The Four Men Who Made Almost Every Hutterite Leave America

Fifteen thousand two hundred and thirty-nine. That is a prisoner number at Alcatraz, issued in July of 1918 to a farmer from South Dakota who was twenty-three years old. The three numbers either side of it went to his two brothers and his brother-in-law. They had not refused to fight. Nobody ever asked them to fight. They refused to sign a card and to put on a uniform. Two of them did not come home. And within about a year, two thirds of every Hutterite in America had crossed into Canada. That is the reason I am sitting in Alberta. I am Andreas Wurz. I keep the books on a colony in southern Alberta. This is the most told story we have, and a story told for a hundred years grows on the way. So I went through ours against the archive, and there are four places where our own version has drifted — and a fifth that is about something I nearly said on this channel myself. That part is at 11:31. There is also one date I keep from you until 13:25, on purpose. SOURCES The men's names, ages and families; the enlistment card and what they refused; Jacob Wipf's testimony; the prisoner numbers; the cell, the uniforms left on the floor, the water ration, the chaining and the fourteen-day rotation; the transfer three days after the Armistice; and Maria Hofer finding her husband in the coffin — Duane C. S. Stoltzfus, "Pacifists in Chains: The Persecution of Hutterites during the Great War" (Johns Hopkins University Press), built on the men's own letters, court-martial and prison records. Summarised by the author here: https://www.plough.com/articles/the-martyrs-of-alcatraz https://anabaptistworld.org/standing-chains-alcatraz/ The Jamesville livestock raid and the ransom demand; the population figures for 1917; the fifty-six men drafted; the permits from July 1918; the roughly 1,200 who had crossed by the end of that year and the 1,700 on fifteen new colonies by April 1919 — Bradley Armishaw, Journal of Mennonite Studies. https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/download/1370/1361/2132 The colonies established in Alberta and Manitoba, and the land purchases — Lawrence C. Anderson, "The Exodus of the Hutterites from South Dakota." https://esirc.emporia.edu/bitstreams/ff53a031-c46a-4a0b-9029-a0feb9a401cf/download The dissolution suit, Judge Alva Taylor's 1919 ruling and the South Dakota Supreme Court's 1922 affirmation. https://prairieprogressive.com/2015/04/30/yielding-our-freedoms-ending-the-hutterite-menace/ The word MARTYR on the two headstones at Rockport, and the Hutterian Brethren's own account of the imprisonment. https://hutterites.org/newsitems/822/ https://hutterites.org/history/sentenced-alkatraz/ Joseph Hofer's dates and burial. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/58431508/joseph-j.-hofer The 1936 return to South Dakota, transcribed from The Weekly Pioneer-Times, Deadwood, 24 September 1936. https://richardmammana.wordpress.com/2022/04/29/hutterites-reestablish-homes-in-south-dakota-1936/ On the beard and the shaved upper lip — the standard account, which traces it to the Napoleonic era and which describes a different branch of the Anabaptists, not us. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Beard A NOTE ON HONESTY The historian who recorded the guards coming with knotted lashes used the word "reportedly." I have not been more certain than he was. The account of the men being stripped and made to wait outdoors at Leavenworth for two hours comes from a devotional book rather than from the archive. The careful version says only that there was a long wait before clothing arrived, and that is the version I gave you. I have not given the total the Jamesville livestock fetched at auction. I found it transcribed three different ways in regional newspapers and could not confirm it in a scholarly source. I could not establish what happened to Michael Hofer's body. There is an account that his father insisted otherwise; it is not in the record. Community post: I am running a poll about the book some of you asked for. It is on the channel's Community tab. Next: the church service we hold every evening of our lives, and the number I worked out about it.