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The Online Journal of Everett Charles Albers: A Daughter’s Perspective
Or, Inside the Garden of the Universe “There is great comfort in absolute conviction, but at a cost to the human spirit.” — Everett C. Albers journal Some folks around this state knew Everett Albers as the long-time, first director of Humanities North Dakota, serving from its inception in 1974 up until his death in 2004. I knew him as my dad. And, since I was blessed—or maybe burdened—with the responsibility of being a memory-keeper in my family, I wanted to offer some context for the essays that follow. |
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My dad Ev wrote and published these journal entries as a daily blog post, uploading the first essay in late September 2002—shortly after his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer—and the last one in April 2004, before he died from his then-metastasized cancer at our home in Bismarck. Sometimes he wrote them on his laptop from the car, as my mom would drive him from Bismarck to Zion, Illinois, for treatment. Sometimes he wrote from home, when he had been laid low with chills and fever. A surprisingly large proportion of the time, however, he wrote from his office, where he continued to report every day he could drag himself there.
I’ve often thought that my dad kept this journal—and kept going to work every day—at least partly just to keep his sanity. As he explains in his first entry, the diagnosing doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, gave him no more than three months to live. In the early mornings of each day, rather than letting his brain be consumed with regret and worry, my dad pulled references and fact-checked the snippets of poetry, the excerpts of novels and memoirs, and the academic works and song lyrics that wove through his memories and appeared in his journal entries. It took work to write and publish an essay each day—and work had always been my dad’s main antidote for keeping demons of the mind at bay. When the body that perhaps he’d never treated all that gently or kindly betrayed him, work was where my dad defiantly turned.
Ultimately, Dad lived about a year and a half, outlasting the Mayo’s predictions about six times over. Likely, his survival was due to the interventions of doctors at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, where my dad received an experimental form of chemotherapy that was intended, if not to shrink the tumor to where it could be surgically removed (that never succeeded), then to at least to deter it from spreading. He wore the machine that administered the chemo in a fanny pack, from which a tube travelled up to a stint in his chest. The skin around the portal often became infected, and so, more and more frequently as the months passed, did his blood. His hair stayed in place, but the weight melted off my dad’s once-robust frame. The blood infections, the fevers, the chills, the malaise, and most of all, the uncertainty over whether any of the chemo that made him so unwell would ultimately matter—for my dad, hope for the future came at a mighty big cost.
Once he began writing and publishing his work every day, he kept writing, and he kept wanting, I think, to be known. To be remembered. Those who did know him would recall that my dad was a behind-the-scenes man. Not at all egotistical. Content to let the limelight shine on others, while he toiled like a farmer, retiring to his books in bed ridiculously early each night so that he could wake before dawn and drive across town to the office. Although he could be gregarious—I’d say charming, and maybe even a bit of an over-talker at conferences and events—my dad, in his day to day, lived like a hermit monk.
I don’t recall ever hearing, a single time, my dad complain that he hadn’t been recognized for something, or adequately compensated for something, or acknowledged or thanked for anything. In my dad’s worldview—and here is a North Dakotan value if there ever was one—work was to be done well, for the work’s sake.
And yet in these essay, my dad wrote about himself. He wrote about his life and the people and places that had shaped him. The personal and familial history that wove its way into these essays holds perhaps the most resonance for me, and could maybe use the most context, as it is a world which is slipping away, little by little, with every elder North Dakotan that we lose.
In his journal, my dad referred to mixed farm on which he was raised, in the rural township of Hannover in Oliver County, west-central North Dakota, as “the garden of the universe.” This statement, some of you will immediately guess, held just the tiniest, smallest hint of sarcasm. As my dad put it in his journal, “The ties to the submarginal land where my father walked and planned on next year’s crop up until he died in his late 70s defy explanation. They are the hills lying about ten miles west and south of where the mighty Missouri bends at the place where Lewis and Clark wintered in 1804–1805—then the center of civilization in the American West, the trading center where lived the Mandan and Hidatsa. On average one crop in three will fail because of drought or destruction by hail.”
My dad had a deep respect for the Native cultures of North Dakota, and his essays reveal that he never lost sight of the fact that his German immigrant ancestors were intruders on the land where they tried—and often failed—to make a living. By the late 1880s, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota people had been forced to cede their rights to much of what would become western North Dakota—rights the U.S. government had only recently affirmed in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie—and were confined to reservations whose borders were steadily shrinking. On the Fort Berthold reservation to the north of Hannover, and the Standing Rock Sioux reservation to the south, Native peoples of North Dakota were undergoing an assault on their way of life designed to force them to adopt the values of private land ownership and the Christian religion.
None of these events were of much concern to the German immigrants who settled in Hannover, who already possessed these values in their fullest expression. Homesteading, for my dad’s predecessors, meant a chance at land ownership and independence, an opportunity to recreate the communities of family farmers as they had known them in their home villages of Germany. Everett’s paternal great-grandfather, Henry Albers, left his home of Hannover, Germany, at age sixteen and was a sailor for nine years. Eventually immigrating to Chicago, he married a woman who had also come from Hannover. They took up a homestead in the new community of Hannover, Dakota Territory, in 1885—most likely to join relatives who had been in the area for a year. By boat and railroad, the same search for land had brought Everett’s maternal grandfather, Henry E. Henke, from Hannover, Germany, with his parents as a ten-year-old boy, to Illinois, then to western Minnesota, and finally with his bride and his brother Eli to a homestead in Hannover, North Dakota, in 1908. For these immigrants, working their own land was the pinnacle of self-sufficiency and independence, a type of independence that was no longer possible in their homeland, where rural space had dwindled.
