingnot being white is so scary that I blur the thoughtand try to dismiss it as soon as it raises its ugly head.

Our charge is to step into our slots in history byputting our shoulders to the great work of the PaulBunyans, Daniel Boones, and Davy Crockettswho have gloriously tamed the mid continent andbequeathed it to us, not that we need to look tooclosely at what that entailed. We pledge allegianceto the flag the first thing in school every morning,even though none of us knows or cares what“pledge” or “allegiance” means. A number of ussay “invisible” rather than “indivisible,” whichmakes as much sense and doesn’t matter as longas we stand straight and don’t falter. Strengththrough unanimity is the basis of post-World War IIAmerican nationalism, which is, without questionor comment, white and European-based. Not thatothers have not contributed, but they have beenthe raisins in the pancakes, the supporting cast,whose job it was to prepare the way for the true

Opposite: W. B. Laughead,The Marvelous Exploits ofPaul Bunyan, Red RiverLumber Company, 1934


all had European ancestors, which I had foundimprobable, if oddly intriguing. Only a couple ofmy fifth-grade classmates had had any knowledgeof ancestors from Norway, Ireland, or some othernorthern European country. Nor is our Albionwhiteness ever named. The phenomenon of racedoes not apply to us. Of course, as raceless andcultureless as I and others in the majority European

American culture of ruralNebraska thought of our-selves, we carry a genealogythat is particular to ourselvesand to the decade. Thesilence on our racial andcultural specificity onlystrengthens our assumptionsof world dominance, leavingthem unexamined anduncontested. This paperflushes out this hidden racialand cultural load and itssignificance.2

W H I T E . Our seventhgrade reading teacher didnot have to worry about thePaul Bunyan story botheringher Negro students, there be-ing no Blacks in the town ofAlbion, or even in BooneCounty at the time. While thestory reveals insensitivity toBlacks, this did not translate

into any apparent racial animosity on the part ofthe citizens of Albion. In my memory, the general1950s climate in Albion was not hostile to Negroes.The minority who followed national news knewabout the desegregation movement that haderupted in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s Brownversus Board of Education ruling. We followed civilrights in the same way that we distantly followedthe World Series rivalry between the Yankees andthe Dodgers. Just as almost everyone in Albionpicked the Dodgers to root for, we rooted for theunderdog Negroes who were knocking on doorssome- where in the South.

The American Legion magazine, which reachedmany veterans’ homes, advocated integration inthe military, and the editor of the Albion News also

Deborah Fink is author ofAgrarian Women: Wivesand Mothers in RuralNebraska, 1880–1940. Shelives in Ames, Iowa.

inheritors of the wealth of the country. The heroesin battle, in politics, on the movie screen, and inthe business world are European Americans, whoare so standard that they become Americans,unmodified.

Hyphenated Americans do not exist in my child-hood. In 1950s Nebraska, immigrant identities havebeen largely left behind, and the later culturalintrospection has not coalesced. The decade is thecrease of amnesia between early twentieth centuryscorn for immigrants and late twentieth centuryethnic pride in immigrant roots. We think of our-selves as just regular kids, some tending towardthe weird, but all of the same generic order.

We are Americans, of course. Our fifth-gradeteacher had told us that a long, long way back we

U.S. Postal Service, Folk Hero Commemorative Series,1996

Below: Elizabeth Eckford taunted by white students atLittle Rock (Arkansas) Central High School, September1957. Will Counts, Arkansas Democrat

WINTER 2007 • 113

came out against prejudice. I followed the indig-nant civil rights reporting and editorials in TheNew Republic. Teachers talked about the immoral-ity of segregation, and we sneered in unison at thephotographs of the fat and ugly segregationists thatappeared in Life magazine. Discrimination becamea negative word in Albion, as throughout most ofthe country.3

Beneath the huzzahs, however, was caution.Many of Albion’s veterans had come in contactwith Negroes during military service and werequietly not sure we should jump to conclusionsabout them. A home economics text on personaladjustment and marriage cautioned that interracialmarriages “do not achieve a high degree ofhappiness.” You had to be careful. Outside theclassroom, a high school teacher confided to myparents that he had known Negroes in the Army,and they stunk. Casual racial humor was a sign ofsophistication, excused because there were nolocal Negroes to have their feelings hurt. When Ithanked a boy for opening a door for me, hetossed off a put-down: “That’s okay, I’d do thesame for a white girl.” A quip, when someoneasked where you got your jacket or notebook was,“I stole it off a dead n——.” Mostly we didn’t con-nect this fun to our consensus on integration inthose far-off places where there were Negroes tointegrate. Open-minded individuals might reasonthat just because Negroes had some strangesmells or habits, that didn’t mean they shouldn’tbe allowed to go to school—in the South.4

Growing up in Albion, my cohorts and I learnedto be white without whiteness ever being explicitlynamed. Although our teacher did not mention thefact that we were to identify with Paul Bunyan andhis lumbermen rather than with the darkey raisins,

we knew it. Nell Painter, writing of the Americanlegacy of slavery, states, “The abuse of slavespained and damaged nonslaves, particularlychildren, and forced those witnessing slave abuseto identify with victim or the perpetrator.” A paral-lel, though less immediate reaction could wellhave occurred as we read about the casual killingof Blacks in the Paul Bunyan story. Identifyingwith the victim would have been too traumatic.Our knowledge of racial others was almost entirelyvicarious, yet the imperative of whiteness was realand beyond debate.5

The work of Mary Ellen Goodman on raceawareness in young American children, publishedin 1952, established that race was not a parallelreality for white and black. While black childrenwere uneasily aware of their skin color, whitechildren were not. The racial curiosity of whitechildren was not about themselves, but ratherabout why black children were different. Theirown whiteness was given and unmarked. Negroeswere a race; whites were not. The vast majority ofus in Albion had seen Blacks in magazines andin infrequent trips to cities; but being white wasnormal, standard, and unremarkable. If some of usfelt the occasional quibble in such material as thePaul Bunyan story, it did not break through surfaceuniformity. Towns like Albion in the mid twentiethcentury really were almost entirely innocent ofrace, as it was defined at the time.6

The invisibility of whiteness underscores, ratherthan negates its power. The mightiness of PaulBunyan was implicitly reinforced by the contrast-ing insignificance and expendability of thenon-white. Ruth Frankenberger, discussing theempty space of whiteness, writes, “The extent towhich identities can be named seems to show an

Eleanor Thomas, Your Town and Mine, Ginn & Co., 1960

Being white was normal, standard, and unremarkable.

