Educating the Enemy: Teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War Borderlands 9780226815961

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E D U C AT I N G T H E E N E MY

Educating the

ENEMY TEACH I NG NAZIS AN D MEXICANS I N  TH E  COLD WAR BO R D E R L A N D S

Jonna Perrillo

the university of chicago press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-81543-5 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-81597-8 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-81596-1 (e-book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226815961.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Perrillo, Jonna, author. Title: Educating the enemy : teaching Nazis and Mexicans in the Cold War borderlands / Jonna Perrillo. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2021033661 | isbn 9780226815435 (cloth) | isbn 9780226815978 (paperback) | isbn 9780226815961 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Children of Nazis—Education—Texas—El Paso. | Germans—Cultural assimilation—Texas—El Paso. | Mexican Americans—Education—Texas—El Paso. | Racism in education—Texas—El Paso. | Americanization—Political aspects—United States. | Education—Political aspects—United States. Classification: lcc lc3746.5.t4 p47 2021 | ddc 370.8909764/96—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033661 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Robert, Frances, and Henry

CONTE NTS

Introduction 1 1. the fight for civilization 12 2. something new in the territory Race, Space, and Schooling in the Borderlands 40 3. at home on the range Civics and Civilization 67 4. the promise and peril of bilingualism Language Learning in El Paso Schools 89 5. devoted to the child Education and the Politics of Children’s Care 116 Epilogue 141 Acknowledgments 151 Abbreviations 155 Notes 157 Selected Bibliography 183 Index 193

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ecades after he was recruited to work for the U.S. Army, V-2 scientist Johann Tschinkel remembered the footage from Nazi concentration camps that he and his Operation Paperclip colleagues were required to watch upon their arrival at Fort Bliss in 1946. The question of “collective guilt,” Tschinkel recalled, loomed powerfully and, at the same time, was difficult to talk about with the other men whose work, together, had created the Third Reich’s most powerful weapon. The reasons for his own complicity, Tschinkel reflected, were more complicated than professional advantage. He knew he could “line up excuses” for why he had consented to the Nazi regime, and yet, he remembered, “the question remained: I had known about the persecution of Jews, Socialists and other regime adversaries.” He had watched his wife’s uncle being forced to wear the yellow star, and he had not tried to help him when he was imprisoned in Theresienstadt and then Treblinka, where he died. He had “heard rumors” about other concentration camps in Poland, and he had watched people try to emigrate. He knew he had not worked with any Jews since 1938. Though he did not say as much in the memoirs he wrote for himself and his family, his professional success and, in fact, the entire pretext for his relocation to the United States, the construction of the V-2 missile, was built on slave labor. And yet, he determined, nothing in his past prepared him to resist. Born in 1907, Tschinkel located the cause of his complicity three and a half decades earlier, in his childhood. Opposing Nazism “would have meant the forsaking of my circle of friends and my ingrained sense of law and order,” he concluded. “Many of the ethnic and nationalistic ideals with which I had grown up were close enough to some Nazi ideas to be seductive . . . some of the ideas of the Youth Movement included the superiority of German culture and the Aryan race. So I acquiesced, as did millions of my fellow Germans.”1 In his ruminations nearly four decades after the Holocaust, Tschinkel identified how the seeds of Nazism were sown long before Hitler, not least through the political and social education of generations of youth. Tschinkel’s ideas about how children’s education—in and outside of the 1

classroom—prepared youth for the political and social roles they would play as adults were shared by many Germans after the war and, just as important, by the Cold War American society in which his own children would be raised. The 1940s and 1950s campaigns for and against school segregation, battles over the content of textbooks, and the collusion and competition among government agencies, parent organizations, and commercial entities to influence the curriculum were all timely manifestations of a lasting belief that what American children learned in public school, from their teachers and school design alike, mattered. It mattered not just to the development of individual citizens, but to the racial and class structures upon which American culture and society operated. Just as Tschinkel saw his own past as preparing him to accept and assist Nazi beliefs and policies, however “repulsive” he later found them to be, American children were taught lessons about their current and future positions in a highly stratified and unequal society as they studied and played. In the El Paso schools his children would attend, students experienced in real time how race, economics, and immigration policy shaped individuals’ social and political opportunities, including the quality of education they were offered. Many American children would challenge these teachings however carefully they were transmitted, as 1960s student activist movements would prove. But just as many students accepted and profited from the lessons about their racial and class entitlement that they learned in school. Educating the Enemy tells the story of American schools and society through the lens of one group of students who profited: the nearly 150 children of Nazi scientists who relocated to El Paso, Texas in 1946 and 1947 as part of Operation Paperclip. In one of the first acts of the Cold War, Tschinkel and 117 other V-2 scientists and engineers, including the future Disney hero Wernher von Braun, were recruited to build a missile program for the U.S. Army based on the German weapon. The scientists were promised from the beginning that their families could accompany them to Fort Bliss, both because military leaders realized it was a necessity in order to win the scientists they wanted and because they saw the children as a pathway to reshaping the scientists’ images (and that of Operation Paperclip) in the public eye. Military officials believed the children promised to “do more to civilize [their] families than most anything else” by learning about democracy and reforming their fascist parents.2 This belief in children as political vehicles was not unique to the postwar era. In previous wars children had been used by both the government and the media as symbols of justice and potential victimhood, an emblem of what American soldiers were fighting for. They were drawn into 2

INTRODUCTION

the sacrifices their parents were also asked to make, and they collected funds for the American Red Cross and planted victory gardens. But they were not soldiers. From the Cold War’s earliest days, children were seen to be just as vulnerable to ideological assault and infiltration as any adult and therefore potentially influential in the war against communism as well.3 Consequently, they were expected to serve as cold warriors in whatever ways they could. The social and political significance of Cold War children in general and the Paperclip children more specifically can be seen clearly against the backdrop of El Paso. The border city and school system where the Paperclip children came to live held a unique position in the Cold War, including its potential value to a growing interest in Pan-Americanism. In 1946 over 60 percent of El Paso public students were of Mexican heritage or birth. Mexican American students were seen by Anglo El Pasoans as less dedicated to and capable of performing the values and skills that were most important in the Cold War, including careful and right thinking, patriotism, and diligence. Like the German children, Mexican American students were met with a carefully planned effort to “civilize” and assimilate foreign students—even those born in the United States. Yet the pedagogical and political beliefs the two groups of students encountered were distinct. While the Paperclip children were immediately integrated into mainstream classrooms and thrived academically, most Mexican American students were tracked to low performing “Mexican” schools where, at the secondary level, many trained for manual or domestic labor. Very few of El Paso’s almost entirely Anglo teaching force spoke Spanish; students heard speaking Spanish in school were disciplined with slaps, paddling, or other forms of corporal punishment. These differences in treatment and opportunity illuminate not just what teachers thought of particular students in the moment, but also the kinds of lives and social roles for which they were preparing their students. Likewise, educators and others called on what they saw as the perceived trajectories for different students—professionalism or house management for the Paperclip children and manual labor for Mexican Americans—and interpreted the children before them in that light. Anglos’ pejorative views of Mexican Americans shifted little after the war, but the stakes of segregation took on new value: long-standing characterizations of Mexicans as people who were unintelligent, antisocial, and lived “a hacienda way of life” met with a Cold War culture that revered psychology.4 Out of this reverence, postwar Americans came to associate democratic behavior not just with the actions people took but with possessing an optimistic and outgoing personality.5 Images of happy, sociable children served as important evidence of the INTRODUCTION

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benefits of democracy, and the Paperclip children were shown to be appreciative of and enthusiastic about the opportunities before them. Educators, parents, and journalists praised the children for their congeniality and quick integration into their school communities and, in the process, advanced an argument that benefited the image of the children and schools alike. By contrast, Mexican students were segregated into schools that offered them little diversity or opportunity to assimilate into other communities, punished for speaking the only language they knew, and were therefore characterized as antisocial and un-American. Hence, while Educating the Enemy centers mainly on the Paperclip children, it charts what the experiences of two groups of students, one of which might have been considered the enemy, the other often treated as such, can tell us about postwar American schooling and political culture. In so doing, it uncovers the role schools played in defining “foreignness,” the Cold War dissonances between international tolerance and domestic segregation, and the influence of both military and diplomatic postwar initiatives on American public schools and students’ treatment within them. The oppressive nature of Mexican American schooling in El Paso will be unsurprising to anyone familiar with the history of education in the southwest, which has been well charted in areas both urban and rural.6 But the changing postwar thinking behind what made Mexican students so inferior and so potentially threatening, and the ways in which the Paperclip children profited from all of these same lines of thought, compels us to think anew about identity formation, citizenship, and the role of schools in shaping both. While we might expect the Paperclip children to be seen by Americans as enemies, in fact they were treated as allies in a new war. They came from a nation that hundreds of El Pasoans had lost their lives fighting. One former Paperclip child, Henry Tschinkel, remembers that “we had expected and we had been warned that there might be a lot of resentment. A year after World War II, the enemy was there in their school. So we were taught to keep a low profile in that sense.”7 And yet, for Tschinkel and others, resentment was difficult to detect. Many former Paperclip children have described their quick acceptance by teachers and other students, despite the fact that they were not ordinary Germans but the children of men who served the Third Reich. They quickly “Americanized”—at least from an outside vantage—in response to a curriculum designed to teach them and other students core American values and ways of thought. This process depended as much on the public perception of the students as on their actual learning. Educating the Enemy shows that Anglo El Pasoans’ quick identification of the Paperclip children as people 4

INTRODUCTION

like themselves, which is to say, as white people and potential compatriots, says much about what kinds of people and ideas seemed most foreign or most redeemable to Americans. During World War II, the children of fascists made for obvious enemies. Within the context of Cold War race and social politics, however, this was no longer the case. The Paperclip children arrived just as this shift from enemy to ally was taking effect. To Wernher von Braun, they were “prisoners of peace”—not exactly prisoners of war, but not altogether free. The children were bussed daily under military patrol from the barbed-wire-surrounded barracks in which they lived to public elementary schools in the city. Other than in school, they had little contact with children outside of their group for four years, when most of the families were relocated to Huntsville, Alabama, to work at Redstone Arsenal. Yet the former Paperclip children now describe their time in El Paso as largely positive even in a conflicted and charged political environment. This perception likely has been shaped by many factors, including the passage of time and its effect on memory. But it is also true that the El Paso school curriculum was in many ways an ideal one for this particular group of students, even in some instances created precisely to enable the Paperclip children to succeed. This is in part because the same postwar forces that brought the Paperclip children to the United States—the fear of communism, a view of the world as divided and up for grabs, and a reliance on both soldiers and ordinary American citizens to serve as cold warriors—also frequently shaped what and how American students learned. As a result, the children found important personal connections and a sense of self-authorization in the curriculum. Although several of the scientists became heroes in the late 1950s as they shifted from building missiles to building an American space flight program, they never stopped being “our Germans,” even decades after obtaining citizenship.8 By contrast, their sons and daughters grew up to be Americans. The importance of schools in enabling this highlights in new and needed ways the vital role schools play in making Americans and shaping the experience of being American for so many of its citizens.

Understanding schools—what they seek to do, what gets taught, and what students’ experiences are like within them—requires contextualizing them within broad national and cultural factors as well as the intricacies of the communities in which students live. After World War II, the experiences and lives of El Paso students, including those of the Paperclip children, were INTRODUCTION

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shaped by such expansive forces as anticommunism, the growth of the military industrial complex in the southwest, and Jim and Juan Crow policies. They were equally impacted by local factors, including changes in El Paso industries, the prevalence of bilingualism in the city, the physical placement of schools to reinforce racial segregation, and particular curricular initiatives. Educating the Enemy begins by exploring these important national and local contexts and their effect on the children at the center of this book. Chapter 1, “The Fight for Civilization,” shows that the German scientists were brought to the United States in case a cold war were to become hot, but they were embraced because of the scientists’ professed desire “to fight for Western civilization.” Repeatedly, in interviews the scientists linked Western culture, civilization, and democracy with American national security, an argument that appealed to American military officials. This shared investment in a fight for Western civilization is particularly troubling in the context of Nazi philosophy and rhetoric, but it resonated with many of the lessons that their children would learn in American schools. The Paperclip children arrived in the country as wards of the U.S. Army but left El Paso in 1950 as ordinary children, soon to be American citizens. Examining how El Paso schools educated them in what it meant to be an Anglo American helps us to understand what the fight for Western civilization was about (including maintaining race privilege within a rhetoric of pluralism), why former Nazis were seen as such valuable allies, and why a majority of the city’s population was not. El Paso served as an especially important location in this fight, from its centrality to a growing Pan-American movement that stressed hemispheric solidarity to its selection as the site of a new American missile program. Chapter 2, “Something New in the Territory,” examines the relationship between race and space in the city and how it came to shape schooling for both groups of children. While the bicultural, transnational aspect of the city might have testified to its importance to the pluralist and democratic ideals associated with the Cold War fight for democracy, these very ideals were often contested and suppressed. El Paso’s status as a border city did not end at its margins; in fact, it sustained many kinds of borders within. Describing the city’s Mexican American population as “a drain on the economy,” Anglo civic leaders worked to contain them in particular parts of the city. In the absence of de jure segregation, Anglos accomplished the goal using school assignment policies. The Paperclip children were also contained, in a way, by the nature of their military housing. At the same time, they benefited from Anglo America’s quick forgiveness of and identification with them, and from 6

INTRODUCTION

the fact that Fort Bliss, and the expansion of the base that the missile program initiated, was an especially important economic factor in postwar El Paso. That the German children were seen as positives for the city’s growth and economic success while Mexican American children were not can be explained in the boundaries that each group was or was not allowed to cross. Chapter 3, “At Home on the Range,” examines the social-studies curriculum in the El Paso schools and how romanticized narratives of the western frontier, especially cowboy-and-Indian stories, served to socialize the Paperclip children. Examining the importance of frontier myths in assimilating children born into Nazi Germany reminds us that such narratives can be nationally specific and transnationally relevant at once. In this case, western myths spoke to deep structural analogs in German and American histories, even as specific events, and the length of time over which they took place, made for important differences. The children’s instruction in western mythology, in and outside of school, taught the children the value of white leadership and power and that democracy in the United States remained vigorous and virile. In turn, the Paperclip children’s embrace of these narratives marked more than their personal assimilation: it signified the victory of democracy over fascism, security over danger, and the power of American fictions as assimilationist narratives. Like the majority of the city’s students, the Paperclip children arrived at El Paso elementary schools speaking almost no English. Chapter 4, “The Promise and Peril of Bilingualism,” charts how language was taught and experienced in El Paso, a national leader in Spanish instruction and a school system pressed to teach English as a second language. Even in English acquisition, which one would think would be virtually the same process for German and Mexican students alike, the two groups faced radically different methods of instruction. The Paperclip children profited from a perception, fueled by parents, teachers, and the press, that they were happier, more democratic, and easier to teach. Their quick mastery of English was understood as a product of these character traits rather than of the unique privileges they were afforded in school. Pan-Americanism encouraged Spanish instruction for Anglo elementary-aged students in Texas, but elementary-level language teaching in both English and Spanish in El Paso was informed by contrasting visions of American global leadership that configured citizens as interAmerican diplomats, cold warriors, and global capitalists. The Paperclip children, like the rest of the city’s Anglo students, benefited most from these visions, while Mexican American students were often ignored. Chapter 5, “Devoted to the Child,” centers on one of the most controverINTRODUCTION

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sial members of the Paperclip group, Ilse Axster. Axster, the wife of a patent scientist for the V-2, worked during the war as both a Montessori teacher and a Nazi Party leader. Yet she reveals a number of transatlantic parallels between progressive education in fascist Germany and in the postwar United States. Her continual claim that all of her work, from teaching to Party activism, was apolitical and based solely on her “devotion to the child” serves as a cautionary tale about the attempted depoliticization of teaching, a profession that is deeply political not just for teachers in a fascist society but for those in a democracy as well. Axster’s story, and this book, show how nationstates and local communities alike have used schools as vehicles for enacting and communicating ideas about citizenship, race, and class, often couching those lessons in seemingly objective, nonpolitical ideas about child welfare.

To reconstruct the story of the Paperclip and Mexican American children who attended school in El Paso, I have drawn on a range of sources, including archived documents in the special collections of military and academic institutions, school district and municipal government materials, media from the period, and oral histories, since little information about the children was retained by officials and agencies (who were mainly interested in their fathers). Oral history is always a complicated if profitable and important methodology, and it can be further complicated by the complexities of working with people linked to the Third Reich and other fascist states.9 Many of the former Paperclip children’s first memories were shaped by the war and the silences that often followed in their families afterwards. The early childhoods even of those whose fathers possessed positions of privilege were marked by air raids, food shortages, and death. Helga Minning McGhee’s memory of her aunt—“carrying me across an open pasture area, and shrapnel hit her and killed her, and she fell on top of me, so I survived”—offers an especially powerful reminder that children of Nazis and Nazi functionaries, too, experienced trauma during the war.10 The children’s experiences of war invariably shaped their impressions and memories of El Paso and the United States. As Ursula Mrazek Vann tells it, relocating to the United States “was sort of an overall experience of new things in a very, very sunny place. The world became Technicolor for me when we came to Texas, so that’s sort of the way my memories are.”11 This cinematic sense of things, and the young age of so many of the children when they arrived, may help to explain why several former Paperclip children have more powerful memories of being treated with hostility in Huntsville, Alabama in the 1950s than in El Paso. On 8

INTRODUCTION

a range of issues, the former children’s memories must be treated with caution or as partial. But those memories—and the invaluable documents and images so many former Paperclip children have contributed to this project— nevertheless offer unique insights into what it meant to the children, and to Americans, to house and educate the children of Nazi scientists, and how, in the words of Helga Minning McGhee, the United States came to serve as a “breath of fresh air. . . . where [she] really felt safe and welcomed.”12 Much of the extant literature on Operation Paperclip focuses on its scientific contributions, its importance to Cold War militarism, and the ethics of recruiting Nazi scientists; almost all of it gives some attention to the issue of the scientists’ political beliefs and culpability in serving the Reich and the V-2 team’s exploitation of Dora concentration-camp prisoners.13 Several of the former Paperclip children I have interviewed for this book have addressed, unprompted, what they see as unfair characterizations of several scientists, especially Wernher von Braun. There is little question that despite the army’s vetting of the scientists before their relocation to the United States, some of the individuals and their families displayed clear signs of Nazi commitment, many of which were documented in the very interviews the army conducted. Scientists who were once storm troopers and who belonged to Nazi organizations as early as 1931, wives who belonged to Nazi women’s groups by choice, and extended family who moved to South America at the war’s end all point to the disquieting political beliefs of people who were allowed entry to the United States at a time when many Jewish refugees were not. I take note of these moments when they shed light on Americans’ ideas about schooling or the Paperclip community. The army denied any “true Nazis” were invited to participate in Operation Paperclip, an inevitable fiction that also shut down any potentially productive thinking about what happened to Nazi fascist ideology when it met American democratic ideology. Where did it go? Was it suppressed, disguised, transformed, defeated? These are questions this book is better equipped to pose than to answer, in part because of how Americans measured and assessed the Paperclip families’ assimilation. The related question of how committed the scientists were to ethnic nationalism and other Nazi ideologies is not the chief purview of this project. Regardless of what individual scientists believed and the degree to which they felt any sense of collective guilt, they were invited to work on behalf of American national security, and they were judged, and most often exonerated, by the American public in this light. This pardoning, not the scientists’ wartime beliefs and actions, is what most strongly shaped the children’s reception and experiences, including their education, in the United States.14 And so INTRODUCTION

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although, as this book shows, education begins with and involves the family, it does not treat the children solely as legacies or products of their families. For one thing, even the youngest students are shaped by the institutions in which they often spend many of the waking hours of their day. For the German and Mexican American children at the center of this book, schools were often used to push back against what Americans saw as families’ failures— whether the failure was Nazism or poverty—even as educators and others failed to face the causes of those failures head on. The quick exoneration of the Paperclip community, if not universal, enabled educators to reeducate the children without explicitly addressing what they were attempting to reform or the degree to which the children even needed reforming. After they left the war zone that was their homeland—one in which some of their fathers may have faced incrimination—the Paperclip children were raised and educated in a radically different environment than they would have been had they stayed. Some students studied German literature and language on their own time, under Ilse Axster and several other Paperclip mothers who were trained teachers; but the formality and effort with which they did so differed from family to family. Like students attending German schools in the American zone, the Paperclip children were taught democracy as a way of thinking and being, but in this case within institutions that were considered a natural product of democracy rather than an imposed reform. In reality, American schools often contradicted and contested the very democratic values and behaviors they were expected to teach. The history the Paperclip children learned amounted to Texas and American history, with its own transgressions and wrongs glossed over. The English they learned was informed by beliefs about who the children were expected to be in school and outside of it. All of the Paperclip children, in attending racially segregated schools, were taught a different version of some the very same segregationist ideals and policies upon which the Third Reich had once modeled its own legal system.15 That is to say, in attending El Paso schools, the Paperclip children experienced democracy in real time, and in both its greatest ideals and its deepest flaws. Their experience in these schools lasted only three years, but it was formative. This brief period of time allows us to take an exacting look not just at what schooling meant to the students, both German and Mexican, but at what the students and their academic performance meant for schools. Finally, I want to register a note on my use of language in this book. I have chosen, without ease, to use the term “Nazi” in the title of this book to refer to the children. It is difficult to uncover the political beliefs of the children at 10

INTRODUCTION

the time, even though some have courageously and honestly shared some of their feelings about race at the time (feelings that may have differed very little from those of many Anglo Americans of the same age). The beliefs of even the youngest children should not be conflated with their parents’ own political beliefs and failings. But I have chosen to use “Nazi” rather than “German,” nevertheless, for three reasons. First, not all Germans were Nazis, but all of these families were brought to the United States because of their service to and advancement of the Third Reich. Second, Americans quickly dropped the term “Nazis” for Germans in reference to the entire Paperclip community for multiple reasons, including deflection from Americans’ own culpability in exonerating and employing potential human-rights violators. It is important to remember that the families were not just any refugees or civil servants but were invited to become American precisely because of their parents’ role in enabling and defending genocide. Third, “German” simply does not invoke the white-supremacist project that was at the heart of educating the Paperclip children, and while that project was an American one, I wanted language that invokes the terror and self-interest that was at the heart of it. This is not simply an ethnic or nationalist story; it is a racial one. I use the terms “Anglo” and “white” somewhat interchangeably because they connote many of the same ideas, including the consolidation of European-heritage people. I use the term “Anglo” more frequently because it is regionally specific to the border area and captures the cultural arguments about language, history, and power that are central to this book. I use the terms “Mexican” and “Mexican American” more or less interchangeably as well, as many Spanish-speaking El Pasoans would have in the 1940s and 1950s (they likely would have used the word mexicano). By and large, it can be difficult to distinguish between Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in border cities, though children who attended American schools most often did so expecting to live in the United States. At any rate, the distinction between where a child was born and what nation he or she was a citizen of was largely immaterial to El Paso educators. While some residents of Ciudad Juárez paid a fee to send their children to El Paso public schools, this constituted a very small fraction of the student population. Nearly all of the Spanish-speaking students attending El Paso schools were El Paso residents, and the majority were American citizens, regardless of whether Anglo educators treated them as such or not.16 Finally, I refer to former students—Paperclip and Mexican American—by the last names they had at the time they were students, even when they are now remembering events from decades earlier; I include women’s married names in the footnotes. INTRODUCTION

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1 : TH E FIGHT FOR CIVI LIZATION

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n a cold December night in 1946, fifteen towheaded German children and their mothers boarded the USNS Goethals and set sail from Bremerhaven, Germany for Hoboken, New Jersey. They would then board a train in New York City and cross the country to their new home in El Paso, Texas, where they would live at one of the nation’s largest army bases, Fort Bliss, in retired hospital barracks surrounded by barbed wire. Their journey went unrecorded in official immigration documents; they were, as then-child Uwe Hueter would later term it, “nonexistent immigrants.”1 But they were noticed nonetheless by the American religious leaders, scientists, and State Department staff who protested their entry. In 1945, in the final weeks of World War II, the U.S. Department of War had organized the rapid recruitment of Nazi scientists while the Soviets did the same. As one war ended, another began. The 118 scientists who were brought to Fort Bliss in late 1945 had built the Third Reich’s most dangerous weapon, the V-2 missile. They were the most significant cohort in the controversial military campaign Operation Paperclip. Now, as the first of the scientists’ families sailed aboard the Goethals, the children spent an evening singing for the American naval officers who were their fellow passengers. The concert included a selection of predictable if suitable German children’s and Christmas songs as well as “O alte Burschenherrlichkeit,” a nineteenth-century fraternity hymn that both Nazis and Catholics had heralded for its messages about brotherhood. It closed with “The Star Spangled Banner,” sung in English, a language the children did not know. The event captured some of the performative nature of and moral ambiguity between fascism and postwar Americans’ strident efforts at antifascism. It also highlighted, in addition to strained attempts at camaraderie and good faith, the centrality of children as political actors and subjects early in the Cold War. The performance “was the highlight of the whole voyage,” the ship newsletter recorded, a period of relief in a trip that had been “grey and rough” and had invited much seasickness.2 Much like the children themselves, the concert offered a seeming respite from a morally complicated affair. 12

The Goethals performance was the first of many such moments Americans would entertain and invite of the Paperclip children, one of many times in which the children would be made into emblems of unity and the allure of Americanization. The children played other roles in a complex narrative of Nazi repentance and American absolution as well. More intimately, they served as public representations of their families’ reformation and assimilation. From the time the scientists were identified for “exploitation,” as the War Department referred to the arrangement, American military officials prioritized the Paperclip wives’ and children’s comfort and security in Germany while they awaited relocation. When the families began to reunite with the scientists, newspapers from Albuquerque to El Paso celebrated the occasion, describing the men waiting at the train platform as seeming “more like excited schoolboys than highly-trained men with doctor’s degrees.”3 Referred to always by the press as “the German scientists,” the V-2 men appeared for the first time as husbands and fathers, making them immediately seem more sociable, more approachable, and perhaps even potentially American. To the scientists, too, their children represented more than just their closest relations. In December 1946 Time magazine reported that the scientists “have been told they may have a chance to become U.S. citizens. The fact that the U.S. is bringing their families to them seems to be a kind of guarantee that that is a promise.”4 For Americans and Germans alike, the Paperclip children signified both sides’ commitment to the operation and to the remaking of Nazi scientists into model American citizens. Finally, the children testified to the power of American democracy and the most important institution in the shaping of democratic citizens: American public schools. While their fathers designed missiles for the army, the children were bussed daily by military police to El Paso schools. In school they had far more interaction with American civilians than did their parents; this socialization, coupled with the curriculum, was designed to produce an education in democracy. While there were many, often conflicting philosophies of what was meant by a democratic education before World War II, El Paso schools fell victim to some of the least interesting interpretations. Theirs was not the kind of education for democracy promoted by the groundbreaking reading theoretician Louise Rosenblatt, who argued in 1938 for education that promoted self-reflection and “liber[ation] from the provincialism of [the student’s] particular family, community, or even national background.” Nor was it the democratic education of the social scientist and teacher educator Harold Rugg, who encouraged examination of how “the social machinery of American life is badly jammed,” because of the “undue control THE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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of wealth, communication, and government by a minority of the people” who practiced “uncontrolled individualism.” Instead, El Paso students practiced democracy through routine and recognition: through singing patriotic songs; memorizing famous speeches; making murals, friezes, and dioramas of select historical events; and by writing plays and speeches about Anglo men. They carved battle scenes out of soap, made “Indian” jewelry out of macaroni, and reenacted the signing of the constitution.5 It was a pedagogy of confirmation rather than investigation of the social status quo; in various ways, it taught students that democracy was inextricably bound to a history of white privilege and supremacy. Like the concert on the Goethals, much of the education in democracy children received in El Paso schools was about behavior or feeling more than thought, even as such feelings vastly misrepresented the moment or the students at hand. It was through this lens that in August 1947 a local reporter visited Fort Bliss, where the Paperclip children were attending summer school in a makeshift schoolroom for which their parents paid $2.25 a week. Three El  Paso teachers taught the classes in the hopes of quickly improving the children’s English proficiency. When asked by the reporter what she liked best about American schooling, seven-year-old Karin Friedrich responded, “I like to say the Pledge of Allegiance better than anything.” In the four months she had lived in El Paso, Karin had learned more than prayers and the pledge: she had come to understand their importance as rituals and enactments of American citizenship. She was not alone. When teacher Nettie Bea Bryant asked the class for a volunteer to hold the flag during the pledge, “arms waggled from every desk in the room”; when the students recited it, the “casual listener[s] would not know the group of voices was that of German children.”6 The news report on the Paperclip children, one of several that summer that highlighted the children’s eager Americanization, served as a public-relations boost for American schooling as much as for the students. Children who had not just been born into Nazism but had profited from their fathers’ service to the Third Reich—first in Germany and then in the opportunity to escape their homeland—reflected back to Americans the virtues of a democratic education. If enemy children could be brought into the fold, seemingly anyone could. Historians and journalists have sought to understand the story of Operation Paperclip for its extraordinary if problematic tale and for what it reveals about Cold War national-security anxieties.7 Yet, the Paperclip children offer a glimpse into entire other aspects of postwar American political and social culture, including public schooling in the transition to the Cold War, the 14

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youth who were enfranchised and disenfranchised by schools, and the relationship between public schools and citizenship in the most literal sense. Early Cold War schools framed democratic education as antifascist and anticommunist education. In many ways the Paperclip children offered a perfect study; they, better than anyone, could prove the power of democracy and public schooling over fascism. A group of 144 children in a school system that served over 32,000 students, they lived in El Paso for just three years before their families moved to Huntsville, Alabama in 1950, where their fathers would build the American space program.8 Nevertheless, they illuminate far more about the role of schooling as a central institution for framing, disseminating, and upholding dominant American political beliefs than numbers might suggest. In coming to the United States, the Paperclip children traded participation in one democratization project—the denazification of postwar German schools—for another: their own induction into American ones. They arrived in El Paso as foreigners, not just children of a recent enemy nation but more specifically the progeny of Nazi servants. When the Paperclip families relocated to Huntsville, they left practiced in many of the most important tenets and expressions of American citizenship, prepared for assimilating into white American society in the Jim Crow south.9 In 1955, less than ten years after their controversial and contentious invitation to live in the United States, almost all of the Paperclip children and their parents would become American citizens. That their initiation to the United States and American schooling first took place in the border city of El Paso is critical. If the scientists and, by proxy, their children were unexpected allies, the Mexican American students who comprised over 60 percent of the city’s student body were characterized by some local educators as a “natural resource” at a time when American interests in Latin America and hemispheric relations felt more urgent than ever.10 To win the Cold War, the United States needed the help of neighborly alliances. And yet, just like those in the rest of the southwest and Texas, shockingly few of El Paso’s Mexican-heritage students were treated as resources; the great majority were segregated in “Mexican” schools on the city’s South Side, most in a neighborhood called El Segundo Barrio. There they faced overcrowded classrooms, partial school days to accommodate students in shifts, and an almost entirely Anglo teaching force, few of whom spoke the student’s first language of Spanish. Even though their parents petitioned for better schools, Mexican American students were assigned to educational situations that no Anglo students in the city endured. They, far more than the Paperclip students, who were assigned to the city’s “American” or Anglo THE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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schools, were marginalized and considered foreigners—and, this book illuminates, enemies, in a nation that perpetually treated democracy and security as a reward for whiteness. Much of the treatment of Mexican students relied on popular interpretations of them and Mexican Americans more generally as reluctant democrats and citizens. Harold Davis, the director of the education division of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, a wartime federal agency focused on preventing the proliferation of first Nazism and then communism in Latin America, offers a case in point. Davis oversaw cultural and education programs designed specifically to improve relations between Americans and Latin Americans, yet even he believed that the “attitudes on the part of Spanish-speaking groups” needed to be changed before their children could be effectively taught. Specifically, Davis identified “feelings of hostility growing out of the Mexican War, the Mexican Revolution and attendant border disorders” that led “Spanish-speaking groups to retire within themselves—psychologically and culturally.” His political interpretation of the cause of Mexican Americans’ inwardness invoked long-standing fears of Mexicans as anarchists and even potential fascists. This was different from the view of teachers, who saw Mexican children as poorly socialized and neglected at home, but they and Davis shared a sense that Mexican students were ill-suited to democratic schools and society. Just as some Americans believed that German children could be politically reformed through schooling, teachers hoped, often with less conviction, that schools could socialize Mexican American children and that their “cultural resistance [could] be overcome partly through the schools.”11 Teachers’ faith in the power of schooling and their attachment to interpretations of the characteristics each group of children possessed—the Germans idealistic and social, the Mexicans diffident and reclusive—shaped their teaching methods and curriculum. The Paperclip children therefore offer a new vantage point on a larger story of race and privilege in American history and the vital role that schools played in making and reinforcing both. Looking back on his early days in El Paso, former Paperclip child Walter Tschinkel recalls that “we German kids, we were admired for being smart. Not all of us were. But . . . almost without exception, we did well in school. . . . So we were branded as smart.”12 The Paperclip children’s privileged status as the children of scientists and as Anglos in a border city informed both their parents’ and their teachers’ expectations that they would contribute and succeed. Americans’ and Germans’ confidence in the children’s aptitude shaped their academic performances and what the children would encounter and experience in school. 16

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Figure 1.1: Young Paperclip children in summer school at Fort Bliss, preparing for the fall in El Paso elementary schools. Courtesy of Walter Tschinkel.

Certainly familial dynamics could differ from one child to another. Hertha Heller remembers that her mother “was always very positioned on us having opportunities, because [she] lived through those years where things were very controlled and [she] didn’t have opportunities.”13 By contrast, Regine Woerdemann echoed the sentiments of other women in remembering that “there [were] no big expectations on my father’s part as to what I would be doing” in school or for a career, a marked contrast to her brother’s experience.14 Paperclip girls, like American girls, were less frequently expected to attend college or to prepare to pursue significant careers, though many did. Still, the belief that the children were enthusiastic, optimistic, and disciplined, doing their best at what was expected of them for their age, helped Anglo Americans to see Paperclip children as much like their own. “Dressed like any American child . . . [girls] with their hair in long pigtails,” even the children’s heavily accented English sounded American.15 This book, then, is about the Paperclip children; but it is also about the idea of the Paperclip children, and what that idea tells us about American social thought in the earliest days of the Cold War. Most of the children were too young to hold political affiliations of their own or to have joined Hitler Youth programs in Germany. Of the 144 Paperclip children who arrived in El Paso between 1946 and 1948, only six were born before 1935 and thus old THE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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enough to have been involved with Hitler Youth. In fact, the majority were born after 1940, making them too young to have even experienced formal education in Germany.16 Still, in ways that were shared by other economically privileged white children, they were consistently treated by American educators and journalists as political agents in a cold war that was fought in no small part through images of and attitudes toward children. They and their Mexican American peers illuminate what occurs when racialized and politicized images of foreign (or foreign-seeming) children meet equally racialized and politicized images of ideal American children. As a group, the Paperclip children served as an affirmation of beliefs about democracy, national identity, and white supremacy in the context of American Cold War politics. Their performance in schools, their engagement with American juvenile popular culture, and their physical appearance marked them as promisingly American. The conditions that they left behind, and those that they discovered in their new home, served as a vital backdrop in a narrative that testified to their political importance to their families and to American schooling and society at large. Treated, much like the Mexican students who attended El Paso schools, as inheritors of national characteristics as much as they were as individual children, they reflected back to Anglo Americans the stories they most needed to believe about themselves, the institutions that supported those stories, and the political beliefs that absolved and created enemies at once.

Saving “Civilisation and Democratie” The Paperclip families arrived at a critical moment for the United States both domestically and in its standing as a global power. The years between 1947 and 1950 marked a period in which the United States assumed “the role of hegemon in the international system” and the global fight against communism.17 Not only did the nation’s shifting position in global politics serve as a backdrop to virtually every aspect of American governance, including a new military-industrial complex that Operation Paperclip helped to birth, but it transformed many aspects of civic life, including schools. Among other effects, American domestic politics, particularly racial politics, were now the subject of international criticism. Soviet propaganda exploited American racism for its own ends and, as Mary Dudziak has shown, argued that “semi slave working forms of oppression and exploitation [were] the rule” for Black Americans. But this propaganda was not wrong, and it created growing pres-

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sure for Americans to address civil liberties and the undemocratic treatment of the nation’s own citizens, all while segregationist practices flourished.18 School segregation—and white resistance to desegregation—was an especially potent and visible example of what Gunnar Myrdal in 1944 had famously called the “American dilemma”—the distance between democratic values and social reality.19 When, for example, in 1949 the Bowie Bears, the baseball team from El Paso’s sole “Mexican” high school, traveled to Austin to play in the state championship, they were forced to sleep in cots under the University of Texas stadium bleachers because no hotels would accept them.20 The Bears’ victory in the championship brought attention to the students’ treatment but did not bring with it a change in policy. When African American veterans returned home from the war and sought to take advantage of the GI Bill’s offer of grants for college education, roughly 55 percent of eligible applicants were rejected.21 These examples prove how segregationist policies were designed to purposely suppress minority communities and guarantee the future of white supremacy, just as the Soviets argued. From the beginning, the scientists understood their role in making the United States a world power and the political anxieties that would shape American culture and institutions during the Cold War, including the schools in which their children would be educated. More specifically, they recognized the fear of communism that prewar Germany and the postwar United States shared. In Germany, too, antipathy toward communists had long intersected with and highlighted the nation’s antagonism toward minoritized communities. Since World War I German leaders had linked anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism; to many Germans, communists and Jews alike appeared as aliens, radicals, and a threat to German political order and identity. Communism, they argued, was a Jewish plot. Nazis transformed these long-standing beliefs by avowing that Judeo-Bolshevism was a threat not just to Germany but to all of Europe, and they used this line of thinking as justification for destroying Jews and communists and for German expansionism across Europe.22 For the American designers of Paperclip, the challenge was to distinguish the shared American anticommunist beliefs and objectives that drove the military operation—including the perception that communism presented a global threat—from the moral cataclysm of the Holocaust. They accomplished this by emphasizing the scientists’ professional status and interests and by flatly denying the scientists’ Nazi affiliations. Before qualifying to participate in Paperclip, the scientists were interviewed to ensure that no “ardent” or “true” Nazis were included. But the Joint Intel-

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ligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), the primary organization responsible for recruiting the scientists, in many cases both ignored and altered information that revealed Nazi activity. “Many specialists and dependents,” army personnel admitted in 1947, “were shipped to [the] U.S. before undergoing denazification procedure as required by law.”23 When asked what led them to seek Nazi Party membership, the majority of the V-2 scientists responded in the same way other Germans did when they filled out questionnaires intended to sift out the worst offenders: they were compelled to join to continue their work or to avoid prison. Few Americans realized that the V-2 missile was made with slave labor and killed more people in its construction than in its deployment.24 Nor did they often understand that Nazi ideology was only one factor, along with “technological fascination, nationalism, money, and careerism” that created a “compliant community of consent” at Peenemünde, where many of the scientists lived and worked together during the war.25 Wernher von Braun, the young leader and most prominent of the V-2 scientists, argued that he and the scientists were only interested in space and rocketry, but their “‘go to the moon’ idea” depended first on appeasing Hitler in order to succeed.26 In other words, professionalism drove rather than simply compelled many Germans to comply with Nazism, including the scientists. The scientists’ individual political beliefs varied and, because they were often distorted by American officials, were largely immaterial to their children’s treatment in the United States. But their activism in organizing their induction into Paperclip is important for what it reveals about postwar political ideology in American society and schools. In their recruitment interviews, the scientists thought carefully about how to appeal to Americans. The process was especially precarious for those who joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeitspartei (NSDAP) before 1933, when membership became compulsory. Ernst Seiler explained that when he finished schooling and began to work in his father’s machine plant in 1931, “the political and economical situation looked terrible . . . The menace from the east by the communismus and the Poland’s desire to get Danzig (the town in which I was born) loosened in me a reaction.”27 Another scientist, Guenther Haukohl, cited a similar reason for joining the Nazi Party in 1932, explaining, “I joined the NSDAP and its affiliated organizations . . . because I supposed, this system could save Germany from the communism.”28 Repeatedly, the scientists who were attracted to Nazism earliest explained their thoughts and actions in terms of battling a communist takeover, hoping that their American interrogators might see that they made the better of two bad choices. In the process, they made clear that they and their American counterparts 20

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were not just fighting against a common enemy but for a shared set of values, the most urgent of which was the preservation of Western civilization. Many Americans might have agreed with the contention of the editor of Life magazine, John Knox Jessup, that Hitler “made a mockery of our inherited optimism.” For Jessup, this disillusionment necessitated Americans’ “rediscovery . . . of personal links with Western Man and his membership in Western civilization.”29 In their testimonies the scientists worked to project this optimism and alignment with Western values. Rudolf Minning knew that he and his colleagues were considered valuable by both the Russians and the Americans, and that “after the war it was very clear to everybody in Germany to decide between the East and West.” His argument, which would be echoed by other scientists, was that “my decision was for the Western Powers because these only are able and willing to save the western civilization for the world.”30 William Mrazek, too, saw in aiding the U.S. military a chance to secure “Civilisation and Democratie as much as enduring peace of the Western hemisphere.”31 What they recognized as fundamental aspects of Western civilization or culture, including “democracy, individuality, tolerance, and humanity,” Ernst Geissler explained, accorded with the scientists’ own “ideolog[ies],” even while they were working for the Nazi state.32 Rescued from a war in which they defended a government that embodied none of these principles, the scientists argued that they were now prepared to assist a nation that did. They maintained these arguments once in the United States, even if they grew less rehearsed. While living at Fort Bliss, V-2 patent lawyer Herbert Axster complained frequently of Russians, describing them to his new American acquaintances as “filthy and cruel,” willing to “graz[e] on grass when out of food.” To the Americans he met, Axster seemed to “ma[k]e this point to show that Russians would be extremely difficult to conquer inasmuch as they were more like animals in their endurance than other people.”33 It may have seemed to them a compelling argument. Unlike the Germans, the Soviets did not just oppose the ideas of Western civilization, Axster and many Americans argued—they were, at bottom, uncivilized. The scientists’ reading of Western civilization as a shared American and European project echoed Americans’ own postwar thinking about freedom and the dangers of communism. They also resonated with what historian Brian Etheridge has termed Cold War American “memory diplomacy.” American government and military officials used news reports and film to create a collective narrative of the Germans as being like Americans, fighting the Soviets all along. Although this narrative competed with other postwar interpretations of Germany, it created a powerful argument for Americans THE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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to forgive and, just as important, forget or ignore the ways in which Nazism was fueled by ordinary Germans.34 Other cultural authority figures also contributed to the Cold War narrative. Prominent historian Garrett Mattingly explained in 1947 that the United States was “moved by the same rhythms” and was “inescapably involved in the same crises” as Western Europe, leaving the two “bound . . . to go forward . . . with a common destiny.”35 Mattingly’s ideas presaged a major strand in academic and government thinking about global alliances in the Cold War. The revived focus on Western civilization served to cement cultural allegiances that Americans needed more than ever. For the scientists, this new understanding of Western civilization as a partnership was essential to their and their families’ futures. Like others, when engineer Arthur Rudolph testified that “the United States as the greatest and most powerful country is the only one that will preserve the Western culture and the peace of the world,” he argued that Western civilization evoked a long, shared history, one in which Nazism was an aberration or exception. Despite numerous indications that Rudolph oversaw the supply of tens of thousands of concentration-camp laborers who built the V-2s, the JIOA added him and his family to the list of Paperclip transfers.36 The scientists’ vexed arguments about culture and democracy evoked the very problems of race and equality that Americans struggled to reframe for global eyes. On the surface, their frequent allusions to “civilization” marked an unsettling choice, given Nazis’ deployment of the concept of Kultur as propaganda to support genocide.37 But in fact, the resonance of the term was much the point. Nazi leaders explicitly designed German racial policies on the model of civilization that American Jim Crow policies offered.38 This context is especially important in light of the scientists’ framing of anticommunism as not just a political problem but also a cultural and social one. The scientists seem to have recognized American white supremacy for what it was; in so doing, they invoked a troubled kinship even while they argued for political unity. “Western values” was a malleable concept, one that Nazis exploited. It signified both democracy and, as Soviets argued, white advantage. As historian Paul Hanebrink has shown, across Europe members of the Right believed that an “Asiatic crisis,” stemming from the influence of Bolshevism, modernism, and “Eastern mysticism,” had threatened Western civilization and had led interwar Europeans to submit to “Judeo-Bolshevik power, racial and sexual contamination, and . . . emasculation.”39 When the scientists called on the rhetoric of protecting Western civilization to exhibit their potential Americanness, they implicitly called on these other longstanding racialized anxieties and sentiments as well. 22

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If the American officials responsible for vetting the scientists noticed the awkwardness of the situation, few commented on it. One who did was Walter Jessel, an army lieutenant conscripted to Bavaria in 1945 to screen the scientists for their political views. Jessel was struck by how much emphasis the scientists placed on anti-Soviet sentiment. “Almost to a man these people are convinced that war between the US and Russia is around the corner,” he wrote in his notes. Skeptical of the army’s decision to recruit the scientists, Jessel saw many of them as opportunists looking to divert attention from their own accountability. One problem with the strategy, according to Jessel, was the Germans’ presumption that they understood American welfare better than Americans did. Another was the haunting sense that the scientists were still driven by ethnic fundamentalism. “They shake their heads in amazement and some contempt at our political ignorance and are impatient at our slowness in recognizing the true saviors of Western Civilization from Asia’s hordes,” Jessel explained. “Which does not prevent them from playing with the idea of selling out to Asia’s hordes if such recognition is not soon extended.”40 Calling purposefully on the language of the “Asia[tic],” Jessel suggested the Germans yet again saw their enemies in racialized terms: as Eastern rather than Western, heathen rather than Christian, and brown rather than white. Perhaps somewhat unconsciously, he pointed to the way in which the scientists’ understandings of themselves as civilized Westerners and natural democrats simultaneously marked an effort to align themselves with Anglo America. This alignment went both ways. If the attention to the Paperclip children in school was designed to prove that they were more like Americans than might have otherwise been thought, the reality of public schools in the postwar years—from their use as tools of racial and economic segregation to aspects of the curriculum—reflects parallels in Anglo American and German thought. Many postwar American education reforms grew out of the same connections the scientists now made about preserving Western civilization. Some educators began to fear that the progressive methods popularized by John Dewey and others in the interwar period were both too ideological and too student centered, threatening to make American children self-indulgent, intellectually lazy, and poor citizens. Arthur Bestor’s 1953 Educational Wastelands and Rudolph Flesch’s 1955 Why Johnny Can’t Read, two best-selling attacks on progressive education, followed years of published works denouncing the “education collectivism” that progressive education supposedly tried to foster. Critics worried not just about how students learned but what, and, from differing political vantage points, they pushed for curricular reform THE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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in the early Cold War. Like their makers, the reforms themselves embodied conflicting political objectives, from the life-adjustment movement, which focused on equipping students with social skills, to the installation of the Great Books curriculum, aimed at schooling students in Western traditions, especially the historical development of democratic civilization.41 Unlike progressive education, which critics associated with liberalism, reorienting the curriculum to Western civilization privileged supposedly apolitical ideas that all Americans valued, including freedom, courage, and consensus. El Paso schools found themselves at the center of some of these changing beliefs, and their response to the changes reflected the specific political context of urban borderlands schools. In social studies lessons on cowboys and Indians, El Paso teachers conveyed messages about Western civilization as a manifestation of Anglo supremacy while maintaining progressivism’s frequent embrace of local context as a backdrop for teaching larger ideas. El Paso schools dedicated growing resources to Spanish acquisition for their youngest Anglo students, not out of the globalist sensibilities that the Cold War fostered but out of Anglo parents’ fears that their children would lose out to Mexicans in a border-city economy. Most directly, El Paso students, including the Paperclip children, received conflicting messages in the racially segregated schools they attended: educators taught that communism was a system in which “minorities have no rights . . . [and] are cruelly and ruthlessly suppressed or exploited,” but democracy was a system in which the “rights of minorities . . . [are] inviolate”—a notion that ran contrary to the students’ lived experience.42 Postwar schools were assigned much of the responsibility for building a culture of racial tolerance and equality during and after the war, but they lacked the policy and will to support it. In many ways the Paperclip children’s professed attraction to the most performative and conditioned aspects of the classroom—including reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “The Eyes of Texas”—reflects not only their recognition of rituals that may have been seemed familiar from their limited German education but also the most consistent and transparent parts of El Paso’s schools and civic culture. A wide array of El Paso educators united around a focus on Western civilization that operated in concert with anticommunist instruction and sounded many of the same notes as the scientists. For example, during the war El Paso High School began to offer a course in Russian history because, as a school administrator explained it, “even while the United States and Russia were fighting side by side we knew that eventually we would have trying diplomatic relations.” Teaching the “true” history of the Soviet Union, it was hoped, 24

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would one day “counteract the effects of Russian propaganda.”43 School superintendent A. H. Hughey seconded this idea when he reminded city teachers that “the thoughts, words, and actions of communists are known to be controlled,” but “American schools represented an entirely different model of freedom of thought.”44 In order for teachers to better understand what he meant, Hughey suggested they read a special issue of School Life magazine and be reminded of the “glorious American heritage of freedom wrung from the bitter struggle of centuries” and a future of “justice, peace, and plenty” that “the elements of Communist strategy,” if victorious, would destroy.45 Such arguments presented the United States as a civilization that bound citizens into one united society, even when that society was under threat. Often this sense of peril both highlighted and deflected from the social and political inequalities that were just as much of a threat to American democracy. In return, American educators, including El Pasoans, continued to herald a narrative of meritocracy, arguing that Americans and their schools “believe in superiority because of ability, and in rewards because of merit, rather than in a superiority, or in an inferiority, of race.” They redirected social critiques toward the Soviets, arguing, in the words of a group of Texas educators, that “we accept individual worth as the doctrine of the democratic State and denounce the doctrine of Superiority of race as the creed of the totalitarian nations.”46 Individualism was neither the equivalent nor any guarantee of freedom or equality. But the concept appeared often in educators’ writing precisely because it was an American value that was successfully practiced. To advocate for the health of American schools required educators, and the public, to select what they saw. In this context, the German occupation and the reform of German schools, like the Paperclip children themselves, became another argument for the power of democratic education at the same time that it distracted from democracy’s failures.

