27. Victor's Family Reminiscences--Part 1

October 16, 2021

Written by my Great-Uncle, Victor Frederick Peterson.  Comments about how I inherited this document.  Other personal comments.

Emigration of Swedes to the US and Little Swedens that dotted the MidWest and about the Peterson family.

1905--Professor Peterson decides to move his family to Mexico.

Three books about rubber and colonialism:  King Leopold's Ghost, Fordlandia by Greg Grandin, In Darkest Africa by Henry Stanley (2 volumes).

PHF News:  David buys a $6,000 tempering machine thanks to USDA grant.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello, this is podcast number twenty-seven. I'm finally back at the business of making podcasts. And um I'm not going to be playing a musical instrument for a while because um I'm stuck in a recovery home for people for people who are at post-operations. I just had a knee operation, uh, and it takes about um at least 15 days. I'll be here for 15 days. Um anyway, so I'm taking advantage of this time to uh to do a series of podcasts, um which will not include music, but they do include uh a document that uh a manuscript that I discovered in my mother's basement. So with that as introduction, let's get started. Welcome to podcast number 27. We will leapfrog over 28 because for some reason I didn't do my accounting correctly. And we will continue with podcast 29 on the next one. There's going to be a whole series of them, probably almost a dozen podcasts uh uh that uh are about this manuscript uh that one of my relatives wrote. It's entitled uh comments about precious memories gleaned from my family tree. The manuscript is actually prepary precious memories gleaned from my family tree. And it was written by my great uncle, Victor Frederick Peterson. And it will have um my comments and sandwiched with his. So uh every paragraph that I have recorded of his, um, then I will then uh also record my comments about what he has written in that previous paragraph. So here we go with my comments. In the early summer of 2021, a global warming-induced cloud burst filled my mother's basement with four feet of water, destroying the furnace, the water heater, the computer, washing machine, dryer, freezer, and a lot of worldly goods. Shortly after the disaster, my sister Joanne did her best to rescue what hadn't dissolved into the gray memory erasing muck. And when I returned to Vermilion, South Dakota with my mother Dorothy, after a highly successful fundraiser for Project Hope and Fairness in San Luis Obispo, I set about clearing the living and dining rooms of their drying detritus. In among the detritus rescued from the fledwaters was this manuscript, carefully typed, pockmarked with mud and rough spots from the brass fasteners binding the hole into a damaged yet imposing document. I knew something of its author, Victor Peterson, as he and a friend in a van visited us when we were still living in suburban Detroit. Through the years, I had heard just a few family stories about Victor's four brothers and his sister Edith, who was my mother's mother. Last Monday, I had a knee operation and I knew that I would be plunged into a monkish existence, having oceans of time peppered with bloodlettings, rebandagings, meal deliverings, and earnest kinesthesiologists, all of which defines the rhythm of one stay in a French postoperative rest home. So with this gift of time, I was determined to learn a little family history. And as I read, I realized that I could actually add my own observations as a 71-year-old member of what looks like a fairly interesting family. So what you are hearing now marks the beginning of a series of podcasts that preserve and revitalize a moment in time, a moment in the lives of a family composed of disparate individuals, each one well endowed cognitively, but spiced with his or her individual psychology, defining his or her actions and beliefs. So what you are about to believe to hear then is my reading of Victor Peterson's, or that is great Uncle Vic's Precious Memories Gleaned from My Family Tree. First, a note on the title. I believe he used the term precious because individuals differ in their level of communication and are far more or less forthcoming. He used the verb glean because Victor was a regular communicator and also a letter saver. Gleaners, true to their titles, are motivated to preserve the past. So his observations are indeed precious because once we die we can no longer express ourselves. Beethoven was a great composer during his life, but once dead, he started to decompose. Precious Memories Gleaned from My Family Tree by Victor Frederick Peterson. Younger members of my family tree have asked me to record my memoirs concerning my family's history. I cannot claim to know all of the important events because I was isolated by my introvert nature and the distance between family members. From correspondence I have secured a great deal of the interesting information written here