Hannover, from its start, was an ethnically homogenous community consisting of extended family members (and staunch Lutherans). By the early years of settlement the community’s church had aligned itself with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, probably as a result of travelling missionaries who visited Hannover in the late 1880s. Founded in Missouri in 1847, this conservative branch of the Lutheran Church spread across the Great Plains by means of itinerant missionaries who targeted communities of unaffiliated German Lutheran settlers. Centered on the concept of reine Lehre—or “pure doctrine”—Missouri Synod Lutherans stressed the infallibility of the Bible and emphatically believed that retaining their German culture and language was necessary in order to uphold the very core of their religious beliefs: the teachings of Martin Luther. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Missouri Synod had developed a highly organized and self-perpetuating system of parochial schools, a publishing house which disseminated its own textbooks and prayer books, and colleges and seminaries which trained its own teachers and, of course, pastors.
Affiliation with such a denomination came naturally to the residents of Hannover, who predominately spoke the low German dialect of their northern Germany homeland and had ambitions to form an insular, self-sufficient village with its own cooperative creamery, general store, and, most importantly, church and parochial school. The high German of Luther’s Bible was used in both church services and the parochial school—where, in addition to learning arithmetic and geometry, children memorized Luther’s Small Catechism in preparation for confirmation at the end of eighth grade, which marked the end of formal schooling and the entrance into adulthood (which was true for my dad’s parents, Albert and Hulda). The English language made significant inroads only through the course of two wars with Germany, during which the national synod was attacked for its strong position on upholding German culture.
On the brink of World War I, in 1916, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church of Hannover voted to have both German and English services. In 1918, they took up a collection for the Red Cross as a show of American patriotism. In 1943, the year after my dad’s birth, the church began holding two English services on Sunday—and only one German service. Nationally, the Missouri Synod refused to waiver from the belief that its parochial school system was vitally necessary for perpetuating the true Lutheran faith and avoiding the Americanization of its children. True to this ideal, Hannover held onto its church-run “big school” (grades 5–8), yielding to the public school system only during the severest crises. The Great Depression was one such crisis, and in 1932 and 1938, “because of crop failures,” the parochial school was forced to go public. For those two years only, although they evidently scraped by for the rest of the dirty thirties, the congregation was unable to pay its own, church-approved, teachers.
The community of Hannover was not unique on the Great Plains in its desire to retain the values of its founders. In her study of the Missouri Synod farming community of Block, Kansas, historian Carol Coburn concludes that three powerful factors—the close association of religion with ethnicity, a homogenous population, and “the benefit of rural and regional isolation”—allowed the village of Block to instill its most cherished beliefs in four generations of residents. Although Missouri Synod pastors had a tendency to exhort against interactions with “outsiders,” fearing their parishioners’ assimilation into American society and a weakening of the reine Lehre, Coburn traced “cracks” in Block’s insularity as early as the 1890s, when Block’s farmers began to take their grain to trade in Kansas City. In contrast, the economy of Hannover remained more akin to that of a village into the 1950s, when my dad was a boy—Hannover’s dairy farmers dealt with their own, taking their cream to the town’s creamery, and families took their eggs to the general store to trade for groceries. Cash was certainly not in abundance. Fifty miles to the east, Bismarck was still considered a distant metropolis for families who put their cars on blocks in the winter and took their children to country school by horse-drawn sleigh.
Change did come to Hannover, although it came in increments and was always resisted. By the time my dad’s mother, Hulda, came of age in the 1920s, a younger generation was gaining a measure of autonomy and showing its willingness to assimilate more into the mainstream of American life. By 1927, the year my grandma was confirmed and completed her schooling at grade eight, families could choose confirmation in either German or English. Hulda’s family chose German. However, Hulda claimed freedom as a young adult that would have been unthinkable in the generation that preceded her. Although St. Peter’s pastor strictly forbid dancing, Hulda began attending barn dances, which were always held in neighboring communities, and never by Hannover residents. I remember my grandma telling me that her folks didn’t think dancing was a sin, “but you always felt like you were sinning, and that made it more fun.”
Despite new attitudes among the young (and even flapper hairstyles!), the older values remained entrenched, among them the belief in the absolute authority of the pastor in religious matters, and of the father within the home. Ever faithful to the literal interpretation of the Bible, the Missouri Synod upheld the commandment in First Corinthians to “let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.” Women and children sat separate from the men during church services through the World War II era in Hannover, and women did not vote in church council or fill church offices. Only men were Elders—the leaders in church who monitored the morality and behavior of individual church members and, if necessary, administered warnings or even demanded public apologies by sinners, under threat of excommunication.