Reforming and Reeducating Germans Had the Paperclip children remained in Germany, they would have experienced some form of antifascist education in any sector in which they lived. American, British, French, and Soviet occupiers alike saw schools as the foundation of a new state and society, one that would be fundamentally better and fairer than the fascist nation German adults had helped to create.47 For students in the American zone, this meant an education in which students were taught democratic ways of thinking and living. Reform required replacing Nazi textbooks with new teaching materials, returning to legitimate acaTHE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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demic disciplines, and revising the previously authoritarian ways in which teachers taught. Young Germans experienced these changes under difficult conditions and in a nation that lacked sufficient resources, including teachers unaffiliated with Nazism. Even so, one of the most important tests of American education as a pathway to global democratization was to be found in American-occupied postwar Germany, where schools served as a critical tool in denazification. The contrast between American and German schools served as an important indicator of what was democratic about democratic education. Democracy was built not just on different political premises than fascism, but on a different conception of group consciousness, Americans argued, one in which citizens needed to take into account the feelings of others without falling prey to groupthink. Because of this, democratization was an intellectual, social, and psychological process. The objective of American occupation was not just to end and prevent fascism but, through reforming Germans, to reveal the true strength and appeal of democracy. That is, German reeducation was less important as a template for anticommunist education in the United States than as an indicator of what American schools were already doing right. Stories of newly liberated German children, like that of a boy who explained to reporters “we were too young to recognize the immense lie, and we were not yet able to differ propaganda from truth. Now everything has changed, the veil has been torn, and we see things, events, the world in a complete new light,” evangelized the power of Americanized schooling.48 Explaining schools’ centrality to German rehabilitation, American diplomatic leaders argued that reconstructed schools could allow children to experience a “positive method of living which democratic citizenship enshrines and climaxes.” To enable this, they pushed for the very kinds of student-centered methodologies that were beginning to face criticism at home, including “cooperative class projects, classroom committees, discussion groups, [and] school councils.”49 Educators commissioned to oversee German school reform circulated translations of Dewey’s statements on democracy and education throughout the occupation zone. Just as Americans saw Dewey’s methods as threatening to make their own children too soft, they hoped his foundational ideas on democracy and education could help to moderate the German character.50 While arguments about Western civilization flourished, by the end of the war many Americans doubted that either civilization or democracy came naturally to the German people. American public sentiment had changed over the war, even as it consistently reflected a greater antipathy toward the Japanese than the Germans. In 1942 a Gallup poll showed that 42 percent 26

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of Americans thought Germans were “just like other people” and had been misled by Hitler. By 1945 many believed that the German people were responsible for empowering him.51 Immediately after the war American psychologists, anthropologists, and journalists, all of whose professional and cultural authority had been bolstered by their wartime contributions, set to analyzing the German people and national character.52 Journalists focused on the “dissatisfied, restless German spirit” that stemmed from an “ancient German thirst for expansion . . . [that] the Nazis exploited with a masterly insight.”53 Continually, they reported from the occupied zone that “the German people do not feel any sense of shame or guilt, either personal or national.”54 Those officials who might have hoped that the Germans would seem contrite or eager for guidance found little of either. Instead, most Germans insisted they were unaware of the genocide that took place around them and powerless to resist a government that punished outliers, as it depended on group complicity. Rather than feeling any sense of guilt, many Germans appeared to possess a widespread “attitude of self-pity.”55 None of this seemed to set the groundwork for reeducation.56 The Paperclip families typified this sense of delusion and entitlement, according to many who were critical of Operation Paperclip. In the first months of the operation, despite the army’s efforts at public relations, the American press frequently portrayed the scientists as egocentric and ungrateful. Although the scientists had been sent to the United States as quickly as possible, their families had remained in military housing in Landshut, Bavaria, where, Time magazine reported, “they are fed twice as well as the Germans outside.”57 Furthermore, they were paid in cigarette rations and money by the U.S. Army, they were provided with coal shoveled by people identified as Nazis, and the children attended school taught by former German teachers at a time when many areas of the country lacked any teachers at all. Paperclip wives and children, some of whom had spent the last months of the war secreted in whatever housing they could find, now bought toys for their children and socialized with the other families, including at a cinema the army opened for them in Landshut.58 And still, the Time report continued, the scientists complained about the slowness of their mail and missing their families.59 When they first arrived in the United States, reported American Magazine, the scientists “were hungry, and correspondingly meek.” But once the men moved beyond an initial state of crisis, “their native German arrogance reasserted itself.” They became demanding, making “desk-pounding complaints about their surveillance, contracts, housing, delays in getting mail—and even pay—possible loss of assets in Germany and the security THE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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and welfare of families still there.”60 They complained of bread that “when you cut it looks like cotton” and the dearth of boiled fish in their new desert home.61 The scientists also lamented their conditions in letters that they wrote home and the army surveilled. “One complains that he had received toast for breakfast instead of fresh rolls,” recounted Curt Riess, a German Jewish reporter and refugee who returned to Berlin after the war. “Another complains because he has no liverwurst. The tenor of these letters is all the same. America is an entirely impossible country.”62 The situation presented several challenges in regard to the Paperclip children, including how to differentiate them from their parents and what many perceived as a historic German attitude. There was also the problem of teaching them how to be part of a larger whole, to think of themselves as part of a common good rather than the political exception that Operation Paperclip had made of them. Children were seen as occupying an especially precarious position within German society: they were the least accountable for how they complied with and facilitated Nazism, but they were also the most entrenched in the only worldview they knew. Articles on German children, much like those on the Paperclip children, began to appear in women’s and news magazines to garner support for the diplomacy narrative of Germans as partners in the Cold War, ready to reorient their political beliefs toward democracy and civilization. Psychologists, anthropologists, and American policy officials agreed that the key to reorienting German youth was overcoming the “intellectual imprisonment” of the Nazi regime. Leaders of the U.S. mission to the occupied zone found young Germans “starved for intellectual information” and “eager to learn.”63 The task ahead was challenging. At the war’s end, the New York Times reported, German children were “told that democracy is the goal towards which they must work; they hear the word repeated over and over again on the radio and see it splashed across the pages of the German newspapers.” But the term was foreign to them, and they lacked “the slightest understanding of its meaning nor, therefore, any real enthusiasm for the concept of democracy.”64 In fact, German schools were not well prepared to model democratic thought. The Paperclip children left behind an entire model of education, not just the Nazi perversion of it, in need of reform. More than repairing this system, American reeducation efforts revealed it. A commission of educators dispatched by the government to analyze German schools found that the buildings were “massive, formal, and dark. . . . The classrooms in general are too small for anything except the most formal type of teaching.” A teachers’

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podium was located in almost every German classroom, “even in the more modern schools built as late as 1930,” reported one commission member. School desks were designed in a bolted “double seat combination similar to the American double seat of two generations ago.”65 In contrast to the dark and inflexibly designed classrooms that American occupation leaders found when they visited German schools, American teachers were believed to work in environments that enabled freedom of movement (and thought), sociability, and cooperation. Whereas American teachers—most of whom were women—were valued for their natural maternalism and “sincere interest in the growth and development of boys and girls,” commission members found that in Germany teachers were almost always elderly men, “with here and there an elderly woman and sometimes a young man or woman.”66 Everything about German schools, the American personnel concluded, contributed to a “Nazi heritage of . . . intellectual and spiritual isolation.’”67 By contrast, American schools emphasized their importance in teaching students the fundamentals in democratic civilization. It could not be assumed, as an El Paso school administrator testified, “that because our children are born into democracy they know how to live in it.” Instead, schools taught them how to do so, along with “the qualities that make for good citizenship—information, appreciation, and devotion.”68 In the summer of 1950 a group of twenty El Paso teachers further parsed out the fundamentals of democratic values and behavior as they applied to upper elementary students. The district published their results and distributed them to the city’s teachers in the fall. The “purpose of education in American democracy,” as the teachers saw it, fell into four main objectives: self-realization (by which they meant the ability to read, write, and speak in English and to sound American); human relationships; economic efficiency; and civic responsibility. The four objectives were bound by sociability as a central concept. Whether “enjoy[ing] a rich, sincere, and varied social life” (human relations), “appreciat[ing] the social value of his work” (economic efficiency), or “measur[ing] scientific advance by its contribution to the general welfare” (civic responsibility), El Paso students, like American students more broadly, were expected to master social skills in school. They were taught to appreciate social life, starting with family, the smallest and most intimate social institution, and scale up their appreciation through their own contributions to society; together these associations would enable students to possess “defenses against propaganda.”69 Being American and embracing Americanness, in other words, was the best possible defense against totalitarianism,

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Figure 1.2: (left): Heiner Tschinkel’s report card from Landshut, April 1946. Figure 1.3: (Right): Heiner (now Henry) Tschinkel’s report card from Crockett Elementary, spring 1947. Courtesy of Walter and Henry Tschinkel.

whatever shape it took. Whether certain youth seemed sociable and appreciative shaped educators’ and others’ views of how potentially American they really were. Henry Tschinkel’s report cards, from the school he attended in Landshut while awaiting relocation to the United States and from his first semester as an elementary student in El Paso, demonstrate some ways in which American and German education differed. Certainly, the two shared qualities that served schools well as institutions. In addition to language and math capabilities, German children were assessed on attention (Aufmerksamkeit), industriousness (Fleiss), and order (Ordnung). American students were also expected to work hard and be judicious with their resources; “thrift,” as further explained on prewar district report cards, referred to careful use of 30

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both materials and time (or what Germans referred to as industriousness). Teachers frequently noted that the Paperclip children arrived “accustomed to strict discipline and polite,” qualities that made them all the easier to teach.70 These were ways in which their German educational experiences served them well, even in Texas. But the differences between the systems were just as important to laying out visions of social participation. While Americans shared a value for neatness (one form of “order”), two of the four skills on which teachers measured El Paso students, dependability and courtesy, were decidedly social, to be measured through children’s interactions with the teacher and other students. The greater, more visible importance of how children treated or respected others in American education as compared to the independent skills (industriousness and attention) stressed in German schools reinforced many of the ideas Americans had about Germans. Life in totalitarian societies was all work and no pleasure. Even with the move away from Deweyan progressive education, educators argued, American students did not just think democratically but practiced democracy in their actions. The national, cultural values that Tschinkel’s report cards capture were tied to larger issues of school and classroom organization, teaching methods, and understandings of character or citizenship and the school’s role in fostering it. The Paperclip children, much like German reeducation itself, could be useful in highlighting these contrasts. For example, the most explicit distinction Americans drew between German schools and their own focused on discipline. Media reports often highlighted the social acceptance of and even expectation of corporal punishment in Germany. According to the New York Times, Germans contended that “‘a firm hand is the only thing [children] understand’” and that “you must be a little ruthless if you wish to keep them under control.’”71 Such accounts melded with the larger view Americans held of Germans as authoritarian and militaristic. For this reason, local newspapers circulated a story of a Paperclip boy returning home from school and telling his mother, “Mama, mama. I found a teacher without a stick!”72 Readers in this instance were expected to recognize all that was right about American schools—rational and fair behavior on the part of children and teachers alike—and all that was wrong with German schools— centralized power and control. But reporters would have been hard-pressed to locate a similar story from El Paso’s Mexican population, whose children faced routine beatings, paddlings, and slaps on the hand for speaking Spanish in the classroom. Mexican American students who attended elementary schools in the mid- and THE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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late 1940s remember not just corporal punishment for speaking Spanish in school, but also suspension from school, being given demerits or detention, or being made to stand in the closet.73 Ruthlessness frequently prevailed in the city’s “Mexican” schools. Nationally, too, corporal punishment remained legal in postwar American schools and was most likely to be experienced by minority children. And still, reporters repeated the story of the Paperclip child to present American teachers as more nurturing, democratic, and selfpossessed than totalitarian ones because for the Paperclip children, as for other Anglo children, they were. Americans’ critique of German school stratification represented another means by which they turned a blind eye to the nation’s own political and social failures. German schools’ separation of students at age ten into academic and vocational tracks meant that there was little “common school life” or “common cultural and social experience” among German youth. But even as Americans critiqued schools that were organized to follow “traditional lines of cleavage in German society”—as opposed to embracing diversity and cosmopolitanism—schools across Texas and the south were segregated by both law and custom.74 This was as true in El Paso as other cities. Segregation correlated with or fueled other educational inequities. On average, El Paso elementary schools served 700 students. Yet four out of ten South Side schools served over 1100 students, and in buildings designed for far fewer.75 Schools on the South Side were often inadequately supplied with cast-off textbooks from Anglo schools and with inexperienced teachers.76 The city’s few Mexican American teachers—18 out of 582 in the 1945–1946 school year—were assigned to South El Paso schools.77 Even so, the city’s majority–Mexican American elementary schools were run almost entirely by Anglo women who had little experience in living or working with Mexican Americans before teaching. El Paso schools, then, illustrate how American democratic schooling neither required nor necessitated the democratic treatment of students. When Americans looked at German schools, they saw institutions that were joyless, routinized, and authoritarian. When they looked at their own, they saw a confirmation of Western values, including optimism, sociableness, and self-government. Just as German schools had created a nationalistic people susceptible to fascist ideology and self-pity, American schools were expected to produce students who were liberated and engaged social contributors and in turn, ideal democrats and cold warriors. Fair and free institutions, the rationale went, created independent and fair people. But the ideals schools promoted were violated by the ways students were treated in school 32

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and in society. Many educators struggled to delve beyond the ideal even as they worked in unequal schools. Too many instead, bowed to discriminatory ideas, fostered their perpetuation, and participated in one of the nation’s greatest obstructions to democracy.

Family, Democracy, and Civilization Speaking before the National Congress of Parents and Teachers in 1942, education professor and civil rights activist George I. Sánchez pressed for improved education conditions for the nation’s Mexican-heritage students. “The unjust treatment of Spanish-speaking children in southwestern schools does more harm to Pan-Americanism than a shipload of Nazi agents,” he proclaimed.78 It was inconceivable to Sánchez, as it would have been to almost all Americans, that at the war’s end Nazi agents really would be brought by the shipload to the United States at the behest of the federal government. Instead, arguing that undemocratic behavior at home was as dangerous as totalitarianism abroad, Sánchez invoked wartime fears that Nazis would infiltrate Latin America and threaten the United States through its southern border. Many Americans believed that World War II had created a “wave of Germanophile sentiment” in Mexico, bolstered by “the list of sins against the U.S. and Britain that the Latin Americans had learned in their histories and that the Germans . . . exploited.”79 Even if Americans showed little interest in addressing those sins themselves, Texas oilman Neville Penrose worried, they had to prepare for the Soviet indoctrination of Mexico and its attempt to “bring their Iron Curtain right up to the Rio Grande.”80 Anglo Texans saw themselves on the frontlines of defense and organized statewide programs to improve transnational relations such as the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, which Penrose would preside over. But they lacked Sánchez’s sense of urgency about the treatment of the state’s Mexican American students, as well as his fear that unequal education conditions threatened American democracy or security. This is not to say that Texans did not experience concern over the number of Mexican-heritage children living in the state. Living in housing with just a few bathrooms per tenement building, South El Paso residents presented what the city’s Anglo elite often saw as “a serious menace to the community’s health and sanitation” citywide.81 Poverty was extreme and widespread. Over 39 percent of city residents lived in housing categorized by the U.S. Census Bureau as dilapidated or without running water. By comparison, only 6  percent of housing in New York and Chicago and 4 percent in Los THE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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Angeles was as compromised. Texas generally had higher rates of unfit housing than other parts of the nation—9 and 13 percent of housing in Dallas and Houston lacked running water or was dilapidated—but by any measure, Mexican American El Pasoans experienced substandard living conditions in far great numbers than most urban Americans.82 Anglo Texans had long exploited these physical conditions, Guadalupe San Miguel has shown, as justification for relegating “ill-clad and unclean” children to segregated, unequal schools.83 Even as the Mexican population served as the backbone of the city’s workforce in manual labor, it was continually characterized by city leaders as “an economic burden to the community, increasing the cost of local government to an extent which is in no ways commensurate with the financial support they render.”84 Schooling conditions echoed the message that Mexican children constituted a drain on resources and extracted more than they contributed. And yet the state of postwar El Paso schools in Mexican neighborhoods was one of near total deprivation. In South El Paso, three elementary schools that served over two thousand students had no lunchroom, which meant that, unlike other city schools, they offered no lunch program.85 Three of the four elementary schools had no library.86 The Aoy School, an elementary school opened for Mexican students in 1897, was by the end of World War I both El Paso’s largest school and the nation’s largest school for Spanish-speaking students.87 Unsurprisingly, it was overcrowded and possessed inadequate facilities and resources, including a faculty comprised mostly of novice teachers.88 Its fourteen hundred students attended schools in split shifts; for many students at Bowie High School, it was their first opportunity to attend school for more than just part of a day.89 Yet it was exceedingly difficult for students who attended these schools to gain entry into others. The idea that Mexican youth and the community presented a hazard and a threat stemmed in part from conceptions about the Mexican family. The fear of Mexican women’s fertility and of Mexican birth rates had played a central role in eugenics and immigration debates dating back to the 1930s. Even within the larger sense of nativism that prevailed in the period, Mexican women created particular anxiety because of the concern that they could travel between the two nations more easily than other immigrant groups, bringing their children with them.90 Women had been shut out of the Bracero Program, a 1942 binational agreement in which the Mexican government contracted men to work for American farmers. This left women and children with little legal pathway for entry. By 1953, over 60 percent of Border Patrol arrests in El Paso were of women and children.91 The anxiety over illicit 34

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families remained alive after the war, even as other political circumstances changed. In 1951 a Presidential Commission had noted that while braceros were not permitted to bring family members, undocumented workers (whom many Anglos called “wetbacks”) “often bring or acquire families,” making them more dangerous than the braceros. In fact, many men may have chosen to immigrate and work illegally precisely so that they could bring their families with them. The difference was more than one of legal disregard, the Commission continued, for “many social complications are intensified by the presence of families.”92 The Commission had been strongly influenced by the work of Grover Wilmouth, the long-serving El Paso District Director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).93 Mexican families, Wilmouth argued, only compounded their illegitimacy, straining the city’s resources and public institutions, including schools. Mexican Americans across class identities often supported firmer immigration regulation as a means to distinguish themselves from illegal immigrants, but Anglo stereotypes about Mexicans did not stop at citizenship.94 Less than 17 percent of the El Paso population was foreign-born in 1950, but that reality made little difference.95 The enduringness of stereotypes, compounded with fluctuating immigration policies, created what Christina Salinas has called “perceptions  .  .  . of a permanently immigrant Mexican community” among many Anglo Americans.96 Drawing on psychological rhetoric like that which shaped German reeducation, American educators saw the Mexican family as an additional source of difficulty in the problems that they passed down to their children. Educators consistently argued that Mexican parents’ own sense of inferiority, defeatism, and failure of selfregulation created similar behaviors and ways of thinking in their children. The result, one such Texas educator argued, was that the Mexican child, expected to meet “certain desirable standards of cleanliness, emotional control, non-belligerency, personal and social responsibility, and mental application, horrifies his teacher with his utter disregard for these standards.”97 Even as teachers argued that the role of the school was to offer “full and complete participation in the communities of which [students] are a part,” few took exception to the premise that to do so demanded social, psychological, and economic adjustments on the part of Mexican children, including “new modes of thought” and “new patterns of behavior.”98 Conservative Anglos fueled fear of a “wetback invasion” after the war’s end, but liberals’ concerns about Mexican Americans over how to “make life more livable for these unfortunate people, and more pleasant and prosperous for all,” as expressed by one borderlands teacher, were frequently dehumanizing as well.99 THE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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Such perceptions of Mexican families placed students in a difficult position. Students’ perceived reticence was often a product of a choice to either struggle to speak in English or say nothing at all. Either could be preferable to the trauma of being suspended or beaten for speaking Spanish. Report cards and other school communications were written solely in English, forcing children to become translators for their parents of all that was taking place in school. Elena Flood recalls that teachers’ prejudices “made chronic liars out of all us Mexican kids. At school we said we had practiced so and so in English with our parents, which we most certainly had not,” either because their families did not speak English or because parents wanted to preserve their children’s Spanish fluency in the home. Flood also “lied at school about dietary things. We were supposed to eat a good old American breakfast— eggs, bacon, orange juice, with a glass of milk, but . . . there wasn’t much time for that kind of breakfast. So we lied at school about what our home was really like.” Mexican parents could be critical of the schools, as well, and she remembers lying to her parents about what she completed in school because they “were shocked the school gave us so little work.”100 In many ways, then, Anglo stereotypes of Mexican Americans impacted not only the quality of schooling students received, but their very relationship to schools. The consequences of racialized thinking about Mexican families comes into even sharper focus when compared to the Paperclip families, themselves a community of undocumented immigrants. The promise of the German children to reform, rather than just reflect, their families’ beliefs or values was not the only difference that marked the Paperclip families as different from the Mexican ones. Materially, they were allotted far greater resources than many native-born citizens. This began in the planning stages of Operation Paperclip, when the War Department prepared for approximately three dependents for each scientist and saw the families not as a strain but as insurance for the scientists’ commitment. The ramifications of this allotment became clear starting with the journey from Bremerhaven, which, despite some difficult moments, was an experience in plentitude. Regine Woerdemann remembers, for example, that in leaving Germany “we went on a ship and that’s the first time I’d ever seen cornflakes and there was candy.”101 Axel Roth remembered having his first Coke aboard the ship and, realizing how much he liked it, “ha[ving] a lot after that.”102 Walter Tschinkel, too, recalls “being fed on the ship [food of ] a quality and level that I hadn’t had in years.” There, he discovered that “I love soft-boiled eggs, so I ordered one after another. Finally the cook came out, after I had ordered my eighth one, to see who was ordering all these-soft boiled eggs.”103 Certainly, 36

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the children celebrated the inconceivable shift from living in a war-torn state to their immediate incorporation into a victorious one. Rather than being treated as extractive, the Paperclip children’s earliest encounters with Americans taught them that they were entering a society marked by abundance and that they were entitled to a share of it. The divergences from Mexican American children were apparent in the Paperclip children’s other immediate experiences, as well. When one child developed chicken pox in Landshut, his mother “sneaked him on board,” Tschinkel remembered. “She wasn’t supposed to. By the time we arrived, everybody had chicken pox. Every kid had chicken pox.” While contagion had often led Mexican American children to face further isolation and restriction than poverty already caused them, the Paperclip group suffered no similar rebuke. Tschinkel’s mother, Lotte, remembered arriving in El Paso looking “somewhat strange in our winter clothes . . . I even wore a fur-lined black overcoat and an unbecoming hat,” and there were the “blotches on Walter’s face [that] were the result of chicken pox.” It “calmed his worried father” to learn that the condition was temporary and not “his normal appearance,” but neither Lotte nor anyone else in the group reported having to confront fears on the part of American officials that they were a publichealth concern, even though the pustules were a visible sign of defiance toward American policy.104 The distinctive treatment of the Paperclip families and the provisions the military made for them spoke to the confidence military officials possessed that the families would assimilate well. This was true, the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps reported in 1946, even as the Paperclip wives divided into “factions” while they waited in Landshut. While military officials stationed at Landshut described the fighting as “a result of feminine cliques,” they worried nevertheless that it could lead to greater unrest among the families.105 The disorder and aggression that the infighting signaled seemed to American officials neither feminine nor motherly, and it led to greater military oversight of the children. In January 1947 Lois Godfrey, a civilian placement officer for the army, was assigned to oversee the families’ adjustment by Major James Hamill, the custodian of and unofficial advocate for the scientists. Hamill, who was by all accounts very close to many of the scientists, needed help, as he explained to Godfrey: “I’m in trouble. I have seen these people . . . the housewives can start a fight over a head of cabbage in the grocery market.”106 If the families were too unruly, he feared, support for Operation Paperclip could wane. Fortunately for Hamill, Godfrey was eager to help with the children. RemTHE FIGHT FOR CIVILIZATION

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iniscing about her work, she explained that when the “families were really beginning to pour in, it occurred to me that school children can do more to civilize families than most anything else.” Godfrey’s conception of “civilizing” families suggested an appreciation for the same values the scientists already claimed they possessed: democratic thought, individual achievement, concern for the social good, and Western chauvinism. At the same time, she also understood the scientists as potentially possessing a shared destiny: once the children corrected or absolved their families, the Paperclip community would be better prepared to assimilate, including the mothers. In making the connection to schools as a civilizing force, Godfrey evoked, though in all probability unconsciously, a long history of American schools as colonialist institutions. This was particularly true in the boarding schools that coerced and often violently forced Native Americans to relinquish all aspects of their identity, including their names, native language, and physical appearance so that they could be “civilized.” Segregated vocational schools had “civilized” African and Mexican Americans by teaching them industrial, agricultural, and domestic skills that would enable them to better serve Anglo capitalist interests; that included including the school located at the ASARCO smelter community in El Paso’s Smeltertown. The situation of the Paperclip children was entirely different, and the contrast points to the degree to which the families’ lack of “civilization”—which, presumably, Godfrey saw as a product of their Nazi affiliations and not just fighting between families—was understood to be a resolvable problem. Just as democracy could be learned, she suggested, other political beliefs could be unlearned through American schooling. In fact, as she tells it, the families were so prepared to be democratized and civilized that they seemed to yield immediately to the idea of schools as democratizing institutions. Godfrey organized the parents and explained to them, “I am going to try to show you how a school operates in a democratic country.” The scientists, in response, proved receptive and helpful; the wives, few of whom spoke English, “never opened their mouths” and either embraced or submitted to Godfrey.107 Godfrey’s account makes her into an authority figure and schools into an immediate source of order and discipline. Her beliefs about the power of public schools to win over strife and chaos with rationalism and democracy were echoed by the El Paso press, who followed the mothers, along with their children, as they began taking English classes on base. Altogether, teachers reported, both “the wives and children are excellent, eager, and serious students,” a far cry from the portrait of clannish infighting Hamill had projected.108 “Unable to speak English 38

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upon arrival,” an April 1948 article reported, the women could now speak English without hesitation. “They practice at every opportunity, consulting a dictionary frequently.”109 The mothers’ industriousness and enthusiasm reflected their children’s behavior and engagement; the civilization project was working. It is no coincidence that the perceived differing potentials of Mexican and German families was echoed in the schooling conditions and opportunities they faced. Tracking the continued presence of nationalism in occupied Germany five years after the war, the reporter Fred Hechinger concluded that the problem went beyond political identification, for “out of the concept of the family and school,” he argued, “grows the pattern of government, industry, and all society.”110 Hechinger saw that families and schools informed, and were not simply informed by, larger social structures. This was as true in the United States as it was in Germany. American schools were not just the product of racial and social policy; they bolstered and ensured the future of it. Likewise, the education of Mexican American and Paperclip students was a product not just of family values, but also of popular thinking about Mexican and German families. Their perceived worth to a larger culture and democratic project in many ways determined the schooling they experienced. More expansively, the acceptance and assimilation of the Paperclip children in El Paso schools both anticipated and enabled their acceptance in American society, just as the marginalization of Mexican children facilitated Mexican American discrimination more widely. The scientists had been right: American democracy possessed deep and long-standing flaws that were centered in the difference between democratic theory, which might have ensured equality for all, and democratic practice, which had always been linked to white privilege. These very flaws, not just anxieties born out of the Cold War, explained the different and unequal treatment of different children. The dilemma of postwar American education, El Paso schooling suggested, was not how democracy and Western civilization informed schooling, but whether schools could reform democracy and civilization.

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2 : S OM E T H I N G N E W I N T H E T E R R I TO RY RACE, S PACE, AN D SC H O O LI NG IN THE BORDERLANDS

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egine Woerdemann’s most detailed memories of immigrating to the United States as a Paperclip child begin with the train from New York to El Paso. For many of the children, the train ride was a revelation, offering their first glimpse not just of a new topography but of Americans and American life, from “luxurious carpets [in the train cars] we hadn’t seen since the bombings” to passengers wearing nail polish.1 For five-year-old Regine, the trip progressed smoothly until a soldier seated nearby offered her a piece of gum. As Regine remembers it, he “offered me some gum, and the way he flipped it, I thought he was going to light me on fire. I screamed bloody murder. . . . It was Juicy Fruit and he flipped it out of the little container you know, the shiny aluminum stuff on it. I thought it was a fire so I started screaming. That was the first time I’d ever seen a Black person.” Regine’s aunt, who had escorted her and her brother to the United States, whisked the girl out of the car until she calmed down. When they returned, the soldier was gone. Seven decades later, Regine recounts, “I remember, he left the gum.” This was her first encounter with race in the United States, a “problem,” as she calls it, rooted in lessons she learned before she left Germany. “When you’re a little girl in Germany, you don’t see Black people at all,” and “they tell little kids stories like, ‘They’re Africans and they put you in a pot and eat you.’” One of her best teachers had been her grandmother, who had warned Regine after learning she would immigrate as part of Operation Paperclip, “‘You will see Africans when you go to the U.S.’” As Regine sees it, her grandmother’s motivation was not to scare her but to prepare her and “just try to say . . . ‘There’s something new coming in the territory. Don’t be afraid of it.’”2 More than the tale of a young girl already impressed by racist narratives she first learned in Nazi Germany, Regine’s story—and her understanding of her grandmother’s advice—makes her a colonizer setting out in a new land that she should think of as her own. In reality, she was the new person in the territory, but in her account it was “Africans” who were foreign and strange. The whole experience was a far stretch from the circumstances of her young life. She had lived during the war years in Cuxhaven, Germany, on the North Sea, 40

where she spent most of her time playing in dikes, isolated from many of her neighbors and the American soldiers other Paperclip children had come to associate with chocolate bars and gum. It was there that Regine met with the stereotype of Africans as cannibals, and there that she was counseled by her grandmother on how to manage her new circumstances. Charged with her grandmother’s advice to discount fear and assume a sense of entitlement to whatever lay ahead, Regine failed, both in her response to an African American and in her inability to conjure that entitlement, though she supposes that she probably chewed the gum the soldier left behind, “little brat that I was.”3 Still, even as white-supremacist narratives had set her up to be terrorized, they also prepared her to terrorize, judging by the soldier’s absence on her return. Fearful and anxious in a new land, Regine nevertheless learned of the power and entitlement she possessed as a white child in the United States. Regine’s memory is about an enactment of racist narratives, the collision of stereotypes and actual people. Given the timing of the event, the most surprising aspect of it was that Regine and the GI even sat near each other on the train. The incident certainly occurred early in her trip, before the train entered the south, where it is inconceivable that the two would have occupied the same car. As a result, it dramatizes a dynamic in which, as described by George Lipsitz, “the lived experience of race takes place in actual spaces, while the lived experience of place draws its determinate logic from overt and covert understandings of race.”4 That is to say, geographical or constructed space is always ideological space as well. Racial power and systems are created, learned, and deployed out of allowable interactions within a given space. Jim Crow policy racialized spatial boundaries in the American south in ways that Nazis would come to emulate. Its practices were also exported to occupied Germany, where African American army officers were prohibited from entering Lieutenant General Lucius Clay’s Berlin headquarters and Black soldiers were allowed to use military pools only on the day before they were drained.5 The shared train car, in Regine’s story, as well as a nation whose citizenry included both Black and white Americans, was essential to the occurrence of events. The veracity of her grandmother’s lessons could only be tested in a space in which Germans and “Africans” could meet. The schooling of El Paso children, this chapter contends, must be understood in relation to the “experience of place” and, more specifically, to the ways in which the city’s social and physical geographies shaped the opportunities of the Paperclip and Mexican American families in the borderlands. Racial identity has often determined urban geographical identities and, in turn, social citizenship in the United States; the more physically mobile SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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and free a community has been within city limits and institutions, the more American it has appeared to be. Racial power determined the spaces the German and Mexican communities were and were not allowed to occupy and the ways in which each community was expected to perform in those spaces. Schools, of course, played a principal role in the racialization of space. Because they are key to the formation of citizenship and to opportunity more generally, schools have been used by Anglos to organize societies by racial and economic advantage across place and time. They are also institutions that invest—or fail to invest—in children and in neighborhoods, again in racialized terms. One effect of this pattern can be measured in the years of education attained by postwar El Pasoans residing in different parts of the city. In neighborhoods with Anglo-dominant schools, the median number of years ranged from nine to over twelve. By contrast, in all of the sectors of South El Paso, home to the city’s “Mexican” schools, the median number of years of education completed was five or fewer.6 A study of seventynine graduates of Bowie High School between 1936 and 1946 found that just one had earned a college degree.7 Schooling, in its presence as well as its absence, served as one of the most important mechanisms or obstacles to mobility, but access to schooling was highly correlated with the spaces in which schools were located. The segregation of African Americans, while not the focus of this book, serves as an important backdrop nevertheless to the assimilation of the Paperclip community because it offered a powerful and widely recognizable lesson in race and spatial constriction. In general, the Paperclip children had little interaction with African Americans, both because Black El Pasoans comprised just over 2 percent of the city population and because all Black youth were required to attended the South Side’s Frederick Douglass Elementary School. Mexican American children, who, unlike Anglos, could live in close proximity with African Americans, were often forbidden by their parents to play with their neighbors and, by some accounts, took this segregation for granted.8 In 1936 El Paso’s Mexican Americans had protested a policy put forth by the municipal Bureau of Vital Statistics to reclassify Mexicans as “colored.” The Bureau wanted to lower white death counts, a plan driven by a desire to sell El Paso as a destination for wealthy East Coasters suffering from or escaping illnesses. But it drew a rapid, forceful, and victorious response from Mexican Americans, who rejected any affiliation with Black Americans and, in fact, thought of themselves as white.9 In different ways, then, the lessons of Jim Crow were learned and practiced by children across El Paso, shaping their ideas about race and belonging. 42

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The relevance of Jim Crow was also reinforced when an African American soldier was selected to escort some of the Paperclip scientists to visit a theater in downtown El Paso. The solider was prevented from entering, and the group had to leave. That a Black soldier was selected to escort the scientists in a segregated city is baffling, given the predictable outcome of events. According to Robert Upton, an army technician aware of the circumstances, the incident taught the scientists that “if you want to go to the Plaza Theater, you have to have someone who looks like the Germans did” to escort the group. It is surprising that this needed to be learned, given that Jim Crow policies were well-known by both military personnel and Nazi policy makers.10 Racial and military hierarchies—in which white missile designers would have possessed greater authority than a Black trooper—may have compelled the soldier to attempt to bring the group to the theater even though he knew he would not be allowed in. Yet the story also highlights the peculiar position of the scientists: the soldier was not a chauffeur, but a required escort. They could not leave him at the door, because they did not possess the full freedom of white Americans, even though they benefited from many aspects of white privilege. Upton was right in this sense: the scientists might alter future situations by requesting a different escort in a way that the Black soldier, who very well may have just defended the United States in the war, patently could not. The incident could only have confirmed for the scientists how racist narratives worked in their new home.11 As these accounts suggest, the Black/white binary that undergirded Jim Crow law impacted race construction even in a city in which African Americans made up only a tiny percentage of the population. This extended to the racialization of Mexican Americans, whose status was complicated because Jim Crow did not apply to them; they were neither as privileged nor as free as Anglos, nor were they as disenfranchised as African Americans. Anglo proprietors still tried to take things into their own hands by posting “No Mexicans Allowed” signs on their establishments, though this seems to have happened less frequently in El Paso than in other parts of Texas.12 Overall, racism against Mexican Americans could be more difficult to name, because it was not as formally sanctioned as Jim Crow and because middle-class Mexican Americans could afford some access to Anglo institutions. One El Pasoan, Manny Morales, explains of growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, “I never did really experience [discrimination] because we stayed in our area of the city and never had any real need to go out and mingle with anybody else.”13 In so doing, he speaks to the ways in which Mexican American spatial boundaries could be characterized as an act of choice rather than policy. Morales SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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may genuinely have felt little interest in contending with Anglos nor indeed any need to do so, but neither was his “area of the city” invited to engage with Anglos. Raul Villa’s childhood memories of postwar El Paso offer a further view into how the Black/white binary failed to represent the dynamics at play in borderland communities. Villa recalls that “El Pasoans treated everyone the same,” even as he felt like a “token Mexican” when hired as a teller at the National Bank and concluded that Mexican Americans “just took what [the Anglos] gave you.” “We all grew up united,” he explains, shortly before noting that African Americans could not live north of Yandell Street, as middle-class Mexican Americans could; they were not part of the “all.” As a young person, Villa socialized with Mexican Americans, Syrians, and Jews whom he met through the Mexican custodian at the B’nai Zion synagogue. In his seeming contradictions, Villa attempts to capture a sense of unity and community that he felt as a young person, but one that coexisted with or even developed out of a concomitant sense of exclusion. This exclusion was both imposed on him by Anglos and, possibly, enacted by him toward African Americans. He struggles, in other words, with a Black/white line that has often shaped constructions of race in the United States but that did not capture his own simultaneous experience of diversity and marginalization. Nor does a Black/white line capture the intentionality with which Anglo El Pasoans turned to other measures to draw boundaries around Mexican American spaces. They did this through networks of business and civic leaders, people with whom some Paperclip members would come to develop close relationships in their time in El Paso. The scientists and their families arrived at an optimistic time in the city’s history, one that they helped to initiate. The expansion of Fort Bliss, spurred largely by the missile program the V-2 scientists led, grew the base, and therefore the city, both demographically and economically. In 1936 the base housed 2,770 enlisted men and officers and even then was considered one of the city’s most important sources of economic support.14 By 1948 the population had grown to 8,000 enlisted men and included several divisions within the new Anti-Aircraft Artillery and Guided Missiles Center, born of the scientists’ work.15 Between 1940 and 1950 the city’s population grew over 30 percent to 130,000. Yet in many ways El Paso still functioned as a small town. Its school superintendent, A.  H. Hughey, had served in the position since 1919, almost as long as the city school system had existed up to the beginning of his administration, and was in many ways synonymous with the city’s schools. A study of the city’s political systems found that “business men exerted . . . great influ44

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ence in El Paso simply because no other organized group was willing to challenge them. . . . there was no disagreement on community goals” because everything gravitated toward Anglo interests.16 Hughey had long-standing, powerful connections to these men. This is to say, postwar El Paso depended both on exclusionary measures and on a purposeful and strategic sense of Anglo alignment that bound individuals—businesspersons, politicians, and educators—and the institutions with which they identified. Children could play a critical role in reinforcing, and in some cases subverting, these boundaries. The personal recollections with which this chapter began testify to the importance of children as actors in race narratives, in their freedom or constriction to transcend race lines and in their power to maintain them. Their ability or inability to move freely through space— whether crossing the nation or within city limits—was a critical indicator of the freedom (or lack thereof ) with which they would navigate public institutions, including schools. The children of Operation Paperclip were foreigners, but they did not share Mexican children’s distance from the established power brokers of El Paso society. They entered the United States and moved to El Paso at the behest of the federal government, and this condition begat others that would accrue into different kinds of social privilege and mobility. As a result, even as they represented “something new in the territory,” the Paperclip children and their families best illuminated the social dynamics that already existed in the spaces around them, whether at school, on the military base on which they lived, or, as one local newspaper report described it, in the city in which they would “generously circulate.”17 That circulation depended on the opportunity and, in fact, on the invitation to interact with people and institutions throughout the city. As the Paperclip children’s novelty intersected with established race narratives, they appeared more eligible for freedom than they would have without those narratives in place. That is, they seemed more potentially American precisely because they attended school with Anglo children, had crossed the country in Anglo train cars, and could patronize any theater they liked. In this regard, both the specter of the Black/white binary and the division between Mexican and Anglo spaces were critical to their education in Americanism.

Borders in the Borderlands Axel Roth’s impressions of the train from New York to El Paso were less dramatic than those of Regine Woerdemann. Ten years old when he arrived, Roth remembered spending time watching the changing landscape of the SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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new country. “One of the things that the mothers in our group noticed,” he wrote decades after the trip, “was that no matter how shabby the house was it seemed to always have a car in front of it and a washing machine on the back porch.”18 To the mothers, the cars and washing machines must have been emblems of American affluence and modernity. They also were connected to one of the most iconic and politically important images of the postwar era: the nuclear-family home. By 1940 the single-family home was a culturally established emblem of citizenship and patriotism, considered a first “unit of society and Government.” El Paso Housing Authority chair George Webber captured the stakes of the symbolism when he argued that “dictatorships aim at the elimination of the home and everything connected with it; the destruction of family ties, family love, family associations, family loyalty.” By contrast, he maintained, democracy “rests in solid foundation upon the home, and to have good American citizens, those citizens must have good American homes.”19 In their suggestions of progress, self-sufficiency, and economic success, American homes made an argument about American identity that the Paperclip mothers appeared primed to notice. Such houses were also an emblem of whiteness, as the history of El Paso housing further demonstrates. In 1936 the Home Owner Loan Corporation (HOLC) had assessed El Paso as part of a national appraisal of cities. The HOLC tour was a signal moment in the New Deal, a response to the 1933 Home Owners Loan Act and a key effort to rescue defaulting homeowners with federalized, longer-term mortgages. In order to determine who should receive loans, HOLC assessed the risk level of distinct neighborhoods in hundreds of American cities, drawing on the opinions of local realtors and banks to make their determinations. Historians have documented the clear and consistent relationship between race and risk in HOLC’s appraisals nationally.20 In El Paso HOLC followed this pattern and found something distinctive: an economy that was “peculiar to the type of city which is so overwhelmingly influenced by foreign elements.” It did not compare economically with other cities of its size, the agency determined, because “the Mexican inhabitants of El Paso have an aggregate income and resultant purchasing power far below that of the average American. Their standards of living are low.” While “the oppression of the race during many generations [made] it a humble, home loving class of people,” HOLC admitted, “the typical Mexican living quarters are hovels of adobe” and the city’s Mexican-heritage population constituted 80 percent of the city’s relief load in the Depression. For this reason, the El Paso report determined, “all of Mexican El Paso is rated as hazardous.”21 Residents living in large swaths of the city, including its entire southern border, 46

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would be ineligible for federal loans because they were Mexican. Depriving working-class Mexicans from buying property and accruing wealth and security was just one means of keeping them in their place. The HOLC appraisals were part of a longer prewar project of physically and economically containing the Mexican community in El Paso. By the mid1920s El Paso was an established center of U.S.-Mexican trade, home to copper smelting, cotton farming, and cattle ranching, and, in the words of one Chamber of Commerce officer, “a reservoir of Mexican labor.”22 But the importance of binationalism to the city’s economy did not mean it had a more progressive outlook on its Mexican American residents. During the Depression, El Paso eliminated a third of its workforce through Mexican “repatriation,” the nation’s largest forced return of foreign and American-born ethnic Mexicans. Repatriation changed the lives of entire families. In one sign of this change, El Paso schools lost 1,377 students in the 1932–1933 academic year.23 Nor did repatriation help Anglos. Contrary to government officials’ promises that Anglos would find more work opportunities once Mexicans left, unemployment rose in cities like El Paso with high deportation numbers. Not only did Anglos infrequently assume formerly “Mexican” jobs, but the repatriations shrank the number of higher-skilled, administrative, and managerial Anglo-dominated positions that depended on low-wage labor.24 Throughout El Paso’s urban development, Anglo El Pasoans’ fortunes were tied to, not in competition with, those of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, whether they understood this or not. The character of those fortunes changed after the war. By 1950, 44 percent of the city’s jobs were located in manufacturing, wholesale, and retail; the source of El Paso’s postwar affluence was located increasingly closer to the city’s center and in industries in which city residents might play a greater role as direct consumers. As much as did the ranches and farms that bordered El Paso, the city’s postwar industries depended on Mexican Americans as laborers, consumers, and negotiators in an increasingly transnational economy. Throughout the 1940s Mexican immigration returned the city’s Mexican-heritage population to pre–Depression era numbers, which both helped the economy and further spurred Anglo anxiety.25 The major question for El Paso’s Anglos was how to profit from Mexican labor and consumerism while preventing Mexicans from advancing into territory, economically and geographically, that they considered their own. The most obvious means by which they did this was through hiring practices. As always, El Paso politics “were controlled by the Anglo-American business interests,” stated a report on the postwar economy, and some of the SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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city’s most powerful industries, including its utility companies, were known to hire Anglos only.26 More than just well-paying jobs, the utility companies provided employees with pensions and benefits that helped improve and ensure families’ economic stability. The city’s business elite consistently denied claims of discrimination, arguing that “people of Latin-American extraction hold important positions in the City” and that, for jobs where Spanish was an asset, such as in retail, “they are the preferred employees.”27 While there was a grain of truth to this argument, the educational disparities found across regions of the city prove how disadvantaged working-class Mexican Americans were in competing in many employment sectors. Charting the city’s pattern of job discrimination and voter suppression for the Nation magazine, Carey McWilliams also noted a rejection of education measures for which “90 percent of the benefits would be enjoyed by persons of Mexican descent.” The “‘better elements’ fear the latent power of the ‘minorities,’” McWilliams wrote, and the result was a sense of political frustration that of all the cities he visited on a cross-country tour “reach[ed] its highest pitch in El Paso.”28 As McWilliams suggested, school was also a primary means by which Anglos attempted to restrict Mexicans. Unable to depend on de jure segregation, city leaders made sure that housing and employment discrimination were not simply echoed in school segregation but enabled by it. Remote from every other major city in Texas, El Paso had led education advances in many areas: it boasted the state’s first public kindergarten, its first junior high school, and its first artificially lit football field; and, at a time when the state’s other public schools ended in the eleventh grade, El Paso was the first city to expand high school to twelfth.29 Yet despite its history of pioneerism, the city deferred to the same racial dynamics that characterized schools elsewhere in Texas. Nearly 59 percent of the city’s students attended schools on El Paso’s South Side, leaving approximately 7 percent of Mexican American students to attend “American” schools on the North Side.30 This segregation was most powerfully enforced in elementary schools, where language learning began and was enabled by policy, if not by law.31 A 1944 El Paso district handbook entitled Rules and Manual for School Employees stated that “children of the south-side districts are not transferred to north-side schools, with the exception of Anglo-Americans upon request and for good cause.” Likewise, only “Spanish-Americans upon request and for good cause” could be transferred from North to South Side schools.32 Even without Jim Crow, segregated schools were a function not simply of residential segregation but of explicitly racialized school assignments. In fact, the policy marked an attempt to make schools even more segregated than the neighborhoods in 48

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which they were located—gatekeepers for the segregation of other public spaces in the future. Most Anglo children had little need for the transfer policy because they already lived in Anglo neighborhoods. The policy’s primary function was to make transfers for Mexican students to Anglo schools difficult. Still, the experience of Dorothy Elder is important to revealing both the policy’s potential use and how its enforcement was supported by city educators. Elder, whose family moved from Fort Clark, in South Texas, to Fort Bliss in 1941, found herself assigned to San Jacinto Elementary on El Paso’s South Side when there was no local school for her to attend on base. On her first and only day at San Jacinto, she found that “I was the only student in the class who did not speak Spanish. . . . Not only would the children not play with me, they would not sit with me at lunch and I had to eat lunch alone!” The experience was enough for both Elder and her mother to decide she would not return to the school. While Fort Bliss staff worked on a plan to have children like her “bused to a school nearer Fort Bliss that was more ‘culturally balanced,’” Elder stayed home. She was only rescued when Alicia Swann, the principal at Crockett Elementary, where the largest group of Paperclip children attended school, drove by one day and saw Elder playing on her lawn during school hours. According to Elder, Swann asked her mother why the girl was not in school; upon hearing her story, she immediately enrolled the girl at Crockett.33 Would Swann have done the same for a Mexican American child? The school demographics suggest that she would not, and that school administrators—not just district leaders—could play an important role in keeping schools racially separate spaces. The policy was fought by some Mexican parents, such as those of Genevieve Draeger and Elena Ruiz, who petitioned for their daughters to attend El Paso High School instead of Bowie. But even though Mexican American students constituted a substantive minority of the school population at El Paso High, the expectations for Anglo and Mexican students were different; for Ruiz, there was never any talk by teachers of her attending college, as there was for her Anglo friends. Bill Rodríguez remembers El Paso High somewhat differently: he found it easy to fit in as long as a person was middle class, but the few “poor Mexican Americans seemed not to mingle.” Rodríguez also discovered that when he requested to transfer to Austin High School, he was not admitted because Austin, located in one of the city’s most solidly Anglo neighborhoods, “was a little bit more ethnic oriented.”34 These dynamics applied to elementary school as well. Gonzalo Rangel, who by his account was the first Mexican American child to attend Mesita Elementary, remembered SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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Figure 2.1 (top): First-grade class at Alamo Elementary, 1946. The three boys in front dressed in military uniforms are decorated in United Service Organizations (USO) badges. Meant to celebrate patriotism, the costumes also evoke the contributions of Mexican Americans to the war effort. Retrieved from Ruth Cummings, History of the Alamo School (History seminar paper, Texas Western College, 1951). Courtesy of C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, University of Texas at El Paso. Figure 2.2 (bottom): First-grade class at Crockett Elementary, including Paperclip child Helga Tschinkel (middle row, fourth from left). Courtesy of Walter and Helga Tschinkel.

feeling included only until the afternoon school bell rang. Of his Anglo classmates, he recalled, “I could be talking to them from the classroom to the gate, and they would be with me, and as soon as we hit the outside, ‘Hey, what happened?’”35 Rangel’s story, like other former students’ accounts of not being invited to his Anglo classmates’ social events or to their homes, reflects the ways in which Anglo children understood their roles in upholding social lines and maintaining racialized spaces, even if they were willing to relax those lines in school. Circumscribing Mexican American aspiration was more complex than school assignments. Anglo school leaders often ignored and suppressed Mexican parents who advocated to improve Mexican schools. The case of the Burleson Elementary PTA, a group of South Side parents who protested conditions at their children’s elementary school beginning in 1946, marks one notable example. At Burleson and nearby Zavala Elementary, children attended school in split shifts. One class at Burleson was taught in a hallway; two classes at Zavala were taught simultaneously in the auditorium. Yet when Mexican parents pushed for another school to be built, they found that an affluent Anglo neighborhood with a smaller school population would gain an improved school building before they themselves did. “What we did is skip the Burleson project,” explained the school board president unhelpfully to parents at a meeting where the decision was announced.36 When the Burleson PTA continued to push Superintendent Hughey for another year, he accused parent leaders of acting as “subversive elements” and “using Communist tactics” in protesting on their children’s behalf.37 Perhaps Hughey, who had exhibited a dedication to anticommunist education, truly believed the parents’ unwillingness to accept second-class treatment for their children marked them as radical; he would not be the only person in the period to couch white-supremacist ideas in the form of anticommunism. Most certainly, as he admitted before a packed auditorium, he believed he “did not have time to be interrupted” by South Side parents to whom he was unused to being held accountable.38 Hughey’s slight was indicative of a larger Anglo response to growing postwar civil rights campaigns and of a strategy to diminish Mexican American democratic participation. For example, Thomas Sutherland, executive secretary of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, was charged with improving Anglo-Mexican relations in Texas in order to advance American political relationships with Mexico. Yet he echoed the same chord when he advised World War II veteran and civil rights activist Hector Garcia, “in the interest of the dignity of the public officials from whom you seek action, . . . never [to] SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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indulge in loud public pressure which is of itself an act of mistrust offensive to them.”39 Configuring himself as some sort of cultural attaché, Sutherland equated fostering racial consciousness with appeasing Anglo sensibilities and anxieties. The sense of offense he describes extended to less powerful Anglos, such as Alice Cummings, a teacher at Alamo Elementary in South El Paso. Cummings cared for her students, providing them with lunch when they had none. But she “hated to hear” local civil rights advocate Cleofas Calleros speak about the importance of education equity. “He was very ugly . . . he accused Anglos of discrimination, and he did it in front of Anglo teachers,” she remembered indignantly.40 Anglos, leaders and community members alike, did not know what to make of Mexican Americans who challenged stereotypes of themselves as passive and disaffected and who advocated for their families and their community. And so, as Hughey and Sutherland prove, they attempted to convince them to fear Anglo rejection, even when they were meant to be aiding Mexican American civil rights efforts. In this sense, schools also served as a critical organ by which Anglos attempted to limit Mexican political organization. Two years after Hughey shut down the PTA meeting, two Burleson parents, Maxine Silva and David Botello, ran for the El Paso school board. Both lost to the incumbent, M. L. Hutchins, a former railroad superintendent, an important player in the city’s economic community, and Hughey’s choice. The El Paso Herald-Post praised the South Side voters who reelected Hutchins and “would have no part of a racial fight.” Yet almost 70 percent of eligible South Side voters did not vote. The newspaper praised them as well, for presenting “an even sharper rebuke than the voting” and for issuing “a very healthy reaction” to the situation.41 The facts were more complicated than the newspaper suggested. To begin with, many South Side voters were prevented from voting by a poll tax that charged city residents a fee to vote. Furthermore, Botello and Silva won handily in many South Side voting districts and together won almost half as many votes as Hutchins; they lost because those votes fell far behind Anglo North Side voters.42 The coverage of the election, and the message that Mexican Americans were most democratic when they either voted against their own interests or refused to vote at all, indicates how firmly city leaders depended on the alienation of Mexicans to keep city politics, including school politics, operating according to the status quo. Mexican parents’ advocacy for their children promised to threaten a school system in which the most and least privileged students attended almost entirely different school systems, from the number of hours they spent at school to the teachers’ aspirations for their students. This is a les52

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son that was often echoed in the instruction Mexican students received in school. From their invisibility in the curriculum to their frequent treatment as remedial students, Mexican children learned that they, like the neighborhoods in which many of them lived, were a poor investment. But as El Paso housing and school policy shows, the relationship between space and place was not merely metaphorical. In describing how residential areas like El Segundo Barrio were shaped by federal and municipal policies, Clarissa Rile Hayward documents that residential and commercial infrastructure and improvements, and “‘public’ amenities, such as parks and athletic facilities and well-built and well-equipped schools, disproportionately have been channeled to places that were, first legally, then practically, restricted to those constructed as white.” Once these segregated, unequal places were created, they bolstered the very narratives of Black and brown people’s “collective problems” and collective behaviors on which the segregation was first designed.43 The difference between Anglo and Mexican neighborhoods was a product of municipal and federal state interventions rather than of the character of the people who lived in those neighborhoods, as Anglo lawmakers, business leaders, and investors often claimed. Together, however, this culture of investment and disinvestment came to shape not only urban spaces themselves, but the kinds of experiences and futures residents would live out within them.