Harriet Beecher Stowe,Uncle Tom’s Cabin, John C.Winston, 1897

Their own whitenesswas given

and unmarked.Negroes were a race;

whites were not.


inverse relationship to power in the U.S. socialstructure. . . The self, where it is part of the domi-nant cultural group, does not have to name itself.”

While the Paul Bunyan story identified theunfortunates who were written out of the realmof pity, the media reports that reached us aboutdesegregation in the South brought mostly distantand disengaged notice. Implicitly identifyingunfortunates who would be grateful recipients ofselected gifts from the American bounty, the civilrights stories excused us from any wrenchinginvolvement.

Even those favoring benevolence towardNegroes were wary about going overboard. Ourwhiteness enabled Olympian detachment as wesurveyed the world and its resources. If some ofthose others got unfairly kicked or drowned inpancake batter, too bad; but we were learning thatthat was the way the world worked. There wasnothing we should or could do about it. We werethe ones who would write the laws and sympho-nies, own the soil, and make the wars and applepie that confirmed the rightness of our cause. Wewere what America was about. This was the un-named advantage that whiteness conferred on us.My classmates and I learned it better because weinferred it ourselves without consciously address-ing it or giving it a name.7

Boredom plagued us in school and outside aswe grew up in 1950s Albion, a possible side effectof the unstated colorlessness and our mission ofbeing generic. It was hard to figure out the road-

map, to grasp what we were supposed to do toget from Albion to the place where we could beprotagonists in Paul Bunyan’s adventure or the U.S.national project as a whole. We went to school inorder to become somebody (or, for girls, marrysomebody) who would succeed in the large worldof American life. But how would our directions berevealed to us, and what actually was it that wasspecial and necessary about our existence? Whywere we the chosen?

Notwithstanding the absence of Blacks inAlbion, the subject of civil rights, race, and espe-cially Negroes captivated many of us, both youthand adult. This was particularly true of the minoritywho read about and kept up with current nationalevents. American Legion magazine discussed racerelations in the light of military experience. Myfather had once known a Black when he was inthe Army, so he understood. A sophisticated andimpressively intellectual Albion high schoolteacher declared in an interview published in thestudent newspaper that he read two books perweek, his special interest being any material onrace relations. One of my classmates wrote aneighth grade information paper on the subject ofNegroes. In 1958, when a “colored quartet” ofyoung Mississippi men entertained an all-schoolassembly with songs and commentary on racerelations, their caustic remarks on Orval Faubus,the racist governor of Arkansas, drew heartyapplause and sympathetic laughter. The fourtravelers had beautiful rhythm and sound, andmany of us wanted to reach out to them and insome way align ourselves with them and theirdistant cause. This felt curiously insubordinateand bad, in a good way. For at least some of us,following sports and watching television furtherfed our fascination with Negroes.8

My interest in Negroes led me to check outHarriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin fromthe public library when I was in junior high. Read-ing this book aroused strong passions. Popularwith white youth in the 1950s, Uncle Tom’s Cabinis no longer widely read or recommended; but itis anything but a simple book, having multiplesubplots and moral messages. Uncle Tom was agentle, loving Negro who passed up escape andlet himself be sold south rather than sacrifice hisfamily to be dispersed by slave traders. Loyal to hiscomrades in chains, he rejected chances to escapein order to stay with his suffering fellow slaves andease their pain. Finally meeting the devil incarnatein the slaveholder Simon Legree, Uncle Tom diedat his hand without succumbing to hatred. In a

Boredom plagued us in school

and outside. . . a possible side effect

of the unstated colorlessness and

our mission of being generic.

NSHS RG2183-1945-10-25-9

Harriet Beecher Stowe,Uncle Tom’s Cabin, JohnC. Winston, 1897

Finally meeting

the devil incarnate

in the slaveholder

Simon Legree,

Uncle Tom died at

his hand without

succumbing to hatred.

WINTER 2007 • 115

parallel-but-opposite narrative, George and ElizaHarris and their son, gifted and enslaved, braveddangers and outwitted slave hunters to make aheroic escape to Canada, where they prosperedwhile gathering their kin to them. In the end theyset sail for Liberia. While the book is permeatedwith descriptions of personal traits acquiredthrough racial bloodlines, it also attributes the

cruelty and insensitivity of white men to their over-weening political and economic power. I believedit all.

Without any significant real life experience ofBlacks, my composite adolescent picture of Blackswas as a breed with superhuman virtue and talent.

An early celebrity crush was Martin Luther King,whom I saw as brave, gallant, handsome, andpowerful. My Walter Mitty dream, shared with noone, was that I would march at his side, standingup for Negroes, maybe appearing with him on thecover of Life, and being especially remarkable be-causeI would be the first white person, a young one atthat, to notice the injustice and speak out. All thiswould have to happen a long way from Albion,where there was no race.

Wini Breines, writing about being a white girlin the 1950s, parses the attraction that black peopleand black culture had for young whites like herwho had little direct exposure to racial others.These youths saw black people as “alive” and“genuine,” in contrast to their own boring andartificial lives: “Otherness was of interest to youngwhite people. . . Undoubtedly by projecting theirown needs and desires onto those who were dif-ferent, white youth remained as ignorant, and inmany cases racist, as they were when they beganto be interested . . . [but] if they were racist intheir objectifications. . . they were also drawn to itrespectfully.” I believed that Blacks knew an im-mediacy of purpose that eluded those like me,who were groping for direction. They had betterstories and truer voices. Appropriating their un-compromising and righteous civil rights strugglewould be a shortcut to figuring out my own baf-fling life.9

Unlike our filtered and contradictory experi-ence of Blacks, young Albionites of the 1950smight have known a more grounded and directhistorical connection to the native peoples of thePlains. The land on which we lived was not yetone hundred years away from being the huntingand battlegrounds of Pawnee, Omaha, and Da-kota peoples.

