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Suckow, Ruth. Country People. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1924.
HathiTrust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015048898756&view=1up&seq=1&skin=2021 Accessed 10 September 2021.
Character List
The Kaetterhenry Family: August Katterhenry’s relatives immigrated to the US from Germany between 1849 and 1850 in one of the early waves of German migrants who pioneered the Midwestern frontier.
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- August: A stubborn, hard-working, and caring German American farmer.
- Emma Stille: A second-generation German American farmer and August Kaetterhenry’s spouse.
- Frank, Mary, Elva, Carl, and Johnnie: The Kaetterhenry children; at the time of World War I, Carl was 23 and Johnnie was 20.
Questions to Think About While Reading:
- How might United States’ entry into World War I have impacted farmers? What about people who lived and worked in towns and cities?
- Like many working class Americans, August Katterhenry is was deeply opposed to the draft. How might people in differing economic circumstances have reacted to the draft?
- After many German immigrants settled in Iowa, several clusters of German communities formed. How is it that August Katterhenry “got off easy” compared to other German Americans?
“The War”
The first years of the war didn’t affect the Richland farmers very much. It seemed far away from them. “Ach, over there in those old countries——” August said with a kind of contemptuous blankness. The men talked about it down at the implement store and at the produce.
August had at first only a slight German feeling. Many of the farmers around Richland were English, and there had always been a little line of cleavage between the English and the German farmers. Sometimes, when August heard old Roland Yarborough “blowing off” about how wicked the Germans were, and that they ought all to be exterminated, it made him hot for a moment, made him feel that he was a German. All the feeling that he had was naturally and instinctively on the side of Germany. But most of the farmers were agreed. “Well, they’ve got to fight it out among themselves. It’s their business; ‘tain’t ours.” That was the way that August felt. He went about his own business.
Grandpa was the one who got excited. The old man, so withdrawn, his inner life known now to no one but himself, buried in strange dreams and prayers and fervours, now suddenly came back to the world. It was as if all at once childhood things, which had long been buried, came surging to the surface and overwhelmed him with memories. He went back to his boyhood in that little village in Mecklenburg whose name the boys had never heard before. Now he was always talking about it—Gultberg. "Ja, in Gultberg den——" “Gultberg? What’s that? What’s he talking about?” the boys asked, half amused. This was all far away to them. It tickled them, they said, to see “grandpa get himself all worked up” over something he had painstakingly read in the paper; come tottering out from his room, in his old felt slippers and patched brown trousers, his dark, sunken eyes burning, shaking one long, bony finger and pouring out a lot of broken English and German that they could only half understand. “Are de Germans so bad, den? Mein oldt Vater, mein Uncle Carl, I remember in de old country, were dey den all such bad men? No, no.” They would listen, grinning a little, until he was exhausted and would go back to his room, shaking his head and mourning sadly, “Ach, no, nein,” to sit in the old rocker, sadly, his hands in his lap, muttering as he used to do about the Sunday travel.
Emma tried to calm him; she was afraid that the excitement would hurt him. She couldn’t see why he was so affected by this, by things so far away; but of course he was thinking about his old home.
But when this country went in, all this was changed. Then feelings that had never been known before were all about. Then the taunts, the talk about Huns and Boche, made farmers like August for the first time actually realize their German ancestry. August had always taken it for granted that he belonged in this country. They awoke a deep racial resentment that could not come flaring out into the open but had to remain smouldering, and that joined with the fear of change, the resentment at interference, into a combination of angry feelings.
This centered chiefly in a deep opposition to the draft. To have someone tell his boys to do this and that! To take away his help on the farm just when he needed it most! To have somebody just step in and tell them where they had to go! Was that what happened in this country? Why had his people left the old country, then, if things were going to be just the same?
Carl was twenty-three now, Johnnie twenty. Carl’s was among the first three names drawn in Richland, where he had to register. It was on the list in the post office—Carl Kaetterhenry, along with Ray Powers and Jay Bennett, the preacher’s son. August stormed, wanted to know what right the Government had. But Carl took it quietly. There was no use kicking, he said. His name happened to be one drawn, and that was all there was to it.
What roused August to the greatest anger was that Harlan Boggs, the banker’s son in “Wapsie,” should get exempt, while his boy had to go. Harlan Boggs had appealed to the board and got exemption on the grounds that he couldn’t be spared from the bank because of Liberty Bond work. But it didn’t matter to the board, August said, that he couldn’t get help and that they should take his boy right in the midst of the harvest season. Johnnie was working for Frank that year, and Carl was the only one he had on the farm. They said, “Produce, produce,” but how was he going to do it when he got no help? There was all this talk about the women working on the farms, but August didn’t see many of those high-school girls from Richland coming out and offering to do his threshing for him. Where were all these women working, then?