in a collection of true stories spiced and flavored with a little bit of personal philosophy of life. I've tried to include enough dates and historical facts to form a usable frame of reference for students of the past. My memory has greatly improved with the attainment of better health and a happier social life. These helpful memories are the ones which tend to build positive and creative bonds between members of the family tree. Recalling the good in others strengthens the love and joy which greatly improve the fruit of the family tree. In spite of economic depressions and troubled times in the family, we have experienced far more good than evil in life. So there is good reason for a happy and positive attitude. I hope that this family historical record will be only one of many to be written by others of our relatives, to be shared among us all. Historical records are important resources for helping to solve present and future problems of life. He who knows nothing of the past is condemned by his own ignorance to make many mistakes of past generations. The little bit I know of Great Uncle Vic was that he had mysteriously disappeared for 20 years. So maybe he's trying with this document to make up for his long silence by providing a service to his family members. I think perhaps this document was written in the 1970s. In addition to his apparent retiring nature, he's the last child in a long line spanning 16 years from 1892 when my grandmother Edith was born to 1908 when he was born. And in between, six other children, of which one died at the age of three. At this point, I should mention that you will hear in this document three family names, the Petersons, the Wrens, and the Lindabores. My mother's mother, Edith Peterson, married Martin Wren. And so that's how the Peterson branch of the tree diverged from its earlier branch and joined the Wrens. My mother's grandmother was Jenny Lindibore, whose trip to America was really quite thrilling, and you'll hear about later. Petersons and Wrens had their ancestral roots planted in the stone covered farms of Sweden centuries ago, but this story begins a little more than a hundred years ago. Sometime after our civil war in the USA, there was a terrible crop failure and extreme food shortage in Sweden that lasted several years. The fish harvest was not adequate to feed the people. The winters were more extremely severe than Sweden or Norway had ever experienced. People had to grind and eat the bark off the trees to live. Thousands of stalwart citizens began to emigrate in the 1860 to 1870 decade, and in the eighteen eighties more than six hundred and fifty thousand people emigrated to the United States from Sweden. The Congress of the United States offered to the Swedish people one square mile of land in Iowa and Minnesota for each family if the people would seriously till the soil and convert the land into producing farms. My father's father was Johann Frederick Peterson, called Movara Peterson, because he strongly advocated moving to America, and he did so himself after his wife bore him twelve of his thirteen children. There was a great need of food and living space for such a large family. He was a skillful carpenter and farmer, but hard times and famines created such severe hardship that three of his children died in infancy. After he and his family arrived in Iowa, he was given a rich section of Iowa land. He was the leader of a good sized group of Swedish immigrants in 1867 who also received large grants of land. At this point, I should mention that the movement of Swedes into the upper Midwest was no coincidence. Toward the end of the Civil War, the U.S. government conducted a policy of genocide intended to wipe out the Indians and abscond with their land while negotiating treaties that were repeatedly broken by the U.S. government. So the fact that Swedes were moving into Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, encouraged by donations of land, just meant that the U.S. government was doing its job, replacing indigenous peoples who were basically seen as mere varmints with good, hardworking European stock. You can't build a capitalist society on the backs of hunter-gatherers. The Swedes, on the other hand, were starving. They didn't want to settle down on the east coast of the United States among Europeans from different parts of Europe, especially some of those southerners, but they wanted to live among their own, among their peers in the nation's midsection where the climate most closely resembled the climate they were used to. So in this document, you're going to see references to Swedish clubs. They were all important toward uh socializing Swedes into this new continent. And the clubs encouraged marriages so that Swedes would stay within their ethnicity, producing little Swedens that dotted the Midwest. We continue with Viktor Peterson. On the corner of his section of land, Johan built a church because he felt strongly that they should