A German Heritage
Like most Americans in the 1930’s, the influences on our life before and during World War Two were local, centered on small communities and tied closely to our immediate families. Two decades later our emerging culture, driven by television, had destroyed much of that community and splintered families into individuals. It was a change as profound as that precipitated by industrialization, which turned small farmers and artisans into industrial workers on assembly lines.
My great grandparents emigrated from Europe in the middle of the 19th Century. My grandfather on my mother’s side lived with us until he was killed in a hit and run accident at the age of eighty-six, and my father’s mother was a frequent and unforgettable visitor, the most frightening human being I had ever seen. My father would remind me repeatedly, when I complained about family rules that seemed arbitrary and at odds with those of my friends, “You are not just anybody, you are a Koch.” At the age of nineteen I described this in a diary as “a feeling of aristocracy, their polished manners and a concept of a heritage that we had obligations that average Americans avoided.”
George Schneider was the family patriarch. The “Koch” name that muddied the family legacy was the result of a forced marriage between my Schneider grandmother and an older German beer maker named Koch. She ended the marriage in the only way possible at a time when men held all marital rights, by running away, in her case to Panama with my father and his older brother in 1912, to join her lover who published a newspaper for the Panama Canal construction crews.
From time to time we could get our father to tell us stories about his teenage years in Panama and later in Alaska, stories of adventures in far away places that seemed in sharp contrast to the cautious executive who came home every day at 5:30 after work. But adventure was another theme that ran deeply in my father’s side of the Koch family.
I recall no stories about the horrendous effort to build the canal. My father and his brother seem to have spent their time digging up ancient gold artifacts … jewelry, statues, and small cups … and then under either Perminia’s or “CW’s” instructions, they melted them down into gold bars, which they then sold.
The point of the story was my father’s closing comment, invariably delivered with a sad shake of his head, “I feel so guilty about melting down all that priceless stuff that I’ve always wanted to be an archeologist, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it.” The message I took from this story was “never listen to your parent’s career plans for you.” But also and more deeply, the importance of history and art over money. Money grubbing, as my father called the actions of more aggressive businessmen, was definitely to be looked down upon. It was not something to which a gentleman paid any attention.
When the Panama Canal was completed, the world’s next big project was the construction of a railroad from Anchorage, Alaska, on the coast of the Bering Sea, to Fairbanks in the interior of this still wilderness possession we’d acquired from the Russians. The international construction crew that built the canal moved on to Alaska.
My father, his brother, his mother and CW went with them, probably arriving in the summer of 1914 to get a start on what they must have known would be a tough winter. CW ran a newspaper again. Perminia started the first hotel in Anchorage. She had acquired a sizable chunk of land in what would become downtown Anchorage where she constructed a huge, double layer tent with canvas curtains separating the interior into “rooms,” which she rented to construction workers. Father’s older brother, Al, at the age of sixteen, became Anchorage’s first Postmaster, and in one famous story saved the canvas post office from burning to the ground.
The family patriarch, George Schneider, fled Germany in 1848 after Prussian troops crushed the fledgling German Republic, and he carried the liberal ideals of the Republic with him when he settled in Chicago where he became a banker, started two German language newspapers and led the anti-slavery movement among German Americans. Schneider knew Abraham Lincoln and became a founder of the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1854. Later in life, he served as American Consul to Denmark.
A surviving photograph of the family in the 1860’s shows Schneider and his wife with their seven surviving daughters (four died in childhood and infancy) standing in front of a Michigan Avenue mansion, each daughter next to her personal maid. Family legend had it that Schneider generously gave a half million dollars to each of his seven son-in-laws, a considerable fortune in the middle of the 1870’s. My brother checked out the story in Chicago archives and discovered that Schneider had actually lent, rather than given, his bank’s money, instead of his own, to his son-in-laws, who then defaulted, precipitating one of the largest crises in American banking history. Although successful most of his life, his fortune was gone by the end of the 1896 depression as he personally paid off the banks depositors who had lost money.