In 1932, my grandma, unmarried, had two little sons and practically no economic options. She had been a domestic servant in various small communities in North Dakota, but she couldn’t make it alone, and redemption in the eyes of the church and reintegration into her community necessitated a marriage. And the man who wished to take her on was a former classmate, Albert Albers (as my grandma once told me slyly, he’d “always kind of liked” her). Unlike Hulda, Albert never spent much time outside the community of Hannover, never ventured much past a small radius around his grandfather Henry Albers’s original homestead. One of ten children of John Albers (who, as my dad put it, had the tendency to “drink a wee bit from time to time”), Albert hired out as a farmhand to a man named Big Freddy immediately upon graduation at age fourteen, turning his wages over to his parents, who were continually hard up. After marrying Hulda in 1937, Albert spent four years driving truck for the man who owned the Hannover store. But he wouldn’t, in the words of my grandmother, “feel like a man” until he had his own farm. And so, the search for a plot of land repeated itself for a new generation.
The year before my grandparents’ wedding, 1936, was the absolute “nadir” of the Great Depression—featuring intense heat, the return of dust storms, and an average wheat crop of about zero in most counties of the state. But problems both environment and economic had plagued North Dakota farmers since the 1920s, which enabled Albert and Hulda to get their initial toehold into farming. After saving for four years, Alberta was able to lease Henry Henke’s farm—after a decade of hard times, Hulda’s father was ready to retire into town. Just two years after beginning their new life together, however, the barn burned, killing the team of horses and cattle Albert had struggled to purchase. It was a catastrophic loss. And so, in 1943, my grandparents, my dad’s older brother, and my one-year-old dad pulled up stakes a short distance to the homestead of Albert’s widowed aunt, living in an old, dilapidated outbuilding until they could fix up the farmhouse where my grandparents would remain until 1990. They swallowed the losses. They started over. I can hear, in my mind, my grandma telling me the story of those years: “It was a joke. It was not good.” But they begin again, anyway. What else was there to do?
The marriage did not begin propitiously—beyond the economic privation, my grandma struggled, I believe her whole life, with the decision to leave her older boy behind for her parents to raise, as her father had convinced her that bringing two children into her new marriage would be one too many. And, in her recounting to me, she remembered feeling protective of the son who did accompany her, leading to early tension with her husband Albert. Her reminiscences, and the wisdom in her retrospect, come back to me frequently almost a decade after her death, as I have navigated parenting a little boy alone and now in partnership with a man as tender-hearted and grounded as my grandfather. Two girls were born after my dad, and Hulda’s marriage to Albert endured, totalling fifty-three years of working together on the farm. I often think I learned pretty much all I needed to know about love—love as habit, love as daily action, love as pure choice—from my grandmother telling me, years after my grandfather died, “I can still hear him in the mornings, you know. I hear him making the coffee, and I can smell it, too.”
Educated in the same parochial school his parents had attended, my dad was, from an early age, skeptical of doctrine. And he was less than enthusiastic about the labor his family did to survive. He discovered, instead, that he liked to read. Confined to bed during the winter of 1954–55 with a severe case of rheumatic fever, my dad devoured a borrowed cache of Zane Grey novels. He also became a pretty good baker of pies in the year he was kept out of school, a skill that greatly impressed the neighboring farm wives. The family was an economic unit, and all shared in the labor it took to make a living. My dad (sometimes begrudgingly, and I imagine while complaining about his hay fever) milked cows, baled hay, hoed potatoes, slopped pigs, and cleaned the chicken shed. The farm, far more than a profitable endeavor, was an exercise in subsistence. In contrast to the independence envisioned by Hannover’s original settlers, not to mention the framers of the 1862 Homestead Act, stood the reality of Farm Security Administration loans, rented acres, and drought and depressions. Still, with the cows they milked, the pigs, chickens, and eggs they ate, and the vegetables they grew and canned, my dad’s family produced much of what they consumed, minus the few staples purchased at the Hannover general store.
The relative self-sufficiency, albeit indebtedness, of those small family farmers was enabled by reliance on the close-knit networks of extended families of which Hannover consisted. Such networks had, since the beginnings of the settlement, offered a buffer when individuals were ailing, struck with bad luck, or just plain eccentric. Mechanical change through the years brought shifts to this system of shared labor among extended family members. My grandmother Hulda remembered her father and his brother Eli always threshing their relatives’ crops together: Eli would shovel the coal into the steam-powered thresher, and Henry always drove. By the time Hulda farmed alongside Albert, labor-intensive, family-oriented threshing had given way to hiring or two professional men with a combine—strangers to the community who would stay only a few days.
The inroads made into Hannover’s insularity and self-sufficiency by government loans and mechanization would be irrevocably widened by the much larger changes that happened after
Everett had left home—first, as was still not unheard of among young Hannoverians who wanted to attain higher education, to attend Lutheran seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota (where I’m not sure he lasted an entire semester) and eventually to undergraduate and then graduate studies in the humanities. Amidst the heady antiwar atmosphere of Fort Collins, Colorado, in the late 1960s, Dad did a master’s degree and much of the work towards a PhD. He returned home to North Dakota to teach at the teachers’ college in Devils Lake, before applying for the executive director job for what was then called the North Dakota Humanities Council in 1974. Between 1978 and 1988—roughly the last decade of my grandfather’s life—the number of dairy farms in America declined by 40 percent. There were still plenty of Albers in Hannover, but it was increasingly a changed place. The creamery and general store both closed in 1969. The parochial “big” school, and the public grade school, were closed forever by 1978, and schoolchildren began to ride the bus to Center, North Dakota. The church remained. Journalist Richard Critchfield, in his comparison of North Dakota and Iowa villages with farming communities the world over, remarks that cultures, being “largely inherited,” tend to change more slowly than the economic systems on which they are based. Hannover (in my dad’s recollections, anyway) largely bears that out.