An Odd Set of Circumstances Like the Mexican American families who lived in “adobe hovels,” the Paperclip families also lived in circumstances that diverged from the ideal American home. Fort Bliss had been chosen to house a new American missile program for a number of reasons, including the base’s ability to accommodate the new installations and people the project would require; the proximity of the White Sands Proving Grounds, located in an desert landscape perfectly suited to missile testing; and the area’s usually clear skies. At Fort Bliss, groups of four families shared single barracks that had been broken into separate bedrooms with a common area; they were, assured one local news report, “barracks termed ‘suited for junior officers.’”44 The buildings may not have lacked running water, as did many South Side tenements, but neither did they constitute the single-family homes that matched the scientists’ prestige. Curt Riess reported for a German newspaper that the “scientists live with their families in a former hospital. They work in former Calvary [sic] barracks. All behind barbed wire. The landscape is depressing. As far as one SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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Figure 2.3: The Fort Bliss barracks in which the Paperclip community lived. Courtesy of Felix and Lilly Axster.

looks, desert.”45 The Paperclip families may have landed in the west, Riess suggested, but their new home, from its topography to its enclosed physical structures, constituted its own form of penance. One of Paperclip child Juergen Haukohl’s earliest memories of Fort Bliss seconded this thought. When his family moved into the barracks, they found a urinal installed in the middle of the kitchen floor. Was the building still being converted into apartments, Haukohl muses, “or, was it a ‘Piss on you!’ message to whichever German family moved in? Understandably, there were still some ill feelings toward Germany following the war.”46 Even reports in the El Paso Herald-Post that documented the Paperclip home as a site of cultural adjustment captured a sense of loss. In an attempt to highlight the wives’ efforts at homemaking, the newspaper focused on how the furniture the families brought from Germany offered “the two-bedroom quarters a [sense of ] distinction.” “A blond heavy oak table and chair, upholstered in red leather, is a bit of home a daughter of wealthy factory owners took to Ft. Bliss,” the report detailed. The new homes signaled a sense of continuity between middle-class Germans and Americans, even if, as scientist Ernst Steinhoff complained, in Germany “families have more furniture because it is handed down from generation to generation and not disposed 54

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of as it is in America.” Yet in this effort to highlight how domestic objects made German homes like American ones, the reporter let slip the difficulties of assimilation. Noting the “greenery from sweet potato plants and inexpensive potted plants [that] give relief to each army barrack-style apartment,” the article recounted, “one wife said she doesn’t like potatoes cooked American style. But she likes to grow potato vines.”47 For the Paperclip wives, at least, the makeshift housing could serve as a retreat from their “depressing” new home and all of its disappointments. If the landscape of El Paso was hostile, its people, by all German accounts, appear not to have been. In his monthly trips off base to theaters, stores, and restaurants, Paperclip scientist Johann Tschinkel found El Pasoans friendlier and more forgiving than he might have expected. “Our Commanding Officer, Major Hamill, was afraid that we might be subjected to hostile attacks in town, but nothing of this sort ever happened. This is astounding in view of the wartime hate propaganda. An expression of generous tolerance,” as Tschinkel saw it. “Even the Jewish merchants gladly sold us their goods.”48 While no record exists of El Pasoans protesting the arrival of the Paperclip community, it is likely that Tschinkel underestimated some of the public opinion about them. The Schwartz family, owners of the Popular Dry Goods department store and among the most prominent merchants in El Paso, knew of the machinations of Nazi Germany not through wartime propaganda but through rescuing their own relatives from the Holocaust. Thanks to negotiations with American and Mexican government officials, Maurice Schwartz was able to relocate five nephews to Juárez in 1940. In 1945 his son brought over five sisters from another branch of the family; all five had survived concentration camps. Far more of the Schwartzes’ European family was murdered.49 In addition, Rabbi Wendell Phillips of El Paso’s Mt. Sinai synagogue was the protégé of Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of the nation’s most powerful critics of Operation Paperclip. Even without official documentation, there is reason to believe that the presence of the Paperclip families unnerved some El Pasoans. Escorted between the base and town, at first monthly and then more often, Tschinkel and other Paperclip members appear to have been protected from the feelings they created for others. This protection extended to their lives on base as well. Fort Bliss was home to soldiers who had just fought in the war. Even as the Paperclip families lived in separate barracks, the scientists worked among army personnel. Undoubtedly some of these personnel shared technician Robert Upton’s disbelief at seeing Paperclip scientists eating in the general mess hall and, in his opinion, acting as if “they had kind of the run of the place.” For Upton, and SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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probably for other soldiers who just returned from the war as well, the scientists’ presence called into question all of the sacrifices they had just made. To him, “it appeared as if the war never happened, if you know what I mean. . . . It seemed like a very odd set of circumstances.”50 In his impressions, Upton links the scientists’ freedom of movement—their “having the run of the place”—with freedom from consequence. Far from facing punishment for their role in serving Hitler, they were rewarded and forgiven. Geographically, politically, and ethically, they were liberated people. Perhaps understanding the skepticism their presence triggered, lead scientist Wernher von Braun often publicly joked that the V-2 team were “prisoners of peace,” a characterization that suggested at once the scientists’ innocence and Americans’ ultimate authority over them. Less consciously, he evoked the central role Texas had played during the war in imprisoning truly peaceful prisoners, including American citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. Until 1947, the Crystal City family internment camp, located six hundred miles east of El Paso, housed 4,058 Germans and 2,264 Japanese deemed “enemy aliens.” The great majority of these people were innocent of any charges.51 If anything, von Braun’s labeling of the group drew attention to just how different the situation was between the Paperclip community and many of the wartime prisoners the United States had seized. They came to the United States willingly rather than forcibly; they were promised safety, security, and possible citizenship in return for their professional skill; and, once stateside, Upton suggested, they were treated with a surprising amount of freedom. In this context, the Paperclip families’ mobility became an important focus of concern for both military and intelligence personnel. While it is true that military leaders mistrusted the scientists even as they recruited them, the degree to which the scientists appeared to experience freedom without consequence constituted another problem. James Hamill understood that public perception was important to the future of the V-2 team, even as he lifted many of the initial restrictions upon the scientists (including, for example, the first-year guideline that they could not leave the base more once a month). He and others emphasized the families’ physical and social isolation, assuring military and Central Intelligence Agency superiors that they were required to live on base, where “their associates consist almost entirely of other German scientists and their families” and “their social functions are confined almost entirely to their own group.” While many former Paperclip children fondly remember weekend excursions to New Mexico as one of the highlights of living in El Paso, Hamill and his colleagues stressed that they 56

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were required to stay within two hundred miles of Fort Bliss and that “their families [had to] stay at home and seldom leave the reservation.”52 Such accounts ignored basic truths, including that the children left base daily to attend school. If the families did not travel more than two hundred miles, they often came close, by the army’s own weekly surveillance records. To the families, these excursions to nearby forested mountain towns were an exercise in the familiar as much as in freedom. Surveillance records show that many families made frequent visits to such New Mexico vacation spots as Ruidoso, Cloudcroft, Las Cruces, and Hot Springs, where they took “recreational trips usually consisting of hiking, horse riding, drinking at the bars, or taking pictures.”53 All of this showed how family, often an argument for containing Mexican Americans, served as a vehicle of freedom for the scientists. When they first arrived at Fort Bliss, the men could only leave base in groups of five, escorted by a soldier. Soon after the families arrived, they were allowed to travel on their own and thereby integrate themselves not only into urban spaces but also into El Paso institutions. Increasingly, this integration was key to the public’s opinion of the Paperclip community. Army surveillance teams reported in the spring of 1947 that the scientists “have been welcomed into American society by a majority of the citizens of the El Paso area and are establishing themselves with the leading and prominent persona of that locality.”54 They were observed shopping, eating at restaurants, and attending PTA meetings and were found to “usually speak English and behave in a proper manner.”55 The El Paso Herald-Post praised the families for “go[ing] to church and mingl[ing] with outsiders as much as possible.”56 Their behavior was further supported by character testimonies collected by the military. Prominent El Paso business leaders and their wives, ministers, teachers, principals, and local college faculty went on record to attest to the scientists’ friendliness, honesty, and apparent loyalty to American principles. At every opportunity, the families seemed to use their freedom and mobility wisely, and this resulted in more of both. Even though they were transported to school on buses escorted by military police, the children experienced many of the same freedoms as other children. Complaints from army officers about them smearing cars with chalk and throwing sand under car hoods suggest that they were not intimidated by the unusual restrictions under which they lived.57 To many, the new landscape served as a site of adventure. Walter Tschinkel remembers needing an identification card to leave base but that not being an issue when the children “dug under the fences . . . [to] go out in the desert and build forts SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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and throw rocks at each other.”58 Klaus Rosinski and Uwe Hueter remember straying so far from base that they ended up at the home of a woman who, after hearing from where they had come, invited the boys in for cookies. Only later in life did Rosinski realize that she must have figured out that they were the children of German scientists, “the enemy,” and still “was as nice as she could be.”59 The shared hospital barracks in which they lived, as far as they were from the image of the nuclear-family home, offered a different kind of happy design for the children. Ursula Mrazek was just one of several children who delighted in roller skating down the barracks’ long hallways. Hertha Heller enjoyed climbing on the armaments parked near their barracks. Henry Tschinkel had a local newspaper route, and many of the children met on their collective lawns to read and trade American comic books. Helga Minning remembers that “we lived right across from the mess hall, so I’d go over there” whenever she liked. As she describes it, her life was part typical—with a pet turtle and a dog—and part child fantasy—“It was an old cavalry base, so we got to ride horses. I thought it was just paradise”—precisely because of their living quarters. For children who had spent much of their young lives in a nation at war, their unusual new living conditions offered freedom, diversion, and normalcy as they now remember it. In fact, the children lived a more entitled existence than some of the soldiers on base even as they lived in a “ghetto of German families,” according to Henry Tschinkel. Tschinkel’s troubling use of the term “ghetto,” inseparable in this context from the extermination of European Jews, is just one of the things that leads astray his attempts to capture the ways in which the families lived separately from American families on base. For many reasons, all of the children’s closest and most significant friendships came from within the group, partly because they lived a separate existence. School friends’ birthday parties, for example, were what Ursula Mrazek has called a “complicated undertaking” because they required leaving base.60 Even so, the children mingled with soldiers and, at times, the children of officers. One of the most common memories of the former children is the swimming pool. “We would make a daily trek to the large swimming pool where we’d mix with the American soldiers who also lived on the base,” Tschinkel’s younger sister Helga remembers. “They were very friendly to us, and I remember getting tossed from one to another through the air.”61 The soldiers she and others remember were invariably white; African American soldiers would not have been permitted to use the pool at the same time as white soldiers, just as they were prohibited from doing so on U.S. Army property in Berlin. All of the 58

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Figure 2.4: Paperclip child Walter Tschinkel’s U.S. War Department identification card. Courtesy of Walter Tschinkel.

children’s engagement with various spaces on post serve as a reminder that even though the Paperclip children’s freedom to move about differed from that of other children, the restrictions they faced were relative to those of Anglo Americans, not of Americans as a whole. Walter Tschinkel’s War Department identification card serves as an important illustration of the particular complications of conceptualizing, if not regulating, the movements of the Paperclip children. Tschinkel, like all of the Paperclip children, was a dependent both of his parents and of the U.S. military. The card, which identifies him as a War Department employee and indicates the boundaries of where he is freely able to travel, is identical to his father’s, because no one on Hamill’s team had developed a unique form of identification for the children. The War Department identification cards more than erased the children’s illegality in the short term; they provided them with protection. As Hertha Heller recalls, “We just basically had paperwork that said if a policeman stopped us, we just showed them our paperwork, and they weren’t supposed to do anything with us.”62 Heller’s recollection is a reminder that the ability of the Paperclip children to move freely was more than just a function of their race and class privilege: it was an orchestration of the federal government and an example of how state power unequally protected some children over others. This orchestration anticipated others, including the children’s placement into Anglo schools. In contrast to Dorothy Elder and other military children who were assigned, however temporarily, to South Side schools, all three of the elementary schools in which the Paperclip children were placed— Crockett, Coldwell, and Rusk—were in the zone for Austin High School, the city’s newest and most “ethnic oriented” high school. In those classes, especially through the humanities curriculum, they learned lessons about SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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civics and language that supported their sense of freedom and opportunity. Altogether, the former children remember their earliest, formative time in the United States as marked by tolerance and acceptance. Some of them have noted the difference between how they may have experienced this time and alternate possibilities. Bernd Seiler, for example, thinks back to his arrival in El Paso and contemplates, “Now here come all these foreigners, and not only are they foreigners but they were the enemy, and they probably caused grief either to the immediate family or to friends at the very least. And yet . . . at no time can I recall any kind of animosity. Nobody ever had a bad word.”63 Helga Minning has expressed a similar idea in other terms: “When I got older and got to thinking about it again, I thought, these Americans are real fantastic people. I doubt if the Germans would have been that kind if a whole bunch of Americans had suddenly invaded their town.”64 Granted, the former children, who now understand how they may have been seen as foreigners, enemies, and invaders, do so from the comfortable position as longtime American citizens who possess none of these associations. The reception they and other Paperclip children remember testifies not just to the quality of personal interactions they had with individuals but the ways in which their lives were structured by American actors, from military officials to educators, to experience that sense of welcome. These recollections undoubtedly differ from those of other children growing up in El Paso who did not experience the same sense of welcome or freedom across city borders—certainly African American children, but many Mexican American children, as well. Hertha Heller recalls “looking behind the water cooler and very loudly asking my mother why we had two water coolers if water came out of the same pipes.” This recollection, as much as a retelling of an event, also reflects her understanding of how Anglo American race stories work: to express incredulity at the very policies and prejudices upon which Anglo identity has been made. That is to say, the story marks a simultaneous acceptance and denial of participation in the restraints upon which white supremacy depends and that were at the root of El Paso urban and civic organization in the early Cold War. More poignantly, Heller realized that her family and others “were included in what I would call the more educated part of the community, and so there’s a lot you don’t see and you don’t experience.” In El Paso, “educated” equated with Anglo; with the freedom of whiteness, Heller suggests, also comes a different kind of limitation, a limitation of awareness more than of geography or mobility. One of the most important absences Heller experienced as part of Anglo El Paso was any significant relationship with the Mexican Americans who constituted the 60

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city’s majority. She and the other Paperclip children saw little of them in a sustained and meaningful way and, like the city’s other Anglo children, garnered little understanding of their experience as marginalized citizens. Any understanding of Americans as tolerant or “fantastic” depended first on this marginalization’s remaining invisible to them. The Paperclip children lacked such understanding in part because of decisions that Anglo Americans—in the government, the military, and the schools—made about who Germans were and where they belonged. Most important, these Anglos decided that the Germans did belong, and in this sense of kinship they expressed a desire for postwar racialized spaces to remain just as they were.

Alien Settlers Geographic and constructed space has not only impacted the formation of racialized identities—it has also played an important role in social and legal constructions of citizenship. Jim Crow, the “repatriation” of American citizens to Mexico, and the wartime internment of Japanese Americans offer examples of how Anglonormative citizenship rights were redefined for other citizens and expressed through restricting their access to particular spaces. The same racialized ideas that informed these policies filtered down into constructs of social citizenship. Social-citizenship skills—the enactment of American or democratic beliefs—were taught most foundationally to young people in the school and in the home. Students’ treatment in school—what they learned and the conditions under which they learned it—reflected how fully particular children were valued as legal citizens. Yet the Paperclip children show how this phenomenon could work in reverse: the assistance they were offered in integrating into El Paso society in many ways became an argument for their families’ legal citizenship in 1955. In the case of citizenship, one mobility begat another: because the Paperclip members performed like good citizens and were accepted by others to be good people, they were allowed to become legal citizens under conditions and agreements unique to them. If Mexican Americans were treated like eternal aliens, the Paperclip Germans experienced a matrix of opportunities set on highlighting their familiarity. This dynamic had a history that predated the Paperclip families. The scientists were not the first Third Reich defenders who would spend time in El Paso. German and Italian soldiers captured in African military campaigns were brought to the United States during the war to compensate for a shortage of Mexican workers. In the fall of 1943 Italian prisoners of war SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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were leased out daily to local farmers to work in the cotton fields of El Paso County. Though they harvested over $300,000 worth of El Paso cotton in the 1943–1944 season, the POWs were no match for the Mexican workers they replaced. “Whereas experienced cotton pickers would harvest 800 pounds a day,” the New York Times reported, “the prisoners picked only thirty to forty pounds.”65 Submitting to well-worn stereotypes of Italians as physically feeble and unmanageable, El Paso farmers demanded in 1944 that they be traded out for Germans.66 While the Germans still may not have approached the levels of cotton harvesting that Mexicans did, farmers liked them better. Physically fit and self-disciplined, they were “the best bunch of boys you ever saw,” according to one Texas farmer.67 The farmers’ expectations were rooted in their beliefs about German supremacy, which in many ways echoed the rhetoric of American political officials. Postwar government publications, speeches, and public opinion surveys often described Germans as industrious, efficient, ingenious, and clean.68 Such descriptions were both articulations of genuine belief and, for some, a purposeful postwar effort to assimilate the Germans, to make them resemble how Americans thought of themselves. Just as Texas farmers echoed these rehabilitative images, so too did Americans extend similarly positive perceptions of Germans at Fort Bliss. There army dentist John Reese found that the German POWs “were very friendly and nice, nicer than the Italians, really.” Working with Nazi soldiers normalized them for people like Reese, even if they did not get to know them well. “It wasn’t mentioned much about what they’d done over there,” he concluded, but “they didn’t act like they wanted to kill anybody.”69 The media expressed the same thought in different terms. Noting that the scientists were “middle-aged or beyond on the average,” a report determined that they “look more like small-town business men than the workers who made the magic for Hitler’s Wehrmacht.”70 In a departure from public opinion polls that doubted the democratic leanings of Germans in Germany, Reese and El Paso farmers illustrate how willing Americans were to forgive and even identify with the German enemies whom they encountered on their own turf. Once surrounded by Americans, the Germans looked familiar. El Paso farmers’ need to learn these lessons was driven by a wartime labor shortage that they had created. Braceros, men contracted by the Mexican government beginning in 1942 to work for southwestern farmers, labored long hours under dangerous conditions, were housed in unsanitary accommodations, and were often underpaid and underfed by dubious Anglo employers. In an especially harrowing connection between histories, Nazi 62

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scientists had learned about Zyklon B—which they later used as a murder weapon in concentration-camp gas chambers —by studying El Paso farmers’ employment of it as an aerosol to disinfect Mexican agricultural workers.71 Because of the chronic mistreatment of Mexican workers and because segregation and discrimination toward Mexican Americans was particularly pervasive and well documented statewide, by 1943 Mexico halted the Bracero Program in Texas. El Paso had been central to bracero exploitation: local border patrol officials undermined braceros entering the United States by “arresting” undocumented (and therefore cheaper) workers at bridge crossings and delivering them to area farmers. These practices had emboldened the border patrol and complicated U.S.-Mexican relations, resulting in a fouryear stoppage of the Bracero Program.72 But even as El Paso farmers continued to employ Mexican workers who crossed the border illegally, they also became dependent on the German labor supplied by the U.S. military. One might think that the POWs’ inefficiency relative to that of mistreated braceros might have challenged the farmers’ views of the Mexicans who worked for them. Instead, farmers continued to exploit unauthorized Mexican workers all while growing to respect the German prisoners. As with urban El Paso, the history of the POWs and of Mexican farm laborers shows the impact that Anglo business interests—and the racialized values Anglos assigned to Germans and Mexicans—held both for policy making and the management of seemingly distinct institutions, including the military. Like the Paperclip scientists, the Germans POWs were exploitable only because of specific, time-bound political circumstances. By contrast, the long-standing exploitation and “imported colonialism” of Mexican workers, in Mae Ngai’s terms, was built on a narrative of racial inferiority that remained static. Ngai has persuasively argued that the mid-century development of a Mexican workforce in the southwest was “the central element in the broader process of Mexican American racial formation” because it had the effect of associating all Mexicans, including the American-born Mexican Americans who constituted the majority of the El Paso population, as foreign. “‘Foreignness’ was a racialized concept that adhered to all Mexicans,” she contends, and “casting Mexicans as foreign distanced them from Euro-Americans culturally and from the Southwest as a spatial referent.”73 In El Paso, Anglos labeled Mexicans as inferior and distinct, regarding urban space as a resource they possessed the right to parcel, distribute, and control rather than a common good that belonged equally to all of the city’s residents. Americans’ perceived assimilation of Germans, and their willingness to SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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see both the scientists and the POWs as the “best bunch” of workers, is all the more significant in light of the persistent foreignness ascribed to Mexicans. These racial dynamics and the importance of agriculture in shaping them coincided when several of the Paperclip scientists began farming during their time at Fort Bliss. Johann Tschinkel was one such person: in 1949 he rented two acres of land ten miles from base to grow produce that he would sell to nearby vendors and to the Paperclip community. The operation was simultaneously a means to earn extra income and a product of his existing wealth. Annually, the scientists earned up to $5,310 at Fort Bliss, nearly double the El Paso median family income of $2,663.74 It also became a means by which Henry, Tschinkel’s eldest son and frequent assistant, would meet and even work with Mexicans. “I had a lot of contact with Mexican adults because my father . . . was hiring the braceros, the Mexican laborers. At that time, it wasn’t a big deal,” Henry recalls.75 His conclusion from the experience echoed his father’s own: four decades later Johann would remember that he “had to admire the Mexican laborers who would hoe for hours without a pause. How wrong it was to picture the Mexicans as lazy.”76 Tschinkel is unclear as to whether he himself had held that view of Mexicans, though it was certainly consistent with American stereotypes he would have encountered daily in the four years he lived in El Paso before he began the farm. At the same time, his ability to invest in land, even as his family was required to live on U.S. military property, offers an important window into his effort at making some territory his own. Even as a renter, Tschinkel began to practice an American idea: he became a landed employer and entrepreneur who started a business built with the help of other foreigners. Ernst Steinhoff ’s farm makes the point even more powerfully. Steinhoff, who, when the other families relocated to Huntsville, remained in Alamogordo, New Mexico, with his wife and six children to direct the missile center at White Sands, bought 180 acres of land in 1950. As he described it to a friend in Germany: “I  .  .  . cultivated [the farm] in my spare time; I received governmental support for this effort . . . by the fall of 1956 I owned 43 dairy cows and calves. I accomplished all of this in my spare time, after working 40 hours a week.” Belatedly, he mentioned that he depended on “the help of 1–2 migrant Mexican laborers who came to the US for 18 months each.”77 Almost an afterthought in Steinhoff ’s account, the braceros he hired undoubtedly accomplished much of the work of the farm. As he emphasizes through his own repetition, his contribution was limited to his spare time, leaving a sizable amount of work for one or two people with no permanent stake in or profit from the work. Steinhoff ’s farm also reveals how the fed64

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eral government played a critical role, once again, in his ability to work and profit in the United States. His tale of upward mobility, all as a supplement to his appointment as director of an American military program, illustrates the ways in which one privilege begat another. While the men who enabled him to profit were required to return to Mexico after eighteen months scarcely wealthier than when they came, Steinhoff put down roots in the southwest and had the land and livestock to show for it. He had become a settler of sorts, the paradigmatic Anglo American man. Ironically, he arrived at this position, like every member of the Paperclip community, out of circumstances that contrasted sharply with those of other undocumented immigrants. All of the Paperclip Germans, as Hertha Heller has described it, were “a version of illegal aliens that the Army brought in for years.”78 Taken to the United States with no documentation other than the identification papers created for them by the War Department, the families eventually required more economic and political security if the Americans wanted them to stay. By 1947 the State Department believed this too and, in the words of one official, argued that “‘we would be fools to let them go home. They know too much.’”79 An arrangement between the military and the American consulate in Juárez allowed the families to cross the border into Mexico, appear at the American consulate, and apply for immigration visas. They were to do so “dressed in civilian clothes, accompanied by an officer of the Armed Forces of our country also in civilian clothes and in a private automobile” so that they would look just like “thousands of tourists daily at this port”—as if no alliance existed between the military and diplomatic arms of the federal government.80 Many of the former children, like Axel Roth, remember this experience and returning to the United States on an El Paso city bus. “The official records now show that I legally entered the United States in July 1950, from Juarez, Mexico even though I had lived in the States since December 1946,” Roth recorded in his memoir. It was only after his trip to Juárez, after years of attending El Paso schools and feeling allegiance with his American classmates, that he realized he had been in the United States illegally all along.81 The terms upon which the Paperclip families entered the United States— not just the military accordance but the way in which their immigration record was first erased and then dishonestly reconstructed—serves as an astounding example of how social privilege can shape mobilities of different kinds, including geographical and political. So, too, does the operation of farms by Paperclip scientists, particularly in the context of El Paso’s agricultural history, serve as a powerful allegory of race and class privilege in the SOMETHING NEW IN THE TERRITORY

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trajectory the scientists took from coerced servants of the U.S. military to Americanized capitalists and owners of small agribusinesses in the course of five years. As the Paperclip families traveled through and increasingly invested in American property, they garnered economic opportunities and, just as important, the increased trust of Americans, including El Pasoans. Their transformation from aliens to settlers completed a new version of a longstanding western narrative of who white Americans are. The lived civics lessons that shaped the Paperclip children’s lives in the United States—that is, the lessons they learned about citizenship, social participation, and national belonging through their everyday experiences—complemented and reinforced the lessons they learned in the classroom. El Paso schools completed the narrative that the city’s civic culture had begun.

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3 : AT H OM E O N TH E RA NG E CIVICS AN D CIVI LIZATION

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ne winter afternoon in 1946, El Paso elementary school principal Alicia Swann received an unusual phone call. Lois Godfrey, the American military liaison for the Paperclip children, was calling to ask if Crockett Elementary might accept some of the ninety school-aged children who would arrive in El Paso that spring. The scientists’ wives and children were already beginning to arrive, and Swann was faced with a difficult decision: could she “consent to let German children—enemy children—come through the door?” The previous year she had raised the funds for a large stained-glass window at the school’s entrance to commemorate Crockett’s war dead. Principal since 1923, just three years after the school was founded, Swann might have known them all. Still, after some consideration, she decided that Crockett could accept the German children. Within months, she found her instincts had been right. By her measure, the Paperclip children fit in easily, learned English quickly, and possessed “no class barriers” from the school’s other students. When asked how she reconciled the fact that the children’s fathers had worked for Hitler, Swann responded, “I cannot concern myself with whatever [the parents] are or have been. It is with the children that I rest my hopes. . . . In spirit and in thinking they are American, for they have a happiness here they have never known before.” Crockett’s embrace of the Paperclip children, she argued, was simply American. To exemplify the students’ easy assimilation, Swann pointed to the example of Peter Lange. In class, another student had referred to him as “our German boy.” Lange corrected him, explaining that he was no longer German but just another “Davy Crockett.” To Swann, Lange’s story proved that the Paperclip students were like any American children in their values and their imaginations.1 Still, the transformation was not predestined. Lange’s choice to figure himself in the mold of the frontiersman, Texan migrant, and Alamo martyr for whom his school was named underscores the purposeful role that schools played in upholding western heroes as models of patriotism and civilization. Swann’s story points to what this chapter traces: the ways in which 67

romanticized narratives of the western frontier—in and outside of the civics classroom—served to socialize the Paperclip children in American Cold War values and align them with Anglo America. All El Paso elementary students were exposed to civics lessons that focused on white people, both in the heroes they put forth and in the students they were designed to privilege. But examining the importance of frontier myths in assimilating the Paperclip children more particularly reminds us that such narratives can be geographically specific and transnationally relevant at once. In this case, western myths spoke to deep structural analogs in German and American histories, even as individual events and the space of time over which they took place differed.2 Reflecting upon his social studies education, Henry Tschinkel concluded that the history he studied in wartime Germany was, in its cultural and nationalist goals, much like “what Crockett taught me about Texas history. . . . The Alamo, David Crockett the good hero, Santa Anna the bad Mexican guy, the heroic separation of Texas from Mexico.”3 Tschinkel and other Paperclip children experienced these stories as both individual history lessons and a broader means of teaching citizenship shared by two nations that, at different times, aggressively sought to create a new geopolitical order. Yet the use of Mexico as a trope in social studies instruction (not unlike the role of the Indian, to promote the heroism of Anglos like Crockett) reflects borderland educators’ specific, often regionally inflected choices in teaching narratives of nation formation. Secondarily, then, this chapter compels us to consider how teachers and schools participated in creating, not just disseminating, nationalist ideology in ways for which they are rarely credited. This was especially the case when it came to the cultural and socializing work embedded in lessons about two more wide-ranging groups: cowboys and Indians, figures Michael Yellow Bird has deemed “the consummate example of American colonialism.”4 Germany attempted to become a settler nation during World War II, but the United States actually is one: a country defined by the attempted elimination of a people through genocide, dislocation, and nationalist narratives that sought to erase them. This history inspired Hitler, in fact, which might have caused mid-century Americans to contend more honestly with the past.5 Instead, Indians, as imagined by white educators, gained greater visibility in the Cold War civics curriculum, just to be erased again. A central purpose of teaching about cowboys in schools like Crockett was to show how Anglo men had come to assume the knowledge and practices of the same Indians whom white Americans simultaneously romanticized, continued to dispossess, and portrayed as nonexistent. Cowboys served as a paradigm of the Cold War values of self-governance, 68

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tenacity, and collective responsibility, traits shared with the Indians they now replaced. Rather than actors in a colonialist origin story or appropriators of Indigenousness, cowboys offered historical and political therapy to white America—and the Paperclip community—through their popular casting as emblems of authenticity and cultural continuity. Unsurprisingly, then, examining the children’s assimilation experiences reveals powerful fault lines in domestic political culture and in populist thinking about race, history, and national identity. Schools were uniquely important in creating some of these fault lines because they were where ideas about citizenship and democracy—particularly for immigrant children born into fascism—were taught. The gap between American democratic thought and the nation’s treatment of many of its citizens was important beyond the pressure Soviet propaganda introduced; it endangered the cooperation of Asian, African, and Latin American nations in a battle against Soviet totalitarianism.6 The immediate postwar recruitment of the Nazi scientists—at the same time 72 percent of Americans disapproved of proposals to take in a greater number of Jewish war refugees—illuminates one failure in American liberalism that begat this pressure.7 That the Paperclip children attended school almost entirely with other white children was another. In response, federal agencies disseminated pamphlets featuring images and anecdotes of race progress to instruct international audiences in the differences between democracy and communism and the ways in which Americans lived by their ideals.8 But, as the experiences of the Paperclip children underscore, these lessons were just as needed at home, where schools failed in basic ways to model them. Lessons in cowboy culture, while reasserting the value of Anglo leadership and power, taught American children that the nation’s transgressions lay in the past, that democracy was vigorous and virile, and that survivors of American genocide lived on—if not through contemporary Indigenous people, who went unrepresented in the school curriculum and public culture—in their service as the forebears of white Cold War heroes. The welcoming of enemy children might have complicated this message of American democracy once again, had not the scientists made such consistent arguments between anticommunism and Western civilization. According to the former Paperclip children, even they arrived sharing the antiSoviet sentiment that undergirded much of cowboy culture. Walter Tschinkel remembered “talk about the Russians” by his grandmother and family friends during and after the war. The combustion engine factory in which Bernd Seiler’s family made their fortune was overtaken by Soviet soldiers, dismantled, and shipped away. Based on a tip from a Nazi general, Helga AT HOME ON THE RANGE

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Figure 3.1: Ernst Seiler with sons Klaus and Bernd in front of their barracks on the boys’ first full day in El Paso, 1948. The boys’ costumes were a gift from their father. Courtesy of Bernd Seiler.

Minning’s father sneaked his family out of their hometown of Stettin in a commandeered military truck in April 1945; the next morning, she recalled, “the Russians invaded the town . . . and slaughtered people left and right.” Even during the war, Ursula Mrazek knew that “Americans were good. Russians were bad.”9 Such stories would have resonated with Americans, even if they had not experienced similar events personally, by the time the Paperclip children were integrated into El Paso schools. Superintendent A. H. Hughey often warned local teachers to be alert to “Russian propaganda and tactics” and the threat of communism.10 Despite the hostility Americans expressed toward the German character during the war, public opinion showed that they still identified with their German enemy more than with their Russian ally; they were willing to ascribe a greater gap between Hitler’s beliefs and those of ordinary Germans than they were willing to do for either the Russians or the Japanese.11 In this context, the public perception of Operation Paperclip as a pathway to global democracy rather than an endorsement of genocide and colonialism always depended on an exhibition of the scientists’ Americanness at heart. As the photo of Bernd Seiler with his father and brother (fig. 3.1) indicates, the German children and their parents were often eager to embrace the assignment.12 From the beginning many Americans, like Swann, were quickly convinced. Echoing the recollections of a number of other Paperclip children, Helga Minning remembers of her treatment by Americans on arrival, “You never had the feeling they thought we were the enemy.”13 Simply put, they hardly were. The Paperclip children’s teachings of and takeaways from cowboy culture reveals that culturally and politically, Anglo Americans

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and Germans were more kin than not. In new ways, the teaching of frontier mythology revealed anew the white-supremacist roots that made the German children into ideal students and Mexican students into invisible ones.

Cowboys at Home and Abroad The denazification of German schools was important not only for what it revealed about German schooling, but for what it revealed about German children. The American officials assigned to determine how to reform German schools reported that the nation’s children, having known only a “consuming and fanatic creed,” had been left “bewildered, confused, and sometimes cynically incapable of new loyalties” from the “spiritual consequences of total defeat.”14 The concern was brought into American homes with Gregor Ziemer’s 1941 best-selling book Education for Death (later made into a Disney animated short), which painted a chilling portrait of the militarization and fanaticism of German schools and youth. American military officials tasked with vetting scientists for Operation Paperclip argued that the political sympathies of the scientists’ children were important to evaluate along with those of their fathers, since “some German youths were among the most rabid Nazis.”15 As it happens, even the few Paperclip children and wives with ties to Hitler Youth were allowed entry into the program. Still, the concern about “rabid” German children in the postwar years challenged American occupiers to address an ideological void with democratic “culture” or “values,” concepts that seemingly allowed for greater self-expression. The “cowboy craze,” as many journalists and other social commentators from the 1940s called it, offered a kind of parallel work at home, ideology disguised as entertainment and popular history. While myths of western settlement had long played a role in American literature and film, the cowboy came to take on new life in both popular culture and a growing childoriented marketplace in the early years of the Cold War. Between 1947 and 1950 the number of companies manufacturing toy guns rose from 15 to 250. Western wear for children had become a $150 million industry.16 Children’s desires to emulate Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Dale Evans were seized on in the classroom as well, especially in civics instruction. Carl Sonnichsen, an El Paso–based historian, urged local teachers to look beyond the stories of Texas heroes like Crockett and instead stress stories about cowboys. In contrast to violent frontier narratives, cowboy stories offered seemingly uncomplicated lessons in self-reliance, industry, and citizenship. Students should

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“read books about cowboys and range life to counteract . . . lurid Wild West stories,” Sonnichsen contended. “There was a lot more to the old West than cattle rustling and lying in wait to shoot one’s neighbors.”17 Educators shared this opinion, and after the war they taught a broader array of western materials and created new western-themed pageants and festivals. At Coldwell Elementary, another school attended by Paperclip children, students held chuck-wagon lunches in a teacher’s backyard, dressed in cowboy clothing, and sang cowboy songs.18 El Paso schools held annual contests in which students competed to dress in both authentic and “drugstore” cowboy and cowgirl gear. The fascination with cowboys went beyond curricular content; it was also policy. Each spring El Paso schools assigned a half day when the rodeo was in town; teachers especially were encouraged to attend.19 These local performances were part of a larger connection between scholastics and narratives of western settlement that found purchase in the midst of the Cold War. Across the southwest ranch boarding schools opened to educate elite Anglo children in academics and the value of hard work, a virtue whose development, parents feared, was compromised by their children’s easy access to wealth.20 Such parents hoped that by playing cowboy, their children could learn how to be productive and industrious people. The Paperclip children arrived in the United States just as cowboy culture was approaching its zenith. Lessons in this culture had been exported to the Paperclip children even before they set foot on American soil. Axel Roth remembered watching American westerns in Landshut as a great pleasure. “Based on these,” he recalled, “I was really looking forward to going to Texas. I thought the cowboys and Indians were great.” On arrival in El Paso, he was disappointed to find neither, but he continued to search for them. “After all, this was Texas. I did see some guys that were wearing cowboy hats, but they were not wearing guns. I didn’t see any horses either. What a disappointment!”21 Paperclip adults shared Roth’s sentiments. Bernd Seiler remembers his parents and others being “mildly disappointed that cowboys and/or Indians were not more prevalent on the streets of El Paso,” because “the adults readily embraced a somewhat idealized concept of Western culture.” This idealization was facilitated by the westerns shown at Fort Bliss theaters as well as in Landshut.22 In the winter and spring of 1946 and 1947, when the great majority of the Paperclip scientists and families arrived, the Fort Bliss theater played weekly westerns of different types, including Wild Bill Hickok’s Ride, Fool’s Gold, California, The Sea of Grass, and Apache Rose.23 The weekly showings, like the equally frequent selection of war films, were

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curated first for their American audience but were just as appealing to many of the Paperclip families. These westerns built on a longtime German fascination with cowboys and Indians with which the Paperclip adults, and some children, were already familiar. In the course of the nineteenth century, well before the rise of fascism, Germans had developed a deep attraction for and aesthetics around stories of encounters between Indians and whites. Beginning in 1890 and for decades to follow, versions of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show toured Germany. In contrast to other European audiences, Germans often idealized Indians even more than Bill Cody, imbuing (as had Americans) the type of the noble savage with a host of other characteristics that they viewed as especially Germanic, including Christianity, reliability, loyalty and honesty.24 By the outbreak of World War II, Germans had developed a culture of games, Indian performances, and hobbyism that allowed a fiction of their own making to inform their reading of history. Like Anglo Americans, Germans romanticized Indians even as they subscribed to the militaristic and genocidal lessons grounded in western myths. Nazis, more specifically, saw a lesson in Indians because they viewed themselves as disenfranchised and threated by “foreign” Jewish occupiers. While their paradoxical understanding of themselves as “noble savages” battling outside invaders and, simultaneously, “noble colonizers” building a better empire marked a significant divergence from Anglo American thought, it relied nevertheless on a shared nostalgic investment in narratives of Indian erasure and white resilience.25 Evidence of this investment can be found in Germans’ reverence of Karl May, whose novels sold tens of millions of copies in the nation by the beginning of World War II. May, who first read James Fenimore Cooper while he was a young man in prison for theft, only visited the United States for the first time in 1908, four years before his death. Much of his writing was a Germanicized cultural translation of Cooper’s work, including his two recurring central characters, Old Shatterhand, the narrator and German surveyor, and an Apache chief named Winnetou. May’s writing was seized upon by the Third Reich and given a new ideological lens. Hitler himself was a devotee of May’s work and recommended that his staff read it. The NS-Lehrerverband (Nazi Teachers Association) promoted the use of May’s Indian stories to teach ideas about leadership, military fitness, and race theory or Indigenousness.26 Teachers initially lacked sufficient textbooks to teach a new Nazi curriculum that included a course in Grenzlandkunde (frontier studies), a subject that combined geography and biology, and German literature courses that

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focused on themes of community as a product of “fate and struggle.”27 But they located in May’s stories of white expansion an analog with Lebensraum (“living space”), an idea that, although it predated the Third Reich, was central to Hitler’s plans for the German conquest of the European continent. Even as Germans fetishized Indians, they recognized in May’s stories moralistic tales of Aryan domination that reinforced Germany’s own political quests and inextricably linked concepts of whiteness to the vanquishing of another people.28 Just as both strands of western myth—Indian romanticism and white supremacy—gained traction in a quickly industrializing and economically volatile interwar Germany, so was the myth reconfigured in the United States to suit Cold War needs. Children were integral to this reworking. The increased visibility of cowboys and Indians in 1940s and ’50s American juvenile and popular culture constituted one response to what historians and political scientists have called a growing “culture of fear.”29 Concerns about national security in the atomic age influenced large swaths of cultural and private life, from architecture to neighborhood planning to children’s literature and play. A wealth of children’s books were published in the 1940s and 1950s about cowboys, from juvenile biographies to small encyclopedias to fiction. The cowboy made for an ideal postwar hero, not a soldier but adept with a gun all the same. The cowboy was “at home on the range,” to quote the title of a unit El Paso social studies teachers designed. He emblematized Manifest Destiny absented of violence and promoted group identification without compromising his independence. He settled and controlled without the burdens of imperialism. All these messages were important to children in the United States, whose place in the global economy changed with the Cold War. In a more internationalist if more evenly divided world order, the United States sought to play the cowboy, benevolently reining in foreign governments in the struggle against communism. That this new world order was set in motion by the defeat of a nation that venerated cowboys and Indians with as much fervor as did Americans anticipated the quick, successful “civilization” of the Paperclip children, in school and out.

