Family History

What do we stand to gain from digging into the history of where we came from? After all, what’s done is done, and we certainly can’t help or change where we came from. If all of it is all a given by the time we are born, can it really affect us?

For a long time, my blithe and carefree self had long been indifferent to just where we—our iteration of “the Cottons”—had came from. The long rosters of names and people I had never met that always accompanied any explanation of who I should expect to meet at family reunions, let alone the stories connected to them, went in one ear and out the other, despite the best efforts of my parents and grandparents to convince me they were worth knowing. Our extended family was always just too big for me to fathom, a product of typical Midwestern family structures I guess.

Only recently, after more than a decade of training as a proper historian, had I given much thought to the prospect of where I came from and what it should mean to me. It actually all started with a photograph of my mom’s dad, Howard Henry Hall, from his days working at the oil refinery in our home town (back when he worked there it was the NCRA, now some global conglomerate bought it out and it’s CHS. They’ve been pumping money into it, and going home now I hardly recognize the McPherson “skyline.” But it’s been good for the local economy, I suppose, at least in the short term).

Anyway, this is my grandpa Hall replacing some sort of gasket up in the coker, in a workshop suspended roughly 100 ft. in the air up the tower. The drill you see hanging above the pipe is sent down in to break up the solids, which, as I understand it in my complete lack of scientific training, become basically coal on steroids. A small hunk of this could get thrown into the stove to keep the place heated, but they had to keep an eye on it to make sure it didn’t get too hot and melt through the base of the stove itself (and probably then the floor below it.

So why did this picture somehow flip a switch? As I was preparing for my general exams back in the Fall, I was doing a lot of reading on Stalinism, and a particularly interesting dynamic therein, which was how social class was determined. In the Soviet Union, class origins were imbued with much the same weight that racial origin was used in Nazi Germany (or any other number of racializing states in Europe and beyond). For some reason, this picture gave me a warm sense of purpose that I came from the same proletarian stock as HHH. It also drove home the fact that my grandfather was a total and complete badass.

I had always thought of Triple H as primarily a farmer. By the time I really got to know him, he had retired from the refinery, after 25 years with the company. He lived on a farm, I helped him with the wheat harvest during the summers and helped burn or plow the fields that he and my grandma owned and still worked until their retirement only about 5-6 years ago. But as I learned recently, his life as a farmer was no post-retirement hobby. This man had been working in the fields to the south-east of Mcpherson, KS since roughly 1955 (the same year they made the Chevy pickup that still sits in the old shed to the west of the house, affectionately named Old Blue), well before my mom was even born. Here it is in its original state, as well as the old barn where they raised pigs for a spell (its always just been a concrete foundation in my memory).

When he first got started he wouldn’t have even begun to fathom the level of technology we would be using to pull in the last crops of his career, when my uncle Kevin told us he was looking into GPS software that could run a combine or grain truck from a computer. So much for my summer job security.

I tell people that growing up I was a farm kid, and to a degree that may be true. I probably drove a lot more tractors and combines, or spent more time tooling around the fields on a 4-wheeler, and was around more livestock and in more barns than your average American kid these days. But in reality, the Hall family farm was more of just a Dacha for us, a place we went on weekends to get away from the very middle-class suburban reality that was our day to day existence. Howard, however, was a real farm kid. Howard was a farm adult. When he and my grandma got married, they set up shop on a small piece of land and a couple hundred acres to plant wheat on, which he farmed WHILE STILL WORKING 40 HOURS A WEEK AT THE REFINERY. He would be up at 5AM, work until around 3PM, and then come home to take care of the homestead. When all the work in the fields was finally done, he went to bed, cause you bet your ass he was going to get up and do it all again tomorrow. He did that for 25 years and then some. He made a decent living, enough to give his family a good and comfortable life, and then gave it up only when he felt like it. Respect is an understatement of a term when it comes to the pride I feel for the life my grandpa led, and that’s even without taking into account all of the warmth, love, and humor that constantly radiates from him and just all and all being a fantastic human being.