all thank God for their many blessings and good fortune. The United States government gave the land free of charge with seeds to plant, and they paid no taxes for many years. Johann was not an ordained minister, but he was an excellent Bible student. He insisted that his group gather in his church each Sunday morning to pray, sing hymns, and listen to his sermon. That was quite near Stanton, Iowa, where my father was born and baptized, as recorded in the certificate and records that his father gave him. Dad was the last of thirteen children, of whom nine survived to grow up in the Promised Land, America. Edward, the twelfth child, died on the voyage across the sea and was buried at sea. These family records were concealed in a secret drawer of his desk and forgotten there until many years had passed when my brother Oliver discovered them just in time for an important occasion when they were needed. And now back to Tom. In the 19th century, the Swedish Lutheran Church controlled civil and social lives throughout Sweden, much as the Roman Catholic Church controlled civil and social life in Italy and France, and the Swedish Lutheran Church collected taxes on each individual. This stems from the 16th century when King Gustav Vassa converted all Swedes to Lutheranism. Refusing to convert was a capital crime. The king made himself the head of the Swedish Lutheran Church, and with the monies that he earned he was able to pay off his war debts. It wasn't until 1951 that Swedes were free to join any other church, and as of 2000, the church and the state were separated. In Sweden, there were two branches of Lutherans, the Orthodox and the Pietists. The Orthodox, which means right way, liked music, especially organ music. The Pietists, on the other hand, despised any pleasures of the flesh, including all music except choral. To see a depiction of the Pietists, watch the movie Babette's Feast. By the way, Stanton, Iowa is in the southwest corner of the state. In 2020, it had 678 residents. It was established in 1870 by Swedish immigrants. Its nickname is Little White City, not because of its racial makeup, which is 99.9% white, but because the railroad depot was always painted white. Also, the world's largest coffee cup serves as a water tower. And like any Swedish coffee pot, it is white and painted with beautiful flowers. By the way, also Mrs. Olson, featured on the Folgers coffee commercials, grew up in Stanton, Iowa. And another, by the way, years ago I heard Garrison Keeler, who of course love to uh recount stories about the mythical town, uh Lake Wobegon, probably it's very similar to Stanton, Iowa, lacking the lake, I suppose. Um Garrison Keeler uh divided Lutherans into two groups, um the Dark Lutherans and the Light Lutherans. And um after I heard that, I decided not to go see a psychiatrist anymore because Garrison Keeler had just solved my problems. My problems weren't individual psychological, they were group related, and that sometimes when I said things or thought things, I was thinking dark Lutheran thoughts like Pietist Lutherans. And uh other times I was thinking Orthodox Lutheran thoughts. And I needed to be able to, following the principles of cognitive psychology, label them for what they were. So that was a very important moment in my life that Saturday morning when I listened to Garrison Keeler talk about Dark Lutherans and Light Lutherans, that is, pietists and Orthodox. And now back to Uncle Vic. My grandparents, Johan and Lottie and Charlotte Peterson, were very happy to be blessed with five boys and four girls to help operate the large farm. Just imagine Ma Mama Lottie calling them all to lunch. Come, Emily, Ida, John, Frederick, Hannah, Jakob, Emma, Victor, Leonard. I'll never forget a similar happening in Rock Island, Illinois when I was a child. The robust wife of Professor Moritzon often called her twelve children home from the neighborhood, and what fascinating music it was throughout that city block or two. We tried to memorize the list of names as well as she did. What fast and easy housekeeping and yard cleaning because she had so many ambitious little hands to help around the house. I'm sure they could have kept a large farm in the top rank of productivity. I'm sure also that was the chief reason for very large families in pioneer days, because the high infant mortality rate. There were only horses, mules, and oxen to pull the plows, wagons, and buggies, so the working hours were from before dawn until dark in spring, summer, and fall. The Petersons must have enjoyed farming immensely, because the majority of them became either farmers or farmers' wives after attending agricultural college at Ames, Iowa. However, Victor Orloff persuaded his father to let him study for the teaching profession. So he earned a degree in chemistry and physics at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and a master's degree at Harvard University. Then he became professor of chemistry and