Pennsylvania
Spiritual
Outlaws

The Way Into the Flowering Heart

These are the angels Blake saw. Think of them as flying nudes. He saw them in the trees and shrubbery as a child, couldn't be convinced otherwise. Now he is famous for his doors of perception, when helped with a little mescaline, but he was au naturale, being completely determined to live in this world while in that other.

He was austere and plain as any Mennonite, took seriously his denomination, would be labeled a dissenter and sectarian if any group fit. He's such a dissenter there are none. Efforts to degrade him to acceptable paradigns, such demolition is commonplace in Coleridge's pipe rather than his mountain climb (see Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind, 81-84), stick his wife, who was especially devoted to him. In this world that makes her a victim. Another problem, Blake is a Christian.

I was studying Blake, made a living off his Tyger. It produced four paychecks. Thinking to calve a Blake comic, I got copies of the slides of Jerusalem before cellphones, but the cost of production outran. Imagine Blake street bound in newsprint of lurid colors. Ignorance is a kind of grace and Enthusiasm its naivete:

"Nearly all of us have felt, at least in childhood, that if we imagine that a thing is so, it therefore either is so or can be made to become so. All of us have to learn that this almost never happens, or happens only in very limited ways; but the visionary, like the child, continues to believe that it always ought to happen. We are so possessed with the idea of the duty of acceptance that we are inclined to forget our mental birthright, and prudent and sensible people encourage us in this. This is why Blake is so full of aphorisms like "I the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." Such wisdom is based on the fact that imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept" (Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 27)

Maybe the first thing anyone hears of Blake is about his angels. Not much is made among the angel classes about Blake, just as little is said of Blake's biblical beliefs and nonconformism among men. Christians didn't claim him, he seems so heterodox. Marriage scares them off. The other great class of believers, scientists, are unappreciated by Blake. Set aside, in his own time Blake was thought mad, denigrated as a naif. Just think, his wife devoted herself to him!

Blake invented the doors of perception that Aldous Huxley sought at his death by mescaline. The list is long of those who seek these doors in and since the 20th century. Just take a little yage you see! But for Blake the doors were open all the time to the way into the flowering heart. They were open for Milton too, and for Donne, who can doubt, who never said a word about perception. The Hebrew poets were singing of it while the Babylonian poets were getting high in West Virginia, "going out and coming in for this day forth and even for ever more."

There has now been a revolution of the tools of thought and access to Blake's life. The incomprehensibility of books written about him begins to pass, complex sentences in apposition that call it a four fold system, simplified in The Tyger, in images and contradictions, before the Princeton Editions and the Blake Archives. Now, if you sit down in a chair and look at the pictures, you pretty quick find out Blake. Blake's religion is the simple, complicated, ecstatic, nonconformist, charismatic, prophetic, biblical kind. Art is a gospel fruit, but he turns theosophy on its head, says God is man, not man is God. Read in context with contemporaries, say George Whitfield, he agrees with nothing and everything. Critics tried to enter his life through his work, but it is easier to enter his work through his life. In the end if he says some mad thing, which he will do, his life makes his work serious, discipline proves him sound. At the time his "pleasing, mild disposition" was said to be the only thing that kept him from being put away. The intolerance of mad poets, now celebrated, addresses nonconformity, as in Stick Up! To what extent must he be made over? Must the mind be ruled to save him from himself? Such notions whelm martyr and visionary. Monastics, Moravians, Mennonites, Quakers, Dunkers are ready to sacrifice the outer world for the in.

Blake's life confronts this inner/outer world, but he is part of such questions from Pilgrim's Progress, melancholy poems about The Grave, Michelangelo's notion of creation, Milton's ditto, and on. It's folly not to see Blake in the center of this context, with his own take on every Biblical idea of outer versus inner, world versus spirit. The experience of the spirit world, especially the biblical part of it cast as hopeless fundamentalism in prophecies of "end times" is not what it seems. In this context one sentence from Yeats is better than whole books. Even spiritualized as Yeats is when he says that for Blake "Christ was his symbolic name for the imagination" (xvii), this partial truth is better than whole lies from the moths of instruction. So when Yeats seems to have his way with finding and losing his life, he makes a greater statement when he says that Blake "came to look upon poetry and art as a language for the utterance of conceptions, which, however beautiful, were none the less thought out more for their visionary truth than for their beauty. The change made him a greater poet and a greater artist; for 'He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it'" (xvii). Surveyed with an open eye only the hugest figures have celebrated that Name above every name that Yeats names.

Who among the poets had a wife who sustained a lifelong relation of devotion, who not only took care and gave life and continuity to the poet, but who did his work, his printing and who was his sole model and consort? Blake and Catharine used to take 40 mile walks together in the countryside. Aesthetes say Catharine got old. In that age a women got old. She got old and Blake was threadbare and dirty. He was a printer. They lived spare, were not thought to be the people they were. Not worldly at all. Is there one other who had his riches? Only Emily. Sole model and consort! Whatever you think Blake was about it hugely concerned the sensual, the sexual, the female in the same way it preoccupied Joyce. Whatever it is we're after in the life of Blake takes to task in us our essential eroticism and identity. Yeats deeply desired in a companion what Blake had, so he would know its value when he says that with Kate, Blake had a "love that knew no limit and a friendship that knew no flaw" (xx).

2.
The greatest oddities occur after Blake is dead. Frederick Tatham disposed of his poetic estate, burned piles, but everybody else has had their day with the objectionable. Blake burned a lot of dross. The flame that draws the Many Moth (critics), in some ways he was better off in obscurity. Moths obscure the light with tantric, alchemic, etc. ideas. The environment is so extreme that Yeats hits a kind of center when he says that Blake displays a profound sanity because he never "pronounced himself to be chosen and set apart alone among men" (xii), rightly seeing megalomania as a common modern disease The problem with Tatham's taste is that he was a convinced Irvingite, given to all the abuses of the spiritual, and as biographer Bentley says, was convinced by the sect that Blake's inspiration was infernal. So the report was that he burned everything he did not later sell of "blocks, plates, drawings and MMS (Bentley Jr., 446).

The rumors of what this estate consisted of are better left unseen because with Blake whatever shards torn from the carcass can be magnified to the loss of the whole, whether it be his empire or presumed philosophies filtered through a thousand critics who pull him asunder, or mistake, like young C.S. Lewis, "shown up a long stairway lined with rather wicked pictures by Blake--all devils and monsters" (Letters. ed, by W. H. Lewis. Geoffrey Bles 1966, 57).

No matter what the parties and parochialisms, all have had their Blake, the latest being tantric sex forced upon him by way of Count Zinzendorf, making Blake's relation with his wife into what only those authors know best from their own, as Marsha Keith Schuchard has confessed. So if we cannot know what and why Mrs. Blake cried, since it has been done to Schuchard, namely all of
the above, it was not done to Kate. How do we know? Get married yourself and find out. So Blake read Swedenborg and Swedenborg emerged from Count Zinzendorf''s cult to such fanfare that promotion and tenure practically dictated, but not the way Milton and Blake were dictated to, that post hoc reasoning would prevail. As to Zinzendorf, it was known long before in Pennsylvania who he was when he decided that all the sects, Mennonites, Reformed could fit into the great arms of his faith. The Count was willing. Read Muhlenberg on Zinzendorf before concluding the premise.

Tantric alchemy and tantricism together remind of John Dee and Edward Kelley proving how much the spirit world wants to get in your pants. Whether to suppress orgasm and recycle eternal energy, maybe never die, the spirit told Kelley to tell Dee to send Jane, Dee's wife, to his bed. Count Zinzendorf wanted to be there too. Whether Kate cried from sex with her husband is undoubted only if grad students and profs take the Munich from the side of their head. If that is not where the bits settle when it comes to Blake and Kate then dress him up in doll clothes as old Arthur Dimmesdale. He married an Irvingite. There is as good evidence for that. Blake is a Christian not in the words but in the life. Unless you live it the words mean nothing.

3.
We can be healthily skeptical of people who greet one another and ask, "is that Michael or Gabriel?" If anybody can be believed that Gabriel sat for his portrait, as Blake is said to have told Thomas Phillips while having his portrait done, Blake might: "he waved his hands; the roof of my study opened; he ascended into heaven; he stood in the sun, and beckoning to me, moved the universe (Davis, 121). Of devotees of the inner world, among many monastics, Blake is alone. He holds to four worlds and four aspects. Aristotle had four causes, why not? Sake of argument grants that his chief hero, Los the imagination, is tarnished as he enters the doors of perception. It is Blake's psychological allegory of the Fall.

So Blake found a Way Into the Flowering Heart where you can live every day, or just those days when you are not high. Be temporal and eternal.

Blake turns over the cart, thinks what has been done to the essence of truth is its assassin. Blake turns angels into devils to say that. If there's a hero of literature it's Blake. He takes the top of the headof the reader off partly because his extreme thought derives from even extremer, say Swedenborg, and partly because Blake does not suffer fools. Support for many radical views found in his politics and poetics, notwithstanding variances, prove Blake a Christian the same way as Edwin Muir, translator of Kafka, who after every devotion to Nietzsche and psychological difficulties, terrors of psycho-analysis, which he says stemmed from his fundamentalist upbringing and a forced religious experience when he was 14, says, "I realized, that quite without knowing it, I was a Christian." (An Autobiography. Seabury, 1968. 168, 247).
Blake forgets to be corrosive when he and his wife kneel and pray to the Holy Spirit for inspiration. (William Blake. A New Kind of Man. Michael Davis. 1977, 155). Imagine what critics do when he reincarnates Milton, as outside the rationalist experience as Milton's insistence that the Holy Ghost dictated Paradise Lost to him each night in entirety, which he told to his daughter the next day. So much of what passes for understanding by critics is amoral black and white. They are the very fundamentalists they flee. The artistic case has even more contradiction than the general human. To withstand the contradictions of Blake's opposite states without compromising the portrait he gives of himself as a Christian is often too much for critical funds. They must make him fit their idea of rationality and art, which they have been doing anyway everywhere, completely absurd.

Talk about straining out a gnat to swallow a camel! A lot of Blake's biography derives from Tatham whose reports give Blake a pietistic tincture, reporting practices of prayer that indicate he is not a free thinker. The same Tatham burned and disposed of much of Blake's literary remains. It did not meet his approval. Just so, critics continue to seek a Blake they can comfortably digest, but his rampant evangelicism is not to their taste. Blake is a prophet in the biblical vein. He says and does things as unprecedented as the biblical prophets.

A comparison for fraktur art and the way into the flowering heart in Blake stems not only from the art, but from the faith. As Stoudt says (Pennsylvania German Folk Art, 24) it is only when a species of disbelief took hold in the minds of the Pennsylvania faithful, what he calls liberalism, that their art failed. And that art under digital magnification continues to amaze, as we hope to show. So what of their faith? There are so many ex-fundamentalists with delicate sensibilities on the ground that many readers of Blake and Fraktur are impaired by their previous lives. Without naming names of our literary peers (at least not yet), this case affects Blake, who is celebrated for his "corrosive" art in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but only because critics pretend Blake is not a Christian.

Unfortunately for understanding, Blake is rather more than merely a Christian in name. He is one in his art, poetry and life, easiest to see in the art maybe, but in his poetry it is more dramatic. Critics gloss over these passages even as they explain them away, as Yeats does in his Introduction (Poems of William Blake), but there it still is, for example in Jerusalem where Blake invites, "I hope the reader will be with me wholly one in Jesus our Lord who is the God and Lord to whom the Ancients look'd and saw his day afar off with trembling & amazement." That alone goes further than allowed by the modern editor. Sorry Blake, "that isn't right for us." But Blake published himself and said what he would. Of course the subjects of his art are wholly biblical in every way, Job, notwithstanding the erosion that occurs from disinformation. If it sounds like this is a conspiracy to deny Blake his own faith, it is his critics who have denied their own.

In his personal life the reports of Blake and his wife are supernaturally scandalous, which information comes from Linnell. Of the application of fundamentalist attitudes to the poets however, witness the psychological dissection of Hopkins, who if he were what anthropologists used to call a "salvage" would have his own museum of reconstructions, here a degenerate, there a fascist, any and all things where the good is remade into stereotypical evil that gets young peppery guys published. The essence of the fundamentalist attitude is celebrated "outward ceremony," Wayne Dwyer selling his 20,000 books and moving to Maui to follow the Tao, just what Oprah would like, an easy grasp of the profound. Blake says that the eternal body of man is the imagination and that to be a Christian is to be an artist, a poet/painter/musician/architect, and that that is the only preoccupation of the mind, gained over life and work, not in ease. Then we can know who the Christians are, not that art makes them so, it is just what the redeemed do.

Another way to demolish art and artist, Blake in particular, is to acknowledge his Christ, but claim him simply confused. Do not forget what they did to Orpheus, tore him limb from limb, "a system so arcane, so embroiled in its own solipsistic mythology, that it is a resounding failure." "I will fit my small mind into his" should be the quest of these seekers of eternity in their dreams. Blake and his companions Milton and Hopkins lived it in the day. "Are you eternal?" You could ask the critics this, but they won't like it. George Richmond went walking with Blake, "feeling as if he were walking with the prophet Isaiah" (Davis, 154).

The smart people of the world want to ask, "was Jesus Christ a Christian?" But "all men are in eternity... though it appears Without, it is Within in your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow." So get on with undressing. Should you never read to perceive another word of the flowering heart below, know that this inwendigkeit is the way peasant ancestors put into their art.

4.

We are flat out of examples of the One Man who keeps cropping up in Blake's visions. When you wrap your arms around a man you are going to get a multitudinious contradiction. Adam Kadmon is not real! Billy Blake is going to be imperfect. Our secularists have gotten way too comfortable in shrinking a christian down to a buffoon with the morals and prejudices of corruption. There is no need to compare him with an animal. The dog is noble. The wolf is noble. It is the man.

As we see Christians in art as writers, they are latitudinarians not Luthers. Blake says Luther kept whores. How modern of him. Christians are like Swift. When his yahoo rains down upon the narrator standing under a tree, that is what a christian would say in art. The broadness of a christian cannot be managed. Donne was a christian when he wrote the Songs and Sonnets.

He says, "so they would read me throughout, and look upon me altogether...let all the world know all the sins of my youth, and of mine age too, and I would not doubt but God should receive more glory, and the world more benefit, than if I had never sinned ("On Prayer, Repentance, and the Mercy of God." Sermons. Ed by Edmund Fuller, 1964, 160).

So many of the profound speakers of English own that language of faith. The only recourse of their enemy, another Christian idea, is to make it seem like there are hardly any Christian poets in English. There is hardly anything else. Wallace Stevens was a Christian! A forgiving bunch, they allow Dimmesdale back in the pulpit after a suitable time because "the gift of God is without repentence." Blake's specie of Christian, and remember that his works were burned by just those same specie, is still a page in Marriage where Palmer says "I think the whole page...would at once exclude the work from every drawing room table in England" (The Stranger From Paradise, 409).

Words and acts judged, who comes off worse in the pantheon, David, Solomon or Blake? It is hard to put asunder what their beliefs join together. It doesn't matter what outlandish thing Blake may have said or done if at root he belongs. Christians say, "by their fruits you will know them." Their lead actor began his career by making them betray themselves under threat of death. That was before, not after? There are all these escape clauses. Kill the body but don't mess the mind.

Linnell said he "found it hard to get the great mystic into their little thimble" (Stranger, 409). George Richmond, the youngest of the Ancients, an aspiring artist, in all naivete asked Blake one day what to do when: a) he wanted to know the will of God b) wanted to know whether to take care of his aged mother or fight in the French resistance or c) what to do when he was out of artistic gas: "To his astonishment, Blake turned to his wife suddenly and said: "It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks together, when the visions forsake us? What do we do then, Kate?" "We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake" (Stranger, 403).

Dissenters speak the language of Enthusiasm, Bentley says, (365) citing Linnell, "The mind that rejects the true Prophet...generally follows the Beast also for the Beast & False-Prophet are always found together." Such notions of the prophetic are intimately biblical, but what they mean is not that "Blake claimed the possession of some powers only in a greater degree that all men possessed and which they undervalued in themselves & lost through love of sordid pursuits--pride, vanity, & the unrighteous mammon" (367). Yeats would come right out of his grave to get such power. Think of the comfort that would give the theosophists. Try as he may Yeats cannot. We will visit him there soon. Stay tuned.Try as he would, to get "the power,"Yeats invented visions out of intellect. If you yourself see fleas in the spirit, as Blake, that is, originally perceive the unknown, be democratic.