While not counted as such by census takers,Albion had at least two individuals in the 1950swho were considered to be Indians of undeter-mined origin. One was an advanced alcoholic.Her son, cognitively disabled, was removed to aninstitution before he reached junior high. Most ofus had little understanding or even any real curi-osity about Indians beyond the stereotype of thedrunken Indian and the caricatures of savages wesaw in Saturday afternoon movies. Our identity asEuropean Americans in relation to the recentlydisplaced Native Americans was limited to anunstated but unanimous conviction that our wayof life was better than theirs. Why would we other-wise have displaced them?10

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, John C.Winston, 1897

George and Eliza Harris…

braved dangers and outwitted

slave hunters to make

a heroic escape to Canada.

Library of Congress 01269

WINTER 2007 • 115


By the 1950s, the story of Indian removal from“our” land was mental wallpaper rather than acause for anguish or spur to action. I cannotremember not knowing that Indians had once heldNebraska, although I may not have realized howrecently this had been. A fifth grade song, which Ihave never forgotten but cannot locate for citation,went, “Where we walk to school each day/ Indianchildren used to play/ . . .All about our nativeland/ Where our shops and houses stand.” In 1942Nebraska writer Mari Sandoz had published oneof the early sympathetic views of Plains Indians, ahistorical biographical novel of the Oglala leaderCrazy Horse, who was killed in 1877 while incaptivity at Fort Robinson in western Nebraska.Unlike her locally popular 1945 book about herpioneer father, Jules Sandoz, neither the story ofCrazy Horse nor her 1953 novel about the displace-ment of the Cheyenne nation was widely read inNebraska at the time.11

The Nebraska History journal would have beena basic source for the compilation of state historymaterials for public schools. Scanning the 1950sissues of this journal provides a window on theacademically current perspective on NativeAmericans. While Indians were not a dominanttheme in Nebraska history in that decade, therewere scattered 1950s articles about them. In 1957,for example, two Nebraska History articles out ofsixteen, and two of twenty reviewed books, wereabout Native Americans. Both of the articles wereabout different approaches that white men took tosolving the Indian problem in Nebraska, the Indian

problem being understood as how to acculturatethem.

An article about early Indian missions stated,“The nation early recognized a responsibility foreducating and civilizing the red man” and pro-ceeded to catalog nineteenth century Christianmissions set up with government aid, the eventualwithdrawal of this aid, and the abandonment ofthe missions. Concluding with a tribute to earlymissionaries, the author stated, “A few of thechurches, built in the nineteenth century, are stillstanding as memorials to the efforts of the mission-aries.” Even this article, ostensibly about Indians,was essentially a tribute to the whites who weretrying to teach them how to be.

Another example of the accepted understandingof the relationship between European Americansand Native Nebraskans was the 1950 NebraskaHistory chronicle of the work of Robert Furnas,later Governor, as Omaha Indian Agent from 1864to 1866. Omitting the detail that the Omaha had,only ten years before, ceded their large northeast-ern Nebraska territory (including part of BooneCounty, in which Albion is the county seat) inexchange for a small tract on the Missouri River,the articles on the career of Furnas emphasizedthe patience that he exhibited and the futility ofhis project of getting the Omaha to “improvethemselves to act as white men.”12

The Indians in these writings were objects offorbearance for white government and religion.Rather than lending insight into the culture andhistory of Native Nebraskans and how we might

Eleanor Thomas, Your Town and Mine, Ginn & Co., 1960

Where we walk to school each day

WINTER 2007 • 117

understand our relations, responsibilities, and debtsto them, the accounts of the Christian missions andof Robert Furnas did the opposite. By emphasizingthe beneficence and sacrifice of the white manand the obstinate refusal of the Indians to respondappropriately, the articles obscured any sense ofinterrelationship that we might have nurtured withthe descendants of those who had so recentlyoccupied the same plot of earth that we did. TheIndian story was significant only in that it pointedout the magnitude of the triumph of the bravewhite men who civilized Nebraska. In this, theNebraska History material on Indians constituteda sub-chapter in the master historical narrative.Just as darkeys were raisins in Paul Bunyan’s flap-jacks, Native Americans were bumps for noblewhite men to straighten out as they made Nebraskahistory. Elementary teachers could be forgiven forglossing over the details of each structurally similarepisode of the white conquest.

Learning bits and pieces about the history ofBlacks and Indians, we who were the youth ofAlbion were simultaneously, if indirectly and in-completely, learning who we were as whites. Wewere not even to think of the possibility that wecould experience the misfortunes of the others.As whites, we were rational, capable, advanced,favored by destiny, magnanimous, and superior.Our task was to live up to our heritage of greatnessand to ignore the gap in the details about wherewe had come from, who we were as a people,and where we fit into history.

A M E R I C A N . The cultural identities of 1950swhite Nebraskans were mixed and ambiguous.Without doubt, some Nebraska communitiesfostered cherished European ethnic identities.For example, the town of Wilber in southeasternNebraska evolved as a center of Czech-Americanpopulation and culture. In the 1950s the Czechlanguage was spoken on the streets of Wilber;gymnastics and social activities at a Sokol Hallcelebrated and preserved Czech values; garlickysausages and sweet kolaches were real Czech foodserved to both visitors and locals, and the SaintWenceslaus Catholic Church provided a spiritualunderpinning for the whole. Notwithstandingnumerous “bohunk” jokes and ridicule fromsurrounding communities, many young CzechAmericans from Wilber were bilingual, wouldunapologetically demonstrate their impressivegymnastic feats and explain precisely why thecultivation of physical fitness was integral to theirCzech identity. This was genuine and unforced,

but atypical of Nebraska communities.The frontier thesis of historian Frederick Jack-

son Turner is the early and classic argumentagainst cultural diversity in Middle America.Writing in 1893, Turner claimed that Europeansmigrated to America and faced the challenges ofthe frontier, which transformed them into newbeings who were distinctively American, notEuropean. He wrote that the frontier produced“a composite nationality for the American people.”Such cultural difference as remained would bemere ornamentation, unrelated to the core Ameri-can character. Turner believed that to study thischaracter, one should look to American ratherthan European factors, because the Americanfrontier experience was overpowering andhomogenizing.