In terms of the Soviet hierarchy of social class, my grandfather would have been the ultimate manifestation of the New Soviet Man. He would have been awarded the Order of Lenin, had songs written about him, campaigns for “Hall-ovites” to emulate his work ethic. He was the literal bonding of Hammer with Sickle, but ultimately an American success story. Oh, the irony...

My Grandma Joyce came from a different world. Not a different place, mind you, just a different worldview. The Schrags were Mennonites, originally Swiss German but from a line that had been farming the Black Soil of Russia for a few generations before they immigrated over to the states a few decades before the revolution. While having this conversation with my grandma, she gave me access to history compiled by a local giving a detailed history of the first families who came over, who set up right off the train in Newton, KS (a town just 30 miles to the south of my hometown, long a railroad stop for ranchers when the rails first came through the territory however long back—so much a part of their town identity that their high school marching band plays “I’ve been working on the railroad” every time they score a touchdown in football, which was super annoying for me because they kicked our ass every year). The Mennonite “village” was more of a halfway house, or rather, a succession of barrack-like longhouses, where settlers new to the area could stay until they established what land they could build on and farm. They started coming in the 1870s and were still coming when my Grandma’s grandma came over. Little house on the prairie, indeed.

The Mennonites largely settled in a north-south band running from Newton to McPherson that we would now describe as the I-135 corridor. Moundridge, Elyria, and Hesston all emerged as largely Mennonite townships, and still hold significant populations to this day—I was shocked when my good friend Brad Horst, who comes from Lancaster Mennonites in Pennsylvania, recognized the name of my hometown, just by virtue of his brother had moved down to Hesston. None of these towns are particularly big or thriving other than Mac (which by the way, is apparently predominantly Scottish, I’ll have to look into that one sometime down the road). We’re small town rural America in this part of Kansas in just about every way, most of the economy revolves around the wheat harvest and whatever livestock is selling well at the time.  

Anyway, Joyce’s family was a pretty tight-nit group set up somewhere outside of Mac. A word about Mennonite social protocols: everything is internal, and stigmas have real weight. In the mid-1950s when my grandma would have been entering the courtin’ phase of her young-adulthood, there was still a book kept by her clan that was essentially a big directory of potential suitors, which families were in good standing and who should be avoided. This was all other Mennonites, mind you; heaven forbid that a girl of any standing would entertain the notion of dating someone from “across the tracks”—literally, there were railroad tracks that were the equivalent of the elephant graveyard (YOU MUST NEVER GO THERE, SIMBA) in the eyes of her kin.

Now in my conversations with my grandma, she had one very strong and hilarious and not a little uncomfortable for me point to make: She was a looker in her day.

She was very particular that I make a note of her waist size when she was sixteen, which I made a very careful note of not doing (sorry Grandma!). Still, you can’t argue with the photographic evidence, she was a dame. The point is though, that while she was expected to be entertaining the notion of marrying into an upstanding Mennonite family, she was turning all the boys’ heads at McPherson High. Most social interactions in those days between young men and women was still strictly regulated, so it wasn’t until a church-sponsored function at the roller rink that she met a swarthy young Swede named Howard “The Body” Hall. Now I’m a little unclear based on my notes whether it was Howard that saw her and said to herself “that woman is going to be my wife” or Joyce that saw him and said “god DAMN now that is a MAN right there HOOOOOOOOOIE” (possibly not verbatim), basically the general consensus was that it was love at first sight and those two were going to get hitched, stat.

So this is of course all undeniably adorable and cute to us now, but for Joyce’s family this was a huge red flag. There was very little in the way of wide-spread family approval on either end, apparently the Swedes and Mennonites in town had a sort of Montesquieu & Capulet feud going on at the time, so the love of Joyce and Howard was more of a Shakespearian miracle (and thankfully, for my sake, not a tragedy). The wedding was modest, and there was a bit of a huff about which church to be married in, but in the end the happy couple were wed and set themselves up on a little plot to the southeast of Mac that still stands as the aforementioned family farmhouse.