From Indian to Cowboy In 1941 El Paso was one of fourteen school districts invited by the National Council of Social Studies (NCSS) to publish a unit of their design in the collection Programs and Units for the Social Studies. The collection appeared just as conservative attacks on Harold Rugg’s social studies books were reaching a 74

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pitch. Rugg’s Man and His Changing Society series, which had sold 1.3 million copies in the 1930s, were now charged with being subversive, un-American, and communist in their critique of capitalism and attention to social inequality.30 In an effort to set a new direction in social studies instruction, the NCSS book amassed a series of lessons containing “a more thoughtful and varied approach” to teaching students about national character, social living, and patriotism for a markedly different time and context.31 Josephine Stueber, writing on behalf of the El Paso public schools, shared a third-grade curriculum that exemplified people’s adaptation to their physical environment and “the interdependence of people [and] a knowledge of how men cooperate,” two themes required of all elementary social studies teaching in Texas.32 This publication would open the door for other El Paso teachers who would develop and publish their work in social studies. Their attention to western life as a way of teaching citizenship values culminated in 1950 in a series for local educators, A Guide for Teachers. In it the teacher writers would lay out in full their designs and thinking for a collection of units they had been teaching for several years, including “At Home on the Range” and “The First Americans (Indians of the Southwest).” These units exemplify that the significance of the cowboy in the curriculum, as in popular culture, was bound to his mirror image, the Indian. Nationally, Indians were one of the most commonly studied foci of third-grade social studies units throughout the 1940s.33 This was partly due to the popularity of an “expanding communities” approach in the field, in which early elementary children prepared for upper-level geography and history classes by first studying their own communities, past and present. To “make each individual a stockholder in American democracy,” as the El Paso Herald-Post explained it, students needed first to understand and contribute to the places where they lived.34 Charged with the primacy of localism, El Paso social studies teachers compiled materials on the southwest that, much like the local histories Jean O’Brien has studied, provided “particular valence to the twinned story of non-Indian modernity and Indian extinction” and the Anglo “replacement narratives” that followed.35 Broadly speaking, the ubiquity of Indian stories in the elementary classroom was to serve as an important illustration of the “beginnings of institutional life,” of inter- and intratribal cooperation, and of “corporate responsibility.” Just as when “a member of a tribe had been guilty of some crime it was thought the gods were sure to be angry with the entire tribe,” explained a textbook that informed the El Paso teachers’ work, “group responsibility still persists.”36 But even as Indians, generically, served as involuntary functionaries in this larger narrative tooled AT HOME ON THE RANGE

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to transmit Cold War social values, the focus on southwestern Indians made them an especially powerful precursor to the cowboys who resided in the region, as well. These curricular novelties were based on larger changes in American academics. For one, the field of anthropology underwent seismic changes in the early Cold War, shifting from a favoring of a neutral, scientific stance that with World War II came to be seen as ethically and politically irresponsible, and toward developing new ideas about how to assess national character. Margaret Mead was one of several anthropologists who posited theories about how to understand and redirect an aggressiveness that seemed endemic to German history and culture and what might be learned from this deeper understanding.37 Similarly, her colleague Ruth Benedict explained, anthropology identified “what makes for well-being and a sense of freedom in tribes like the Blackfoot and for the conviction of doom in tribes like the Chukchee.”38 That is to say, anthropology, like history—both of which informed the discipline of social studies—became reoriented toward studying culture as a pathway into resolving or acting upon current crises rather than simply something to catalogue. Teachers often lacked the training to embrace these new strands in thinking about culture, even as they attempted to extract lessons and morals from Indigenous cultures. Their attention to Indian objects reinforced ideas about Indigenous people as premodern at the same time they favored pedagogical theories that taught about race and culture through demonstrations and performances.39 Recommended exercises in “First Americans” included numerous craft projects (making baskets, clay pots, and tomahawks; fashioning Indian jewelry; dressing dolls in traditional tribal clothing), watching films about Navajo and Pueblo life, and listening to Indigenous music. Such activities made students into object hobbyists, a popular Cold War expression of racial fetishizing in which Anglos viewed Indians as “reflections of a primitive stage of cultural existence” and themselves as preservationists of an authentic if archaic culture.40 Teachers’ reliance on the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railroad for source materials—both of which promoted the collecting of “primitive” southwestern Indian art—provided further means for the treatment of Indians as archaeological specimens.41 The unit’s greater focus on the Pueblo and Hopi peoples was also significant, for, while they were rooted geographically in the region, they also were viewed by many Anglo Americans as “civilized” artisans and agriculturalists who once lived in homes not unlike those of El Pasoans. As such, they provided a more ideal lesson than did the equally Indigenous Apaches, in terms of the domestic 76

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values they were made to represent and the mimetic pedagogical activities they inspired.42 For educators who were beginning to face more pressure to address civil rights and make race a part of the postwar curriculum, Indians presented an ideal choice precisely because of a persistent cultural narrative that relegated them—and their problems—to the past. Both the fiction and the nonfiction that teachers frequently adopted for the classroom avoided reference to reservations; instead, southwestern Indians were shown to live in pueblos and hogans with unidentified communal boundaries, free from but not necessarily predating white contact. Consistent attention in the literature to the rain dance, the drum circle, rabbit hunting, and sheep herding was intended to depict the traditions that defined southwestern Indian culture and, as the anthropologist Frank Speck explained it, to bring young readers “nearer that vision of life, in a real, yet strangely fantastic land of thrilling adventure.”43 That sense of adventure heralded a lifestyle that, writers suggested, was based on unique, traditional cultural practices, a potentially authentic antidote to the homogeneity of the new company man produced by postwar prosperity.44 But it was a view that would remain untested and unknown. Although students visited nearby cotton farms and ranches, teachers made no plans for students to interact with tribes that lived outside the city’s limits, for meeting actual Indigenous people would have challenged many of the lessons about race and history that students were taught through them. In fact, the unit’s ahistoricism is central to what K. Tsianina Lomawaima has labeled the “Indian paradigm,” a structure that relegates Indians to “circular thinkers traumatized by a linear world.”45 School materials could present Anglicization as a pathway for survival. One of the books selected for the unit, Armstrong Sperry’s 1938 Little Eagle: A Navajo Boy, tells the story of a boy and his sister, White Shell Girl, who returns home from a distant government school. White Shell Girl identifies with the school, where she has replaced time spent sheep herding and weaving with classes in domestic science, in which “she had learned so much.” The school’s teachers “had been good to her,” she felt, even “car[ing] for her as tenderly as her own mother could have” when she fell ill.46 The school she attends carries all the hallmarks of federal boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian and save the man,” complete with hair shearing, illness, and an emphasis on vocationalism. But the school in Little Eagle is nevertheless presented as symbolic of schools’ (and other government institutions’) power to reform social ills and spare Indians from their Indianness. Unlike many other messages in the literature, schooling held explicit ties to the present. In 1941 fourteen thousand AT HOME ON THE RANGE

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Indigenous children still attended federal boarding schools, many of them in the southwest, though it is most unlikely that Crockett students would have been encouraged to make the connection.47 Nor would the Paperclip children have been encouraged to consider why public schools could “civilize” them but not Indigenous people. The difference, again, came down to images of the family. Little Eagle maintained that Indians, much like Mexicans, were incapable of “civilizing” their own children. Killed or saved, they were figures of the past. Implicit in these lessons about Indian extinction was the idea that “Indianness” could only be performed in modern life and, as Philip Deloria argues, constituted “a matter of behavior . . . [that] individual non-Indians could also learn.”48 Deloria traces how Anglo Americans worked diligently to perform Indianness in the Cold War, out of anxieties about race and culpability and out of concern that postwar middle-class Anglo culture seemed to lack any real sense of personality or identity of its own. The cowboy made a perfect icon for the age because he learned from the Indian directly and effortlessly. It was not a matter of playing Indian; the cowboy virtually was an Indian, but in the form of a living, breathing white man. Problems with the construct began with the fact that in film, books, and school curricular materials, cowboys were almost exclusively white. This inaccurately represented the history of the profession and the west as a place occupied solely by Anglos and Indians. In fact, El Paso would have been an especially easy place to debunk the myth of the Anglo cowboy. Mexican vaqueros did not simply work alongside Anglo cowboys; in the nineteenth century, they had taught Anglos much of their trade. Land parceling policies, outside investors, and changes in water and grazing rights in the late 1800s led to expansive corporate ranches in which the cowboy became a wage laborer. Eventually Mexican cowboys outnumbered Anglos two to one in West Texas because Anglo ranchers would pay them half as much.49 By the 1930s, journalist J. Frank Dobie explained, “from San Antonio northwest to El Paso  .  .  . the route lies almost wholly through arid grazing lands tended largely by Mexicans . . . doing the work that twenty-five years ago and less ‘white’ men were doing.” The ranching industry, like agriculture, depended on Mexicans and Mexican Americans who were willing to “work for less, expect less, and often do more—so the ranchmen who employ [them] say.”50 The actual history of cowboys, then, was a complicated tale of appropriation and exploitation that many borderlands residents might have understood well. For that reason, and because of the larger dismissal of non-Anglos in the 78

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curriculum, even in school districts in which, like El Paso’s, the majority of students were Mexican, civics lessons omitted the vaqueros. South Side elementary schools would participate in the same kinds of cowboy pageantry as would Anglo schools—the same costume contests and western-themed days—but the students were no more likely to learn about the Mexican cowboy past (or present) through textbook learning or class projects than were Anglo students. At the “Mexican” Roosevelt Elementary, students completed projects that were analogous in spirit to those at Anglo schools: they made replicas of the Alamo, copied a famous painting of Santa Anna surrendering to Sam Houston, and made statues of the Texas Navy out of soap.51 To the degree that Mexicans surfaced in the curriculum, they were treated as Indians, primitive relics of the past. An explicit example of this is found in materials that were created in 1950 to celebrate El Paso County’s centennial and distributed to teachers throughout the city. The writers largely reconstruct a history of Indian conquest and Anglo competition, arguing that “traces still linger of [El Paso’s] dramatic alien origin and colorful stages of growth” one hundred years after the county’s incorporation. Outside the city limits, it explained, “many quaint Mexican customs prevail in the smaller villages and settlements, and for gala affairs, lace mantillas frame lovely olive faces,” just as “on special feast days, remnants of the Indian tribes assemble before the valley churches and perform their ancient tribal dances with a savage, haunted, and haunting fervor.”52 In relegating Mexican Americans to antimodern, costumed foreigners who lived outside the city limits, the materials erased the actual Mexican Americans that made up the majority of the city’s population. Much like the “remnant” Indians, the document reveals, Mexicans found little purchase in the Anglo imagination other than as objects of  conquest. The erasure of Mexicans from western history and cowboy culture as it was taught in and outside of school was central to the lessons about race and nation for which the cowboy was so useful. There was no place for Mexicans in the curriculum because the central point of the lesson was to subordinate racial and ethnic differences to everything the Anglo cowboy stood for, including white supremacy and advantage. In this sense, the invisibilities of Mexicans in the curriculum paralleled their marginalization in school politics. The whiteness of cowboy culture had in fact intensified in interwar and postwar years. While the Wild West shows that traveled to Germany in the 1880s and 1890s would have included Mexicans and Native Americans, Laura Barraclough explains, the 1936 founding of the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association “promoted the idea that rodeo was an outgrowth of inforAT HOME ON THE RANGE

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mal contests among Anglo—and only Anglo—cowboys on the open Texas range.”53 Something similar can be seen in the relationship between cowboy culture and El Paso power brokers. Beginning in 1938, one of El Paso’s most important sources of revenue was a rodeo, staged within the city limits and cosponsored by the city police department and the Chamber of Commerce in order to fund police pensions. The rodeo united these two Anglo institutions with city business owners, including merchants, also largely Anglo, who decorated their windows and used the occasion to promote the sale of western wear.54 Altogether, the event was as much a function of urban Anglo networks as of the cattle industry itself. By the end of the war, the pageantry of cowboy culture, like the schools’ curriculum, was a statement about solidifying racial, political, and economic power as much as it was an idealization of the west. Even in this politicized and marginalizing context, teachers saw the “At Home on the Range” unit as a tool for students to develop “an appreciation of the democratic way of life,” “an understanding and appreciation for good social relationships,” and “the idea that cooperation is the basis for world security,” all intercultural inflected concepts that offered an extension of the principles students learned from the “First Americans.” But the learning looked different as students met with local ranchers, designed their own cattle brands, and, less explicably, “ma[d]e a movie on wrapping paper.”55 If students acted as anthropologists in “The First Americans,” now they were innovators. Cowboys, too, were presented as prototypically modern, at home in their world and the world at large, a point powerfully made by their contrast to Indian stories. In the assigned book I Want to Be a Cowboy, for example, the cowboy is depicted as indebted to the Indian and different from other Anglos. The cowboy knows that Indians “had suffered many injustices both in the early days and in the days after they had been placed on reservations. In the early days trappers had swindled the Indians without mercy. Many times Agents held back government money from them. The government itself had required them to live on reservations.” This history of dispossession, exploitation, and relocation—if ignoring the violence that enabled it—is something the cowboy knows is wrong and “resent[s] . . . for . . . in the early days on the range, the Cowboy had learned much about the art of scouting buffalo and taking other wild game from the Indian.” The cowboy himself acknowledged that his vocation “had long copied the ways of the Indian in preparing his camp on the open prairie” and “from the very beginning . . . had learned and observed and followed lessons and signs of nature taught to him by the Indians.” The book’s empathy, however, relies on and repurposes 80

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political distortions. Cynthia, a young visitor to the ranch, understands that reservations “cover acres and acres of land, and this land has been set aside for them by the Government. No white man can ever take it away from them anymore,” a conclusion that avoids the plunder that motivated Indian relocation in the first place and that the book allows—indeed, encourages—to go uncontested.56 Like Cynthia, young readers were to view reservations as expansive protective institutions, monuments to a “picturesque life” that held little purchase in contemporary culture other than as a legacy of conquest in which ranching played a significant part. Teachers’ objectives—that students learn to think and act democratically— depended on their ability to absent the cowboy from a colonialist history of white conquest and corporate greed. Instead, he was frequently depicted in the literature of “At Home on the Range” as a veritable replacement of the Indian in his lifestyle and relationship with the land. In one of the last scenes of Sanford Tousey’s Cowboys of America, the cowboy sits alone on a hill and “looks to the heavens, to the sun, or to the moon and stars, and knows that his God is there.”57 In what O’Brien terms a “seizure of indigeneity,” this book and others figure the cowboy as melding the naturalism of the Indian with Christian (and thereby modern) ways of knowing.58 In contrast to the company man who emblematized postwar economics, the cowboy harked back to a less autonomous time. The campfire ritual, in which one cowboy “may bring out a harmonica, and another, a guitar” but together they “roll up in blankets beside the fire and sleep the deep sleep of tired men who have worked all day in the open,” captured how the cowboy’s life embodied modern cultural values (individual responsibility and industry) and all that the culture feared that it had lost (community, tradition, and ties to the land).59 More than just an analog for American dominance abroad, the cowboy offered broad, apolitical inspiration for addressing problems at home, including, for El Paso children, in their own proverbial backyard. Less explicitly, Americans across the political spectrum also united behind the kind of expertise the cowboy embodied. Tousey details the specialized work of different types of cowboys—animal wranglers, branders, trainers— and the skills involved in each. It is a more generic cowboy, however, who at the end of his book “after several years of bronco busting and cattle roping . . . usually [seeks] to have a ranch of his own.” This ranch, a portrait of modern technology, operates with “a shiny new motor truck, with modern kitchen equipment in the rear, [that] replaces the old horse-drawn chuck wagon.” Rather than “mounting his bronco and riding for miles to do the trading,” the cowboy “gets his automobile out of the garage and drives the family to AT HOME ON THE RANGE

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town.”60 Such images recalled the observations Paperclip mothers made as they watched American homes pass by from their train seats. Advancing to cattleman was an improbable trajectory: few cowboys earned enough to buy their own ranch.61 But repackaging the cowboy as a patriarch and capitalist transformed him from myth to man and offered students an important lesson in the rewards of expertise and industry. Even if many young readers would have preferred the chuck wagon to a modern kitchen, they were to understand that the freedoms cowboys experienced and the unique knowledge they possessed led them back to modern society and the socialized. Now adults, few of the Paperclip children recollect specific school lessons, but many nevertheless have proven that they absorbed the power of these messages. When an El Paso family befriended Klaus Rosinski after he first wandered into their yard after playing in the desert, “they dressed [him] out with a cowboy suit, boots, hat and two six shooters, pearl buttons.” Rosinski felt he had “died and gone to heaven.” While some own photos of themselves dressed as cowboys, no one dressed as Indians. Even when they played what the children called cowboys and Indians, Bernd Seiler recalls, they enacted something more like “good cowboy versus bad cowboy.”62 Indians offered little as a model of heroism, given their constant construct as archaic and extinct. But in light of the German hobbyism and identification with Indians that was familiar to their parents, the Paperclip children’s greater interest in playing cowboy marked a unique moment of cultural crossover. In school, Americans learned that Indians were noble but defeated, sympathetic but anachronistic. Amid the national anxiety over scientific and military advance that brought Operation Paperclip to fruition, Indians’ most valuable contribution lay in their reminder of white supremacy in an American context. The reinforcement of this worldview depended on consistent narratives of romanticism, nationalism, and assimilation. Both units told students that genocide can be overlooked; that conquest and violence are natural, if unacknowledged, phases in societal advancement; and that survivors are picturesque, noble, and accommodating. The children of Operation Paperclip knew some of the effects of war firsthand, and many experienced personal losses, but most were too young to understand either Nazism or their parents’ relationships to it. Yet beyond the normative Cold War values embedded in these units were additional messages about individual and group responsibility and about cultural and political exoneration that constituted an important lesson for the German children, just as it did for Anglo children in El Paso. These units taught children that it was fun to study Indians but better to be white. That shared if often 82

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unspoken German/American belief about racial identity and privilege may have been the most central factor in the assimilation—even embrace—of enemy German children in American schools and society.

Crossing the Last Frontier If every nation creates the myths it needs, it is nevertheless striking how quickly and expertly frontier narratives spoke to the Operation Paperclip community, children and parents alike. Many of the beliefs about cowboys and Indians the Paperclip children encountered in the classroom and on the playground were a part of German culture and art well before the children were born. Even if they did not have a great deal of experience with or exposure to these narratives before they came to the United States, their parents did; fathers, especially, passed these narratives on to their children. For many Paperclip children, cowboy iconography bridged their move to a new country and their reconstituted family life within it. From the children’s first moments on American soil, seeing many of their fathers dressed in western wear guided their entrée into American society. Walter Tschinkel remembers that before the family joined his father in El Paso, he “got himself some cowboy garb and a hat and sent pictures of himself, you know, as a cowboy, and then [the scientists] learned how to ride horses and all these sorts of cowboy things.” Because of her father’s war work, Helga Minning had not seen him for a long time before her arrival in 1947. Her mother had noted that before the families arrived the scientists ate snake meat and made a pet of a porcupine. When Helga and her mother and brother arrived at the El Paso train station, she recalls, “Here he was, wearing a big cowboy hat and, you know, looking like John Wayne to me. He had a stalk of bananas over his shoulders, and his pockets stuffed with chocolate. It was instant love.”63 In no small way, the continuity of worldview between German and American culture must have been helpful to some of the children. Their accounts suggest that cowboy culture provided multiple generations of Paperclip Germans with a means to perform a new identity, one endowed with a sense of security and plentitude. The assimilation of the scientists in the United States went beyond acceptance; in communities with connections to the military and space industries, especially, they were seen as heroes. Their ability to shed their history and shared relationship to Nazism was enabled by many factors, including the racial and professional privilege they possessed in American society. But their children played no small role in this cultural assimilation and political AT HOME ON THE RANGE

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Figure 3.2 (top): Henry Tschinkel practicing with a lasso, 1947. Henry would become an experienced rider in El Paso. Courtesy of Walter and Henry Tschinkel. Figure 3.3 (bottom): Johann Tschinkel “assimilating himself” to American life in an especially Texan way, 1947. Courtesy of Walter and Henry Tschinkel.

acceptance. This was partly due to a general cultural presumption that children were both more morally pure and more impressionable than adults, more easily molded by American beliefs. This is what Lois Godfrey meant when she remembered that when the “families were really beginning to pour in, it occurred to me that school children can do more to civilize families than most anything else.”64 The scientists, more apt to see themselves as being Americanized than civilized, nevertheless understood the role their children played as their first means of contact with the American public, especially in El Paso, where the children spent considerably more time in civilian life than did their parents. This much is clear from a 1950 letter scientist Ernst Steinhoff wrote to Pentagon officials. In it he pressed for citizenship, explaining that “in accordance with our desires to apply for American citizenship we have handled the education of our children in a way which facilitated their personal adjustment to the American way of life and which gives them all of the prerequisites to become good and desirable American citizens.”65 It was precisely because of the lessons like those learned in El Paso civics classes that Steinhoff could argue his children were American citizens in the making. In exchange for the privileges the Paperclip children inherited, they provided Americans with evidence of the power of democratic ideology that their successful assimilation confirmed. Children, generally, held unique significance in Cold War culture, when, as Elaine Tyler May has shown, they offered a broad “feeling of warmth and security against cold forces of disruption and alienation” in the nuclear age.66 Although children are always emblematic of the future, they took on even greater value in an era marked by fear of nuclear apocalypse. For this reason, it was important that the German children offered this same sense of security and appeared American as much as they might feel American. Embracing and enacting a romantic history of the American west became one means for the German children to appear American. To the degree that the press paid attention to them, the children came to represent the potency of American icons and ideas. “Our Germans, when they first arrived, were contemptuous toward American democracy, culture, institutions, even housing,” reported American Magazine in 1948. But time and, even more, exposure to American culture had changed them, made them “more tolerant” and seemingly more appreciative of their experiences. This was most evident in their children, who, “[while] attending American schools and associating with our children, are becoming Americanized. Most of them now speak English almost perfectly. They get along well with American children, playing their games, wearing cowboy suits, and eating hot dogs.”67 The image of former enemy children as indistinguishable from any other children AT HOME ON THE RANGE

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in their cowboy costumes marked more than their personal assimilation: it showed the victory of democracy over fascism, of security over danger, and more specifically, it demonstrated the power of American fictions—taught formally and informally—as assimilationist narratives. These narratives enabled the Paperclip scientists and their families not only to create a new future for themselves on American soil but also to reframe, if not rewrite, the past. Reminiscing about his own education in Germany, scientist Ernst Stuhlinger recalled, “My friends and I avidly read books about America. Most of them were adventure books; they told of Indians, of the early settlers in the wild western territories and the various gold rushes, they told of the great railroad projects that won the West . . . [my teacher] planted in us a seed of love for this marvelous country.”68 For Stuhlinger and no doubt many other Paperclip scientists, an education in stories of Indian and western life set the stage for their eventual shelter in the United States. El Paso made an apt destination, Stuhlinger explained, its “landscape totally different than anything they had ever seen” yet “exactly as the Wild West had always lived in [their] imagination.” This landscape “was now the stage” on which the Germans, like many Americans before them, could remake themselves.69 In his interest and long-standing love of the idea of America, Stuhlinger suggested, he was American all along, even as he designed V-2 missiles for Hitler. But if the scientists and their families were well prepared for American assimilation by virtue of their German roots, they also played a unique role in changing American Cold War popular culture and iconography. In March 1952 Wernher von Braun published an essay in Collier’s magazine arguing for the construction of an orbiting space station. Eight years before John F. Kennedy would make his famous “New Frontier” speech, von Braun titled his essay about space exploration “The Last Frontier.” In it, he argued that a satellite like the one he envisioned would certainly be constructed; the question was whether it would become “the greatest force for peace ever devised, or one of the most terrible weapons of war.” That depended on who created and controlled it, von Braun argued, for “if we don’t do it, another nation— possibly less peace-minded—will.” Space was man’s “oldest and last frontier,” a “dark void” that now quickly required exploration and possession.70 In meticulous drawings and text, von Braun illustrated how the rocket used in building the satellite was based on the V-2 missile. Executives at Disney Studios liked the article so much that they commissioned him and two other Paperclip scientists to develop three one-hour television programs on space exploration. The Man in Space series popularized the work the Paperclip sci86

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entists had completed as a team in the United States and made von Braun a household name.71 It also signaled the transformation of the scientists from “Class I and II Nazis” into ideal immigrants and vital contributors to American science and society.72 As von Braun’s writing reflects, this transformation drew on Cold War anxieties about national security that frequently posited scientific and military advances as the path to American dominance. But it drew just as much from an older narrative of frontierism, one that compelled Americans to see space as a void to be colonized. It was a story that von Braun, born into an elite and literate German family, had been long prepared to tell and that Americans were trained to receive. The metaphorical shifts von Braun makes in “The Last Frontier” between history and the future, conquest and scientific exploration, were ones that he would repeat in other writings. In an essay entitled “Why I Chose America,” he described feeling “intensely curious” when he learned he was going to be sent to El Paso, “part of the American ‘Wild West.’” As a child, he had read Karl May and German translations of Zane Grey, books that had informed his expectations of the United States. “You can imagine my surprise to find a modern metropolis with traffic lights, airport, and skyscrapers,” he wrote. “This change had come in less than two decades, which told me something about America’s tremendous vitality.”73 Von Braun’s characterization of the border city from dusty frontier to modern metropolis entrained a story of technological advance that would become all the more widespread as the Cold War progressed. By the late 1950s space toys rivaled cowboy paraphernalia in popularity and sales. After the launching of Sputnik in 1957, children flocked to a line of model U.S. missiles that were accompanied by a thirtypage pamphlet written by Paperclip scientist Willie Ley.74 The Paperclip scientists did more than merely live out the atomic age in the United States: in petitioning for and leading important aeronautical advances, they took an active role in changing its course. As the cowboy gave way to the astronaut in American juvenile culture, the scientists could measure their impact on its expression for their own children and for others. The success of this contribution, both to American scientific advances and to popular culture, was first made possible by a governmental and military decision to absolve and recruit one enemy to fight another; but it was fostered, too, by ordinary Americans, who saw in the Paperclip families versions of themselves and who, like Alicia Swann, readily accepted the ability of American schools and culture to reform individuals. The values that the children learned in El Paso schools through frontier mythology taught them a particular way of thinking about Western civilization, one that began AT HOME ON THE RANGE

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with expansion and ended in democracy and progress. In this light, Juergen Haukohl’s memory of leaving El Paso for Huntsville offers an especially weighted and suggestive image of myth in action. Like many of the Paperclip children, Haukohl was not particularly excited to leave El Paso. As he remembers it, “We loaded up our 1947 Pontiac, the first model with an Indian chief profile with headdress as a hood ornament,” and drove east to Alabama. In a reverse homesteading migration, the families took the deeper understandings of American nationalism and race that they gleaned from their immersion in frontier mythology and Western civilization as El Paso performed it and prepared to live as other white Americans did. Of the hood ornament, and the fictions it memorialized, Haukohl recollects wistfully, “I wish I still had that thing.”75

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licia Swann knew the names of all 936 students at Crockett Elementary. There were “Bill, James, John, and Mary from El Paso [and] Juan, Maria, Consuelo, and Jesus from Juarez in Old Mexico.” Now, with the birth of Operation Paperclip, there were also “Helga, Ingebord, Klaus, and Rolf.” In this recounting to journalist Bea Bragg, Swann presented the multinational group of students at Crockett as friends and neighbors, even though her characterization of Crockett’s few students of Mexican descent proved that elite Mexican students who paid to attend El Paso public schools possessed a currency that Mexican American children who had lived their entire lives in the United States did not. This mattered little in Bragg’s essay “Democracy’s Children,” for while she tracked scenes of transnational friendships, all of the children she was interested in were white. Visiting Crockett showed Bragg that El Paso “met the problem” of the German students in American fashion. “The prejudices and hates of adults were forgotten,” she found, “when the children became involved in a game of marbles, or volleyball, or football. In the schoolroom, too, they were forgotten in a common struggle to add, multiply, and divide.”1 If readers questioned the ethics of Paperclip, they could now be comforted by how easily the German students united with the Anglo American ones in play and work. Bragg’s portrait reinforced what Swann had been telling the press all along: that the Paperclip children were “happy, responsive, and eager to learn.”2 Unlike “Spanish-American” students who reportedly “drift[ed] off amongst themselves” when they attended school with Anglos, the Germans were congenial and eager to assimilate.3 A photograph of Paperclip student Barbara Angele and El Paso native Catherine Graves, captioned “Girlish secrets know no national barriers,” captured Bragg’s argument best.4 The girls could share secrets because they now shared a language in which to communicate them. They shared a language, less than two years after the Paperclip children’s relocation to El Paso, because the Germans’ contentment and eagerness made them easy to teach. The story of language instruction in El Paso serves as the most important 89

and illustrative example of the differing treatment given white and brown students in city classrooms. Like the great majority of the city’s Mexican Americans, the Paperclip children began schooling in El Paso with almost no English. Between the time the children arrived and the time Bragg met with them in September 1948, adults would testify, they had become Englishspeakers. How this worked, as well as the radical differences in the methods German and Mexican American youth were taught English, offers a view into both the unequal opportunities offered to the two groups of students and teachers’ differing expectations. These expectations were based not just on the students’ race and class identities, but also on how these identities connected with personality characteristics in the minds of people such as Bragg and Swann. The characterizations of happy German children and withdrawn Mexican children reflected a growing investment in what Margaret Peacock calls “the happy and afforded child” in Cold War culture. Images of contented and economically comfortable children, found everywhere from television to advertisements to journalism like “Democracy’s Children,” served as an argument for the benefits of democracy. Yet these children, almost always white, served as a “thin patina” obscuring all of the children democracy failed, including poor children and children of color.5 The story of the Paperclip children and their peers, both Mexican and Anglo, reveals in new ways the importance of language proficiency to these cultural images. The happy child was a social, expressive, even loquacious child. From this perspective, English fluency was a central, if unspoken, factor in the afforded child. This chapter treats three different kinds of language learning: the teaching of English to Mexican American students, the teaching of English to the Paperclip students, and the teaching of Spanish to young Anglo El Pasoans, including the Paperclip students. Just as the Paperclip children were integrating into El Paso schools and learning English, Anglo elementary students met with an initiative to teach them Spanish that grew out of this same concern for the happy and afforded child. Language instruction, like civics, was politicized from the earliest years of the Cold War. Ironically, this politicization is clearest in light of the focus on Spanish instruction for Anglo students in “American” schools, including Crockett, where it served as both an exercise in Anglo entitlement and a response to fear of Anglo decline.6 Together, all three language stories show that in contrast to scholarship that has considered foreign-language instruction in American schools a cosmopolitan and pluralist practice, language learning in the borderlands was shaped by conservative interests and outlooks, from racialized conceptions of who was most equipped to learn English to equally racialized ideas about 90

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whom bilingualism best served.7 Language instruction served as a means to improve children’s abilities to negotiate a more globally connected world, all while demarcating which children’s welfare mattered most. Between 1945 and 1950 the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, a statebased institution inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, made elementary Spanish instruction one of its most urgent statewide goals. El Paso was particularly important in the effort; of Texas’s five largest school districts in 1948, it was the only one teaching Spanish throughout the elementary grades.8 One of the central objectives of the initiative was to harness the natural American sociability Bragg described and develop students into cultural ambassadors. Teaching Spanish to Texas’s youngest citizens, the Commission’s executive secretary, Myrtle Tanner, explained, could appear to “neighboring nations as a pledge of friendship” and was vital to developing a sense of “hemispheric solidarity,” so urgently needed in the midst of the Cold War.9 As a leader of the Commission, Tanner was tasked with advocating for Mexican American students’ rights to education and creating a greater sense of racial tolerance and Pan-American identification among Anglo students.10 In her promotion of Spanish instruction, she utilized “soft” Cold War rhetoric, stressing the value of the intercultural understanding and empathy that bilingualism could foster. Her motivations differed from the harder, protectionist aims expressed by many of the industrialists who also served the Commission, including its chairman, oil tycoon Neville Penrose. For Penrose, bilingualism was most important in its potential for combating communism. Because “communists seize[d] on” stories of American racial discrimination in Mexican newspapers, Penrose warned, it was important to improve race relations and rewrite the narrative about them. With Spanish fluency, he argued, “every school child in Texas” could become “effective little secret service m[e]n by getting the stories of our side spread by word of mouth all over Mexico.”11 Tanner and Penrose advanced two different ideological premises for bilingualism, one based in global outreach, the other in national security, but they shared a belief that Spanish acquisition represented a necessary response to a new world order, one in which Anglo children would lead. Their shared calculation reveals how Spanish instruction in the Cold War borderlands served as a mechanism for responding to a nexus of anxieties about Anglo American security, prosperity, and identity. In both an extension and a departure from borderlands scholarship that has centered on Anglos’ use of Spanish as a vehicle for school segregation, the story of Spanish instruction illustrates how the language also served as a commodity Anglos deeply desired, one THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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they were harder pressed to acquire precisely because of their marginalization of the people best equipped to teach it to them.12 From this we see that language served not only as an instrument of power, as El Paso schools surely illuminate, but also as one of attempted profit. Understanding Anglos’ aspirations for Spanish acquisition, like their distrust of Mexican students’ use of Spanish in school, reveals that they saw their supremacy as more fragile and tenuous than other parts of the Paperclip children’s story captures, and can deepen our understanding of white racial anxiety in postwar America. Neither Penrose nor Tanner’s arguments gave weight to the potential bounty Texas possessed: tens of thousands of young citizens already fluent in Spanish. As Rosina Lozano has shown, the segregation of Mexican American students, concomitant with the popularization of Spanish as a tool for the realignment of global politics, only reinforced the sense that Spanish was a foreign language rather than the language of American citizens.13 The alienation of Spanish, spoken by a majority of El Paso residents, extended to its speakers and did little to help the city’s Mexican American students. “Spanish Americans,” as Anglos persistently referred to Mexican Americans, and their language remained associated in the Anglo imagination with poverty, lassitude, and a failure to assimilate. Contrasting visions of what schools should accomplish for different students revolved around two distinct understandings of Spanish itself: a signal of foreignness and deficiency for Mexican Americans, and a doorway to political opportunity for Anglos. This sense of contradiction was not exclusive to the politicization of Spanish, however; it also mirrored the distinctive ways in which German and Mexican students were taught English. Teachers expected the Paperclip students to learn the language quickly and easily because they possessed all of the incentives and support for becoming fully American, including participation in the political, economic, and social benefits afforded to Anglo Americans. But with Mexican students being punished for speaking Spanish in school, it was less clear that Anglo educators saw these same benefits as available to them. Instead, they consistently portrayed Mexican American youth as withdrawn and unwilling to socialize beyond their group; these were the qualities neither of democratic children nor of global ambassadors. The politics of language instruction was not just shaped by statewide and national factors; it was also influenced by local interests. In short, few El Pasoans shared the larger sense of racial or cultural liberalism expressed by Tanner. Nor were Anglo El Pasoans change agents; while they supported bilingualism as it applied to their children, they saw Spanish instruction as a means of retaining, not challenging, the status quo. Many residents would 92

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have agreed with Chris Fox, the city’s popular and influential Chamber of Commerce president, who considered the “creation of [the] Commission” and its school desegregation platforms “a mistake” and potential “sounding board for a lot of rousing hell raisers to play upon and to create their symphony of discord.”14 Fox’s annoyance at the Commission’s founding reflects how Anglos centralized political and economic power in the city, even as they depended on Mexican labor. Anglo parents reinforced many of these ideas in letters they wrote to the local press in support of teaching Spanish. For example, one El Paso Times reader questioned the connection between bilingualism and good neighborism. “I doubt if our ability to speak Spanish is conducive to a more friendly relationship between the peoples of the two countries,” she wrote. But she was nevertheless strongly in favor of Spanish instruction because of the “economic value of such a move. . . . If you want your child to feel fairly certain of employment in hard times, your child has a tremendous advantage if he or she knows both Spanish and English.” Mothers, especially, expressed the fear that their children were at a disadvantage if they remained monolingual. As one reader described it, “In all businesses in and around El Paso Spanish is used almost as much as English. . . . You can bet those children of ours that live here all their lives would certainly be grateful to us if . . . they had the opportunity to learn Spanish and learn it right. I’m all for it and I know plenty of other mothers are too.”15 Rather than the diplomatic aspirations of Tanner or the national security concerns of Penrose, Anglo El Pasoans were most squarely focused on how language enabled their children’s economic and social stability in a changing city. That is to say, they worried about their children remaining afforded children. The conservatism in these concerns is also important for understanding how English was taught, to whom, and for what ends. Many Mexican students became fluent in English, but its immediate associations with authority and dominance distinguished it from their native language. In their support of bilingualism, Anglo parents nevertheless revealed that Spanish was a lingua franca of the city, not just the language of the barrio. Yet Mexican American students rarely experienced the language as such in school and spoke it at their own risk.16 Retributions and humiliations were both resented by students and considered normative at the time. They also marked a central difference of experience from the Paperclip students, who were taught by a system of reward rather than punishment. This inconsistency, like many others that this chapter charts, points to a host of problems in postwar Anglo thought about language, identity, and the fear of the foreign that would shape the experiences of children in El Paso and beyond. THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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Teaching and Pathologizing the Mexican American Child In a Commission report on the education of Mexican American children in Texas, sociologist Lyle Saunders argued that if “Spanish-speaking children are to be drawn into the educational system and made to feel welcome there, teachers and administrators . . . have to be people of a broader vision, higher ideals, and keener insight than those of the communities in which they live.” Across Texas, he concluded, “they are not.”17 Saunders captured several of the dynamics that worked against Mexican American student achievement, including the role schools played in upholding racial hierarchies. On the ground, reformist educators worked to frame the story differently. “Possibly the most amazing thing about the El Paso schools is the splendid result achieved by the teachers and pupils at the first-year level who must begin their school life together without knowing each other’s language,” wrote assistant superintendent Byron England.18 England, like Tanner an enthusiastic proponent of inter-American or pan-American education, presented the classroom as a cross-cultural encounter, one in which Mexican students and Anglo teachers overcame their differences and the child succeeded. Yet England’s optimistic account, like Saunders’s critique, spoke to the near-total reliance on Anglo teachers in southwestern schools, including those in El Paso. School was the first experience in English immersion for thousands of young American citizens in El Paso. Herschel Manuel’s 1930 study of Spanish-speaking children in Texas, a text that strongly influenced the Commission, documented that 90 percent of Mexican American children spoke no English upon entering school. Out of 523 Mexican elementary school children Manuel polled in El Paso, just 6 heard English spoken in the home.19 This challenge was all the more important because almost half of Mexican American children who were enrolled in school were in the first grade; threequarters of all Mexican American students attended first to fourth grades.20 English acquisition was not just a challenge to beginner students; it was, in addition to retention, the definitive academic issue for Mexican American students. This was a fact that teachers, most of whom lacked strong skills in speaking Spanish, lamented and pathologized. Nationally, intercultural textbooks, seeking to explore and celebrate cultural differences, characterized Mexicans as idle, folksy, and coming from “a ‘hacienda’ way of life.”21 Thomas Sutherland, who served as the executive secretary of the Commission from 1948 to 1951 and might have been expected to articulate a more enlightened view, called on the same primitivist-based stereotypes, explaining that “Mexicanos . . . [,] except for their educated class, are an earthy folk, 94

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rooted in an ancient culture more in harmony with the thirteenth century than with ours,” and that they possessed “a lack of materialism” that “enriched their lives with spiritual qualities.”22 Like Sutherland, teachers depicted Mexican students as emotionally and socially restricted and unprepared for the fast-moving urban centers of the United States. Teachers subscribed to many of the same views. In a contrast to the happy and afforded child, teachers consistently depicted Mexican students as a conflicting mixture of lazy but anxious, uninterested but hypersensitive. They described students’ difficulties with language as psychological, cultural, and even racial problems rather than political in nature. For example, one El Paso teacher explained that “the Spanish-speaking child usually has such a limited contact with the English-speaking public that he has little opportunity outside of the school either to hear English spoken or to practice it himself. His opportunity for practice at school is limited by his supersensitiveness to racial differences.”23 “Too often it is impossible to ‘interest’ the Spanish-American child,” another El Paso teacher explained, “his poor clothes, his unkempt appearance, his so-called dumbness (which is usually only a language handicap) make him unattractive, personally, to the teacher, and for this reason it is difficult for her to reach him, because the pupil senses the teacher’s feelings unconsciously.”24 Here, the teacher-writer’s conflation of language (Spanish) with national origin (“Spanish-American”) points to how language marked Mexican American children as diametrically opposed to the afforded child: poor, foreign, emotionally limited, and, in turn, fundamentally un-American in spirit. Tellingly, even teachers who elected to work on behalf of educating Spanish-speaking children often upheld these stereotypes. In 1946 a group of El Paso teachers was selected by the Commission to prepare materials on teaching English to Spanish-speaking children. The funding represented an opportunity for El Paso educators—geographically and politically marginalized within state education politics—to make visible some of what they knew from their own experience. The selected teachers attended workshops that summer where they wrote and later published their own lengthy primer on language instruction. The materials that resulted from the workshop were, in education professor and Commission member George I. Sánchez’s view, “unusually good—both from the standpoint of organization and from that of their value in the education of Spanish-speaking children.” In his assessment, the materials were not only “amongst the best that have been produced” in workshops organized by the Commission—they were better than anything assembled in similar workshops held in Austin.25 But even if the THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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curriculum worked, other writings by this group of teachers indicated the challenges to implementing it, including their own prejudices. It was important to “exercise a genuine interest in the Mexican child,” advised the introduction El Paso teachers wrote, and for the teacher “to acquaint herself in so far as possible with his cultural heritage, his mother tongue, and his home environment.”26 This was challenging work, they admitted, as they continued to characterize Mexican students much as everyone else did: as possessing “disciplinary problems brought about by a poor type of guidance in the home” and preoccupied with extracurricular interests that were “foreign to school activities” and “frequently antisocial.”27 As a result, teachers of Mexican students focused on teaching English as a pathway to “a rightful place in a democratic society” and on teaching a host of skills that Anglo students of the same age were expected to already know, including taking pride in one’s personal appearance, the importance of flushing a toilet, and the appropriate amount of clothing to wear indoors and out.28 If these skills did not make students more sociable, happy, and psychologically healthy, they would at least address their physical well-being. Racist beliefs about Mexican students’ social deficiencies were buttressed by a Cold War theory of language instruction that vocabulary should echo, more than expand, students’ communities and experiences. This theory encouraged El Paso teachers to hypothesize, generalize, and interpret those experiences and eventually fall back on discourses of health and hygiene that Anglos had deployed to segregate schools and justify the poor conditions of “Mexican” schools.29 They then applied these discourses to the curriculum. While first-graders learning both languages focused on some common basics, including numbers, colors, and pronouns, the differences from there on were substantial. Throughout the interwar period the city’s South Side had been wracked by outbreaks of tuberculosis, diphtheria, smallpox, and typhoid fever, presenting a serious threat to neighborhood residents and the city’s economy, which, like many southwestern localities, touted an image of El Paso as a sanctuary for patients suffering from tuberculosis. When the Alameda Housing Project opened on the South Side in 1940, new residents were required to have all of their possessions fumigated before moving in, an act that echoed the ritual disinfections of bracero workers entering the United States.30 In addition, the instruction manuals produced through the El Paso workshops prescribed that Spanish-speaking first-graders focus on expressing ideas about health, sanitation, and social habits (“My nose is clean” and “Jose went to the clinic”). Even as South El Paso struggled to gain access to basic housing and sanitation standards (a 1940 Federal Public 96

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Figure 4.1: This 1949 photograph of children in El Segundo Barrio was taken by Russell Lee as part of a larger project entitled “Study of the SpanishSpeaking People of Texas.” The project, commissioned by Lyle Saunders, was to provide visual documentation of the sociologist’s research on the aspirations and unequal living conditions of Mexican Americans. Lee’s image of seemingly happy children playing outside of a dilapidated building captures both. Courtesy of the Russell Lee Photograph Collection, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Housing Authority study showed that over half of the city’s dwelling units lacked an indoor toilet or private bath or needed major repairs), Mexican American students were taught that public-health concerns were acts of individual, private responsibility.31 The purposefulness of these pedagogical decisions becomes especially clear when we compare what the children’s Anglo counterparts were learning in Spanish as part of the Commission’s push for bilingualism. Englishspeaking first-graders were taught about detailed parts of a house, including the phrases “En el aparador hay dos candeleros” (On the buffet there are two candlesticks) and “Estos son los muebles de la sala: el sofá, el sillón, una mesita con flores, una mesita con una lámpara, el piano, y el radio (tocadiscos)” (This is the furniture of the living room: the sofa, the armchair, a small table with flowers, a small table with a lamp, a piano, and a radio [record player]).32 That is, Anglo students learned a language of cataloguing and plentitude, vocabulary and acts of mind intended to be useful for THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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local and global capitalists alike. Even differences between similar acts of speech could be revealing. Teachers were instructed to introduce Spanishspeaking children to the sentences “I went to the toilet. I washed my hands,” while English-speaking children learned sentences such as “El niño se lava las manos y la cara en el lavabo” (The boy washes his hands and face in the washbowl) and the word “un excusado” (toilet) only as a bathroom fixture. While Anglo children learned to describe washing as a private if ordinary act of the home, Spanish-speaking children practiced identifying it as a task to be reported to and monitored by the teacher.33 In all, the guidelines found in the materials that the El Paso curriculum builders designed mirrored their sense of the values and habits students brought to school and embedded a belief that teachers were expected to train students to succeed in social class structures into which they were already born. Yet vocabulary was only half the battle. Educators saw themselves as addressing two main issues when they were teaching English to Spanishspeaking students. The first of these was the problem of interest in learning or a desire to speak English, since so many students seemed to resist doing so. Teachers were encouraged to create “motivating instruction” and to provide “opportunities for the child to recognize the necessity of using a second language.” “Bilingualism is the objective, not the substitution of English for Spanish,” the workshop teachers explained, in hopes that teachers would not produce greater insecurities for already insecure students. Educators focused on oral facility and sound over reading and writing as a critical element of elementary language acquisition. They worried that Spanish-speaking children would arrive at high school with “a definite foreign accent” rather than “good colloquial speech” and saw elementary teachers’ most important goal as to “attune [students’] ears to American speech sounds, and to train [their] speech organs to make them.” The focus on oral instruction made evidence for student learning all the more difficult to pin down. The workshop teachers’ argument that the “action of children themselves yields an intangible means of evaluation; their interest in learning and speaking a new language, their desire to speak, and their ability to understand are all valuable indexes of success” was potentially problematic given so many teachers’ convictions that Mexican American students were antisocial and exhibited little interest in learning the language.34 Both the issue of the persistence of an accent after a decade of school and that of motivation to learn English might have pushed educators to think about how few native English-speakers Mexican American students encountered in school. Instead, the city continued to restrict the majority of Mexican Americans to Mexican schools. 98

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Despite teachers’ worst assumptions and characterizations, evidence exists that Mexican American children and their parents were interested in English instruction, and that their best opportunities to express their shared interest lay outside of the classroom. At Alamo Elementary in El Segundo Barrio, a group of 230 students formed a citizenship club called the Crusaders of the Silver Shield that focused on improving members’ English vocabulary. To do so, they required each student to study for and write an essay on a topic in El Paso history and to present it before an audience.35 At San Jacinto Elementary, also in El Segundo Barrio, the fourth grade organized a Speak English Club, which met every Friday and “encouraged the speaking of English in its correct form.”36 At Zavala Elementary, club members recorded their voices and studied their speech for irregularities.37 One way to understand these clubs is in their ubiquity: both English clubs and citizenship clubs were founded at schools across the city, Mexican and Anglo alike.38 Students throughout El Paso with differing relationships to both Spanish and English joined English clubs. The clubs thus marked a meeting ground of beliefs: they may have performed more as language remediation than rhetoric study groups in some schools than at others, but they represented a shared ideal that English proficiency, sociability, and good citizenship were connected and, more important, skills to be mastered by all. Undoubtedly, Mexican American students believed in this ideal more than teachers believed in Mexican students.