Regarding the 1950s Czech Americans, aproponent of Turner’s frontier thesis might havemaintained that their farming practices, architec-ture, political ideology, and schools were inessence more American than Czech, and that theirlife in Nebraska had transformed them more thanwas obvious. The Czech Americans of the 1950swould no longer be the people who had emigrated.They might have carried some residual Czechstyle, but their substance had become American.Further, insofar as Wilber did maintain a sem-blance of Czech culture, the Turner thesis mightallow that it was a curious enclave that would notdefine the American experience as a whole anymore than a three-legged dog would define thenature of dogs.13

Among the many historians who have takenissue with the Turner thesis is Jon Gjerde. In his1997 book The Minds of the West, Gjerde claimsthat the free or cheap land of the Middle Westafforded fertile ground for the re-rooting of pocketsof European cultural patterns in the nineteenthcentury. Admittedly, European patterns could notbe transferred without alteration; but the resultwas an assortment of cultures, or “minds,” thatwere fundamentally different from the Yankeementality that prevailed among those settlers whomigrated from the eastern United States. Immigrantcommunities, while not uniform, tended to main-tain the importance of family and the churchcommunity, while Yankees valued freedom ofindividual action. Ethnic identity was consistentwith, rather than contradictory to an allegiance toAmerica. The resulting pattern was a patchwork ofMidwestern communities, many of them orientedinward and centered on conservative family andreligious values, while others were liberal and

Indian children used to play.

A s w h i t e s ,we were rational,capable, favored

by destiny,and superior.

Private collection

WINTER 2007 • 117


outward-looking. This, rather than Turnerianfrontier homogenization, was the essence of therural Midwest of the nineteenth century, accordingto Gjerde.14

Of note in considering either of these positions,or others in the spectrum of arguments for plural-ism or singularity of rural Midwestern culture, isthe fact that the evidence in either direction islargely anecdotal. One of my great-grandfathers, aPrussian who emigrated in 1889 and reached ruralNebraska in 1892, anglicized his German namefrom “Walther” to “Walters” as he discarded hisGerman identity to better seek his fortune in theUnited States. Another great-grandfather, whoemigrated from near Stuttgart, moved his childrenout of their rural Nebraska school to ensure thatthey would speak only English and not German.On the other hand, my husband’s grandfather, whoemigrated to South Dakota from the same Stuttgartarea, maintained his German language andculture, so that my husband, a third-generationGerman American, spoke German in his homeuntil he was fourteen years old. For every anecdotedemonstrating Americanization in the ruralMidwest, a skeptic would produce another show-ing a prevailing European orientation, and viceversa. Indeed, Gjerde carefully notes that his modelapplies to elements of the immigrant populationand segments of the American-born.15

Further difficulty in sorting out ethnic identitiesof historical Nebraskans has been the tendency toconflate ethnicity, nationality, and country of birth,which sidesteps Turner’s assertion that immigrantsshed their European traits as they adapted to thefrontier. Census data reveals only limited clusteringof European immigrant populations in Nebraskaand the Middle West, either in the settlement periodor later. Such clustering as is apparent providesa map of likely places to look for flourishingEuropean ethnic identities, but most of theconcentrations were weak. For example, datafrom Boone County indicate that in 1900 only 15percent of the population was foreign-born, andthis 15 percent was divided among eighteendifferent countries of origin. Early settlement inNebraska consisted of westward migration ofnative-born Americans, with the majority of theforeign-born coming later. This suggests a smatter-ing of ethnic flavors, with a dominant Yankeemood; but it does not prove anything. Third-generation immigrants sometimes cherished theirroots; new immigrants sometimes discarded ordenied them.16

Although the strength of European cultural traits

in nineteenth-century Nebraska may continue tobe debated, there is little question that such hold-overs as existed were considerably diluted in thefirst half of the twentieth century. Gjerde enumer-ates some of the homogenizing factors thatappeared with World War I, which he labels“transfigurative.” Immigrants were among thoseconscripted into the U.S. Army, which forcedEuropean conscripts, many of them German, tochoose their new country, fight their kin, wearstandard issue military clothing, and eat armyfood. In the spirit of war support, Americanism andun-Americanism became topics of debate on thehome front, as foreigners were pressed to becomenaturalized, buy war bonds, and plant their gardensfor American victory. Nebraska was amongtwenty-one states passing English language laws,forbidding the speaking of foreign languages in


WINTER 2007 • 119

most public spaces. In the process, immigrantminds became American minds. In Gjerde’s view,it was World War I, rather than the frontier experi-ence, that forged European minds into Americanminds.17

Even more uniformity came in the followingdecades. In 1921 and 1924, immigration wasdrastically curtailed and quotas were instituted torestrict the growth of the immigrant population.The Ku Klux Klan targeted immigrants in their 1920sMidwestern incarnation, with some of the secondgeneration immigrants themselves enlisting todeny proximity to their European roots. The GreatDepression and the government’s role in relief andsocial welfare was a further centralization andstandardization of functions that were previouslyaccomplished locally, thus limiting the power offamily and local communities to control the

WINTER 2007 • 119

The word ‘ e t h n i c i t y ’ was not used in the 1950s.

distribution of wealth. Fair labor laws and steadilyincreasing levels of public education weakenedtraditional family and community norms. WorldWar II was even bigger and more totalizing thanWorld War I in drawing human and materialresources into the uniformity of the war machine.Such European ethnic character as remained inrural Nebraska after World War II was quitedifferent from earlier forms.18

In the 1950s the immigrant settlers who hadcome before World War I were passing on. InBoone County, the small number of foreign borndecreased by nearly two-thirds between 1950 and1960. The majority of those immigrants allowedinto the United States under the immigrant quotasof 1924 made their homes in cities rather than ruralareas. But even early immigrants had often marriedoutside of their sub-groups, and the children of

Fourth grade class, Bayard, Nebraska, 1952. Private collection


these mixed marriages were likely to settle onEnglish rather than the different languages of theirgrandparents, thus laying the ground for theirseparation from immigrant identities. World War IIhad disrupted what contact remained betweenrural Nebraskans and their European relatives,and re-establishing ethnic roots in the immediatepost-war period was not a high priority. On thecontrary, few in Boone County fully respectedthose with even a hint of foreign accent or old-country ways; ridicule of trace cultural holdoverswas accepted and common.19

Contrary to the founding vision of America,the 1950s saw the coalescing of the ideal of whatwas frankly termed an “American culture,” or a“national culture” based on the English languageand the Anglo Saxon template set out historicallyby the founders. In his 1951 book, The Uprooted,Oscar Handlin posed displacement as the definingAmerican condition and the bitter price of freedomand opportunity. Mid-twentieth-century Americanscould be appropriately grateful to their ancestorswho had broken the chains of tradition, andnothing could be gained from holding onto themiserable past. Once the European umbilicus wascut, individuals were ready to prosper as trueAmericans.

