19th Century German Immigration to the Texas Hill Country: Laying the Groundwork for a Successful International Novelty Business

The 19th century witnessed a significant influx of immigrants from Germany into the central Texas Hill Country. Initially encouraged by a consortium of German princes and nobility in the 1840s, these immigrants arrived to a country and climate that was very, very different from their own, forcing them to learn anew everything they thought they already knew. In this, the Germans were highly successful due to several key qualities:

• their ability to adapt;
• their willingness to assimilate;
• a strong ethic for hard work; and
• a proclivity for experimentation and ingenuity.

Into this milieu, Carl "Charles" Apelt (my great-grandfather) arrived from Mühlberg, Germany, in 1887 for a visit with relatives. A family tragedy during his trip resulted in his decision to remain in Texas, where he later started and successfully operated an international novelty business, the Apelt Armadillo Company. I believe that the German people and communities of which he was a part provided a vital and solid foundation on which he could build his company. He both benefited from and possessed himself the qualities listed above, all of which proved so important to his (and his critters') success.

Blog Comment

This week I commented on David McKenzie's blog.

Tourism Comes for the Hill Country

Hal K. Rothman's book, Devil's Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth-Century American West (University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, Kansas. 1998. Pp. xi, 434.), speaks to me on a very direct, personal level. Early on, Rothman writes that "Tourist workers quickly learn that one of the most essential traits of their service is to mirror onto the guest what that visitor wants from them and from their place in a way that affirms the visitor's self-image." (12) The tourist of Rothman's study is not ultimately seeking to learn about the truth and history of a place, but rather to see in that place their version of it as seen in their mind's eye. I know what that's like.

How? Five little words: I grew up in Texas.

Texas is one of those places about which everyone seems to have an opinion. What's more, they think they know what Texas is, what it looks like, feels like, who Texans are. Here's a sampling of the comments I've heard ad nauseum over the years:

• Is it like the TV show Dallas? 
• Do you have a ranch like Southfork?
• I bet you ride your horse to school.
• Do you have a belt buckle with your name on it?
• Where are your boots?
• What do you mean you don't have a cowboy hat?!?
• Do you drive a pickup truck?
• Do you speak Spanish?
• You don't like tomatoes or spicy food? Aren't you from Texas?

The list goes on, but you get the idea. And then there's the other part of it, the assumptions people make about Texans that they're too polite to say: that we're puffed up, loud, prideful, bombastic rednecks who think we're the best at everything and are racist, homophobic jerks. I remember when I moved to Chicago at the age of 22, I gradually realized how non-Texans apparently saw us with something nearing shock. I had no idea. Really. None.

So I grew up just like a lot of other American kids did, but with this little thing in the back of my mind that told me that when I was not in Texas, I needed to fill a certain mould, walk, talk, act a certain way because that's what people expected. (To this day I am regularly asked why I don't have an accent. If you must know, it comes out when I'm tired, angry, tipsy or around my family. Or talking to someone with a southern accent.) And there are times when, often without thinking, I agree to give the person I'm speaking with what they want: yes, I have boots, and yes, I can ride a horse, and yes, my family has a ranch. But in my mind, I'm thinking, I haven't worn those boots in a decade, haven't been on a horse since 2006, certainly never barrel raced, and our ranch looks nothing like Southfork.

Texas, especially Austin, has remade itself to reflect visitors' expectations back at them, just as Santa Fe did in Rothman's account. Being an Austin native, I constantly hear affirmations of how hip and cool my hometown is, yet I find its hipness to be manufactured, created and very self-consciously nurtured. In the 1970s and 1980s, before the rest of the country discovered Austin, it was truly cool, with an authentic vibe that just was without trying. Then it began attracting technology businesses like Dell and Intel, and a grungy little music and film festival called South by Southwest, and an iconic film called Dazed and Confused came out, and the rest of the country started paying attention. And then moving there in droves. And these newly arrived folks loved Austin so much that they started remaking it into the Austin they imagined it to be. (And don't even get me started on San Antonio...Riverwalk, anyone?)

Today, my hometown is in many ways unrecognizable to me. It's a nice place to visit, and there are pockets that remain strangely, wonderfully untouched, but its retail developments and ridiculous sprawl are unfamiliar. It's in the same geographic location where home used to be, but it's not my Austin. I imagine this must be how the longtime Santa Fe residents Rothman discusses felt after watching Edgar Hewett, Mary Austin and their acolytes repackage their town: equal parts bewilderment, nostalgia, and alienation from a town that is, and yet is not, theirs.

Blog Comment

This week I commented on Megan's blog.

