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Chapter Nine: Official Misjudgment
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Chapter Nine Official Misjudgment Ye shall be brought before rulers and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them. —Mark 13:9 Hutterite Colonies Pack for Canada When he finally returned to South Dakota, Jacob Wipf found a Hutterite homeland transformed. Many of the colonies had abandoned their farms and moved to Canada, having purchased land in Manitoba and Alberta where they looked forward to a warmer reception. While the treatment of the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf confirmed the rightness of the decision to move, the Hutterites had begun exploring land options in Canada well before the men left home to report to Camp Lewis, as the war fever began to spread.1 When the United States sent men to war in 1918, the Hutterites counted eighteen colonies in the country, two of them in Montana and the rest in South Dakota. By the spring of 1919, only seven colonies remained, including Rockport, where Joseph and Michael Hofer had just been buried. Meanwhile, the troubles continued in South Dakota, even after the war. The South Dakota Council of Defense was pressing to disband the remaining colonies, arguing that they were leveraging their religion for an unfair economic advantage over neighboring farmers (not to mention, the council said, being an unpatriotic menace to society). The state took up the cause. 212 Pacifists in Chains In round one, the Beadle County Circuit Court decided against the Hutterites , recommending that their communal corporations cease all farming. The South Dakota Supreme Court in the end did not require the dissolution of colonies but did suggest that its judicial sympathies lay with critics of the Hutterites.2 When they reunited that spring, Jacob Wipf and David Hofer may have taken a short walk up the Rockport hillside to the cemetery to pay their respects to Joseph and Michael. One pictures them bending low to read the grave markers, sharing tears if not words as they remembered all that they had been through. In the years after their release from Fort Leavenworth, David Hofer and Jacob Wipf spoke only rarely with others about their imprisonment , family members said. A daughter of David Hofer, Katie Hofer Waldner, who welcomed the author to her home at the Miller Colony in Montana, said that the subject remained forever emotional for her grandfather .3 Waldner, who was eighty-three at the time of the interview in 2009, sat in a rocker, a “Love One Another” cross-stitching on the wall behind her. She said, “You could see when he started telling us about what happened, the tears came. We didn’t talk about it much.” Work in the fields offered a welcome respite for her grandfather, she said. She could still see him cultivating with a team of white horses, readying the land for another crop of wheat. As he got older, she said, David Hofer talked about pain in his hips, which he attributed to the time he had spent hanging in chains at Alcatraz. Joe Hofer, bonded by name to the grandfather who died at Leavenworth, learned to know Jacob Wipf after the war when they lived on the same colony in Canada. At the time of an interview in 2009, at Hofer’s home on the Kyle Colony in Saskatchewan, he was seventy-two and was assigned to the care of calves in the dairy barn. He said that Wipf was a blacksmith both before and after the war: “He had arms like an ox. He was strong. Time [spent working] was nothing to him.”4 In the 1950s, the two men worked together, sometimes in the fields, sometimes in construction. Hofer recalled: “We would drive a couple of miles to get a soil and gravel mix. Then he would build sidewalks seven or eight inches high that would pack hard as a rock. He loved every minute of it. He loved working with soil.” He said Wipf occasionally spoke about his [52.90.181.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:31 GMT) Official Misjudgment 213 ordeal: “He said it was hard to come back to the colony after the war and start over. While he was away, he was sure that he was going to die.” Though the story of the Hofer brothers and Jacob Wipf is known to every Hutterite, care is taken not to glorify the men in a way that would lift them up above others in the community. “We don’t try to make heroes out of our ancestors...