My dad saw the cultural inheritance of his Missouri Synod upbringing as both positive and negative. He reflected on the sometimes-hostile intolerance of outsiders in the earlier years—and the moral policing of those within the group, which always fell more heavily on the women. He also remembered the kinship and community that brought people together towards a common goal: cooperation that made extracting a living from a frequently harsh environment workable. He worried about the future of North Dakota’s young people in much the same way that Critchfield raised troubling questions about our newer national values of individualism and materialism in a modern, technological age that has moved farther and farther away from a rural economic and cultural framework that valued familial cooperation, thrift, and helping one’s neighbor. He worried about young American families—particularly farm families—in which men and women take on two or three jobs a piece just to get by, none of which carry health insurance. He wrote often about his great love of his home state, about the outmigration of young people, and about how to draw them back home: I have often wondered how he would have reacted to the in-migration that began to accompany the Bakken explosion, just two years after his death. I tend to think he would have focused on how to lure the newcomers into staying.
My dad knew who he was in regard to the place he came from. In his recollections, vivid are the pastures where he took the cows while riding his horse Teenie—complete, in his earliest memories, with a Roy Rogers cap gun in a holster to protect the herd from cattle rustlers—the stream he fished in, the route to school from the back of a horse-drawn sleigh driven by his father Albert. Yet in his memories, he never fully found a comfortable way inside some of the mindsets of the community into which he was born. I once heard my dad introduce himself at a lecture (given to Unitarians, no less), as a “recovering Missouri Synod Lutheran”—and he was only half-joking. My learned father, who gave his daughter Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, and even Margaret Fuller, for goodness sake, opened lectures by announcing himself to be, in essence, a recovering misogynist. My dad believed you could scarcely swim against the current in which you were steeped as a child unless you underwent some serious self-examination. “Undergoing some serious self-examination,” in and of itself, however, is a pretty darn Lutheran endeavor.
I hope I have shed a little light on the world that my dad and his parents showed to me during my childhood. Even as a ten-year-old, in October 1990, standing in the cemetery at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, wearing the red wool sweater and skirt that had been my first day of school outfit, holding my grandmother Hulda’s hand, and watching as my grandfather Albert was buried, I understood the links to land and to culture that were being severed by his death. It is a world that got much dimmer still, for me, after my father passed, and I’m grateful that he wrote down as much as he did in those eighteen months of illness.
Maybe it is natural to look backwards once slammed with a terminal disease, but for Dad, stories of his early life often became a springboard for broader themes. He was, to the end, a humanities scholar, after all. He wrote about his life in order to remember, but he wrote about it most of all in order to explore. My dad loved the revolutionary, Marxist-leaning North Dakota poet Thomas McGrath, who—like my dad, but several decades earlier—had ventured from home into the wider world only to discover that his childhood universe, the family farm on which he was raised, was a microcosm of the human struggle in so many places. McGrath wrote:
Dakota is everywhere.
A condition.
And I am only a device of memory
To call forth into this Present the flowering dead and the living [. . .]
My dad had a knack for journeying from the very particular (the childhood memory, the colorful character from Hannover at mid-twentieth century, who was long since dead) to the very broad within a few pages, as he exhorted us always to look at the past in order to figure out where on earth we are going. In these essays, Ev ponders how we can search for the spiritual without stifling either intellect or creativity. He examines (prompted by the example of a strong-willed mother) the ways in which German Lutheran paternalism and a belief that wives and mothers belonged in the sphere of “Kinder, Kuchen, and Kirche” (children, kitchen, and church) failed to recognize women’s full humanity. He wrote about the heavy burden that a fundamentalist upbringing can lay on the hearts of not only women but also men—men like his father, whom my dad recalled in his journals as struggling with immense guilt on his deathbed, despite having lived a blameless life, a life of loving his wife, raising children, and rising early and working hard each day even when the bottom fell out of the price of dairy and it made absolutely no economic sense to work as hard as he did. He explores the tension between his immigrant family background and the Native inhabitants of the region. He remembers the events of the 1950s as he first heard about them as a farm boy in Hannover—the fear that a nuclear holocaust was imminent, and the Civil Rights movement happening in seemingly faraway places—while he attended a church that would have had him believe that people of other beliefs and ethnicities, and in particular the godless Communists, were probably damned to hell. But even as a young person, Ev had a suspicion that perhaps the problems of the “outside” world were not all that far away. He wrote about race and religious extremism in our country, about the politics of fear in the wake of 9/11, writing always from the standpoint of one of the great quests of the humanities: that of humanizing the other.