Sociologist Milton Gordon, in laying out a theoryof acculturation, differentiated between culturalblending and structural separation. In his 1964

book on assimilation, he wrote: “The United States.. . is a multiple melting pot in which acculturationfor all groups beyond the first generation of immi-grants. . .has been massive and decisive, but inwhich structural separation on the basis of raceand religion. . .emerges as the dominantsociological condition.” While allowing for separateorganizations for such minorities as Jews, Negroes,and possibly Catholics, a strong and definingAmerican center was the standard to which thesesubgroups did or did not match up.20

In Albion, the public school was key to shapingand enforcing American cultural norms. Allinstruction was in English, and Latin was the onlynon-English language taught until 1958, whenSpanish was inserted into the high school curricu-lum. No one in Boone County had Spanish-speaking ancestors. Career days explored prospectsfor making money by becoming useful in thenational military-industrial system. Success in lifewas measured by how far one might rise in thisnational system. To this end, besides beingmonitored through grades, students followed anexacting dress code, studied textbook courtshipand marriage principles, and participated inAmerican Legion government days. When ourninth grade English class was thrashing around forideas for essay topics, our teacher told us not towrite about the backgrounds of our ancestors.A grade school teacher had already cautioned usthat some of our grandparents might not useproper English. She told us to be aware of theirpeculiarities and avoid adopting their speech,without necessarily holding this deficiency againstthem.

Some theorists of ethnicity and assimilationbelieve that proponents of ethnic preservation inthe United States have exaggerated minor detailsof ethnic survival while neglecting clear patternsof assimilation. Ethnicity is more than what kindof cookies people eat at Christmas. Milton Yingerdiscusses four dimensions of assimilation: struc-tural, cultural, psychological, and biological.Structural assimilation refers to the extent to whichmembers of a particular group are integrated intoorganizations and institutions that reach beyondgroup boundaries. Cultural assimilation concernsthe degree to which members of the group adoptthe language, norms, and values of the overallpopulation. Psychological assimilation is aboutwhether members of the group carry a sense ofbelonging to the larger whole. Biological assimila-tion means intermarriage and gene mixing.

Along these axes the case for broad assimilation

Ethnicity is

more than

what kind of

c o o k i e s

people eat

at Christmas.


Advertisement, Handbook for Boys, Boy Scouts of America, 1952

WINTER 2007 • 121

in Boone County and the rest of rural Nebraskain the 1950s is strong. While some Protestants andCatholics might have tried to keep a prudentdistance from each other, both were thoroughlymixed in terms of national backgrounds, except insuch limited areas as Wilber. As the 1950s wore on,more of my cohorts were ignoring even religiousboundaries by falling in love, marrying, and work-ing out on their own whether to be Catholic orLutheran. Only the degree of integration in psycho-logical identity is realistically open to question.21

The word “ethnicity” was not used in the 1950s,and scholarly works on Nebraska history from theperiod included little on immigrant culture. Acomprehensive 1995 bibliography of sources onNebraska history includes 134 entries under theheading “Immigrants and Ethnicity,” but only sevenof these works date from the 1950s. Of the seven,five were unpublished or had very limited, localdistribution. The other two appeared in NebraskaHistory, both biographical essays on prominentSwedish men. Biographical material on statesmenand entrepreneurs was a dominant topic inNebraska History in the 1950s, a pattern reflected inthese two articles. More typically, as with accountsof such figures as William Jennings Bryan, George

Norris, and John J. Pershing, historians did notdwell on European roots.22

One of the Nebraska History articles on immi-grants appeared in 1950 and was written by notedNebraska folklorist Louise Pound. Although it wasprimarily about the life of an early state promoterand entrepreneur, Olof Bergstrom, it includedpieces of information about German and Swedishimmigration and settlement in Nebraska and aboutcommunication and travel between Nebraska andSweden. Given this attention and her lifetime ofresearch into the folk culture of Nebraska, it istelling that the 1959 publication of her folkloreessays, which she was editing at the time of herdeath the previous year, included nothing thatwould suggest ethnic culture as a significantpresence in Nebraska history. In fact, her essay onthe possibility of English-Scottish roots in westerncowboy songs rejected the assertion of Europeanorigin, claiming instead that the songs were eitheradaptations of popular American songs or improvi-sations based on the life of the cow trail.23

In sum, the 1950s (and the 1940s) marked a lowpoint of explicit awareness of specific Europeanconnections and identities in Nebraska. Thefollowing decades have seen a revaluing of immi-

NSHS RG2183-1953-0320-11

Besides being

monitored through

grades, students

followed an exacting

dress code,

studied textbook

courtship and

marriage principles,

and participated in

American Legion

government days.


to a more limited usage. The early Greek termethnos was related to a pejorative term used byJewish people for gentiles, thus carrying the senseof a disparaging view that insiders have for outsid-ers. Early English burdened the word with negativeovertones of superstition, barbarism, and strange-ness. In medieval Europe ethnic identity meanttribal affiliation, associated with those who livedas minorities apart from their dominant regions.