Thus I inherited a legacy of German idealism and an abysmal ability to handle money.
My great grandfather’s ideals were shaped by an 18th century philosophical movement called The Enlightenment, which was also the inspiration for America’s founding fathers in the 1770’s. The Enlightenment came late to Germany, and it put down its firmest roots in the Rhineland along the French border where George Schneider lived in Pirmasens. He was probably at the 1848 Frankfurt Assembly, which some historians call “as distinguished a parliament as the world has ever seen.” It must have been a heady time for Germans.
Europe had been torn by war at the beginning of the century as Napoleon Bonaparte crushed the enlightened French Republic, then unleashed the ideas of the Enlightenment across the continent on military campaigns that tore Europe and the Middle East apart for a quarter of a century. A kind of peace descended after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, but the ideas of the Enlightenment didn’t go away.
In Germany, Napoleon had abolished the Holy Roman Empire and established a German confederation, which didn’t survive, but it inspired intellectuals like Schneider to dream of a unified Germany modeled on the liberal tradition of Great Britain. Prussian soldiers crushed their attempt in 1848.
Schneider was one of several hundred thousand German liberals who fled to the United States, Switzerland, and England. Intellectuals, who stayed in Germany, turned their backs on the Enlightenment and began to argue that state power was more important than individual liberty. Liberalism eventually became “National Liberalism,” a small step from “National Socialism” and Adolph Hitler. Almost exactly the same process would take place a hundred years later when Neoconservatives in the United States abandoned the ideals of the New Deal and embraced the growing power of the imperial government.
My great grandfather was an atheist and a freethinker. He marched with like-minded Germans on Sundays past churches singing drinking songs to disrupt religious services. He thought priests, ministers and rabbis were running a shell game along with other grifters. He believed that religions were responsible for more human misery and bloodshed than any other human organizing principle.
My father never attended the high religious festivals (Christmas and Easter) where mother took us. She tolerated his rejection of religion, because she related less to any doctrine than to the age old, universal ceremonies mankind has always designed to mark the rebirth of life in the Spring, harvest in the Fall, and a festival in the darkest days of winter. She was raised an Episcopalian and encouraged my brief flirtation with becoming a Unitarian minister in my teens. She had a strong sense that we are connected body and soul to a higher force, but father always scoffed at religion, viewing his body as plumbing and engineering and his mind as some kind of electronic switcher where the soul had no role at all. Psychiatrists were charlatans.
My father’s atheism was accompanied by a powerful sense of right and wrong, however. His lack of religion did not diminish his belief in principles. Honesty, decency and a regard for others were among the most important. He knew that we are all in this together. His thinking was very much in keeping with his strong "Enlightenment" views. He was disgusted when in 1953 Congress unanimously added "under God" to our scrupulously secular pledge of allegiance.
My Mother’s Family
My mother’s family came from Easton, Pennsylvania. The 1860 census lists her grandmother, Mary, as a single head of a household with three children. She was a shopkeeper, known for her excellent mead, an old English alcoholic honey drink that takes getting used to. By 1870, she’d lost the shop. Her youngest, son, Villias, was my mother’s father. He attended school until the age of fourteen, when he went to work for William Young at his brass works. Young and his wife took an interest in Villias and offered to pay his tuition to Lafayette College, but his mother insisted she needed his wages. He eventually became a self-educated bookkeeper and accountant who studied French and had a library including the works of Shakespeare and Dickens. He loved to quote the classics, and he bestowed in my mother a fierce love of books and reading.
Villias met Elizabeth Haines Ashton (called Lizzie by her friends), in the late 1880's or early 1890's when she would have been almost 27. Villias would have been about 33. They fell in love, late for the age, and wanted to marry, but Villias’ mother complained that she would end up in a poorhouse. They waited for ten more years. Finally in 1900, when Lizzie was 37 years old, she and Villias went to New York City where they were married in All Souls Church on October 10th. My mother was born two years later, on January 18th, 1902 in Easton, Pennsylvania.
