Most of us have a hard time admitting that the days of our youth are now history, and I’ll admit a certain ambivalence on the question myself, but History is my job, and so I have to face up to the task of chronicling and interpreting the experience of what I have named, borrowing a label from Larry McMurtry, the Last Picture Show Generation on the Great Plains of North America.
The 1960s are pivotal in this period, which leads me to the symposium on the Great Plains convened at NDSU by the Institute for Regional Studies in 1965. Studying the proceedings, I find some troves of insight — the essay by A. H. Anderson on community adjustment in changing times, for instance — but for the most part, I find the scholars and scientists divided and confused as to what was happening, or should happen, on the prairies.
The organizers seem to want the northern plains to double down on wheat and insist that an economy based on that commodity holds unprecedented promise. Others say, yeah, that’s our problem, and we need to find other ways of making a living, and a life, on the prairies.
Another clearheaded voice in the collection, though, was a young priest, Father William C. Sherman, whose experience in North Dakota was grounded in St. Michael’s Church of Grand Forks, in the University of North Dakota, and in North Dakota State University, where he was beginning to teach part-time. Father Bill would go on to become one of the great interpreters of the immigrant ethnic experience on the plains. He did so both as a scholar and as a priest, who loved his flock.
Father Bill also was a discoverer, and the voice of a cultural emergence in the region. His contribution to the 1965 symposium was an essay entitled, “The Germans from Russia.” That very term, “Germans from Russia,” was new coinage. Previous commentators had called the folk who came from the Russian Empire to the northern plains Russians, which was misleading, culturally; Russo-Germans; or, somewhat better, German-Russians.
I don't know if Father Bill himself devised that descriptive term, Germans from Russia, but it has stuck. He injected it into the literature. I’m giving him naming rights. When in 1976 the citizens to which it applied organized to celebrate their lineage as the Germans from Russia Heritage Society, they adopted it.
In the text of his 1965 essay we find Father Bill breathless with excitement. Here is this ethnic culture — and he was beginning to suspect that the Germans from Russia, not the Norwegians, were the largest ethnic component of North Dakota — an ethnic culture emerging to talk about itself, and he had the privilege of representing and naming it.
He begins, “Catherine the Great is a name revered by some and cursed by others in Eastern Europe, but grizzled old settlers of many American Great Plains villages speak of it with respect.” Father Bill is literally calling forth a people on the plains and positing for this people a distinctive history and role to be credited here.
This was a people not without faults. Father Bill wishes they were a bit more enthusiastic about education. But he admires their cultural resilience and their agricultural ethos. “Their peasant past and Russian village experience made ownership of land the paramount value,” Bill says. “Survival, status, and leadership depended on it.” Pausing as I read, I hear the gravel of that land in Bill’s beloved voice.
