From Europe to America

Valerie Fitzgerald

Part 3 in a 4-part series
Every 4th of July, Heather Cox Richardson posts about the Declaration of Independence. She describes the world left behind by European immigrants who came to the Americas: “a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth.”
This describes my great-grandparents, who came to America from Ireland, Norway and Germany during the 1800s. They came to a nation in conflict.
The Democratic Party was controlled by slave-holding elites in the South; the government, in turn, was controlled by Democrats. The Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, rose in opposition to the spread of slavery throughout the growing United States.
Heather wrote about this time in her book, "How the South Won the Civil War." Eleven Southern states seceded, formed the Confederate States of America, and declared war on the U.S. Lincoln and the Republican party defended this country. They “created an income tax, and a government bureau, the Internal Revenue Bureau – the forerunner to the IRS – to collect it… The new federal taxes were overwhelmingly popular. Paying them signaled support for the government and democracy.”
As the war continued, emancipated Black Americans served with the U.S. military. Lincoln established The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land to provide them with assistance. It came to be called disparagingly the “Freedmen’s Bureau,” implying that it only helped freed Black people when, in fact, the agency helped impoverished southern Whites, as well.
The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, sometimes called the Reconstruction Amendments, ended slavery, established birthright citizenship, and granted the right to vote to Black Americans. However, soon after the war, the South began to enact laws that restricted the rights of Black people. Reconstruction ended in 1877 and civil rights won during the war ceased to be enforced.
There are volumes of history that describe the Jim Crow era. Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian – these histories tell stories of vibrant cultures that fought oppression. By contrast, much of the history I learned as a kid focused on conquest and the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a ruling elite.
To my knowledge, none of my great-grandparents in the Midwest were involved in the Civil War. In fact, my mother recalled that some of her ancestors fled to Canada to avoid the draft. She explained that one of their motivations for leaving Germany was, in her words, “the everlasting wars and conflicts going on over there.”
I can’t find any documentation in my own genealogy of direct conflict with Indigenous people. My ancestors were protected by the Army as they occupied the prairies that had been home to the Anishinaabe and Dakota for thousands of years. However, it is likely they knew of conflicts like the U.S.-Dakota War and the Wounded Knee Massacre.
My great-grandparents focused on survival as they farmed the prairie. They were used to being poor. They did not have the language or ideas to describe assimilation into a foreign culture. They did not think of themselves as accepting a social, economic and legal hierarchy based on skin color. They were learning to be White.
Many years later, my parents lived through the Great Depression as farmers in North Dakota. My mother plowed fields with a team of horses during the 1930s because most of her older brothers and sisters had moved away by that time. One brother was in the Civilian Conservation Corps. In a brief autobiography for her family’s genealogy, my mother wrote: “Every month a check came for $25 from the CCCs. It was a godsend in those days… Dad often referred to Franklin D. Roosevelt as the man who saved the farmers.”
My father was also in the CCC and, later, he fought in World War II. After the war, my father had a blacksmith shop in a small town in rural North Dakota. He had all the work he could handle during the planting, growing and harvest seasons, but in the winter he had to look for income. Twice, he packed up our growing family and traveled to California. My father found work but both times, he was drawn back to his blacksmith shop.
Eventually, in the 1950s, my family moved to Minnesota. My father found a job at Armour & Company meat packing in South St. Paul. We lived on a small farm near Stillwater, where my parents continued to raise some crops and livestock. I was the second youngest of eight children. By the time I came along in 1959, most of the animals were gone, except for the cow that my dad milked every morning and evening. My parents remembered what it was like to have no money, but cows and chickens in the barn and preserved foods in the cellar so they would not starve.
I grew up a White, Catholic, working class girl who attended public school in Washington County, Minn. in the 1960s-1970s. According to the 1970 census, Washington County was over 99% White. My community celebrated Columbus Day; we learned that Washington was the father of our country, and Lincoln freed the slaves.
They didn’t talk a lot about politics, but I knew my parents were Democrats. In Minnesota, the Democratic Party is called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL). My parents started life as farmers, then my dad made the transition to being a union laborer after he returned from World War II, so the DFL seemed made for them.
From my parents and teachers and peers in public school, I learned the boundaries of what was allowed for me, and the consequences of stepping outside those limits. It would take many years for me to be able to articulate these lessons, and describe the impact they had on my life.
Valerie Fitzgerald is a clinical counselor who has worked in mental health care since 2011. She resides in Howe. This is the third in a four-part series. Read the others online at www.LongfellowNokomisMessenger.com.