From both our parents, we children inherited a powerful tradition: liberal, intelligent, inquisitive, hard working, self reliant with a streak of idealism. Our home was ruled by a formal regularity, a sense of following age-old rituals. My father arrived home at 5:30 in the afternoon, put on his slippers and my parents had a drink. We ate sharply at 6:00 and were expected to eat all the food on our plate (“think of the starving children of Europe”). We sat straight, elbows off the table. Dinner was not served until everyone was seated and no one could have seconds until everyone else had been served their first portions. We were expected to discuss our progress at school and the news.
After dinner, we sat as a family around the only radio set in the house and listened to the radio reports, mainly foreign correspondents speaking in crackling voices from the bombed out cities of Europe, first London and then as the war began to be won, Rome, Paris and finally Berlin.
The War Years
Kids who grew up during World War II became patriotic in a way that few others can understand. We came of age when people gave up privilege and bigotry to fight together for a higher cause. World War II was wholly engaging, a shared emotional roller coaster, fought with idealistic fervor to make the world more fair and equal than it had been before.
A government we respected administered the equality we shared. Life for the poor got better during the war. Jobs were so scarce that sound trucks roamed the streets, pleading for workers. Wages were fixed, so employers offered vacation time, pensions, and health insurance to keep good workers.
Wartime output demanded overtime, and blue-collar workers did well. Salaried workers (like my father) lost ground. And the rich actually paid high taxes (94% at the top). But most people agreed that sacrifices were necessary for the national good — “for the duration of the war,” most people added.
Resources were rationed to make sure poor people got their fair share. We were allowed three gallons of gasoline a week. We used government issued coupons to buy tires, bicycles, gasoline, fuel oil and kerosene, stoves, rubber boots, shoes, sugar, coffee, processed foods, meats, canned fish, cheese, canned milk, all fats and typewriters.
Production of most consumer goods was banned during the war. Cars, new housing, vacuum cleaners, toys, and kitchen appliances disappeared from shelves. Industry focused on building our war equipment. Appliances had been built to be easily fixable and to last forever. Toys and bicycles were handed down and we learned how to fix them ourselves.
Voluntary, patriotic contributions to the social good were the norm, not the exception.
Hollywood led the way, with well-publicized efforts by young starlets dancing with enlisted men or stripping off their stockings to contribute to the war effort. We all washed our cans, squashed them flat and set them out for recycling along with newspapers. Regular drives, encouraged by radio and movie announcements, sent us kids scurrying to find every scrap of rubber, tin, lumber, copper or steel. In the fall we gathered bags of wild milkweed pods for military pillows.
Parting with some old possessions destined for the scrap heap was bitter sweet. I mourned the loss but treasured the feeling of being needed, like the chores I was required to do at home on a daily basis.
The sense of being part of something bigger than myself came most vividly when working in our victory garden. Twenty million Americans planted victory gardens during World War II. They grew nine to ten million tons of food, half the vegetables and fruits that we ate during the war. Most of the Victory Gardens were in cities. Chemical fertilizers did not yet exist, so our gardens were organic and few of us have ever tasted better fruits and vegetables than what we grew during the war years.
My father was never drafted and World War II was a distant event, played out on a world map my father kept in his study, where he moved color coded pins matching Allied and Axis forces (they were black, the Russians were red and we were white) in tempo with the news. We collected and recycled newspapers, old clothes and crushed tin cans, and we contributed rubber tires and rain boots to the war effort, kept a large Victory Garden and gathered milkweed for stuffing pillows for the troops. All these activities were encouraged and frequently subsidized by government, which we thought of as a friend, helping us through tough times.
Occasional blackouts gave me a chance to eat corn on the cob with my fingers but suggested no tangible threat. Essentials were rationed and almost everyone in America, rich and poor, got a fair share. I was trained from infancy to believe that by pulling for the general good we all helped keep each other safe and secure.
School
Almost all schools, except those for the very rich and a few religious schools, were public. They struggled to curb our naturally wild, individualistic tendencies and mold us to conform as obedient, unquestioning, fungible ideals of good worker and citizen. Just like today, except the proliferation of private schools since the 1`980s has decimated funds for public education.