The term “ethnic,” defined as somethingpertaining to a culture, still carries a connotationof someone or something that is special or differ-ent, perhaps exotic or dangerous, but in any casenot ordinary or colorless. Politicians who court theethnic vote are going for pockets of unassimilatedpersons, maybe uneducated, but definitely diver-gent from the presumed American norm. Ethnicityexists in tension with a central consensus and isdependent on this center for its meaning: Thecenter and the nonconformist ethnic complementand shape each other. In this sense, it is possibleto imagine a group of people without an ethnicity.In fact, the non-ethnics could be the majority.Unpalatable this may be to those with a vision ofdemocratic plurality, it nevertheless uncoverssomething about how Americans have attemptedto define themselves and how identities shift.26

Ethnicity, where it exists, is artificial, not natural.It is created or invented rather than discovered. Itjoins race in being a socially constructed set ofmeanings that materially affects the way a categoryof people confronts the world and the way theworld confronts these people. As Werner Sollorsasserts, the phenomenon of ethnicity is a set ofpower relations that creates a pseudo-historicalexplanation of itself. It involves a search for mean-ing in both the center and the periphery. Ethnicitymay be about language, dress, art, eye color,occupation, residence, lineage, education, or earshape; but it is never reducible to any of these.Whether a group of people defines itself or isdefined by others according to a particular con-figuration of traits has to do with historical processthat proceeds according to a particular logic thatmay run its course, recreate itself, or blend intothe center. Ethnicity is a contrived puzzle to bedecoded and read for what it reveals about asocial system and people’s place in it.27

How did rural Nebraska of the 1950s sort itspeople? Was there a muted pattern of Europeanimmigrant identity waiting to be brought forth lateras ethnicity? How did the 1950s carry people likeme from the first half of the twentieth century tothe second half?

grant culture in Nebraska, as in the United Statesas a whole. Part of this was an attempt to revitalizeethnic roots that were presumed present andshaping the beliefs, values, and outlook ofNebraskans, even if they were not acknowledgedat mid-century. Another aspect of the raising up ofethnicity has been the attempt to understand whatit was about the 1950s that would have led to suchwidespread erasure of the immigrant past. Manylater considered that neglect of Nebraska’s ethnicdiversity had been a bad turn.

In 1973, twenty-two years after publication ofThe Uprooted, which had applauded EuropeanAmericans’ break with their past, Oscar Handlinappended what was essentially an apology for hisyouthful arrogance. Over time, immigrant ancestors,once deemed quaint and irrelevant to the boldnational venture, came to be pursued as lost love.Increasing numbers of Americans, including third-generation-and-beyond immigrants, began to claima non-English mother tongue after the 1950s. PaulOlson, who in 1976 wrote the introduction to thefirst published work in Nebraska salvage ethnicity,was direct: “The melting pot vision never did work.This book is written in celebration. . .of thosepeoples and cultures which did not melt.” Perhapssome Nebraska immigrant group identities hadpersisted underground through the consensusyears and were being invited out of the closetwhen the time was ripe.24

What exactly is ethnicity? Richard Rodriquez,who was born to Spanish-speaking, Mexican-American parents, captures the poetry of ethnicityby calling it “memory, response, attitude, mood,coded in the soul, transmitted through genera-tions.” Having proffered this airy image, heproceeds to deflate it: “Defined this broadly, Isuspect, ethnicity is only a public metaphor, likesexuality or age, for a knowledge that bewildersus.” Milton Yinger expresses nearly the same mean-ing as Rodriguez, but in the language of sociology:“An ethnic group [is] a segment of a larger societywhose members are thought, by themselves and/or others, to have a common origin and to shareimportant segments of a common culture andwho, in addition, participate in shared activities inwhich the common origin and culture are signifi-cant ingredients.” Ethnicity is about the heart andhow people experience themselves.25

To an anthropologist, the prefix “ethno-” meansculture. All people have culture to the same degree,although the content of culture varies widely.While this would suggest that each person also hasan ethnicity, the origin of the word lends validation

Over time,

immigrant ancestors,

once deemed quaint

and irrelevant,

came to be pursued

as lost love.

NSHS RG3542-106-1


WINTER 2007 • 123

these goals require. In my skepticism about thesalience of immigrant cultural identity in Albionin the 1950s, I doubt not the reality of culture, butrather its ethnic content.

In Albion, Americanism and the flag were domi-nant symbols that everyone was required torespect and salute; no one questioned this. Militarysacrifice for America was a high calling, and therewere periodic rites and ongoing habits of remem-brance of soldiers, both living and dead. Furthercentralizing and aligning ourselves with main-stream America was our measuring of life progressby standard milestones of starting kindergarten,

graduating from junior high and high school, get-ting college degrees if we could swing it, makingmoney, and retiring from making money. Schoolspirit was expected; cheerleaders and athleteswere seen as the most promising comers. Moviestar beauty was a goal for all girls; boys wantedshiny cars. In short, we were mid-century main-stream Americans, not ethnics. If we were rusticand small townish around the edges, it was a faultto be hidden and corrected, not embraced. YoungAlbionites were trying to work out how we couldnavigate the American system. No viable alterna-tives to the national consensus existed.

World War II cast a long shadow on the childrenof 1950s rural Nebraska, but few of us had knownthe emotional intensity and purpose that hadshaped our parents’ lives. Unlike our parents, we

A m e r i c a n i s mand the flag

were dominantsymbols that

everyone wasrequired torespect and

salute.

The white ethnicity that rose in the late twenti-eth century was quite different from the patchworkof immigrant cultures that existed in the early yearsof the century. The cultural particularity of earlierEuropean immigrant communities, insofar as itexisted, came with an historically specific configu-ration of costs and benefits for its members. Unlikeearly immigrant community culture, late twentiethcentury white ethnicity, which Mary C. Watersterms “symbolic ethnicity,” could be evokedsituationally and disregarded most of the time. U.S.census protocol inserted a general question aboutancestry in 1980, but it was a controversial addi-tion because of the unreliability of the data.Testing indicated that a person might specify anethnic identity at one time, only to answer thequestion differently when asked again. A 1977study of ethnic salience in Nebraska found thatmost northern and western Europeans, even if theyknew their ancestral background, attached littleimportance to it, even when they wished for stron-ger roots. Waters identified what she called a“hunger for ethnicity,” a desire for an idealizedversion of a close community that would provide asense of belonging and security without suffocat-ing rules. Romanticism allows soft and blurryedges and smoothed-over surfaces, the opposite ofthe splinters and sharp corners that poke throughin real life. White ethnicity called for obfuscationas well as memory, thus a sufficient space of timeas separation from raw experience.28

Growing up in Albion in the 1950s, I understandthe “hunger for ethnicity,” ill-defined and unrealis-tic as it was for me. The dominant Albion under-standing of immigrant culture more nearly matchedthat of the ignorance, stink, and grime associatedwith immigrants in the early twentieth century thanthe romantic complex that would coalesce later,which is undoubtedly why I dreamed of aligningmyself with distant Blacks rather than charactersout of my actual family history. Albion, as anaspiring piece of mainstream American culture, wasthe antithesis of ethnicity. Although we were aware,to varying degrees, of immigrant ancestors, thisknowledge was suppressed and did not overtlyinform our values and aspirations.