All men are equal, what! Tatham, burned the plates (Blake merely gouged them). This very tainted source, says when Blake thought he had the Seeing fixed "before his mind's Eye...that while he copied the vision (as he called it) upon his plate or canvas, he could not Err; & that error & defect could only arise from the departure or inaccurate delineation of this unsubstantial scene" (371). Blake's claim to infallibility in something nobody can confirm smacks of Enthusiasm. Enthusiasts must be taken for what they are. Bentley says "the testimony about Blake's madness among contemporaries who did not know him is close to unanimous" (379). Of those who knew him, at least prior to 1820, the case was only somewhat better.

Bentley gives an understanding that the grounds of his mad reputation were based on the observation that Blake's spiritual world was in form disconcertingly like the material outer world (380). Would we expect them to be different? It would seem inevitable that such "resemblances" (see Wallace Stevens' Necessary Angel, "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet," 61) are necessary to recognize the form being seen. It is always the case in these philosophies, occult or other, that reflections of order occur for the purpose of recognition, that the Other is not hiding so much as hid, as Linnell means about "sordid pursuits" that blind.

Evidence that after 1820 Blake became serene occurs in his Virgil woodcuts, his taking a glass of porter (393) and the conviviality of his circle, especially Edward Calvert, Samuel Palmer, George Richmond and Frederick Tatham (401). The woodcuts receive approval from all comers. Samuel Palmer at the time said, "There is in all such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul, and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are like all that wonderful artist's works the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain" (392). This flesh curtain is much at issue with Blake.

Never take what others say somebody said without compelling reason. That means what Varley or Crabb Robinson say Blake said is not much admissible as fact. Quote what Blake wrote. But Linnell is worthier. Is that because Varley is an astrologer and says Blake has Mercury square Mars which gives depth of mind? What about Blake's seances with the Visionary Heads? Blake, starved for company was adopted by a handful of young men who came to his house after 1820 and cultivated him. He told them he could see into the you know what, so Varley got him at a table and Blake drew heads like Edward I, etc. Then Blake drew the visionary head of a flea. That's the high art of spoof. Varley's a little serious? He says Blake said the flea was originally created large but had to be shrunk because it was too great a predator. It's a good thing Donne didn't hear about it. The sensationalisms of literature should be read as fiction. Shall Gulliver be turned into Hakluyt?

The Lily in the Garden

Pennsylvania Dutch imagination is communal. It borrows biblical metaphor and puts it on chests, linen, china, ironwork, fraktur. The tree, the branch, the corn of wheat symbolize Christ, so that natural existence is sanctified with his symbolic presence. Such understanding has been resisted in the demythology of Anabaptist religion by its own proponents, partly from embarrassment at claiming any virtue in particular. Generations who shunned outward celebration were a little silent about this inner world even while they went day to day in faith contemplating its flower of an “uncontaminated good within natural reality.” (Stoudt, 101). Surrounding themselves with natural images of Christ transferred their own redemption to creation, which came close to being an unstated sacrament. The lily, its predominant symbol, represented many aspects, but the artistic setting was not a garden, it was show towels, quilts and chests. With this decorative principle emerged an aesthetic of life.

That said all kinds of formalists question whether if it is a lily why does it look like a tulip? But the lily is not from nature. It represents an internal state, an internal flower, a flowering heart. If it’s not a tulip, it’s not a lily either. Appearances are deceiving in this symbol traced by critics in philosophy, hymns, gardens and kitchens. As a course in interior design, of household effects, it is the quintessential Dutch art. As itself the flower represents a series of devotional attitudes and states of mind described perhaps by Johann Arndt in his Paradies Gartlein, the book that would not burn (Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 247), but it is more generalized than that. When Stoudt observes that “Pennsylvania German folk art is basically spiritual in concept and the motifs and designs used are non-representational expressions of traditional Christian imagery” (vii) he is and is not to be believed. These symbols are imagistic conceptions of faith and without the faith the symbols are questioned. Hymnals sang of die unfgehende lilie, the opening lily, the lilen-Zweig, the lily twig and the wohlriechenden lilen, the fragrant ones (Stoudt, 85, 89, 95). The important thing is that the “lily age” conferred on gardens and animals an internal state. Thus stated, artifacts, hymns, transmitted the two greatest proponents of these ideas to the linens, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and Johann Arndt (1555-1621), “lost in obscure German books which no one reads today” (Stoudt, 92).
Critics have been pretty quiet about this iconic mind filled with decorations and gardens, a “use of natural events and objects to describe spiritual conditions," as if the subject will go away. Interpreted with hymns and flowers, stars and roses on pottery and linens, the lily “dominates the poetry and the literature; tulips appear rarely in verbal form” (Stoudt, 100). If the inescapable Dutch “tulip” that looks like a tulip, indeed we would say it is a tulip, is Christ, and is heavily medieval in its praise, an “inarticulate belief in the artist’s heart” (Stoudt, 15), that is a problem for those who believe otherwise.

It was always the English grievance against the Dutch that they were uneducated. Germans reveled in it to some degree, boasted they were peasants and resisted learning even while faulting themselves for not having it. So Boehme was their perfect master, a shoemaker with visions, “one of the most remarkable untrained minds” (Rufus Jones, preface to Stoudt’s tr. vii). The shoemaker was like the baker, Conrad Beissel (1691-1768) who founded Ephrata. There was room for farmers and peasants of all kinds in the Dutch artifact of original thought, even if the peasant Boehme influenced Milton, Newton and Emerson and had his writings early translated to English (1647-1661).

The lily in the hymns and the gardens, was an image from the Song of Songs before its elaboration in the writings of Boehme and subsequent celebration in colonial Pennsylvania, transported there by the Ephrata Cloister. As a manifestation of their inner redemption, "a fair flower grows out of the rough earth, which is not like the earth but declares by its beauty the power of the earth, and how it is mixed of good and evil; so also is every man, who, out of the animal, wild, earthly nature and quality, is born again so as to become the right image of God. For those who are a growth of such a kind, and are shooting forth into the fair lily in the kingdom of God and are in process of birth, have we written this book” (Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points, 4).
The flower of this soil compared to the image of God emerging from the animal man is an outcome hard to obtain. The silence of devotion, the acceptance of suffering, union with God in this inmost birth are the consummations imaged in “the blossoming of the lily,” Christ in the believer's heart compounding paradise. Rejection of the lily, disguised as apparent acceptance, has allowed its adversaries to say one thing and do another as they destroyed God's handiwork and call it progress.The destruction of the earth, clothed in progress, and a hardheartedness against the poor, were in other words merely the rejection of Christ.

This celebration of the garden within, a terrestrial paradise, was also part of the larger medieval setting. Catholic writers sang in celebration of love in the German Minnesong and baroque German religious poets (Stoudt, 56) as in Bernard of Clairvaux and Dionysian Neoplatonism, even more obscure, but how did the lily get on the linens and into the chests? The train of descent seems to be that the image in Boehme and Song was transferred to hymnists, “escaped to illuminated writings, to the decorated chest, and to pottery” (Stoudt, 92). So a four fold progression accounts Bible, Boehme, hymns and folk art or, starting from the end result, “Pennsylvania German folk art is basically spiritual in concept and the motifs and designs used are non-representational expressions of traditional Christian imagery” (Stoudt, vii). All this is merely to say that the symbols of this art are intellectual conceptions of its faith.

Of course simplicity is itself an offense so this could not be left to stand. A great many efforts were made to demolish this view, both in its precursors and its antecedents, concentrated in the modern era on the destruction of Stoudt. We come to it below.

A more common objection is, if it is a lily why does it look like a tulip?

Answer: because the lily is not from nature but from art, that is to say, it is not drawn to look like a real flower but represents an internal state, an internal flower, a flowering heart. Of course it’s not a lily either, it is a symbol of the internal fourfold discernment traced by critics in philosophy, hymns, gardens and kitchens and household effects. As a course in interior design, it is the most quintessential Dutch practice. In actuality the flower is a series of devotional attitudes and states of mind. That being the case, while they name it the lily, that flower does not best describe it, which honor may fall to Johann Arndt in his Wahres Christenthum. Stoudt documents the lily in its folk representations, but we would want to find out its origin in folk life outside of Boehme which occurs in folk art: fraktur, embroidery, chests.

The inescapable Dutch “tulip” then, that looks like a tulip, indeed we would say it is a tulip, is Christ, says Stoudt (106) and is heavily medieval in its praise as an “inarticulate belief in the artist’s heart” (Stoudt, 15). Critics have been pretty quiet about this iconic mind filled with decorations and gardens, a “use of natural events and objects to describe spiritual conditions." Interpreted with hymns and flowers, stars and lilies, roses on pottery and linens, the lily “dominates the poetry and the literature; tulips appear rarely in verbal form” (Stoudt, 100). These collective biblical images underlay their minds with faith. But the mind is not separate from the body or from the emotions. The Pennsylvania Dutch “produced an American decorative art which, with few minor exceptions, is the only indigenous art of its kind in our land”(Stoudt, 3).

If your father grows up and your mother grows up and the world grows up and you grow up, and you help your neighbor grow up and you love the world, you love the life of the world of blossoms and waves and the nectar waves grow way up high, will we see you fly?

Shaker, Fraktur and Blake

A comparison of Shaker, fraktur and Blake is first a comparison of art and text. Blake's images, his decoration, languished in much the same way as fraktur, divorced from the text when his work was neither reproduced nor understood. Even though Weiser says "Fraktur existed for the sake of the texts," and "a few selected images to convey the message," nobody read those texts, much less took them seriously. Weiser says it was because of a "preoccupation with death and religious themes" (xxviii), but such themes everywhere overwhelm English poetry at every turn, so why should it diminish the German? Separate from the text, fraktur decorations resemble Blake's art divorced from his writing. The visual image was accepted before the written.

If we could prove there was something esoteric about it would would get a following, but how can there be a vision in fraktur when it had multiple authors? But that is the point, it displays a collective intelligence. The vision is communal but not as esoteric among its practitioners as Blake among the scholars who spin a theory of imagination out of his evangel Jerusalem. Until Erdman or Frye, critics were affronted at the idea of coherent system in Blake. Their cousins among Pennsylvania critics are equally affronted at a hidden meaning of fraktur texts. Stoudt started to find it out, but his pietists, peasants and Catholic saints got little support in a hidden world in hymns. It affronted scholars also when he claimed a personal transcendentalism for thousands of Pennsylvanians a century before its appearance in New England. Pennsylvania could have been credited had come after, but coming before was not tolerated. What is a personal transcendentalist? You have the idea and live it instead of talk about it. It sounds like the Hopi elders. [Coming here, a consideration of German Literary Influences in the American Transcendentalists.]

So what is the relation of Pennsylvanians to decoration greater or less than tulips, hearts, stars and crowns? Mennonites turning flowers into bookmarks to bring paradise indoors?
To linens, furniture and pottery of communal tulips that migrate from paper to linen to wood?
Letters filled with swirls and stipples that whirl under signatures in descending spirals?
These have as much to do with the absence of things as their presence, the plainness of a board and a lapel, cap or hat capable of inner spiritual form from which the outer surface proceeds, greater decoration as the less.

Stoudt's mystics find allies in the Shakers. Thomas Merton's Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shakers (2003) has a view of The Inner Experience where Merton's phrase "images of Paradise" translates that art of making. It is all about believing and doing. Among Shakers "the peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it" (Shakers, 85) says Merton. This believing has been a stumbling block to visions of every kind among the critical classes, from the prescient Milton taking dictation from the Holy Spirit each night to compose Paradise Lost, to the Shakers, who "believed their furniture was designed by angels--and Blake believed his ideas for poems and engraving came from heavenly spirits" (85). It is a great irony that Blake says his poem entitled Milton was so dictated. A little of this frustrates the rationalist.

Merton illumines fraktur too against "the blindness of 'single vision' which sees only the outward material surface of reality, not its inner spiritual form and the still more spiritual 'force' from which the form proceeds" (74). Shaker "work of the craftsman's hands had to be an embodiment of 'form.' The form had to be an expression of spiritual force. The force sprang directly from the mystery of God through Christ in the Believing artist" (79). If the believing artist was given these forms in hand and mind by a spiritual force, God in Christ, that art would not find illumination outside these beliefs. Merton says Shaker art has "something to do with what Blake called 'the secret furniture of Jerusalem's chamber'" (74), that "a work-a-day bench, cupboard, or table might also and at the same time be furniture in and for heaven" (74). For Merton it is also obvious that "Shaker inspiration was communal...due not to the individual craftsman but to the community spirit and consciousness of the Believers" (76).

So Anabaptists are like the Shakers in the communal production of their forms. Merton says Shaker forms were "a better, clearer, more comprehensible expression of their faith than their written theology" (76), which is what Stoudt says of Pennsylvania art, whose theology was a mythology seeing the outer surface through the inner form, the "spiritual force from which the form proceeds" (Merton, 74).

Merton, Shakers, Blake and fraktur of the Pennsylvania Dutch celebrate images of the natural fruition of paradise, a renewal of plant and animal that finds human life amid these images as a way into the flowering heart. Frakturs covered with lilies in the shape of a tulip, images of a tulip blooming from a heart, roosters, flower-stars or any field or haystack transformed by the renewing mind, spider, fly, rooster, child, cow, farmer, sky, grass endowed with plain dressed and unplain people ornate in their inner lives. "Their only advertisement was the work itself" (Merton, 79) in the field, orchard and plant. Spiritual conditions made out of the natural set Pennsylvanians apart. This celebration of life was many ways opposed to much of the surrounding English culture whose domination of peoples and empires had commercial motives.

Recapturing this Lily Age might be like trying to live out the prophecies of Blake of mental archetypes, meditating giant forms. But the Lily has as much to do with the artifact as the Elohim have to do with the hex. Nada. Both are round. You can't get to the Lily by turning it counterfeit. The Lily Age is not about nostalgia for a thing that once existed, stone pullers, horseback riders. You have to live it. Paradise is not an external state. It is interior, matching something unseen, mirrored in the seen, connected to an organic field which is an image of the Kingdom of God, the ground out of which the Lily grows. Artifacts may be said to leave a trail of crumbs to show the external that it belongs.

That paradise accompanies the child is the point of paradise art, to decorate the new with hope. Pennyslvania German art is an art of paradise reckoned from the child archetype. Fraktur Vorschrift were given to school children as a reward for good performance. The teacher would make a flower as a bookmark or a watercolor according to ever more elaborate systems of ornament. Verses of the Bible turn the letters of words into flowers. The message was, "here is a picture of paradise." Such symbols emerged from a life view that implied a millennium ready to lie down with the lion and lamb. Their notion of paradise fostered a fantastic idealism of decoration on linen, furniture, pottery, barns. They planted equally fantastic gardens if they moved to the city, covered their windowsills with violets. "We have heard how Christopher Dock prodded his pupils with such drawings. If he did not originate the practice, he is evidence that it was in use at an early date, for Dock wrote in 1750. These tiny scraps of paper with birds, tulips, other flowers and occasionally other subjects survive by the dozens" (Weiser, xx). In the greater tradition it had wider applications. Most of this communal body was unsigned, but it was repeated again and again in images that migrated from paper to linen (show towels) to wood (decorated chests).

There are individual characteristics of fraktur artists. Dock uses block designs, initial capital letters filled with swirls and stipples, as Hershey puts it (59f ). He includes an alphabet and numbers in German and in English, with some scripture translated to English, a bilingualism that mostly ended with him. Sometimes he runs a banner through the illuminated title or above it. His students imitate these features, establishing a style which grows more ornate in later examples. Borders marked by whirls also under gird the initial letter in descending spirals, a common feature of Pennsylvania signatures.

Fraktur occurs in baptismal certificates called Taufschien, mostly printed, but the most notable are freehand letters of reward and instruction, vorschrift, given to children. Until Hershey's Teaching (2003) there were few good reproductions. Blake's watercolors were hidden from public eye until the Princeton editions and the Blake Archive, though inferior reproductions existed. The essentially different genres of Taufschien and vorschrift, with the division of art from text, mirror the divided demographics of the Pennsylvania German between the 90% "churched" Lutheran and Reformed Taufschien and the 10% Mennonite and Anabaptist vorschrift. The "churched" assumed proprietary status over the whole by their majority, but were often outweighed by the social/political acts of Mennonites. A sibling rivalry still impacts discussion.

