Shipshewana

Dorothy O. Pratt

Description

2005 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection

While most books about the Amish focus on the Pennsylvania settlements or on the religious history of the sect, this book is a cultural history of one Indiana Amish community and its success in resisting assimilation into the larger culture. Amish culture has persisted relatively unchanged primarily because the Amish view the world around them through the prism of their belief in collective salvation based on purity, separation, and perseverance. Would anything new add or detract from the community's long-term purpose? Seen through this prism, most innovation has been found wanting.

Founded in 1841, Shipshewana benefited from LaGrange County's relative isolation. As Dorothy O. Pratt shows, this isolation was key to the community's success. The Amish were able to develop a stable farming economy and a social structure based on their own terms. During the years of crisis, 1917–1945, the Amish worked out ways to protect their boundaries that would not conflict with their basic religious principles. As conscientious objectors, they bore the traumas of World War I, struggled against the Compulsory School Act of 1921, negotiated the labyrinth of New Deal bureaucracy, and labored in Alternative Service during World War II. The story Pratt tells of the postwar years is one of continuing difficulties with federal and state regulations and challenges to the conscientious objector status of the Amish. The necessity of presenting a united front to such intrusions led to the creation of the Amish Steering Committee. Still, Pratt notes that the committee's effect has been limited. Crisis and abuse from the outer world have tended only to confirm the desire of the Amish to remain a people apart, and lends a special poignancy to this engrossing tale of resistance to the modern world.

Contents
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1. The LaGrange County Settlement
2. Creating Cultural Fencing
3. The Draft and the First World War
4. The Indiana Councils of Defense and the Amish
5. Modernization and the School Issue
6. The Great Depression
7. Civilian Public Service
8. The Home Front in the Second World War
9. Gaining Control, 1946–1975
10. Conclusion

Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Midwest
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Medio Oeste de Estados Unidos
• Mensajería instantánea
• Midwestern United States
• Christianity
• United States
• History
• Middle West
• IN
• OH
• MI
• Amish

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 19 octobre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253023568
• Langue: English

Extrait

Shipshewana
Shipshewana
An Indiana Amish Community
Dorothy O. Pratt
This book is a publication of
Quarry Books
an imprint of Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders
800-842-6796
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812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail
[e-mail]
2004 by Dorothy O. Pratt
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pratt, Dorothy O., date
Shipshewana : An Indiana Amish community / Dorothy O. Pratt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-34518-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Amish-Indiana-Shipshewana-History. 2. Amish-Indiana-Shipshewana-Social conditions. 3. Amish-Indiana-LaGrange County-History. 4. Amish-Indiana-LaGrange County-Social conditions. 5. Shipshewana (Ind.)-History. 6. LaGrange County (Ind.)-History. I. Title.
F534.S54P73 2004
977.2 79-dc22
2004007615
1 2 3 4 5 09 08 07 06 05 04
To Jack, Jack IV, and Daniel. Thank you .
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction
1. The LaGrange County Settlement
2. Creating Cultural Fencing
3. The Draft and the First World War
4. The Indiana Councils of Defense and the Amish
5. Modernization and the School Issue
6. The Great Depression
7. Civilian Public Service
8. The Home Front in the Second World War
9. Gaining Control, 1946-1975
10. Conclusion

