The Worst Hard Time: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

By the summer of 1929, there was a food surplus in the United States. There were piles of unsold wheat. Europe faced the same problem after Russia began exporting its wheat again. In the U.S., prices fell quickly. Farmers had two choices: plant less and wait for prices to rebound, or plant more to try to make the same money on higher yields. They chose to do the latter. There was, after all, pressure to meet their bank debts.

In September 1929, George Alexander Ehrlich sat at a wedding table and told his grandchildren the story of what it had been like on the Volga River in Russia, where he had come from. He spoke “a very old style of German,” mixed with Russian and “spiced with the dialect of Texas-Oklahoma.” In the Russian countryside, George’s father had been a leather tanner whom George accompanied to work so that he could learn the trade. George would have done just that if not for being drafted into the czar’s army on his sixteenth birthday. To avoid service, he had to leave Russia. In 1890, George boarded a ship to New York out of Hamburg, Germany. The ship got caught in a typhoon in the Atlantic. The captain sent out an SOS and told the passengers and crew to prepare for death.

George’s story was the founding narrative of the Ehrlichs and how they got to Oklahoma. At the wedding table, they “poured wine and quaffed beer and ate the spicy, smoke sausages.” The Russo-Germans were still regarded as strangers in the High Plains due to their accents, strange clothes, strange foods, and a German heritage that made them suspect during the First World War. After 166 years of bouncing from southern Germany to the Volga region of Russia to the former Cherokee territory of Oklahoma, they wanted only to be left alone. It seemed that, in the U.S., they were finally at home.

Russo-German culture seemed “frozen in place in 1763” and transplanted to the Great Plains as it had been in Germany. When they boarded ships for America, they carried “seeds of turkey red—a hard winter wheat”—in the pockets of their vests. The crop was resistant to cold and drought and made agronomists rethink the notion that the Southern Plains were unsuited to agriculture. “Turkey red” had allowed the Germans to move from the valley to the drier and higher steppes.

The Russo-Germans were “migratory” and “tough-nutted pacifists” who earned a reputation for draft-dodging. Some were opposed to war on principle, while there were plenty who fought for the United States during both World Wars. What they would not do was fight for the Russian czar or—worse—the Bolsheviks. Catherine the Great had promised them, in a manifesto dating back to July 22, 1763, that they would be excused from military conscription. It was part of a beneficial package deal she offered to bring Germans into Russia. The empress was German-born and preferred the manners of her own people. She also wanted farming colonies filled with people who were not Russian. She believed that the farms would be a “buffer,” deterring the warring tribes who roamed the steppe from pillaging villages.

Catherine the Great was eager for as many Germans as possible to populate the villages. Most of the migrants had come from poor villages in southern Germany, where families had suffered in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. Catherine also suggested polygamy to increase populations, but the Germans were not interested in this at the time. Instead, they were more concerned with keeping dirt away from their homes. After arriving, they did suffer invasions from the Kirghiz, a Tartar tribe whose members burned the Germans’ church, raped women, and kidnapped babies. Captives were sold in Asia as slaves.

By 1863, a quarter-million Germans lived on the Volga. Another group of Germans, composed of Mennonites, lived near the Black Sea. The German colonists never assimilated fully into Russia. Meanwhile, Russians became resentful of their prosperous farms and their exemption from military service. Then, in 1872, Czar Alexander II revoked Catherine’s promises to them and demanded that the Russo-Germans stop speaking German and join the army. He raised taxes on them and revoked their exclusive licenses to brew beer.

Meanwhile, in America, railroad companies had already drawn the ire of farmers in Nebraska and Kansas for their promotion of fraud. The agents began courting immigrants—their last hope to avoid bankruptcy. Immigrants traveled in groups, worked hard, and paid on time. Brochures advertising land were printed in German. Some Germans returned from the U.S. to the Volga, talking about what they had seen of the Great Plains. They liked it. It seemed like the “Promised Land” all over again, as Russia had been.

Starting in 1873, villages along the Volga “became near ghost towns” as people boarded “small boats on the Volga to Saratov.” Then, they rode the train to a North Sea port where they took ships to major U.S. ports—New York, Baltimore, and Galveston. Many were amazed to see black people for the first time. In the 1870s, about 12,000 Russo-Germans arrived in Kansas. In fifty years, there would be 303,000 in the Great Plains. In Kansas, the Germans established numerous towns with German names and kept many of their traditional customs, including their tidiness and their fondness for singing.

George Ehrlich turned eighteen during his trip across the Atlantic. He strapped his money to a lower leg and put all of his possessions into a small bag. Though the trip was only supposed to take two weeks, due to the storm at sea, George’s ship arrived in New York Harbor after two months. The ship had been lost at sea and ran of food, and some of the immigrants fell ill, but they had made it to America. It was New Year’s Day, 1891.

In the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles, some Volga Germans were “shedding some of the thrift their forebears had practiced” by buying new tractors and borrowing money from banks to buy more land. The goal was to plant as much wheat as possible—fast.

When George arrived in the High Plains, he initially stayed with relatives in LeHigh, Kansas and looked for work. He missed the land grab in 1893, when former Cherokee lands were opened up. Six years later, George heard that there were still a few sections left, far west of the prime land. During a trip from Kansas to Shattuck, Oklahoma in the fall of 1900, George staked his claim to “a quarter-section of rich grass at the base of [a] hill.”

George returned to Kansas to make peace with his family, then he took a train back to Shattuck, Oklahoma with hundreds of other Germans, who were accompanied by livestock and precious items from home. When the immigrants arrived, they witnessed a land that looked like hell. The prairie had been burned by the Cherokee in revenge for being betrayed by the U.S. government for the third time. However, the Germans stayed, despite the cold and the prejudice they faced from Anglos. Some Anglo shopkeepers initially refused to sell them food, and others tried to pass an ordinance against speaking German. The Germans stayed no matter what. They were used to living in a treeless, unfriendly place.

George Ehrlich’s first job was as a ranch hand. To learn English, he carried a notebook in his back pocket, in which he wrote down new words. He married a fellow Volga German, Hanna Weis, and they had ten children. During the First World War, the family was nearly run out of town after a schoolteacher whom they invited into their home reported to the police that they had a picture of the German Kaiser in the house. The cops surrounded their homestead and searched it. George and eleven other German immigrants were accused of espionage, and rumors circulated that they were to be hanged.

Around midnight, the police went to the jail in Arnett, Oklahoma, where Ehrlich and the others were being held and took them to Woodward, a bigger town to the east. George appeared before Judge T.R. Alexander around 2:00 AM. The police explained that the Germans were spies. The judge spoke to George Ehrlich and asked what he was doing there. In his broken English, George explained that it was because of the picture of the Kaiser. The judge asked the Germans how many of them were supporting the war effort. All of their hands shot up. Ehrlich dug in his pocket and pulled out two hundred dollars’ worth of government stamps. The judge asked the sheriff how many of his officers had war bonds or stamps. None of them did. The judge dismissed the case.

The youngest of the Ehrlich children, nicknamed Georgie, was doted upon for his boundless energy. One summer evening, on August 14, 1924, he wandered out onto the road, lost in the sand wafting in the air from the tractors. A cattle truck came along and ran him over—the driver never saw the boy. George Ehrlich and his wife, Hanna, remained shaken from the loss. Still, George thought that “he could live through anything.” He did not realize that in five years, he would live through something meaner than old Russia and a “storm-tossed ship.”