physics at Augustana College. It's interesting to hear Great Uncle Vic's pronouncements about the concept often referred to as that of many hands making light the work. Uncle Vic never had children and clearly lacked the gene for leadership as he was pretty much a loner. Having raised five children myself, I know something about potential energy and children. Yes, speaking as an experienced father, if you can inspire and command your children, then yes, you can run a family as a business. It's a big if, however. Sometimes you spend more time reminding your children to take out the garbage than it would have taken to do it yourself. However, there must be a clear relationship between family size and agriculture. Otherwise, people wouldn't have 12 children. Farmers wouldn't have 12 children. So, yes, in the 19th century, children could make and stack, rake and stack the hay, feed the animals, and so on. And yes, because one in three children died before they were five years of age, one had to accept a large family just because of the effects of disease. My father used to wonder, uh, because he often would wonder out loud to me, whether if, as Darwin says, natural selection is the primary driver of a species survival, what will happen to human genetics as we interfere too much in natural selection? This is one of those questions that continues to be asked, but for which there is no clear answer. However, since family size is clearly mechanistically correlated with survival, as we become a species that no longer practices agriculture, as we approach the imminent end of the 12,000-year-old agricultural revolution, what happens? What becomes of us? For one thing, it seems that the family is falling apart. It has no function uh anymore. It has perhaps outlived its usefulness. Too bad my father is not here to argue with me. He might even agree. We return to Uncle Vic. When he when Dad attended Augustana College in the eighteen eighties, he was so strong and husky that he enjoyed playing football. He was only five feet nine inches tall, but having been a hard working farm boy, he was very tough and able to take the hard knocks. He had many friends among the students and teachers, so he naturally applied for the position of professor of chemistry and physics in 1891 and was quickly appointed. That same year he married one of the students, Jenny Alita Lindeborg, who had been elected one of the beauty queens at the college. She was also an honor student. A classic wedding was held in the college chapel before a fall of Well, this sure shows genetic variance. This entire manuscript is about one family. And judging by the actions of each member, you can see genetic randomness at work. On one extreme, you have a real social winner, Victor Olaf, who marries the beauty queen. On the other extreme, you have his youngest son, a loner, who never marries. And yet it's great Uncle Vic, the youngest son, who actually left a wonderful manuscript that I find extremely useful, and to him I am forever grateful. And I am also grateful, of course, to my sister Joanne for extricating the manuscript from the muddy water. We return to Victor Frederick. A wealthy Ericsson family bequeathed their home to the college for a science hall where Dad taught chemistry and physics until 1905 when he went to Mexico. Although he enjoyed his work, he was paid just twelve hundred dollars per year, which was the price of his new ten room story and two story house in eighteen ninety-one. During those teaching years, six of his children were born, one of whom died at three years of age. She was a beautiful and bright girl named Mildred Henrietta. In the order of arrival were Edith, eighteen ninety two, Harold 1894, Mildred, 1897, Reuben, 1899, Oliver 1901, and Rolf 1903. Home, church, and school kept the family very busy learning and growing. One of the very distressing aspects of living in the early 21st century is Is the utter lack of appreciation for science. The fact is, we have people making a living out of pulling the wool over people's eyes. Carl Sagan predicted this period as the beginnings were already manifesting themselves when he was still alive. The fact is, during most of human history, as Hobbes said, life was short and brutish. For a beautiful child to perish at three years of age, that was not unusual. But today it would make the nightly news. And yet we don't appreciate what science has given us. In fact, the enlightenment period isn't even part of the curriculum. I didn't know what the enlightenment was about until I was in my forties. And there are whole states in the United States where Darwin isn't even taught. We return to Victor Frederick. A financially tempting offer to become manager of a rubber plantation in Oaxaca State in southern Mexico seemed to Professor Peterson, my dad, to be an emp uh an opportunity to better himself and his family. The automobile industry was calling for plenty of rubber for tires, while he was both