Teaching and Rewarding the German Child The Paperclip children shared with Mexican students the centrality of language to their success in school. Few of the children arrived in the United States with any facility in English. Even some of the scientists lacked experience with the language, and many took advantage of group lessons offered on at Fort Bliss to both themselves and their wives. Just as some Mexican students were held back one or more grades when they struggled in English, the Paperclip children were placed in classes one or two years behind the grade that corresponded with their age when they arrived in the spring of 1947. Assigned to these classes, the children “had to swim along without a knowledge of English,” recalled Lotte Tschinkel, mother of three. “Every day,” she said, “they were given an extra lesson in the new idiom, and it was marvelous how soon they spoke English without reserve. After three months, they were fluent in English.”39 This quick fluency, to the degree that it was true, seemingly reflected one of the most significant differences between the children THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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and their Mexican counterparts. But the story was more complicated than Tschinkel’s account suggests. In fact, parents like Tschinkel, whether or not they spoke English (she did), played a critical role in orchestrating private English lessons over the summer and continued special classes in English that they would receive at Crockett for as long as necessary. It may be understandable that Tschinkel remembered her children’s language acquisition to be quick and effortless, if still extra, especially given that her recollection occurred decades after her children had become completely fluent in the language, attended college, and succeeded in careers. Still, the children’s enthusiasm and lack of reserve, as she described it, echoed a popular narrative of the children at the time, one that suggested they possessed personalities and talents that made English acquisition all the easier. If the students were naturals at English, as she and others suggested, might this mean they were naturals at democracy as well? This was a question the El Paso press would advance more explicitly, for it worked to shape the public perception of the Paperclip children as potential patriots and contributors to American society. The El Paso Herald-Post, charged by the army with putting an ideal face on Operation Paperclip, saw that the children were the best means of illustrating the potential Americanization of the group and spent much of the summer of 1947 focusing on them. That summer, after their first semester of American schooling, the children took ten weeks of group English classes that the El Paso Herald-Post had reported on. Paid for by their parents, the classes were taught by two El Paso teachers, Eleanor Outlaw and Mary Jane Bush, and the future principal of the Fort Bliss Elementary School, Nettie Bee Bryant. Like the other young Anglo women who made up the city’s teaching staff, they were no language experts. But they offered more than rote grammar drills and taught without knowing any German, calling often on pictures and songs.40 In a typical day, the children would begin with the Pledge of Allegiance, recite a prayer, and then be taught a lesson about a major American figure such as George Washington. Students learned by immersion, both in terms of language and in their intensive introduction to Texan and American culture. In the course of things, the children accomplished more than mastery of a new language; wrote one journalist, “They study the American way of life. They learn about freedom.”41 Eager and enthusiastic, the children “are interested in everything,” testified Nettie Bee Bryant.42 At the heart of these studies was both an Americanization project typical of all immigrant education in the United States and, more specifically, a reformation project in which children born into fascism were taught to think more democratically. American patri100

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otism and ideals, it appeared, came as easily to the children as the language in which they expressed it. As with the city’s Mexican American children, the Paperclip children most often spoke their native language in the home, both owing to their parents’ wishes and out of necessity. The scientists’ interviews upon entry to Operation Paperclip reflect that even as they mastered repeated lines about the importance of Western civilization, some struggled with English. This was even more true of the Paperclip mothers, some of whom had neither the schooling nor any reason to learn English before they moved to the United States. As a result, for many of the children, according to Ursula Mrazek, families had “rules that when they cross the threshold they had to switch to German. . . . At home it was always German.” Siblings, recalled Christel Angele and Helga Minning, often spoke to each other in English, but even when their parents understood some English, they spoke to their parents in German. Some families, such as the Tschinkels and the Angeles, invested in lessons for the children to study German literature from the Paperclip member Ilse Axster.43 The Paperclip community remained attached to the language for the same reasons that many Mexican El Pasoans conducted much of their lives in Spanish, including cultural identification and the greater importance of the language to their immediate community and interactions. But their attachment to German attracted less attention and criticism because it was clearly delineated as the language of the home and because the children were seen as eager learners and speakers of English. All of this said, the Paperclip parents played an important role in the children’s English acquisition, even when they did not speak the language. They did this in ways that were both private and ordinary—buying their children books and comic books in English, for example—and by means that were more uniquely available to them, such as requesting and funding the summer classes, something that was not offered to the city’s thousands of Mexican American students. In addition to affording these special opportunities for their children, the parents, because they were followed by the press, were able to communicate publicly their enthusiasm and support for their children’s studies, something that also was unavailable to the city’s Mexican American parents. Teachers often followed suit, paying particular attention to the German students, according to many within the Paperclip community. Senta Minning, Helga Minning’s mother, recorded that “almost all children started school in fall, [and] were able to start school according to their ages. They encountered no problems in school. Texans were very tolerant.”44 Minning’s sense that the children were readily accepted by Anglo El PasoTHE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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Figure 4.2: The youngest Paperclip children in English class at Fort Bliss. Courtesy of Helga Minning McGhee.

ans is supported by nearly every account of the Paperclip children, from news reports to the former children’s own histories. For example, Axel Roth remembered one of his first American teachers, Miss Cole, giving him a book whose cover depicted an American soldier with a plane flying in the sky behind him. Miss Cole pointed to the plane, as Roth tells it, “and looked at me. I said, ‘airplane.’ She and the whole class clapped. She pointed to the sky, and I said ‘sky,’ with the same results. She went through the other things on the picture and I knew all of them, in English.”45 Teachers like Miss Cole appear to have been approving, supportive, and eager for the Paperclip children to recognize and prove their abilities. Whether the perception is fully accurate or representative of how all El Pasoans felt, its repetition indicates that Anglo El Pasoans and the Germans alike recognized that the children’s language acquisition, like their treatment in school, constituted a lesson in communicating democratic values, including enthusiasm, hard work, and, as Minning termed it, tolerance. Once assigned to the grades with which their ages aligned in the fall of 102

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1947, the Paperclip children were seemingly indistinguishable from other Anglo children. For example, Bragg found “Kathleen, president of her home room, child of an El Paso dentist, walking hand in hand with Inge who had been in this country for only six months.” Kathleen’s own father had fought in Europe in World War II, and yet now, just years later, she wondered, “Did Kathleen think of Inge as an enemy alien?” As she watched the two girls “wander[ing] down the hall, whispering and giggling as only little school girls can,” she decided not.46 The economic and linguistic privilege that Kathleen, daughter of a dentist, and Inge, daughter of a scientist, now shared outweighed the differing political circumstances and ideologies into which they were born, according to Bragg and Swann. At root, Bragg argued, the girls were bound by happiness. But such easy assimilation did not extend to the city’s majority base of Mexican students, only a few of whom attended Crockett. In a few cases, the children themselves were aware of the dual treatment. Former Paperclip child Juergen Haukohl possesses a distinct memory of a Mexican girl who was assigned to serve as his partner in a maypole dance. The partnership, as Haukohl has come to see it, “was a move of convenience because the Germans still stirred strong feelings with some people and the Mexicans didn’t seem to be fully accepted. My sister said in her class, the Mexicans kids sat together on one side of the room and everyone else took up the rest of the classroom.” Haukohl’s mother reported similar findings when she visited a beauty salon, where Anglo and Mexican customers were serviced in different rooms. The girl assigned to be his maypole partner cried throughout the dance, Haukohl believes, because “America had just been at war with Germany and I was a blond headed German boy.  .  .  . She probably thought I would hurt her.”47 Regardless of the cause of her distress, teachers refused to reassign either the girl or Haukohl, instead making them both suffer the consequences of the forced cross-ethnic encounter. Haukohl’s story, one of the few critical memories rendered by the Paperclip children, illuminates exactly what many of the people invested in the children went to great lengths to avoid: contending with the ways in which not all Americans may have perceived them as welcome guests and the simultaneous disenfranchisement of so many within a democracy. Instead, journalists and educators were interested in images and stories about children who now easily and enthusiastically saluted the American flag, played games on the playground, and otherwise blended in with other Anglo children, despite the uniqueness of their living circumstances and infrequent interactions with American children outside of school.48 These accounts, however, contain THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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important information about how the Paperclip children learned English and the different pedagogical styles and contents that they experienced in the classroom compared to those experienced by Mexican students. One example of this was a system of rewards in summer school, whether those rewards came from winning a spelling bee or forgoing German. Throughout the summer classes, the Paperclip children were given written tally marks for speaking German. The children with the fewest marks at summer’s end were rewarded with ice cream, a gesture that was particularly meaningful to children who had experienced food shortages during the war.49 Rather than being punished for their native language, the children were incentivized to adopt a new one by a range of gestures, both material (in terms of food and gifts) and social (including in their revised placement into grades that matched their ages). As significant as this difference in attitude toward the German children and their potential, however, was the Paperclip children’s integration and assimilation into “American” schools. Former Paperclip child Axel Roth recalls that while the classes at Fort Bliss were important, the children “mostly . . . learned English by interacting with the other kids in our class or out on the playground during lunch and recess.”50 This enactment of the happy child, playing with others and Americanizing in the process, was a key aspect of the German students’ sense of opportunity. It was an opportunity that Mexican students were not afforded, whether by the very nature of school segregation or by the kinds of segregation that educators reported seeing in schools. This self-segregation was a result of many dynamics within the schools, including the importance of language and the ways in which distinct groups of students were taught to use English differently. That is to say, when Mexicans learned to engage in health and hygiene reporting, the assumed recipient of such conversations was an Anglo or English-speaking adult rather than another child. By contrast, the Paperclip children were taught English as a lesson in cultural literacy, that is to say, the English with which all Anglo American children were expected to be familiar. In both cases, teachers seem to have heard what they wanted to hear: deficiency in some cases, rapid proficiency in others.

Teaching and Empowering the Anglo Child Within its segregated education system, El Paso had produced an unusual history of experimentation in teaching Spanish to young students well before the development of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission. When eight 104

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“American” elementary schools adopted courses in Spanish for Englishspeaking children in 1940, it was the city’s fourth attempt to make Spanish part of the elementary curriculum since 1914. In her school newspaper in 1931, Crockett sixth-grader Marion Fisk wrote about how much she enjoyed learning a “beautiful” language like Spanish, as opposed to “guttural” German. Learning Spanish at an early age “is of benefit to me because I am going to take Spanish in High School,” Fisk reflected. “If I choose to take it in College it will be of more benefit.”51 Fisk failed to specify how the language would serve her as anything more than an academic subject, but her teachers held clear goals. One Crockett teacher, Grace Munro, expected her students to possess a five-hundred-word vocabulary by the end of seventh grade that would prepare them to conduct important transactions. Munro encouraged students to “pretend that you are lost in a Mexican town where no one can speak English. Try to give directions so that a Mexican policeman can take you home.”52 She urged girls, presumably, to “pretend you have a maid working for you who understands no [English]. Give directions your mother would have to give at home, such as ‘Maria, please hurry, sweep the floor [and] wash the windows’ or, to the gardener, ‘how much do I owe you?’” Whether abroad or in the home, Spanish for Anglos was imagined to be a language of affluence and exchange, one that illuminated existing racial and ethnic hierarchies and the position of Crockett students within them. Popular booklets published in El Paso in the early 1950s with titles such as Learn How to Speak Spanish with Your Servant reflect the stability of these ideas about language and privilege in the Cold War. Directed at married Anglo women, the booklets promised readers aid in “translat[ing] your wants and needs to your Spanish speaking help,” by providing vocabulary for every room of the house, and phrases such as “Va a dormir en la recamara de los niños” (You will have to room with the children) and “No soy exigente, pero el cuidad de los niños es lo importante” (I’m not hard to please but the care of the children is the important thing).53 These informal instructional materials echoed much of the vocabulary Anglo students had learned in school, especially in terms of the focus on household objects and fixtures. Yet although these books and the curriculum suggest that the ultimate value of Spanish for middle class women was to oversee “servants” in their homes, many found it useful in the marketplace as well. In 1940 male and female El Pasoans attended college in almost equal numbers (3509 men and 3334  women reported completing college programs of some kind). According to a city study, over 23 percent of the workforce in El Paso was female, with almost equal numbers of women hired in domestic service THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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(2,869) and clerical work (2,884)—stenographers, receptionists, secretaries, and bookkeepers.54 These employment changes also altered the reasons for Anglo women to speak Spanish. Classified advertisements in the El Paso Herald-Post between 1946 and 1950 reveal that employers frequently, though not predominantly, required proficiency in Spanish for exactly these kind of semiprofessional positions. Even if such women eventually entered into marriage and motherhood and left the workforce—and booklets like Learn How to Speak with Your Spanish Servant reminded women that this was the ultimate goal—the market shows that Spanish proficiency held economic value beyond directing household staff for women. This was not the only way in which economics influenced the appeal of Spanish instruction for Anglos. Rapid postwar industrialization had pushed El Paso business leaders to seek more capital investments from outside the city to grow its changing economy. In doing so, they drew on long-standing stereotypes of its Spanish-speaking workers as one of the city’s greatest assets. The El Paso Industrial Development Committee, for example, sought to entice textile industries to establish new factories in the city, arguing that the city’s abundant population of Mexican American workers was “particularly good at repetitious operations,” a common stereotype that teachers as well as industrialists might have subscribed to.55 But statistics show that Mexican American workers were making strides in new areas of the economy, despite these efforts to characterize them as low-level workers. Employment in manufacturing doubled in the city between 1937 and 1949; by 1951 the city’s three oil refineries employed more than 750 people, with a payroll of over $2.5 million.56 Even if professional positions and the city’s highest-earning work remained dominated by Anglos, an increasing number of middle-level jobs in these industries went to people who spoke Spanish. From 1940 to 1950 the number of Mexican Americans in lower white-collar positions, such as clerks, foremen, and secretaries, grew by 8 percent. The percentage of Mexican Americans and Anglos in semiskilled and service positions had been nearly equal in 1940; a decade later Mexican Americans occupied twice as many such positions as Anglos (33.2 percent vs. 15.6 percent).57 Classified advertisements in El Paso newspapers frequently asked for Spanish-speakers for jobs in sales, while also specifying for Anglos (or “locals”) to apply.58 Even entry-level positions were important, because they could lead to more profitable management positions in the future. In 1948 a plant foreman, likely to direct workers who spoke Spanish, could earn up to five times as much as an unskilled worker and twice as much as a lineman.59 Unable to fight off these changes in the same ways that he resisted school 106

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integration, A. H. Hughey enthusiastically promoted the elementary Spanish program, explaining that “teaching Spanish to our American-speaking [sic] students certainly is one of the biggest educational problems in the Southwest.”60 Hughey blamed the failure of previous attempts to make Spanish part of the curriculum on insufficient numbers of qualified teachers, principals’ resistance, and a lack of interest among Anglo students. But Anglos’ interest, if not school conditions, had changed. The growing Anglo cognizance that much of the economic and civic life in border cities operated in Spanish was especially evident when editor of the El Paso Times W. J. Hooten argued for the inclusion of conversational Spanish in elementary schools in 1946; it began what would become a three-month-long debate with readers. Hooten, who was strongly in favor of daily Spanish instruction, reminded readers that they would discover “practically all of the Americans of Latin descent will be bi-lingual, while those of Anglo descent will know only the one language.” It made little sense for El Pasoans, with a Mexican American student population of 64 percent by 1946, “to teach our children along the same lines as children are taught in Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, and Lubbock,” he urged.61 Hooten made an important point. Of the major cities in postwar Texas, only San Antonio approximated El Paso’s demographic proportions. In Dallas County, the Mexican-heritage population was 3.4 percent; in Bexar County, home of San Antonio, 49 percent; in Harris County, which contained Houston, it was 17 percent. El Paso’s relative population statistics more closely resembled rural districts such as Brownsville and McAllen, which might house only a handful of schools, than it did other major urban areas.62 If El Paso was to develop into a metropolis on the scale of other Texas big cities, and if Anglo El Pasoans were going to remain afforded white Americans, schools were going to need to educate young Anglos uniquely from other cities in the state. Class anxiety and fear of Anglo decline were not the only factors to effect Spanish instruction after the war, however, and there were other ways in which the goals of El Paso schools and the Commission overlapped. While earlier experiments in elementary Spanish instruction always focused on oral facility, politics as much as pedagogy now pressed educators to focus on sound and, more specifically, sounding “Mexican.” That is, Anglo students were under greater pressure to sound like the Mexican American students many of them had little occasion to hear. While in the 1930s students needed to worry about making themselves clear to their household staff or other subordinates, now Anglos were more concerned about winning over others, in the workplace and abroad. Superintendent Hughey, in announcing THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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the beginning of conversational Spanish lessons in eight elementary schools in 1941, assured parents that “El Paso’s native color and Mexican vocabulary will be used in the course. Fluency in speaking and a ‘Spanish ear’ will be the aim of the teachers rather than teaching pupils to read Spanish.”63 The focus on colloquial “Americanized” Spanish rather than Castilian Spanish, which dominated high school instruction in the previous decades, was in line with larger trends in foreign-language instruction throughout the Cold War.64 Federal education commissioner Earl James McGrath echoed Commission members in arguing that mastery of foreign languages was essential for building alliances and fighting communism, and he called for an emphasis on “idiomatic speech, the everyday language of people of other lands.” American children could only be inter-American if they sounded like native speakers and natural global citizens, with “as little accent as possible,” rather than people who studied Spanish in a classroom for two years without any practical application. Focusing on elementary-aged children offered the greatest potential but also required disposing of such traditional methods of language instruction as “direct memorization of vocabulary, the conjugation of verbs, and the declension of nouns” and instead focusing on what would “excite the interest of pupils” and nurture “verbal facility.”65 This meant enabling students to converse about the kinds of things in which Anglo children were expected to be interested: their families, their homes and possessions, and the animals and objects found on the ranches and farms that surrounded El Paso. The emphasis on the colloquial and on sounding natural only highlighted how few El Paso teachers sounded like native speakers. Of the 592 teachers in the El Paso schools in the 1945–1946 school year, just 18 had Spanish surnames.66 Myrtle Tanner advised that anyone preparing to teach elementary school in Texas take twelve hours of Spanish, but this recommendation lacked teeth, in El Paso or anywhere else, and it offered an unrealistic view of the time it took to learn a language, especially as an adult.67 A study of fourth- and fifth-grade El Paso teachers who were Spanish majors revealed that very few felt they spoke fluently; their own education had focused on reading and writing in Spanish and often lacked application outside the classroom.68As Hooten pressured Hughey to expand Spanish instruction in the schools beyond fifteen minutes of conversation a day, the superintendent, who five years earlier had argued for change, took on the “considerable comment in the local newspapers” to defend the status quo. Hughey pointed to the lack of qualified teachers and the inadequacy of “having a teacher read

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out of a book, mispronouncing the words because they don’t understand the language”; “we are teaching Spanish when we can get teachers who speak it well enough to teach children,” he contended.69 The teacher issue, coupled with community interest, was the most important challenge to expanding Spanish instruction everywhere in Texas. In order to implement the 1940 initiative, the district persuaded the high school instructor Carlos Rivera to leave the Segundo Barrio school where he worked in order to serve as a traveling teacher, giving twenty-five lessons a week to mostly Anglo elementary students.70 The schools expanded this model in the 1950s, when a team of seven itinerant teachers alone served ten thousand elementary students.71 While the city’s percentage of Mexican American teachers grew steadily if incrementally throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until the late 1970s that it topped 30 percent—still less than half the percentage of the Mexican American student body.72 Despite these shortcomings in resources, middle-class Anglos continued to push for more Spanish instruction. E. M. Pooley, the editor of the El Paso Herald-Post, like his competitor at the Times, made it difficult for Hughey to scale back instruction. Reminding his readers that “there are 10,000 qualified teachers of Spanish in this City,” Pooley shamed Hughey with claims such as, “When the cooks and maids of El Paso do a better job of teaching Spanish to small children than the School System, somebody ought to hand in his head.”73 He railed against the state board of education, which denied “hundreds of women capable of teaching Spanish to the small fry” the opportunity to do so because “they do not have the ‘hours’ required by Austin.”74 At the time Pooley’s ideas were difficult to take seriously, given the class dynamics of the city and state politics, but decades before the paraprofessional movement, he considered something the Commission never did in pushing for the inclusion of nontraditional teachers to teach Spanish. Despite these challenges, however, the efforts of the Commission and the appeal of Spanish instruction came to fruition in El Paso. When Hughey retired in 1957, his replacement initially claimed there was no room in the budget to continue elementary Spanish instruction. Once again local newspapers brought attention to the issue, and the local board revised the school’s position: now Spanish lessons would be offered to interested students after school. To the surprise of the board and the superintendent, over six thousand elementary students showed up for lessons.75 Whether this interest was due to the now common rhetoric of good neighborism or simply the pragmatic appeal of bilingualism in a border city, the demands of the after-school program sig-

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naled a major shift in Anglo thinking from seeing Spanish as a helpful tool for taking vacations and overseeing servants in the 1930s to viewing it as an essential academic and life skill. The Anglo push for Spanish acquisition echoed important beliefs and techniques that teachers employed in teaching English to German and Mexican students; in each case, language instruction was a pathway to cementing one’s existing value to the nation. Thus Anglo El Pasoans exhibited a greater interest in bilingualism than did many Americans, even if their motivations stemmed from their concerns about raising “afforded” children rather than from a racially liberal worldview. In 1947 Governor Beauford H. Jester considered legislation making the teaching of Spanish compulsory in the state’s elementary schools.76 Anglo El Pasoans voted with their feet, not waiting for a mandate that never arrived. Yet even though they saw a pragmatic value in learning Spanish, they did not understand it to be their ethical or political responsibility to become better neighbors in the most literal sense of the term. In the early years of the Cold War, Anglo and Mexican children may have functioned as neighbors in reality, but most dynamics of school life in El Paso, from the composition of the student body at individual schools to the dynamics of student groups within some of them, indicated that they were infrequently so in spirit. Still, the city’s dedication to Spanish instruction for its Anglo students remained strong over time. This continued even as Texas’s commitment to Spanish waned in the 1950s. By 1952, Tanner reported, only 10 percent of the elementary schools that had offered Spanish instruction in 1945 still did. El Paso and Corpus Christi retained “outstanding elementary programs,” but Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Austin, Amarillo, Galveston, and Lubbock had all dropped theirs.77 El Paso remained the exception, in what the Modern Language Association’s executive secretary characterized as Texas’s “illfated statewide Spanish ventures.”78 The reasons for the steep decline, the Commission found, were rooted in the problems the movement had experienced all along, including an insufficient teaching force and a fundamental lack of faith in the diplomatic, inter-American ideals that Tanner espoused but few Texan Anglos seemed to share in their purest, least opportunistic forms. The continued dedication to Spanish instruction in El Paso proved the importance of an immediate sense of need that, far from Tanner’s liberal ideals, stemmed from prejudice, anxiety, and self-interest. These beliefs would change little over the course of the early Cold War, throughout which Spanish would be viewed as the most desirable foreign language to learn and, at the same time, the greatest foreign-language threat in American classrooms. 110

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Spanish may have been the language of profit, but English was to remain the language of power.

Bilingualism, School Segregation, and Americanism The teaching of English and Spanish in postwar El Paso schools was informed by contrasting visions of American global leadership. These visions differently configured citizens as cultural diplomats, cold warriors, and successful capitalists, all of which would serve as foundational strands of American action in the Cold War. But “the citizen” in these visions was always Anglo. The story of language instruction in El Paso reflects not just the existing prejudices and anxieties of Anglo educators and others, but also the future role they imagined students as playing in American society. Mexican families who had successfully immigrated to the United States, as Anglos saw it, seemed to demonstrate little enthusiasm or appreciation for their circumstances. By contrast, the Paperclip children, as Swann and other journalists described them, were at bottom happy children, despite or because of whatever they may have left behind in Germany. The Paperclip children were aided by their race and class privilege, but they were just as powerfully impacted by social skills and personality traits that Anglos associated with those identities. Mexican students who kept to themselves and failed to assimilate lacked not just language proficiency but the disposition and character traits so important to democratic citizens in a new world order. The wide-ranging plan for the Paperclip children to experience democracy in action through school was replicated on a smaller scale in their English instruction. Hertha Heller recalls that “the primary Americanization occurred for us through the schools, where we were taught the Pledge of Allegiance, the patriotic songs, and the English language (no English as a second language! Thank God!).”79 The praise Heller renders for the immersion method, where students were expected to “swim along” in a language they did not speak, worked precisely because the Paperclip children were not the majority. They had many teachers of English, including their own peers. But the system still functioned uniquely for them, as they received direct instruction in the summer and specialized lessons for some part of the day at Crockett. This was different from “Mexican” schools, where students were isolated from native speakers and where there was no clear way for teachers to attend uniquely to variations in fluency and facility. In broad strokes, Americanization may have looked similar for all students, but comparing English instruction for German children with that available to Mexican children reveals that THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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more localized decisions, from teaching resources to models of punishment or reward, differed in important and impactful ways. Naturally, the Paperclip children’s acquisition of English was different from child to child and, at the same time, more complex across the board than adult accounts reflected. Regine Woerdemann, for example, remembers happily playing with a friend and then feeling surprised and disappointed when she told the girl to “go home” and the girl left.80 Language learning is always marked by mistakes, misunderstandings, and false starts, even if parents and educators portrayed the children’s learning as natural and effortless. Believing that English came easily to the children both served as a comment on their aptitude and implicitly advanced a political argument, one that equated learning with personal character and will. As the press portrayed it, the Paperclip students learned English without difficulty not just because of their innate intelligence or interest in education (though they were associated with both), but because of their appreciation for an opportunity to live in the United States and their strong desire to be like Americans, if not American citizens. Reflecting back on her earliest months in El Paso, Helga Minning remembers, “We wanted to learn English, and we wanted to be part of the community. We didn’t want to just be Germans.”81 Her feelings are the feelings most immigrants experience in a new home, but it is noteworthy how much more willing educators were to believe this of the Paperclip children than Mexican students, whether they were actually immigrants or not. Anglo El Pasoans believed the Paperclip children were the progeny of men who served as a political resource and, in their outgoingness and desire to assimilate, valuable school citizens in themselves. Anglos seemed to have possessed little recognition that Mexican El Pasoans, even though they spoke Spanish, understood themselves to be Americans, not prospective Americans. Given the period’s push for stronger global relations, the Mexican students who made up the majority of the school system constituted a “natural resource,” as George I. Sánchez would refer to the half million children living in the southwest. “These children and their English-speaking fellow-students are in an enviable cultural situation,” as he saw it, and offered “a tremendous ‘head start’ to the curriculum designer . . . seriously concerned with adjusting the program of education to the demands of a hemispheric and world order that already looms large on the horizon.” Sánchez envisioned a system in which Spanish- and English-speaking children attended school together and taught each other their respective language more authentically and intensively than either group could experience in the classroom alone. In other words, he imagined Mexican American and 112

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Anglo American students learning language in the way that the Paperclip children learned English. Understanding that the “traditional inertia” backing a pernicious pattern of school segregation threatened any such possibility, Sánchez argued that the true promotion of bilingualism could only be considered in tandem with desegregating schools.82 Desegregation proved to be something that El Paso school leaders had little interest in, partly because they failed to recognize the resources in their midst. Sánchez’s vision of language instruction was impossible to realize in a segregated school system, but neither was it well supported by larger ideas about bilingualism during the early Cold War. Pushing for the expansion of Spanish instruction nationally, the U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs education director, Harold Davis, explained that “complete cultural assimilation may eventually eliminate bilingualism. But meanwhile many considerations urge the desirability of the study of Spanish, by English-speaking as well as Spanish-speaking groups, in a region like the United States Southwest where the two cultures are meeting.”83 Davis revealed the potential entanglements between inter-Americanism and Cold War American expansionism; for him, bilingualism was a solution to an immediate problem in addressing cultural difference and a complication in itself that could be remediated by assimilation. This view of cultural assimilation undoubtedly expected more accommodation on the part of Mexicans than Anglos. Because of racial segregation and the general absence of any opportunity for cultural exchange, El Paso schools operated for the most part according to this line of thinking. Superintendent Hughey maintained that “the practice of bilingualism in an American public school is inconsistent with good school operation.” He condemned the casual, natural exchange in Spanish between Mexican American children on the playground or otherwise; in his eyes, such use of Spanish necessarily led to the “neglect [of ] the English language  .  .  . allimportant to their American education.”84 To him and other Anglo educators, the only kind of bilingualism consistent with school goals was the adoption of English by Mexican (or German) students and the practice of Spanish by Anglo ones. Mexican American civic leaders lent support to this flawed conceptualization of bilingualism and its merits. Among El Paso’s small but significant middle-class Mexican American community, support for English-only instruction was strong. Since 1929 members of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) had fought for Mexican American civil rights across the southwest, largely by arguing that Mexican Americans were legally white. This strategy was at the root of LULAC campaigns for equal and THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF BILINGUALISM

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integrated schools. The centrality of whiteness to LULAC’s conceptions of race equity and its dedication to integration, a strategy that Cynthia Orozco and others have argued was a response to Anglo anxiety over a “Mexican problem” such as that found in El Paso, preconditioned its allegiance to English as the language of the public sphere.85 Like other locals, the El Paso LULAC chapter saw English as “necessary for the enjoyment of our rights and privileges” and therefore “the official language of this Organization, and we pledge ourselves to learn, and speak and teach same to our children.”86 Just as significant, by the 1940s LULAC had surrendered its original commitment to promoting the maintenance of the Spanish language.87 LULAC members, who lived predominantly among Anglos in the city’s neighborhoods just north of El Segundo Barrio, shared their neighbors’ investment in ideas about the afforded child and saw English and education as key.88 Their dedication to English was even more uniform than their ideas about education. For example, William Flores, in 1944 the national president of LULAC, remembered that, while he “always lived on the American side” of El Paso and attended school there, his predecessor, Modesto Gomez “liv[ed] himself on the Mexican side most of the time because he go[t] his business there,” and he sent his children to Bowie, the city’s Mexican high school. Flores questioned Gomez on his decision when he could have sent his children to school on the North Side, but Gomez “stayed firm, that he was going to help Bowie and his children were going to graduate from there.”89 Yet no parallel debates took place within the organization about the privileging of English as an expression of citizenship and security. This view of Spanish as secondary, even for native speakers of the language, was certainly not the only one held, and the middle-class Mexican Americans who comprised LULAC were unrepresentative of the city’s larger working-class population, even as they advocated for them. But if the interests of different groups of Mexican students varied, their outcome appeared much the same in this respect. Spanish was much more popular at Austin High School, the city’s Anglo high school, where 47 percent of students studied the language, than at Bowie High School, located in the heart of the city’ South Side, where only 25 percent did so.90 Given the dearth of qualified teachers and their own oral mastery of the language, Bowie students had less to gain by studying Spanish in school. Studying Spanish also might have presented an unwelcome struggle for them, given its absence from the curriculum in the earlier grades. Esther Brown, a Bowie teacher, argued that Mexican American students needed to study Spanish even more than Anglos.

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While the Spanish-speaking child “knows how to speak the language of his forefathers, he needs to be taught to read and write it,” she maintained.91 But neither the school structure nor the elementary curriculum supported her contention. Instead, most Mexican American students spent their school day operating in English, surrounded almost entirely by non-native speakers of it. When El Paso attorney Luciano Santoscoy wrote to Sánchez to protest that Spanish-speaking elementary students received no Spanish instruction, while Anglo children received fifteen minutes per day, Sánchez answered that “slight variations in curriculum do not constitute discrimination” and encouraged Santoscoy to contact the superintendent.92 For Sánchez, the absence of fifteen minutes of Spanish appeared “slight,” but Santoscoy underscored the way in which Spanish instruction stemmed from Anglo privilege and why it mattered. In contrast to neighboring New Mexico, where Spanishspeaking citizens argued forcefully for formal Spanish instruction for their children, relatively few El Paso parents expressed a similar desire.93 Instead, Hughey claimed, “complaints from Spanish-speaking parents who send their children to school to learn English” had led schools to enforce Englishonly policies and suspend students for the “habitual speaking of Spanish on school grounds.”94 The reason Spanish was habitually spoken was that Spanish was Mexican American youths’ shared language in school. Nonetheless, they were expected to feel a need to speak English on the playground and elsewhere even though school demographics provided them with little reason to do so. Seeing these conflicting views play out in the schools shows how central a role race anxiety played in both. But it also illuminates the complexities of public thought about immigration, citizenship, and who most easily gets to be an American. In learning English, the Paperclip children both Anglicized and Americanized themselves, a process that was not equally available to all immigrant groups, regardless of how “happy” and “eager to learn” they were. Becoming and being American, El Paso schools proved, was a process determined as much by others as it was by the self.

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n May 1947 Ilse Axster recounted to American military officials her transformation from Montessori teacher to Nazi accomplice. The wife of V-2 patent lawyer Herbert Axster, at the time of her testimony she had been living in El Paso for a month. More than any of the scientists themselves, she had become a lightning rod in debates about the ethics of recruiting former Nazis. Despite her wartime leadership of her local Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft (National Socialist Women’s League; NS-Frauenschaft), Axster contended, she was not a true Nazi. “My attitude toward the Nationalsozialismus was the following,” she insisted: “I was never interested in political matters. My strength and work were always devoted to the child.” When Hitler banned Montessori schools in 1936, a decade’s worth of her work was threatened. Rather than resist, she reconsidered and found that like Montessori philosophy, Hitler Youth programs also sought to empower children. “Some sentences in the book ‘Mein Kampf ’ by Adolf Hitler seemed to show that it might be possible to continue my work by altering the education,” she recalled. Hitler Youth’s focus on elevating children and emancipating them from their parents’ authority echoed some of what Axster found so attractive in Montessori theory. Continuing her work, however, meant disassociating herself from the Jewish students under her care. Given the “changed circumstances” of Germany under the Third Reich, she believed, the Montessori philosophy could still operate, even if “it could only be a work for the German children.”1 But the choices she made were not ones she later wanted to own. Like the scientists, she testified to officials in 1947, her dedication to Nazism was born out of a commitment to preserve her then “20 years of scientific work” in Montessori theory. By her rationale, it was her very devotion to children that required her to sacrifice some for the sake of others. In contrast to her protestations that her work was apolitical, Axster, like many American educators, found teaching a means by which to enact her deepest political convictions about children, German identity, and government, in terms both of the nation and of the self. In this sense, her history reveals not just transatlantic echoes across education movements—including 116

the centrality of race and citizenship ideals within them—but the vital role teachers played in enacting the political hierarchies at hand. Politics were central not just to her pedagogical beliefs but to her professional authority. In 1932, before she abandoned her Jewish students, she orchestrated the overthrow of Clara Grunwald, a Jewish socialist who was foundational to the German Montessori movement and who had once taught Axster’s own son. Axster would go on to lead the Berlin Montessori movement for as long as the Reich allowed; Grunwald would die in Auschwitz.2 Axster’s professional history reflects a conscious attempt to exploit anti-Semitism for her own gain and a greater commitment to Montessori theory than to Montessori students and teachers. In this theory, she found both a worldview and a pathway to her own empowerment. Under these extreme circumstances, Axster made explicit ideas that Americans also contended with, if often with less candor. For adults who aligned with movements as varied as fascism, American Cold War democratic culture, and progressive education, a devotion to children’s welfare and moral upbringing served as an essential means to enact larger ideals about selfgovernment and citizenship. Indeed, as the story of El Paso schooling shows, Americans, too, treated children as both transmitters and enactors of political and politicized ideas, though some children were considered more valuable actors than others. American children learned—in classrooms, libraries, theaters, and on the playground, all places that seemed distant from the world of politics—lessons about race, power, and belonging, both geographically and politically, in American society. None of the social and political lessons students learned, Axster reminds us, would have been possible without a corps of teachers that was committed both to children and to particular concepts of national identity and belonging. The systemic discrimination that defined mid-century borderlands education and, indeed, American education itself was the product of many factors, including professional complicity. The greatest number of American teachers in 1950 was comprised of women in their mid-forties.3 These were not ingénues just finishing school themselves; they were, like Axster, experienced adults with developed and likely long-standing political views. Just as Axster saw “German children” as excluding Jewish youth, so too did Anglo teachers treat white children as more inherently American than others. As civics and language education in El Paso proves, teachers who saw themselves as ordinary patriotic Americans played an essential role in maintaining, perpetuating, and even helping to create the cultural and racialized narratives upon which democratic and Western thinking was predicated DEVOTED TO THE CHILD

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and that children were expected to master. The transmission of these narratives depended both on technologies of education (textbooks, lesson plans, learning objectives) and on teachers’ investment in them. The messages they taught about American identity and democracy seemed to many teachers natural, inherently true, and objective, just as they did to Anglo Americans more broadly. Like Axster, many, perhaps most, American teachers saw their work as apolitical, even though it was central to the maintenance of political structures. This political project ran counter to the way the teaching profession was conceived in the American cultural imagination. Much of the thinking—both popular and professional—about teaching focused on teachers’ character and personality rather than their intellect, especially in the case of elementary teachers. American teachers were expected to project optimism and congeniality, qualities associated with both democratic and maternal behavior. Indeed, educators maintained, teachers’ warmth and encouragement were vital pieces of what was democratic about democratic education. The child expert Benjamin Spock captured this idea when he declared in his 1946 Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, “A good teacher knows that she can’t teach democracy out of a book if she’s acting like a dictator in person.”4 So did the education professor Willard Goslip when he lectured to El Paso teachers that one of their greatest responsibilities was to send students home at the end of the day “emotionally more stable” than when they arrived.5 These messages embodied particular images of care that privileged psychological encounters over political advocacy. To some degree, teachers believed in and leaned on the same conceptions, like South El Paso teacher Alice Cummings, who saw that some of her students “were really hungry” even if, surprisingly, they “were always quite clean.” When she saw “a child that needed food, I would immediately get it,” she recalled. This particular expression of care superseded other possible forms, however, as is clear in her explanation of forgetting a student who would later remember her—“there’s so many Fernandos, and usually I don’t get familiar with the last name”—and in her skepticism of and umbrage at “this business of discrimination” lodged against El Segundo Barrio schools like her own.6 Consistently, South El Paso parents indicated that their schools were not places where their children felt cared for; most Mexican youth learned in overcrowded rooms with teachers who were overextended at best and hostile at worst. Nevertheless, in many teachers’ imaginations, discrete individual acts of devotion to the child, as Axster characterized her own work, countered, ameliorated, or discredited the systemic discrimination about which Mexican parents testified. 118

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In stark contrast to American conceptions of teaching as a caring profession, both Axster and Maria Montessori believed that teachers did their best work when “the personality of the teacher . . . disappear[ed].”7 By not addressing the issue of care directly, Montessori offered a radically different, more seemingly methodized, model of teaching and child devotion. Montessori’s ideas developed out of her work as a physician to so-called feeble-minded children in the slums of Rome in the 1910s; by the time Axster studied under her in the late 1920s, these ideas had become a European movement. Influenced by medical science, anthropology, and psychology, Montessori viewed teachers as scientists whose greatest purpose was to observe the child, respond with as light an impact as possible, and above all “preserve the liberty of the pupils in their spontaneous manifestations.” She developed and patented toys, teaching materials, and furniture for her classrooms because she found that objects such as stationary desks and chairs proved that “the principle of slavery still pervades pedagogy.” The success of her method, in Montessori’s own opinion, was that she understood how to “awake[n] the children and encourage them to use [her] didactic material[s] . . . to educate themselves.”8 Nurturing children did not mean coddling, but rather staying out of their way and allowing them to realize their innate abilities. For Axster and Montessori, children’s liberation depended most on freedom from adult authority and interference. Both Axster’s conception of teaching and her desire to turn teaching into an intellectual pursuit rang hollow to Americans. Montessori’s was one of a

Figure 5.1: Ilse Axster in 1947, shortly after arriving in El Paso. Courtesy of the National Archives, College Park, Maryland.

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great number of child-centered education theories that blossomed globally in the decades leading up to World War II. But its focus on individualism seemed to many American educators a source of oppression in itself. Unlike other progressive or child-centered movements that came under criticism after World War II, American experimentation with Montessori education ended almost as soon as it began. Left in its wake was a commonplace perception, fueled by education leaders such as William Heard Kilpatrick, that Montessori theory was “unduly restrictive,” “repress[ive],” and “naïve.” Liberation, American educators argued, was not the equivalent of democracy; freedom only meant something when guided toward a larger sense of belonging and purpose. Whereas American kindergarten classes were organized so that the child “contemplates at each moment the whole of her own group,” Kilpatrick wrote, the Montessori student was “an isolated worker.” Preparing democratic children required them to “learn conformity to social standards mainly through social pressure,” rather than the alienation that Montessori appeared to promote.9 Kilpatrick’s emphasis on conformity and bending to the will of the majority may have conflicted with other possible conceptions of democratic ideology, but it described well how borderlands schools worked when Axster arrived in America. Although Axster attempted to continue teaching in El Paso, her Nazi affiliations destroyed many of her opportunities. Hired as a German teacher by a private girls’ school shortly after she arrived, Axster found the offer rescinded when she was refused a work visa. Denied the prospect of American citizenship because of Ilse’s fascist past, the Axsters would eventually repatriate to Germany in 1953, one of the few Paperclip families to do so. Yet as with the Paperclip children, reactions toward her were as revealing of American culture as they were informed responses to her. In the eyes of Paperclip liaison Lois Godfrey, Axster’s twin commitments to children and her own professional authority made her ambitious, brilliant, and dictatorial, “a very domineering woman who was a genius in handling children.”10 This perceived sense of dominance stemmed both from Axster’s personality and from her unfeminine commitment to her “scientific work.” But this work was not taken seriously by Americans. As a result, Axster was seen neither as a scientist, like the V-2 men, nor as a socially capable and engaged German wife and mother; instead, she often seemed to embody the image of the rigid, Nazified German that one-dimensional media representations of the Paperclip families had been designed to counter. This was a problem, primarily for her but also for the operation’s public image and for Wernher von Braun, who had argued for Herbert Axster’s essential status in the oper120

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ation. Von Braun’s response was to turn on them both and accuse Ilse Axster of operating “cleverly and cunningly” to run a kindergarten out of her barracks and “influenc[e] the wives who in turn influenced their husbands.” But it was unclear what von Braun thought she was trying to convince them of, other than her own worth. Although she tried to “win the admiration and respect of her husband” as a means to battle “a tremendous inferiority complex,” she instead gave people the “feeling of . . . a rattlesnake trying to hypnotize them” and caused difficulties within the group.11 Von Braun’s descriptions to James Hamill, as he must have known, sounded something like a Nazi, even if he was unable to use the term. This very challenge captured how Axster threatened to reveal the greater complexity and potential complicity of the Paperclip members and, by extension, that of the U.S. government and military. In short, if Americans were quick to see most of the Paperclip Germans as much like themselves, Axster earned little of this good feeling, and her role as an educator was central to the problem. Journalists and military officials highlighted her forcefulness of belief and desire for professional recognition, even as the scientists’ actions and beliefs were diminished and erased. The sheer number of testimonies against her stood out and led the New York Times to highlight her in a January 1947 article questioning the efficacy of recruiting hundreds of Nazi scientists and their dependents. Because her role as an NS-Frauenschaft leader made her a major offender under Allied denazification laws, she would have been barred from associating with any organization, political or otherwise, had she stayed in Germany; “ordinary labor” would have remained her only option for public engagement.12 Military and government officials overseeing the recruitment process felt the pressure of the coverage, especially given that Herbert Axster was already living and working at Fort Bliss when the Times piece was published, and Ilse’s relocation was all but certain. The tension continued after she and her two children sailed to the United States in March 1947. That summer she was found to be teaching kindergarten to some of the children of Operation Paperclip out of the barrack in which she lived. When the press reported on it, she was ordered by military officials to stop.13 The thought of Axster quietly indoctrinating the Paperclip children prompted army officers to surveil all of her correspondence for the four years she lived at Fort Bliss.14 Axster’s particular education theories also presented a problem for her. Upon her arrival in El Paso, a board of military officers questioned her about her continued dedication to Montessori education. From this she was flagged for her “gullibility and readiness to ardently accept and promote new or radiDEVOTED TO THE CHILD

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cal ideas.” “Nothing derogatory is known or inferred regarding the Montessori educational system as such,” concluded one official whose understanding of its theories was certainly thin. Because Axster had been “so gullible” as to subscribe to it, officials considered her likely to “be receptive to some undesirable group in the U.S. that could promise a more favorable financial position to her.”15 Nothing in Axster’s past suggested that she had any interest in communism; in fact, there was much to indicate that she loathed it. Montessori’s theories of the individual would have found little purchase in communist theories of the collective. But Montessori, like communism, appeared to cultivate a fanaticism that conflicted with the objective, rational thinking that social critics argued was central to democratic and Western thought.16 Communists were distinctive not just in what they believed, but in how in believed; they did not “shrink from risks or combat,” the New York Times announced, but in fact were “combative by temperament.”17 American officials recognized all of these qualities in Axster; her determination to keep teaching in El Paso only solidified their anxieties. A society’s schools, Axster’s history suggested, could only be as progressive as the people who worked in them. This was a radical idea for Americans, who focused on teachers’ political identities in terms of loyalty and speech rather than considering politics in a broader or more complex way. During Axster’s residency in the United States, thousands of allegedly communist teachers were purged by school districts, echoing larger red-scare, anticommunist campaigns.18 Americans worried not only about teachers’ communist affiliations, but also about how poised and engaged teachers were in the classroom; however, this is different from asking how fair or equitable they were, or how democratically they lived their lives. Axster highlights all of these quandaries. As a fascist, a Montessori teacher, and a mother who worked by choice rather than because of economic necessity, Axster resisted Americans’ expectations of teachers. She exposed how people with conservative beliefs could nevertheless be drawn to progressive education and how seemingly progressive education theories could coexist with and even serve fundamentally reactionary and undemocratic systems. Because of how narrowly child devotion and education politics were defined, none of these complexities were recognized in Axster’s own time. Instead, her dedication to Montessori aligned her with foreign ideas about child development that Americans feared, unlike Nazism, might still hold life. As a result, her beliefs about what it meant for a child to be free, to learn, and to be treated with respect were discredited, when in fact their trajectory was all too familiar. Whether Montessori or mainstream, schools revealed more 122

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about the states and societies they served than the potential of the children who attended them.

The Power of the School and State Lecturing before the Berlin Conference on Toddlers in 1932, Ilse Axster argued for the importance of Montessori thought in light of a modern society that had become increasingly hostile to the experience and idea of childhood. In contrast to Western societies, where parents focused on preparing children to “be good citizens, or fighters of equality, to become industrious successors in their own profession,” or to otherwise achieve “what the parents failed to do,” “primitive” societies valued children for what and who they were in the moment. Whereas Western children suffered from the desires of their striver parents, “among some peoples, such as the Eskimo,” children spent more time in the natural world playing with other children, sometimes mimicking the labor of their parents with their own, child-sized set of work tools, but always in their own time. “Primitive” children learned to survive with adult help but without adults’ own ambitions projected onto them. “Only industrious human beings are able to make it in such a natural environment,” claimed Axster, without explaining what happened to the less industrious.19 According to Axster, the child lived in a world that was not merely adult but was becoming increasingly incompatible with childhood. Modern homes, she contended, were “spaces built by the adult for the adult.” Playgrounds, streets, and courtyards now required adult surveillance. “Cars race through even the smallest villages, and in the parents’ home there is no place for the child,” she lamented. Nor did there seem to be room for children in many parents’ lives, because of their “obligation to work, their poverty, or their addiction to pleasure.” She saw modern technology and advances as further orienting social life in favor of adults and creating a class of “displaced and suffering people.” If children were simply allowed to be children, she suggested, they would naturally develop into capable adults. This was what Montessori promised: a system in which adults relinquished authority and allowed the child to “grow in peace and harmony among other children until it has completed its creation and is no more.”20 Part spiritual, part political, Axster’s explanation of Montessori’s value captured how the education movement sought to bind scientific ideas of child development with cultural critiques of modernity, capitalism, and Western civilization. Much of Axster’s rationale for the importance of children’s liberation DEVOTED TO THE CHILD

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supported American fears that Montessori theory exalted the individual and therefore sacrificed broader social beliefs or identities. Nor did she explain whether or how children’s liberation would lead to freer, more selfactualized adults. Instead, she remained convinced that Montessori promised a great social achievement simply in recentering the child in Western culture and civilization. “Let us consider what we can still accomplish in the next twenty or thirty years of our lives—not much,” she charged. “Let us consider what the political parties of the contemporary moment mean in the face of a history that spans thousands of years—not much. Let us consider what the child means—everything.”21 In her evocation of a thousand-year history, Axster called on a familiar concept in German thought, one that Hitler would soon repurpose into the Tausendjähriges Reich, the empire that was to last a thousand years. Like Nazi philosophy, Axster’s interpretation of Montessori hinged on a belief in an imaginary past, one in which, she thought, children played a central role. In contrast to American progressive education movements, which viewed student centeredness as a means of instilling democracy, child centeredness for Axster was both the method and the objective, the means and the end. Like Americans’ relationship to Western narratives, Axster’s romantic understanding of history was most useful in explaining the present: a society that she saw as devoid of traditional values, captured best by its treatment of children. Americans might have identified with elements of this idea. When Axster relocated to the United States in 1947, she encountered a society whose fear of communism “derived much of its power from the threat of loss,” Margaret Peacock has argued, including the potential loss of private property, race privilege, family structures, and religion.22 And while Americans would have spurned Axster’s antimodernism, both she and American political culture projected their fears onto children and schools. American schools were charged with protecting children from what communism threatened to take away, and they accomplished this in a myriad of ways, from instilling patriotic values, to the tracking of students by race and class into vocational and academic programs, to civilian defense drills. Shared global sentiments about loss during and after World War II affected children considerably, sometimes in ways that shaped their life paths. Axster’s ideas about loss were informed by her own childhood experiences that were both individual and socially constructed. Born in 1895 to a German army officer and his wife, Axster’s upbringing was privileged, if not always easy. Her mother moved the family from Frankfurt to Berlin after her husband’s death in 1898. There Axster belonged to a minority of girls who 124

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completed Mädchenschule, or academic high school, where she would study classical German literature and history, subjects to which she developed a lifelong attachment. If schooling provided her with academic grounding, her experiences as a Wandervögel offered her a political education. Youth who joined the Wandervögel movement shared a belief that contemporary German culture was soulless and utilitarian and that Germany’s famously authoritarian schools indoctrinated them in a meaningless status quo. To resist, they turned to the countryside and to a mythic conception of German history, transforming the physical stamina required of alpine survival into a pastime and retreat from adult authority. Groups of Wandervögel spent their weekends hiking, dressed in traditional clothing and singing folk songs that, members believed, reflected a “true” or “original” German culture.23 Axster’s membership came at the height of the youth movement. For Axster and the fifty thousand other Wandervögel at the time, the movement influenced their developing political and social views, in terms of both the importance of youth culture and ethnic revivalism. Their ideas of the Volk, or people, celebrated what the historian Peter Stachura has described as an “original Germany . . . untainted by modern impurities.”24 This blend of antimodernism and nationalism, along with the Wandervögel’s emphasis on physical training, anticipated many ideas that Nazism would adopt and distort to the party’s own ends in the late 1920s. It sowed the seeds for Axster’s beliefs about history, which informed her attraction to Montessori theory and to Nazi ideology, and it reflects how powerfully her education as a young person shaped her as an adult. Although the groundwork for Axster’s turn to an alternative education movement was laid by popular German political movements, she rejected the idea that children were agents of what she referred to as “political parties of the contemporary moment.” At least some of what she valued about Maria Montessori was her perception that Montessori navigated, but did not align with, state politics. To be sure, Montessori had to negotiate complex and often conflicting ideologies, including the secular, scientific tradition out of which her work was born and the Catholicism that stood at the center of Italian politics and culture. She did so by claiming to be apolitical, and, like Axster, to care only about the “cause of the child.” But as with Axster’s own claims, this was not entirely true. Montessori negotiated with Mussolini to keep her school system open and flourishing. In 1926 she was made an honorary member of the fascist women’s organization Tessera Fascista; by 1929 the curriculum she designed for her teacher-training schools in Rome included a course entitled “Fascist Culture.”25 Her ability to work within the DEVOTED TO THE CHILD

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Figure 5.2: Ilse Axster with her three children in 1931. Oliver and Wendelin Axster were some of the oldest children who immigrated to El Paso via Operation Paperclip. The eldest son, Claus-Christoph, died of illness in 1934. It can be easy to forget Axster was a mother, given how differently she lived and was treated from the other Paperclip women. Photo courtesy of Felix and Lilly Axster.

political system was important not just for the sake of her schools. Montessori was a shrewd businesswoman, patenting her educational materials and becoming wealthy from the rapid spread of her method in the 1920s and 1930s in Italy, first, and then across Europe. A trained physician and unwed mother, she saw science as a pathway to women’s liberation and said that she wished she “could make all women fall in love with science.” But her own work methods were often authoritarian. In Italy, she closed schools rather than allow them to operate with teachers who had not been trained under her personally. Even after her movement grew to transcend national borders, she reserved the right to oversee all teacher preparation.