Culture provides indispensable wisdom aboutwhat constitutes nobility, beauty, sanctity, humor,ugliness, and abomination. It specifies when it isappropriate to celebrate and when and how togrieve. A culture has rites of passage that lead anindividual from birth through coming of age,marriage, and death. Culture defines goals andthe frequently painful and arduous sacrifices that


had no clear memory of the privations of war orthe Great Depression of the thirties. While thesemay have hung in the air we breathed, we didn’tacknowledge them as shaping our lives. Our loom-ing task was finding our way through the newopportunities and constraints of the post-warperiod. We had inherited the forms of patriotismand unanimity of the 1940s, and some of us weremoving toward the 1960s culture of discontent,self-expression, and critique. Seeking an under-standing of the world that was life size, within ourgrasp, and transformative, we embodied Americanculture aching to break itself down into moregenuine, more textured, less artificial components.

W H I T E A N D A M E R I C A N . Race wascommonly understood as a biological classifica-tion in the 1950s, and most believed that theclassification was unambiguous and identifiableby sight. With the dissolution of its biological un-derpinnings, the concept of race has fusedanalytically with ethnicity, as an invented methodof classification. While ethnicity arises in people’sheads, it is sustained (or muted) in varying waysby legal and customary processes and economicinequalities.29

Ethnicity, as counter culture, varies inverselywith the force and scope of the central culture.When the national consensus is strong and com-prehensive, as it was during and after World War II,ethnic identification wanes; when consensuscracks or breaks, ethnic identities flourish. The1950s was a low point of ethnic awareness in theUnited States and rural Nebraska.

As an Albion child, I learned that some charac-ters in fiction and in history had substantially lessclaim to mercy and fairness than I was beingtaught to assume. Only indirectly and diffusely didit become clear that the crucial difference wasbetween European and non-European ancestry.European ancestry was so unanimous in Albionthat it seemed as if we were the world and thatnon-Europeans inhabited an alien reality thatoperated according to inferior laws and principles.We did not name this as either ethnicity or race.While race was a topic in the news at the time,we did not believe this was about us or about theprivileges and resources that we took for grantedas rightfully belonging to us.

The imposed acquiescence of the decade bredfestering dissent. Some of us coming of age inAlbion began to be restless and impatient with thelives we were given. Soon there would be smalland hesitant moves out of the mainstream culture.

Our hunger for roots was real, if unnamed. Our1950s attempts at breaking through the consensuswere fanciful and conventional, if earnest. Whileromantic identification with exotic others violatestheir integrity as well as our own, our real hungerwas for substance, not fantasy.

Integral to claiming roots in rural Nebraska isclaiming the period when the salience of theseroots was weak. The 1950s was such a time, to beunderstood in historical and cultural perspective.As hard-luck Chrissy said in 1986 in “Search forSigns of Intelligent Life in the Universe,”

All my life I’ve always wanted to be somebody.But I see now I should have been more specific.30

Me too. �

N o t e s

1 Wallace Wadsworth, “Paul Bunyan’s Great Flapjack Griddle,”in Beacon Light of Literature, Book Seven, ed. Rudolph W.Chamberlain (New York: Iroquois Publishing, 1945), 339–349.

2 The mid-century ebb in Nebraska ethnic identity is discussedin Paul A. Olson’s introduction to Broken Hoops and PlainsPeople (Lincoln: Nebraska Curriculum DevelopmentCenter, University of Nebraska, 1976). The term “rural” in thispaper is used according to the census definition of areas out-side population aggregates of 2,500 or more. The town ofAlbion and all of Boone County were thus rural.

3 Brown v. Board of Education was the 1954 Supreme Court de-cision that declared public school segregation to be a denial ofconstitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law. Itunleashed a flood of civil rights action.

Living in Albion, I never saw a Negro in the town until someof the young people who went away to college started bringingtheir black friends home with them in the 1960s. The federalcensus turned up no Negroes in Albion in 1950 or 1960. The twoNegroes outside of Albion living in Boone County in 1950 haddisappeared by 1960. Although the population of Nebraska wasapproximately 50 percent rural in the 1950s, only 4 percent(781) of its small 1950 Negro population was rural. Nebraskahas historically been among the whitest states in the country. In1950, 1.5 percent of the population of Nebraska was Negro; 0.3percent was Indian (Native American), these being the onlynumerically significant groups of non-European descent. Thesenumbers come from the 1950 and 1960 federal census reports.For the American Legion, see John L. Sullivan, “You Are YourBrother’s Keeper,” American Legion, Feb. 1950, 28, 41–42. Ex-amples of anti-discrimination editorials in the Albion News areMay 28, 1959, which scored Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus,and June 1, 1950, which espoused the cause of an “American-Jap” who was born and educated in Nebraska.

4 Judson C. Landis and Mary G. Landis, Personal Adjustment,Marriage and Family Living, 2nd ed. (New York: Prentice-Hall,1955), 124.

5 Nell Painter, Southern History Across the Color Line (ChapelHill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 32.

6 The work of Mary Ellen Goodman, Race Awareness in YoungChildren (1952), is cited in Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, “TheComedy of Domination: Psychoanalysis and the Conceit ofWhiteness,” Discourse 19 (1997), 138–9. The concept of race ishistorically defined, and it was only after World War II when re-cent European immigrants came to be grouped withAnglo-Saxons as being unquestionably Caucasian. MatthewFrye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immi-

Race was understood as a biological classification in the 1950s.

WINTER 2007 • 125

grants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1998), 109.

7 Ruth Frankenberg, White Woman, Race Matters: The SocialConstruction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1993), 196.

