Wallers Formed My Political 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 in 1880 by the death 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 they wanted were laborers who could speak English and who had become comfortable with American culture. The Cambridge Y under Sect. Waller developed an effective Americanization program, including ESL; it drew strong industrial support for the Y and impressed 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 and was seconded by the International Division of YMCA. 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. At that time, Akron was the fastest growing major city in the country. 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.  His Y taught American history, English, civics, 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, Pittsburgh, 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, Goodrichs, and Firestones. But it also attracted backlash, and by the early 1920s, from the Ku Klux Klan. By this time, Halley Waller was serving as elected chair 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 school Board 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 – a 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 was invited to join an advisory panel by the Akron Y but no longer served as its Secretary. He joined Northwestern Mutual as an insurance agent and, as the Klan wave receded, worked to re-establish 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.

As for Fletch Waller, Sr: he went to Colgate on a football scholarship which was cancelled his sophomore year after a blown knee injury. He majored in industrial psychology and worked his way through with summer jobs as tennis coach and (armed) bodyguard to the Seiberling kid (in response to the dreadful Lindberg kidnapping, 1932). Dad worked in the sleep lab at Colgate during school. He met Eleanor Taylor, Syracuse University coed; they secretly married at Easter, 1933.

Fletch left Colgate prematurely, in May of’33, to get the jump on job hunters coming out of Eastern schools all within a three-week window of late May and early June. Through his and Grandad Halley’s contacts in Akron, B F Goodrich picked him up for their industrial relations department because of his studies in industrial psychology. But there was position budgeted. So, first, two years of 20 hours/week of night shift on a heel press line. This is where Fletch developed his respect for labor, for workers, for unions. These years of the late ‘30s impressed on him the terrible toll un- or under-employment takes upon workers and families.

He was promoted to line supervisor but argued that he should retain his union membership. The union disagreed, strongly: for his trouble, Dad was physically thrown out of the union hall and had his arm broken. Eventually, this smart, college guy was moved into time studies and onto the management development ladder.

December 7^th, 1941, the day that changed the direction of our lives. I had recently turned seven. That Sunday evening, Dad, borrowing Grandad’s Pontiac coupe, was taking our cousin, his Aunt Evie’s son, after a weekend visit back to the Navy’s Sandusky training station on Lake Erie. I seated between them, the radio on, and came the flash interruption announcing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I sensed their alarm, their outrage, but little grasped how that day was to alter forever the course of our lives.

December 8^th, 1941. Monday, my mother made me stay home from first grade in order to listen on our huge, console radio to President Roosevelt’s speech to Congress, the famous “day of infamy” speech. To be kept home upset me, for I was a good boy who had learned how important it was to attend school. I have a strong memory of that day at home and the sound of Roosevelt’s voice, but I’m not sure if that's a memory of the event or of multiple replays of the famous call-to-arms. Later that afternoon, the Senate declared war on Japan 82 - 0, and the House, 388 – 1 (Montana pacifist Jeannette Rankin dissenting.)

December 11^th, 1941. On this day, Hitler acted out his 2^nd worst decision: his declaration of war on the US. The first? to invade the USSR in June of 1941. Had Hitler and Mussolini not declared war on us in accordance with their alliance with Japan, we likely would have stayed out of the European war in order to focus entirely on the hated Japanese Emperor and his Premier Tojo. Hitler’s two decisions rang the death knell on the Drittes Reich. 

            That afternoon, the US declared war on Italy and Germany. Now, it was full-on WWII.

This was the day in’41 that Dad tried to enlist at the Akron Army Recruiting Center. Rejected:30-yrs old, married, two kids (Carol born in January of ’39,) a trick football knee, and working in a war industry, rubber: tires, tank treads, seals, boot soles & heels, essential bushings, transmission belts, and such.

Soon Dad turned to Taylor family acquaintance Larry Appley, recently appointed Advisor to Sect. of War Stimpson on civilian and personnel training. Larry arranged an interview in Washington. We, none of us save Dad, ever saw Akron again.

Fletch was assigned to the War Dept.’s Office of Civilian Manpower and posted to McDill Army Air Force base, then under construction in Tampa, Florida. Mom, Carol and I moved into a tiny little rental on a dirt road on the edge of St. Petersburg. Dad worked six days a week, essentially disappearing from Carol and my lives. Grandma and Grandpa Taylor wintered each year in St. Pete, so we were not entirely alone.

In small town Florida, I saw prejudice, discrimination, and segregation in action, while watching Mom treat all people with respect and dignity. Aside from that, my Mom imparted more personal than political values. I recall, later, her taking me, a third-grader, to get my first library card; to open a savings account; her admonitions to “look it up”, to know; her management of our Cub Scout pack. During the AEC years in Washington, it was she who taught me to drive and parallel park. Politics and public policy? Not so much; that was Dad’s province.

And here was forged his respect for independent contractors; his appreciation of the cruel discrimination against Negroes (we didn’t use Black back then) who had not migrated Northward. He encountered bureaucratic nonsense from the Pentagon, nonsense he castigated in colorfully irreverent telegrams north.   

Soon enough, he received a summons to appear at his boss's desk ASAP: "if you know so damn much, get your ass up here." I recall we taking him to his priority reservation out of Tampa’s tiny airport on a Lockheed Lodestar, the first commercial airliner I had ever seen. Dad went, expecting to be fired.

Ellie received his wire the next day: "Gather up the kids and meet me in Washington." He had been appointed Deputy Director of the War Department Office of Civilian Manpower. I remember the subsequent two-day drive in our '41 Oldsmobile with its wondrous Hydra-Matic transmission. (A new car? Dad ordered it when the public learned US production of civilian automobiles was to be suspended for production of tanks, Jeeps, trucks, army staff cars, and aircraft. It was among the last that rolled out of the plant in September of ’41. We had the olds until1953; I learned to drive in it.)

I remember Mom's confusion at DC addresses and the mystery of traffic circles. But most vividly, the awesome nighttime arrival with the Lincoln Memorial welcoming us from the DC end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Eventually, we found our way to the Bethesda house he had rented and to an anxious reunion. All in time, the next day, to register for 3rd grade.

His experiences at MacDill Field imbued him with tolerance and a hatred of prejudice and discrimination, values he passed on to his children. He also acted out his impatience and irreverent disdain for bureaucratic impedimenta, attitudes I unfortunately have come to share.

Fletch Waller, Sr. went on to develop a remarkable career of public service at the War Department and then at the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission. He worked 6 ½ day weeks during the war, and six-day weeks until 1952 when he left government to join private industry again. 

BTW, Colgate came back and offered him his degree – provided he pay his library overdue fines with interest. He told them to go to hell, so, no, Fletch Waller never graduated from college.

Liberalism, intolerance of intolerance, respect for work, civic courage, faith in education, skepticism of ideologies, urge for pragmatic solutions – all products of the lives of Halley Templeton Waller, of Fletcher Charles Waller, and of Eleanor Taylor Waller, of the facts of their public and private lives and of the family mythology that has grown up around them.

 

So, that’s what I would tell my reluctant acquaintance if given the chance. Perhaps he’ll read it here. I want to learn how his very different views developed, first out of curiosity and second because it might help build bridges to friendship.