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None of this dampened Axster’s enthusiasm for what Montessori promoted and promised. Montessori aimed not just for a change in teaching method, Axster explained, but for “the construction of a new world,” one in which education played a central part. She sought “humility and respect for the child” in a broad sense, including in the “acknowledgment of children’s rights in public life.”26 The most central of these rights was freedom from adult tyranny or authority. Like many progressive education movements in the United States, Montessori theory viewed teachers as child advocates, but it grounded the expertise for that advocacy in science rather than maternal responsibility. Despite Axster’s willingness to thwart traditional ideas about childhood for a new education science, her attraction to Montessori’s theories was rooted in the same kinds of antimodern beliefs that she once embraced as a Wandervögel. Children’s lives were defined by constriction where they needed freedom and neglect where they needed attention. In her view, a world that “is not the children’s world” called for a revolution, but one that again harked back to the past, when space was made for children and parents valued children’s pleasure as much as their own.27 Montessori’s theories about self-government and the individual provided Axster with one of the most noteworthy distinctions between herself and American teachers: her ability to state explicitly what drew her to particular concepts of education, often in terms that differed radically from mainstream beliefs. To German education critics, Maria Montessori was “a lady from Rome,” a clinician “from the dissecting table,” and a lesson in the shortcomings of “the modern woman of sharp intellect.”28 Montessori challenged some of the most fundamental ideas in German education, including the notion that teachers and schools were conduits of state authority. Many German educators and National Socialists believed her children’s homes sent children the wrong message about discipline and power by embodying what one German critic called “an exaggerated cult . . . of independence and freedom.”29 Despite her otherwise strong nationalist tendencies, Axster sided with the new science, largely because its findings confirmed what she had believed to be true since her time as a Wandervögel: life in Germany had once been better for both children and adults. Ilse Axster’s professional trajectory was different from that of postwar teachers in another sense as well: it was built on ideas that she developed throughout her life but only found appreciation for in a foreign, if increasingly globalized and growing, education movement. By comparison, most borderlands teachers, like most American teachers, worked in schools that

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often replicated their own education experiences and versions of ideas they had once been taught. This became complicated when Anglo teachers went to work in Mexican American schools, for example, but even in times of education experimentation and change, many classroom rituals and traditions remained recognizable. The distinction between Axster and Americans teachers—and all of the ways that Axster defied expectations of a woman of her station, even in Germany—promised to make her a more independent thinker than other teachers of her time. The construction of an educational and professional movement led by women created a unique kind of problem, one that threatened to link Montessori schools to a host of other liberal identity groups that the Nazi state prohibited and sought to destroy, including Jews, communists, and Eastern European immigrants. Axster’s work alongside Jews and socialists who were also drawn to Montessori education in Berlin—often because they saw it as a means to protect socially and economically vulnerable students—once more held the potential to make her into a different person than the teacher and Nazi functionary she became. Instead, she went to work for a political regime that would undermine her as a teacher and as a woman. Certainly, Axster’s choices can be explained by the power of personal ambition and fascist politics. In her dedication both to Montessori and to Nazism, she exhibited a readiness to be ruled, an eagerness for authoritarian structures that coexisted with an aggressive dedication to her own professional advancement. But her choices also highlight the vulnerability of schools that lack larger, more concrete social and political goals than a method of learning. Axster’s focus on loss attracted her to Montessori and made her vulnerable to Nazi ideology, but it failed to offer a larger vision of schools and the cultural work they accomplish in which American schools— however deeply flawed—were so well versed. In other words, if American schools were committed to teaching democracy, the problems lay in their interpretations of democratic thought and their methods, not in the greater goal. Axster proved that if schools could become organs of the state, as Nazified schools were, operating outside the boundaries of the state was not an immediate or guaranteed solution. As she lectured on devotion to the child, she complied with, and possibly actively facilitated, the alienation and peril of Jewish children. But for all of the meaning she found in Montessori’s messages about the role of schools in mediating parents who wanted children to bend to their desires, it had nothing to offer about the responsibility of schools in societies that wanted certain children eliminated. Wrestling with

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this question would not only have risked her ambitions—it would throw into sharp relief the fiction of thinking of education as apolitical work.

Completely Nazified German devotion to the child, according to American journalists, had a complex history. Responding to the masses of German women driven to the front lines to seek aid for their children after World War II, many journalists came to see them as opportunistic and resentful. Rather than the powerless, meek figures German women had been confused for, the New York Times reported, they were even more “completely Nazified” than the men because the “poison Nazi ideology ha[d] bitten deeper into their souls.”30 They contaminated society, some Americans surmised, through their natural role as teachers. In fact, maternal instruction in nationalism predated Nazism because it was fundamental to the German family structure, journalist Sigrid Schultz wrote in her best-selling 1944 book Germany Will Try It Again. Women, she argued, had always been “more fanatically pan-German than their menfolk” and, because of their role as children’s caretakers and first teachers, essential to the success of the Reich.31 If women like Axster did not commit the same kinds of crimes as German soldiers, Schultz suggested, they were all the same powerful political actors who set the ideological groundwork for fascism. Schultz’s contention, accurate or not, supported the narrow lens through which Americans conceived of “political” teaching: the indoctrination of children into particular regimes or ideologies other than democracy. As a result, Americans conceived of their own teachers, who were mostly women, to be less or differently political—and drawn to teaching for different reasons—than their German counterparts. If teachers from totalitarian regimes echoed the authoritarian nations and school structures in which they worked, the environments in which American teachers taught were assumed to create more democratic interactions. Borderlands schools show how flawed this premise was—some of the most political investments teachers made were through their support of unequal school policies, judgment of student aptitude, and curricular matters in which teachers created different versions of the same problematic ideas. Their work as “human engineers who . . . mold the citizens of tomorrow,” as El Paso teachers heard in training seminars, was often engineered, too, to help teachers to support social structures that benefitted the same racial, economic, and gender privilege structures that thrived outside of the classroom.32 And yet despite their many

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differences, one of the most important commonalities between Axster and American teachers was their shared disavowal of the notion that teaching was an inherently political exercise. Contrary to Axster’s claims that her teaching or scientific work was apolitical, it is impossible to separate her work from Nazism even as the Third Reich banned Montessori schools. Her history shows that she exploited Nazi ideology as much as she was restricted by it, and she eagerly deployed the power that state politics made available to her. Her treatment of Clara Grunwald makes for a powerful case in point. By the time Axster earned a place on the lecture circuit in 1932, claiming erroneously that Maria Montessori’s ideas “were not yet known” in Germany, Grunwald had been training German teachers in the Montessori method for more than a decade. For Grunwald and the other Jewish socialists that Axster would meet through the Montessori movement, teaching was deeply political work. Grunwald saw the potential of the movement to provide high-quality education to poor children, just as Maria Montessori had done in the Roman children’s asylum where she established her reputation. But, Grunwald lamented in a 1925 report, private Montessori children’s homes far outweighed public ones in Germany, of which there were only two. Those two houses, which took in thirty working-class children every day from eight o’clock in the morning to five o’clock in the evening, were “exemplary,” but they had little impact on the need for educational facilities for young children of working mothers.33 For Grunwald, opening schools for poor children was fundamental to what Montessori theory promised: attention to the child. To contend with the demand for teachers that opening more public schools would require, she began training teachers in the method herself, without Maria Montessori’s permission or signature on the completion materials. She may have expected that Montessori would have viewed this as a worthwhile compromise. But to Maria Montessori, teachers such as Grunwald threatened her own sense of authority over a rapidly growing movement. Axster recognized the distinction and seized the opportunity, untroubled by the less privileged children for whom Grunwald advocated. In 1925 Grunwald had formed the German Montessori Society (GMS), the third incarnation of an organization that represented the country’s growing interest in Montessori education. Axster, who trained with Montessori in London the following year, belonged to the GMS until 1930, when she and a group of other members formed a competing organization, the International Montessori Association (IMA), with Herbert Axster as its chair. The IMA was made up of wealthy conservatives, people whose political views contrasted sharply 130

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with the socialist leanings of many GMS members. In 1931, after Maria Montessori a received a letter stating that the GMS was training German teachers incorrectly, the GMS and IMA went head to head. Grunwald, in addition to training teachers independently, had developed a German Montessori grammar book. Grunwald’s supporters called on nationalist arguments to defend her decision “to become independent and not to slavishly transplant Rome to Berlin.” The Axsters were unmoved and accused Grunwald of misrepresenting Montessori’s ideas and “the ideological why” of her theories.34 Already doubtful, Maria Montessori disavowed the GMS and appointed the Axsters head of what would become the only remaining official Montessori organization in Germany. None of these developments can be understood as apolitical work, especially in light of the growing anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s. Axster fluctuated between recognizing and exploiting the political moment and revering the antipolitics of Montessori philosophy. In 1932, the year after Grunwald was removed, Axster claimed that “no foreign language, no class difference, no skin color or one race can be an obstacle to the child who will always feel close to another child.”35 She contended that children lived outside of politics and the political pressures of Germany in 1932, just as she did. But little in Germany supported these contentions, and she must have known this when she chose to ostracize Grunwald from the movement. Within a year, according to her own accounts, she would be helping four Jewish Montessori teachers to emigrate; Herbert helped to free one from arrest by the Gestapo.36 In the fall of 1935 one of her communist colleagues disappeared, never to be heard from again. That year she complied with orders to stop teaching Jewish children, but she said nothing about what happened to those children, the role she played in identifying them, or any conflict she felt about the order. Instead, Axster felt herself to be a target and later explained, “I did a fully unpolitical work and took care of children without discrimination of descent and race [and] I was called from one side Jewish and Communist, from the other side Fascist and Reactionary.”37 In the “time of dark powers,” as Axster would describe it, Montessori teachers were “denounced and called every name in the book, communists, Catholics, atheists, fascists, Jews, foreigners.”38 This is highly plausible, given the Nazi conflation of all threats with anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism, but at the same time, Axster embraced the opportunity to use those dark powers to empower herself. Regardless of the role she may or may not have played in helping some Jewish teachers, it is certain that Montessori’s antipolitics consistently opened the movement up to charges of holding unspoken political allegiances, both DEVOTED TO THE CHILD

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in wartime Germany and, as Axster would experience, in the postwar United States. Yet her dedication to Montessori science—and to a particular theory of devotion to the child—did little to help her articulate empathy toward Jewish children and many of her Jewish colleagues. In a society that was visibly turning to state-sanctioned terrorism and violence, Axster focused on her own professional advancement and authority. She must have had a sense of what happened to her socialist colleague, but her greater concern was how the “accident” of his arrest “endangered once more [her] work.”39 Forced by the Third Reich to disband the IMA in 1936, Herbert Axster told American military officials, all he could do was to help his wife “safeguard her scientific and practical work and to help some of our teachers to emigrate and find jobs in other branches of the association, as they could not remain in Germany with regard to their racial descent.”40 Herbert Axster would know: he was a patent lawyer well acquainted with what kind of information could and could not find purchase in the growing Nazi state. In short, Nazism may not have shaped Axster’s teaching, but her desire to teach certainly shaped her Nazi involvement. In 1939 Herbert moved to Peenemünde, the military proving ground that served as the home of the V-2 scientists and many of their families. Instead of going with him, Ilse and their children moved from Berlin to Herbert’s family farm in Loddin, a village on the Baltic Sea conveniently located near Peenemünde. There she ran an illicit Montessori kindergarten, headed the village’s NS-Frauenschaft, and earned a reputation for whipping and starving the Ukrainians and Poles she employed to work the family farm.41 When a county leader asked her to become a NSDAP member in 1937, she at first resisted, not because she disagreed with the party but because she “disagreed entirely” with the local leader and his management style. To her surprise, when she rejected the offer she was “instead of being pursued for this frankness . . . offered once more membership of the party.” The pursuit appealed to Axster’s need for recognition. And since she “nourished always the hope to come to a productive Montessoriwork [sic] in Germany” and did not want to jeopardize “all relations to the leading party,” she chose to join the Nazi party sometime that year.42 Axster’s repeated portrayal of herself as a victim obscures what she achieved in working for the state. Her neighbors’ descriptions of her, problematic and self-serving in their own way, suggest that some of the work she enacted through the NS-Frauenschaft echoed what she could no longer achieve through Montessori. Women who had worked with Axster in the local NS-Frauenschaft described a person dedicated to children and the Reich alike. Axster “spent her personal money for the support of the NS aims,” 132

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claimed a former neighbor, including through “representing the godless principles in the Nazi education of children.”43 As the organization’s leader, Axster convened women’s meetings, gave speeches on the importance of National Socialism, and offered shooting lessons.44 She also assigned herself the role of handling social welfare matters for village children and fed some of them from her home.45 As she said, she hoped her role as an NSFrauenschaft leader would help her to conceal her continued work as a Montessori teacher. But instead she continued to be marginalized and “attacked within the Frauenschaft on account of my educational work and principals [sic] which were called international or Jewish.”46 Former neighbors described her as a “convinced” and “fanatical” Nazi who “always had to concentrate her energy on a fized [sic] aim” and whose disposition grew worse precisely because she had no other avenues to power. “After the dissolution of the Montessori,” explained a former colleague, “she completely devoted herself to Nazi Socialism.”47 More generally, villagers described her as carrying a pistol and a horsewhip. Women claimed they did not attend her meetings or the Nazi performances she organized because “they did not like her on account of her appearance and conduct. . . . Frau Axster acted as if she was the ruler of the entire village,” one former colleague explained. Others referred to her as a Flintenweib, a “rough sort of woman” in the senses of both toughness and imperiousness.48 Even if these village women used Axster to conceal their own actions and complicity, the grounds upon which they criticized her—her unattractiveness, aggressiveness, and even manliness— contributed to a familiar portrait of someone who defied social expectation through belligerence, antagonism, and force. Worst of all, some said, she was self-serving and cowardly. Axster had encouraged other women to “defend the fatherland with kitchen knives and spades,” but when the Russian troops arrived, she was the first to run.49 To be sure, these descriptions hardly accorded with the vision of an early childhood teacher, even in a totalitarian state. Axster’s prizing of Montessori’s rigidity echoes both the rigidity of Nazi philosophy and her personal behaviors as she worked for the state, but even that does not establish what she was like in the classroom. Ironically, the only existing impressions of her as a teacher come from Paperclip children, to whom she taught German at Fort Bliss when they were older than the children she had taught in Berlin or Loddin. In fact, Paperclip children provide some of the most forgiving views of her: they remember her as intimidating in appearance and manner but dedicated and generous. Letters that she wrote to the Tschinkel children after they moved to Huntsville reflect a woman who was interested DEVOTED TO THE CHILD

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and engaged but still deeply invested in romantic visions of the past. “In the past I was in charge of schools that brought joy to everyone, where the children learn[ed] a lot with ambition and interest” she wrote to thirteen-yearold Walter Tschinkel, but she feared that school was “never a good time” for children any longer.50 She promised Henry Tschinkel that she would provide him with “some fun hiking songs soon, which we used to sing when we had to still go on really long walks, and when the country roads were not going to end.”51 Echoing the language of antimodernism that inflected all of her writings and ideas, these letters capture Axster’s incapability in distinguishing care for children, even individual, actual children, from a machinated philosophy of the past. In her attempts to seek authority and influence across various institutions—from schools to Nazi organizations—Axster enacted the personality traits most rewarded by a society in which the unleashing of violence against Jews, foreigners, and communists was endorsed by the state. She was controlling, uncompromising, and unquestioning. In Axster’s eyes, she conducted herself as “a German woman, whose husband was a soldier in the front line, wishing that my country would win the war and taking care of the children and the house.” In this respect, despite the eccentric turns of her career path, Sigrid Schultz would argue, her views and conduct were common. Axster conceded that she “stood positively to some fundamental ideas of the Nationalsozialismus and hoped for a long time that the good would win” but found, after battles with the Gestapo, other NS-Frauenschaft members, and other Nazis, that her “idealism had been misled.”52 She apologized for her idealism but not for her alignment with NSDAP values. She shared the Reich’s anti-Semitic, ethnic fundamentalist, and antimodern beliefs, even though the ideas about self-government that Montessori prized conflicted with Nazism’s authoritarian political structures. Women like Axster may have complied with the state for their own advantage, but this did not mean that the relationship always went well or that she was better off as a Nazi functionary than she was before Nazism.53 Similarly, working for the Reich did not necessarily offer her a better venue for transmitting and acting upon her nationalist values than did the classroom. Axster reveals what teaching and schools could and could not do for women who sought social authority when they lacked it, as they did, globally, at mid-century. The authority that she achieved as a Montessori “scientist” and member of a women-led education movement, versus the short-lived power she possessed as a Nazi leader, suggests that she found greater value in the former. So, too, does her continued desire to teach in the United States, 134

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even as she sought to build a new life there. Axster’s own grandchildren offer some of the most telling views of her, and some of the most potentially helpful ones for understanding what her career might reveal more broadly. Her grandson Felix has concluded, “I don’t doubt that my grandmother was terrible. At the same time  .  .  . blaming her was a way for my grandfather to whitewash himself and his Nazi entanglements.”54 Ilse’s experiences in El Paso, especially, reflect how her complicity and actions came to stand, in Americans’ eyes, for those of many other Paperclip members. Lilly Axster, her granddaughter, concurs with her brother and remembers Ilse as a “heavy Nazi,” a woman who would take her and her siblings to the Alps in the winter and the Italian seaside in the summer but was never “really present,” leaving them in the care of a nanny while she “always hi[d] behind her desk” working.55 These memories solidify the image that Axster’s professional trajectory suggests: a teacher who found more enjoyment and use in an ideology of the child than in actual children, more value in the intellectual challenge of building a movement than in the people who were part of it. In the United States, women shared this much with German women: they were drawn to teaching, sometimes out of their regard for children, but largely because it was a respectable profession that remained open to women of all social classes. Some, if not many, found themselves in need of making the profession enjoyable and sustainable. And some, certainly, might have preferred to follow Axster’s model of making teaching an intellectual pursuit without having to the accept maternal responsibility for other people’s children.

The Ideology of the Child American children in the Cold War, Sharon Stephens has argued, were imagined, discussed, and treated as the “vulnerable core” of a society at risk. Images of children, especially white, middle-class children, were deployed by politicians, educators, and culture makers to create political consensus around a broad platform of ideas, from interpretations of democracy to the development of the postwar national security state.56 The threats they faced may have been different from those Axster saw in prewar Germany, but Americans generally shared Axster’s view of the centrality of children to 1950s national political culture and their importance to building a new society. Certainly some El Paso parents pointed to the ways in which schools enhanced, rather than addressed, children’s vulnerabilities. “Democracy cannot hope to survive unless equal opportunity is given to students on both sides of the track,” Maxine Silva, a South Side parent and PTA leader, argued DEVOTED TO THE CHILD

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to the El Paso school board in 1947.57 But the kinds of vulnerabilities that school leaders were attuned to were almost completely focused on the fear of communism, anxieties around language proficiency, and the moral and hygienic threats they saw students to bring to school. Principals and teachers alike had startlingly little to say on record about systemic inequities that impacted both students and teachers on the South Side. Responding to a comprehensive 1950 report showing that South Side schools were not performing well, the committee responsible for it recommended a program of “social education” in neighborhood schools that focused anew on “social living, citizenship, and character education,” and a revived emphasis on “health, sanitation, family relationships, recreation, grooming, food, clothing, and shelter.” Finally, the committee recommended, every South Side elementary school should include homemaking and shop facilities.58 While children in South El Paso attended classes held in school hallways and auditoriums because their buildings were so overcrowded, school leaders maintained that improvement could only come about from a greater focus on reforming and training children for working-class lives. The greatest threat in the war against communism was not racial injustice, borderlands educators maintained, but the failures of individual students and their families. Ironically, given the skepticism of military officials toward Montessori, some of Axster’s ideas about education became normalized in a Cold War American culture that centered on the development of children into more capable, happy, and independent people—cold warriors in the rough. In this sense, both the scientists and their military allies were out of step with American culture. Explaining why he withdrew his daughter from a kindergarten class Axster taught out of a Fort Bliss barrack, V-2 scientist Walter Weisemann explained that he disagreed with her “scientific” methods of child training, including her “frown[ing] upon the spanking of children.”59 Weisemann’s objections were reflective of those of many Paperclip adults who themselves grew up in highly authoritarian schools and homes where corporal punishment was routine. His ideas about what constituted appropriate discipline diverged not just from Axster’s philosophies but, increasingly, from Americans’ ideas as well. Even though corporal punishment remained legal in every state but one during World War II, totalitarianism pushed Americans to radically recalibrate how they conceived of child rearing, discipline, and education. Education professors such as Columbia University’s Walter Falk argued that in Germany an “urgency of discipline” served to simultaneously control the young and emblematize the fascist state: the very concept “of authoritarian society[,] wherever maintained, is . . . reflected in the school in 136

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the form of corporeal [sic] punishment.”60 Americans may have been more permissive with their children, he and others argued, but, more important, they were democratic in their relationships. This was not the only way in which Axster’s ideas about childhood and the treatment of children seemed to align more closely with postwar American ideas about parenting than prewar German ones. Witnessing what happened in Nazi Germany altered the ideas and influence of a wide array of wartime American child experts, including psychologists, pediatricians, and anthropologists. From Margaret Mead to Benjamin Spock, child experts came to view fascism and authoritarianism as the products of human instincts allowed to grow unchecked, beginning in childhood. Germany’s “totalitarian ‘Kultur,’” pediatrician and psychologist Arnold Gesell diagnosed, subordinated “the family completely to the state, foster[ed] autocratic parent-child relationships, [and] favor[ed] despotic discipline.” The goal of democratic parenting, as he and a host of other child experts would refer to it, was to affirm the dignity of the child, “favo[r] reciprocity in parent-child relationships, and encourage humane discipline of the child through guidance and understanding.”61 In his best-selling 1943 book, The Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, Gesell recommended that parents stage their preschool children’s rooms much like a Montessori classroom, with “spheres of interest,” such as “a doll corner here, fitting toys there, a magazine on the bed and a tray of plasticene on the table.” Most important, Gesell recommended that children be allotted time each day to play without adult supervision, with parents even tying the child’s bedroom door shut to ensure this time alone. In contrast to prewar philosophies, in Cold War America the value of individualized play gained greater currency and was seen as essential to the development of a happy and liberated, if self-regulated, democratic child.62 The postwar turn to a supposedly apolitical ideology of the child, even as this thinking still clearly privileged white, middle-class, nuclear families, may not be surprising given the racial and social politics that the Paperclip children’s presence in American society illuminated. Competing postwar rhetorics of tolerance and pluralism, combined with an entrenched dedication to racial segregation and disenfranchisement, pushed teachers to negotiate between arguments about American equality and meritocracy and the reality of the nation’s dedication to creating and maintaining a racialized underclass. In the borderlands, educators did so in the ways this book uncovers surrounding school assignments, language policy, and curriculum. More broadly, Americans also turned to Montessori education, which caught on in the United States during the early Cold War and has remained a popular, DEVOTED TO THE CHILD

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if often elite, school of early childhood education ever since. In Montessori, Cold War Americans found something they had not needed earlier in the century: a progressive education movement that circumvented any potential reflection on or questioning of the progressiveness of American society. What is particularly striking about the introduction of Montessori to Cold War American society, especially in light of Axster’s work, is its explicit link to German Montessori, specifically. Nancy McCormick Rambusch, a young teacher who is widely credited with bringing the movement to the United States, was in many ways like the striver parents that Axster both resembled and criticized. In 1958 she and a group of other like-minded Catholic parents, whom she described as “sassy, articulate, and . . . sophisticated in their knowledge of Freud, Jung, and Spock,” founded the Whitby School, the first American Montessori school, and she was appointed the head of it.63 Rambusch would spend the next three decades advocating for the power and ideology of Montessori. The appeal of Montessori, she explained, stemmed from the postwar “American pattern of large, tightly spaced families” which, when compounded by traditional education methods, “depriv[ed] many children of ‘lebensraum.’” “The physical limitations of small servantless homes are cramping the child physically as well as emotionally,” she wrote, echoing Axster’s writings from decades earlier, “because there are frequently no provisions made for him to get away from others.”64 Rambusch’s reference to Lebensraum was an odd and conspicuous word choice that evoked the racialism and colonialism of Nazi theory. But it also alluded to and captured well the yearnings for space and separation that drove suburban development and white flight in the Cold War.65 If in Germany Lebensraum was associated with a violent, colonialist takeover, in the mid-century United States “living space” was associated with escaping the city and racialized urban/suburban boundaries. Many of the parents drawn to the Whitby School and a new American Montessori movement knew this firsthand. The application of Montessori to poor children, however, reveals even more pointedly why Americans would have been attracted to it at this time. While Montessori was becoming popular for middle-class white children such as those who attended the Whitby School, it also gained a following among urban educators who worked in the very kinds of segregated neighborhoods that HOLC identified and codified in El Paso in the 1930s. In Chicago, teachers began a Montessori school to prepare “fatherless Negroes and Puerto Ricans whose mothers work or are on relief ” for the “strange world of middle-class public schools.” In language reminiscent of the focus

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on El Paso children’s health and hygiene and on Mexican parents’ deficiencies, Montessori teachers described students whose “hands didn’t even operate as hands” because “they had never been given anything to handle.’”66 At its core, Montessori theory maintained that childhood was defined by oppression, but it identified the source of oppression as parents and adults generally. As a result, Montessori became a way to reform poor children just as it liberated suburban ones, a politics-free theory that seemed to serve a wealth of contradictory needs. Axster’s beliefs about Montessori as a solution to corrupt, modern societies, when combined with Americans’ fear of brown and Black children, transformed urban American Montessori schools into familiar places of improvement and assimilation, not unlike English classes in Cold War El Paso. Like Clara Grunwald, American educators located children’s physical and spiritual entrapment in poverty, though they pathologized the children in a way Grunwald never did. Like Axster, American Montessoris saw “conformity-oriented education” as a cause of further disenfranchisement for children of all types.67 Neither Axster nor many Americans gave much thought to the ways in which both states and schools disenfranchised, marginalized, and entrapped entire groups of children by design. The appeal of Montessori during the Cold War stems from problems that marked much of American education. These problems had long characterized schooling in the borderlands and beyond. Montessori’s rapid popularization in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when civil rights were both repressed and deployed in anticommunist campaigns, spoke to the education movement’s failure to address openly social or economic problems and to acknowledge on a larger scale the ways in which children were both political and politicized beings. The 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case, following the important Mexican American–led school segregation cases Mendez v. Westminster (1946) and Delgado v. Bishop (1947), revealed how children, specifically, suffered at the hands of racist, separatist governmental policies. Yet Montessori theory, as popularized by Montessori, Axster, and Americans such as Rambusch, framed children’s agency and suffering as a tension between young person and adult, child and parent, as opposed to a conflict between the child and the state, or between enfranchised and disenfranchised children. It is easy to see how this might have appealed to teachers, nations, and social systems like those in fascist Germany and in the United States, in which particular groups of children suffered systemically. Rather than misreading the links between two radically different

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political movements, Montessori and Nazism, Axster identified the ways in which they worked both for her and, potentially, for other privileged people and nations who view some children as more valuable than others. Axster highlights a final and more fundamental difficulty as well: the persistent problem in casting education as nonpolitical work. Her life shows that the ideology of the child is a political fiction, but only because she left such a full record of her thinking. For Axster, just as for such American educators as Alice Cummings, Alicia Swann, and the committees of teachers who wrote curricular materials in El Paso, the rhetoric of children’s care served as a retreat from, obfuscation of, and articulation of commitment to political systems, sometimes all at once. Schools, the story of the Paperclip children shows, are inherently political institutions; teachers can either implicitly or explicitly support or contest the political beliefs on which they are designed, but they cannot operate outside of them. Axster, as much as any other figure in Operation Paperclip, begs the question of what happens when ideology falls short of its promises or falls out of favor. But this failure did not challenge her desire for order and belief itself. From the time of the Third Reich’s edict banning Montessori education, her life trajectory was one of allegiance to different suspect ideologies. Neither this fact, nor her time in the United States, altered her commitment to Montessori. In this sense, Axster and the education of the Paperclip children—from their school placement to what they encountered in the classroom—illuminate how deeply political the project of education is. Education, in short, is never just about devotion to the child. It is about a devotion to certain ideas, social systems, and desires for stasis or change. The story of Axster, like the story of the Paperclip children, illuminates the beliefs, anxieties, and prejudices to which Cold War America was most committed, and it challenges us to question those to which we remain consigned today.

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T

he public story of the Paperclip families was never one of pluralism. Popular writing about the scientists and their children— and even internal military documents—show that the stories Americans wanted to hear about them were not ethnic, melting pot–type identity narratives, but were about the redemptive powers of American exceptionalism. In the families’ earliest days, the press relayed the Germans’ complaints about American food and the speed of the mail; less publicly, the scientists protested that their talents were being wasted, and that the U.S. military was “counting pennies” when the Third Reich had supplied them with whatever resources they requested.1 Their questioning of American culture and industry was dangerous, less to themselves than to the military institutions that had made the argument that the scientists belonged in this country. Over time, these differences seem to have receded in the Germans’ minds, and they certainly became less visible in the media. The Paperclip children and adults were Americanizing through their changed attitudes and beliefs, a kind of assimilation best available to people who were white. What their story makes plain to contemporary readers is how deeply assimilation has depended not on immigrants’ actual ability to adapt, but on the degree to which they are seen as adaptable and to which they confirm, however fallaciously, standard American narratives about freedom, industry, fairness, and opportunity. Men who had been characterized as the “former pets of Hitler” when they first arrived in the United States increasingly divorced themselves from that image as they and their families integrated into El Paso society and institutions.2 Their work made many Americans more confident in the prospects of winning the Cold War should it become hot. The scientists’ accomplishments at Fort Bliss and at the nearby White Sands Missile Range had bestowed on El Paso a unique role in the fight against communism, one that made an American border city distinctively American. When the scientists left for Huntsville, Alabama in 1950, first to build a ballistic missile and an American satellite at the Redstone Arsenal and then to help build the American space program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 141

El Pasoans felt the families’ loss. “The scientists have adapted themselves to the life of El Paso, and have been an important economic asset,” the El Paso Herald-Post mourned. “Their children attend El Paso schools and their wives have generously circulated through El Paso.”3 Versed in American racial customs and laws from their integration into El Paso’s social fabric, the families would make an even greater mark in Huntsville, where they were allowed to buy homes in town and live like any other white southerners. The Herald-Post’s mention of the children was no small point. The Paperclip community’s commitment to democratization was evidenced through their commitment to the nation; their commitment to the nation was measured through their children’s schooling and integration into American society. As had been the case throughout the Paperclip families’ time in the United States, the press understood the children’s presence in American schools as a sign of promise and trust on both sides. Precisely because of the future the children emblematized, they were noted frequently in coverage about the scientists, even if in just a line about their schooling. The scientists “have been ‘accepted’ here and are putting down roots in American soil, chiefly through their children,” proclaimed one such New York Times article in 1947.4 In winning over the scientists and their families, American beliefs about democracy’s strength and power of persuasion—the promise of America to serve as a moral corrective to autocratic, prejudicial, or otherwise enemy thinking—were proven true. Like the children, El Paso also changed during the early Cold War. As the United States strove to become a model, a protector, and a living example of democracy and pluralism in action for any nation that wanted to join it in the fight against communism, American government, at times reluctantly and with resistance, came to realize the democratic example more fully. International criticism of segregationist and racist domestic policies—toward public spaces and institutions, marriage, and voting, especially—served as a powerful force for change. This change extended to the borderlands. In 1957 Raymond Telles was elected El Paso’s first Mexican American mayor and the first Mexican American mayor of any major city in the United States. Telles had been born in South El Paso, attended Catholic schools, completed college in El Paso, and was a decorated World War II veteran, where, thanks partly to his bilingualism, he was made director of the Air Force’s lend-lease program with Latin America. A popular and effective two-term mayor, Telles created a racially integrated commission to study and address discrimination in civil service employment. Thanks to his administration, middle-class

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Mexican Americans gained expanded economic, social, and political power in the city.5 But this change did not extend to schools. Despite the fact that El Paso was the first school district in Texas to desegregate African American students in response to the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision, its “Mexican” schools remained Mexican. And a growing number of schools became Mexican. As Mexican Americans increasingly crossed residential borders in the 1950s and 1960s and Anglos expanded and developed the city’s western margins, once-Anglo schools flipped from one racial group to the other. Nationally, race reform, including school desegregation, went hand in hand with the amount of global media attention American policies generated, as Mary Dudziak has shown. Coverage of organized, violent white resistance at Little Rock’s Central High School convinced President Dwight Eisenhower to deploy the National Guard, but less spectacular forms of school segregation went unchecked.6 None of the methods used to segregate Mexican students in the borderlands captured this kind of global attention. But the methods and their ramifications were recorded in Alvarado v. El Paso Independent School District, a case that began in 1962 and reached the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1971. Alvarado documented how schools in El Paso, like other schools across the nation, had long segregated the city’s youth through zoning policies, busing routes that transported students to schools based on their racial identity rather than geographic proximity, and the sites chosen for new school construction. Report cards continued to be written only in English until 1975 even as the percentage of Mexican Americans in the city— and Mexican American teachers fluent in Spanish—rose.7 In other words, schools were some of the last bastions of racial segregation and Anglo supremacy in a city otherwise inching toward pluralism, if not equality. They were the last and most resistant institutions to change, as the story of Educating the Enemy reflects, precisely because they were the most important to the racial status quo. This history is easy to forget in light of so many pressing problems in our own time. In the years it has taken to write this book, the United States has devolved into what Germans have called the “American catastrophe.”8 The symmetries between the present and the Cold War are multiple. Our commitment to pluralism is unclear. We are at best a model of flawed democracy. Nativism, white supremacy, and the suppression of poor communities hold a visible, violent role in American public culture, incited and nurtured for four years by a presidential administration that disregarded American law

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and global public opinion. Voter suppression, police violence, and government corruption have become endemic, almost normalized, even as a culture of public protest has thrived alongside the catastrophe. The questions of national identity and values that these incidents have forced into public debate are painful, imperative, and profound. In just four years it became evident how poorly equipped democracy is to protect itself from authoritarianism. The United States is still no fascist state, but it is worth highlighting that these are questions familiar to historians of Nazism. “No matter what happens” from here on out, the philosopher Susan Neiman has argued in her work on German and American historical memory, “we will have to come to terms with the fact that the Trump presidency was possible.”9 Existential questions about the strength and authenticity of American democracy, which will continue far beyond any one administration or policy change, have often distracted from equally important questions about where schools fit in. Acts of racial disparity—including public school closures, the use of charter schools to deflect from questions about school equity, and the unequal onus of standardized testing—garner little public attention or response in the face of seemingly more significant political issues. Teachers who see the inequities, in their schools and in society, often feel poorly prepared to help their students question or challenge them.10 When they register these concerns, teachers frequently have in mind the challenges of helping students to debate specific topics respectfully and reflectively. Academic freedom and job security have a troubled history in the profession, but teachers also worry about offending individual students, sometimes many individual students. It is a legitimate concern, though one that can be overcome. Equally important—and perhaps less commonly considered by many teachers—is helping students to understand and question the larger systems of power and inequality that this book traces as well as students’ own historical location in those systems. What kinds of assumptions do we make when we talk about democracy? In what ways has citizenship been racialized? And how can a culture change when public institutions, especially schools, have been designed and exploited to create and deepen inequalities? The history of El Paso schools, from their organization to the curriculum, show how purposefully and powerfully school systems, and at times teachers, have suppressed, shut down, and avoided these questions. The marginalization of political talk in schools stems from the fact that schools serve youth, and American society has rarely excelled at recognizing young people and their concerns. In addition to rethinking what schools can and should do, the history that Educating the Enemy traces challenges us to 144

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consider more seriously how we treat children, some of the most contested and yet most invisible political subjects in our society. On this issue, El Paso has served as a geographic center of the American catastrophe through the enforcement of a federal “zero tolerance” policy against Central American immigrants. As thousands of migrants arrived daily to El Paso’s border in 2017 and 2018, the city became the epicenter of family detentions, a place where federal agents seized children from their parents and arrested them both. The stories of young children, including infants, incarcerated for months at a time, cared for largely by older children, evoked comparisons to the internment of families in places like Crystal City, Texas, during World War  II. It was the kind of choice that many Americans thought we would never make again, and yet this time it even more explicitly sought children as its victims. But it is the kind of impulse—the projection of our greatest social failures onto children—to which we have historically been prone. Even with the caveat that family separation has played a long historical role in the Latinx experience in the United States, the images of mass imprisonment of very young children served as some of the most mobilizing and challenging events of the American catastrophe.11 In capturing this response, journalist Francisco Cantú explained that “because we are rightly habituated to believe in the innocence of children, because the ‘othering’ of children requires a special degree of callousness,” the images “caused us to feel, in brief reverberating moments, a sense of horror at beholding our nation, our institutions, and perhaps even ourselves.” Many Americans, shocked by the images of incarcerated immigrant children in El Paso, understood what they were seeing as an aberration. This aberration may have had its historical rhyme, but it was not a typically American way of conducting policy, they thought. Cantú, a former Border Patrol agent, views it differently. “The incarceration of children was no singular event,” he concludes, but “a chilling extension of the dehumanizing policies and rhetoric that were already in place.”12 The dehumanization Cantú identifies has shaped the history of the borderlands and, as the story of this book reveals, had always involved and often started with children. Even though the family separations and incarcerations were out of step with much of public opinion, they built on a history in which certain kinds of families have been seen as more dangerous, and less deserving or capable of belonging, than others. This book is not primarily about immigration, even though some of the children it focuses on were immigrants. But it is about the treatment of children—the country’s own young citizens—as foreign and less American than actual foreign children. It is EPILOGUE

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about a nation that has historically been capable of seeing some children as enemies of the American promise because the promise historically had not been made to them. This truth reminds us that failures of democracy are as woven into our national character and thought as deeply as are our greatest aspirations. We must recognize these failures not just as voids or deviations, but as coexisting strands in American political thought. We might even consider them in relation to the larger historical links between American democracy and German fascism. Works such as James Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model earned wider readership during the Trump presidency as journalists and public intellectuals struggled to explain the state of American politics. Although the United States did not produce Nazism, Whitman argues, its legal system and specific history of nation building, particularly the genocide of its Indigenous people and use of Jim Crow, served as a model for Nazi policy. The United States, Whitman contends, “with its deeply rooted white supremacy and its vibrant and innovative legal culture, was the country at the forefront of the creation of racist laws.” American law was the most codified, most easily recognizable administrative tool of race supremacy and nativism for Nazis: “The image of America as seen through Nazi eyes in the early 1930s is not the image we cherish, but it is hardly unrecognizable,” he argues.13 In his careful study of German law, Whitman helps readers to see American racial policy and philosophy through a different lens. Educating the Enemy was not written as a response to Whitman’s work, but the story of Nazis’ attraction to American law and history and the American idealization of Germans who had served the Third Reich, including German prisoners of war, tell a connected story. To be sure, some Paperclip Germans—the scientists, the women who were assessed and determined by American officials to be “excellent” wives and mothers, and the children— were seen to hold great potential for assimilation and American citizenship, while a minority of others—including Ilse Axster—were not. And to clarify, Nazis did not need a model for white-supremacist sentiment: they looked to the United States for how to legislate ethnic fundamentalism, not how or why to believe in it. But there were other powerful tools of expression, as the history of schooling in the borderlands shows. The sentiments were articulated in many more slippery methods that extended well beyond World War II: through local school policy, through a teacher’s judgment or assessment, and through the textbooks, images, and classroom rules that children encountered and experienced. These actions and events were dangerous precisely because they were so routine and so patterned as to seem natural. 146

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Even liberal teachers could and did tell themselves that what we would now call “deficit thinking” about Mexican students was a commonsense, rational identification of students with the skills and behaviors they brought to school. Comparing the diminishment of Mexican children with the idealization of German children in the same space and time raises different questions than does thinking of either in isolation, including whether the uncomfortable problem Whitman traces, the issue of white supremacy and transnational identification, did not go both ways. It is important not to carelessly equate the two nations, or even the forms of race hatred in each. The Cold War United States was a democracy, not a fascist state. But the continued Anglo American identification with the scientists and their children, while they diminished, disenfranchised, and marginalized Mexican American children indicates that in German enemies, Anglo Americans saw something admirable, something of themselves. Anglos identified the similarities they saw in terms of a work ethic, an orderliness, and a shared intelligence. More honestly, they might have recognized an opportunism, a presiding self-interest, and an enduring preference of tribalism over pluralism that Germans and borderlands Anglos both possessed and defended. Anglo Americans, like Nazi Germans, often equated the advancement of others with their own loss and located the source of their own decline—or perceived sense of decline—in a racialized other. The story of the Paperclip children shows how this sense of disenfranchisement and competition was not just felt but taught, systemically, to Anglo children in school and in policies that shaped the schools they attended. How did these race narratives become the substance of school teachings? And more largely, how do structures of feeling materialize into organized educational institutions? In this sense, Claudia Koonz’s work on the Nazi conscience can be helpful. In her tracing of how Nazism transformed ethnic fundamentalism into a government, Koonz argues that, “like citizens in other modern societies, residents of the Reich believed the facts conveyed by experts, documentary films, popular science, educational materials, and exhibitions.” Koonz is careful to distinguish this kind of coordinated popular education from brainwashing, which, in her words, simply “turn[s] its subjects into mindless automatons.”14 The difference, Koonz contends, is that much of the German population, including educators, already believed; they were primed to learn what could be taught. They worked not under a racist state but for one because the state explained, confirmed, and rewarded their developing worldview and sense of national identification. The Third Reich sought a populace, one devoid of Jews, communists, and dissidents, EPILOGUE

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in which “Germans” would feel a greater sense of belonging because they shared ideas about who Germans were and want it meant to be German. To be sure, the dissemination of the narratives about Aryanism were coerced when they did not come naturally: rebellious teachers like Clara Grunwald were fired and worse, while others were required to take oaths and to support the goals of the Third Reich in their classroom. Schools in Nazi Germany were not organs of democracy, and they did truly differ from American schools in the ways that American occupation officials named. Germans also learned this sense of belonging from a range of sources neither of the state nor coerced by it. Ilse Axster’s childhood, particularly her experiences with the Wandervögel, illustrates how a movement that that was not Nazism nevertheless prepared generations of young people in traditions and ways of thinking about national identity that would later serve the Nazi state. The same can be said for Johann Tschinkel’s memories with which this books begins: he realized he complied with Nazism not just out of fear of the Third Reich, but because of the social costs defiance would extract and the rupture it would create with his own personal history. By his account, he was afraid less of political repression than of losing a sense of community and identity, one produced in part by what he learned in school. This is not to say it would have been easy for any person to rebel against the state; doing so often led to disastrous results. But Tschinkel shows that when people explained their complicity in a more honest fashion than they could when the stakes were high (such as in interviews for inclusion into Operation Paperclip), we can see how a political education forms from the narratives communities and families tell themselves about who they are and what it means to belong. This is true for democracy and fascism alike. The American conscience is not the Nazi conscience. Our national narratives of belonging differ from those that guided the society into which the Paperclip children were born, even if systemic, historical forms of racism and ideas about exceptionalism have been woven into them. But we do share a dedication to particular narratives at the cost of others and at the cost of some children over others. These narratives, about the virility and persuasion of American democracy, and about who is and is not a fully realized American, develop and are taught across a range of institutions and events. If the story of Educating the Enemy reminds us of anything, it is of the centrality of schools to their perpetuation and creation. More than just organs or delivery systems of our national conscience, schools are makers of it. They relay, construct, and perform ideas of citizenship—or a lack of fully realized citizenship—for their students at hand. 148

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Too often, this story shows, those beliefs about citizenship have been too distinct from one group of children to another, a failure enabled partly by school segregation and the inequalities it breeds and partly by what happens and is taught in schools. But it does not have to be this way. It can be difficult to prioritize schools when it feels as though democracy is failing, perhaps even crumbling. But history tells us that we must, and that public schools do not exist simply to communicate information about democracy. Instead, they promise to bring it into being, one child at a time.

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S Writing this book took me well beyond the scope of what I knew when I began it, and I am indebted to many people for helping me along the way. To begin, Jonathan Zimmerman and Robert Gunn read drafts of the book, each with as exacting and critical an eye as any writer could hope for. Jon is a legendary model of generosity, professionalism, and good faith to everyone he works with, which is an expansive—and ever expanding—group of historians. I am so very fortunate to be able to call him a mentor and a friend. Robert is my partner in life and work; no one heard more about this book or impacted my thinking more than he. From beginning to end, our conversations pushed me to sharpen and more fully explain my ideas. Jon and Robert, thank you. Zoë Burkholder, Judith Kafka, Nicole Wallack, Nick Juravich, Michael Glass, Lisa Stuhlberg, Andy Fleck, the New York University History of Education writing group, and the anonymous readers of American Quarterly and the Journal of American History all read and helped me to rethink parts of this work, often radically. Yoon Pak and Geraldo Cadava read the manuscript with generosity and acuity for the University of Chicago Press, helping me to resee important moments and make them better. Cynthia Gwynne Yaudes’s careful eye produced improved images for the book. Marion Rohrleitner’s German translations, both literal and cultural, were invaluable, and working on this together added another dimension to our long friendship. Danke schön, Marion. Monique Laney generously shared her own materials and her time with me in the earliest stages of this project, which helped me to get started. Ben Fagan, Juliane Braun, and Katharina Fackler helped me to access primary sources in Germany. Jim Albisetti, Brian Puaca, Ansley Erickson, David García, Julian Lim, Elizabeth Todd-Breland, Victoria-Maria MacDonald, Barbara Beatty, Ann Taylor Allen, Angus McLeod, Michael Neufeld, and Leah Gordon helped me with secondary sources or rethinking big ideas. I am ever thankful for how my friendships with Jon, Zoë, Judith, Ansley, and Nick—and those with other historians, too, including Joan Malczewski, Michelle Purdy, Victoria Cain, and Diana D’Amico—keep me grounded in the field of education history when my teaching life is often located elsewhere. My research for this book was made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foundation, and I simply could not have written the book without it. The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) also generously contributed to this 151

project. I benefited from a UTEP Career Enhancement Grant, the John D. Wilbanks Faculty Excellence Endowment in the Department of English, and the Robert B. and Lorez M. Price and Mary Smith Price Memorial Endowment in the College of Liberal Arts. I am grateful for all these funding sources, as well as the advocacy of the Department of English’s Steering Committee; the department chair, Brian Yothers; and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Denis O’Hearn. I interviewed many former Paperclip children and El Pasoans for this book, and some were exceedingly generous with their memorabilia as well as their memories. Walter, Henry, and Helga Tschinkel; Bernd Seiler; Helga Minning McGhee; Lilly and Felix Axster; and Genevieve Gonzalez all shared personal photographs and documents, including report cards. The children were, as children tend to be, overlooked in the historical record, and I could not have reconstructed the events here without so many interviewees’ contributions. I thank them for trusting me with these items. Many archivists helped me diligently, but Paul Brown was instrumental in helping me to make my way through the vast and at times confounding military collections at the National Archives. Carla Alvarez, of the Benson collections at the University of Texas Library; Tonia Wood, of the Texas State Archives; and Sue Taylor, of the New Mexico Museum of Space History, were generous with their time on site and from afar. Danny Gonzalez, at the El Paso Public Library’s Border Heritage Center, and Armando Loera, of the El Paso Independent School District, helped me to gain access to unprocessed and underappreciated local resources. Lisa Grant, the Crockett Elementary School librarian, located and dusted off boxes no one had thought of in many decades. Retired Lieutenant Colonel John Hamilton generously opened the collections at Fort Bliss to me. At the C. L. Sonnichsen collections at UTEP, Claudia Rivers and Abbie Weiser answered my every query over many years. I already knew going into this book what a privilege it would be to work with Elizabeth Branch Dyson at the University of Chicago Press. She and Mollie McFee make an expert and cheerful team, and they and Carrie Olivia Adams, Michael Koplow, and Ryo Yamaguchi shepherded this project through with enthusiasm, attention, and care at every stage. Copy editor Barbara Norton read the manuscript with precision. Truly, I could not have asked for more. My friends Beto O’Rourke and Ray Telles served as an informal El Paso research team, sending documents and information my way. Bill Clark, owner of Literary Books and my friend, lent me any book that he had that I needed during the pandemic, when libraries were difficult to access. 152

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I set out to write this book for people who may or may not have a foundation or even an abiding interest in education history. Around the dinner table and in auditoriums, friends whose expertise lies in areas other than history helped me to think about this project and why it matters. I am especially grateful to Rosa Alcalá, Jeff Sirkin, Amy O’Rourke, Stacey Sowards, Gyneth Garrison, Brad Jacobson, Melissa Barba, Lowry Martin, Noemi and David Tovar, Carley Moore, Nick Granbacher, Cady Erickson, Anne Giangiulio, Liz Camp, Andy Fleck, and Gwen Pulido. I am happy to have met Drew Newman in the last year of writing this book; our common interests have helped me to find a means for linking history and literary studies. Other friends improved my life in ways that contributed my writing, as well. Ann Horak sets the example for community service, and volunteering with her over the years has helped me to feel a deeper connection to where we live and a better understanding of borderland politics. Ashley Miller, Elizabeth Jeanneret, and Swati Agrawal gave me even more to look forward to on my research trips to Washington, D.C. Katie Sanders and her husband, Lawrence Gardner, were alive when this book began and now they are not, but the book means more to me because we talked about it. My graduate students are my best reference for the legacy of this history in El Paso schools today. Our conversations about school inequality and what it means to be a political teacher have taught me about the challenges and possibilities of addressing this history head on with young people. I especially want to thank Vanessa Sanders, Joe Avila, Renee Trejo, and Ana Maria Portas for their energy and commitment to these conversations and their dedication to young people in El Paso. My parents, Robert and Johanna Perrillo, have always set a foundation of support, encouragement, and love. From their eagerness to serve as the CEOs and counselors of Camp Perrillo to my father’s reading of article drafts, this book has profited from their devotion and influence. My sister and brotherin-law, Kerry and Tim Childress, lived in Germany when I started this project, and their experiences helped draw my eye to the story. Our conversations about Germany and the military, which took place across continents and states, have provided me with me context and grounding. Ann and Larry Gunn are generous and loving in-laws who treat me like their own daughter and are always interested in my work. Sara Wilhelm, my sister-in-law, came to our family’s rescue when we needed her most. I completed the last pieces of this book in the pandemic summer of 2020. One of my happiest memories from this time is my family’s long summer evening bike rides where, if we headed downtown, we circled around the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

153

schools of El Segundo Barrio or, if we headed east, we passed Hughey Drive, named after the superintendent. My son, Henry, would ask about stories he had heard from me of the teachers at San Jacinto Elementary whenever we approached it, ever troubled by the injustice they revealed. My daughter, Frances, is a committed and passionate writer herself, and we often compared notes on our respective projects while we biked. At nine and twelve years of age, they move me with their engagement with and empathy for their community and beyond. Throughout these days, during such a difficult time for the world, I knew that I would find in them something to remember and hold dear. My greatest fortune in life is to be a family with Robert, Frances, and Henry, who have gifted me with time, patience, and their own curiosity, all of which I needed in writing this book.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABBREVIATIONS ARMY. BHC. CF.

