Pacifists in Chains: The Persecution of Hutterites during the Great War

Chapter Two: Forced Migrations

Chapter Two Forced Migrations The worldly sword and the spiritual sword cannot dwell together in one sheath; each has its own sheath. —The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren Camp Lewis Welcomes Recruits The best way to picture the importance of Camp Lewis to the nation during World War I, according to a correspondent for Collier’s Weekly, was to stand in the Texas Panhandle and face north, drawing an imaginary line through the middle of the country—through Oklahoma, then Kansas, and Nebraska and the Dakotas, right up to the Canadian border. If you looked east from that line, you would have seen fifteen national army training camps. If you looked west, you would have seen one: Camp Lewis, at American Lake, Washington. The nearest army neighbor, Camp Funston, was in Kansas, about 1,800 miles away. The recruits from Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, and many more from Minnesota and the Dakotas, all headed to Camp Lewis, some traveling as far as 2,000 miles. The Collier’s correspondent wrote: “There in that great cantonment, far on the yon side of the Rockies, beyond the desert wastes and the Cascade snows; there in the brilliant wet green of a Puget Sound prairie, the men of the entire West are learning war.”1 Stretching across about 70,000 acres, Camp Lewis was the largest of the 24 Pacifists in Chains army’s cantonments, as the training camps were known in military parlance , both in capacity and in the number of states whose soldiers it housed. As the nearest city, seventeen miles away, Tacoma was eager to lay claim to the camp, but the land itself had been a gift to the federal government from all of Pierce County, whose taxpayers approved a $2 million bond for the purchase early in 1916, well before the United States declared war. It was, in many respects, an ideal place in which to train for battle. The average summer temperature climbed to a comfortable seventy-one degrees and dipped down to a refreshing fifty-two degrees at night. Few of the other training sites could compete with the vista at Camp Lewis. The barracks were arrayed in two curving arcs, which opened southeastward toward Mount Rainier, the “Great Sentinel of the Camp.”2 The mountain stood thirty-five miles away, its broad top covered by glaciers and snow fields, a white canvas etched where rock came poking through. On clear days (the camp did have the unfortunate distinction of recording more entirely clouded days than any other cantonment), soldiers could see not only Mount Rainier and its fir-clad companions in the Cascades but also the Olympics to the northwest. Directly west, over the forested hills and out of sight, but close enough to be felt, lay the Puget Sound and then the Pacific. A forty-one-year-old military captain, David C. Stone, a quiet officer with graying hair at the temples, had supervised the construction of the camp on a tight deadline and with a vast work crew of ten thousand. During the summer of 1917, the men constructed 1,757 buildings, put down fifty miles of roads, and laid twenty-seven miles of sewers and thirty-seven miles of water pipe. The Tacoma Ledger called it the “most stupendous construction project ever attempted in the northwest—the building in a little more than two months of a city for nearly fifty thousand men, modern in every respect.”3 In keeping with the military proclivity for order, army officials and civilian experts developed standard specifications for sixteen soldier cities throughout the country, which local overseers like Captain Stone followed in their building. For example, while the grounds at each camp might require some variation in layout, the standard shape was to be a letter “U,” with the division headquarters at the bend of the letter and barracks spread along the letter’s two branches, with the middle space reserved for parade and drill grounds.4 The national design prescribed two-story, boxlike bar- Forced Migrations 25 racks for the soldiers, about forty feet wide by 120 feet long, with a kitchen tucked into a short extension at one end. Washington’s efforts at nationwide uniformity didn’t eliminate all sense of competition among the cantonments. The local commanders in Washington State were eager to note that the cost per capita of constructing Camp Lewis was...