Interpreting and Using History

I’ll just right out with it: I loved Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, London. 2013. Pp. xiii, 363). Somewhere in my progression through graduate study, I began to realize that history is not static, not universal, not one correct version of facts in the midst of other wrong versions. It is, rather, a set of histories, interpretations of a time or event with which we each engage through the lens of our varied experiences and viewpoints. Kelman’s profiling of Sand Creek’s journey to memorialization illustrated that in delicious detail.

As I progressed through A Misplaced Massacre, I frequently found that two works repeatedly rose to my consciousness. Jay Winter’s Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 1995. Pp. x, 310) assesses the ways in which Europeans attempted to understand, mourn and come to terms with their losses in World War I. He examines a broad array of coping mechanisms, including art, architecture, film, literature, body recovery, and spiritualism; he also spent a good deal of time analyzing the meanings and politics of memorial sites. He states that, “war memorials [serve as] foci of the rituals, rhetoric, and ceremonies of bereavement. This aspect of their significance has not attracted particular attention from scholars in this field. Most have been drawn to war memorials as carriers of political ideas…or the multiple justifications of the call to arms.” Quite simply, says Winter, “War memorials were places where people grieved, both individually and collectively.” (78-79)

The opening of a memorial site at Sand Creek holds with Winter’s analysis. It was clearly a place where the Arapaho and Cheyenne peoples could (and do) bury and mourn their slain ancestors, both individually and as nations, with rituals and quiet personal moments. It was also a politically charged site from the moment Chivington’s soldiers finished firing. Not only was it the site of violence, it also held vastly different meanings for different people…

…which caused me to revisit Jerome de Groot’s Consuming History: Historians and heritage in contemporary popular culture (sic) (Routledge: New York. 2009. Pp. xii, 292). I think historians, with their methodologies and standards and quests for unpacking what happened, can forget sometimes that people – all people, not just historians – use history in varied ways. History has meaning; “fact” and “truth” are not synonymous. De Groot opens his book with a challenging question: “Who, then, tells the public what ‘history’ is and what it means? If ‘the past’ is after all an empty signifier, just what are the semiotic processes involved in constructing, perpetuating and consuming purported meaning – what strategies are in place for pouring sense into such representational aporia?” (1) He proceeds to explore the various ways in which we “use” history, the ways in which it has (or finds) meaning to us as humans; he discusses historical films and reality shows, genealogies and Ancestry.com, video games, historical reenactments, museums, documentaries, literature…the list goes on.

I thought about this as I read Kelman’s account of the many missteps and blunders that the National Park Service (NPS) made as it tried to work with Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and local Kiowa County residents to navigate toward opening a federal memorial site. The Indians who worked with NPS on this effort had strong “memories” of the massacre (I say “memories” because none of them were there, yet they cherish these “memories” as though they had been, much as an American of my generation might treasure “memories” of, say, a grandfather’s exploits during World War II; Alison Landsberg would call this “prosthetic memory”) that the NPS failed to understand. Not because the NPS folks were bad people or out to get the Indians, but simply because they were human and viewed the massacre through an entirely different lens, a lens which, I believe, was not less valuable or “right” than the Indians’, only different.

History is messy. As de Groot concludes in Consuming History, “The fact that history pervades contemporary culture demonstrates the keen importance for the scholar in understanding the ways that it is manifested and in which it is conceptualised (sic)…The past is fantasy, lifestyle choice, part of the cultural economy, something which confers cultural capital, something to win or desire, a means of embodying difference and a way of reflecting on contemporary life. It is engaged with on a personal, group and family level; it can be experienced in a range of ways at the same time.” (249) Kelman’s book demonstrates how challenging it can be to marry popular consumption and scholarly exactitude for today’s historian.

Blog Comment

This week I commented on Megan's post, A Very Complex Empire.

Filling the Void (or, Today Carol Goes Off the Reservation)

Several years ago, I helped create and oversee a Federal program that provided funds to organizations that were attempting to eradicate gangs from their communities. I knew nothing about gangs; thus began my education. I remember spending a few days in Chicago, conducting site visits with some grantee organizations to see how their government-funded efforts were progressing. I met with community advocates, some of whom were former gang members who had served considerable prison time for their activities, including murder. They told chilling stories from their gang days, and then shared the reasons why they now worked so selflessly and diligently to help stop gang violence. It was one of those amazing, humbling experiences that dramatically changed my worldview.

During a drive through a rundown, gang-ridden south Chicago neighborhood with an activist pastor who was pointing out various gang boundaries and sites of past violence, I ignorantly asked how it was that gangs had made such a stronghold of the area. I took for granted that everyone knew how awful gangs were, and couldn’t understand how they came to be so powerful.

This patient pastor explained that the area was so blighted that it was ignored by most: there were no businesses, no jobs, little public or other transportation options for the welfare families who lived there. Most of the commercial buildings were abandoned and deteriorating, as were many of the residences, though many of those still housed families struggling to survive. There were no human services organizations, no food pantries, nothing but the few brave churches like his who remained to care for the people there. When you have no transportation, no job options within walking distance, and no ability to travel to where the jobs are elsewhere in the city, what do you do?