Grandpa quieted down after he learned that this country was in the war; regarded with a hurt, sorrowing, bewildered wonder that it should be fighting Germany. That was all that mattered to him, all that he could see of it. Carl went in to say good-bye to him, embarrassed and a little afraid of what grandpa might do. The old man rose from his chair, holding it by one arm, and quietly shook Carl’s hand. Then he returned to his solitary brooding. It was strange and remote, the touch of that dry, aged, bony hand, although grandpa had been there in the house ever since Carl could remember.
The train left in the early morning. August drove his family in, Emma and Carl and Marguerite. Johnnie and Frank and Frank’s wife came in Frank’s car; Mary and Elva and Roy in Roy’s. There was a little group at the small wooden station: the other two boys and their families, a few people from town, one or two detached traveling men. The family stayed awkwardly in the depot, didn’t know what to do or to say to one another. Johnnie and August went out to see if the train was in sight.
Just before the train came—the morning Clipper, the Chicago train, by which clocks were set and rising timed—old Jerry McGuire the postmaster, an old Catholic who had come into office when “the Democrats came in,” lined the three boys up on the station platform and read the President’s Proclamation to them. It was a strange, solemn, unreal scene. Even the people who saw it didn’t believe in it. The three boys standing there, their figures against the dim red of the harvest sunrise, with solemn blank faces, frowning a little to keep down any signs of emotion. One of the mothers sobbed. Emma wept only a little, effacing herself even now. Carl looked big and fresh between the other two boys, Jay Bennett, a thin boy, dissipated in a small-town way; Ray, gawky and sunburned, with a wild head of hair. Carl was such a big, sturdy boy! He had his father’s fresh-coloured skin, only finer-grained, rough light hair, full boyish lips, and clear blue eyes.
The little town was silent. Away from the station stretched pastures, the dew lying wet and heavy on red clover and tall weeds. The train came bearing down upon them, puffing out blackish smoke into the pale morning sky. It went black and big into the red prairie-sunrise. The fields were left silent again. The scattered group of people on the platform got into their battered cars and drove back home to the morning chores.
When Johnnie had to go, they were more used to it.
It was a queer time at home. It was so strange to be without the boys! August was a big, vigorous man, but now he realized for the first time, now that he had everything to do alone, that he was getting older. He had never stopped working hard; but now he saw that, strong and dogged as he was, he couldn’t quite do the work he had done in those days when they first went on the farm. He didn’t even think of getting Emma out into the field now. “Mamma” belonged in the house.
The feeling in the neighbourhood against the German farmers had grown to a degree that would have seemed incredible at the beginning of the war. August “got off easy” compared with some of them. He had two boys in the service, he could keep his mouth shut, he bought Liberty Bonds, although he didn’t like to be told to do so. If it had not been for Carl and Johnnie in the army, he might have refused, like old Rudolph Haas, out of pure Kaetterhenry stubbornness. It was the thought of Carl and Johnnie that kept him from flaring up too fiercely when the boys yelled at him, when he drove into Richland, “Hey, Dutchy! Old Dutchman! Old Dutchy Kaetterhenry!” Once or twice he threatened, and started after them; but usually he only glared at them, smothering his impulse to fight. Some of the other German farmers came up before the board because of things they had said, or were reported to have said. Old Haas’s corn-crib was burned. But nothing worse happened to August than being yelled at on the street and finding painted in crude red letters on his barn: “Old Dutchy Kaetterhenry. Hun. Bosh. Look Out.”
They were having terrible times down around Turkey Creek, which was solidly German, and where there had been more resistance to the draft. One of August’s brothers had been threatened. A mob of boys and men from “Wapsie” had gone down there one night and tarred and feathered the preacher at the old Turkey Creek German church.
August kept himself in hand because of the boys and because of the way Emma worried. And underneath all his anger was a strange, hurt, puzzled incredulity. Hadn’t he lived here all his life, been born twenty miles from here? Didn’t everybody know August Kaetterhenry? Hadn’t he been a good farmer and citizen and church-member all his life? There was at the same time something fiercely real and yet utterly incredible about the whole thing.
Emma worried about the boys. She never heard the telephone ring that she didn’t think it might be a message for them, as their neighbour, Mrs. Griffin, had got. She knew now that of all the children Johnnie was her boy, just as Carl was August’s. Carl was steadier and more level-headed. She had a feeling that Carl would take care of himself, that nothing would happen to him. But Johnnie—he would go rushing into everything.
