Pacifists in Chains: The Persecution of Hutterites During the Great War

Pacifists in Chains: The Persecution of Hutterites during the Great War. By Duane C. S. Stoltzfus. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2013. Pp. 268.

The 1918 deaths of two Hutterite conscientious objectors (COs) after being tortured in U.S. prisons links them to ancestors who died for their faith and also to brutalities visited on numerous prisoners throughout the nation’s history. Duane C. S. Stoltzfus, professor of communication at Goshen College, works carefully with limited sources to give voices to the two brothers and two other Hutterite men. An engaging author, Stoltzfus weaves the few cherished letters home and the military trial transcripts of these men into three larger contexts: of U.S. military and home front history of the Great War (a common name for World War I as it was being fought); of conscientious objection among diverse pacifists, especially those in the Anabaptist family; and of U.S. prisons.

Stoltzfus winds his narrative and analysis around events from May 1918 to April 1919. In just under a year, brothers Michael, Joseph, and David Hofer and relative Jacob Wipf were conscripted for military service; left their families and their Hutterite colony of Rockport in South Dakota; traveled to Camp Lewis in Washington State; were court-martialed for failure to follow military orders; and were imprisoned first on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and then in Fort Levenworth, Kansas. In late November, Joseph died. In early December, Michael died, and a day later David was released and returned home, as did Jacob in April. At each step of this tortuous journey, Stoltzfus helps readers understand how a host of social and cultural structures, contingencies, and arbitrary decisions yielded this tragic outcome.

The four men’s trip west by train parallels a brief description of Hutterite origins and early history in the sixteenth century and their arrival in the United States in the late nineteenth century, where about a third of the group established communal farm communities in what became South Dakota. As with many other Anabaptists, the desire for farmland intertwined with that for autonomy to define their nonconformist religious practice, uniquely for the Hutterites a community of goods. The centrality of that old and corporate Hutterite faith is etched in the individual voices of the men. When asked about his church’s position on war at his court-martial, Wipf answered, “They are strictly against war. That is why we left Russia” (p. 84). In camp, Michael wrote, “One is able to see what he is missing when the community is taken away” (p. 91). In their letters, greetings to wives and children flow into those to “all the brothers and sisters” (pp. 158, 159). The men’s consistent stance that their community’s objection to war meant absolute non-cooperation with military orders, which they perceptively extended to orders given them in prison, also suggests the depth of faith as a community matter.

Stoltzfus uses the month in Camp Lewis and their court-martial to present the unclear, evolving, and sometimes-intolerant federal policies toward COs, with particular attention to President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker. Mobilizing a disciplined war machine also required muzzling civilian opposition with the Espionage and Sedition Acts and releasing jingoistic emotions in local communities. Both Hutterites at home and those in military camps experienced abuse for their pacifist stance, but also for their German ethnicity. In the chaos of the military mobilization, individual military personnel were sometimes the most brutal. But bad timing led to sentences of twenty years of hard labor rather than to farm furloughs on which these most consistent of objectors agreed they could grow food “for the poor and needy ones” and to which many other absolute COs were furloughed (pp. 85, 87). Stoltzfus skillfully intertwines contingency, official culpability, and the exasperating (sometimes even to Mennonite COs) determination of ordinary Hutterite men to practice their faith.

The chapters on the four men’s months in Alcatraz and Fort Levenworth provide a powerful indictment of physical abuse and the psychological assault of solitary confinement of these men and of too many others in U.S. prison systems. Stoltzfus takes special care to understand the prisons with both archival research and with a visit to Alcatraz, including its dungeons. These are also chapters that demonstrate the way in which official violence is often justified and the ways in which the National Civil Liberties Bureau supported the work of Hutterite and Mennonite leaders attempting to alleviate the suffering and to gain the release of imprisoned COs. All efforts came too late for Joseph and Michael, who officially died of pneumonia. Stoltzfus’s final analysis moves beyond the individuals who visited violence on these men to federal policies that undergirded that violence.

Brethren in Christ readers with a historical bent or family connections will hear echoes of the community’s own experiences of pacifism in the Great War and their impact on the next war. Just as importantly, Stoltzfus’ book not only looks back but makes connections to militarism, incarceration, and solitary confinement so prominent in our own period.

Stoltzfus’s narration includes his visits with descendants of the Hutterite brothers. That family members contributed personal letters to his study suggests that these are new sources that illuminate the understated paths of martyrs and survivors. A broader discussion of if and how Hutterites and historians of the community have written about the Great War experiences—the strong bibliography shows a substantial number of works on the community—would help to highlight Stoltzfus’s contributions to earlier conversations within and about the community. That said, this is a fine work for church members, for scholars, and for classrooms.