While Howard worked the coker and the fields, Joyce took up teaching. An incredibly talented pianist and overall musician (not to mention artist), my grandma brought her enthusiasm to the classroom and quite simply crushed it teaching elementary ed all the way up until the time my sister and I were going through school. Even after her official retirement, she stayed on in the district as one of the most coveted substitutes in the music classroom; every time her class would let out the students back to class, if they were extra quiet while they lined up she would play the Pink Panther theme song as an outro as we left the room. I still remember the pride I used to feel when my classmates would get visibly excited when they heard that Mrs. Hall was going to be taking over that day. I also loved it, because damn right I was going to get grandma to play favorites and try to get away with more than I had any right to.

Of course on top of their work, my grandparents had my mom, Michellionaire Diane Hall, and also adopted her little brother, my Uncle Mike (who basically fits the initial description of the protagonist of Mac and Charlie’s screenplay from that one episode of Its Always Sunny… A scientist with the body of Dolph Lungren). My mom was your typical farm kid who grew up to be a huge band nerd, where she met my Saxophone slinging dad, the rest being history, so to speak. Look at these slick folks, just slaying it in the 1970s...

Now, onto the Cotton side. It’s a bit of a ride, and I don’t really know where to begin, so bear with me here. I’ve unfortunately had less time to talk to my dad’s parents, and even when I have, it’s been slow going. My grandma Esther suffers from a speech impediment that can be pretty debilitating at times, and Dean “The Judge” Cotton is just… well… a hard subject to interview. Nonetheless, this side of the family was just as interesting to delve into, and so we’ll start with the part that sounds like it comes straight out of a movie (possibly directed by Kurt Cameron).

Esther is the youngest daughter of the rather prolific Ikenburry clan. The grew up, alongside her 3 siblings, with her parents, who were Brethren missionaries stationed in China when she was born in the 1933. By all accounts, she had a very happy childhood, she attended school with other Americans but also spoke Chinese well. However, for those of you who are familiar with Chinese history, you probably know that this period was a bit of a rough patch for the nation as a whole. I’ll try here to give a brief (and probably inadequate) recap: after the Qing dynasty falls apart just before the first World War, China slips into a state of chaos. With China having been the target of ruthless imperial exploitation for decades prior (look up “the Opium Wars” or “the Boxer Rebellion,” for instance, if you would like to dig into this—WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?), there is no real semblance of a modern state strong enough to step in and replace the old order. While order on the coast is maintained largely by the maritime strength of the major Western imperial powers, the interior of the country falls into the grip of local warlords vying for power and territory.

By the time of the 1920s-1930s, after the success of the Soviet revolution in Russia and the postulates of Wilson’s Fourteen point plan decide the status quo in post-War Europe, two main factions arise—the Nationalists of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For a time they work together in the shared goal of once again uniting China under a single government rule, but by 1927 the KMT, wary of the influence of their partner, carried out a bloody purge of communists from within their military, which immediately sets both sides at each other’s throats. The resulting struggle of the Chinese Civil war lasts over 20 years, and is so bloody and virulent that it keeps going even in the midst of another global conflagration that directly threatens both sides… but I’m getting ahead of myself there. What you need to know for now is that the Nationalists smash the Communists militarily, but can’t destroy their political leadership, and a band of several hundred thousand party members and their family begin the long trek into China’s deep interior, beyond the reach of the Nationalists. It’s called the Long March, a guy named Mao plays a pretty important role, and at the end they form their own little mini-state that allows them to slowly regain their strength and build an army… (Again, WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE? This is all online, we live in the future, go look it up for yourself you bums!)

