Two Roads Diverged in a Wood

Gus was discharged from the army in December 1945 and intended return to California and maybe get back into the hay bailing business. In any case, when he joined the army, he had become firmly established there. His cousins Glen and Ray were like brothers. His best prospects were In California.

But there was no hurry, he thought he would take his time and visit friends along the way. The mood of the nation as GIs were discharged and returned home must have been something of an ongoing celebration. It was an atmosphere a single guy could soak in for a while before returning to an everyday life of a job and responsibility.  His itinerary included Milwaukee. As it turned out he became waylaid there. These things happen.

Pictures they say can tell a thousand words. There is one where a story is written plain. It was taken in Milwaukee at the time, and is a picture of Gus and an attractive young woman, Herta Hintz, It’s a picture that fully captures the portrait of couple in love.

His brother Harry confirmed the romance. “Ya, I know it. They were sweethearts.”

No matter what a person’s best plans might be life sometimes intervenes. Romantic love waylaid Gus in Milwaukee and familial love anchored him there. While in Milwaukee he received a letter from his mother. He hadn’t heard from her in more than a decade and his plans changed. Everything changed in unexpected ways.

He had just returned from the war torn rubble of Germany and had firsthand experience with the misery of the displaced persons camps and more so of refugees who were shoehorned into one or two rooms in the home of a reluctant host. His mother, half-brother Harry and half-sister Irene were locked in a post war purgatory. This was misery he could relieve. His priorities changed. Sponsoring them for immigration necessitated a job and a place to put them up. To that end, Milwaukee was expedient and made sense.

Milwaukee, historically, was significantly shaped by German immigrants. Within that context there remained groups close to their ethnic ties. Bethany Baptist Church, a North American Baptist Conference congregation, was one of those. The Evangelical Christian denomination was founded in the 1840s to serve German immigrants in the United States and Canada. In 1919 it wanted to shed its image as an ethnic German denomination and began encouraging the use of English as the primary language for its church services. Like so many things German, that change came stubbornly slow.

The church history claims the vision of a predominately English language church was realized in the 1940s. But that self-assessment is more hopeful than true, at least at Bethany. History intervened.

The wake of World War Two included a large wave of immigration of Europeans to North America. This wasn’t an immediate humanitarian tsunami, but rather unfolded gradually. Gus didn’t have any problems in securing immigration visas for his mother, Harry and Irene. They were blood relatives after all. They fit neatly into U.S. immigration law that was in effect at the close of the war.

The Mail Order Bride Act of 1946

The Immigration Act of 1921, variously known as the Immigration restriction act and the Johnson Quota Act, the more restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 assigned more than 50,000 immigration slots to Germans. Both acts highly limited immigration slots and were hugely favorable to Northern Europeans by tying the quotas to the existing ethnic balance as reflected by the 1910 census. By contrast Italian immigrants competed for 4,000 slots. Immigrants with blood relatives in the United States were given priority for immigration visas. Gus quickly snatched his mother from the Bavarian farm where she was quartered. Harry and Irene quickly followed.

When he went to pick Irene up from the Milwaukee train station, though never having met her, he said she wasn’t too hard to recognize. “She was the only woman getting off that train who looked confused, and she was the only one who didn’t speak English.”

Gus didn’t know it then but in one way or another, the scene would play out again and again.

Meanwhile, U.S. immigration law was in a state of flux, slowly trending toward opening hundreds of thousands of immigration slots to displaced persons who remained in Germany and ethnic German refugees, who were kicked out of Eastern Europe and beyond, who fled in advance of the from the Red Army.

But with regard to adopting U.S. immigration policy to the post war reality there were certain issues that weighed more heavily on lawmakers than the plight of displaced persons and refugees – war brides and their children. President Truman signed the War Brides Act into law on December 28, 1945. It granted an unlimited number of slots to non-Asian women who married American GIs during the war.  (This restriction was temporarily lifted with amendments in 1947, and done away with entirely in 1952 while the United States was engaged in the Korean War.)

The new immigration law became significantly more robust with the passage of the Fiancés Act in June 1946.

Enter Olga.

If our lawmakers were more honest in naming bills they would have more truthfully called it the Mail Order Bride Act of 1946.

Under its provisions an American who served overseas could apply for a three month visa for their “fiancés.” They had to make the travel arrangements for their future brides and if they were not married within three months, they had to send the women back or pay for deportation. Nevertheless, it opened the door to all sorts of marriages of convenience. Between the “War Bride” and “War Fiancé” acts as many as 500,000, mostly British and European, women were granted immigration visas into the United States.

I Know Such A Fine Girl for You

Gus’s mother arrived in the United States in 1947. Her son was a bachelor. Once settled in she remarked, “I know such a fine young girl for you from the old country. We were neighbors.”

Gus’s mother somehow cajoled her son into an “arranged marriage” and correspondence courtship. Gus became a married man on January 29, 1949.  And it worked, on November 24 of that same year he was a father. Things changed.

His previous sweetheart Herta married Art Hintz. As it turned out, Gus built his first house next door to them. He might have looked back once or twice, or more likely over the fence between the two yards. At the time he might have said:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Sometimes ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

Took the least travel by,

And that has made all the difference.”

 

Robert Frost penned those lines sometime around 1920. With only a few lines, he captured the treble and the tenor of a time and it resonated for decades and still today. Those few words might have been a man’s theme song – from Ukraine to Canada, to the United States and then back to Europe and finally marriage to a refugee mail order bride. With every step along that way “two diverged in a wood.”