Language Flowers
Fraktur is a species of language flower, but according to Weiser, "...one basic fact must be underscored in studying these documents--the illumination was auxiliary to the text" ("Piety and Protocol in Folk Art," 1). Such divorces are premature because the illuminations emerge from the text. Consider Plate 60 of Hershey's This Teaching, "Ihr Kinder Wolt ihr Lieben," ("O Children Who Are Loving"). This particular design is attributed to schoolmaster Jacob Gottschall (1793), but the text, "O Children" is a hymn of Christopher Dock's, himself a schoolteacher. It was presented as a reward to a student, Anna Kampffer in 1793, but the actual letter strokes mimic the design of the flowers in the composition, making the teaching a kind of Calligrammes, a hand drawn vispo, flower of the hand and mind. Letters, alphabets, numerals, colors and shapes woven to attract the child, now the adult, contemplate the text with the art.

A vine, a "stem" of tulips germinates from a globe/seed in the right corner. This spreads up and to the left. Another bloom of this "plant," slightly unconnected and larger, blooms down from the top left as though rooted in air, coextensive, but separate from the vine. The second larger bloom mimics the colors and shapes of the capitals of the title, Ihr Kinder in rose, blue and gold stripes, as though the letters were flowers or the flowers letters.The upstroke of the blue I combines with the down stroke of the rose h, making three letters out of two, an elision designed. The larger blooms have smaller dark stems, unrooted, air borne. A current of air lifts the "letter petal" leaves, from right to left which "blooms" in two large four-chambered blossoms, penetrated by segments of the unattached vine through each center of the four chambers (circles) of the flower, covered by a cross hatched red and gold diamond, Hershey's "checkerboard."

so ubt was freude worth...

Erquicken Hertz und muth

[The practice of joy...
quickens hearts and minds.]

Several phonetic cognates sound like English.The immediate short lines and rhymes are felt in translation. The vine that springs from the seed at the lower right flows across the top of the page, which seed, translated, says, "Be with us, on all our ways / Dear God with thy blessing," which blessing, rises in the vine. The title words Ihr Kinder, underlined in gold, resemble the block style of Dock's fraktur. These intersect the center of the page and divide the text below from its flower above, as if a flower of the text rises from the word garden. Language flowers teach children to identify petal letters. The writing of the text below in thirteen long cursive lines, is identified in stanzas only by numerals 1 to 5, set in a hand so small the students must have known the hymn by heart.

A child art, the colors, floral designs intend to attract the eye. At least among Mennonites fraktur was child art, designed for children, sometimes executed by children with its colors and floral designs intended for the child's eye. Before we defame it as not high art we should remember our literary master William Blake and fear his reproving. The first study of it was by H. C. Mercer, "The Survival of the Medieval Art of Illuminative Writing Among Pennsylvania Germans." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 36 (1898): No. 156, 423-432.

New England vs. Pennsylvania

As an image of uncontaminated nature the lily renewed the physical by association, a physical flower transferred to spiritual life. The Puritans went the opposite way; for them the spiritual did not renew the physical but was contaminated by it. Uncontaminated nature does not mean clean land fills, it means uncontaminated by the inner human world. In the context of total depravity, the Puritans transferred sin from themselves to the forest. After all, it hid the predator. It was a motive for cutting the trees. Such a view fueled botanical and biological extinction.

Concepts of nature thus underlie the two competing American philosophies of the Puritan and Pennsylvania Dutch. What they thought of themselves they thought of nature, equivocated as human nature, not the natural world. "World" was a place of temptation, not the eco-sphere. Both philosophies projected an image of themselves outward.

New England puritans, conditioned by their fear, took the view that "the world," meaning nature, would contaminate them. Many such ideas were misapplied by the mind of the believer. The baggage of puritan beliefs was more toxic in the austere climate and soil of New England. Garrisoned against the natural they would have welcomed the Pennsylvania genius inviting nature indoors (as they did a century later in the guise of transcendentalism), had they not feared the unknown (in themselves) that lurked at the clearing's edge. By 1850 transcendentalism made them long for the pond, but two centuries earlier New England believed that the savage Indians, wild men and their own sins were only kept at bay by fear of this soil and cutting back its growth, which helps explain natural demolitions such as clear cutting the forest three and four centuries later. Prevent sin and make a profit at the same time. Their idea of sin in nature perverted creation in their souls. Against the evil they found in themselves, projected outwardly, they erected a theology of dominion and racial superiority. In a new puritan age today, "this spiritual imagination is impotent, sterile, or dead, is necessarily going to be an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

It's a joke that racism and biological extinction lay down like Romulus and Remus for suckling at the door of the Puritan English, but it's not funny. Question more deeply the house and those within if you dare, but for their own reasons the Pennsylvania Dutch were not so afraid. Many had faced their adversary in the old world tortures. Here, in the milder circumstance of Pennsylvania they domesticated nature, invited it indoors, befriended it in their own natures, and while they spoke little of this faith, painted it, embroidered it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Thus domesticated, Pennsylvania didn’t produce a Scarlet Letter or spooky stories, but decorated chests and barns.

One cannot say the puritan hid his malaise. He legalized it, celebrated it with intellectualism. Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather drew sharp lines. If you disagreed with the governmental/pastoral views you had better be quiet about it. These things are thrown into sharper contrast compared with the milder governmental/pastoral conditions of Pennsylvania, where the English were and still are the majority party. Making literature into sociology tempts the effect of depravity upon nature that occurs in Hawthorne, whose "virgin soil as a cemetery" (Scarlet Letter, ), "the pine trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children"( ).

There are any number of such statements to the effect that "to the Puritan, nature was not benign. The wilderness was a place of terror"“ (Broyles), or as William Bradford put it (1620) "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men." Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he says to differentiate the kinder nature of Puritan composer William Billings who was opposed to his fellows (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770) also see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more than this has been said of the Puritan fear of those first two centuries.

Divide and conquer is the oldest rule of opposition. Quakers aside, who had more in common with the pacifist PA sects than with those who came to rule in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, these English exploited difference among the Pennsylvania German peace lovers, which admittedly the colony had been founded to pursue. Relations with the "world" were a sticking point for immigrants of the Lily. Some held differing taxonomies of Church and Sect, celebrated to this day as insoluble, that is of the churched vs. the plain. Should they be in love, half in love or not at all? The divided separate but equal existence of Germans alongside the English in American civilization came to an end after the Civil War, for then, though the Dutch were still divided, they were assimilated. Some people think the Amish are the last bastion of the "separated" and that these differences existed even in 1950, that is, speaking German, farming, going barefoot, everything the matriarch, Anna Mack, despised. The Amish may continue to exist in 2050, but assimilation got all the rest.

Compromise

For a long time Pennsylvania Germans sought to show that even if they were German they really did belong. Millard Gladfelter in his Foreword to Pennsylvania German Fraktur demonstrates this view when he refers to the persistent contests among Pennsylvania cultures for retention of custom and language" (ix). His "contests" feature a cultural cold war between the English "on the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers" and the Germans of "outlying countrysides." In the same volume Weiser is at pains to make the Dutch into Americans. He broadens the mandate of Penn's colony into "the much-celebrated openness of the United States...to receive into its midst persons and cultures of widely disparate origin" (xiii). But it was not the United States that welcomed them, but Penn's Quaker Pennsylvania. American is a misnomer here for the English and Puritan, but it has to be, for the English never welcomed the disparate, the range given by Gladfelter from "Negro Spirituals to Pennsylvania German Fraktur" (1x). Quite otherwise, they exploited them. So in order to fit in, assimilate even in the bi-centennial world of 1976 that these volumes commemorate, Weiser constructs a rhetoric that celebrates the whole for its part, the United States for Pennsylvania, but it was only Pennsylvania that welcomed the diverse. Weiser's Introduction of Fraktur is worth attending because he expresses transparently the attitudes and prejudices in the background of this paradise art.

There is a perennial defensiveness in Pennsylvania German writing about the survival of its folk culture. "We are richer for it,' says Weiser. Instead of celebrating the dishes and language for themselves, it has to be for "the tolerance of American polity" (xiii), almost apologizing for being. Welcoming the diverse may be what America says of itself today on the Statue of Liberty, but to the extent it is true, the only practical example was among the Pennsylvania Germans in Philadelphia. Then the American rhetoric hatched that all men are created equal. It is a Pennsylvania dream of equality that Weiser celebrates "in styles at variance with the majority" (xiii), not an American one, even if it becomes so, and it was not "the majority" they were at variance with, it was the English! Reading all these continual apologies for their Dutch defensiveness, it isn't that they are false to the fact so much that they apologize for being what they are. Keyser, commenting on the texts of fraktur in his Preface to Hershey's book, doesn't have to add, but does that "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (8), he could easily have said, "these texts are an invaluable window into the mind of their art."

Borrowings From Betters

Even friends of fraktur feel they must not seem partisan. Weiser says that "with some exceptions, the motifs of Fraktur are simply embellishment and have no esoteric meaning or function beyond the beautification of the piece" (xxvii). Hershey defends fraktur as cultivating the beautiful, "a process that stretches the imagination and pushes the artist toward an appreciation and even a love for things beautiful"(52). Even! Why are such things said? Answer with a question, "Why else would this large body of folk art...have been preserved and so obviously treasured?" It is only the PA Dutch who can doubt their beauty while everyone else celebrates it. This is a trait held in common by all subjugated groups. After examining a thousand pieces of fraktur Hershey says that in some cases the design illustrates the text, but mostly they are "lovely compositions," pretty pictures if you will that "convey religious meaning equally as well as they communicate the value of beauty in everyday life" (56). One feels drowning in the tepid.

The abstraction of image from text proliferated from fraktur through the other folk art genres of linens, chests, pots, ironwork and barns. This encouraged the divorce of meaning from text, Stoudt's point, that the images derive meaning from the hymns, etc., but that their later abstraction does not sever their prior connection to this origin. Weiser wants the images to be an imitation of the nobility by the middle class, a folk art, of "cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" (xxviii), not a rising from they hymns or the unconscious as we know all art truly is. He uses this failing social/political analysis in his Preface to the Pennsylvania German Decorated Chest. It is the omnipresent Dutch apology that the brutish peasant boors could do nothing but imitate in bastardy their betters.

Keyser says "none of this little-studied body of folk poetry is fine literature" (This Teaching, 8). Who does not quarrel with such a plebian notion of fine? It is an odd determination if this little-studied art is compared with Mozart, but not with Kafka or Borges, who though entirely irrelevant, also apply for "fineness" in vain. Has such a claim of fine been made of other folk art? "Their copies of upper class, from furnishings to portraits, to attire, are frequently grouped together under the name of folk art" (Chest, 13). Weiser's "constant cultural sinking from the tastes of upper levels of society" so that "fine engravings and prints owned by the elite found their country counterpart in the drawings of schoolmasters and itinerants" (Fraktur, xxviii) are a discredited assumption. He cites the lion and unicorn from British arms and the eagle from American, as borrowings from betters. Everything has context, but it is patently post hoc to say that because they preceded them they caused them. Images have to be allowed their own world outside social milieus. The Dutch eagles are a supreme delight in their interpretations, hardly copies. Do you say Navajo weavers imitated their betters when they wove chief blankets or railroad trains at the behest of traders?

Rationalizing art is a hard road, divorcing text and context the same, which was argued of Blake, whose illuminations were not even "mere embellishment." It would be better for critics to admit they cannot see any connection and consider getting glasses.

Spiritual Transfer

Technology, philosophy and religion promoted assimilation. Early twentieth century transfers of decorative images from chest to barn were a so-called "last flowering" (Yoder, Hex Signs, 3) of this art, but the compromise of Dutch ways is tracked in every activity, from song to speech. "Did any of the now common English choruses originate among the Pennsylvania Dutch and spread, through translation from German to English...? Yoder answers his own question, "the type of spiritual transfer that took place--one might almost call it spiritual osmosis--was from the greater to the lesser body. Anglo-American religious patterns were adopted by the Pennsylvania Dutch, rather than vice versa (Pennsylvania Spirituals, 348). But it wasn't just the permeable membrane of song, it was the stenciling of patterns instead of free-hand painting (Fabian,63), "machine made ware from England [Gaudy Dutch china] resulted in driving out local potteries" (Frederick, 257). "English ideas about furniture finishes, printed birth certificates, and Victorian popular designs, the Pennsylvania Dutch lost interest in the artifacts of earlier generations. In time, the chests, pottery, and pie safes were relegated to the attic or barn" (Hex Signs, 37).

Substitution of English ideas in the Americanization of the Pennsylvania Dutch touched the flower-star and the images on barns transferred from household decorations. These images may have had a contentious history, but they came from everyday relations with nature, sun, animals, plants. For all the debate of the origin of the hex sign, the twelve pointed star, the image comes from gardens, it is the image of a double tiger day lily, a duplicate of its shape. This is easy or difficult to find in the borders and plots of day lilies. The deeper legacy must involve a use of earth, design of internal landscapes, a spirit of acceptance that permeates mind and spirit, a spiritual force symbolized by the natural.

These images are taken from nature, from the wilderness as it were. The prejudice against the natural, its repression, a fear of it, was transferred from the New England mind.

Spiritual Demise

Stoudt says the images are mandalas, after Jung, but gets no credit for it from Yoder. The images painted on furniture, embroidered on linen, drawn on paper are "a full range of celestial and earthly subjects. Stars and birds, both identifiable and unrecognizable, are seen along with the plump heart..." (Fabian, 58). With the toasting couple, the unicorn, equestrian figures and mermaid Fabian describes techniques, "the unicorn painters of Berks County, for example-also had templates for the major elements of their designs" (62), but "after the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, stenciling is frequently used in lieu of freehand painting. It is obviously used as a time-saving device and as such is one of the heralds of the decline of the traditional arts of rural Pennsylvania" (63)

But the most usual popular treatment rouses superstition before dashing it to the ground. Pennsylvania Dutch Country, (Irwin Richman) invokes amulets and symbols, "askew crosses," scratched into lintels, "almost invisible except to the knowing eye," "symbolism and magic" (53) before taking Yoder's Hex Signs as proof against this voodoo. Having his cake and eating too, the author dances with popular modern hex signs, but allows little if any "iconic meaning to the decorations found on fraktur," the quintessential Pennsylvania German Artifact," with every one of those barn symbols and then some, "flowers, vines, animals and birds...hearts, crowns, angels and compass stars" (56).

Exfoliations of the lily in this spiritual flower garden, "died when the point of view which created them—the faith of Pennsylvania’s radical religious sects—was killed by the advent of religious liberalism” (Stoudt, 24), the introduction of English in schools and the death of home-crafts by the industrial revolution (Stoudt, xviii). Stoudt already rules out a huge segment of the population when he says "sects." But Yoder also allows that the decline of fraktur "can be found in the nineteenth-century disintegration of the folk culture of the Pennsylvania Germans, particularly (1) the disappearance of institutional elements such as the parochial school, which had produced the Vorschrift, (2) the shift to the English language, which brought with it an inevitable loss of German devotional literature as the wellspring of fraktur symbolism, and (3) the decline in the very meaning of baptism, which had produced the Taufschein." The decline of baptism "can be partially attributed to the impact of the revivalist movement, which invaded the Pennsylvania German churches and sects from the world of Anglo-America." It was a complete conquest: "Fraktur was part of the old-style colonial culture, which, especially in the field of religion, was being challenged and reshaped through acculturation with Anglo-American forms" (280). Reshaped through acculturation here means denatured. So the decorative art of the lily, its expression of an inner state, abstracted completely out of its origin, became the so called “prayer acts” of Wentz (24) and the lily was exhausted.

However much a meliorist one wants to be about this is a choice, to celebrate the past from the majority point of view of the English or lament the passing of the Dutch? Going from the island to the continent of the majority gives so many rewards, but foreordains the peasant to be inferior to the Ph.d. This also begs the question of what the rural folk benefits were, if impossible to recapture, when everyone suddenly wishes the garden were back again that has been sacrificed to progress.

What is the meaning of the flowering heart, its iconography and philosophy in itself? Who are the suspects in its demise? Were, as Stoudt argues, whole classes of these people [German-American] transcendentalists one hundred years before Emerson? Where are the studies of that text from the many sources that remain untranslated of the 3151 books and almanacs printed in the German language in America between 1728 and 1830? What devastations wreaked upon these people in the interests of social control need correction?



Afterword - Did You Find Paradise Today?