Anyway, digression aside, this is all important to Grandma Esther’s story. While Christianity never had major success in China, it did have some, and apparently the missionary pursuit was strong enough to keep the Ikenberrys in the Middle Kingdom even as global events made it a pretty undesirable place for American Christian Missionaries to be. Take, for instance, 1940, when the Japanese imperial army’s drive onto the continent had taken Nanjing (one of the most horrible incidents of the War in the East), which was just only about 40 miles away from the small village where their family was currently posted. Nonetheless, when my great grandfather had an errand to run into occupied territory, he didn’t shy away. According to my grandma, while crossing a checkpoint her father and his guide were stopped and detained by Japanese soldiers. While in custody they hung the guide by his thumbs for 4 days, trying to make him confess that my great grandfather was an American spy. The guide, a Christian who had known the Ikenberrys for some time, didn’t break. The errand was never completed, but they were allowed to return back to the village from which they had come. That’s got to be a fun “HEY, PACK YOUR THINGS, WE’RE MOVING, LIKE… RIGHT NOW” conversation to have.

After a few weeks, other contacts had helped the family attain permits to travel by rail to the coast, where they would hop the next available boat back to the States. The one final hitch that remained, in my grandma’s recollection, was the mission’s radio unit, which was far too valuable to leave behind but had been declared contraband by the occupying forces. Luckily again, they knew the local gendarme (another convert), who let them know what time he would be at the rail-checkpoint, and how best to smuggle the radio through. Here’s where Esther comes in again, and even gets a starring role: In order to attract the least suspicion, she, as the youngest, would hide the radio in her oversized trunk. My tiny grandmother at just eight years old was to lug the trunk with her to the station, and then plop herself down on top of it, not to move for anything (she was to be “too tired” and be fussy if anyone asked her to). The search turned up nothing, and they gained their passage home, early in the winter of 1941. How’s that for a slice of Christmas dinner conversation?

But wait! It gets better! The Ikenberrys, I learned, were nothing if not stubborn. My grandma recalled to me that she finally realized she was actually an American when she finally stopped dreaming in Chinese (though how long that took she could only guess). All she knew was by 1945, after the Japanese had been driven off the mainland, she was headed back. The family took up residence in Shanghai, and her parents continued their missionary work. Meanwhile, after attending your average mid-1940s American middle school, suddenly spent her high school years prepping for China’s rigid exams, still in place under Chang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist party rule. From what I could tell, she rolled with it. She spoke very fondly about those years…

Again, those of you with a grasp of Chinese history have probably already guessed what’s coming next. The Communists time in exile had come to an end, and the People’s Army had already begun its slow, inexorable march to the coast. This time it was the Nationalists who could not stand against the onslaught of their opponent’s massive army, and more and more territory fell into the hands of the CCP. Shanghai, the coastal trade port, was not necessarily a bastion of Nationalist power, but geographically speaking it had long been out of Mao’s grasp. In 1949, the Nationalists would flee across the sea to Taiwan, and hence the tense standoff between the two states today over the island and who “rightfully” deserves it.

Esther remembers the day the Communists entered the city. There wasn’t a battle, persay, but she could hear them before she could see them—chants, slogans, drums, and victorious music rang through the city. By and large, the city’s inhabitants seemed largely indifferent. Nobody at that was expecting the social upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, no one foresaw the tragedies of the Great Leap forward; it was simply that power had changed hands one more time. I asked my grandma if she and her family were afraid, being Christians (communist militant atheism, and all that). She said that, at the time, it really didn’t seem that big of a deal. The communists then were still too concerned with simply gaining and imposing political control, and at the time, there was little to be seen of the anti-religious rhetoric that characterized, say, the Soviet 1920s. Still, there was reason to be wary—the city now swarmed with soldiers, many who were simply uneducated peasant conscripts, who just reached the end of a victorious campaign. With exams about to start, Esther was going to have a chaperone with her everywhere she went from now on.

She never did finish her exams. While it wasn’t particularly dangerous to be Christian at the time, it was pretty abundantly clear that they would have problems as Americans following the victory of the world’s (numerically) largest ever socialist revolution. Once again the family called in its favors and got passage home. My grandma re-began her struggle to dream in English. She also met Dean.

...