NOTES
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
INDEX
Acknowledgments
When I first began this project, little did I expect it to take over my life and consume so much of my time and effort. The book began from a simple question: How did the Amish get to LaGrange, and how did they survive? Thence came a dissertation, and from there sprang the beginnings of a book. It has been a long journey, and one that at times I feared would not be completed. The narrative, however, is a compelling one, and I felt some responsibility to those Amish folk who have shared their story and have trusted me to write honestly about their experiences. This book would never have been completed without their help.
In addition, there are others I should thank. The Indiana State Archives, the Indiana Historical Society, the Mennonite Church USA Archives-Goshen at Goshen College, the Mennonite Historical Library, the South Bend Tribune , the LaGrange County Library, the St. Joseph County Library, and the University of Notre Dame Library are amazing organizations that surprisingly work miracles to help a struggling researcher. At the University of Notre Dame, Mark Roche, Dean of the College of Arts and Letters; Hugh Page of the Undergraduate Studies Office; and many in the History Department have offered greatly appreciated help.
Others have read the manuscript and offered suggestions, some anonymously, others well known to me, such as Walter Nugent, Gail Bederman, Phil Gleason, Thomas Blantz, C.S.C., Vincent DeSantis, and Laura Crago. Their comments have been valuable and were treasured. Emily Holmes s editing helped to carve away excess wording that I had been loath to expunge. I also appreciate Indiana University Press, which expressed faith in this project and has helped bring it to fruition.
Mostly, I thank my sons, Jack and Daniel, who have lived through the birth of this book, and especially my husband, Jack, who has overcome the mysteries of formatting that I could never conquer. I am grateful for you all.
Shipshewana
Introduction
Amish Country is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Indiana. Demand for tourist information has increased so much that the Elkhart Visitor s Center sponsors a Heritage Trail Tour, a CD-prompted, self-guided journey through LaGrange, Noble, and Elkhart Counties, which contain the third-largest settlement of Old Order Amish in the world. Here there are no amusement parks, exclusive restaurants, or resorts. The area is not even particularly easy to find, yet the people come.
The attraction of this Amish community, primarily set in LaGrange County, is more complex than it appears. Although academics often worry about the inevitable process of assimilation, every tourist knows that part of the appeal is that the Amish seem to have resisted integration into mainstream society. The public asks: How did this group survive as a cultural and ethnic entity when others did not? How has their culture been robust enough to withstand the onslaughts of materialism, war, economic depression, and technology?
This book is an ethnic case study of one particular Amish settlement; it is not a religious history. It emphasizes how the group has managed not only to survive but also to thrive. 1 Certainly any examination of the Amish must consider their religion, for it would be difficult, if not impossible, to separate questions of ethnicity from religious tradition. 2 The Amish, however, are more than a religious denomination. They are an ethnic group: One is born Amish; evangelism is unknown. By definition, an ethnic group is a biologically and culturally discrete unit. Anthropologist George De Vos defines an ethnic group as a self-perceived group of people who hold in common a set of traditions not shared by the others with whom they are in contact. Such traditions typically include folk religious beliefs and practices, [and] language. De Vos adds that an ethnic group also possesses a sense of historical continuity, and common ancestry or place of origin. . . . [E]ndogamy [marriage within the group] is usual. 3
Examination of the Amish through the lens of ethnicity opens valuable avenues of analysis, particularly regarding their resistance to change. Other ethnic studies focus primarily on Americanization as predestined linear evolution. 4 Cultural change, however, is neither wholesale transformation nor stagnation. All cultural groups negotiate small and large decisions daily, but for some, including the Amish, the possibilities are more narrowly defined. Moreover, nuanced alterations in cultural choices are not the same as substantive transformations in social structure, which can provoke profound reverberations throughout a society. As a case in point, this study concentrates on the Old Order Amish in Shipshewana, LaGrange County, Indiana, a group that settles on the continuum of change far closer to the concept of cultural persistence than most.
Although the general population knows the entire Amish settlement by the town s name of Shipshewana, the name really should not be used to generalize the Amish in the area. The Amish group themselves by settlement; the settlement in northern Indiana is named Elkhart-LaGrange. Each settlement is divided into districts, overseen by bishops. Only one of these districts is known as Shipshewana, and the townspeople are quick to explain that the little village of Shipshewana is composed of more than just Old Order Amish. I have chosen, however, to use the popular term for the area rather than the insider term, because that is what the general population knows. In fact, when referring to the settlement, listeners often correct me to say, Oh, you mean Shipshewana. I have succumbed to the inevitable.
Early Amish History
Religious beliefs define the Old Order Amish worldview and act as a prism through which the Amish interpret their environment. Therefore, to understand the history of the Amish in Indiana during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one should have a rudimentary understanding of their history prior to 1841, when the Amish arrived in northern Indiana. The Amish trace their origins to the Anabaptist movement during the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Switzerland. These proto-Amish shared the Protestant insistence on the supreme authority of the Bible, but their views differed from those of other reformation movements concerning baptism, separation of church and state, and nonresistance. 5 Anabaptists believed Christianity to be an informed adult decision; therefore, baptism could be performed only on adults, which in turn necessitated the rebaptism of those who had been baptized as infants (hence the name Anabaptist). During the next hundred years, Anabaptists endured much abuse because they were viewed as heretical. This abuse was documented for future generations in the Martyrs Mirror . 6
The result of this persecution was a recommitment to the idea that Anabaptists, or Mennonites as their wing of the movement came to be known, must be a people called by God to be separate from the world. 7 If the surrounding community continued to threaten their self-imposed segregation, the only feasible alternative was to move. Mennonites eventually fled their homes in Switzerland and settled in other parts of Europe, including France, Holland, Alsace, and Russia. In spite of migration and harassment, the Mennonite sect thrived.
A breach developed within the sect in 1693 over the strict interpretation of shunning ( Meidung ) and resulted in the formation of the Amish wing of the Mennonite church. Shunning, a form of social ostracism, was a disciplinary action taken by church members. Those shunned were totally ignored; they could neither participate in social activities nor take part in the life of the family. The purpose was to use societal pressure to induce an errant Amish person to return to the flock. If shunning did not work, the community resorted to excommunication ( bann ) to p