Part 3: The Shameful History Behind Iowa’s English Only Policy

by Nancy Thieman, LMSW, Sioux City, Iowa

An original Blog for Iowa exclusive in four parts

Targeting the Average German Speaker
    
There are many instances of outrageously-large fines being levied and enforced if citizens were overheard speaking German in public.  In Scott County, in the day of party lines, four women of German ancestry were fined $225 for speaking German on the telephone.  That is the rough equivalent of $3,200 in 2006 dollars.
    
In the Lowden incident mentioned in part two, four men, all naturalized citizens in their fifties and sixties who had spoken out in favor of the Rev. Reichardt, were arrested and taken forty miles to the Cedar Rapids court.  There, they all denounced the reverend, and charges of “treasonable utterances” were dropped.  They were released without a fine, but were ordered never to speak German again.

The Ironically-named Liberty Bonds
    
Next came the enforced coercion of the Liberty Bonds, an ironic name being as German-Americans were forced to buy them to prove their loyalty to the country that was abusing them.  According to Allen, each federal reserve district would be assigned a quota for bond sales and then local committees would be responsible for meeting that quota.  In Iowa, the local committees would snoop into the business of private citizens, including looking at property records, bank accounts and other assets, and then determine exactly how many Liberty Bonds each person was required to purchase.
    
At first, no one paid much attention to these “requests” for money.  But once the systematic enforcement set in, people were much more willing to part with their hard-earned cash.  This enforcement was made up of public lists of those who had and had not paid up, i.e., loyalty lists; the distribution of cards telling how much each person was required to pay; and frequent warnings of negative consequences for not paying.  Citizens who did not “give” a sufficient amount were taken before “slacker courts,” yet another method of extra-legal intimidation which was supervised by the county Council of Defense and which seemed to prove very successful.  In fact, 400 people were summoned before the slacker court in Council Bluffs in one year.  And in Black Hawk County and elsewhere in Iowa, the sheriff would be so good as to accompany you to the court if you decided not to show up on your own.
    
In one case on record, a farmer from Newton, Iowa, named Peter Frahm, was called before the post-war slacker court at the Courthouse in Jasper County.  He had apparently balked at paying the required $1350 that the committee had decided was the amount that would prove his loyalty.  The intimidation seemed to work, since his name never showed up in the records again.  To guarantee his safety and that of his family, Mr. Frahm had, in the end, forked over the modern-day equivalent of $16,225.

Tomorrow on Blog for Iowa
Government-sponsored Coercion Leads to Mob-mentality Violence, Part 4 of The Shameful History Behind Iowa’s English Only Policy

Allen, L., (1974). Anti-German sentiment in Iowa during World War I. The Annals of Iowa, 42, 418-429.

Derr, N., (1989, Summer). Lowden: A study of intolerance in an Iowa community during the era of the First World War. The Annals of Iowa, 50(1), 5-22.

Dollar Times Inflation Calculator. (2007). Retrieved September 21, 2007, from http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.html.