Told it doesn't exist you long for paradise. When it was in the interest of scholars they believed, not that they personally thought it existed or its art in the mountain sunset or the mouse. Were paradise free speech or whatever pleases, the three harvests and hot tubs of the captives of pleasure could have private paradises too. But the art of paradise is not about us, it's about the creatures that inhabit it, wild or domesticated in a green Shade. Paradise kept with hands brings the natural to the human.

Free of the separation which we reckon occurred when the serpent came to America, myth before discovery, besieged by enemies in a colonial fantasy of sexism and racism so called, thinking makes it so. Serpents destroy forests, prairies and animals, take dystopia over utopia, symbols of destruction over innocence. It's hard to imagine paradise in an age that denies it but longs for memories of wholeness it forgot. Was there peace? Nobody wants Inferno, but nothing succors in the deconstruct.
We get over disbelief. The child believes, but the adolescent diminishes, imitates the adult. In their private paradise they go to pillage the garden. Ask if one believes and get a look. One believes in profit. One believes in success. But look for paradise if you believe it's lost. Find a piece of paradise. Evening conversations would begin, "did you find paradise today?" Everyone would be looking.

This fictive assumption presumes a restoration of earth was forming in the minds of artists with the industrial revolution, the chimney sweep of Blake, that paralysis immobilized agencies able to effect remediation. In reinvention, but the paralysis is also metaphorical, we rise in the night, thoughts start before four AM. So would creation travail with the problem sons. You could wish they were out of the way, but not if worse were in store. We may go on with daily life, right to the end, shibboleths of the past argue, as though they meant something. Doctrines of false imagination finish the day, sleep another night in evasion and deny.

Man of Peace at War with the Divided Self

So if Pennsylvania Dutch art is a product of "a spirit of mirth, of play...a love of beauty and a fantastic impulse to embellish" painted furniture, carved wood or Christmas cookies cut "in hundreds of designs," or inlays, embroideries of "glee that only a man at peace with life can relish" (Frederick S. Weiser in The Pennsylvania German Fraktur of The Free Library of Philadelphia, 1976), xv), maywe say that the man of peace was at war with the divided self imaged in his alienation from nature? The man of peace at war may be the genius of his muse.

Dominant eighteenth century English-American culture saw nature as a mine, for exploitation, in spite of the phrase in the Declaration of "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," but the lily age of the German peaceniks celebrated nature for itself in behalf of Christ, which today might mean legislating protection for the whale because God loves it, a Pennsylvania Dutch conservation of the biosphere. It was once thought that the first principle of creative art and life among these peculiar people was "the divining of nature" (Stoudt), a beating of swords into plough shares as a shorthand of that paradigm. "Peculiar" is a compliment connoting unworldly, uncommercial. Substitute the sword with the plow, commercial exploitation with conservation, and electric companies will be decommissioning dams in this spirit to restore riparian habitat (Fossil Creek, AZ) when earth enters its final age of peace.

The Pennsylvanians as an antidote to the destruction of nature, treasured it so within to foster the underpinnings of a more caring world against the outer division that transforms everything to itself. The irony is that this liberation comes from a people Franklin called brutish, not elegant, who rejected the outer ethic of exploitation and "original sin" of slavery now celebrated by presidents. But commissions of an even greater original sin than slavery were and are committed along salmon coasts and prairie, a sin against nature as old as Cotton Mather's infection of new worlds

Two views of paradise and wilderness occupy the outward surface that begs to be called a corn field resurrection. The literal is thus made symbolic, as in such transformation as Van Gogh makes of field and sky. But alternate realities come to pass as different poets touch paradise. Blake in Songs, Roethke, The Far Field, slightly demented, Lawrence, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn, Ted Hughes, Barry Lopez, Aesop celebrate the inhabitants who are not ourselves. Lopez in Lessons from the Wolverine, from Field Notes, empathizes the living, and in Apologia the dead. T. H. White's instructions of the animals to Arthur in Merlyn must spring from his rich translation of the 12th century bestiary, The Book of Beasts.

Take as a premise that to name a thing you must understand it, dream of it, meditate it like St. Francis. The naming of the animals is not what a government biologist does in thinning wild horse herds or elk to protect cattle, masquerading human good as a care of the wild. Preconditions of wilderness also require health, thoughts think free of hindrance, fatigue, prejudice, greed. The Pennsylvanians had their own image myths of the natural. They seem accompaniments to the archetype of the child, viz. paradise, much as the mobile above the crib, the doll, the stuffed animal accompany the child. You can see them in This is the Way I Pass My Time. Ellen J. Gehret. Show towel decorations, The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest. Monroe H. Fabian. This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools. Mary Jane Lederach Hershey. Fraktur Writings and Folk Art Drawings of the Schwenkfelder Library Collection. Dennis K. Moyer.

Paradise and wilderness are mutuals not opposites. Glimpses of these ideas in American Indian notions of natural relation are unbelievably also present in Pennsylvania Dutch art, which include: "tulips and hearts and stars and crowns and angels from peasant art, unicorns from the British arms and eagles from American heraldry" from "birth certificate to tombstone" (Weiser, xv).
Hershey says "the predominant designs are taken from nature," with the exception of "the angel and heart motif," and "more variations than one person could imagine, as well as birds of all feather and fancy" (52).

The artists of these were first children and teachers of children, parochial schoolmasters and Mennonites. Christopher Dock began the traceable fraktur tradition in Montgomery County PA. This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools, 1747-1836, says it was "along the Skippack." The full flowering of the art declined after the mid 1830's when a PA public school system began to supersede religious instruction, but this was not the sole means of decline. It is more customary to speak of the decline than of the flowering.


Works Cited

The Adams-Jefferson Letters. Edited by Lester J. Cappon. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987.
Jacob Boehme. Six Theosophic Points. Translated by John Rolleston Earle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958.
F. George Frederick. Pennsylvania Dutch Cookery.
Mary Jane Lederach Hershey. This Teaching I Present: Fraktur from the Skippack and Salford Mennonite Meetinghouse Schools, 1747-1836. Intercourse, PA: Good Books 2003.
Monroe H. Fabian. The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest. Pennsylvania German Society, 2004.
John Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. Allentown, PA: Pennsylvania German Folklore Society. 1966
John Joseph Stoudt. Jacob Boehme's The Way to Christ, In A New Translation. New York, London: Harper, 1947.
Frederick S. Weiser and Howell J. Heaney. The Pennsylvania German Fraktur. Breingigsville: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1976.
Richard E. Wentz. Editor, Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Spirituality. Sources of American Spirituality Series. New York: Paulist Press, 1993]
Don Yoder. Discovering American Folklife. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books. 2001
Hex Signs (with Thomas E. Graves) Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000.
Pennsylvania Spirituals. Lancaster, PA: Pennsylvania Folklife Society, 1961

The Indian and the Pennsylvania Dutch

The New World as a Metaphor of the Kingdom of God

Draw this picture if you will, unless you think Herriot already did it in Virginia. The poet John Donne, wishing to get to Jamestown, declares, "but who ere saw, though nature can work so, /That pearl, or gold, or corn in man did grow. / We have added to the world Virginia." For him the new creature of virtue to whom the golden age is a reality is a metaphorical Virginian. This voyager under the protection of the Virgin settles the new land as the ground of Christ (136).The benign interactions between foreign peoples that these lines suggest is a far different from the real politik extermination of native cultures everywhere. But, big surprise, the Indian in our analogy is not from America. He is from India!

Real politik in the treatment of occupied peoples is the most common new world act. Nowhere is the velvet glove more off the fist than in England's occupation of India. This treatment also compares with the Pennsylvania Dutch, but American Indian, Welsh and Irish also have tales. Majority history myths are romances of the popular mind to take social control. The Pennsylvania Dutch got along well enough with the Originals without calling them child of the devil as the Puritans did, which seems visionary in those Utopian states of golden ages, harmony with nature, gentle breezes, three harvests.

No good deed is unpunished. English occupation of colonies is more brutal the further it strays from European ethnicity. British education in Ireland was not as much charged with the root of racism as it was in India. In India the English cultural machine was in full view, even if Swift's fictional/realistic Irish peasants model his yahoos. It is everywhere commonplace that English/ British oppression occurred in greatest force in India, not that a like cultural war did not also occur in the homeland of the Welsh, and Irish and among the Bengali. Cultural wars are still going on against the Hispanic.

Colonial rule in India demanded that "Britain needed a class of intellectuals meek and docile in their attitude towards the British, but full of hatred towards their fellow citizens. It was thus important to emphasize the negative aspects of the Indian tradition, and obliterate or obscure the positive." These were standard plays. The Pennsylvania German was called such names as stubborn and thickheaded so much they even so called themselves. "Indians were to be taught that they were a deeply conservative and fatalist people - genetically predisposed to irrational superstitions and mystic belief systems." The educated native remnant was to think and speak like the conqueror and reinterpret itself as English. These quisling substitutes did the teaching.

The particulars of German speech and habits cited by Weygandt in Red Hills (1929) match the Dutch equivalent of these "intellectuals meek and docile." They were people "doing what they did in the days before the Mexican War, interpreted without sympathy it means that the 'Dumb Dutch' do not know that the world moves":

It is a worn witticism in Pennsylvania that we still vote for Andrew Jackson in Berks. This saying, interpreted with sympathy for us, means that things change so slowly in the heart of the Red Hills that people are doing there what they did in the days before the Mexican War. Interpreted without sympathy for us it means that the "Dumb Dutch" do not know that the world moves. A libel, some of us declare the last interpretation, a half libel others. There are those among us who will admit it has in it a modicum of truth, if it be taken, of course, figuratively. In any event it serves to point out that we Pennsylvania Dutch are the most conservative people in America. We still approve strongly of all Andrew Jacksons, of their works and of their ways (5).

Take the Dutch hex signs for irrational superstition and their sectarian pietism for mystic belief systems and you can see the analogy between India and Pennsylvania, although the argumentative will want to say that these occurred at different times, hence must not be true, and anyway the Germans were the colonists not the English. False rhetoric continues until the lights go out.

British rhetoric said that India "had no concept of nation, national feelings or a history," which argument applied also to the division of the Dutch between Church and Sect, as if, to reduce it to most common denominator, hex signs and plain dress were their markers of culture, as Yoder says ( ). Such rhetoric declared that "if they had any culture, it had been brought to them by invaders - that they themselves lacked the creative energy to achieve anything by themselves." This writes large the trivialization and peasantization of Dutch culture that centuries of folklore societies and universities foster.

"The British, on the other hand epitomized modernity - they were the harbingers of all that was rational and scientific in the world." Escape from this mental prison of ethnicity for the young was the same for the Navajo and Pennsylvania German as it was forthe Indian. Identify with the British and repeat the idea of their superiority verbatim in the minds of young who receive instruction. The British in India created a class of quislings, as Macaulay (1835, cited in this source), 'to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.'" [see British Education in India]

These native English-Indians were the vanguard of cultural domination. Their role in India resembled the church groups in Pennsylvania, Lutheran and Reformed, who much to the disagreement of their own historians that this happened, sold themselves for social acceptance to the English. The quisling Pennsylvania German class, speaking for the colonial powers, characterized the native German in burlesque, a caricature, of itself. Yoder says that as Dutch plain folk got plainer and legislated their plain dress to further theirDutch identity, church folk painted hex signs on their barns to preserve their compromised ethnicity.

English rule was always to insinuate shame where their language wasn’t spoken, like the dual street signs in Wales with the Cymraeg crossed out. English fear of German dominance in PA was a chief motive behind English Only, if that phrase sounds familiar, but English domination could not have occurred without the deconstruction of Pennsylvania German culture and language. This deconstruction took many forms. Peasantry, including folk art, was denigrated as ignorance. You can take political and social prisoners if you denature ethnicity and language, for instance, put all the Navajo children in "Indian schools," where they are forced to speak English. You say the Americans did that, not the English, but that is the point. The English transferred all their social control systems to the Americas. There the majority leaders were English and quisling English. These mind games occurred between the English and every ethnic and racial group in America, the Indian the first, the German the second, the Hispanic the latest.

Turning self-denial into an inferiority complex, English parody of the German began with the so-called dark faces and incomprehensible tongues that antagonized Ben Franklin. These were made to symbolize the mind. Franklin’s prejudice gets barely a footnote in his illustrious life, as though his prejudice were merely a stigma against farmers. This prejudice existed before 1730, when Pennsylvania had passed two acts to regulate immigration, requiring an oath of allegiance to George I, the taking of names, occupations and points of origin of immigrants in the famous ship lists. How many immigrants there were was exaggerated, but even the exaggerations were doubled to make Franklin’s point. His cronies insisted around 1750 that Pennsylvania was being overrun. Various Presbyterian and Anglican clergy influenced by Franklin hatched a scheme called the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge and the English Language among the German Emigrants in Pennsylvania (1753). Its purpose was to domesticate the either 60 or 100 thousand “foreigners,” and “strangers,” for “speaking a different language from the English colony’ (S. Chandler, quoted 309).

It was always the view of the formal churches, Lutheran and Reformed, that true wisdom came from hierarchy and authority, not from people. Church formalists reasoned that the populace was “utterly ignorant” and “in danger of sinking deeper and deeper every day into these deplorable circumstances, as being almost entirely destitute of instructors, and unacquainted with our language” (Smith, 309). This talk masked deeper political and social motives, especially that the Germans “shall turn our trade out of its proper channel by their connections, and perhaps at last give some of our Colonies laws and language” (Smith, 310). Such rhetoric stemmed from Franklin’s ideas and politics. Franklin’s more plain view was that the “Palatine Boors” should “swarm into our Settlements” (Letter 1751) “of the most ignorant Stupid Sort (Franklin, [1753] (1961: IV, 483–484). Their ignorance and stupidity were reason for thinking they would subject themselves to “Credulity” and “Knavery,” meaning influence by the French. That Pennsylvania would become a “colony of aliens” provoked fear that they “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion" (IV, 24.[confirm page #] Franklin's wit betrays the racism of his understanding. (The letter of May 9, 1753 to Peter Collinson.)

So Franklin made alliance with “Lutheran, some Reformed, and the rest Englishmen” who were offended by the many undisciplined populist sects of Mennonites and Dunkers because they opposed their views on infant baptism, war and serving in the militia, let alone paying the war tax. The ill-fated Michael Schlatter was appointed Supervisor of these “schools” of correction in the German settlements, but was mightily opposed by the Germantown printer Christopher Saur. Schlatter funded a rival press supporting his views against Saur. Since the school plan was merely to anglicize Germans and maybe to get German votes to fund military salaries for preachers and schoolmasters, Saur supposed that they “had the least regard for the uninformed Germans of Pennsylvania, to actually convert them; or whether the establishing of the Free-schools, is not rather to serve as a foundation upon which to establish the thralldom of the Germans” (319). In addition to language, religion and war were vehicles of English prejudice as Franklin mocked the German mind, habit and skin color. If the goal was to make them “good protestants, join the militia, speak English,” the means was backward. In the end the free school movement lasted but ten years. Schlatter resigned and joined the British Army as a chaplain!

Saur said that turning everyday people to English speech had as its motive a social overturning of German society, like Mennonite arguments against contact with outsiders, for “German children learn to speak English according to English fashions; and parents have a great deal of trouble to get such foolish whims out of they heads” (320). The English attempt to steal ethnicity with language was not a religious or altruist but “a political affair” (321), as Muhlenberg, who initially supported the plan, later said. Franklin's fear that too many Germans would destabilize the colony show the fears of a xenophobe, but with inevitably greater fallout than that. Yoder says (280)

the disappearance of the parochial school and the shift to the English language especially caused the loss of “the mystical and theosophical symbolism of Rose and Tulip and Lilly of Jacob Boehme and his medieval sources” (280). This impacted every folk form from fraktur to design, “the entire nineteenth century disintegration of the folk culture of the Pennsylvania Germans” (280).

However you define it, it is not easy to make the invisible visible. To view nature as uncontaminated, whether without or within, contradicts puritan thought, Calvinist and American fundamentalism. It contradicts materialism and is most contrary to what is taught in the schools about these Pennsylvania people, who if they did view nature as uncontaminated were among the first environmentalists. Though the flowering heart was gone by the Civil War, with remnants lasting a half century, it is still easy to love their flower torn as a product of their cultural endgame, indoctrinated with English poetry, puritanism and dominion politics so that every prejudice the Pennsylvanians internalized might be taken as fact, which tells in fact that it is not.