EAS.

EPCP.

EPISD. FBI. FS.

GIS.

HOLC.

IOH.

JIOA.

LG. LULAC.

Records of the Army Staff (RG 319), National Archives at College Park, MD. Border Heritage Center, El Paso Public Library; El Paso, TX. Chris Fox Collection (MS 150); C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, University of Texas at El Paso Library; El Paso, TX. Ernest August Steinhoff Papers, 1943–1982, Archives and Special Collections, New Mexico State University; Las Cruces, NM. El Paso Department of City Planning Records (MS 204), C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, University of Texas at El Paso Library; El Paso, TX. El Paso Independent School District Archives; El Paso, TX. Central Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (RG65), National Archives at College Park, MD. Foreign Scientist Case Files 1945–1958 (Entry A1-1B), Records of the Secretary of Defense (RG 330); National Archives at College Park, MD. George I. Sánchez Papers, 1919–1986, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin Library; Austin, TX. City Survey Files, 1935–1940, Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Records, 1933–1951, National Archives at College Park, MD. Institute of Oral History, C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, University of Texas at El Paso Library; El Paso, TX. General Correspondence, Records of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (Record Group 330.11.2), Records of the Secretary of Defense; National Archives at College Park, MD. Lois M. Godfrey Papers, New Mexico Museum of Space History; Alamogordo, NM. League of United Latin American Citizens Presidential Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin; Austin, TX. 155

OMGUS.

TGNC.

156

Records of the Office of the Military Government for Germany, Office of U.S. Occupation Headquarters, World War 2 (RG 260), National Archives at College Park, MD. Texas Good Neighbor Commission, Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives Commission; Austin, TX.

ABBREVIATIONS

N OT E S INTRODUCTION 1. Johann G. Tschinkel, “As I Remember My Life: From the Sudetenland to the USA with Rockets” (unpublished memoir, 1999), 52–53. Specifically, Tschinkel is referring here to his time as a member of the Wandervögel, a popular German youth movement that celebrated a return to nature and to an “authentic” German identity as an antidote to a quickly modernizing society. Historians have shown that Tschinkel’s assessment of interwar German organizations was usually accurate. For more on the Wandervögel, see chapter 5’s discussion of Ilse Axster. On the influence of German youth movements, see Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 1–12; Peter D. Stachura, The German Youth Movement, 1900–1945 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); Walter Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (New York: Basic Books, 1962); Andrew Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Robbert-Jan Adriaansen, The Rhythm of Eternity: The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). 2. Lois Godfrey, interview with George M. House, May 23, 1944, LG. 3. See Margaret Peacock, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Victoria M. Grieve, Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); William M. Tuttle, Jr., Daddy’s Gone to War: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 4. Lloyd Cook and Elaine Cook, Intergroup Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), 23. 5. For more on influence of psychology in the military and popular culture during World War II, see Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog, eds., Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); James H. Capshew, Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice, and Professional Identity in America, 1929–1969 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6. See Carlos Kevin Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004); Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., “Let All of Them Take Heed”: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2000); Rubén Donato, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997); Rubén Donato, Mexicans and Hispanos in Colorado Schools and Communities, 1920–1960 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Jeanne  M. Powers, “Forgotten History: Mexican American School Segregation in Arizona from 1900–1951,” Equity and Excellence in Education 41, no. 4 (2008): 467–481; David G. García, Tara J. Yosso, and Frank P. Barajas, “‘A Few of the Brightest, Cleanest, Mexican Children’: School Segregation as a Form of Mundane Racism in Oxnard, California, 1900–1940,” Harvard Educational Review 82, no. 1 (2012): 1–25; David G. García, Strategies of Segregation:

157

Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2018). 7. Henry Tschinkel, interview with the author, April 27, 2015. 8. This argument is made most powerfully in Brian E. Crim, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). 9. Though oral history functions as what Joan Tumblety calls a “performanc[e] of remembering” influenced by “intervening presents,” it nevertheless can powerfully nuance other forms of historical documentation, including those I draw on in this book. The literature on oral history and memory is extensive. See Joan Tumblety, ed. Memory and History: Understanding Memory of Source and Subject (London: Routledge, 2013), 7; Kathleen M. Blee, “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lesson from Oral Histories of the Klan,” Journal of American History 80, no. 2 (1993): 596–606; Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 48–58. On oral history and fascist states in particular, see Kimberly Ann Redding, Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow: Remembering Youth in Postwar Berlin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), xvii–xxxv. 10. Helga Minning McGhee, interview with the author, January 12, 2016. 11. Ursula Mrazek Vann, interview with the author, June 12, 2016. 12. Helga Minning McGhee, interview with the author, January 12, 2016. 13. Clarence G. Lasby, Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War (New York: Atheneum, 1971); Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America (New York: Back Bay Books, 2015); Monique Laney, German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (New York: Mariner Books, 2015); Crim, Our Germans. 14. Michael Neufeld, who has studied the scientists’ histories and professional accomplishments extensively, estimates that half of the V-2 group was genuinely affiliated with the NSDAP at some point. This does not take into account the wives’ political beliefs, which were more difficult to document but could be important. See Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 217. 15. James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 16. For more on thinking about the concepts of “Anglo” and “Mexican,” see Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).

CHAPTER 1 1. Recollections of Uwe Hueter, “Immigration as a Great Adventure,” panel discussion, Apollo 11 Legacies, Listen Notes: Apollo 11 Legacies, July 3, 2019, hosted and produced by WHNT 19 News, https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/apollo-11-legacies-whnt -news-19-ONHFcekn4LT/.

158

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

2. “A Farewell Message,” Goethals Sheet (newsletter of the USNS Goethals), December 16, 1946. In possession of the author, courtesy of Walter Tschinkel. 3. “German Scientists’ Wives Arrive in E.P.,” El Paso Herald-Post, March 1, 1947. 4. “We Want with the West,” Time, December 9, 1946, 67. 5. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, 5th ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995), 184; Harold Rugg, Democracy and the Curriculum: The Life and Program of the American School, ed. Harold Rugg (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939), vi–vii. Most of these curricular examples can be found in “Students Pledge Allegiance in Rededication Programs,” El Paso Herald-Post, February 13, 1948. 6. “German Pupils Sing ‘Eyes of Texas,’ Like to Recite Pledge to U.S. Flag,” El Paso Herald-Post, August 5, 1947. 7. For more on the fight between the War Department and State Department and on Paperclip, including other groups of scientists who went to work at other American military sites, see Crim, Our Germans. See also Laney, German Rocketeers; Lasby, Operation Paperclip; Hunt, Secret Agenda; Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door; Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip. Important interpretations of Paperclip and the scientists can also be found in Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space; Michael B. Peterson, Missiles for the Fatherland: Peenemünde, National Socialism, and the V-2 Missile (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 8. Statewide Survey of Enumeration, Enrollment, Attendance, and Progress of Latin American Children in Texas Schools (Austin: State Department of Texas, 1944). 9. On the Paperclip families’ residency in Huntsville, see Laney, German Rocketeers. 10. Statewide Survey in Texas Schools; “Inter-American Relation Education in Texas,” in Teacher Training Workshop, Inter-American Relations Association, Program, Personnel, Reports, Recommendations, Summaries, University of Texas, Austin, April 17–22, 1944, p. 2, box 54, folder 2, GIS. 11. Harold E. Davis, “Education Program for Spanish-Speaking Americans,” World Affairs 108 (1945): 43–48, at 45. 12. Walter Tschinkel, interview with the author, April 27, 2015. 13. Hertha Heller Hughes, interview with the author, June 30, 2016. 14. Regine Woerdemann Von Aspe, interview with the author, June 2, 2015. 15. “German Pupils Sing ‘Eyes of Texas,’ Like to Recite Pledge to U.S. Flag,” El Paso Herald-Post, August 5, 1947. 16. Eighty-one of the children were born after 1940. All information about the ages of the children comes from “Roster—Ordnance Research and Development Division Suboffice (Rocket)/Fort Bliss, TX: Department of the Army Special Employees (DASE) and/ or Their Dependents,” LG. 17. Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origin of the Cold War, 1917–1953 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), 64. 18. Quoted in Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 37. 19. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944). 20. Alexander Wolff, “The Barrio Boys,” Sports Illustrated, June 27, 2011, 62–69. 21. Isser Woloch, The Postwar Moment: Progressive Forces in Britain, France, and the United States after World War II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 241.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

159

22. On these relationships, see Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 23. WAR from Civil Affairs Division, Memo to OMGUS, August 7, 1947, Entry 134A, Box 19, ARMY. Letters of protest from American leaders ranging from Albert Einstein to the civil rights activist Walter F. White can be found in this same collection. 24. Cited in Crim, Our Germans, 27. 25. Peterson, Missiles for the Fatherland, 253. 26. “German Scientists at Fort Bliss Tell of Research in First Interview Here,” Fort Bliss News, December 6, 1946, 3. 27. Affidavit of Membership in NSDAP of Ernst E. Seiler, November 14, 1948, box 156, file: Seiler, FS. 28. Affidavit of Membership in NSDAP of Guenther H. F. Haukohl, May 15, 1947, box 65, file: Haukohl, FS. 29. John Knox Jessup, “Western Man and the American Idea,” Life, November 5, 1951. 30. Restricted Biographical and Professional Data for Rudolf Friederich Franz Minning, May 16, 1947, box 113, file: Minning, FS. 31. Restricted Biographical and Professional Data for William Anthony Mrazek, February 14, 1947, box 134, file: Mrazek, FS. 32. Restricted Biographical and Professional Data for Ernst Dietrich Geissler (JIOA Form No. 1), March 8, 1947. In Geissler file, box 50, file: Geissler, FS. 33. Department of Justice Special Inquiry of Herbert Felix Axster, October 6, 1949, p. 31, file 77-963, FBI. 34. Brian C. Etheridge, “The Desert Fox, Memory Diplomacy, and the German Question in Early Cold War America,” Diplomatic History 32, no. 2 (2008): 207–238. 35. Quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 311. 36. Restricted Biographical and Professional Data for Arthur Louis Huge Rudolph, May 16, 1947, box 139, file: Rudolph, FS. In the 1980s, as historians began investigating Paperclip and this information became public knowledge, Rudolph forfeited his American citizenship and returned to Germany. Nor could Americans easily contend with the fact that the V-2 was built with slave labor given, that they were recruiting men who profited from it. For example, one journalist reported the 1945 experience of Lieutenant Colonel Herb Karch when he discovered the Mittelwerk factory, where “a few days previously, 9,000 workers had been turning out V-2’s at a rate of 700 a month” (emphasis mine). See Don Eddy, “Life among the Rockets,” American Magazine, August 1947, 99. 37. See David B. Denn, Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 38. James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 39. Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe, 109. 40. Walter Jessel to Officer in Charge, Appendix A, June 12, 1945, box 8, Entry (A1) 170, OMGUS. Saul Padover, an intelligence officer who interviewed German civilians after the war, found a similar pattern and concluded, “Hate Russians, flatter Americans— such seems to be the Germans’ present technique.” See Michaela Hoenicke Moore, Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933–1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 334. 41. On these ideological conflicts and reforms, see Andrew Hartman, Education and the

160

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Thomas D. Fallace, In the Shadow of Authoritarianism: American Education in the Twentieth Century (New York: Teachers College Press, 2018); Zoë Burkholder, “‘A War of Ideas’: The Rise of Conservative Teachers in Wartime New York City, 1938–1946,” History of Education Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2015): 218–243. On the Great Books program, see Joan Shelley Rubin, “The Enduring Reader,” in The Enduring Book, ed. David Paul Nord, Joan Shelley Rubin, and Michael Schudson, vol. 5 of The History of the Book (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 412–431. 42. “Americanism, Communism, and Fascism,” School Life 30, no. 5 (1948): 28–31, at 29. 43. A. O. Wynn, “A Study of the Operations of the El Paso Public Schools during the School Years 1930–31 through 1945–46” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at El Paso, 1948), 23. 44. A. H. Hughey, Bulletin to Principals and Teachers: Supt’s Bulletin #15, March 9, 1948. 45. Commissioner John W. Studebaker, “Communism’s Challenge to American Education,” School Life 30, no. 5 (1948): 1–7, at 3. 46. “Inter-American Relation Education in Texas,” in Teacher Training Workshop, InterAmerican Relations Association, Program, Personnel, Reports, Recommendations, Summaries, University of Texas, Austin, April 17–22, 1944, p. 5, box 54, folder 2, GIS. 47. On German schools and denazification, see Brian M. Puaca, Learning Democracy: Education Reform in West Germany, 1945–1965 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009); Benita Blessing, The Antifascist Classroom: Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945–1949 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 48. Helen Dwight Reid, “Opportunity for American Youth,” School Life 30, no. 5 (1948): 17. 49. Report of the United States Education Mission to Germany (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 14, 23. 50. On use of Dewey in the American occupation, see James F. Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5; Puaca, Learning Democracy; Blessing, The Antifascist Classroom. Fallace shows that Dewey critics often distinguished between student-centered means of organizing classrooms and schools from his philosophies of democratic thinking, which they continued to uphold. See Fallace, In the Shadow of Authoritarianism, 90–99. 51. On the Gallup poll information, see Richard W. Steele, “American Popular Opinion and the War against Germany: The Issue of Negotiated Peace, 1942,” Journal of American History 65, no. 3 (1978): 704–723, at 710 n. 16; Ron Rubin, The Barbed-Wire College: Reeducating German POWs in the United States During World War II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 7–8. On the differing views and representations of Germans and Nazis versus the Japanese, see John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 52. See Herman, The Romance of American Psychology; Pfister and Schnog, Inventing the Psychological; Capshew, Psychologists on the March. 53. Sigrid Schultz, Germany Will Try It Again (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944), 180. 54. “Lack of Shame Normal,” Science News Letter, June 23, 1945, 389–390, at 389. 55. Report of the United States Education Mission to Germany (Washington, DC: U.S. Gov-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

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ernment Printing Office, 1946), 3. See also William Harlan Hale, “Germany’s Deformed Conscience,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1946, 1–9, at 3. 56. Americans in the occupation zone found that young Germans were often more concerned about obtaining food than about their education opportunities. Report No. 12, Attitudes of Some Bavarian Schoolchildren (28 June 1946), in Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt, eds. Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys, 1945–1949 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 86–87. 57. “We Want with the West,” Time, December 9, 1946, 67. 58. Lotte Tschinkel, “Memories of a Long Life” (1984), 79. Personal memoir, in possession of the author. 59. “We Want with the West,” Time, December 9, 1946, 67. 60. Harry F. Byrd, “Hitler’s Experts Work for Us,” American Magazine, March 1948, 136. For similar characterizations of the Germans, see also Morton M. Hunt, “The Nazis Who Live Next Door,” Nation, July 16–23, 1949, 82–84. 61. “American Cooking ‘Tasteless,’ Says German Rocket Scientist; Dislikes Rubberized Chicken,” El Paso Herald-Post, December 6, 1946, 1. 62. Curt Riess, “Fort Bliss, the American Peenemünde,” Der Kurier, March 10, 1948, p. 5, box 13, folder: G-2 Miscellaneous, January 1948–June 1948, JIOA. 63. Report of the United States Education Mission to Germany (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 49. 64. Tania Long, “Spawn of the Nazi Code,” New York Times, November 25, 1945. 65. Ray L. Hamon (Chief, School Housing, School Administration Division of U.S. Office of Education), “School Plants in Germany,” School Life 20, no. 1 (1947): 20–22, at 22. On teachers’ professional agency in Nazi Germany, see Konrad H. Jarausch, “The Perils of Professionalism: Lawyers, Teachers, and Engineers in Nazi Germany,” German Studies Review 9, no. 1 (1986): 107–137; Marjorie Lamberti, “German Schoolteachers, National Socialism, and the Politics of Culture at the End of the Weimar Republic,” Central European History 34, no. 1 (2001): 53–82; Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (New York: Berg, 2010). 66. Bess Goodykoontz (Member of Education Mission to Germany), “U.S. Education Mission Report,” School Life 20, no. 1 (1947): 10–12, at 11; Philip G. Johnson, “Secondary Education in the Schools of Germany,” School Life 20, no. 1 (1947): 12–14, at 13. 67. “U.S. States Policy on German Education,” New York Times, October 8. 1947. 68. “Citizenship to Be Taught in All Classes,” El Paso Times, August 31, 1940. 69. El Paso Public Schools, Tentative Guide for Language Arts, Grade 5 (August 1950). 70. “German Pupils Sing ‘Eyes of Texas,’ Like to Recite Pledge to U.S. Flag,” El Paso Herald-Post, August 5, 1947. 71. Tania Long, “Spawn of the Nazi Code,” New York Times, November 25, 1945. 72. Bea Bragg, “Democracy’s Children,” Rocky Mountain Empire Magazine, September  5, 1948, 8; Virginia Strom, “Children of Germans Salute American Flag,” El Paso Herald-Post, July 3, 1947. 73. This system of punishments echoes throughout scholarship on Mexican American education but has been reinforced by El Pasoans, including Elena Ruiz Tovar, interview with the author, April 25, 2017; Raul Villa, interview with the author, May 13, 2017. See also Rosa R. Guerrero, interview with Paulina Aldrete, May 3, 1983; Joe A. Rosales, interview with Homero Galicia, February 7, 2009, IOH.

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74. Report of the United States Education Mission to Germany (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 19, 34. 75. El Paso Public Schools, Take a Good Look at Your Schools (August 1951), folder: Schools, BHC. 76. Ray Past, “English (Only!) Spoken Here,” Password 20, no. 2 (1975): 63–77, at 74. 77. Oscar J. Martinez, The Chicanos of El Paso: An Assessment of Progress, Monograph 59 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1980); Ray Past, “English (Only!) Spoken Here,” Password 20, no. 2 (1975): 63–77, at 75. 78. “Justice Urged for Mexicans in the U.S.,” Washington Post, May 6, 1942, 13. 79. Tom Sutherland to Neville G. Penrose, October, 1949, folder 17, box 1989/059-47, TGNC. On the fear of German influence in Latin America, see Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 80. Neville G. Penrose to Sam M. Tabor, January 27, 1950, folder 18, box 1989/059-47, TGNC. 81. George Sessions Perry, “El Paso,” Saturday Evening Post, February 4, 1950, 58. 82. U.S. Bureau of Census 1950, “Block Housing Statistics, El Paso, Texas,” 1950 Housing Census Report 5, no. 59 (1952): 3; Bureau of the Census, Housing Characteristics of the New York-Northeastern New Jersey Standard Metropolitan Area: April 1, 1950, 1950 Census of Housing Preliminary Reports (July 22, 1951), 9; Bureau of the Census, Housing Characteristics of the Chicago, ILL., Standard Metropolitan Area: April 1, 1950, 1950 Census of Housing Preliminary Reports (June 8, 1951), 9; Bureau of the Census, Housing Characteristics of the Los Angeles, CALIF., Standard Metropolitan Area: April 1, 1950, 1950 Census of Housing Preliminary Reports (May 15, 1951), 9; Bureau of the Census, Housing Characteristics of the Dallas, Texas, Standard Metropolitan Area: April 1, 1950, 1950 Census of Housing Preliminary Reports (June 8, 1951), 9; Bureau of the Census, Housing Characteristics of the Houston, Texas, Standard Metropolitan Area: April 1, 1950, 1950 Census of Housing Preliminary Reports (June 8, 1951), 9. 83. Quoted in San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed,” 49. 84. As paraphrased in “Confidential Report of the Survey in El Paso, Texas for the Mortgage Rehabilitation Division, Home Owners’ Loan Corporation,” May 6, 1936, 1, box 154, folder: El Paso, HOLC. 85. El Paso Committee on the Border Project, A Study of the Conditions Affecting Children in El Paso County (El Paso: Border Project Committee, 1948), 116. 86. El Paso Public Schools, Take a Good Look at Your Schools (August 1951), folder: Schools, BHC. 87. Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880–1920 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 6. 88. Pauline Kibbe, Report to Dr. Sánchez on Trip to El Paso and Del Rio, Texas, May 19–26, 1943, 4, folder 14, box 32, GIS. 89. Lucille Prim Jackson, “An Analysis of the Language Difficulties of the SpanishSpeaking Children of Bowie High School, El Paso, Texas” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1938), 48. 90. See Natalie Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 82–85.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

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91. Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), 134–135. 92. President’s Commission on Migratory Labor quoted in Nellie Ward Kingrea, History of the First Ten Years of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission and a Discussion of Its Major Problems (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1954), 17. 93. See S. Deborah Kang, The INS on the Line: Making Immigration Law on the US-Mexico Border, 1917–1954 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 114–138. 94. On the response of middle- and working-class Mexican Americans, see Hernández, Migra!, 174–175. 95. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1950 Census of the Population: A Report of the Seventeenth Decennial Census of the United States, vol. 2, part 43: Texas (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), table 34, p. 98. 96. Cristina Salinas, Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 5. 97. Dorothy Swope, “Let’s Make Democracy Work for the Latin-American Child,” Texas Outlook 31, no. 6 (1947): 21–22, at 22. 98. Davis, “Education Program for Spanish-Speaking Americans,” 44; Dorothy Swope, “Let’s Make Democracy Work for the Latin-American Child,” Texas Outlook 31, no. 6 (1947): 21–22, at 22. 99. Mary Ishenhower Perkins, “Our Border Problems,” Texas Outlook 28, no. 7 (1945): 40. 100. Quoted in Ray Past, “English (Only!) Spoken Here,” Password 20, no. 2 (1975): 63–77, at 74. 101. Interview with Regine Woerdemann Von Aspe, June 2, 2015. 102. Axel Roth, “Remembrances” (unpublished memoir, n.d.), 16. In author’s personal collection. 103. Walter Tschinkel, interview with the author, April 27, 2015. 104. Lotte Tschinkel, “Memories of a Long Life,” 87. 105. Memo to Col. Bixel, asst chief of staff, Third Army, from Leonard Clark, Combined Arms Center, “Inspection of Operation Paperclip,” April 13, 1946, box 1, RG 338.9.3, Records of the Third Army, National Archives at College Park, Maryland. 106. Lois Godfrey, interview with George M. House, May 23, 1944, LG. 107. Lois Godfrey, interview with George M. House, May 23, 1944, LG. 108. Virginia Strom, “Children of Germans Salute American Flag,” El Paso Herald-Post, July 3, 1947. 109. Kay Bowers, “German Household Taste Lingers as Scientists’ Wives Go American,” El Paso Herald-Post, April 23, 1948. 110. Fred Hechinger, “Eagle without the Swastika,” Harper’s, January 1950, 54–62, at 57.

CHAPTER 2 1. Christel Angele Jacobson, interview with the author, October 28, 2016. 2. Regine Woerdemann Von Aspe, interview with the author, June 2, 2015. 3. Regine Woerdemann Von Aspe, interview with the author, June 2, 2015. 4. George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 6.

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5. Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, A Breath of Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 41. 6. Department of Planning, City of El Paso, “Median Number of School Years Completed, School Tracks,” p. 23, folder: Schools, BHC. 7. By contrast, 61 out of 137 Austin High graduates and 69 out of 135 El Paso High graduates had earned college degrees. See Thula Hardie, “A Study of Opinions of Graduates of El Paso High Schools from 1936–1946” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at El Paso, 1950), 51. 8. Elena Ruiz Tovar, for example, lived across the street from African American children that she was not allowed to play with and says she did question why. Interview with the author, April 25, 2017. 9. For more on this event and its importance to thinking about race construction, see Mario García, “Mexican Americans and the Politics of Citizenship; The Case of El Paso, 1936,” New Mexico Historical Review 59, no. 2 (1984): 187–204; Neil Foley, “Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problem with the Color Line,” in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest, ed. Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parkers (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 341–355; Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, “Good Neighbors and White Mexicans: Constructing Race and Nation on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Journal of American Ethnic History 33, no. 1 (2013): 5–34. On Mexican Americans’ relationship to Black civil rights in Texas, see Brian D. Behnken, Fighting Their Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Texas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Neil Foley, Quest for Equality: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 10. Robert Upton, interview with Michelle L. Gomilla, 1994, “Interview no. 871,” IOH. See James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 11. For more on the scientists’ views on race as it pertained to African Americans, see Laney, German Rocketeers. 12. Alonso S. Perales, Are We Good Neighbors? (San Antonio, TX: Artes Gráficas, 1948); Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). 13. Manny C. Morales, interview with Richard Estrada, 1975, “Interview no. 178,” IOH. 14. “Confidential Report of the Survey in El Paso, Texas for the Mortgage Rehabilitation Division, Home Owners’ Loan Corporation,” May 6, 1936, p. 3, box 154, folder: El Paso, HOLC. 15. “Modern Fort Bliss Is Vast Plant with AA Weapon,” El Paso Herald-Post, November 4, 1948. 16. William V. D’Antonio and William H. Forum, Influentials in Two Border Cities: A Study in Community Decision-Making (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), 223. On how this groupthink dynamic led El Paso to lag behind other southwestern cities in development in the 1950s and 1960s, see Bradford Luckingham, The Urban Southwest: A Profile History of Albuquerque, El Paso, Phoenix, Tucson (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1982). El Paso’s lack of importance in histories such as Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), illuminates the city’s limitations as well.

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17. “Army Will Move Bliss Scientists,” El Paso Herald-Post, November 4, 1949. 18. Axel Roth, “Remembrances” (unpublished memoir, n.d.), 18. In the author’s personal collection. 19. Robert Ely, quoted in Clarissa Rile Hayward, How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 119; George  F. Webber, quoted in Manuel Bernardo Ramirez, “Life and Society in Mexican El Paso, 1920–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mississippi, 2000), 97. 20. See Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Norton, 2017); Jennifer S. Light, “Nationality and Neighborhood Risk at the Origins of FHA Underwriting,” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 5 (2010): 634–671; Amy E. Hillier, “Residential Security Maps and Neighborhood Appraisals: The Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Case of Philadelphia,” Social Science History 29, no. 2 (2005): 207–233. 21. “Confidential Report of the Survey in El Paso, Texas for the Mortgage Rehabilitation Division, Home Owners’ Loan Corporation,” May 6, 1936, 1, 8, 29–30, 10, box 154, folder: El Paso, HOLC. 22. Quoted in Monica Perales, Smeltertown: Making and Remembering a Southwest Border Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 31. 23. Wynn, “A Study of the Operations of the El Paso Public Schools,” 36. Wynn shows that this drop was confined to this single year, which suggests that much of it was due to repatriation rather than the longer effect of economic depression. 24. Jongkwan Lee, Giovanni Peri, and Vasil Yasenov, “The Employment Effects of Mexican Repatriations: Evidence from the 1930s,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 23885, September 2017, 19–20, 24, 32. http://giovanniperi.ucdavis .edu/uploads/5/6/8/2/56826033/mexican.pdf (accessed July 1, 2018). See also Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); Kang, The INS on the Line. 25. Luckingham, The Urban Southwest, 105. While the number of ethnic Mexicans rose in the city in the 1940s, their percentage of the urban demographic dropped, largely because of the postwar expansion of Fort Bliss. The percentage of Spanish-surnamed students in El Paso dropped from 70.77 percent to 68.19 percent between 1929 and 1942. See Lyle Saunders, The Spanish-Speaking Population of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1949). On ethnicity and migration in El Paso leading up to World War II, see Julian Lim, Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). On postwar population growth in the Sunbelt, see Geraldo L. Cadava, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 59–60; Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 108–110. 26. Patricia Reschenthaler, Postwar Readjustment in El Paso, 1945–49, Southwestern Studies 6, pt. 1 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1968), 4. 27. Ed Holden to Nelville Penrose, June 21, 1950, box 1989/59-18, folder 43, TGNC. 28. Carey McWilliams, “The El Paso Story,” Nation, July 10, 1948, 46. 29. Byron England, “El Paso Forges Ahead in Curriculum and Building Design,” American School Board Journal 114, no. 2 (1947): 43–45. 30. Wynn, “A Study of the Operations of the El Paso Public Schools,” 48. It is difficult to calculate exactly how many Mexican students attended Anglo schools, but the school

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district was roughly 63 percent Mexican. Thus, the 7 percent estimate allows for over 3 percent of the South Side population to consist of Anglos and African Americans. 31. Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 66–67. 32. Public Schools of El Paso, Texas, Rules and Manual of School Employees (El Paso: El Paso Public Schools, 1944), 76. 33. Dorothy N. Elder, “No Housing Available,” Password 5, no. 2 (2005): 97–98, at 97. 34. Elena Ruiz Tovar, interview with the author, April 25, 2017; Bill Rodríguez, interview with Oscar J. Martínez and Mario Galdos, 1979, “Interview no. 610,” IOH. 35. Gonzalo Rangel, interview with Edmundo Valencia, 2010, “Interview no. 1480,” IOH. 36. “Group Opposes Giving Kern Place Building First,” El Paso Herald-Post, January 28, 1947. 37. “School Chief Will Meet Again with Burleson PTA,” El Paso Herald-Post, March 12, 1948. 38. “School Superintendent and PTA Clash over Questions at Burleson School,” El Paso Herald-Post, November 11, 1948; “School Chief Will Meet Again with Burleson PTA,” El Paso Herald-Post, March 12, 1948. 39. Thomas S. Sutherland to Hector P. Garcia (Corpus Christi), May 27, 1949, box 1989/59-19, folder 61, TGNC. 40. Alice B. Cummings, interview with Richard Estrada, 1978, “Interview no. 426,” IOH. 41. “A Sharp Rebuke,” El Paso Herald-Post, April 8, 1948. 42. “Victorious Board Members Continue Present Policies,” El Paso Herald-Post, April 5, 1948. 43. Hayward, How Americans Make Race, 63. 44. “German Scientists at Fort Bliss Receive up to $5310 a Year,” El Paso Herald-Post, July 18, 1947. 45. Curt Riess, “Fort Bliss, the American Peenemünde,” Der Kurier, March 10, 1948, 5, box 13, folder; G-2 Miscellaneous, January 1948–June 1948, JIOA. 46. Juergen Haukohl, “School in El Paso” (excerpt of personal memoir in possession of the author), 1. 47. “Rocket Scientist Says American Cooking Tasteless,” El Paso Herald-Post, December 6, 1946; Kay Bowers, “German Household Taste Lingers as Scientists’ Wives Go American,” El Paso Herald-Post, April 23, 1948. 48. Johann G. Tschinkel, “As I Remember My Life: From the Sudetenland to the USA with Rockets” (unpublished memoir, 1999), 52. 49. The Preisz sisters were rescued by Albert Schwartz, who was stationed with the army in Germany at the war’s end. See Floyd S. Fierman, The Schwartz Family of El Paso: The Story of a Pioneer Jewish Family in the Southwest, Southwestern Studies 61 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1980); Albert Schwartz, interview with Becky Craver, 1993, “Interview no. 791,” IOH. 50. Robert Upton, interview with Michelle L. Gomilla, 1994, “Interview no. 871,” IOH. 51. See Jan Jarboe Russell, The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and American’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II (New York: Scribner, 2015).

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52. Memo to Peyton Ford, May 14, 1948, box 49, folder: 105-8090 Section 4, 1 of 3, FBI. 53. Department of the Army, “Consolidate Monthly Surveillance of DASE, Ord Res and Dev Division, Sub-Office (Rocket) Fort Bliss, Texas, 1–31 May 1948,” entry 47B, 755004, box 1005, ARMY. 54. “Intelligence Summary: Memorandum for the AC of S, G-2,” April 14, 1947, entry 47B, 755004, box 1005, ARMY. 55. Department of the Army, “Consolidate Monthly Surveillance of DASE, Ord Res and Dev Division, Sub-Office (Rocket) Fort Bliss, Texas, 13–30 April 1948,” entry 47B, 755004, box 1005, ARMY. 56. Kay Bowers, “German Household Taste Lingers as Scientists’ Wives Go American,” El Paso Herald-Post, April 23, 1948. 57. Deputy Project Manager to All WDSE and their families, November 24, 1947, EAS. 58. Walter Tschinkel, interview with the author, April 27, 2015. 59. Recollections of Klaus Rosinski, “Immigration as a Great Adventure,” panel discussion, Apollo 11 Legacies, Listen Notes: Apollo 11 Legacies, July 3, 2019, hosted and produced by WHNT 19 News, https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/apollo-11-legacies -whnt-news-19-ONHFcekn4LT/. 60. Recollections of Ursula (Mrazek) Vann, “Operation Paperclip: Life at Fort Bliss,” panel discussion, Apollo 11 Legacies, Listen Notes: Apollo 11 Legacies, July 3, 2019, hosted and produced by WHNT 19 News, https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/apollo-11 -legacies-whnt-news-19-ONHFcekn4LT/. 61. Helga Tschinkel Motley, private communication, May 5, 2015. The frequency with which the pool comes up in the former children’s memories, as well as their photographic documentation of the time they spent there, is especially interesting given the El Paso Herald-Post’s assurances that the scientists were not permitted to use the pools on base. See “German Scientists at Fort Bliss Receive up to $5310 a Year,” El Paso Herald-Post, July 18, 1947. 62. Interview with Hertha Heller Hughes, June 30, 2016. 63. Interview with Bernd Seiler, June 3, 2015. 64. Interview with Helga Minning McGhee, January 12, 2016. 65. Walter C. Hornaday, “War Prisoners Working on Southwest’s Farms,” New York Times, October 10, 1943. 66. Richard Paul Walker, “Prisoners of War in Texas during World War II” (Ph.D. diss., North Texas State University, 1980), 58–59. 67. Matthias Reiss, “Bronzed Bodies behind Barbed Wire: Masculinity and the Treatment of German Prisoners of War in the United States during World War II,” Journal of Military History 6, no. 2 (2005): 475–504. 68. Moore, Know Your Enemy, 342. 69. Interview with John Reese by Phyllis Kent, 1993, “Interview no. 812,” IOH. 70. Frederick Graham, “Nazi Scientists Aid Army on Research,” New York Times, December 4, 1946. 71. See David Dorado Romo, Ringside to the Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez, 1893–1923 (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005), 240–243. 72. For more on the Bracero Program and its implementation in El Paso, see Oscar J. Martínez, Border Boom Town: Ciudad Juárez since 1848 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); Richard B. Craig, The Bracero Program: Interest Groups and Foreign Policy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971); Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational

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Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Mireya Loza, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Salinas, Managed Migrations. 73. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 129, 131–133. 74. “German Scientists at Fort Bliss Receive up to $5310 a Year,” El Paso Herald-Post, July 18, 1947; U.S. Census Bureau, 1950 Census, vol. 2: Characteristics of the Population, Texas, table 11. 75. Henry Tschinkel, interview with the author, April 27, 2015. 76. Johann G. Tschinkel, “As I Remember My Life: From the Sudetenland to the USA with Rockets” (unpublished memoir, 1999), 57. 77. Ernst Steinhoff to Heinz [no last name], May 15, 1960, box 19, folder 20, EAS. 78. Hertha Heller Hughes, interview with the author, June 30, 2016. 79. Seymour Nagan, “Top Secret: Nazis at Work,” New Republic, August 11, 1947, 24–26. 80. Stephen E. Aquirre to Captain Bosquet N. Wev, September 7, 1946, box 2, folder: Immigration Diary, Record Group, JIOA. 81. Axel Roth, “Remembrances” (unpublished memoir, n.d.), 37. In the author’s personal collection.

CHAPTER 3 1. “Democracy’s Children,” Rocky Mountain Empire Magazine, September 5, 1948, 8; Maude Maddox, History of Crockett School (Seminar papers; History no. 33, Texas Western College, 1951), 13–14, Sonnichsen Special Collections, University of Texas at El Paso Library. 2. For this distinction between structure and event, see Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, and Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 102–132. 3. Henry Tschinkel, email to the author, April 29, 2015. 4. Michael Yellow Bird, “Cowboys and Indians: Toys of Genocide, Icons of American Colonialism,” Wicazo Sa Review 19, no. 2 (2004): 33–48, at 38. 5. Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Edward B. Westermann, Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016); James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 6. See Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights; Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 7. Figure taken from an American Institute of Public Opinion poll from August 28, 1946. See Princeton University Office of Public Opinion, Public Opinion, 1935–1946 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 387. 8. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 47–78. 9. Walter Tschinkel, interview with the author, August 31, 2016; Bernd Seiler, interview with the author, June 3, 2015; Helga Minning McGhee, interview with the author, January 12, 2016; Ursula Mrazek Vann, interview with the author, June 12, 2016.

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10. A. H. Hughey, Bulletin to Principals and Teachers: Supt’s Bulletin #15, March 9, 1948, EPISD. 11. See Moore, Know Your Enemy; Dower, War without Mercy. 12. Multiple former Paperclip children I interviewed spoke of their parents quickly outfitting them with western clothes and books. Wernher von Braun wrote of the groups starting to wear sombreros and cowboy boots as they acclimated to their new home. See Wernher von Braun, “Why I Chose America,” American Magazine, July 1952, 111–115. 13. Helga Minning McGhee, interview with the author, January 12, 2016. 14. Report of the United States Mission to Germany (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 3. 15. “Proposed News Release on Exploitation of German for Technological and Scientific Information,” [1945], box 4, folder Policy 1946, JIOA. For an extensive analysis of Education for Death, see Moore, Know Your Enemy, 198–203. 16. John Sharnik, “It’s Go Western for Young Men,” New York Times Magazine, September 24, 1950, 16; “Boys’ Wear Buyers Place Fall Orders,” New York Times, May 9, 1950. See also Angela F. Keaton, “Backyard Desperadoes: American Attitudes Concerning Toy Guns in the Early Cold War Era,” Journal of American Culture 33, no. 3 (2010): 183–196. 17. “Teachers Told to Give Pupils Yippee Stories,” El Paso Herald-Post, March 16, 1940. 18. “Crockett Stages ‘Go Western Day’ During Rodeo,” El Paso Herald-Post, February 27, 1948; “‘Go Western Day Winners Announced,” El Paso Herald-Post, February 20, 1948; “Ranchero Assembly Held at Lamar,” El Paso Herald-Post, February 27, 1948, 14; “Franklin Class is Entertained by Small Animal,” El Paso Herald-Post, March 25, 1949; “Disney Characters Come to Life in Morehead Class,” El Paso Herald-Post, February 23, 1951; “Only Horses Missing When Lamar School Goes Western,” El Paso Herald-Post, February 11, 1953. 19. “Teachers Half-Day Holiday for Rodeo,” El Paso Herald Post, March 20, 1947. 20. Melissa Bingmann, Prep School Cowboys: Ranch Schools in the American West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015). 21. Axel Roth, “Remembrances” (unpublished memoir, n.d.), 13, 19. In the author’s personal collection. 22. Bernd Seiler, email to the author, February 4, 2017. 23. See the “Fort Bliss Theaters” listing in the Fort Bliss News for the following dates: November 22, 1946, 2; January 17, 1947, 2; January 24, 1947, 2; March 14, 1947, 2; May 2, 1947, 2. 24. Julia Stetler, “‘Painting the Town Red’: Buffalo Bill’s Indians in the German Media,” in The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture, ed. Frank Christianson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 155–174. 25. On this paradox, see H. Glenn Penny, Kindred by Choice: Germans and Indians since 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 241; see also Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archaeology of Genocide,” Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A.  Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 49–76; David Furber and Wendy Lower, “Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-Occupied Poland and Ukraine,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 372–400. 26. Hartmut Lutz, “German Indianthusiasm: A Socially Constructed German National[ist] Myth,” in Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Collin G.

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Calloway, Gerd Gemunden, and Suzanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 167–184, at 179. 27. H. J. Hahn, Education and Society in Germany (New York: Berg, 1998), 89; Pine, Education in Nazi Germany, 54; Petra Goedde, GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 33–34. 28. See also Richard Cracroft, “The American West of Karl May,” American Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1967): 249–258. Western myths could be used by Nazi resisters as well. The Edleweiss Piraten, one of the two largest youth resistance groups in wartime Germany, was made up of working-class teens who rejected Hitler Youth and their forced membership in it. Employing a mixture of metaphors, the group divided into regional branches called the Fahrentenstenze (“Roving Dudes”), the “Navajos,” and the “Kittlebach Pirates,” all names that sought to capture the rebellious yet morally righteous ethos of the group. For more on the Edleweiss Piraten, see Detlev J. K. Peukert, “Youth in the Third Reich,” in Life in the Third Reich, ed. Richard Bessel (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 30; Stephen Pagaard, “Teaching the Nazi Dictatorship: Focus on Youth,” History Teacher 38, no. 2 (2005): 198, 207; Detlev J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 154–165. 29. See Elaine Tyler May, “Gimme Shelter: Do-It-Yourself Defense and the Politics of Fear,” in The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. James W. Cook, Lawrence Glickman, and Michael O’Malley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 217–241; Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). On the effect of this culture of children, see JoAnne Brown, “‘A Is for Atom, B Is for Bomb’: Civil Defense in American Public Education, 1948–1963,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 68–90; William M. Tuttle Jr., “America’s Children in an Era of War, Hot and Cold: The Holocaust, the Bomb, and Child Rearing in the 1940s,” in Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 14–34. 30. See Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 65–80; Adam Laats, The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 73–122. 31. Henry Kroenenberg, ed., Programs and Units in the Social Studies (Washington, DC: National Council for the Social Studies, 1941), iii. 32. Josephine Stueber, “El Paso, Texas Public Schools, Grades I–XII Illustrative Unit for Grade III on the Grocery Store,” in Programs and Units in the Social Studies, ed. Henry Kroenenberg (Washington, DC: National Council for the Social Studies, 1941), 16. 33. Cited in Anne-Lise Halvorsen, Romance and Reality: A History of Elementary Social Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 125. 34. “Pupils Well Versed in American Democracy,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 12, 1948. 35. Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv, 55. 36. John Schwarz, Social Study in the Elementary School (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1938), 103, 178–179. 37. See Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 140–141.

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38. Quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, 284. 39. See O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 35–37. On anthropologists’ influence on public education, see Zoë Burkholder, Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900–1954 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 40. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 135. 41. “The First Americans,” in Third Grade Course of Study Committee, Guide for Teachers Grade Three (El Paso, TX: El Paso School Board, 1951), 269. 42. See Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians of the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1997), 98–102; Joel Pfister, Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 156–166; Margaret D. Jacobs, Engendered Encounters; Feminism and Pueblo Encounters, 1879–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 149–179. 43. Muriel H. Fellows, The Land of Little Rain (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903). 44. On the fear of the company man, see David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955); William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956); Deloria, Playing Indian, 130 ff. 45. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, “Federalism: Native, Federal, and State Sovereignty,” in Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians, ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Julianna Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Manning Stevens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 273–286, at 276. 46. Armstrong Sperry, Little Eagle: A Navajo Boy (Chicago: John C. Winston, 1938), 42, 41, 56, 100–101. 47. Margaret Connell Szasz, “Federal Boarding Schools and the Indian Child, 1920– 1960,” South Dakota History 1, no. 4 (1977): 371–384, at 377. See also Szasz, Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination, 1928–1973 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1975–1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995); Pfister, Individuality Incorporated, 31–95. 48. Deloria, Playing Indian, 141; for a fuller discussion of the cause and effect of hobbyism in the Cold War, see 128–153. 49. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 90. On the relationship between cowboys, land parceling, and race, see 75–99. 50. J. Frank Dobie, “Ranch Mexicans,” Survey, May 1, 1931, 167–170, at 168. On Texan and Mexican cowboys, see Tim Lehman, Up the Trail: How Texas Cowboys Herded Cattle and Became an American Icon (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). 51. “Roosevelt Students Are Studying about Texas Revolution,” El Paso Herald-Post, April 22, 1949, 43. 52. Anna Brand, Margaret Irby, and Erin Humphrey, History of El Paso County (November 20, 1950), EPISD. 53. Laura R. Barraclough, Charros: How Mexican Cowboys Are Remapping Race and Identity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 13. 54. Nora Ramirez, The Southwestern International Livestock Show and Rodeo, Southwestern Studies 32 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1972), 16–17. See photos and names of Chamber of Commerce members, 22. 55. “At Home on the Range,” in Guide for Teachers Grade Three, 298.

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56. Emilie Toepperwein and Fritz A. Toepperwein, I Want to Be a Cowboy (Boerne, TX: Highland Press, 1947) 21, 10. 57. Sanford Tousey, Cowboys of America (New York: Rand McNally, 1938), n.p. 58. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, 53. 59. Tousey, Cowboys of America. 60. Tousey, Cowboys of America. 61. See Lewis Atherton, “Cattleman and Cowboy: Fact and Fancy,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 11, no. 4 (1961): 2–17; Lehman, Up the Trail. 62. Recollections of Klaus Ronsinski, “Immigration as a Great Adventure,” panel discussion, Apollo 11 Legacies, Listen Notes: Apollo 11 Legacies, July 3, 2019, hosted and produced by WHNT 19 News, https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/apollo-11-legacies -whnt-news-19-ONHFcekn4LT/; Bernd Seiler, email to the author, February 4, 2017. 63. Walter Tschinkel, interview with the author, August 31, 2016; Helga Minning McGhee, interview with the author, January 12, 2016. 64. Lois Godfrey, interview with George M. House, May 23, 1944, LG. 65. Ernst Steinhoff to Colonel Holgar W. Toftoy, August 3, 1950, Foreign Scientist Case Files, 1945–58, box 161, file: Steinhoff, FS. 66. May, Homeward Bound, 23. 67. Harry F. Byrd, “Hitler’s Experts Work for Us,” American Magazine, March 1948, 138. 68. Ernst Stuhlinger, “German Rocketeers Find a New Home in Huntsville,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 31 (December 1, 1996): 157–166, at 158. 69. Ernst Stuhlinger and Frederick I. Ordway III, Wernher von Braun: Crusader for Space (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1994), 69, 70. 70. Wernher von Braun, “Crossing the Last Frontier,” Collier’s, March 22, 1952, 26, 74, 25. 71. See also Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997); Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, 285–290. 72. “Nazis Sent to U.S. as Technicians,” New York Times, January 4, 1947. 73. Wernher von Braun, “Why I Chose America,” American Magazine, July 1952, 112. 74. Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing Worlds of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 156. 75. Recollections of Juergen Haukohl, “Paperclip Family Legacies: Juergen Haukohl,” panel discussion, Apollo 11 Legacies, Listen Notes: Apollo 11 Legacies, August 28, 2019, hosted and produced by WHNT 19 News, https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/apollo -11-legacies-whnt-news-19-ONHFcekn4LT/.

CHAPTER 4 1. Bea Bragg, “Democracy’s Children,” Rocky Mountain Empire Magazine, September 5, 1948, 8. Not insignificantly, Bragg was the sister of Lois Godfrey, the army liaison to the Paperclip children. 2. “Scientists’ Children Enter E.P. Schools,” EL Paso Herald-Post, January 20, 1947. 3. Raymond J. Stover, “Eight Schools Try Spanish,” El Paso Times, April 12, 1940. 4. Bea Bragg, “Democracy’s Children,” Rocky Mountain Empire Magazine, September 5, 1948, 8. 5. Margaret Peacock, Innocent Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 31. 6. Of the Paperclip children I interviewed, only Regina Woerdemann Von Aspe re-

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members learning Spanish, but documents and newspaper reports attest that Spanish was a regular part of the curriculum at Crockett during the years the German students attended. 7. On pluralism and language education, see Theodore Andersson, The Teaching of Foreign Languages in the Elementary School (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1953); Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education, 24–41; Jonathan Zimmerman, “Ethnics against Ethnicity: European Immigrants and Foreign-Language Instruction, 1890–1940,” Journal of American History 88 (2002): 1383–1404; Jeffrey E. Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European Immigrants (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 8. “Minutes of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission meeting, March 1948,” box 18, folder 1, GIS. 9. Myrtle L. Tanner, “Spanish in the Elementary Schools,” Texas Outlook, October 1950, 24, 37; “Multiple Troubles Faced by the Good Neighbor Body,” Dallas Morning News, April 9, 1948. 10. For more on the history of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission, including its platforms in areas other than education, see Kingrea, History of the First Ten Years of the Texas Good Neighbor Commission; Carlos Kevin Blanton, George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); Emilio Zamora, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009); San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed”; Thomas A. Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the Transnational Struggle for Civil Rights in World War II Texas.” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (2000): 1212–1237. 11. Neville G. Penrose to Members of the Legislature, November 7, 1949, box 1989/05947, folder 18, TGNC. 12. Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education; San Miguel, “Let All of Them Take Heed”; Donato, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools; Powers, “Forgotten History.” 13. Rosina Lozano, An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 178. 14. Chris Fox to Dorrance D. Roderick, December 4, 1947, box 2, folder 2, CF. 15. Quoted in W.J. Hooten, “Everyday Events,” El Paso Times, January 29, 1946. 16. This system of punishments echoes throughout the literature on Mexican American education generally but has been reinforced by El Pasoans, including in author interview with Elena Ruiz Tovar, April 25, 2017; author interview with Raul Villa, May 13, 2017. See also interviews with Rosa R. Guerrero, May 3, 1983, conducted by Paulina Aldrete; Joe A. Rosales, February 7, 2009, conducted by Homero Galicia, IOH. 17. Lyle Saunders, “Educational Problems of the Spanish-Speaking Child in Texas” (speech), n.d., box 32, folder 10, GIS. 18. Byron England, “El Paso Develops Aids for Teachers of Bilinguals,” Texas Outlook, October 1945, 42–43. 19. Herschel T. Manuel, The Education of Mexican and Spanish-Speaking Children in Texas (Austin, TX: The Fund for Research in the Social Sciences, 1930), 120. See also Wilson Little, Spanish-Speaking Children in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1944), 26. 20. Manuel, 119. 21. Lloyd Cook and Elaine Cook, Intergroup Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954), 23.