a chemist and an agriculturalist who knew how to grow the trees and to produce the natural rubber. The family considered it a call to new and profitable adventures in the fascinating jungles of tropical Mexico. And here are my comments. And I bet they embarked on the adventure dissatisfied with the lack of support for the sciences at Huron College. Imagine a wealthy family, the Ericssons, needed to donate their house to serve as the new chemistry department. In 1905, the sciences were only appreciated by an elite few. After World War II, the federal government supported the sciences for the first time in American history, but now we are today in the 21st century plunged back to the level of ignorance. Regarding the act of leaving the temperate zone in Illinois, where you merely remove the top foot of topsoil, then scratch ancient and life-giving volcanic dust and insert seeds as far as the eye can see. And then you move to a tropical zone where some plants grow a foot overnight and where nature abhors intruding species. The Peterson family soon discovered their mistake on the job, as you'll find out. Regarding Mexican culture, which you'll also learn about, I imagine they knew comparatively little of Mexican history, of the unbelievably barbaric twin barrels of the Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec overlords. The Petersons arrived most likely with an innocent Rousseauian vision of the indigenous people as noble savages. They arrived naive. They left maybe a little wiser. The school of hard knocks is indeed a cruel taskmaster. In the fall of 1905, the Rock Island Tropical Rubbery Plantation Company was organized for the purpose of raising rubber trees in the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, which Professor Peterson with Professor Peterson as manager. He resigned his teaching position and took his family along while maintaining ownership of his home in Rock Island. The children looked forward eagerly to adventure in the jungles of Oaxaca. During the fall of 1905 and the spring of 1906, the family took up residence in the village of San Hieronimo, a small community at the base of Mount San Hieronimo. Dad, with a crew of natives, built a lumber mill to harvest mahogany trees, which grew abundantly on the plantation. It was a large order to clear land for the rubber trees because everything grew very fast in the tropical climate. In the long run, the company could have made more profits if it had organized a lumber company instead of a rubber plantation. Edith and Rolf got very sick on the trip and had to return to Rock Island to stay home. At first, Dad built a log cabin for the family with only Harold along in the fall of 1905. Then he brought the rest of the family to San Hieronimo the next spring. It was during that winter that Harold enjoyed working along with Dad and the crew of natives clearing land of brush and jungle trees. They harvested enough lumber to help finance some of the expenses and to build cabins and offices for the company and the workers. Harold took up his first deep interest in construction and carpentry. He also had plenty of adventures among the wild animals, snakes, brightly colored birds, and flowers. The natives taught him a little Spanish and Indian dialects spoken is spoken in southern Mexico, but Edith and Rolf missed out on the San Hieronimo and plantation experiences. The town's name was spelled San Hieronimo G-E-R-O-N-I-M-O on English postcards. And now back to Tom. It has been said that World War I was fought on rubber. Without it, the internal combustion engine would not have functioned, which means no planes, no tanks, nor any other engines of war. Rubber was needed for gaskets that separated water, oil, and gasoline inside the engine. If you are interested in colonial history, here are three books about colonialism and rubber that you might find interesting. The first is King Leopold's Ghost, a story of greed, terror, and heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild. Dr. Hochschild, a professor at Calper Berkeley, ripped open the hidden wounds of the Belgian past and exposed one of humanity's most awful stories, King Leopold II, after the Berlin Conference of 1885, in which the Third World was divided among the First World nations, resolved to make little old Belgium a respected colonial power. He hired Stanley, the intrepid American explorer and journalist, to cross through the Congo an as yet untapped source of natural rubber found in many which is found in many tropical vines in the Congolese forest. Leopold used the Belgian army to establish a system of forced rubber extraction in which the Belgians hired Congolese troops to enter villages and demand fifty baskets per week per able-bodied man of latex balls collected by those men. Should a man fall short of the goal, the hands of two of his children would be chopped off. They were then smoked and brought down the Congolese River, the Congo River, to be entered