It was a hard question, but it revealed the answer to my question: the gangs saw a need, and they filled it. They provided food and other necessaries to those struggling in the neighborhood. They were the human services agency that the local government had failed to make available. As such, gangs won the people’s gratitude, loyalty and affection, enabling them to cultivate and harvest a fertile recruiting ground for new members.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because Pekka Hämäläinen’s fascinating book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press: New Haven and London. 2008. Pp. viii, 500), has brought that afternoon with the pastor to mind. Just as gangs create complex systems of trade and community relationships to further their own interests, so too did the Comanche manipulate Spanish, Mexican and Texan citizens into reliance and even near-subjection to meet the Indians’ material needs and imperial goals.

Popular American history would have us believe that big, bad imperialist Europeans wiped out all Indians, and the Indians were helpless before the onslaught. Hämäläinen proves that, for the Comanche, at least, this is untrue. She restores Comanche agency and, indeed, effectively demonstrates just how capable they were at beating the Europeans at their own game: “By 1810, the real nerve center of the Southwest was not Santa Fe, but the western Comanche rancherías along the upper Arkansas, Red, and Brazos valleys, where peoples from numerous nations congregated to exchange goods, forge and maintain political alliances, and organize large-scale multiethnic military campaigns. New Mexico’s economic and political ties to Comanchería endured, but they had come to reflect its dependence on, not control over, the Comanche nation.” (202) Hämäläinen goes on to show how New Mexicans ultimately rejected their own government’s directives, choosing instead to nurture and maintain their vital trade relationships with the Comanche. (212-213)

It is the New Mexicans’ rejection that triggered my memory of the blighted south-side Chicago slum. A community pursues that which best takes care of the needs of its people. In the 19^th century, the Mexican government failed to strengthen and protect its New Mexican citizens, opening the door for the Comanche to fill the void, just as gangs do in impoverished American neighborhoods today. It is, to me, a striking parallel.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Federal Support of the Transcontinentals

Being still in the midst of Richard White’s Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, I cannot pretend to write effectively yet regarding its overall impact, success or themes. That said, as I progress, I find my thoughts repeatedly turning to another work that seems to offer a fascinating companion viewpoint to that White seems to be putting forth.

Brian Balogh’s book, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America, argues that the laissez-faire style of government we all learned about in high school, that hands-off approach favored by the American government during the Gilded Era, was a myth. The federal government may have governed differently than its more pro-active European counterparts, Balogh says, but that does not mean it governed less. Balogh asserts that, despite embracing an attitude of American exceptionalism founded on strong beliefs of individualism and free market self-reliance, Americans frequently looked to the federal government throughout the 19^th century, and that “the national government proved to be most influential when it was least visible.”¹ Americans expected their national government to play an active role in their communities, in westward expansion, in economic development, and in other areas of American life; they just did not wish to see that activity. Hence Balogh’s theme of a “government out of sight”.

Balogh’s position resonates as one reads White’s Railroaded. The United States government was so deep in bed with the railroad companies that there was hardly room for everyone under the covers. White demonstrates just how crowded that bed was when he unpacks the Crédit Mobilier scandal, which “implicated not only the leadership of the Union Pacific Railroad but also Schuyler Colfax, the vice-president of the United States; James A. Garfield, a congressman who would be a future president of the United States; James G. Blaine, a Speaker of the House who desperately wanted to be president; and a covey of leading senators and representatives who scattered like so many quail for shelter.”² And that was just one railroad.

Not only were a number of elected officials on the railroads’ lucrative dole, but their assumptions about the projected success of the railroads (when they would eventually be built) and their utter lack of understanding of how the railroad companies operated (due to the railroads’ intentional opacity and outright lies regarding their financial activities) led them to enact legislation favorable to the railroads, unfavorable to the federal coffers, and that the railroads would ultimately manipulate to their further advantage using another federal entity: the courts.³

Most Americans, I suspect, were not aware of the intricacies of Congress’s activities with regard to railroad financing or, if they were, probably did not understand them. How could they, when Congress did not? Thus, it seems plausible, even despite contemporary newspaper exposés, that Americans did not recognize just how embroiled in the railroads their government truly was, nor could they understand the enduring and damaging repercussions of that entanglement on the federal treasury. The lack of a sustained and substantial public outcry (at least through the portion of the book that I have completed) would seem to indicate the truth of my suspicion, though perhaps my continued reading will disabuse me of this notion.

