Road Trip Through History: The Boom and Bust of Nininger, Minnesota
To my surprise, ghost towns were a recurring theme of our multi-year trips along the Great River Road. More than once we saw small exhibits dedicated to towns that had grown up to support the fur trade, the logging industry, or mining and withered away because industries closed, transportation routes changed, or county seats shifted. A chilling reminder of the impermanence of the things we build.
On our most recent trip, in and around the Twin Cities, we were introduced to a new type of lost town, courtesy of a historical marker. Founded in 1856 on the banks of the Mississippi, Nininger Minnesota did not grow organically around an industry. The town’s founders, John Nininger, and Ignatius Donnelly moved to Minnesota with the plan of building a new city as a contender for Minnesota’s capital. It was not an implausible goal at a time when Minnesota’s cities were just taking shape.
In order to create the appearance of a boom town, Donnelly purchased 100 of the 3,800 platted lots and advertised the benefits of the new community in newspapers and immigrant neighborhoods throughout the Eastern United States.
By 1857, the new town, with seventy buildings and a population of some 1,000, was a bustling river port.[1] It had everything you would expect in a river port at a time when lumber was booming: two sawmills, a grist mill, several factories, two boarding houses, six saloons, and a dance hall, not to mention a baseball team. The developers had aspirations to be more than just a successful port. They had plans for a public library, a debate hall, and an athenaeum--which in my mind is a combination of a public library and a debate hall, but I am not an urban developer with big dreams.
Those dreams crumbled in the Panic of 1857.[2] By 1869, Nininger City existed largely on paper, though Donnelly’s two-story mansion remained, overlooking the failed city from a hill on river. By 1932, there was nothing left except Donnelly’s mansion and the foundations of a few old buildings, hidden in the prairie grass.
Donnelly lived in his mansion until his death in 1901: one of those larger-than-life enthusiasts (aka eccentrics) whom the nineteenth century produced with some regularity. After Minnesota became a state in 1858, he served three terms as a congressman and one as its lieutenant-governor. He wrote the best-selling Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882)[3] , which is credited with popularizing the idea of the lost civilization, and three books arguing that Francis Bacon wrote not only Shakespeare’s plays, but the works of Marlowe and Montaigne. He supported women’s suffrage and the Farmers’ Alliance, an agrarian movement which sought to improve economic conditions for farmers through political advocacy and the creation of cooperatives. He ran for vice-president on the tickets of two different populist parties. (Not at the same time.)
[1] By comparison, St. Paul, the capital, had a population of roughly 10,000. The population of Minnesota as a whole was about 85,000.
[2] Here’s the short version:
Grain prices dropped due to a combination of bumper crops and reduced demand from Europe due to the end of the Crimean War. Foreign trade imbalances led to a drain on the nation’s gold reserves and increased interest rates. Banks failed. The development of railroad had been a driver of the economic boom that preceded the panic. Now the collapse of credit halted their construction. Unemployment in the large cities of the Northeast and the Midwest soared.
The Panic of 1857 also widened the economic differences between the North and the South, The South, which was less industrialized than the North, did not suffer to the same extent. Low tariffs (ahem) protected its cotton trade with Europe, and sustained its overall economy.
[3] Still in print 140 years later. I can only dream.
Learning Japanese at Fort Snelling during World War II
One of the first things we saw when we got to Fort Snelling was a row of storyboards posted along the sidewalk leading to the visitors’ center. One of them showed a photo of three young Asian-American women in uniform, with a quotation above them:
“I was born in the states, in Nebraska, and I’m an American just like you.”
Sue Ogato Kato. Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, U.S. Army 1943-46.
As I read further, I learned that Sue Kato translated Japanese documents for the American army. I was eager to learn more. Fort Snelling did not disappoint.
In addition to serving as an induction center for new recruits during World War II, Fort Snelling was home to the Military Intelligence Service Language School (MISLS), where second generation Japanese (Nisei) like Sue Kato were trained to read and speak Japanese to prepare them for work as interpreters, interrogators, and in some cases as spies.
Shortly before the war began, the American military recognized they would need Japanese linguists. The military, sharing the general prejudices of the time, would have preferred linguists who were fluent in Japanese but were not themselves Japanese. It turned out to be a very small population. Their next choice were second generation Japanese immigrants, the Nisei, who proved to be less fluent in Japanese and more American culturally than the military leaders had expected. (Only three percent of the Nisei already in the army spoke fluent Japanese,) Even those who spoke Japanese well were not familiar with military terminology in that language or details of the Japanese army.