I don’t really know where to go with Dean. Really, I don’t. While I interviewed my grandma, he sat looking slightly annoyed (again, her stories take some time to tell, with her speech impediment) and interjected next to nothing. I figured maybe he was chomping at the bit waiting for his turn, so I asked him if he remembered what he was up to in 1949. I then got about 30 seconds of him giving me a laundry list his life story, when he went to college, when he became a judge, when he went to work in Topeka, and when he retired. That was that. No follow-up. No details. No anecdotes. Nothing. I was at a bit of a loss, and decided that I didn’t really feel like pushing it.

Afterwards, I got the long and short of it from my mom: Dean’s dad was pretty bare-bones working class, not particularly well off following the depression, who made a living running a gas station on the north end of town. As the eldest, my grandpa was expected to help out A LOT at the shop, which I guess made for a less than ideal childhood. Determined not to follow that route, Dean worked his way through college and then eventually even law school. He worked his way up as a city attorney to the position of judge for the city of McPherson. For the most part, this turned out to be a largely pretty mundane job, and didn’t exactly make the big glamorous bucks that we think of now associated with the profession—my theory is that this period of his life is what drove the humor straight out of him, as I have never seen any sign of it in my lifetime. After a stint there in Mac, he and my grandma moved up to Topeka to work for some legal department of the statehouse, and from there he retired, returning back to live in our hometown.

Notably, he left out a rather interesting story, in which he was kidnapped by gunpoint by a disgruntled mental patient. Since I've only heard it once, I'll just link the story  here: http://genealogytrails.com/kan/mcpherson/newsarticles1.html

You would think that would have made for a good conversation right? Now, that’s not to say that our conversation over Christmas didn’t have fruitful results pertaining to this project. Sensing I wasn’t going to get much out of The Judge, my mom brought up to Kenjamin that he should show me the results of the family history project his great-uncle had passed on to him. Here it is, sorry if it’s hard to read, I’ll try to point out the “highlights,” so to speak:

So apparently the “Cotton” line first came to America to settle as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. That’s right folks, the one founded in 1628 by a bunch of English Puritans. Grand. There was a Reverend John Cotton who made quite a name for himself there, so if he really was my progenitor, that means I came from the same proud line that stole land from native Americans and burned women for witchcraft in Salem, all because the mean old Church of England wasn’t overly fond of their religious extremism. Off to a real strong start. He was even a man of the church in a ridiculously overly-religious society, which means he probably had a fair amount of clout. Apparently you can read about him (with several links connecting him to his rather more well-known grandson, Cotton Mather) on Wikipedia. I don’t want to delve into it too much here, though, because as you can see, this isn’t exactly a strongly verified claim. I can’t tell here if Pops thought this to be true, or was just engaging in some wishful thinking. Either way, there’s plenty more silliness to cover, so let’s move on.

The first thing that grabbed my eye was President Zachary Taylor. Alright, now this seems to at least be somewhat rationalized, tracing the line from my dad all the way back in concrete lineage. So who was this Zachary Taylor? You might not know very much about him for being a U.S. President, even if you paid attention to your American history, and that’s with good reason: he died after being in office a little over a year after eating some bad fruit. Huh. Well, his family were “planters” in Kentucky—read, slaveholders—he got his start a soldier in the Black Hawk War in 1832 (a war started when US troops fired on a group of natives who had crossed the Mississippi to pray on their ancestral land that had been, you guessed it, stolen and incorporated into the US during the Treaty of St. Louis), and later rose to fame as an officer in the border war with Mexico in 1846 (started by crazy ass Texans). By the time he won office, the issue of slavery was getting pretty tense, especially what to do with the inclusion of new territories out West. I was relieved to learn that he didn’t support expanding slavery, and even actively encouraged New Mexico and California to exploit some existing loopholes to become states without having to directly confront the matter. Slight consolation I guess. Kind of pales in comparison to the next bombshell though. Zachary Taylor had three daughters that made it past infancy. His second eldest, Sarah, married Jefferson fucking Davis—future president of the Confederate States of America.