It was long since she had done the milking and all such work. Despite having less cooking and washing to do, it was hard on her. She was ailing more or less, although she kept up. That old trouble that she had sometimes had before came back on her. “Spells with her stomach,” she called it. The family had long supposed that these spells were just something that mamma had, but now she told Mollie that August wanted to get the doctor out for her. She always said, “Ach, no. Wait awhile. I guess it won’t last long.” Then she would feel better again.
Things were strange all about these days. One of the queerest things that happened was Mary’s marriage. Years ago Mary had gone with Joe Fields. He used to take her to the county fair when Roy took Elva. But then Mary had wanted to go to school, and Joe had married Ada Griffin. He was a widower now, with four little children. Mary was “sewing around.” People hadn’t even known that Joe was “looking in that direction” again. But all at once he and Mary turned up at the Kaetterhenry farm married! Well, the family were glad that she was settled, although they didn’t see how she was going to be strong enough to do all that work and look after those four children. But she and Joe, it seemed, had always liked each other, although once Mary had wanted a different kind of man from Joe. The family thought it was a good thing to have her settled down at last. This was something to write the boys, if it didn’t take them so long to get their mail that it would be old before they heard of it.
Carl had gone into the army first, but Johnnie got across before he did. Carl had his father’s knack with horses. They kept him down at one of the Southern camps training new recruits to handle the horses. Johnnie was in the machine-gun division. He was right in the thick of it, as they thought Johnnie would be sure to be. He was wounded once, but his family didn’t hear of it until he was back in the fighting again. Carl just got across when the armistice was signed.
Carl came back, ready to settle down for good, saying that this old Iowa farm looked better to him than any place he had ever seen or hoped to see. That went far to soothe August’s anger. Carl hadn’t been at home three weeks when he married his old girl in the country, Clara Josten, and brought her out to the farm until he and she could find a place of their own.
But Johnnie was different. He was restless. He was reported cured of his wound, but they could see that he was nervous, jumpy, not the boy that he used to be. He couldn’t seem to be still a minute. He was always running off with the car and going to town. The car was the only thing in which he was interested. August, who was a cautious driver, grumbled about the way that Johnnie drove, with all the gas on, muffler open, fenders rattling, making that old car go at top speed every moment. Johnnie went over to help Frank again. They thought that maybe that might help to give him a change and quiet him down. But at the height of the season he suddenly walked out and went into Richland, where he got a job at the garage with the Beal Brothers.
August shared in the high prices and the land boom that raged in Iowa after the war. He had an offer of five hundred dollars an acre for the farm. It dazzled him, but still August was too cautious to sell. And if he did, then what would he do? It was a better piece of land than he could pick up again. Ray Robbins and Elva did sell their farm, but then the slump in prices came, and the man couldn’t make payments, and they had it back on their hands again. There was a piece of land down near Turkey Creek, however, that old Casper Kaetterhenry had left to the children; the second wife had got the home farm. August and his brother Heinie bought that piece from the others and sold it when prices were at the peak.
War-time feelings died out, but a little of the old resentment stayed. August never felt quite the sense of home and security in Richland Township that he had felt before.
Discussion Questions:
- When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, anti-German sentiment increased dramatically. Many Americans suspected that German spies were present throughout the country, leading to the formation of groups such as the American Protective League (A.P.L.) and the targeting of Germans by mobs. How have other groups been similarly stigmatized and scapegoated in more recent history?
- In this chapter from Suckow’s novel, a major source of August’s frustration is Harlan Boggs’ exemption from the draft on the grounds of “Liberty Bond” work. Much of Ruth Suckow’s fitcion is centered around the struggles of working-class families in early 20th-century America. What does Boggs’ situation tell us about Suckow’s view of American society at the time the story takes place? Where else in Bogg’s time might economically and financially privileged persons have derived unfair benefits ? And in the contemporary United States?
An interjection meaning Oh, Ah, or Alas.
Scornful; feeling or expressing deep hatred or disapproval.
Intense and passionate feeling. Alternate spelling is fervors.
"Yes, in Gultberg the--"
"My old father"
Oh, no, no.
A derogatory term primarily used by the British and the Americans to refer to German soldiers.
A derogatory French term used by the Allies during WW I and WW II referring to German soldiers and to Germans collectively.
A small farming community on the banks of the Wapsipinicon River in northeastern Iowa.
A type of mob vengeance in which perpetrators pour wood tar onto a person and then threw feathers on the victim.
Disbelief; refusal to accept something as true.
