Latvians in Michigan. "Discovering the Peoples of Michigan" series by Silvija D. Meija (review)

Book Reviews 123 many workers formed strong communal bonds within theirethnic groups and often developed complex year-round employment patterns encompassing both rural agricultural and urban industrialwork. Mapes traces theMichigan sugar-beet industry from the Spanish American War to the beginning of the Second World War. She shows how the skyrocketing price of sugar during the First World War produced even more conflict among processors, farmers, and workers over potential profits. The 1920s saw increasing criticism of the sugar beet industry as factories in the fields exploiting child labor. New Deal agricultural policies in the 1930s pressured processors to share the largesse of price supports with growers and workers, often with uneven results. The Department of Agriculture took on the problem of child labor in the sugar-beet fields, and workers organized unions and demanded collective-bargaining rights, even as most agriculture was excluded from the provisions ofmodern federal labor law. SweetTyranny is anchored in the environmental and historical contexts of centralMichigan in the firsthalf of the twentieth century and is also connected to the global debates over American imperialism. There are a fewmoments?such as the discussion of the Farm Bureau and theNon partisan League, and the conflict with theMexican government over migrant-labor policy, both during the FirstWorld War?when Mapes is slow to depict the links between national and international politics and theMichigan sugar-beet industry. But inmost of the book, the local, national, and global connections are explained clearly, logically, and informatively. By looking carefully at one cash crop in one region in one state,Kathleen Mapes has uncovered patterns of global trade and labor markets thathave had a profound impact on American society from the turn of the twentieth century up to the present day. David A. Zonderman North Carolina State University Silvija D. Meija. Latvians inMichigan. "Discovering the Peoples of Michigan" series. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005. Pp. 121. Appendices. For further reference. Index. Notes. Photographs. Paper, $11.95. More than five thousand Latvian World War II refugees arrived in Michigan in the late 1940s and early 1950s, sponsored by churches, farmers, and other individuals under the Displaced Persons Act of 124 MichiganHistoricalReview 1948. After completing the eighteen-month work agreement stipulated by the sponsorship, most of these immigrants moved on to other jobs, earned college degrees, bought houses, and established businesses. Their free timewas filledwith cultural activities: Latvians built churches and assembly halls; compiled libraries; organized sports activities, theater performances, art exhibits, choirs, folk-dance groups, and Latvian speaking Boy Scouts and Girl Guides; and established schools and summer camps, allwith the purpose ofmaintaining Latvian heritage. Litde has been published in English about Latvians in North America. Standard references such as Edgar Anderson's entry in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, and Maruta Karklis's The Latvians in America, 1640-1973: A Chronologyare more than three decades old. Recent memoirs byModris Eksteins and Agate Nesaule (listed in the book's bibliography) dwell on the historical trauma caused by war and political terror inEurope, leaving it to other scholars to describe Latvians' vibrant cultural life in the New World. Silvija D. Meija, a professor at Michigan State University, does much to fillthisgap. Latvians inMichigan concentrates on the second wave of Latvian immigration?the WWII refugees and their descendants?and offers a few tantalizing glimpses into the firstwave, the "Old Latvians," who arrived inMichigan before the Second World War (pp. 27-28, 35-36). These glimpses add a human face to the information in other publications that mention prewar immigration to Michigan only in passing. This book does not discuss the third (post-1989) wave of Latvian immigrants. Sections of thework are devoted to describing the postwar Displaced Persons (DP) camps in Germany (pp. 19-26); giving overviews of the communities in Kalamazoo, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Saginaw, Lansing, and Three Rivers (pp. 27-58); and asking why few Latvians returned to Latvia after the country again became independent in 1991 (pp. 65-67). An interesting chapter surveys Michigan's partnership with the government of Latvia, which was critical to building western-style military structures in that country (pp. 59-64). Meija adds a valuable perspective with autobiographical anecdotes (pp. 30-31...