So much has happened since my dad left us in April 2004 that would have fascinated him. Not just the rumblings of change from another oil boom in western North Dakota, but the backlash against systemic sexual harassment, most everything about the ascendancy of Donald Trump, and so on. I wonder so much what my dad—the descendant of so many good plains folk who just would not acculturate to American norms, and didn’t want to—would have written about the current debate over immigration, for instance. That we stay questioning, and questing—not convicted, and never sure—and that we continue the conversation, always, would be my dad’s greatest legacy. I hope, in that spirit, that you enjoy his essays.
—Gretchen A. Albers, August 2018
I’ve often thought that my dad kept this journal—and kept going to work every day—at least partly just to keep his sanity. As he explains in his first entry, the diagnosing doctor at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, gave him no more than three months to live. In the early mornings of each day, rather than letting his brain be consumed with regret and worry, my dad pulled references and fact-checked the snippets of poetry, the excerpts of novels and memoirs, and the academic works and song lyrics that wove through his memories and appeared in his journal entries. It took work to write and publish an essay each day—and work had always been my dad’s main antidote for keeping demons of the mind at bay. When the body that perhaps he’d never treated all that gently or kindly betrayed him, work was where my dad defiantly turned.
Ultimately, Dad lived about a year and a half, outlasting the Mayo’s predictions about six times over. Likely, his survival was due to the interventions of doctors at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, where my dad received an experimental form of chemotherapy that was intended, if not to shrink the tumor to where it could be surgically removed (that never succeeded), then to at least to deter it from spreading. He wore the machine that administered the chemo in a fanny pack, from which a tube travelled up to a stint in his chest. The skin around the portal often became infected, and so, more and more frequently as the months passed, did his blood. His hair stayed in place, but the weight melted off my dad’s once-robust frame. The blood infections, the fevers, the chills, the malaise, and most of all, the uncertainty over whether any of the chemo that made him so unwell would ultimately matter—for my dad, hope for the future came at a mighty big cost.
Once he began writing and publishing his work every day, he kept writing, and he kept wanting, I think, to be known. To be remembered. Those who did know him would recall that my dad was a behind-the-scenes man. Not at all egotistical. Content to let the limelight shine on others, while he toiled like a farmer, retiring to his books in bed ridiculously early each night so that he could wake before dawn and drive across town to the office. Although he could be gregarious—I’d say charming, and maybe even a bit of an over-talker at conferences and events—my dad, in his day to day, lived like a hermit monk.
I don’t recall ever hearing, a single time, my dad complain that he hadn’t been recognized for something, or adequately compensated for something, or acknowledged or thanked for anything. In my dad’s worldview—and here is a North Dakotan value if there ever was one—work was to be done well, for the work’s sake.
And yet in these essay, my dad wrote about himself. He wrote about his life and the people and places that had shaped him. The personal and familial history that wove its way into these essays holds perhaps the most resonance for me, and could maybe use the most context, as it is a world which is slipping away, little by little, with every elder North Dakotan that we lose.
In his journal, my dad referred to mixed farm on which he was raised, in the rural township of Hannover in Oliver County, west-central North Dakota, as “the garden of the universe.” This statement, some of you will immediately guess, held just the tiniest, smallest hint of sarcasm. As my dad put it in his journal, “The ties to the submarginal land where my father walked and planned on next year’s crop up until he died in his late 70s defy explanation. They are the hills lying about ten miles west and south of where the mighty Missouri bends at the place where Lewis and Clark wintered in 1804–1805—then the center of civilization in the American West, the trading center where lived the Mandan and Hidatsa. On average one crop in three will fail because of drought or destruction by hail.”
My dad had a deep respect for the Native cultures of North Dakota, and his essays reveal that he never lost sight of the fact that his German immigrant ancestors were intruders on the land where they tried—and often failed—to make a living. By the late 1880s, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota people had been forced to cede their rights to much of what would become western North Dakota—rights the U.S. government had only recently affirmed in the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie—and were confined to reservations whose borders were steadily shrinking. On the Fort Berthold reservation to the north of Hannover, and the Standing Rock Sioux reservation to the south, Native peoples of North Dakota were undergoing an assault on their way of life designed to force them to adopt the values of private land ownership and the Christian religion.
None of these events were of much concern to the German immigrants who settled in Hannover, who already possessed these values in their fullest expression. Homesteading, for my dad’s predecessors, meant a chance at land ownership and independence, an opportunity to recreate the communities of family farmers as they had known them in their home villages of Germany. Everett’s paternal great-grandfather, Henry Albers, left his home of Hannover, Germany, at age sixteen and was a sailor for nine years. Eventually immigrating to Chicago, he married a woman who had also come from Hannover. They took up a homestead in the new community of Hannover, Dakota Territory, in 1885—most likely to join relatives who had been in the area for a year. By boat and railroad, the same search for land had brought Everett’s maternal grandfather, Henry E. Henke, from Hannover, Germany, with his parents as a ten-year-old boy, to Illinois, then to western Minnesota, and finally with his bride and his brother Eli to a homestead in Hannover, North Dakota, in 1908. For these immigrants, working their own land was the pinnacle of self-sufficiency and independence, a type of independence that was no longer possible in their homeland, where rural space had dwindled.