English culture invented a theology to include the destruction of the natural with the cultural; both were allied against the Germans not only for control, but because it as also a habit. The English did it without thinking, the natural expression of a will to empire. This value system of domination was transferred from its specific English origin to more general "white" politics with scarcely a murmur from the English authorities, and their thinkers. To claim cultural dominion as their own would be to expose themselves as its authors, so dominion was cast as a wider cultural custom belonging to all white new world settler groups, but it was all along only English politics and theology transferred entire to the now dominant, American culture, an English Only beyond language. Take heart you ethnic white people, you are not all inherent racists.

The English invented American racism. Boehme and the PA Dutch were a different cup of tea from the reigning English philosophy of Puritan and erudite Jefferson who sounds like Franklin on the imperfections of the Germans when he worries about Jews' so called inferior moral philosophy. Jefferson had razored out the words of Jesus, “cutting verse by verse out of the printed book” and made his own gospel of 46 pages (The Adams-Jefferson Letters, 384). Expunging the so-called Platonized corruptions from the text did not however result in his own perfection; attention to the details of the Law would have remedied his own failure of the “minute enumeration of duties” (383) he blames the Jews for keeping. Neither did the English understand the natural goodness the Germans posited. If you boil it down to a sound bite, what you get from the Pennsylvania Dutch is more acceptance than rejection, for rejection had already been theirs in Holland and Germany.

The argument that the demise of German acculturations was a function of social controls foisted on them by the English, with subtle and not so subtle social mechanisms, is not favored by writers such as Don Yoder, the best contemporary. His epilogue of German Broadsides takes its assumption that such losses are to be expected and are good and desirable in order to make American homogene, the Americanization of sorting out the idiosyncrasy of subgroups so they can be homogeneous interchangeable parts of American citizens held together by a general glue such as economy, human rights, commercialism and language.

This is the implicit destiny of all migrant groups then and seen as a good by homogenators now. But do not forget that once the sub culture is denatured, subverted from its peculiarity, identity shorn, it is more apt to social control. What is done to the immigrant group to make it general and American is now to be done to the American to make it global. That this argument is somehow progress not loss is an issue. That this occurs concomitantly with the standard of diversity, that many are one, only shows that the opposite of things is the case. The more diverse we get the more the same we get. Blacks, Germans, Hispanics, Indians, once they lose they languages and folkways will be the same interchangeable widget the English first desired to control.

This phenomenon where the cure becomes the disease is common enough in psychology where the patient is named for the disease and the side effects of medications given for the cure become the new symptoms and cause. The phrase that we are our own worst enemies in the environment or the economy where, if we do stop spending for consumer goods, the greater economy will go into depression, but it we spend we individually all go broke, pretends that acclimation to gas prices if done in an unpatterned way prevents pain. But this fails to realize that a sudden shock would have changed behavior and caused true change. Applied to culture and subcultures this makes for denaturing, denuding, destroying the uniqueness of whatever is addressed, wilderness, humanity, botany, wildlife.

Not that the Germans did not reject themselves. The seeds of division were the stuff of social control, although the more formal churches were quicker to identify with the colonial English powers, witness the tortured Schlatter. Folklorist Don Yoder sees division as a function of religion, not of politics, that the "sectarians withdrew from worldly matters; in fact the word "worldly" among them had a negative connotation" (The Pennsylvania German Broadside, 170), he says with amazing naivete, as though worldliness were not a huge Biblical problem. That Lutheran and Reformed groups should be "both church members and citizens" was the point of tension for the whole he says, so

"because of this radical division, this cultural gulf between the plain sectarians and their more worldly neighbors in the Lutheran and Reformed churches, the Pennsylvania Dutch population has never been able to unite on any major political or cultural question" (171).

But we want look at it differently as though there were a war of attrition and survival being waged and like any war of this kind quisling substitutes infiltrate the native, naive body politic to disestablish it. All kinds of pretty humanistic labels put on this change it not. We're doing it for your own good, making you learn, dragging you kicking and screaming into the 20th century, or to the texting world of the 21st. The tactics are the same. Liberation and emancipation mask darker motives. These motives are not likely to be confessed, instead their uncovering will be resisted. Do you want to perpetuate cultural ignorance, the Dutch seemed to ask themselves?

But their insecurity was forced from the outside.Yoder laments the failure of Zinzendorf's attempt in 1742 to join all the churches under his headship. He calls an "ecumenical project" what was a naked power grab clothed in religious images and words (175). The sectarians were as suspicious of him as Sauer was of Franklin's effort to establish English schools for the Germans.

Yoder allows the loss of German individuality just about the time of everyone else: "in the twentieth century Pennsylvania Dutch religion changed radically. The churches themselves became group oriented. Following the American penchant for joinerism...(175), but at least he allows that "all of these institutions came in from the English world of Anglo-American denominationalism" (175). Revivalism, Boy Scouts, Christian Endeavor and like species, with premillenialism were introduced from without. With this demythology of the Dutch status Yoder allows (210) came efforts of scholars to show how the former beliefs, whatever they were, were superstition, "a common conceit of scholarship at the time" (1908), in this case referring to the Himmelsbrief, or so called Heaven-letter, but it is an example of a much wider practice of disestablishing all the Dutch beliefs and ways, so that, throughly anglicized, their culture was discredited and abandoned.

Sect or Insect

Right away the designation of 10 % or 25% of the Dutch population as sect does not endear them to any sensibility. The connotations are difficult. Those who control history are in charge, the majority Dutch, as Yoder finally calls them (Broadsides, 87) deny prejudice, say that this was the designation from the beginning.

There is a shadow of prejudice of the Church groups against the plain sects. To be fair there is a rejection of the Churched as doctrinally weak and worldly, substituting world wisdom for biblical. But majority prejudice rules, so that of the Church groups went against anyone who opposed the standard historical line they offered. The Churched after all did not suffer in the old world as the plain sects did and their claim that they came, like the sects, to gain freedom to worship in America comes with the old assumptions of power from the state to enforce their way, how else explain the short shrift their best historians Henke and Harbaugh give for the founding of the first Reformed church in PA, in Skippack, c 1727? This we continue to research here.

This animus does not seem to be returned from the plain sects against the churched, just a rejection of what they consider false doctrine, viz. infant baptism, worldliness. Yoder revisits this again and again when he cites "this radical division, this cultural gulf" Broadsides, 171), even attributing to plain sects part cause in "the demise of the hex sign..when they purchase a farm with hex signs, the signs are one of the first things to disappear...part of their aesthetic of plainess" (Hex, 39). This troubles him because he attributes the images on barns as a last vestige of the culture, but the plain people would surely retort that the images are within their minds.

This Shaker-like aesthetic of austerity does not quite claim "that their furniture was originally designed in heaven, and that the patterns have been transmitted to them by angels," as cited by Thomas Merton. But Merton, already a monastic, sees what he himself has a capacity to know and likens the Shakers to Blake's interiors, invoking "Edenic innocence" (79), that "work was to be perfect, and a certain relative perfection was by all means within reach: the thing made had to be precisely what it was supposed to be. It had, so to speak, to fulfill its own vocation." (78-9). To further the point, "the American was a new being who had nothing to do with the world of European complexity and iniquity" (84).

Yoder says "Pennsylvania Dutch culture is still evolving, and the modern hex signs can be seen as new outgrowths of the older folk art trends that were brought from Europe and transplanted.... (Hex Signs, vii). That culture is more co-opted. Yoder says "this colonial ethnic group evolved into one of the most colorful and most original cultures on the East Coast." When you are all done put on the lights and put a sign on the container, Einstein's brain, which, except in science fiction, is not evolving. Latin is called a dead language with little embarrassment to Rome.

There are remnants of course of colonialism in the 60% unemployment rate on the Navajo reservation or the Pennsylvania suburbs made from farms. Yoder speaks for the point of view that all is well that they "formed one people with a culture united except for religion" (Hex, 2). United in what? Subjugated cultures continue to exist, but not in the same state; they are artificially controlled. He says sociologists divided them into church and plain but he knows that was done from the very beginning before 1730 by Boehm and all the churched and furthered by Mittelberger, et al. Church and Plain means worldly and austerely and could well suit the opposition of mass manufacture vs. hand. Mass culture dictates that it will absorb you. The Church faction was absorbed and assimilated and as a reward got the tourist trade. The Plain groups, Plain and Plainer in dress, speech, life got islanded and compromised by the pressure of the great malleable whole.

The assumptions that justify this whole process of assimilation are today brought into question, not only from the the loss of identity through the creation of a group mind in the media, but from those same pressures toward globalization that promise to do to the American what was done to the Dutch. We do not need to pose an even further erosion of identity that would occur from contact with alien civilizations beyond earth's, but that analogy makes plain what happened to the Dutch and every other colonial or conquered people.

Majority scholars and quislings will want to posit exceptions to this general rule, but it stands in the same relation to the present as those Indians taken back to Elizabeth's court to be displayed, trophies of capture, followed by slavery at Jamestown. That is, the majority always takes captive one way or another, subverts native identity, appoints from among the natives governors, just as the Romans did, while it swallows them. This is not pretty put this way, for at all costs the majority view is to make things seem a lot better than they are. As Sartre might have said, resistance is existence in the will to know.

Assimilation was never a good idea, no matter what the propagandists say, especially if it was forced in subtle and unsubtle ways. It was never anything but the theft of a heritage, but its seamy underbelly has the prime minister of Australia apologizing for it even as Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Canada's native peoples for "forcing their children to attend state-funded schools aimed at assimilating them" (Bob Gillies, AP, June 12, 2008). Surely an apology is due the Hopi and Navajo children sent to "Indian schools" in Phoenix, where even roads are so named. These travesties seem easier to see than the very same things wreaked upon the Pennsylvania Dutch in the nineteenth century. Take their language, assimilate them into the body politic, but even then the "dark faces" Ben Franklin feared among the Dutch will succor racism. It is an English invention.

So far there has never been an attempt to view the Dutch as an oppressed or co-opted people subject to great pressures to surrender their ethnic identity as is commonly observed of the peoples of India in relation to the British. The difference is only a matter of degree.
David Weaver-Zercher gives a good summery of the cultural war between the English and the Dutch (The Amish in the American Imagination, 2001). It was entirely rhetorical, but understood against the history of English colonies in subverting the identity of sub groups, the Germans were pretty defensive, conceding the doltish nature they were charged with. "It was not that Pennsylvania Germans but were brutish by nature," the Pennsylvania German Society said, but "they were too busy conquering the elements to support higher education, fine arts and other cultural endeavors" (Weaver-Zercher, 28). This was exactly the line taken by thinking Dutch years after and I even heard it myself from older family.

The discussion of Stoudt in his preface concerning the demise of the Dutch cites many of the causes, but at the root is the whole belief that to fit in is good, to belong, to homogenize is necessary or desirable. The apology for speaking Dutch is that "it in no way distorts their Americanism" (xvi), not the other way round that speaking English does distort their Dutch. Colonial powers have usually found benign rule to be in their interest to encourage commercial exploitation.

Loss of identity is the damage done by the British/American propaganda machine to all subgroups. Call it "slow disintegration" or "slow absorption" "slow strangulation"(Stoudt xvii) the key is that "the Pennsylvania German soon began to view his own culture as outworn and outmoded" (xvii). It was the loss of the language and the culture, which was composed of practices, beliefs and doctrines different from the English. Many writers cite the loss of German devotional ways "as English hymns and devotional literature supplanted the traditional literature, as spiritual vitality degenerated into camp-meeting hallelujahs" (xviii), plus of course the grand Industrial revolution. In all this however Stoudt makes an assumption or a judgment that the ones who really defined the Dutch were the sects and not the Churched who assimilated more easily. This has probably caused him to be given short shrift in the 75% majority Dutch church culture. When he says "most of the German settlers...were religious refugees" (xvi) that is inaccurate, only the sects were. He takes the part for the whole, attributes most of the peculiarities to sects, "left-wing, radical Protestant groups," (xvi) and it is these whose vitality was dimmed by the camp-meeting hallelujas, it was these whose "apocalyptic ideas dimmed when the 'lily age' seemed further and further away" (xviii).

But the slow strangulation was also a function of the propaganda machine. Prejudice is learned not observed, says Gordon Allport, and all the more easily taught, especially when the people teaching it are one of the group. Yoder in Broadsides chooses his examples strangely, perpetuating the stereotype, that "European travelers, especially those of German background and education, who visited the Dutch Country in the nineteenth century, often sneered at what they considered the 'ignorance' and limited viewpoint of the Pennsylvania Dutch" (15). What is his point anyway? Travelers is plural but he gives only one example, "the most pointed" that proves the negative which he himself calls "damaging and very biased." But he quotes at length about the books on "dreaming and witchcraft" (17), the "corrupt dialect." His second example, not a traveler, but a scholar, damns with the faint praise that "they were not as ignorant as has sometimes been stated...granting that the aims of many of them, especially in the rural districts, were very narrow, nevertheless" (17). The weigh of this stereotype, repeated ad infinitum over centuries continues in the present. Its justification, for it will be justified, is that they are just repeating what was said. Ben Franklin lives.

There is something noxious in the immersion of every member of a class into an ethnic/language identity. That is the way sociologists work. Not troubling the exception, everything is the rule as if all of "them" were homogeneous. This mindlessness curses for instance David L. Valuska and Christian B. Keller's Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg (2004) who cite Steven M Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land for the same repetitions. Only after reading these again and again does an underlying point of view, an ax that grinds come clear, a combination of defensiveness that hides behind scholarly fact/myths, as if apologizing for its subject, dumb, damn, Dutch, explicitly repeating 18th and 19the century prejudices and a repugnance it seems for the subject at all. This negative point of view is supported by the various societies and publishers who foster it, who must think it attracts the market they target, as though none of them survived Ben Franklin's worst day.

Pennsylvania Myth

Self-loathing is a deep contradiction, but it goes along with the Pennsylvania mythology of the simple, dumb German peasant. Apparently this is a saleable item for being so widely repeated on every front. Pennsylvania Dutch Stuff by Earl F. Robacker (1944) is as good as the current folklore in this even if so old. He says "the Pennsylvania Dutch of yesterday were a simple folk and came of peasant ancestry long ago" (1) which could no doubt be said of anyone.

If a twelfth of Americans were Dutch in 1775 that is roughly the same percent as Hispanics today. The problem doesn't go away. Proof comes from the mouth of travelers north of Bisbee. Spokesmen for minorities find alliances among liberal activists of human rights, or so it seems. The crux is always that they are "colonists of non-British extraction" (Stoudt, xv). Chauvinism is strong on both sides, but the stakes are greatest for the loser.

Works Cited

Thomas Merton. Seeking Paradise: The Spirit of the Shakers. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003.

John Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. 1966.

Frederick S. Weiser in The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest by Monroe H. Fabian. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd.

J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.

Cornelius Weygandt. The Red Hills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1929

Don Yoder & Thomas E. Graves. Hex Signs. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000

Don Yoder. The Pennsylvania German Broadside. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.

English Only

From the point of view of the Anglo everybody is anglicized, the melting pot rules. Do not think to perpetuate old or other world customs without questions about whether you are really an American. This is as old as the hills. Surely evidence exists for this in ancient Greece. Speak Greek or die. So the PA German is a forerunner of the Hispanic. Pennsylvania Germans spoke German in some cases into the 20th century. Even as late as the World Wars it was in the interest of the United States to negative stereotype Germans; profiling and prejudice had existed from Franklin on. There were many shades of opinion. In 1794 a group of German immigrants asked for the translation of some laws into German. This petition was rejected by Frederick Muhlenberg saying, "the faster the Germans become Americans, the better it will be" (the "Muhlenberg Vote"). Becoming an American meant speaking English.
Different churches made different adaptations. Mennonites held on the longer to German, "church" people, Reformed and Lutheran, anglicized more early. Old First Reformed Church of Philadelphia indicates that "throughout the eighteenth century, services were conducted in German and the majority of records were kept in German...in 1819 church officials began keeping minutes and financial records in English. For a time, English and German were used alternately in services, but after 1830 English was used exclusively in worship and in most records. As late as the 1850s, however, many reports from domestic missionaries were written in German."

German sources of Pennsylvania Dutch and Mennonite thinking extended into the 20th century even if it seems hard to believe. The problem is exemplified in the wrestlings over language in the life of Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack (1836-1917). The lateness of his German was a product of his age and place especially. He was a youth in the beginning of the free school movement(c. 1835) and “in the community where his family grew up the Pennsylvania German language was so generally spoken that no one who remained in that section at the time learned to speak the English fluently” (Noah Mack, 11). But “another cause for him not attempting to learn English [was personal] his deep sense of correct speech and definiteness of expression. In himself he had developed well the real German” (Mack,12).

