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

Preface

Preface On July 27, 1918, while American and Allied soldiers fought German forces along the Western Front in Europe, four young Hutterite farmers from South Dakota arrived at the prison on Alcatraz Island. Weeks earlier they had been found guilty of failure to obey military orders. The farmers had refused to line up and drill alongside other recruits who were training as infantrymen at Camp Lewis in Washington State. The Hutterites said they could do nothing to aid the war effort, not even clean the dishes of the men who would carry guns into battle. And so the four men found themselves chained in the dungeon at Alcatraz, each sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. They were filled with foreboding. One of the four Hutterites, Michael Hofer, wrote to his wife, Maria: “We are now in the military prison of Alcatraz behind iron and locks. We don’t know what will become of us.”1 His younger brother, David, also wrote home: “We all do not expect to see each other in this world anymore.”2 Likewise, a third brother, Joseph, sent dire word back to their communal colony: “It is very clear that we are not destined for better days ahead and that our lives will endure for only a short while.”3 During the day, the men were strung up by their wrists so that their toes scarcely touched the cold and wet floor, a technique known as “high cuffing ,” well established in the history of torture. The cells measured six feet high at the uppermost point, six and a half feet wide, and eight feet deep. For drink, they had water; for food, bread; and for company, the rats that viii Preface scurried around the clock. Guards left uniforms on the cell floors, but the men remained in their underwear, unwilling to wear anything that carried a military label. In this dank, windowless basement, they lived in darkness, by day and by night. In that summer of war, scarcely anyone but South Dakota relatives paid much mind to the Hutterites locked away. World War I brought a mountain of suffering to the people of many nations. Americans focused their attention, and sympathy, on the fighting along the Western Front, where tens of thousands of their young men would be buried in blood-soaked fields before the war ended. That was one true measure of the cost of war: simply counting the dead. More than nine million combatants in all died as the fighting raged between 1914 and 1918. Even after the armistice was signed early on the morning of November 11, 1918, but before it took effect, commanders continued to offer up their men in an eleventh-hour sacrifice. The United States came late, and reluctantly, to the war. President Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 by reminding voters that he had kept the nation far from the killing. Only a few months later, citing German provocations, he asked Congress to declare war. The president warned that conformity would become a virtue and dissent a vice. True to those words, the United States woke up on April 7, the morning after Congress had declared war, as if to put on the armor of a different country. For its part, the federal government introduced an expansive military draft and vast measures of control like the Espionage Act. Amid an outpouring of government propaganda about war being waged at home as well as abroad, a hyperpatriotic fever swept across the land, turning neighbor against neighbor in a relentless search for traitors. When these neighbors formed mobs, they set about their business with hanging rope, whip, tar and feathers, yellow paint, and midnight fires. South Dakotans targeted the Hutterites who lived in sixteen communities , which they referred to as colonies, in the southeastern part of the state. The Hutterites had several strikes against them. As speakers of a Germanic language, they broadcast their ancestry while the United States waged war against Germany. Moreover, they belonged to a Christian community that held all property in common in a nation that prized private enterprise and personal accomplishment. Preface ix Most troubling of all, they rejected military service at a time when young men were expected to eagerly put on uniforms to protect the home country, support the Allies, and advance democracy. As the war effort in the United States gained urgency in the spring of 1918, patience with the...