8 The interview with the teacher, Herbert Knutson, was pub-lished in the Cardinal, May 4, 1956, a student newspaper, copyat Albion School. The account of the quartet comes from mymemory and from the Cardinal, Nov. 16, 1958.

9 Wini Breines, Young, White and Miserable: Growing UpFemale in the Fifties (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 19.

10 The Native American population of the Great Plains was influx, especially after the westward movement of Eastern Wood-land nations brought largely by European colonization. Anoverview of Nebraska peoples in place at the time of Europeansettlement can be found in Bradley H. Baltensperger, Nebraska:A Geography (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 37–44. For a de-tailed ecological and political analysis of the frontier phase ofPlains history, see Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians,Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: UniversityPress of Kansas, 1998).

11 Mari Sandoz, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas(New York: A.A. Knopf, 1942); Old Jules (Boston: Little, Brown,1935); Cheyenne Autumn (New York: McGraw Hill, 1953).

12 Ray H. Mattison, “Indian Missions and Missionaries on theUpper Missouri to 1900,” Nebraska History 38 (1957): 127, 154;Berlin B. Chapman, “The Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation,”Nebraska History 38 (1957): 1–24; Roger T. Grange, Jr., reviewof A Sioux Chronicle by George E. Hyde; Philip S. Holmgren,review of A History of the Dakota or Sioux Indians, by DoaneRobinson, Nebraska History 38 (1957), 69, 71; Robert C. Farb,“Robert W. Furnas as Omaha Indian Agent, 1864–1866 (I),”Nebraska History 32 (1951), 192.

13 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontierin American History,” in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays ofFrederick Jackson Turner (Englewood Cliffs, NY: Prentice-Hall,1961), 51.

14 Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution inthe Rural Middle West, 1830–1917 (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1997).

15 Gjerde, Minds, 22.16 Gjerde, Minds, 6; Baltensperger, Nebraska, 73–85; James C.

Olson and Ronald C. Naugle, History of Nebraska, 3rd ed.(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 175; Frederick C.Luebke, “Time, Place, and Culture in Nebraska History,”Nebraska History 69 (1988): 160; Deborah Fink, AgrarianWomen: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880–1940(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 40–42;James Sellers, “Nebraska—One Hundred Years,” NebraskaHistory 34 (1953): 259.

17 Gjerde, Minds, 321–325; see also Burton W. Folsom, Jr.,“Immigrant Voters and the Nonpartisan League in Nebraska,1917–1920,” Great Plains Quarterly 1 (1981): 159–168.

18 Walter Johnson, “Politics in the Midwest,” Nebraska History32 (1951): 13.

19 The Letters of Louise Ritter From 1893 to 1925: A Swiss-German Immigrant Woman To Antelope County, Nebraska, ed.Darlene M. Ritter (Fremont, NE: Siegenthaler-Ritter Publishers,1980) records Ritter’s intense homesickness, pain, and eventualreconciling to Nebraska as her sons and grandchildren aban-doned her language. After her death in 1925, a son notified hersister in Switzerland and then ceased the correspondence. In1910, 30 percent of Nebraskans had foreign-born or mixedparentage, while only 19 percent had both parents born in thesame foreign country. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population:Nebraska-Wyoming, Vol. III of Thirteenth Census of the United

States, Taken in 1910 (Washington, D.C. 1913), 50.20 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (New York: Little, Brown,

1951); Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: TheRole of Race, Religion, and National Origin (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1964), 234–5.

21 J. Milton Yinger, “Ethnicity,” Annual Review of Sociology 11(1985): 151–180. Peter Thaler, who has examined the case ofNorwegian Americans in the Midwest, declares NorwegianAmericans assimilated, on the basis of loss of the Norwegianlanguage and structural assimilation to mainstream America.See Peter Thaler, Norwegian Minds—American Dreams: EthnicActivism Among Norwegian American Intellectuals (Newark:University of Delaware Press, 1988), 120–139.

22 Michael L. Tate, Nebraska History: An Annotated Bibliogra-phy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 323–336.

23 Louise Pound, “Olof Bergstrom: Swedish Pioneer,” NebraskaHistory 31 (1950): 64–74; “Cowboy Songs and English-ScottishBallads,” in Nebraska Folklore (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1959), 170.

24 Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown,1973), 274; Joshua A. Fishman, “Mother-Tongue Claiming in theUnited States Since 1960: Trends and Correlates,” in The Riseand Fall of the Ethnic Revival: Perspectives on Language andEthnicity, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (New York: Moulton, 1985),136; Olson, introduction to Broken Hoops, xii.

25 Richard Rodriquez, “An American Writer,” in The Inventionof Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1989), 8; Yinger, “Ethnicity,” 159.

26 Joshua A Fishman, “Language, Ethnicity, and Racism,” inRise and Fall of Ethnic Revival, 11–12; Thaler, Norwegian Minds,121.

27 Werner Sollors, introduction to Invention of Ethnicity, xvi.In this book, Kathleen Conzen gives an example of nineteenthcentury German American ethnicity defined by festivities thatpresented German culture to the American public and then ranits course as this complex transformed mainstream patterns ofcelebration and thus blended itself into the larger culture. SeeKathleen Neils Conzen, “Ethnicity as Festive Culture: Nine-teenth-Century German America on Parade,” in Invention ofEthnicity, 44–76.

28 Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities inAmerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 9, 152;J. Allen Williams, Jr., David R. Johnson, and Miguel A. Carranza,“Ethnic Assimilation and Pluralism in Nebraska,” in Ethnicity onthe Great Plains, ed. Frederick C. Luebke (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1980), 210–229.

29 David Roediger is among the scholars who take vehementexception to equating race and ethnicity, pointing out that racehas its own separate American history, apart from ethnicity, andthat blending the two concepts obscures the central and endur-ing reality of race in America. Disputes over definitions rarelyyield incisive points, but it seems reasonable to me to refer todifferent kinds of ethnicity rather than to field periodic claimsof biological determinism in race, as opposed to ethnicity. SeeDavid R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 140–150.

30 Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in theUniverse (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 35.

“The Races of Man” fromNoah Webster, AmericanDictionary of the EnglishLanguage, C. G. Merriam,1884

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