My older siblings thrived in school. I failed and was an embarrassment to them, so they had as little to do with me as possible. My older brother was out of the house before I made it down to breakfast. He rode his bike three and half miles to high school, a hazardous trip in winter when the roads were icy. My sister, Mimi, was out the door by the road before the bus arrived at 7:30. I frequently ran to the driver’s angry horn. My sister ignored me as I headed toward the back of the bus where the trouble was.
School was a burden. I can see the hallways and smell the gymnasium, feel the carvings in the wooden desks, the dried wads of gum stuck to the bottom, the endless boredom as I stared out the windows at trees swaying in the wind.
The motor skills that served me well in the woods didn’t work for penmanship. In those days, they taught a completely counter-intuitive way of writing called the Palmer Method. You moved your lower arm at the elbow, keeping the wrist rigid, in order the write letters. It seemed to me, like much of school, absurd.
Today, I’m sure I would have been heavily medicated. I was a ruthless marble payer winning pennies and candy from classmates. This put me constantly in trouble with the authorities. Why couldn’t I be like my older brother and sister? I could identify teachers on the street outside of school because they had that “children hating look.”
Problems with authorities served me well as a journalist. I’ve never trusted people in power. They want control and rarely serve you. In the third grade, teachers advised my parents to abandon any hope of a college education and put me into a decent trade. Journalism was a trade for much of its history, a working man’s job for both scribbler and typesetters, until elite journalism schools turned it into a profession and gentrified the newsroom.
The End of the War
April 12th, 1945, an announcer broke into our afternoon radio broadcast, President Franklin Roosevelt had died of a stroke. His last pictures made him seem ancient to me, but he was only 63 years old. His death left my family emotionally raw, as if something had broken. A funny little guy with a bow tie, a haberdasher from the mid-west named Harry Truman, was president. We were moving into unsettled times.
Three weeks later, on April 30th, Hitler committed suicide. Germany surrendered on May 6th. Victory in Europe - VE Day. My father came home early from work. Victory celebrations were muted by the war in the Pacific, which dragged on through some of the most brutal fighting of the war. My 19-year-old brother graduated from Harvard and became eligible for the draft.
Vivid newsreels of the concentration camps, pictures of war-torn Europe with millions of displaced people roaming highways, cities in utter ruins, dominated movie trailers. The good guys had won. We had won. We had saved the world from the tyranny of a ruthless dictatorship that supported crony capitalism, world conquest enforced by terror, mass deception, and the elimination of individual rights.
Three months later the moral universe became more complicated when we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6th and another bomb three days later on Nagasaki. The impact of the two atomic bombs dwarfed the subsequent Japanese surrender nine days later, on August 15th. No one in my family questioned the use of the bomb. It kept my brother out of the fighting. At the same time, it was clear that something irreversible and dark had been leashed upon the world. For the rest of her life, my mother’s response to natural calamities was, “it’s the atomic bomb.”
The end of the war hit me in a much more personal and frightening way. When revelations about the concentration camps were first reported on the radio, I heard the name of Ilsa Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” for the first time. Ilsa had made lampshades out of human skin, cut from the Jews her husband exterminated in the camp’s gas chambers. My father had an antique German lamp, with a parchment shade covered with German writing. In my ten-year old mind, I firmly believed it was a gift from Ilsa, and this possibility so terrified me that I didn’t want to know the truth. I never mentioned my suspicions to a living soul until I was an adult, when the memory seemed a strange apparition.
War for me was never again romantic after the summer of 1945. My parents took me to a 4th of July day picnic, held by one of my mother’s cousins to honor local wounded veterans. On a green, summer hillside, with a stand of trees along the ridge, small children played while tired wives set out food and drinks on brightly colored quilts, boys just a few years older than my brother with broken bodies and spirits sat in wheel chairs or leaned against trees on crutches, with distant stares and unspoken pain.