A month before Pearl Harbor, the Army opened a small class of 60 language students in an empty airplane hangar on Crissy Field at the Presidio in San Francisco. The first class graduated in may, 1942, the same month that the American government began to move Japanese-Americans into internment/concentration camps. With California, western Washington and Oregon and southern Arizona designated as an Exclusion Zone from which Japanese were barred—and overt hostility in California for Asians, even those in military uniform—the school needed to be moved away from the West Coast. MISLS moved to Minnesota, first to Camp Savage and then, as the number of students grew, to Fort Snelling.
More than 6,000 linguists graduated from MISLS, including many recruited from the camps. The curriculum was intensive. In addition to becoming both fluent and literate in Japanese, students learned Japanese army jargon. They learned to read a special style of Japanese used in personal correspondence. They studied captured documents and Japan’s history and culture. They learned to read maps and monitor radios. In 1945, the school added courses in Chinese and Korean and civilian administration in anticipation of new challenges after the end of the war.
Once in the field, MISLS graduates translated and interpreted documents, interrogated prisoners, and communicated with civilians. They convinced soldiers and civilians to surrender at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. One of their most important contributions was translating the “Z Plan,” captured documents which outlined Japanese plans to counter attack in the Southwest Pacific in 1944. General MacArthur’s chief of military intelligence, Major General Charles Willoughby, later claimed The Nisei shortened the Pacific War by two years and saved possibly a million American lives and saved probably billions of dollars."
Their work continued after the war. MISLS graduates served with the army of occupation in Japan and during the Pacific war crimes trials, where they monitored the work of Japanese translators for accuracy.
In 1946, the school moved to Monterey and was renamed the U.S. Army Language School
From the Archives: Curiosity’s Cats
By the time this post is available for you to read, I will be deep in the final day of a four-day exploration of a previously untouched and barely organized archive. I hope to come out the other end knowing whether I have enough material to write a proposal about a subject I'm interested in. (And no, I'm still not giving you any hints.). I had hoped to have a new blog post for you today, but it's only halfway done and I'm running short on time and brain power. Instead I'd like to share a post about doing research from 2014.
Wish me luck!
Research is a big part of my writing work day. In fact, I read far more words than I write in my constant search for a topic, a story,* and/or a telling detail. I have special glasses for the hours I spend on the computer, and eye drops that I generally forget to use. (Excuse me, while I pause and lubricate.)
More importantly, I have library cards for five local library systems, am an active user of Interlibrary Loan, and frequently max out my borrowing privileges. Because contrary to popular opinion, you really can't find everything on the internet.** Sometimes you need to browse the shelves, skim an index, read a primary source or an authoritative history, succumb to the allure of the archives, or ask a reference librarian for help. Some of the most satisfying moments of my career have occurred in libraries.***
Bruce Joshua Miller, editor of Curiosity's Cats: Writers on Research, makes no secret of his discomfort with researchers' increasing dependence on digitized sources. The 13 essays he commissioned for the collection share a common mandate: tell a story about a research project that required techniques beyond computer searches. The resulting collection could have been an extended Luddite shudder against technology or a simple exercise in nostalgia. It is neither, though several of the essays include a variation on "I'm not a Luddite, but..." and the final essay (Marilyn Stasio's "Your Research--or Your Life!") uses nostalgia to pointed effect. Instead, each piece explores the complicated and often personal relationship between writers and their research.
The essays, written by novelists, historians, journalists and a filmmaker, vary widely in topic, tone and method. Some give detailed accounts of methodology, like historian of science Alberto Martínez who gives a step-by-step account of the convoluted and creative process tracking down a single elusive fact: the date that Albert Einstein had the intuitive flash that led to the theory of relativity. Others, like essayist Ned Stuckey-French, who describes research as a way of life for his entire family, are more impressionistic. Despite the book's focus on non-digital discoveries, several also celebrate new opportunities of on-line digging.
Whether funny or poignant, describing the insights that come from getting lost in a strange city or the development of a research path over the course of a career, the essays in Curiosity's Cats celebrate the joy of research on-line and off.
* Topic and story are not the same. This is the first lesson any writer must learn if she wants to survive.
**Though you can find more than you may realize if you know how to look. I take a lot of pride in my on-line search skills.
***Not to mention some of the most embarrassing. If you meet me in person ask me about the "sexist man alive" incident at Chicago's Harold Washington Library. Let's just say librarians don't always whisper.