into ledgers by Belgian accountants. It is estimated that almost 20 million Congolese died in a 20-year period during this rubber extraction period from 1899 to 1910, rivaling in both size and atrocity Hitler's attempts to exterminate the Jews and anyone else who was deemed by the Nazis to be unworthy of German citizenship. Most of the turn of the century beautiful buildings in Belgium were built with the money from rubber and severed hands. Until the 1960s, when Dr. Hochschild did his research, there had been just a few murmurings about the awful truth, but the truth was repeatedly squelched. And it took a professor from Berkeley to bring it to the fore. The second book about rubber and colonialism is Fordlandia, the rise and fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. This describes how the mix of ignorance, greed, pride, avarice, and cockiness make for a deadly cocktail of failure. Back in Detroit, Henry Ford maintained a special force of goons, thousands of them, who entered workers' houses and threw out any bottles of alcohol and dismissed workers who were repeatedly broke the rules. He hated the Jews and funded a newspaper that Hitler would have been proud of. He treated his son Edzel with no respect. He wouldn't listen to the advice of experts. So when Henry Ford decides that since the Brits controlled the international rubber market, he would try to fight their bloody insufficient, inefficient system by cutting out the middlemen and establishing Ford plantations along the Amazon River. Good idea superficially, but as they say, the devil is in the details, and Henry Ford was the wrong man for the job. First, he thought that white people knew more than colored people, so he would have gotten along with Donald Trump and a whole lot of our current politicians who shall remain nameless. Then he thought that Western civilization is superior civilization. And combined with all this, he just wouldn't listen to experts, again, like Trump. So his rubber plantation idea failed because he didn't appreciate that plants live in an environment. If you engage in monoculture in a tropical environment, that's like storing dynamite next to the matches. It's just plain stupid. Because once a disease such as a rust starts, it will destroy all the rubber trees for hundreds of miles in less than a week. And that is what happened. A very exciting book. The third book I found years ago in the basement of my parents' house. Without asking, I absconded with it. And it's a good thing because it gave me a view on the European-American notions of racial superiority combined with Christianity, combined with colonial behaviors that would make the devil blush, not that that matters since the devil is red. It's also good because it would have been uh the book would have been the books would have been destroyed in the flood. It's a marvelous out-of-print two-volume series about Stanley taking an expedition across Africa, purportedly to save some potentate, and that's in the title of the book, but really it was all about setting the way for King Leopold so he could exploit Congo. Inside the book, I found a letter from the Rock Island Rubber Company advertising shares in the company. I doubt if my great-grandfather Victor would have known that Stanley was working for King Leopold. In any case, most people did not appreciate the ugliness of white supremacy and the colonialist mindset. It took many years for that to come out. Well, that's the end of the first podcast, uh podcast number 27, regarding my great uncle's manuscript. A few notes about um Project Open Fairness. Uh, we had a very successful fundraiser. We raised about$15,000, and uh now I'm sending, I just sent$4,000 to David uh in um in um Dalwa, I mean Depa, to um um to buy to get the machine out of Hawk. Uh the he got through a USDA grant of six thousand a six thousand dollar machine, and then the government of um Ivory Coast holds that, and then you have to pay customs duties, which about amount to about 66% of the value of the item. So if it's six thousand dollars, you pay four thousand dollars to get it out of um customs prison. So he should be able to do that this week. It's a tempering machine, and that will really revolutionize his production of chocolate bars so that uh the chocolate bars, which we will bring another batch over in about a month, um just uh probably shortly before Thanksgiving or perhaps in the week after Thanksgiving, um, and that they will be available for sale. And uh, those of you who've tasted them, uh you'll you've I'm sure noticed that this is very high quality chocolate. David is uh really uh being very picky about picking the bean, picking through the beans, and producing a very high quality chocolate. Okay, that's it for today. Uh end of podcast 27, and we are going to leapfrog over 28, which you've already heard, and on to 29, which is the second in the series about my uncle's, my great uncle's manuscript about his family.