From 1880 to 1900 a kind of “realism” conditioned a notion among these Pennsylvanians that English speech was pretense, something you were not. Speak English, submit to fancy dress and thence an idea outside the communion followed by reluctance to submit to the fellowship at all. Fancy language, fancy thought: “in the mind of the older people in the church, English was considered almost a synonym for pride,” Noah Mack writes. “So it was the opposition to the English language sixty years ago [from the time of his writing in 1939] was so strong in the plain churches and others too” (Mack, 11).

For Andrew Mack, forty four in 1880, learning English well required some sacrifice for he had a ministry, a family, a trade and a farm, especially learning it well enough to suit his own standards. Noah seems a little severe with his father in this respect, taking the view that learning English is a moral thing. Maybe it was for Noah. [Andrew Mack] “seemingly would not muster courage to attempt to use a language which he knew he could use but very poorly to begin with. In the five years above referred to, Father Mack and the rest of the family could have gotten a good start in the English language but sentiment from without and fear from within prevented all of the family from thinking about such a thing as talking English to the family.” (12).

Cornelius Weygandt confirms the wide span of these German habits: “old ways, however, in household economy, in family government, in allegiance to church and political party, did persist among us longer than in almost any part of the country. Down to 1900 the standards and the ways of living were about what they had been for a century. We were still largely a farming people, with nearly all the old-country crafts demanded by a farming people descending from father to son among artisans who were also something of artists” (Weygandt, 5-6.

As Noah observes, all his father’s speaking “reading and meditations were in German’ (Mack, 4). “In preaching Bro. Mack used the scriptural German language well, which the German people enjoyed to hear much better than the Pennsylvania German’ (Mack, 7). Andrew's younger brother Henry shows what difference 18 years would make, for he spoke and wrote English fluently from the start. It’s not as though Andrew did not see the need to speak English, for he early sent his oldest son Noah to a school where everyone did so. While“he never lamented much, but it was noticeable that he much regretted the fact that in many places his services were no more practicable nor desirable because of the German barring him from being understood” (Mack).

The expectations of speaking and understanding German continued. Writing in 1939, the German undertow remains so strong that Noah Mack, who spoke English his entire life, lapses into incomprehensibility when he speaks of the dialect problem: “At a time the remark was made in the home; had we begun to talk English when there was one member of the family who could talk it and who taught it in school, who was in the home yet at the time; then father you could talk English too now. For he was only about forty years old when he sent his oldest son [Noah] to the English school” (Mack,
Noah gives his father’s response in untranslated form, assuming his readers understand it: “Yah over the Leut hette ghsawt, seht overmowl der Hochmuth, der Mack un sei Buva schwetza Englisch (11). Prior to 1900 no Pennsylvania Dutch native did not speak or understand some species of the German. A surprising percentage still then used it only, making them in Weygandt’s terms, “the most conservative people in America” (5), meaning that “people are doing there what they did in the days before the Mexican War” (5).

The Intellectual German

It seems odd that Franklin was able to convince his followers of the doltish image of the German when more and more modern scholars follow the lead of Stoudt and argue "there were German Americans in greater numbers than the English-speaking literati who were responsible for the development of a form of American romanticism known as transcendentalism" (Wentz, 25). The notion is that New England got its transplanted German romanticism a century after Pennsylvania got it native, but that the Dutch variety is "folk transcendentalism" not elitism.

The so called cultural inertia of Andrew Mack’s locale did not prevent his intelligence from profound opportunities to develop his gifts. It is decidedly of an individual kind. We can track his reading and thinking to some extent. His niece, Anna Bechtel Mack, brother Henry’s daughter, dearly wanted to emerge from the pejorative idea of this ethnic shadow, but when she lived with Andrew and Elizabeth Mack in 1886 and 1887 after her mother had died, she was deeply impressed with her uncle’s study habits and demeanor, remembers that “each day, after the noon meal, he would retire to the room where he had a roll-top desk, get out his Bible to study and read for an hour before he went back to the farm work” (BFF, 6). We might think this a recombinant Thoreau.

Throughout the time he served as bishop, Andrew Mack was also a farmer. Of these study habits, Noah Mack says that “his main reading book was the Bible,” that “he had presented to him Starks German commentary which had come down the years from one generation of ministers and bishops to another. He however made little use of it” (3). That he made little use of the commentary further reveals his methods. Even though “all his reading and meditations were in German,” insight came from the text and not from criticism of it making up his mind: “He was heard to say, ‘when scriptures are deep and difficult to interpret then commentators are cloudy and express themselves in many words and ofttimes have no clear interpretation and are undecided as to the real meaning of the Word’” (3). “His conviction was rather that commentaries are not of much help to those [for] whom preaching was primarily by the power of the Holy Ghost and who depended on the Spirit for interpretation and for revelation.”

An aid in this original form of study was Buchner’s concordance. “He made much use of his concordance in finding references in searching the scriptures bearing on the subject upon which he was meditating.” No doubt there were other books in his possession such as otherwise might occur in Mennonite libraries as we have seen, Wahren Christenthem. Die Wandelnde Seele, Pilgrim’s Progress, any of Henry Funk’s three works, The Imitation of Christ, various songbooks and Psalters (Alderfer, 8).

This kind of meditation and reflection, producing the knowledge from the inside not the outside was an early habit. Andrew Mack had apprenticed for “two to three years” as a carpenter with his uncle in cabinet making as a youth, working especially in the preparation of sashes and doors for houses built the next year. Son Noah says that he “followed it a few years but when he had a family, a small farm and the ministry he no longer followed the trade” (2). His habit then was what it was when he came in later from the fields for lunch. “He would carry a little pocket testament while at work and would refer to the Scriptures at spare moments” (3). These days this would mark him a fanatic, but then one could read and think without deconstruction.

Such habits give a sense of his mental acuity. He had a simple folk education, not in the Latin and Greek, but to the eighth grade, enhanced by his father, Jesse Moyer Mack, who “had taught during the transition period from the old subscription school to the free school system.” The workmanship of his sermons and letters evidenced the “deep sense of correct speech and definiteness of expression” (11) A test of this is his letters which show him a good writer and compassionate thinker. This seems important for the verbal facility it implies. We infer an intelligence which communicated itself well in everything he did, from seeking out “the benefit of the instruction of a well gifted and qualified teacher who taught in one of the public schools” (1), to his “developed vocal music in which he had a great delight and taught several singing classes which prepared him to be chorister for a number of years in the Hereford congregation, where he worshipped and served all his life time” (1). All the Mack brothers were musicians, singers and teachers of music.

He used the principle of induction to teach: “He would read his text, rarely mentioning the theme of his mind or subject upon which he was going to speak but generally those who could follow him would clearly understand at the close what his theme was.” “He possessed a distinct sense of definiteness” that measured his intellect. “He would not preach on any scripture or theme on which he had not a clear vision.” Thus, “his sermons were mostly textual.” “Papers with notes and references might be found about his place of meditation and study but he was not known to take any notes or outline along into the pulpit.” We of course know that such habits of the particular and definite are always the sign of a fine mind.

Why were “early European and American Mennonites (until recent years)…generally free of any doctrine of a millennium,” Wenger asks, (459), especially since millennialism with its counterpart of the tribulation was so much talk in the other Protestant denominations? Twentieth century North America saw dispensationalism spread into Mennonite churches through evangelical literature and conferences, Bible colleges and seminaries, but was not well established among the Old Mennonites.On non speculative matters Andrew Mack formed early conclusions. With all this he had a life long reputation for diplomacy and social and religious innovation. He advocated and practiced foot washing, missions and Sunday Schools well in advance of his own congregations, but waited until for signs of readiness before introducing these practices.

Of Dispensations and the Anglo Revivalist Theology

Although the Pennsylvania German and Mennonites generally held to a thousand period of peace, called chiliasm, the idea was a passive until the English theologian John Darby (d.1882) systemically defined it as a millennial reign. Mennonites considered much of this eschatology speculative, probably because they had an overwhelming vocation to live in the present. John Bechtel’s pondering such timetables or the lack of them in The Wandering Soul illustrates this retro Mennonite take on future things. It tells much about him and them. But then Mennonites often placed themselves outside the boundaries of popular thought, they did so with slavery and infant baptism, with social welfare and separation from the world, with nonresistance. Darby’s ideas of a rapture, tribulation and millennium began to be accepted in America in the 1880’s and 1890’s, but Old Mennonites resisted them(204,51,204)"Bishop Andrew Mack, ordained by John Bechtel we recall, a chief Mennonite, was a careful scholar who felt that difficult subjects could not be much elucidated by commentators. His means of inquiry were “reflection, meditation, study, self examination, prayer, and depending “on the Spirit for interpretation and for revelation” (Noah Mack, ).He would not promulgate a notion of the intellect he had not himself proved on its own merits. “He would not decide for himself nor for any other before he had found the answer himself to the satisfaction of his own mind,” says his son Noah. And again, “he would not reject nor accept before the question involved was cleared up in his own mind.”
Mack pondered the millennial doctrine all of his life, but “in his later years he once remarked in reference to this disputed question, "I am too old now I cannot get the points together to think it through. This was the last known word that he expressed on this question, but this was his rule in general.” Noah seems a little defensive for the sake of his father just because by the time he is writing, there was much more pressure to conform to the dispensational view.

Twentieth century dispensationalism made deep inroads in North American Mennonite churches through non-Mennonite literature and prophetic conferences, and through non-Mennonite Bible colleges and seminaries, leading to considerable dissension and controversy. Today relatively few Mennonite scholars espouse dispensationalism and it is advocated mainly by teachers and preachers who received their theological training in non-Mennonite schools. Ewert, David. "Dispensationalism." Canadian Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1989. Mennonite Historical Society of Canada. Retrieved 6 Oct 2005.

As late as 1933 the Rules and Discipline of the Franconia Conference urged that leaders “not speculate on unfulfilled prophecy as the doctrine of the Millennium” (Wenger 431). Why were “early European and American Mennonites (until recent years)…generally free of any doctrine of a millennium” (Wenger, 459)? Especially since this view with its counterparts of the tribulation etc. are the substance of so much talk in all other Protestant denominations. Shall we blame inertia, that the millennium was only invented so late, or is it that the Mennonites value, as Ruth says, less talk and more action.

Behind the times, behind the times, the languages, the doctrines, but not the heart and the life. Acknowledgments:

Many thanks to Isaac R. Horst for his provision of translations of the 49 Andrew Mack letters in the Mensch collection.

Joel Alderfer. “Several Documents Relating To Early Franconia Conference Mennonites.” Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania, Newsletter supplement, July 1984.
J. Paul Graybill, Ira D. Landis, J. Paul Sauder. Noah H. Mack His Life and Times, 1861-1948 Scottdale, PA.
">Noah H. Mack.
Andrew Stauffer Mack
1939)Written at the request of John D. Leatherman. Photocopy of ms. in the Goshen College Library.
The Letters of Andrew Mack excerpted from the Jacob B. Mensch Letter Collection in the Mennonite Heritage Center. Translated by Isaac R. Horst
J. C. Wenger.
History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference<. Scottdale, Pa.: Mennonite Publishing House, 1985.
">Cornelius Weygandt. The Red Hills Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929.
Anna Elizabeth Reiff Young.
Best Foot Forward. Manuscript biography of Anna Mack Reiff (1982).

Culture War II

A Case in Point

German sources of Pennsylvania Dutch thinking survived into the 20th century. The dilemma facing Mennonite Bishop Andrew Mack (1836-1917) illustrates this. His son, Noah Mack, says, all his father’s speaking “reading and meditations were in German” (Mack, 4). “In preaching Bro. Mack used the scriptural German language well, which the German people enjoyed to hear much better than the Pennsylvania German’ (Mack, 7). But the lateness of the Bishop’s non-English usage sticks out, especially since it limited his outreach, a product of his age and place, age because he was a youth in the beginning of the free school movement and place because “in the community where his family grew up the Pennsylvania German language was so generally spoken than no one who remained in that section at the time learned to speak the English fluently” (Mack, 11). More personal motives also occur, for “another cause for him not attempting to learn English was his deep sense of correct speech and definiteness of expression. In himself he had developed well the real German” (Mack, 12).

Andrew’s younger brother Henry Mack shows what a difference 18 years would make. Henry spoke and wrote English fluently from the start. It’s not as though Andrew Mack did not see the need for English, he early sent his oldest son Noah to a school where everyone spoke English: “he never lamented much, but it was noticeable that he much regretted the fact that in many places his services were no more practicable nor desirable because of the German barring him from being understood.”

Expectations of speaking and understanding German among these people were very strong. The German undertow is so strong that it overwhelms Noah writing in 1939, who spoke English his entire life. His English writing is generally clear, at least until the point where he speaks of this dialect problem. Then he lapses into incomprehension: “At a time the remark was made in the home; had we begun to talk English when there was one member of the family who could talk it and who taught it in school, who was in the home yet at the time; then father you could talk English too now. For he was only about forty years old when he sent his oldest son [Noah] to the English school.” Noah gives his father’s response to the question of speaking English in untranslated form, assuming his readers understand it: “Yah over the Leut hette ghsawt, seht overmowl der Hochmuth, der Mack un sei Buva schwetza Englisch” (11) [Yes, but the people said, 'look again at the attitude, Mack and his boy are talking / talk English.'] (courtesy of Joseph Salmons) Prior to 1900 it would perhaps be impossible to find a Pennsylvania Dutch native who did not speak and understand some species of the German. A surprising percentage still used only German, making them in Weygandt’s terms, “the most conservative people in America” (5), meaning that “people are doing there what they did in the days before the Mexican War” (5).

Speaking English was also complicated by religion. Even from 1880 to 1900 the pull of the German was strong. “In the mind of the older people in the church, English was considered almost a synonym for pride,” Noah Mack writes. “So it was the opposition to the English language sixty years ago [from his time of writing, 1939] was so strong in the plain churches and others too” (Mack, 11). That is, Mennonite “realism” conditioned the notion that speaking English was a pretense, because it was pretending to be something you were not. First a brother might speak English, but then came fancy dress, maybe an idea outside his own culture, followed also by reluctance to submit to the fellowship. Fancy language makes for fancy thought. The contradictions and conflicts of their identity were complex and widespread.

For Andrew Mack, already forty four in 1880, with a ministry, a family, a trade and a farm, learning English would have required sacrificing something else dear, especially learning it well enough to suit his own high standards. Noah seems a little severe with his father in this respect, taking the view that learning English is a moral good, which means that it was that for Noah. [Andrew Mack] “seemingly would not muster courage to attempt to use a language which he knew he could use but very poorly to begin with. In the five years above referred to, Father Mack and the rest of the family could have gotten a good start in the English language but sentiment from without and fear from within prevented all of the family from thinking about such a thing as talking English to the family...” (12).

3. Example from the Next Generation

Allegations that the English invented racism and spread it as a virus to other white new world immigrant groups, superceding their belief systems of acceptance of the stranger, true of many Pennsylvania groups, are the product of long meditation upon paradoxes expressed by native informants, to speak the sociology of it.

This understanding was a long time forming against the myriad sources of disbelief opposing such a proposition, for certainly no such idea was ever expressly uttered or implied from the sources. The opposite was the case. English was seen as the culture of choice, implying that all of art, education and desirable sophistication was English and the native German of no repute was to be rejected. Such statements and judgments were taken at face value for the longest time, but ultimately did not explain the mass of data and artifacts collected. Questions arose from the investigations then as to why such contradictory feelings existed that rejected their own past even while they could not outlive it, yet felt that they were culturally inferior. Anyone who has lived in American cultures besides the English sees this habit in full bloom in alcoholism among Indians and historic insecurity in many forms among hispanics and blacks. Truly the only exit from this oppression is confrontation even if it comes late.


The Prejudice Against the Body
Let it be said withal that English defamations of Indians, Germans and Irish were more famously a personification of the English themselves. Psychological pictures of Indians and wild men represented the Puritan fear that they sought to keep from entering outposts and towns. Such self prejudice was transferred to the Pennsylvania Dutch. Caricature, parody and shame, before the offer of assimilation, converted Dutch shame into a lingering symbol, alleged upon both their speech and physiognomy, to indict the universal peasant identified with New England’s dark nature.