Hannover, from its start, was an ethnically homogenous community consisting of extended family members (and staunch Lutherans). By the early years of settlement the community’s church had aligned itself with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, probably as a result of travelling missionaries who visited Hannover in the late 1880s. Founded in Missouri in 1847, this conservative branch of the Lutheran Church spread across the Great Plains by means of itinerant missionaries who targeted communities of unaffiliated German Lutheran settlers. Centered on the concept of reine Lehre—or “pure doctrine”—Missouri Synod Lutherans stressed the infallibility of the Bible and emphatically believed that retaining their German culture and language was necessary in order to uphold the very core of their religious beliefs: the teachings of Martin Luther. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Missouri Synod had developed a highly organized and self-perpetuating system of parochial schools, a publishing house which disseminated its own textbooks and prayer books, and colleges and seminaries which trained its own teachers and, of course, pastors.
Affiliation with such a denomination came naturally to the residents of Hannover, who predominately spoke the low German dialect of their northern Germany homeland and had ambitions to form an insular, self-sufficient village with its own cooperative creamery, general store, and, most importantly, church and parochial school. The high German of Luther’s Bible was used in both church services and the parochial school—where, in addition to learning arithmetic and geometry, children memorized Luther’s Small Catechism in preparation for confirmation at the end of eighth grade, which marked the end of formal schooling and the entrance into adulthood (which was true for my dad’s parents, Albert and Hulda). The English language made significant inroads only through the course of two wars with Germany, during which the national synod was attacked for its strong position on upholding German culture.
On the brink of World War I, in 1916, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church of Hannover voted to have both German and English services. In 1918, they took up a collection for the Red Cross as a show of American patriotism. In 1943, the year after my dad’s birth, the church began holding two English services on Sunday—and only one German service. Nationally, the Missouri Synod refused to waiver from the belief that its parochial school system was vitally necessary for perpetuating the true Lutheran faith and avoiding the Americanization of its children. True to this ideal, Hannover held onto its church-run “big school” (grades 5–8), yielding to the public school system only during the severest crises. The Great Depression was one such crisis, and in 1932 and 1938, “because of crop failures,” the parochial school was forced to go public. For those two years only, although they evidently scraped by for the rest of the dirty thirties, the congregation was unable to pay its own, church-approved, teachers.
The community of Hannover was not unique on the Great Plains in its desire to retain the values of its founders. In her study of the Missouri Synod farming community of Block, Kansas, historian Carol Coburn concludes that three powerful factors—the close association of religion with ethnicity, a homogenous population, and “the benefit of rural and regional isolation”—allowed the village of Block to instill its most cherished beliefs in four generations of residents. Although Missouri Synod pastors had a tendency to exhort against interactions with “outsiders,” fearing their parishioners’ assimilation into American society and a weakening of the reine Lehre, Coburn traced “cracks” in Block’s insularity as early as the 1890s, when Block’s farmers began to take their grain to trade in Kansas City. In contrast, the economy of Hannover remained more akin to that of a village into the 1950s, when my dad was a boy—Hannover’s dairy farmers dealt with their own, taking their cream to the town’s creamery, and families took their eggs to the general store to trade for groceries. Cash was certainly not in abundance. Fifty miles to the east, Bismarck was still considered a distant metropolis for families who put their cars on blocks in the winter and took their children to country school by horse-drawn sleigh.
Change did come to Hannover, although it came in increments and was always resisted. By the time my dad’s mother, Hulda, came of age in the 1920s, a younger generation was gaining a measure of autonomy and showing its willingness to assimilate more into the mainstream of American life. By 1927, the year my grandma was confirmed and completed her schooling at grade eight, families could choose confirmation in either German or English. Hulda’s family chose German. However, Hulda claimed freedom as a young adult that would have been unthinkable in the generation that preceded her. Although St. Peter’s pastor strictly forbid dancing, Hulda began attending barn dances, which were always held in neighboring communities, and never by Hannover residents. I remember my grandma telling me that her folks didn’t think dancing was a sin, “but you always felt like you were sinning, and that made it more fun.”
Despite new attitudes among the young (and even flapper hairstyles!), the older values remained entrenched, among them the belief in the absolute authority of the pastor in religious matters, and of the father within the home. Ever faithful to the literal interpretation of the Bible, the Missouri Synod upheld the commandment in First Corinthians to “let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.” Women and children sat separate from the men during church services through the World War II era in Hannover, and women did not vote in church council or fill church offices. Only men were Elders—the leaders in church who monitored the morality and behavior of individual church members and, if necessary, administered warnings or even demanded public apologies by sinners, under threat of excommunication.
In 1932, my grandma, unmarried, had two little sons and practically no economic options. She had been a domestic servant in various small communities in North Dakota, but she couldn’t make it alone, and redemption in the eyes of the church and reintegration into her community necessitated a marriage. And the man who wished to take her on was a former classmate, Albert Albers (as my grandma once told me slyly, he’d “always kind of liked” her). Unlike Hulda, Albert never spent much time outside the community of Hannover, never ventured much past a small radius around his grandfather Henry Albers’s original homestead. One of ten children of John Albers (who, as my dad put it, had the tendency to “drink a wee bit from time to time”), Albert hired out as a farmhand to a man named Big Freddy immediately upon graduation at age fourteen, turning his wages over to his parents, who were continually hard up. After marrying Hulda in 1937, Albert spent four years driving truck for the man who owned the Hannover store. But he wouldn’t, in the words of my grandmother, “feel like a man” until he had his own farm. And so, the search for a plot of land repeated itself for a new generation.