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22. Thomas S. Sutherland, “Texas Tackles the Race Problem,” Saturday Evening Post, January 12, 1952, 23. 23. Jackson, “An Analysis of the Language Difficulties,” 6. 24. Esther Brown, “Some Aspects of Teaching Languages in the Grades in the Southwest,” Hispania 23 (1940): 171–174, at 173. 25. George Sánchez to Fred McCuisition, February 5, 1946, box 56, folder 1, GIS. 26. El Paso Public Schools, A Manual of Aids and Devices for Teaching Bilingual Children in the El Paso Public Schools, Grade 5 (El Paso: El Paso Public Schools, September 1947), 4. 27. A Manual of Aids and Devices for Teaching Beginning Non-English Speaking Children, Level One (El Paso: El Paso Public Schools, 1946), 1. 28. Workshop for Developing Teaching Aids for Non-English Speaking Children (El Paso: El Paso Public Schools, September 1945), 44, 56, 61–62. 29. On the relationship between health and school segregation, see Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 194; García, Strategies of Segregation, 13–16; San Miguel, “Let Them All Take Heed,” 49. 30. Raymon E. Patton, A History of the Housing Authority of El Paso and Low-Rent Housing (seminar paper; History no. 73, Texas Western College [c. 1953]), 22. C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, University of Texas at El Paso Library. 31. For FPHA statistics and more on housing and public health in the city, see the El Paso Committee on the Border Project, A Study of Conditions Affecting Children in El Paso County (El Paso: Committee on the Border Project, 1948), 106. For more on public-health concerns and reality in the city, see García, “Mexican Americans and the Politics of Citizenship”; John Mckiernan-González, Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 1848–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Ann Gabbert, “Defending the Boundaries of Care: Local Responses to Global Concerns in El Paso Public Health Policy, 1881–1941” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at El Paso, 2006); Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, “Good Neighbors and White Mexicans: Constructing Race and Nation on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Journal of American Ethnic History 33, no. 1 (2013): 5–34. On public health and Mexican Americans more generally, see Natalia Molina, Fit to be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). 32. A Manual of Aids and Devices for Teaching Beginning Non-English Speaking Children, Level One, 14, 24; A Manual of Materials, Aids, and Techniques for the Teaching of Spanish to EnglishSpeaking Children, First Grade (El Paso: El Paso Public Schools, 1952), 45, 31. 33. A Manual of Aids and Devices for Teaching Beginning Non-English Speaking Children, Level One, 17; A Manual of Materials, Aids, and Techniques for the Teaching of Spanish to EnglishSpeaking Children, First Grade, 89. 34. Workshop for Developing Teaching Aids for Non-English Speaking Children, 33. 35. “Alamo Students Form Club to Increase English Vocabulary,” El Paso Herald-Post, April 4, 1946, 9. 36. “English Club at San Jacinto,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 17, 1948. 37. “Better English Drive on at Zavala School,” El Paso Harold Post, October 3, 1947. 38. See “Better English Is Goal of New Club,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 6, 1950; “Better English Is the Club Aim,” El Paso Herald-Post, October 2, 1940; “Mexican Group Gives Party,” El Paso Herald-Post, April 24, 1940. 39. Lotte Tschinkel, “Memories of a Long Life” [ca. 1984], 90. Unpublished memoir in possession of the author.

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40. Virginia Strom, “German Children Sing ‘Eyes of Texas,’ Like to Recite Pledge to U.S. Flag,” El Paso Herald-Post, August 5, 1947, 1. 41. Virginia Strom, “Children of Germans Salute American Flag,” El Paso Herald-Post, July 3, 1947, 1. 42. Virginia Strom, “German Pupils Sing ‘Eyes of Texas,’ Like to Recite Pledge to U.S. Flag,” El Paso Herald-Post, August 5, 1947, 1. 43. Ursula Mrazek Vann, interview with the author, June 12, 2016; Christel Angele Jacobson, interview with the author, October 28, 2016; Helga Minning McGhee, interview with the author, January 12, 2016. On German instruction, see chap. 5. One notable divergence from these stories was Bernd Seiler, who experienced “no effort really to advance my German even at home. The emphasis at home was, ‘Learn English.’ . . . Every day I came home from school, I needed to have at least one new English word.” Bernd Seiler, interview with the author, June 3, 2015. 44. Helga Minning McGhee, interview with the author, January 12, 2016. 45. Axel Roth, “Remembrances” (unpublished memoir, n.d.), 21–22. In the author’s personal collection. 46. Bea Bragg, “Democracy’s Children,” Rocky Mountain Empire Magazine, September 5, 1948, 8. 47. Juergen Haukohl (unpublished memoir, n.d.), 4. In the author’s personal collection. 48. This differed some child by child. Axel Roth remembered befriending the son of an American officer on base; Helga Minning remembers being invited to dinner by an American family and not possessing the English vocabulary to ask for particular food items. Many remembered few encounters of consequence with American children outside of school. For all, the children’s most important friendships and the majority of their social world were defined by other Paperclip children. 49. Bea Bragg, “Democracy’s Children,” Rocky Mountain Empire Magazine, September 5, 1948, 8. 50. Axel Roth, “Remembrances” (unpublished memoir, n.d.), 22. In author’s personal collection. 51. Marion Fisk, “Spanish: How It Can Help Me,” Crockett Sun, December 18, 1931, 4. 52. Grace Munro, “Resume of Spanish for the School Year 1931–1932,” Crockett Sun, May 20, 1932, 5. 53. Sandoval News Service, Learn How to Speak Spanish with Your Servant (El Paso, TX: Sandoval News Service, 1952), 4–5. In the possession of the author, courtesy of Gyneth Garrison. 54. Bureau of Business Research of the College of Business Administration at the University of Texas, “Table 15: Years of School Completed in El Paso County and El Paso, 1940,” An Economic Survey of El Paso County Prepared for the Texas and Pacific Railway Company (March 1949), El Paso Department of City Planning records (MS 204), b. 57, f. 29, C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, University of Texas at El Paso Library. 55. El Paso Industrial Development Committee, Opportunities in El Paso, c. 1953, p. 8, b. 46, f. 14, EPCP. 56. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “El Paso,” Monthly Business Review 36, no. 7 (July 1, 1951): 89–97, at 92. 57. Martínez, Border Boom Town, 164–165; Stephan Thernstorm, The Other Bostonians:

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Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 290–292. 58. See, for example, an advertisement for a Hotel Supply Company shipping department that sought “young Anglo-American to train for shipping department. Must be able to speak some Spanish.” El Paso Herald-Post, May 21, 1948, 25. 59. Bureau of Business Research of the College of Administration at the University of Texas, An Economic Survey of El Paso Country Prepared for the Texas and Pacific Railway Company (March 1949), 3.0206, b. 57, f. 29, EPCP. 60. Raymond J. Stover, “Eight Schools Try Spanish,” El Paso Times, April 12, 1940, 16. 61. W. J. Hooten, “Everyday Events,” El Paso Times, February 11, 1946, 4. 62. For statistics of all counties in Texas, see Texas State Department of Education, Statewide Survey of Enumeration, Enrollment, Attendance, and Progress of Latin American Children in Texas Public Schools, 1943–1944 (Austin [ca. 1944]). 63. “Conversational Spanish to Begin in E.P. Fifth Grade,” El Paso Times, August 21, 1941. 64. For more on the changes in upper-level Spanish instruction between 1925 and 1941, see Muriel Grace David and Henry Grattan Doyle, “Spanish Language Textbooks,” in Latin America in School and College Teaching Materials (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1944), 275–315. 65. Earl James McGrath, “Foreign Language Instruction in American Schools,” Modern Language Journal 37, no. 3 (March 1953): 115–119, at 117. 66. Oscar J. Martínez, The Chicanos of El Paso: An Assessment of Progress, Monograph 59 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1980), n.p. 67. Myrtle L. Tanner, “Spanish in the Elementary Schools,” Texas Outlook, October 1950, 24. 68. Carlos Rivera, “The El Paso Spanish Program: Grades One through Seven,” Hispania 41, no. 2 (1958): 263–265, at 264. 69. “School Chief Defends Spanish Instruction,” El Paso Times, February 9, 1946, 1, 10. 70. Bill Broom, “‘Buenos Dios, Ninos,’ Opens Spanish Teaching in Schools,” El Paso Herald-Post, September 24, 1951, 3. 71. Rivera, “The El Paso Spanish Program,” 265. 72. See table 15 in Martínez, The Chicanos of El Paso. 73. E. M. Pooley, “Side Bar Remarks,” El Paso Herald-Post, February 12, 1946. 74. E. M. Pooley, “Texas Schools in Danger,” El Paso Herald-Post, March 30, 1949. 75. Rivera, “The El Paso Spanish Program,” 265. 76. On Jester see “History of the Good Neighbor Commission” (unpublished report, Austin, 1952), pp. 51–52, folder 4, box 1989/059-48, TGNC. The idea was ultimately rejected because of teacher supply. 77. “Survey Shows Drop in Spanish Teachers,” Biweekly Report of the Good Neighbor Commission 2, no. 4 (April 7, 1952), box 1989/59-47, folder 13, TGNC. 78. Kenneth W. Mildenberger, “The Current Status of the Teaching of Spanish in the Elementary Schools,” Hispania 37, no. 1 (1954): 63–65, at 64. 79. Hertha Heller Hughes, email to the author, February 1, 2017. 80. Regina Von Aspe, interview with the author, June 2, 2015. 81. Helga Minning McGhee, interview with the author, January 12, 2016. 82. George Sánchez, “Inter-American Education: The New Frontier,” in National

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Congress of Parents and Teachers, Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Annual Convention, vol. 26, May 3–7, 1942, 33–40, at 39. 83. Davis, “Education Program for Spanish-Speaking Americans,” 45. For more on interwar thinking about bilingualism, see Zimmerman, “Ethnics against Ethnicity”; Mirel, Patriotic Pluralism. For more on the role of the OIAA in serving American military and business interests in the United States and Mexico through film, advertisements, radio, and media sources, see Monica A. Rankin, ¡México, La Patria! Propaganda and Production during World War II (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home! Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Darlene J. Sadlier, Americans All: Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012). 84. A. H. Hughey, “Speaking English at School,” Texas Outlook 28, no. 11 (November 1944): 36. 85. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed, 59–61. Other works that stress the efficacy of LULAC’s racial strategies as a political calculation include Craig A. Kaplowitz, LULAC, Mexican Americans, and National Policy (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005); Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors; Zamora. More critical accounts of LULAC and Caucasian rights include Benjamin Márquez, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993); Guglielmo, “Fighting for Caucasian Rights”; Neil Foley, “Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and the Faustian Pact with Whiteness,” in Reflexiones: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, ed. Neil Foley (Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1998), 53–70. 86. Council #132, “Aims and Purposes of the League of United Latin American Citizens,” October 11, 1945, box 1, folder 3, LULAC. 87. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 163. 88. “Master List of Members—LULAC—Council No. 132, El Paso, Texas, December 8th, 1945,” box 3, folder 21, LULAC. 89. William Flores, interview with Oscar J. Martinez, November 26 and December 4, 1975, IOH. 90. “Project Stated to Teach Spanish in All Grades,” El Paso Herald-Post, July 14, 1945, 1. 91. Brown, “Some Aspects of Teaching Languages,” 173. 92. Luciano Santoscoy to George I. Sánchez, September 29, 1949, folder 23, box 12, GIS; George I. Sánchez to Luciano Santoscoy, October 4, 1949, box 12, folder 23, GIS. Blanton shows that Sánchez’s fears of segregation led him to diminish the importance of Spanish instruction until later decades; George I. Sánchez, 229–231. 93. See Lozano, An American Language; Phillip B. Gonzales, “The Political Construction of Latino Nomenclatures in Twentieth-Century New Mexico,” Journal of the Southwest 35, no. 2 (1993): 158–185. 94. “Spanish Ban in School Is Tightened,” El Paso Times, July 8, 1944.

CHAPTER 5 1. Testimony of Mrs. Ilse Axster, May 22, 1947. File: Hebert F. A. Axster, entry 1B, box 5, FS. 2. Emblematic of a pattern of frustration and overstatement of Axster’s professional life, a 1977 special issue of Das Kind referred to her in a feature on her as the “sister of the

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President of the first Montessori Society in Germany.” Herbert Axster, her husband— not her brother—was the nominal chair of a new organization the couple founded after usurping Grunwald, but Grunwald herself was the first leader of the German Montessori Society. 3. On the sociological analysis of teachers after the war, see John L. Rury, “Who Became Teachers?,” in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, ed. Donald Warren (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 9–48, at 37. 4. Benjamin Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1946), 329. For more on Dr. Spock’s relationship with progressive education, see William Graebner, “The Unstoppable World of Benjamin Spock: Social Engineering in a Democratic Culture, 1917–1950,” Journal of American History 67, no. 3 (1980): 612–629. 5. “Teachers Told Education Must Meet Changes,” El Paso Herald-Post, March 18, 1950. 6. Alice B. Cummings, interview with Richard Estrada, 1978, “Interview no. 426,” IOH. Almost seven decades after Genevieve Gonzalez taught at the San Jacinto school on the South Side, she remembers and feels disturbed by the entirely Anglo teaching staff (except her) taking the Mexican janitors’ home-cooked meals for their own lunch. Genevieve Draeger Gonzalez, interview with the author, April 14, 2017. 7. Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method: Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education in “The Children’s Houses,” with Additions and Revisions by the Author, trans. Anne E. George (Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1965), 80. 8. Montessori, The Montessori Method, 16, 37. 9. William Heard Kilpatrick, The Montessori System Examined (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 30, 33, 14, 16. 10. FBI Case File 77-963, box 45, FBI. 11. Testimony of James Hamill, October 4, 1949, FBI File 77-693, box 45, 105-11452, FBI. 12. Delbert Clark, “Nazis Sent to U.S. as Technicians,” New York Times, January 7, 1947. 13. “Information upon Which to Base an Investigation of Paperclip Activities at Fort Bliss,” October 1947, Entry 47B, ARMY. 14. From Ord O to Director of Intelligence, GSUSA, August 6, 1948, entry 1B, box 5, FS. The most powerful and organized response to Axster came from Rabbi Stephen Wise. An account of his response can be found in Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip, 264–265. 15. Office of the Military Government of the U.S., Revised Security Report on German (or Austrian) Scientist or Important Technician, re Ilse Axster, May 12, 1948, entry 1B, box 5, FS. 16. Novick, That Noble Dream, 288. 17. Harold Callener, “Inquiry into the Communist Mind,” New York Times, March 24, 1946, 92. 18. The literature on communist teacher purges is extensive, but some representative examples include Marjorie Heins, Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anti-Communist Purge (New York: New York University Press, 2013); Clarence Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Jonna Perrillo, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 19. Ilse Axster, “Das Kind unter Kindern,” in Das Kleinkind: Seine Not und seine Erziehung (Jena: Zwing, 1932), 108–120, at 108, 109.

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20. Ilse Axster, “Das Kind unter Kindern,” in Das Kleinkind: Seine Not und seine Erziehung (Jena: Zwing, 1932), 108–120, at 120, 110. 21. Ilse Axster, “Das Kind unter Kindern,” in Das Kleinkind: Seine Not und seine Erziehung (Jena: Zwing, 1932), 108–120, at 120. 22. Peacock, Innocent Weapons, 75. 23. One New Year’s Eve, for example, Axster and her local group climbed a mountain in deep snow, singing “humorous wandering songs” along the way. When they reached the top, they made a bonfire and sang “Flamme empor” (Ascending Flame), a nationalist song later appropriated by the Third Reich at book burnings. Ilse Axster to Henry Tschinkel, January 15, 1953, in the author’s possession. 24. Stachura, The German Youth Movement, 17. For more on the Wandervögel movement, see Laqueur, Young Germany; Donson, Youth in the Fatherless Land; Adriaansen, The Rhythm of Eternity. 25. Montessori’s biographer Rita Kramer has interpreted her aim as to manipulate fascism in order to keep her school open and thereby ameliorate the effects of fascism on children. See Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press 1988). 26. Ilse Axster, “Das Kind unter Kindern,” in Das Kleinkind: Seine Not und seine Erziehung (Jena: Zwing, 1932), 108–120, at 114. 27. Ilse Axster, “Das Kind unter Kindern,” in Das Kleinkind: Seine Not und seine Erziehung (Jena: Zwing, 1932), 108–120, at 113. 28. Walter Kulemeyer, “Montessori in Deutschland,” Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerzeitung 58 (1929), quoted in Montessori Lehrmaterialien, 1913–1935: Möbel und Architektur, ed. Thomas Müller and Romana Schneider(Munich: Prestel, 2002), 30. See also Ann Taylor Allen, The Transatlantic Kindergarten: Education and Women’s Movements in Germany and the United States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 29. Quoted in Renato Foschi, “Science and Culture around the Montessori’s First ‘Children’s Homes’ in Rome,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 44, no. 3 (2008): 238–257, at 249. 30. Tania Long, “They Long for a New Fuehrer,” New York Times Magazine, December 9, 1945, 89. 31. Sigrid Schultz, Germany Will Try It Again (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944), 122. 32. “Teachers Told Education Must Meet Changes,” El Paso Herald-Post, March 18, 1950. 33. Thomas Müller and Romana Schneider, eds., Montessori Lehrmaterialien, 1913–1935: Möbel und Architektur (Munich: Prestel, 2002), 33. 34. Inge Hansen-Schaberg, “Die Montessoribewegung in Berlin während der Weimarer Republik und der Konflikt zwischen Clara Grunwald und Maria Montessori,” in Basiswissen-Pädagogik: Reformpädagogische Schulkonzepte, Bd. 4 of Montessori-Pädagogik, ed. Inge Hansen-Schaberg and Bruno Schonig (Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, 2002), 98–111, at 105. For more on the conflict, see Müller and Schneider, Montessori Lehrmaterialien, 1913–1935. 35. Ilse Axster, “Das Kind unter Kindern,” in Das Kleinkind: Seine Not und seine Erziehung (Jena: Zwing, 1932), 108–120, at 113. 36. Testimony of Mrs. Ilse Axster, May 22, 1947, entry 1B, box 5, FS. 37. Testimony of Mrs. Ilse Axster, May 22, 1947, entry 1B, box 5, FS. 38. Ilse Axster, “Maria Montessori und der Verein Montessori Pädagogik Deutschlands von 1926–1936,” Das Kind, special issue, 1977, n,p.

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39. Testimony of Mrs. Ilse Axster, May 22, 1947, entry 1B, box 5, FS. 40. Testimony of Herbert Axster, May 22, 1947, File 77-963, box 45, FBI. 41. Like many women, Axster was left in control of foreign workers because of a dearth of German men to work or to oversee foreign workers. On anxieties about this, see Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 296–297. 42. Statement of Mrs. Ilse Axster, May 22, 1947, entry 1B, box 5, FS. 43. Testimony of Elly-Maria Eberardt, February 9, 1948, File 77-963, box 45, FBI. 44. Testimony of Gerhard Weise, n.d., File 77-963, box 45, FBI. 45. Testimony of Charlotte Mielenz, February 10, 1948, File 77-963, box 45, FBI. 46. Statement of Mrs. Ilse Axster, May 22, 1947, entry 1B, box 5, FS. 47. Testimony of Annelisse Aumuller, September 4, 1947. Case File 77-963, box 45, FBI. 48. Memo, Subject: The Axster Couple (Formerly Usedom, Pomerania), Berlin, March 25, 1948, entry 1B, box 5, FS. 49. Testimony of Gerhard Weise, n.d., File 77-963, box 45, FBI. 50. Letter from Ilse Axster to Walter Tschinkel, January 15, 1953. In the author’s possession, courtesy of Walter Tschinkel. 51. Letter from Ilse Axster to Heiner Tschinkel, January 15, 1953. In the author’s possession, courtesy of Walter Tschinkel. Axster wrote these letters from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she and Herbert moved briefly after von Braun’s continued and amplified rejection of the couple. Herbert attempted to start his own law practice there before the two returned to Germany. 52. Statement of Mrs. Ilse Axster, May 22, 1947, entry 1B, box 5, FS. 53. For more on Nazism and functionaries, see Ian Kershaw, “‘Working towards the Fuhrer’: Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship,” Contemporary European History 2, no. 2 (1993): 103–118; Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005). 54. Correspondence with Lilly and Felix Axster, December 21, 2019 (group email). 55. Correspondence with Lilly and Felix Axster, December 4, 2019 and December 23, 2019 (group email). 56. Sharon Stephens, “Nationalism, Nuclear Policy, and Children in Cold War America,” Childhood 4, no. 1 (1997): 103–123. 57. “Board Presses Plan to Build New East El Paso High School,” El Paso Herald-Post, February 19, 1947, 7. 58. “Evaluators Ask Study Changes in E.P. Schools,” El Paso Herald-Post, August 10, 1950, 1. 59. FBI Case File 77-963, box 45, FBI. 60. Herbert Arnold Falk, Corporal Punishment: A Social Interpretation of Its Theory and Practice in the Schools of the United States (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University Press, 1941), 109, 108. 61. Arnold Gesell and Frances L. Ilg, The Infant and the Child in the Culture of Today (New York: Harper & Row, 1943), 9–10. 62. Gessel and Ilg, The Infant and the Child, 187, 57–58. 63. Nancy McCormick Rambusch, Learning How to Learn: The American Approach to Montessori, rev. ed. (New York: American Montessori Society, 1992), 69. 64. Rambusch, Learning How to Learn, 68; italics mine.

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65. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Rothstein, The Color of Law; David Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 66. “Teaching Montessori in the Slums,” Time, July 10, 1964, 53. 67. Rambusch, Learning How to Learn, 68.

EPILOGUE 1. On complaints, see Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, 219. 2. Frederick Graham, “Nazi Scientists Aid Army on Research,” New York Times, December 4, 1946, 35. 3. “Army Will Move Bliss Scientists,” El Paso Herald-Post, November 4, 1949, 1. 4. Hanson W. Baldwin, “New Peenemünde Rises on Rio Grande’s Banks,” New York Times, June 22, 1947, 103. 5. Mario T. García, The Making of a Mexican American Mayor: Raymond L. Telles of El Paso and the Origins of Latino Political Power (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008); Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Texas Mexican Americans and Civil Rights (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 45–62. 6. Mary L. Dudziak, “The Outcome of Influence: Hitler’s American Model and Transnational Legal History,” Michigan Law Review 117, no. 6 (2019): 1179–1194, at 1193. 7. In the case, Crockett Elementary was named as one of the schools that had empty spaces even as a new school was built nearby to serve Mexican American students. Alvarado v. El Paso Independent School District, 426 F. Supp. 575 (W.D. Tex. 1976). accessed August 1, 2020, https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/426/575/ 1594995/. South El Paso schools are currently at the center of another court case focusing on school closures and environmental racism; see Familias Unidas por la Educación v. El Paso Independent School District, Case No. 3:20-cv-170, United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, El Paso Division, filed June 15, 2020, accessed August 4, 2020, https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/School-Funding.pdf. 8. Roger Cohen, “American Catastrophe through German Eyes,” New York Times, July 24, 2020. 9. Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019), 352. 10. Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson, The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 11. See Balderrama and Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal; Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Abrazando el Espíritu: Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014); Leisy J. Abrego, Sacrificing Families: Negotiating Laws, Labor, and Love across Borders (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 12. Francisco Cantú, “Has Any One of Us Wept?” New York Review of Books, January 17, 2019. 13. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, 138, 136–137. See also Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020). 14. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, 272.

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191

I N DEX The letter f following a page number denotes a figure. African Americans: in El Paso, 42, 44, 60, 143, 165n8; military and, 19, 40–41, 43, 58 Alamo Elementary School, 50f, 52, 99 Alvarado v. El Paso Independent School District, 143 Americanization: curriculum and, 110; film and, 27, 72–73; Paperclip children and, 13, 14, 100; Pledge of Allegiance, 24, 114, 100, 111. See also assimilation; cowboys Angele, Barbara, 89 Angele, Christel, 101 Anglos: anxieties of, 24, 52, 90, 91, 107, 111, 114; children, happy and afforded, 90, 103; as curricular focus, 14, 68–69, 78–80; economic interests of, 38, 45, 47–48, 62–63, 106; German affinity, 4–5, 17, 23, 61, 147; parents, 24, 93; power brokers, 6, 33, 53; school leaders, 51, 113, 136; as segregationists, 19, 43, 48–49, 60–61, 96, 103, 143; students and segregation, 15, 49, 51, 61; students and Spanish, 7, 24, 91, 97–98, 107–10; students and white supremacy, 82, 147; students as cowboys, 72; teachers, in Mexican schools, 32, 52, 128; teachers, monolingual, 15, 94, 108; teachers and white supremacy, 117–18; Texans, 33, 34, 110; women’s employment, 105–6 anthropology, 27, 28, 76–77, 80, 119, 137 anticommunism, 6, 18, 74, 136, 141; antiSemitism and, 19, 22; bilingualism and, 91, 108; children and, 3, 16; education and, 5, 24, 51, 70, 124, 136; Montessori education and, 122; Paperclip scientists and, 19–22, 69–70, 160n40; racism and, 51, 69, 142; teachers and, 122, 124. See also Western civilization anti-Semitism, 19, 117, 131, 134. See also Jews

assimilation, 42, 100, 139, 146: American self-concept and, 62; to democratic ideology, 9; frontier mythology and, 7, 68, 82, 84f, 86; of Mexican Americans, 3, 4, 92, 103, 111, 113; of Paperclip adults, 9, 13, 37, 55, 63; of Paperclip children (see Paperclip children); performances of, 13, 14, 111; personality and, 89, 112; white privilege and, 15, 83, 141 Aoy Elementary School, 34 Austin High School, 49, 59, 114, 165n7 authoritarianism. See Montessori, Maria; totalitarianism Axster, Felix, 135 Axster, Herbert, 21, 116, 120, 131; estrangement from Paperclip community, 121–22, 181n51; International Montessori Association and, 130–32, 178n2 Axster, Ilse, 199f, 126f: anti-Semitism of, 117, 131–32; communism and, 121–22, 128, 131, 134; depoliticizing of teaching, 8, 116–17, 130, 140; as education scientist, 120; foreign workers and, 132, 181n41; at Fort Bliss, 21, 121, 133, 136; on Montessori theory, 119, 123–27, 139–40; Nazi activity, 116, 121, 132–33; Paperclip children and, 133–34; teaching in United States, 10, 101, 120, 136; as threat to Operation Paperclip, 121–22. See also Axster, Herbert; Montessori, Maria; Montessori movement; von Braun, Wernher Axster, Lilly, 135 Axster, Oliver, 126f Axster, Wendelin, 126f Benedict, Ruth, 76 Bestor, Arthur, 23

193

bilingualism: accents, 17, 98, 108; in El Paso, 6, 104–5, 109, 142; LULAC and, 113–14; objectives of, 91, 92, 97, 98, 107, 113; parents’ views of, 93, 110; school desegregation and, 113. See also English language; Spanish language B’nai Zion synagogue, 44 Border Patrol, 145 Botello, David, 52 Bowie High School, 19, 34, 42, 49, 114 braceros, 35, 62–64 Bragg, Bea, 89–91, 103, 173n1 Brown, Esther, 114–15 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954) 139, 143 Bryant, Nettie Bea, 14, 100 Burleson Elementary School, 51–52 Bush, Mary Jane, 100 Calleros, Cleofas, 52 child devotion/child welfare: Montessori and, 118, 119, 122, 128, 132; as nonpolitical, 8, 117; politics of, 91, 116, 117, 129, 140 children: as cold warriors, 3, 32, 111, 136; emancipation of, 116, 123–24, 125, 127; as enemy, 4, 14, 15, 58, 60, 67, 70, 103; happy and afforded, 3–4, 89–90, 95, 104, 111, 137; juvenile culture, 18, 74, 87; literature for, 74, 77, 84; Mexican American, as antisocial, 3–4, 16, 89, 92, 95–96, 98; political marginalization of, 61, 144–45; selfgovernment and, 32, 71, 127, 134, 137; as “vulnerable core,” 135–36. See also Hitler Youth; Nazis/Nazism; play citizens, American: as cold warriors, 5, 7, 91, 108, 111; democracy and, 25, 26; disenfranchisement of, 19, 56, 61, 69, 145; homeowners as, 46; Mexican Americans as, 11, 16, 35, 61, 92, 94, 113–15; Paperclip members as, 13, 15, 36, 60, 61, 85, 112; parenting and, 123; schools and, 5, 13, 91, 108, 111 citizenship, American: classroom methods, 23, 31; curriculum and, 26, 68, 71, 75, 136; ideals, 14, 15, 29, 117;

194

Paperclip members, denial of, 120, 146, 160n36; Paperclip members, securing of, 5, 56, 61, 85; school clubs, 99; schools and, 4, 8, 15, 42, 69, 148–49; social, 41, 61, 66, 99 Ciudad Juárez (Mexico), 11, 55, 65, 89 Clay, Lucius, 41 Cody, Bill, 73 Coldwell Elementary School, 59, 72 colonialism: Germany and, 70, 138; schools and, 38; United States and, 63, 68–69, 81. See also Lebensraum college, 19; El Paso, 42, 49, 142, 165n7; for girls, 17, 105 concentration camps, 1, 22, 55, 63, 160n36; Auschwitz, 117; Dora, 9 communism. See anticommunism corporal punishment, 3, 31–32, 136–37 cowboys: and Anglos, 79–80; as astronaut predecessor, 87; Cold War values and, 69, 74, 80–82; craze, 71, 74; Mexicans and, 78–79; pageantry and, 72, 79, 80; Paperclip children and, 7, 72, 82, 85–86; Paperclip scientists and, 72, 83, 87, 170n12; as patriarchs, 82; selfgovernment and, 68, 71; social studies curriculum and, 24, 68–69, 72, 78–82; vaqueros, 78, 79. See also Indians Cowboys of America (Tousey), 81–82 Crockett, Davy, 67–68, 71 Crockett Elementary School, 30f, 50f; instruction at, 68, 90, 100, 105, 111, 173n6; Mexican students at, 89, 103; student assignments to, 49, 59, 67, 182n7 Crystal City (TX), 56, 145 Cummings, Alice, 52, 118, 140 Davis, Harold, 16, 113 Delgado v. Bishop, 139 democratic behavior, 3, 29, 118, 137 democratic education, 38: as anticommunist, 15, 26; contradictions in, 10, 32; as curriculum, 80, 102; Paperclip children as evidence of, 25; philosophies of, 13–14, 120, 128, 161n50; preconditions for, 25–33,

INDEX

129; rituals of, 14, 24, 100, 111; selfgovernment and, 32, 68, 71, 137; teachers’ importance to, 118; tolerance and, 24, 85, 91, 102, 137 democratic parenting, 136–37 Dewey, John, 23, 26, 31, 161n50 discipline. See corporal punishment Disney studios, 71, 86 Dobie, Frank, 78 Draeger, Genevieve (Gonzalez), 49, 179n6 Dudley Elementary, 49 Education for Death (Ziemer), 71 El Paso Bureau of Vital Statistics, 42 El Paso Chamber of Commerce, 47, 80, 93 El Paso Herald-Post (newspaper), 52, 75, 106, 109; coverage of Paperclip community, 54, 57, 100, 142 El Paso High School, 24, 55 El Paso Housing Authority, 46 El Paso Industrial Development Committee, 106 El Paso School Board, 51, 52, 136 El Paso schools. See specific schools El Paso Times (newspaper), 93, 107 Elder, Dorothy, 49, 59 England, Byron, 100 English language: accents and, 17, 98, 108; clubs for, 99; democratic education, 29, 90, 96; enfranchisement and, 90, 99, 115; English-only instruction, 113, 115; instruction to Mexican American students, 93, 95–96, 98; instruction to Paperclip students, 7, 10, 14, 92, 100–104, 110, 112; Paperclip adults’ proficiency in, 38–39, 99, 101; Paperclip children’s proficiency in, 7, 12, 67, 85, 99–100, 176n43, 176n48; personality and, 90. See also Spanish language Falk, Walter, 136 family separation, 145 Flesch, Rudolph, 23 Flood, Elena, 36 Flores, William, 114

Fort Bliss, 1, 49, 64, 77, 141; education at, 14, 17f, 99, 102f, 104, 136; housing for Paperclip families, 5, 12, 53–55, 58, 70f; as Operation Paperclip site, 2, 12, 53; postwar expansion of, 7, 44, 166n25; prisoners of war at, 62; scientists’ freedom and restrictions at, 55, 57; swimming pool, 58, 168n61; theater, 72 Fort Bliss Elementary School, 100 Fox, Chris, 93 Frederick Douglass Elementary School, 42 Friedrich, Karin, 14 friendship: Mexican American students and, 99; Paperclip students and, 58, 82, 112, 176n48; politics and, 1, 89, 91 frontier myths: as assimilation tool, 7, 68, 82, 83, 88; German adoration of, 73–74; juvenile culture and, 71, 74; white supremacy and, 71, 78. See also cowboys; Indians Garcia, Hector, 51 Geissler, Ernst, 21 genocide: in Germany, 11, 22, 27; Operation Paperclip and, 70; in United States, 68, 69, 82, 146 German language. See Paperclip children German Montessori Society (GMS), 130– 31, 179n2 German schools. See schools Germans, Americans’ identification with, 61–62, 147 Germany: American occupation of, 10, 25, 26, 29, 148, 162n56; American public opinion and, 26, 62, 70; children within, 26, 28, 71. See also Nazis/ Nazism Germany Will Try It Again (Schultz), 129 Gesell, Arnold, 137 Godfrey, Lois, 37–38, 67, 85, 120 Gomez, Modesto, 114 Graves, Catherine, 89 Grunwald, Clara, 117, 130–31, 139, 148, 178n2 Hamill, James, 37, 38, 55, 56, 59, 121 Haukohl, Guenther, 20

INDEX

195

Haukohl, Juergen, 54, 88, 103 health/hygiene, 33, 37, 96, 104, 136, 139 Hechinger, Fred, 39 Heller, Hertha (Hughes), 17, 58–60, 70, 101 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 21, 116, 124; American culture and, 21, 73–74; American policy and, 68, 146; American public opinion of, 27, 70; Paperclip scientists and, 20, 56, 62, 67, 86, 141. See also Hitler Youth; Third Reich Hitler Youth, 17–18, 71, 116, 171n28 Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), 46–47, 138 Hooten, W. J., 107–8 housing. See Fort Bliss; South El Paso Hueter, Uwe, 12, 58 Hughey, A. H.: Anglo power brokers and, 44–45; anticommunism and, 25, 70; Mexican American parents and, 51–52; Spanish instruction and, 107–9, 113, 115 Huntsville (AL), 5, 64, 88, 133, 141; Paperclip families’ assimilation in, 8, 15, 142 Hutchins, M. L., 52 immigration, 2, 115, 145; of Mexicans, 34–35, 47, 111; of Paperclip families, 12, 40, 65, 126f Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 35 Indians: German fascination with, 68, 72–74, 82, 86; Indianness and, 78; juvenile culture and, 74; social studies curriculum, 24, 68, 75–83. See also cowboys industry. See labor market Infant and Child in the Culture of Today, The (Gesell), 137 inter-Americanism, 33, 91, 94, 110; bilingualism and, 7, 108, 113; El Paso and, 3, 6 International Montessori Association, 103–31, 132 janitors, 179n6 Japan, American views of, 26, 70 Japanese Americans, 56, 61

196

Jessel, Walter, 23 Jessup, John Knox, 21 Jester, Beauford H., 110 Jews, 28, 130; in El Paso, 44, 55; Nazi views of, 19, 58, 73, 133; persecution of, 1, 58, 116–17, 128, 131–32, 134, 147; refugees, 9, 69 Jim Crow, 15, 48, 61; in El Paso, 42, 43; Nazi emulation of, 22, 41, 46 Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), 20–21, 22 labor market: Anglo anxiety and, 47, 93; industry, 47, 80, 106; workforce, 3, 34–35, 47, 63–64, 78, 105–6; worker shortage, 61–63. See also braceros Landshut, Bavaria, 27, 30f, 37, 72 Lange, Peter, 67 League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), 113–14 Learn How to Speak Spanish with Your Servant, 105, 106 Lebensraum, 74, 138 Ley, Willie, 87 Little Eagle (Sperry), 77–78 Man in Space (television series), 86 Manuel, Herschel, 94 Mattingly, Garrett, 22 May, Karl, 73–74, 87 McGrath, Earl James, 108 McWilliams, Carey, 48 Mead, Margaret, 76 memory diplomacy, 21–22 Mendez v. Westminster, 139 Mesita Elementary School, 49 Mexican Americans: African Americans and, 38, 42–44; class, 35, 48, 106, 113–14; curriculum and, 78–79; family, Anglo perceptions of, 34–36, 39, 41, 111; labor and, 3, 47, 63, 78, 93, 105–6; as “natural resource,” 15, 112; parental advocacy, 49, 51–52, 118; repatriation of, 47; stereotypes, 16, 35, 63–64, 79, 94–95, 147; student statistics, 3, 48, 94, 107, 166n25, 166n30; students as resistant, 16, 98; as teachers 32,

INDEX

109 teachers’ views of, 16, 35–36, 95–96, 147; as white, 42, 113–14. See also children; English language; segregation, school; South El Paso; Spanish language Mexico, 61, 65, 68, 89; U.S. relations with, 33, 51, 63, 91 military police, 13, 57 Minning, Helga (McGhee), 102f, 176n48, 58, 83; American reception of, 9, 60, 70; assimilation of, 101, 112; war, 8, 69 Minning, Rudolf, 21, 83 Minning, Senta, 101 Mittelwerk factory, 160n36 Montessori, Maria: authoritarianism of, 126, 130, 131; children’s freedom and, 119, 124, 134, 139; fascism and, 125, 132, 180n25; methodology of, 119, 126, 127; self-government and, 127, 134. See also Axster, Ilse Montessori movement: American fear of, 122, 124, 136; German fear of, 127, 131; in Germany, 116, 117, 128, 130–31, 178n2; in United States, 119–20, 137– 39. See also Axster, Ilse Morales, Manny, 43 Mrazek, Ursula (Vann), 8, 10, 58, 70 Mrazek, William, 21 Mt. Sinai synagogue, 55 Munro, Grace, 105 Myrdal, Gunnar, 19 National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 141 National Council of Social Studies, 74–75 nationalism: American, 11, 68, 82, 88; Axster and, 134, 180n23; Montessori and, 131; Nazism and, 9, 20, 123, 129; postwar Germany, 39 Nationalsozialistische Duetsche Arbeitspartei (NSDAP), 20, 132, 134, 158n14 Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft (NSFrauenschaft), 116, 121, 132–34 Nationalsozialistische Lehrerverband (NS-Lehrerverband), 73 Nazis/Nazism, 16, 27, 55, 69; American

perception of, 33, 38, 62, 121; American racial policy and, 22, 41, 43, 144, 146; anticommunism and, 6, 20–22; antimodernism and, 124– 25; childhood and, 1–2, 9, 28, 71, 148; conscience of, 147–48; cowboy culture and, 33, 37; denazification, 25–26, 71; expansionism and, 27, 74, 138; German resistance to, 171n28; Nazi conscience, 147, 148; Paperclip scientists’ relationship to, 1, 9, 158n14; racism and, 19, 40, 41, 43; schools and, 29, 73, 82, 137, 148; scientists’ exoneration from, 9, 13, 19–20, 83–84, 87; women and, 129, 132–33. See also Axster, Ilse; Paperclip scientists Operation Paperclip: logistics of, 2, 12, 26; public relations and, 11, 27–28, 37, 55–57, 70, 120; resistance to, 55–56, 160n23, 179n14. See also Paperclip children; Paperclip mothers; Paperclip scientists Outlaw, Eleanor, 100 pan-Americanism. See inter-Americanism Paperclip children: as absolving their families, 13, 38, 85; American acceptance of, 17, 60, 70–71, 101– 3; American citizenship, 15, 61, 65; Anglo alignment and, 67–68, 141; anticommunism of, 69–70; assimilation of, in school, 39, 83, 85–86, 104, 111, 142; as civilizers, 3, 36, 38, 85; English acquisition, 14, 17, 99–104, 111–12; freedom of, 45, 57–59; German language and, 10, 101, 133, 176n43; as happy, 67, 89, 103, 104, 111, 115; immigration, 12, 36, 40–41; Nazism and, 10–11, 12–13, 14, 82; public perception of, 4, 12–13, 14, 100, 142; on race and racism, 40–41, 45, 60, 103; as smart and enthusiastic, 4, 16, 17, 99–100; teachers’ perceptions, as democratic, 7, 67, 89, 100–102; teachers’ perceptions, as good students, 16, 38, 89; trauma and, 8

INDEX

197

Paperclip mothers, 83, 103, 126f; on American wealth, 46, 82; assimilation of, 19, 38, 55, 101, 146; on children’s education, 17, 38, 99, 101; employment of, 10; as homemakers, 54–55; Nazi complicity, 9, 71, 158n14; public relations and, 27, 31, 37–39, 120, 146; relocation, 12, 13, 27, 67; social networks, 37, 121 Paperclip scientists: American identification with, 121, 147; anticommunism of, 19–23; on children’s education, 38, 85, 101, 136, 142; cowboy culture and, 72–73, 83–84, 86, 87; as demanding, 27– 28; exoneration of, 86–87, 146; on Mexicans, 64–65; Nazi complicity and, 1, 9, 20, 148; professional privilege and, 8, 16, 55–56, 65, 83; racial privilege and, 6, 16, 39, 43, 64–66, 83; restrictions on, 43, 66–67; Western civilization and, 21–23 Parent Teacher Association (PTA), 51, 52, 57, 135 Peenemünde, 20, 132 Penrose, Neville, 33, 91–93 Phillips, Wendell, 55 play, 41, 97f, 112; Cold War culture and, 74; as freedom from adults, 123, 137; racial segregation and, 113, 115, 165n8; as sign of Americanization, 82, 85, 89, 103, 104. See also children Pooley, E. M., 109 prisoners of war (POWs), 5, 61–64 psychology, 3, 119; on German character, 27, 28, 137; politics versus, 95, 118 Rambusch, Nancy McCormick, 138, 139 Rangel, Gonzalo, 49 Reese, John, 62 repatriation, 47, 61, 120, 166n23 Riess, Curt, 23, 53–54 Rivera, Carlos, 109 rodeo, 72, 79–80 Rodríguez, Bill, 49 Roosevelt Elementary School, 79 Rosenblatt, Louise, 13

198

Rosinski, Klaus, 58, 82 Roth, Axel, 36, 45, 65, 72, 102, 104, 176n48 Rudolph, Arthur, 22, 160n36 Rugg, Harold, 13, 74–75 Ruiz, Elena (Tovar), 49, 165n8 Rules and Manual for School Employees, 48 Rusk Elementary School, 59 Russians, 12, 25, 113; American views of, 24, 25, 33, 70; critique of United States, 18–19, 22, 69; German views of, 21, 23, 69–70; propaganda of, 18–19, 69 San Jacinto Elementary School, 49, 99, 179n6 Sánchez, George I., 33, 95, 112, 113, 115 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 68, 79 Santoscoy, Luciano, 115 Saunders, Lyle, 91, 97f schools: assignment policies, 6, 48–51, 137; assimilation and, 5, 7, 16, 69, 77–78, 82–83; citizenship conferment and, 8, 29, 42, 61; as civilizing, 3, 28, 36, 74, 78, 85; democratic behavior and, 13–15, 31, 111; democratic methods of, 26, 128, 161n50; democratic values and, 10, 29, 32; discipline in, 3, 31–32; German, 10, 15, 25–32, 71, 125, 127; media coverage of, 14, 52, 100, 108–9; as national conscience, 148–49; nationalist narratives and, 68, 148; report cards, 30–31, 36, 143; summer, 14, 100; as vehicles for social hierarchy, 2, 39, 94, 129, 139; zoning, 48–49, 143 Schultz, Sigrid, 129, 164 Schwartz, Maurice, 55 segregation, neighborhood, 15, 34, 42, 46, 48–49, 51, 53, 165n8. See also South El Paso segregation, school: of African Americans, 42; and Anglo power brokers, 93; and bilingualism, 113, 178n92; hygiene as justification for, 34, 96; of Mexican Americans, 4, 6, 19, 48, 53, 104, 182n7; Paperclip children

INDEX

and, 2, 10, 15, 24, 45, 59; persistence of, 143; policy for, 6, 48–49; school resources and, 27, 32, 51; Spanish as justification for, 91–92; students’ responses to integration, 49–51, 103; and vocationalism, 38. See also South El Paso Segundo Barrio, 15, 53, 97f, 114, 153; schools, 99, 109, 118. See also South El Paso Seiler, Bernd, 60, 69, 70f, 72, 82, 176n43 Seiler, Ernst, 20, 70f Seiler, Klaus, 70f Silva, Maxine, 52, 135 slave labor. See concentration camps Smeltertown, 38 social education curriculum, 136 Sonnichsen, Carl, 71–72 South El Paso, 142; health and, 33, 53, 96; housing in, 33–34, 46–47, 48, 96–97; political advocacy in, 51, 52, 135, 182n7; racial segregation of, 15, 42, 48, 166n30; schools, 32, 42, 49, 52, 79, 114, 118, 136, 179n6. See also Segundo Barrio Soviet Union. See Russians Spanish language, 11, 33, 34, 49, 97f, 166n25; as Anglo commodity, 24, 90–91, 107–10, 173n6; bilingualism, 113–15; colloquial versus Castilian, 108; fluency outside of school, 36, 94, 101; instruction for Anglos, 97–98, 104–5, 107–9, 114; instruction for Spanish speakers, 114–15; interAmericanism and, 7, 16, 91, 108, 112; labor market and, 48, 105–6, 177n58; perceived cause of social deficiency, 16, 95; “Spanish Americans,” 89, 92, 95; teachers’ deficiency in, 3, 15, 94, 108–9, 143. See also English language; segregation, school Speck, Frank, 77 Sperry, Armstrong, 77 Spock, Benjamin, 118, 137, 138 Steinhoff, Ernst, 54, 64–65, 85 student-centered teaching, 26, 161n50

Stueber, Josephine, 81 Stuhlinger, Ernst, 86 Sutherland, Thomas, 51, 52, 94, 95 Swann, Alicia, 49, 89, 140; on Paperclip children, 67, 87, 103 Tanner, Myrtle, 91–94, 108, 110 teachers, 2, 40, 49, 57, 71, 103; assessment of students, 31, 104; as caretakers, 118, 129, 131, 140; fear of offending students, 144; German, 28–29, 73, 127, 129, 148; as human engineers, 129; identities of, 32, 34, 108, 143; as models of democracy, 29, 31, 32, 122, 129–30; Montessori, 119, 126–27, 130–32, 138–39; nationalism and, 68, 117–18; personality of, 32, 118, 122, 188; political complicity and, 117–18, 136, 140; political neutrality and, 8, 118, 130, 140; prejudices of, 3, 16, 36, 52, 147; purging of, 122; qualifications of, 76, 107, 108, 114; silence on inequities, 35, 116, 136, 137, 144; social studies, 24, 71, 72, 74–81; training of, 76, 108, 125, 129, 130–31. See also anticommunism; child devotion/child welfare; Spanish language; English language Telles, Raymond, 142–43 Texas Good Neighbor Commission, 93, 104; research produced by, 94, 95; Spanish instruction, advocacy for, 91, 97, 107–8, 109; transnational relations and, 33, 51, 91, 110 Third Reich, 10, 147, 180n23; schooling, 73, 116, 130, 132, 148; Paperclip scientists and, 4, 8, 11, 14, 61, 141, 146. See also Hitler, Adolf; Lebensraum totalitarianism, 25, 31, 137; child discipline and, 136; democracy versus, 30, 33, 69; schools and, 125; teachers and, 26, 31, 32, 129, 133 Tousey, Sanford, 81 Tschinkel, Helga (Motley), 50f, 58 Tschinkel, Henry, 36f, 68, 84f; American reception of, 4; work and, 58, 64

INDEX

199

Tschinkel, Johann, 64, 83, 84f, 157n1; Jewish reception of, 55; on Mexicans, 64; Nazism and, 1, 148 Tschinkel, Lotte, 99–101 Tschinkel, Walter, 17f, 59f, 75, 83; American reception of, 16; and Ilse Axster, 134; freedom of movement, 57, 59; passage to United States, 36–37 University of Texas, 19 Upton, Robert, 55–56 U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs, 113 USNS Goethals, 12–14 V-2 rocket, 1, 8, 86: American missile program and, 2, 44; American space program and, 86, 136; construction of, 1, 9, 20, 22, 160n36; scientific team, 12, 13, 56, 132, 158 vaqueros, 78, 79 Villa, Raul, 44

200

von Braun, Wernher, 5, 56; Ilse Axster conflict, 120–21, 181n51; frontier mythology and, 86–87, 120–21; Nazi status of, 9, 20 Wandervögel movement, 125, 127, 148, 157n1 Weisemann, Walter, 136 Western civilization, 26, 88, 123; as anticommunist trope, 6, 21, 23, 69, 101; curriculum and, 24, 29, 87; transglobalism and, 21, 22 White Sands Missile Range, 53, 64, 141 white supremacy, 19, 143, 143; frontier mythology and, 71, 74, 79, 82; Germans and, 18, 22, 60, 146, 147 Wilmouth, Grover, 35 Wise, Stephen, 55 Woerdemann, Regine (Von Aspe), 17, 36, 40–41, 45, 112 Zavala Elementary School, 51, 99

INDEX