If you were a German peasant you were ridiculed as being short, powerful and close to the ground. As the “realistic” Dutch subject might say, “short legs and powerful thighs are better for digging with shovels.” Humpty Dumpty would have nothing on this perfect peasant, round and stupid. The chain of association made short thighs and brutish body stand for a brutish mind. The Pennsylvania German mind, all along the target of the cultural war, was thus degraded by association with physiognomy. Short thighs equaled a short brain! The Dutchman was not supplied with cardinal virtues, but shamed with retrograde stubbornness, pride and separateness, irritating, petty and just plain thick headed, symbolized by fiction as late as 1942 inthe house frau, die Mem, the rough skinned ignorant universal farmer’s wife.

Apple in the Attic

Such an image of brutishness among an indefinite number occurs in Apple in the Attic: A Pennsylvania Legend, pervasive as late as 1942. Its heroine Emma is so dominated and peasantized she doesn’t even know she is pregnant as she compounds her fears with superstition. Apple in the Attic briefs the whole pantheon of stereotypes against the Pennsylvania German from the angry brutish husbands to the ugly broken skin and calloused hands of the wife.

It reads right out our informant’s feelings against Dutch language, customs and people, the product of the English/German cultural war. The only difference is that Elizabeth and her mother Anna were together in the front ranks striving for the rights and equality of women against these forces, even if they missed the greater English domination. In the novel Emma’s child Flora was the exact person Elizabeth abhorred being, “brought up on pap as a baby, soon graduated to sauerkraut and pretzels” (134). So while the novel panders stereotypes, and Emma in her attic of seclusion justifies them, they have nothing whatever to do with the real person. This Elizabeth, not of Her German Garden, a would be physician, never spoke a word in dialect, even if her mother understood it and her grandfather. A notable exception in this effort to overthrow English stereotypes was her mother’s stepmother, for grandfather Henry had remarried after his first wife died. The second wife was everything a stepmother is feared to be. Anna, the only daughter and the oldest, bore the brunt of government. We can hear it in Emma’s words above, “stop your vashing to change again zem didies” (122), but that’s more than taking the part for the whole.

Die mem had two more sons with Grandfather Henry after that who, while they achieved the peasant anatomy, being a little stout as she would say, were really smart and highly principled men, Philip Mack the millionaire, Harvey Mack, fulfilling his Mennonite vocation as an ambulance driver in WWI and afterward in the reconstruction of France.

This was replayed countless times across Pennsylvania before 1942, from the doll Flora wanted (165) to the Mother who is even more desperate to give it to her, a replica of Anna, to the hands, “tools of a farmer’s wife…these were not a woman’s hands, for they were too gross to be gentle” (144). Anna had had but one doll in childhood, given by her deceased mother, but showered dolls upon her daughters and when they were grown persisted as a folk doll artist, making doll clothes galore and giving many shows. Elizabeth, early a confirmed realist, naturally cared little for them.

Though temporarily vexed by her circumstances Anna still inherited the innate nobility of her Mack forebearers, those uncontentious gracious musicians and teachers, a side of the Pennsylvania German that English prejudice ignored from Franklin forward. If fleeing the farm was the message of the English, Anna got it and left. People have been reluctant to much admit this ethnic prejudice, but were victims of it, all the while internalizing it more.

It’s easy today to be facetious about such attitudes. Elizabeth’s own defense against the imposed peasant stereotypes and norms was caustic humor. Her approach-avoidance of folk life and folk art was like to her ambivalence the stereotyped uneducated Mennonite. She called herself “a mashed potato baby,” made it a negative myth of childhood that her people were all peasants with stubby fingers, thick thighs and heavy accents. This English loathing was translated in sayings like, “mashed potatoes were a substitute for mother’s milk for Pennsylvania Germans.”
“They called me chubby baby.”
“My legs were slightly uneven making me a little clumsy.”
“I wasn’t muscular.”
“I was a mashed potato baby.”
>She had a surgeon’s hands and mind but denied it: “I have peasant hands, short stubby fingers.”

The prejudice was not all learned; some was experienced in high school after WW I, vaguely suspect of being Germanic, she felt implicated in the lingering prejudice of supposed 5th column movements, further efforts to destablize the republic, as well as by the failure of Mennonites to baptize infants as all her friends had been done.

So even if the men of the Mack family were tall and finely tuned as they were, she charged them with shortness. "Henry had suits made to order. He was long from the waist to the knee, had heavy thighs." But Henry was a lousy farmer. “They weren’t athletes." Her nephew and his family were the only athletes she had heard of. She did not live to see her great nephew Andrew compete in the USTA Super Nationals. She also included her other grandfather in this indictment, defendant Jacob L. and his son, Howard, her father, storekeepers, “stocky, thick.” None of this was applied much however to the women, except herself.
“My family never had any growth spurts.”
“It’s an ethnic thing,” she maintained.
"I have a peasant body."
As though she foresaw this concern over the vexation of the body and wanted to further document it, she wrote, “my grandparents were farmers, but both my mother and my father had moved from Berks County to the city before they married in 1906. I was born in Philadelphia and attended Philadelphia schools, but I can claim all the virtues as well as the shortcomings of the Pennsylvania Dutch. One writer says ‘they have their admirable features including frugality, tenacity and an extraordinary sense of community, but they can be irritating, petty and just plain thick headed as most of their neighbors will testify at length.
At the end of that talk she gave at Strathaven High School in 1991 the virtues and shortcomings were still in conflict. She said, “as times have changed, we have stopped feeling inferior because of our peasant ancestry.” But that is the point, for they did not.

Her facetious boasting of opposites is doubtless another sign of intelligence, for she made English prejudice a joke, crowed that her people had been peasants born of peasants before Charlemagne. Teasing, she would look down the nose to see if one believed it. Of course, aping the peasant has been good business for artists since the Impressionists who went native, but even in poverty, even in the country, on the farm, artists have no doubt who the true aristocrats are, that is themselves, those who see, hear and think things the plebeian can't, the immense world of delight compassed by the senses five.So her insistent claim to peasant hood was always a high class put on, yet insisted upon to the end. Sure, her grandfather, Henry Mack, did a tour on the farm, but her mother Anna escaped and this daughter never milked a cow.

Reconcile the Paradox
If you reconcile these paradoxes you have the case in point, the last Dutchman of nine generations of vested folk identity and an artist trained and meticulous who negates both. That almost makes her more interesting than if she had affirmed both. Of course she denies this in interesting ways because her folk nature and the credentials of eye and mind persist.

We can undeniably generalize this as an identity conflict and take it that such contradiction results from the shame and prejudice directed against us all when we are living contradictions and affirmations of ourselves, our families and our physical and mental beings. But if we are going to excavate the folk identity beneath the layers of prejudice we can’t entirely believe the reports given us. The task is to work through the details, which, when framed properly in context, give opportunity to reconstruct the life that was, leaving us better able to solve the life that is.

So as la ast Dutchman in a family of only Dutchmen for nine generations, agonized by stories of farm drudgery, poverty and cultural isolation, this past conflicted strongly with her ideals. She believed it preempted her from becoming a physician. She knew Latin and read literature, but feared the lingering effects of the Pennsylvania ethos. Conflicted by her perception of every positive and negative trait of her Pennsylvania Dutch identity, she was a born artist. These contradictions preoccupied her in a speech at a local high school. She wrote in a draft that “the human urge to create something beautiful has always given the world artists, composers, musicians, architects, furniture makers, dress designers and a long list of others who have spent their lives in the pursuit of beauty.Not the Pennsylvania Dutch! Their harsh existence kept them busy supplying the needs of family and community without much thought for beauty

Such contradictions are a prime element of the “Dutch,' who above all else have always and only been preoccupied with beauty as a concern of everything she did. Graduating high school at 15 She immediately entered the Moore Institute of Design for Women, this born genius, but fond of boasting the opposite: “I was realistic enough to realize I wasn’t a genius, only a medium talent. On the piano I could only play hymns for Sunday school.” At the end of her life she even declared, “I’m very thankful to be realistic. I tell people I’m dying of cancer." The doctors at this stage were as suspicious of the cancer as the analysis is of these beginnings. Three months following the diagnosis of the most inoperable and untreatable pancreatic cancer, already spread extensively to the liver, no symptoms had appeared at all. The doctors wanted more tests, but she would give none. It took twice over this span for her to succumb.

She maintained contradictorily that she had been born of a long line of peasants. But her maternal grandfather’s family, the Macks were teachers from before the beginning of the free school movement in Pennsylvania, and also pastors and musicians for generations, even-minded and thoughtful people. Her maternal grandmother Elizabeth Bechtel likewise inherited books inscribed by family members of four generations of Mennonite pastors, from at least the 1780’s.

Her grandfather Henry Mack was a school teacher, as was his brother Peter Mack from 1860-1870, before becoming a pastor. Peter, and Andrew Mack, the oldest brother, were Lutheran and Mennonite clergy respectively. Her great uncle Andrew Mack, a cabinet maker, was the most significant leader and diplomat for 19th century Mennonites. All three of these brothers left their thoughts in written form. Bishop Andrew Mack left 49 letters, 1870-1906, courtesy of the Jacob Mensch collection. Peter left a diary, kept from 1870 until his premature death in 1878. Henry kept detailed ledgers of his activities from the age of 21, 1875 until 1900 and also compiled the Record of Tombstone Inscriptions / Old Mennonite Cemetery of the Hereford Congregation of Mennonites (1934) an invaluable preservation of the identity of these early settlers.

The musical aptitude of her background further contridictss the boast of peasantry. Grandfather Henry was a “chorister and musical director in many [Mennonite] churches in this part of the state” (obituary). He and his brother Andrew Mack, the Mennonite bishop, had been choristers since 1860 (Wenger, 120). Likewise, Peter Mack was “an accomplished musician.” Her own brother, Howard, assistant VP of Bell, was a devoted lifelong chorister who married the daughter of the Philadelphia architect, Edwin A. Yeo. A cousin by marriage, Anthony J. Loudis, graduated Juilliard in 1928 in piano and composition, took advanced degrees at Columbia and was chairman of the University of Delaware music department. Another cousin, Noah K. Mack, M. B. E., physician graduate of Hahnemann Medical School in 1937, was a Mennonite medical missionary in Tanzania for 14 years before becoming the sole doc of Morgantown, Pa. Her sister was a groundbreaking author with a graduate degree, chairman of home economics education of the Wilmington school district. Her mother was a tailor, dress designer and a woman of great independence of character, a Mennonite Mary Shelley instilling the rights of women in her daughters. Surrounded by excellence and thoughts of beauty of every kind, her people were not even pretend peasants.

So these lives and their response to prejudice may be like the parable of a Henry James story, mysterious if explained. Or it be a case of the mystery of coincidence like the supposed Shakespearean authorship of Psalm 46 translated in the King James Version. Yes, evidence can be cited, parallels in the Sonnets and the Plays can support this translation of the psalm, leaving a signature if you count 46 words from beginning and end. But these supposed facts belie the most obvious one that in every English translation before the King James Version this supposed “code” was just a word or two from being sprung. So is the peasant, artist, intellectual in denial a representative of her people, an even greater mystery put that way, a metaphor of her life, with a basement and attic filled with facts extracted as inferences on the floors between.

Works Cited

Mildred Jordan. Apple in the Attic. A Pennsylvania Legend. NY: Knopf, 1942.
Peter Mack. Cited in Souvenir History of Zion Lutheran Church 1753-1893.
John Joseph Stoudt.Pennsylvania German Folk Art Allentown, PA: Schlechter’s
1966.

Frederick S. Weiser in The Pennsylvania-German Decorated Chest by Monroe H. Fabian. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd.

J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.

Cornelius Weygandt. The Red Hills. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1929.

The Loss of German Devotional Ways

The relation of Pennsylvania Germans to decoration greater than tulips, hearts, stars and crowns, or Mennonites turning flowers into bookmarks to bring paradise indoors, or linens, furniture and pottery of communal tulips that migrate from paper to linen to wood, or even letters filled with swirls and stipples that whirl under signatures in descending spirals has as much to do with the absence of these things as with their presence, the plainness of a board, the cut of a lapel, whether cap or bonnet or hat, Christmas cookies at play and glee, but in a life capable of belief, an inner spiritual form and force from which the outward material surface of reality proceeds, the greater decoration is the less.

“Are there also men who are not conscious of possessing a higher spirit than brutes, and yet maintain, that they can keep their minds in a good state of rest in this life?” This question is in one of the books. Plain folk means black suit and dress, but what are they hiding? Is it something you can't see, invisible or covered up? To hide in a rough brown cabinet wood handled tools, embroidered linens in trunks on metal rollers, pottery in wardrobes, unknown, unsigned, eponymous paradox, hand painted china, hand made dresses.

The loss of German devotional ways goes to the heart of the loss of folkways, art, language and culture. What indeed were the picture oriented, word oriented, Bible centered devotional ways that Yoder ties to the roots of fraktur in Central Europe from the sixteenth century, expressed in fraktur in calligraphy and symbols "from the tombstone to the barn," he says, "the six-pointed star with its variations, the tulip-rose-lily, the tree of life" (272)? He supposes a disagreement between experts to preserve an objective distance. Choose among Stoudt's "brand of Christian mystical theology leading down from medieval Catholic mystics to Boehme and the Pietist hymnists of the seventeenth century" (274), a less Catholic, more Protestant church or sect, or a cast off pagan origin of hex signs. Pretend choices matter little to the survival or demise of devotional outlooks that fraktur exemplifes with all the other forms of folk art in this tradition. He admits, "the devotional life of the Pennsylvania Germans centered around Bible, hymnbook, and prayerbook, and strangely enough, fraktur" (275), which was "needed in the culture that produced it. It was a visual, moral, and religious symbol of the individual's relation to the institutions within the folk culture--the church, the school, and the family" (275). Except it was a symbol of relation to the natural world.

Origins

The outlook that informs these arts stems from the devotional classics found in that culture, which existed when fraktur was flourishing, "approximately from the 1750's to the 1850's" (274), always allowing precursors and survivals. Even if today these classics in German are scarce to find, they were commonplace, often reprinted. A typical small holding of books, not as an example of a library so much as a pretext of exploring devotional attitudes, takes us into the history of the 3151 books and almanacs printed in the German language in America between 1728 and 1830, most issued in Pennsylvania. Certain titles were continually reprinted, popular depending on the community, handed down on the basis of family association and particular esteem. These were further identified by the signatures of their owners as they passed through the generations. Samplings of Mennonite libraries of that era show that two dozen books in 1800 was a large number.

If we focus on selected contents of those books and their teachings the chief among them must be Johann Arndt’s, Wahren Christenthem (True Christianity). In mid 18th century Pennsylvania, Lutheran pastor Muhlenberg equated Arndt’s book with the Bible: “…take hold of the Holy Bible and True Christianity every day….” (Journals I, 219). But if we want to know its particular attraction, in truth it was the same motive that formed the domestic arts from fraktur to embroidery, that is, the central principle was an inner life, a thought life maintained by continuous meditation of the good. From this proceeds all those images of paradise that abound in Dutch art, but in Ardt there is a nemesis of this meditation because it is made difficult by counterfeits in the mouths of those who profess that very good, but do not present it in their lives. The chief attribute of the good begs to be called “mystical union," which the critics do call it, except wrong headedly invert its meaning. Arndt holds that wrestling with nemesis of all kinds in this is its proof, that is the production of a continual reassurance of joy. What bridges the feeling of union, which is everything, with its absence, is faith. That faith does not require feeling, is a paradox because without feeling where is the faith? So to paraphrase the process it is as if you wake up one day and have an inner life, where inner means beautiful, good, wholesome, joyful, but you don't naturally know where it comes from. Those who speak of it do so to betray it, but even poetically expressed the stages that critics offer in analysis as stages in the process, that is, purgation, illumination, and union, mean nothing because they are reversed. Arndt holds union as the eternal state of waking in a day, but the day is a decade, suddenly, as a tree turns seed to sapling to rough bark. Then you have an inner life where prayers are answered and you are weak as cloth which a tide of trust carries out to sea and back.

If this sounds a presumptuous claim as union with God, impossible to reason unless as product of effort or exercise, Arndt answers that union with God is accomplished solely through union with God, not by effort, but effortlessness, like some notion of backing a horse into the stable forwards. As explanation of such things people today are fond of calling on such authorities as the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who cites a similar paradox in the problem of language in describing the dual nature of matter and radiation: “it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time” (10-11). We are maybe more used to duality in physics than the beginning and end of unity in Arndt as a problem of language, that is, doing and not doing simultaneously. How resist the temptations of zen? By faith the believer is incorporated into Christ through the Spirit as Arndt places mystical union at the beginning of the Christian life not the end.