The year before my grandparents’ wedding, 1936, was the absolute “nadir” of the Great Depression—featuring intense heat, the return of dust storms, and an average wheat crop of about zero in most counties of the state. But problems both environment and economic had plagued North Dakota farmers since the 1920s, which enabled Albert and Hulda to get their initial toehold into farming. After saving for four years, Alberta was able to lease Henry Henke’s farm—after a decade of hard times, Hulda’s father was ready to retire into town. Just two years after beginning their new life together, however, the barn burned, killing the team of horses and cattle Albert had struggled to purchase. It was a catastrophic loss. And so, in 1943, my grandparents, my dad’s older brother, and my one-year-old dad pulled up stakes a short distance to the homestead of Albert’s widowed aunt, living in an old, dilapidated outbuilding until they could fix up the farmhouse where my grandparents would remain until 1990. They swallowed the losses. They started over. I can hear, in my mind, my grandma telling me the story of those years: “It was a joke. It was not good.” But they begin again, anyway. What else was there to do?
The marriage did not begin propitiously—beyond the economic privation, my grandma struggled, I believe her whole life, with the decision to leave her older boy behind for her parents to raise, as her father had convinced her that bringing two children into her new marriage would be one too many. And, in her recounting to me, she remembered feeling protective of the son who did accompany her, leading to early tension with her husband Albert. Her reminiscences, and the wisdom in her retrospect, come back to me frequently almost a decade after her death, as I have navigated parenting a little boy alone and now in partnership with a man as tender-hearted and grounded as my grandfather. Two girls were born after my dad, and Hulda’s marriage to Albert endured, totalling fifty-three years of working together on the farm. I often think I learned pretty much all I needed to know about love—love as habit, love as daily action, love as pure choice—from my grandmother telling me, years after my grandfather died, “I can still hear him in the mornings, you know. I hear him making the coffee, and I can smell it, too.”
Educated in the same parochial school his parents had attended, my dad was, from an early age, skeptical of doctrine. And he was less than enthusiastic about the labor his family did to survive. He discovered, instead, that he liked to read. Confined to bed during the winter of 1954–55 with a severe case of rheumatic fever, my dad devoured a borrowed cache of Zane Grey novels. He also became a pretty good baker of pies in the year he was kept out of school, a skill that greatly impressed the neighboring farm wives. The family was an economic unit, and all shared in the labor it took to make a living. My dad (sometimes begrudgingly, and I imagine while complaining about his hay fever) milked cows, baled hay, hoed potatoes, slopped pigs, and cleaned the chicken shed. The farm, far more than a profitable endeavor, was an exercise in subsistence. In contrast to the independence envisioned by Hannover’s original settlers, not to mention the framers of the 1862 Homestead Act, stood the reality of Farm Security Administration loans, rented acres, and drought and depressions. Still, with the cows they milked, the pigs, chickens, and eggs they ate, and the vegetables they grew and canned, my dad’s family produced much of what they consumed, minus the few staples purchased at the Hannover general store.
The relative self-sufficiency, albeit indebtedness, of those small family farmers was enabled by reliance on the close-knit networks of extended families of which Hannover consisted. Such networks had, since the beginnings of the settlement, offered a buffer when individuals were ailing, struck with bad luck, or just plain eccentric. Mechanical change through the years brought shifts to this system of shared labor among extended family members. My grandmother Hulda remembered her father and his brother Eli always threshing their relatives’ crops together: Eli would shovel the coal into the steam-powered thresher, and Henry always drove. By the time Hulda farmed alongside Albert, labor-intensive, family-oriented threshing had given way to hiring or two professional men with a combine—strangers to the community who would stay only a few days.
The inroads made into Hannover’s insularity and self-sufficiency by government loans and mechanization would be irrevocably widened by the much larger changes that happened after
Everett had left home—first, as was still not unheard of among young Hannoverians who wanted to attain higher education, to attend Lutheran seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota (where I’m not sure he lasted an entire semester) and eventually to undergraduate and then graduate studies in the humanities. Amidst the heady antiwar atmosphere of Fort Collins, Colorado, in the late 1960s, Dad did a master’s degree and much of the work towards a PhD. He returned home to North Dakota to teach at the teachers’ college in Devils Lake, before applying for the executive director job for what was then called the North Dakota Humanities Council in 1974. Between 1978 and 1988—roughly the last decade of my grandfather’s life—the number of dairy farms in America declined by 40 percent. There were still plenty of Albers in Hannover, but it was increasingly a changed place. The creamery and general store both closed in 1969. The parochial “big” school, and the public grade school, were closed forever by 1978, and schoolchildren began to ride the bus to Center, North Dakota. The church remained. Journalist Richard Critchfield, in his comparison of North Dakota and Iowa villages with farming communities the world over, remarks that cultures, being “largely inherited,” tend to change more slowly than the economic systems on which they are based. Hannover (in my dad’s recollections, anyway) largely bears that out.