Let’s pause for a moment here, so I can real quick clarify: I have long been scared to imagine how I ended up with the last name I have. Just knowing the system of surnames and how they tend to be given, I had long been terrified that my ancestors got their name from coming to America and growing cotton by means of slave labor. According to this document, my fears were both inaccurate and yet completely founded. Glad to know, over time, my ancestors got the fuck out of the south and made it to Kansas (which is by no means a perfect, glowing example of race relations, but at least we got John Brown, right?). Still… this was the first time in all my delving into my past that I came away feeling… soiled.

There is a lot I could say yet about the issue of race, my life, and that of my family. With my particular situation of having a sister who is herself half-black, it all hits me maybe a little more sharply than it would for most. I’ve been increasingly troubled with the world we live in now, at a moment that seems so critical. Basically, nothing from this document made any of the crippling sense of guilt I feel over a past I had no part in go away. Again, by the Stalinist passport model of the Soviet 1930s, my class and social origins are checkered, to say the least.

There’s a lot more yet too that I could say about The Judge, and his particular place in my feelings in all this, but… I feel this just isn’t quite the time or place to do so. Some things get a little too close with family history, particularly when you start getting into lived memory and when your historical subject is still living and breathing right alongside you.  

I guess it’s time to draw some conclusions, and to relieve you, dear readers, from the slog that I have put you through thus far. So what did I learn from all this? I certainly gained an enormous amount of perspective, both on my grandparents as fully realized human beings (and not just a source of loving holiday cards and the world’s best cinnamon rolls) and a lot about myself, and the origins of this extremely charmed life I have lead thus far. I have a much more sincere understanding of the privilege I’ve been given based on the efforts of my ancestors that came before me. I maybe even learned a bit about how I’ll be seen and understood by my grandkids someday (my life and achievements will probably go widely ignored, the little shits).

What has really been on my mind throughout this process though, is what our pasts can mean for us now, trying to make our way here in the future. I don’t think it’s entirely possible for me to describe, I think I lack the poetic spin to do it true justice, but I do know this: I think everyone who has the opportunity to do a family history, however brief or superficial, should do so. (This is something that every U.S. Historian who teaches has apparently known for a long time, but damn it, some things you have to just learn by doing!) It is something that can both define what you understand of your self and at the same time the rest of the world; it can bring things into focus that might remain entirely buried otherwise. Plus, getting to see all the random chance, all the cosmic improbabilities and chaos that go into the creation of a single human life that we understand as “I” is a pretty humbling thing to behold!

As you can tell by my own discoveries, this isn’t always going to be pretty. Not every link in the chain of our existence is going to be Marx, or Gandhi, or Dr. King, or those historical figures we most admire—those that we may wish we were directly linked to. Especially in this country, with our exceptionally sordid past, odds are you are going to stumble across things you’d rather not have known. Having the guts to own up to the mistakes and transgressions of our predecessors is a key step, I believe, in our chances at improving the lot of our world today. I have a lot of faith in our generation in that respect: we seem to be more critical, and have a keener sense of justice than our predecessors. Maybe it's because of the internet? And I have to assume we'll just keep sharpening that a generation or two down the line. At least... that's what the optimist in me continues to hope... 

I think with that note, I will wrap up this week’s issue of WSP. For those of you that read all the way through, thanks for your rather admirable commitment! As a caveat, just remember that this piece is subject to all the factual failings of any oral history, as well as the failings of memory (including my own), so some of the details may be a little off. This piece will probably undergo multiple revisions as I continue to learn more and flesh out all the details in between. I wish I would have dedicated more time to the life and works of my amazing immediate family, Meghan, Michelle, and Ken, but they may be the subjects of a later post! I would like to give a special thanks to my good friend Matt Van Duyn for his help fact-checking my Chinese history, which I hadn’t reliably had to draw upon since 2009. I’ll definitely try to keep things much more brief next week, and I think I’ve settled on the subject of “Making a Murderer vs. Making an Enemy of the People,” so we’ll delve back more into the realm of Soviet and contemporary politics, state systems of power and policing, and the morality of modern living! Oh what fun we shall have!

Until next time, Comrades…

-MC