To jump ahead, one of the last such Dutch resorts of faith and doctrine was the popular catechism, Christliches Gemuths-Gesprach by Gerhard Roosen. The English translation, Christian Spiritual Conversation. First authorized in 1856, the takes a reasoned appeal to nature.

Question: “Are there also men who are not conscious of possessing a higher spirit than brutes, and yet maintain, that they can keep their minds in a good state of rest in this life.”

Answer: “whenever any of these men become of another and a better mind, and get into other reflections, (which cannot take place, however, without divine agency) and continue in them,--they will come not only to a knowledge of the nature of their condition, but also to a knowledge of themselves, and their higher spirit….

Question: “in what then, does man’s true knowledge of himself consist?

Answer: This knowledge consists in two things 1. to know that of and from himself he has no power to do or understand any thing, either in matters external or spiritual. 2. To have a knowledge of his transitory and troublesome state of life” (5-6).


Cited

Werner Heisenberg. The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1930.

The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Camden, Maine: Picton Press. Fortress Press, 1942.

The Library of Elisabeth Bechtel

They were a family of old Mennonite ministers in the Hereford area of Pennsylvania. Especially John B. Bechtel, Anna Mack's grandfather, had four titles from the 1830’s and before, the earliest being 1745, given nominally to his daughter, Elisabeth Longacre Bechtel (8 February 1852 – 22 April 1885). These, along with New Testaments, Mennonite song books and catechisms of the 1870’s with Elisabeth Bechtel’s inscription, were found in the attic of her daughter Anna (1880-1970) long after both she and her mother had died. Elisabeth's husband’s name, Henry Mack, is stamped in one and two others are inscribed by Anna, but the works from the 1830's contain the names of her mother, father and grandfather. Elisabeth seems to be their common denominator, but some are the professional books of a minister. Considering that other members of the family were also clergy additional books were in the family’s possession. These kept by or for the daughter may be explained by early mortalities in the family. Elisabeth Bechtel herself died prematurely in 1885.

We document this provenance for its own sake, but it leads also to an understanding of the loss of the devotional ways, so has a wider interest. John Bechtel and his wife had eight children, but five died before their parents, including Elisabeth. How then were the books passed down? Elisabeth's mother, Mary, who lived until 1898, left them as a keepsake for her grand daughter, Anna Bechtel Mack, “on her 21st birthday Anna inherited several hundred dollars from her maternal grandmother” (Elizabeth Reiff) . The books slept incognito a hundred years. Left to Anna they were in turn left to her daughter Elizabeth. They were not opened much in that time, those secrets of past owners’ lives.

The most important name in the transmission is John B. Bechtel, who acquired Johann Arndt’s, Wahren Christenthem at the estate sale of his father’s library. He wrote on the first free endpaper in English and German, “Bought at the Sale of my dec’d Father Abm. C. Bechtel Nov the 15th 1861 / John B. Bechtel /paid $1.00 / one of the administrators.” On the paste down his father had written, “Subscriber /Abraham C. Bechtel / January the 26th 1833."

Abraham C. Bechtel (1776 -1861) is not to be confused with his father, minister Abraham Bechtel (1749-1815), trustee in 1780 for an acre of land given by Henry Stauffer for the Colebrookdale meetinghouse (Wenger, 251, 121). Abraham C. 's brother, Bishop John C. (Clemens) Bechtel (1779-1843), was also a "preacher at Hereford in 1816 and bishop in 1830" (Wenger, 251) whose son, the above John B. Bechtel (1807-1889), was ordained at Hereford in 1848. To fully account the four generations of Bechtel Mennonite pastors, John B. Bechtel's grandson, Henry G. Bechtel (b. 1878) was ordained a minister at Vincent in 1914.

The Arndt work that Abraham C. subscribed had two parts bound in one, 941 and 232 pages respectively, with 2 copper-engraved title pages and 63 full-page woodcut emblems. It is commonly said to have been the most frequently used devotional book for more than two centuries among Mennonites. Three German editions appeared in Philadelphia and Germantown prior to this one, Ben Franklin’s (1751), Christopher Saur’s (1765) and Johann Georg Ritter's, 1830. In mid 18th century Pennsylvania, Lutheran pastor Muhlenberg said of Arndt’s book, “take hold of the Holy Bible and True Christianity every day" (I, 219).

Regardless of how much of Arndt's views are implicit in Abraham C. Bechtel’s subscription of Wahren Christenthum, the separation between priesthood and laity was slight for Mennonites who expected to be ordained if their name were chosen out of a hat. In this election anyone might serve as much anyone could democratically begin such a union. Most of Bechtel’s family and the community at large would be so inclined. Such views and practices underlay Mennonites claim to peace. So the secret life of a mystic is revealed in owning a book? At least in what we can know, John B. Bechtel was important in sustaining the continuity of Hereford Mennonites. He may be compared with George Clemens Reiff in Skippack who served a like preserving function among Mennonites during the Oberholtzer schism of 1848. Christian Clemmer, who had been the pastor in Hereford, went with Oberholtzer's “New” Mennonites and Bechtel was elected his successor.

On 17 January 1852, John B. Bechtel of the Old order, paid to the New $75.00 for its one half interest in the old meetinghouse…” (Good, 19). Bechtel wrote that Clemmer “publicly denounces us from the pulpit as trouble makers and good-for-nothings” (Ruth, 283), but in testimony for a Supreme Court of Pennsylvania Appeal (Samuel H. Landis et al. vs. Henry H. Borneman et al.) (1883), Bechtel conciliates that "the object of the conference is to keep the congregations[s] together and to promote unity of opinion, and if any trouble arises to consider and adjust them" (Wenger, 51-52).

This lot that fell to John B. Bechtel at age 41 in this crisis in 1848 does not prove he had been yearning for the call, but his annotation of Die Wandelnde Seele in 1835 suggests he was perhaps a Mennonite philosopher. There are several different signatures in it, implying group study. His own many signatures and the comment, “a very useful book” signify his interest. The title from the first English translation of 1834 is, The Wandering Soul; or, Dialogues Between the wandering Soul and Adam, Noah, and Simon Cleophas Comprising A History of the World, Sacred and Profane From the Creation Until the Destruction of Jerusalem. Two copies remain among those attic books in German, 1833 and 1834. That of 1833 is heavily inscribed by both Bechtel and his wife Mary.

In fact he has signed it three times, first with wife, Mary L., on the front pastedown in English and in German. Aross from these signatures, on the first free endpaper, he writes with a flourish in both languages, “Wandering Soul / a very useful book.” Turning the page, he signs again in German in pencil on the verso while the recto of the second free endpaper, utterly certain to establish ownership, writes large in English, in ink with a flourish, “John B. Bechtel / February the 13th 1835.”

The Wandering Soul had great popularity among Mennonites. Written in Holland in 1635 by Dutch Mennonite Jan Philips Schabaelje, translated into German, it was published in seven different editions in Pennsylvania from 1767 to 1833. It is cited today in the debate over dispensationalist theology, that is, of the last days. Wandering Soul has even been reissued by Preterists, who hold the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD fulfilled the major part of The Apocalypse of St. John hence that the last days have already occurred. In its fictional account of world history, Wandering Soul supports aspects of preterism concerning Jerusalem as opposed to dispensationalism, an English theology that only began to effect Mennonites after the English revivalism was adopted by Mennonites in the 20th century.

The oldest title in that attic collection is Die Ordnung des Heils nach dem Catechifmo Lutheri. (Bernigeroda, 1745), a technical commentary on Luther’s catechism, with a long preface by Samuel Lau and many contemporary notes in the margins in ink. The Order of Heaven is externally identified three different ways. It is signed on the first free endpaper “Benj. German,” presumably the first owner. There is a book plate on the rear pastedown, “Bibliothek, Pastor G. R. Brobft,” and it is signed in pencil “W. W. Deistler(?). The extensive notes in ink suggest it was used for instruction and that it belonged to a pastor, as indeed the bookplate states, but another bookplate of a Pastor Brobft, on the Lutherifche Kalender of 1875, identifies a “Paftor G. R. Brobft & Co.” a bookseller in Allentown, Pa. (See, Almanacs in the George A. Smathers Libraries Rare Book Collection) but other such calendars exist as early as 1854: Der Lutherische Calender fuer das Jahr 1854


This book certainly could have belonged to Elizabeth Bechtel’s brother in law, Peter Mack, Lutheran pastor at Hummelstown before his premature death in 1879, possibly retrieved by Henry Mack, the dates for this are right, or it too could be from the library of John B. Bechtel.

Wahren Christenthem and Die Wandelnde Seele are landmarks of German pietism much appreciated by Mennonites but not in themselves Mennonite in nature. They represent a mystical-evangelical outlook, the desire for a deeper, more genuine spirituality, much in the air in the 1830s as really almost always among Mennonites who examine every boundary between their faith and the world.

Most of the books of Elizabeth Bechtel’s time and before are in German, but she was literate in English as her father seems to have been. Her signature occurs in German “Elizabeth S. Bechtel” and opposite, in English, “Lizzie S. Bechtel" on successive free end papers, in the German / English New Testament (1870). It seems her father’s family spoke both languages and her husband’s entire ledger is in English.

There are two other testaments. One has no date or marks of any kind. Das Neue Testament. Philadelphia: Georg W. Mentz (J. Howe, stereotyper), 1831 [504pp with plates]. has a name in German written twice on the front free endpaper and is dated, January 1836. There is a blue paper cutout marker at p. 189. George Mentz, the publisher and bookbinder, was not a printer. He used a variety of Philadelphia-based printers to print his books.

All of this collection has been kept for a purpose. Two identical copies of Die Kleine Geistliche Harfe der Kinder Zions (Lancaster, 1870), leather bound with clasps, stand side by side. Zion’s Harfe, (Zion’s Harp) was the Franconia Mennonite Conference hymnal. It had 40 select Psalms in a first section, followed by 474 hymns in a second section under a new title, with some variation in the later editions.

These two copies belonged to Henry Mack and Elizabeth Bechtel, evidently when they were courting. Elizabeth’s is signed “Lizzie L. Bechtel / Feb 11th ’72,” His is stamped with his name “Henry S. Mack.”

Henry was a chorister, his obituary says that he was “active in Mennonite church work for 60 years, serving as chorister and musical director in many churches in this part of the state.” The historian Wenger calls him and his brother, Andrew Mack, choristers since 1860 (120) so obviously he loved music. He led the singing the whole of his life in several different congregations (Wenger, 120). Henry kept their songbooks together all the years after Elizabeth had died.

New testaments and hymn books were standard fare in Mennonite families, as were catechisms. One of the most popular catechisms was the Christliches Gemuths-Gesprach (1869) by Gerhard Roosen. (Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1869). This has been signed on the first free end paper, “Annie B. Mack / Mar 7 1897.

The English translation, Christian Spiritual Conversation (Lancaster, Pa. John Baer’s Sons, 1892.) is also signed, “Annie B Mack. 1897” on the first front free endpaper, A couple of pages are bookmarked, p. 84, on the baptism of small children and p. 292, “On Predestination.” (Cited in Funk )

The titles themselves tell a tale. Another popular devotional in the collection is a dual language German-English translation of Habermann’s Prayers of 1873: MORNING AND EVENING / PRAYERS / FOR EVERYDAY OF THE WEEK / BY / /DR JOHN HABERMANN. (Philadelphia, IG. Kohler, 1873). This is initialed in pencil on the second front free endpaper, “AM,” that is, Annie Mack. If we think that the use of a book tells us something of the user then we note that several pages are dog eared,. Especially notable this way is p. 103, “prayer of a child” in which we see perhaps the wrestling of the young Annie, beset with difficulty with her stepmother yet trying to subdue herself to the good:

“Give me an obedient heart that I many patiently obey, serve and show myself obliging and ready to do every thing which they desire, that is not contrary to the will of God, nor at variance with my soul’s salvation, so that I may receive their blessing and live a long and pleasant life. Protect me against sin and evil society, so that I may not provoke and grieve my parents with hatred, sadness, unfriendliness, contempt, disobedience and stubbornness, so that I may not bring upon myself here on earth both their and thy curse….”

So these books are a window to the past and as we see through them we want to ask further of Elizabeth Bechtel, who lived from 1852 to 1885, whether her love was great enough to live even longer, to leave a testament of herself for future centuries, she for whom otherwise all we know is little else than that she had red hair and was one of 8 children?

John and Mary Bechtel buried five of these eight children, all those whose birth and death dates are known, two at Christmas, but they themselves lived into their eighties. That they both signed their names together in the frontis of Die Wandelnde Seele fifty years before is sheer luck, but more than that. Together the events speak of a great faith and a greater love. These did not fail them, even if they seemed to. How could they have believed that even with the loss of their daughter Elizabeth in 1885 they would be honored more than a century later, that their lives would be remembered and in some measure restored. Unbelievable, that their love for each other would be celebrated at some 150th wedding anniversary.

The tragedies in these lives are all too evident, but what about the triumphs, the enthusiasms, the love? When things look bad, when Elizabeth had died, it was the very darkest. We learn from them that that’s when you most need to find the love and faith to believe it will be all right, because it will be. The unbelievable promise to a thousand generations is partly fulfilled in the ten from now until someone, some family member, stands in your place and remembers you. We learn to be strong in the midst of pain and sorrow. It’s going to be all right. Believe in your children, in yourself, in God.

Postscript

Anna’s family, Bechtels, Longacres, Stauffers, Macks, imbibed pretty deeply from the pietists’ well. Pastors and schoolteachers, they were practical intellectuals, an important glue of the infrastructure. Elizabeth Bechtel’s death diminished this because the reading and thinking that concerned her daughter Anna was of a different sort, for her mother was not there to buffer the child from the difficulties of younger brothers, step mother, farm bother and little schooling. It was in Anna to want education because it was in her family, but her literary remains are sparse. She had few books growing up, although Henry’s Ledger mentions a few schoolbooks, but no fairy tales. Aside from the catechisms of 1897 above there is only an Appleton’s Third Reader, dated Oct 28, 1889.

Anna’s hunger for the life of the mind was evident not only in her conversation of later years but also in the books she got her daughters that tell the story of what she missed. She could not have been more proud when she complained she lost her daughter when she began to read at the age of two, nor done any more to have fostered imaginative delight in her.

Her daughters’ childhood reading included:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Elizabeth Reiff / June 19, 1917. / From Mrs. Lenters.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “To Elizabeth / From Mother / Dec. 25, 1917.”

Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper and other Stories. “Dec. 1915. Elizabeth Reiff.”

Raggedy Ann Stories. “Florence M. Reiff.”

A Child’s Garden of Verses. Robert Louis Stevenson. “Florence M. Reiff / 3319 N 15th St.”

Oliver Twist, inscribed “A. Elizabeth Reiff.”

Little Women and Little Men, both inscribed “Elizabeth Reiff.”

Longfellow’s Evangeline.

Aurand’s Collection of Pennsylvania German Stories and Poems.

Yes there is a Pilgrim’s Progress, a Bible given by her grandfather in 1926, but Anna’s attempts to nurture imagination in Elizabeth were more thwarted by that child’s love of the rational than they were for lack of imaginative reading, what she herself called “realism,” giving no quarter to the fantastic or whimsical. Alice fell on fallow ground where William Osler would have flourished. In her last years Elizabeth read Malamud’s The Fixer with pleasure, liked translations of the Aeneid, Tolstoy, Dickens. Her theological exposure, reading and understanding was pretty circumscribed however, an aversion probably gained from her mother’s milk. She hardly knew Wahren Christenthum and Die Wandelnde Seele were even in her attic let alone that they were signed by her ancestors who engaged in their own lively thoughts.

We can trace these books through their holders, Anna Bechtel Mack for instance, whose two uncles, Andrew, a Mennonite and Peter a Lutheran, were both ministers along with her Mennonite Bechtel uncle, grandfather and great grandfather. She was surrounded with clergy. The Bechtels left Anna a small collection of books through her grandmother Mary.

Cited

Johann Arndt. Wahren Christenthem Sechs Bucher vom Wahren Christentum…Nebst DessenParadiesgartliein (Four Books Concerning True Christianity).Philadelphia: Georg W. Mentz und Sohn, 1832.
German/English New Testament. New York: American Bible Society, 1870.
Douglas L. Good. The Growth of a Congregation. A History of the Hereford Mennonite Church. 1988.
The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Camden, Maine: Picton Press. Fortress Press, 1942.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. 1985.
John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984.

Bechtels of Old Mennonite Hereford, PA

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