Balogh tells us that Americans expected much from their national government, but that they avoided large bureaucratic federal efforts in favor of less visible governing styles, where “the law, the courts, trade policy, fiscal subsidies – supported by indirect taxes – and partnerships with nongovernmental partners” shaped the nation’s economic development.⁴ This appears evident in the narrative White is unfolding: out of sight, out of mind, coupled with an “if you build it, they will come” enthusiasm that appears to have been chimeric. 

Bibliography

Balogh, Brian. A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

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[1] Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America, 2.

[2] White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, 64.

[3] Ibid., 22–23.

[4] Balogh, 379.

Blog Comment

This week I commented on Diane Haight's blog post.

“We traveled without firearms, to the regret of the boys.” – Margaret Rumsey Wright, reminiscing about her family's 1916 road trip in 1966.

In June of 1916, 37-year old widow Frances Rumsey and her three children – Hammond, age 15, Margaret, age 13, and Francke, age 12 – set off from Seattle for a road trip across the country in their new Model T Ford. Destination: Boston, where the children would be attending school. And oh what a road trip it was!

Margaret, or Margs, as her family called her, was charged with keeping a diary of the trip, a responsibility she adhered to faithfully. The result is a charming, often humorous, sometimes harrowing account of early 20^th century road travel. It is easy to forget when reading Margs’ highly literate tale that it occurred 98 years ago. Her prose and humor feel contemporary, except for the very occasional jarring anomaly. For instance, on June 15^th, the family dines at a Chinese restaurant, where Margs twice refers to the proprietor as a “chink” without a hint of sarcasm.

The family’s trip eastward spans three months and includes several days visiting Yellowstone National Park (where Margs twice comments on their feeding of the bears), only recently opened to vehicles at the time, Niagara Falls, and nearly every auto mechanic’s garage between Washington and Massachusetts. Margs’ reader quickly learns that flat tires and blowouts were daily occurrences, as were other mechanical failures. If there is one constant to Margs’ story, it is the constant coddling and care that their Model T demanded on an hourly basis. This is likely due to two main reasons: 1) the poor conditions of the roads, especially in the western states (once they get to Ohio and Pennsylvania, they seem to have far fewer problems, likely because of the presence of more paved roads), and 2) the apparently delicate nature of the parts and assembly of the Model T. Overall, though, the tires were by far the most vexing issue. After a mosquito-plagued night camping in Yellowstone on July 3^rd, Margs wryly remarks, “A flat tire was the first thing we noticed as we stretched [in the morning] and we were sure the mosquitos [sic] had done it.”

Surviving both a head-on collision with a driver that lost control of his vehicle and a serious wreck that overturns their vehicle (requiring several days of repairs), the Rumseys make it to Lake Forest, just south of the Wisconsin border in northern Illinois. Here they spend nearly two weeks with family, swimming in lakes and visiting Chicago. Margs particularly enjoys visiting Marshall Field’s department store, where Cousin John is President. I was especially gratified when she paused to remark on the store’s employees’ Choral Society, which is occasionally accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a venerable institution that I had the immense joy of working for from 1999-2001.

Continuing their journey east, Margs’ August 25^th entry details their stop at the headquarters of Firestone, where they let that company know just how flimsy they’ve found Firestone tires to be. The company gives them new tires at reduced rates, but I suspect Margs has not high expectations that they will be any better than their predecessors.

On September 2^nd, they finally arrive in Boston.

As I read young Margaret Rumsey's account, I was repeatedly struck by how very different the Rumsey family’s road trip experience was from such trips we embark upon today. Aside from the constant tire and mechanical trouble and poor roads, what stuck out most to me was the interactiveness of the trip. The car would get stuck or have trouble, and other drivers or people in the neighborhood would come help. Farmers would invite the travelers to camp on their property and share their company on the porch. The Rumseys would solicit news about road conditions from other travelers at gas stations and garages. At Yellowstone, they spoke with other park visitors, upon which Margs would comment in her diary. There was only one instance where the Rumseys encountered an inhospitable family, but that was quickly forgotten when another family a little further down the road proved kind and generous. This community approach to travel is alien to us today: we isolate ourselves in our cars, with our cell phones and satellite radios, engaging in minimal verbal interaction with gas station clerks and fast food employees, allowing ourselves to be guided by interstate signage and flashy billboards declaring must-see attractions rather than by knowledgeable locals (who might not give us the time of day if we did ask).

Margs’ diary of this three-month trip feels accessible and familiar, and yet wholly unrecognizable too. This is what makes her account so special and fun.

Wright, Margaret Rumsey. “Margaret Rumsey Wright Diary”. 1916. Letters, Diaries and Documents from the Montana Historical Society. Contributed to the Montana Memory Project by the Montana Historical Society Research Center. http://www.mtmemory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p267301coll2/id/1443/rec/69http://www.mtmemory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p267301coll2/id/1443/rec/69, accessed November 1, 2014.