How Wallers Formed My Values and Views

Dear Clan:

As some of you know, I have been journaling since last Sept 12^th  (the opening gun of my 92nd lap) and have kept at it quite religiously. Also, quite satisfyingly. What the regimen has done is make me more aware, more observant, more willing to open myself to memories and reflection which I note and describe. Someday, when I’m gone, you can read it – maybe.

My reflections have touched on family history and that, in turn, has touched on material suitable for a One Small Step engagement. What’s One Small Step? This is an initiative of NPR’s StoryCorps designed to bring Americans with different political views into a single, respectful, 50‑minute conversation—not to debate, but to recognize each other’s shared humanity and to search for shared values or views. It’s framed as an antidote to polarization, grounded in listening rather than argument. The structured conversation probes how one’s political views and values have developed; what and who influenced one’s adoption of a political philosophy, belief, or viewpoint. In the last year, I have had three such One Small Step encounters and seek more. We locally, from Wider Horizons and/or Braver Angels, who wish to participate find conservatives generally reluctant to take part; many more blues than reds are willing to partake. StoryCorps reports that this is the case nationally, as well.

An acquaintance of mine, who holds diametrically opposite political views from mine (i.e., a MAGA Trump loyalist) turned down my invitation to do a One Small Step, saying something along the lines of it would be useless, you’re too far gone in your close-minded liberalism. This shows I failed to convince him that I wanted no debate, no proselytizing, no Road to Damascus conversion, just an exchange of histories of how our political values and views were established. Apparently, he distrusts me.

So, here’s what I might tell him about my history if given the chance. I know some of you of the Holmquist/Waller Clan will find of interest my version of our Waller family history. Adrien may have a different take and I hope she will share that. But, for most of you from the Holmquist side, this will be more than you really want to know and I will not be offended if you bail out from here.

               For One Small Step:

My strongly liberal political values were forged from those of Grandfather Halley Templeton Waller and his son, Fletcher Charles Waller. Halley was one of four brothers between ages 1 and 8 orphaned by the death in 1880 of Henry Curtis Waller, killed by measles. The brothers’ mother, Josephine Martha Bogue, followed Henry four months later, dying of a broken heart people said. They lived in Enosburgh and Barton Landing, VT. Percy, at 13 months, was adopted by his aunt and uncle Templeton; the other three were raised by the Bogues.

Grandfather Halley was a Baptist. His grandfather had turned away from the Congregationalists and founded a Baptist Church in Royalton, VT at the start of the 19thC over the issue of baptism: he was said to prefer to worship “with people bathed in the spirit of the Lord rather than were merely sprinkled.”

Halley was bright and ambitious. The Bogues helped Halley attend The Vermont Academy and from there he earned admittance to Brown University, class of 1901, the “noughty-ones.” He was putting himself through school by teaching elementary children in a one-room schoolhouse near Providence. He roomed with a minister and was increasingly drawn into Christian values and views and into the orbit of the local Young Men’s Christian Association. The YMCA of Providence appointed him chair of its college relations program. Halley proved an adept organizer, leader, and ambassador.

Upon graduation from Brown, Halley matriculated to the Baltimore Medical College (not a predecessor of John’s Hopkins but of the University of Maryland’s Medical School. Two of his brothers were physicians graduated from BMC.) But Halley withdrew from medical school in his 3^rd year to answer a call from the Providence Y to join its staff.

In 1905, he answered a second call from the Cambridge, MA Y to become its Secretary, what we would call its Exec Director or CEO. It was in this role that my father’s and subsequently my political values were most powerfully shaped. These were the years of max immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. The mills and watchmakers of greater Boston were hiring. But what thry wanted were laborers who could speak English and become Americanized. The Cambridge Y under Sect. Waller developed an effective Americanization program, including ESL; it drew strong industrial support for the Y and impressed the national YMCA administrators. Sect. Waller was a comer.

His college friend, Fletcher Brockman, had gone on mission to found the Y in China. He asked Halley to join him in that work. But Halley’s beloved wife, Florence Henrietta Cook, was suffering a difficult pregnancy. Her docs did not want her to take such an arduous trip across the continent and Pacific to Shanghai. So Halley put China aside. Fletcher (for the missionary) Charles (for Florence’s father) Waller was born in Cambridge in 1911, at the height of the influx of immigrants.

Meanwhile, the auto industry was booming in Michigan, Indiana, and Northern Ohio. Cars needed tires, five of them apiece. Seiberling (Goodyear), Goodrich, and Firestone needed workers in their Akron tire plants, workers who spoke English and who would become dedicated to American mores and values. Most of the immigrant arrivals in Protestant, conservative Ohio were coming from Eastern and Southern Europe – Roman Catholic Italians and Hungarians, Secular and Jewish Czechs, RC Slovaks, Orthodox Greeks, generally less well-educated than their more familiar German, Irish, English and Scandinavian predecessors. 

What the rubber industry needed was what Boston had: the Y’s Americanization programs. Sect. Waller’s programs celebrated these new citizens and encouraged pride in their national traditions blended with patriotic pride in their new homeland.  The Y taught American history, English, Constitutional rights of free expression and assembly in civic associations (read unions?)

1914: the Great War. Halley Waller headed the Akron War Bond drive, established Y-based programs of war relief, and sponsored a variety of USO and veterans’ relief programs.

The war shut down migration from Europe. Asian immigration was centered on and absorbed by the US West Coast. Detroit, Chicago and Akron began to promote migration from the South; the Great Migration of Black rural labor soon to encounter the explosive, racial animus of Northern urban citizens.

In the meantime, the Akron Y was recipient of generous capital investment for facilities and expansion of its programs from the rubber-baron families, i.e., the Sieberlings (Goodyear), Goodrichs, and Firestones. But it also attracted backlash, and by the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan. By this time, Halley Waller had been elected head of the Akron School Board, so he had two strikes against him in the eyes of Klansmen: Americanizing Catholics at the Y and running an integrated public school system. In 1922, the Klan ran candidates against him and took over the school board. A cross was burned on their front lawn; Dad, ten at the time, thus received his first taste – bitter, fearful distaste – of racial discrimination and intolerance, what Timothy Eagen called “The Fever in the Heartland.”

The heat got too much for the rubber families, who withdrew support of the Y. The new school board forced Halley’s resignation. Public attitudes were changing. Even Halley, in 1924, gave grudging support for the new national laws establishing quotas on immigration. I was shocked to discover a speech he gave to the Akron Chamber of Commerce expressing concern about northern European values being subsumed in the uncontrolled wave of immigration from Eastern Europe and the US South.

Dad was withdrawn from the public schools and sent to Western Reserve Academy, in Hudson, Ohio. BTW, Rob Janes, another Ohioan, was graduated from Case Western Reserve before going to med school.) Halley continued as advisor to the Akron Y but no longer served as Secretary; he joined Northwestern Mutual as an insurance agent and as the Klan wave receded, worked to re-establishe his civic leadership and esteem, particularly for his resistance to the Klan.

From this background came Dad’s and through him, my political values of civic service, public courage in the face of intolerance, and liberal respect for all callings of men.

So, that’s what I would tell my reluctant friend if given the chance. Perhaps he’ll read it here. I hope to learn how his very different views developed -- for that might help us bridge our divide and help develop acquaintance into friendship.