My dad saw the cultural inheritance of his Missouri Synod upbringing as both positive and negative. He reflected on the sometimes-hostile intolerance of outsiders in the earlier years—and the moral policing of those within the group, which always fell more heavily on the women. He also remembered the kinship and community that brought people together towards a common goal: cooperation that made extracting a living from a frequently harsh environment workable. He worried about the future of North Dakota’s young people in much the same way that Critchfield raised troubling questions about our newer national values of individualism and materialism in a modern, technological age that has moved farther and farther away from a rural economic and cultural framework that valued familial cooperation, thrift, and helping one’s neighbor. He worried about young American families—particularly farm families—in which men and women take on two or three jobs a piece just to get by, none of which carry health insurance. He wrote often about his great love of his home state, about the outmigration of young people, and about how to draw them back home: I have often wondered how he would have reacted to the in-migration that began to accompany the Bakken explosion, just two years after his death. I tend to think he would have focused on how to lure the newcomers into staying.
My dad knew who he was in regard to the place he came from. In his recollections, vivid are the pastures where he took the cows while riding his horse Teenie—complete, in his earliest memories, with a Roy Rogers cap gun in a holster to protect the herd from cattle rustlers—the stream he fished in, the route to school from the back of a horse-drawn sleigh driven by his father Albert. Yet in his memories, he never fully found a comfortable way inside some of the mindsets of the community into which he was born. I once heard my dad introduce himself at a lecture (given to Unitarians, no less), as a “recovering Missouri Synod Lutheran”—and he was only half-joking. My learned father, who gave his daughter Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, and even Margaret Fuller, for goodness sake, opened lectures by announcing himself to be, in essence, a recovering misogynist. My dad believed you could scarcely swim against the current in which you were steeped as a child unless you underwent some serious self-examination. “Undergoing some serious self-examination,” in and of itself, however, is a pretty darn Lutheran endeavor.
I hope I have shed a little light on the world that my dad and his parents showed to me during my childhood. Even as a ten-year-old, in October 1990, standing in the cemetery at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, wearing the red wool sweater and skirt that had been my first day of school outfit, holding my grandmother Hulda’s hand, and watching as my grandfather Albert was buried, I understood the links to land and to culture that were being severed by his death. It is a world that got much dimmer still, for me, after my father passed, and I’m grateful that he wrote down as much as he did in those eighteen months of illness.
Maybe it is natural to look backwards once slammed with a terminal disease, but for Dad, stories of his early life often became a springboard for broader themes. He was, to the end, a humanities scholar, after all. He wrote about his life in order to remember, but he wrote about it most of all in order to explore. My dad loved the revolutionary, Marxist-leaning North Dakota poet Thomas McGrath, who—like my dad, but several decades earlier—had ventured from home into the wider world only to discover that his childhood universe, the family farm on which he was raised, was a microcosm of the human struggle in so many places. McGrath wrote:
Dakota is everywhere.
A condition.
And I am only a device of memory
To call forth into this Present the flowering dead and the living [. . .]
My dad had a knack for journeying from the very particular (the childhood memory, the colorful character from Hannover at mid-twentieth century, who was long since dead) to the very broad within a few pages, as he exhorted us always to look at the past in order to figure out where on earth we are going. In these essays, Ev ponders how we can search for the spiritual without stifling either intellect or creativity. He examines (prompted by the example of a strong-willed mother) the ways in which German Lutheran paternalism and a belief that wives and mothers belonged in the sphere of “Kinder, Kuchen, and Kirche” (children, kitchen, and church) failed to recognize women’s full humanity. He wrote about the heavy burden that a fundamentalist upbringing can lay on the hearts of not only women but also men—men like his father, whom my dad recalled in his journals as struggling with immense guilt on his deathbed, despite having lived a blameless life, a life of loving his wife, raising children, and rising early and working hard each day even when the bottom fell out of the price of dairy and it made absolutely no economic sense to work as hard as he did. He explores the tension between his immigrant family background and the Native inhabitants of the region. He remembers the events of the 1950s as he first heard about them as a farm boy in Hannover—the fear that a nuclear holocaust was imminent, and the Civil Rights movement happening in seemingly faraway places—while he attended a church that would have had him believe that people of other beliefs and ethnicities, and in particular the godless Communists, were probably damned to hell. But even as a young person, Ev had a suspicion that perhaps the problems of the “outside” world were not all that far away. He wrote about race and religious extremism in our country, about the politics of fear in the wake of 9/11, writing always from the standpoint of one of the great quests of the humanities: that of humanizing the other.
So much has happened since my dad left us in April 2004 that would have fascinated him. Not just the rumblings of change from another oil boom in western North Dakota, but the backlash against systemic sexual harassment, most everything about the ascendancy of Donald Trump, and so on. I wonder so much what my dad—the descendant of so many good plains folk who just would not acculturate to American norms, and didn’t want to—would have written about the current debate over immigration, for instance. That we stay questioning, and questing—not convicted, and never sure—and that we continue the conversation, always, would be my dad’s greatest legacy. I hope, in that spirit, that you enjoy his essays.
—Gretchen A. Albers, August 2018
