ST. LOUIS AND CIVILIZATION

As I said at the time …

We share a debt of gratitude to your grandmother, who has spent many hours assembling a remarkable gift for you – a knowledge of your ancestors. I hope you will come to treasure her findings, and the love she has put into this project.

Through Eide Henry Hopke, you and I also share a common bond, although our legacy from him varies in one crucial aspect. For you, he provides not only your surname, but also some distinctive DNA strands that come only through the male line. For me, he is part of a maternal genetic mix that is ever-expanding, the further back we go. (For example, while Eide Henry is one of my sixteen great-great-great-grandfathers, only George Hodgin carries the equivalent DNA strands for me; Eide Henry’s endowment, meanwhile, comes down through my mother’s father’s mother’s mother, in a bit of a zig-zag path.)

I hope you won’t look at your genealogy simply as a long list of names and dates – a sort of variation on the Biblical begats. (That’s not to deny the frustration and pleasure that goes into the investigative digging and puzzle-solving involved along the way of gathering these details.) Rather, the power comes in building the story of these seemingly common people and the ways they addressed their time in history and the places they dwelled. Researchers who try to connect their ancestry to ancient royalty or who stop the moment they find an ancestor hanged as a horse thief need to rethink their vision. In this venture we need to accept the facts, good or bad, in their full truth; what we eventually have is a personal history, one that will often stand at some distance from the one taught in schoolrooms or give us some insight into a greater framework. As you read historical accounts, you may find that through these ancestors, you, too, are in their time and place. Oh, yes, and as stories go, genealogies can turn up the most unexpected twists. For instance, the first of my Hodson surname ancestors in America arrived as the only surviving family member after their ship had been captured by French privateers (pirates); his great-grandson, a miller, owned a gold mine in North Carolina; and, on my dad’s side, all of my ancestors until the Second World War were staunch pacifists in their religious principles – I knew none of this when I was growing up.

On my mother’s side, Eide Henry emerges as a remarkable figure. Maybe you’ll be the one to figure out how he arrived in the New World, whether he came alone or with family, how he paid for his journey, or what led him to St. Louis; there are certainly many details to fill in about his life, and every answer seems to produce more questions. But what we already can sketch from the facts at hand point to an enterprising character who adapted himself well to his new surroundings. While we don’t know for certain what prompted him to leave Prussia, we can imagine the values the place instilled in him – truthfulness, modesty, self-control, and loyalty, in the words of Peter F. Drucker. “This Prussia had been a military state” and “was not educated, let alone cultured; but it was pious, with a narrow and sentimental Lutheranism,” Drucker notes, including an observation credited to Bismarck “that the Germans require a father figure, and that they will fall victim to a tyrant unless they have a legitimate and lawful king.” (From “The Man Who Invented Kissinger” in Adventures of a Bystander.) We can ask ourselves how much of this played out in Eide Henry’s life – in his decision to serve in the Mexican-American War, for instance, or in naming sons during the Civil War Robert Lee Hopke and Jefferson D. Hopke. This, despite the reported universal opposition to slavery by the German population in St. Louis during this period. (As you grow older, you may come to realize how often our values conflict or how much ambiguity arises in daily life; black-and-white decisions seem to be far rarer than we’d like.) We can also imagine that Eide Henry knew sorrow, in the death of his first wife or young children, and perhaps in the separation from his homeland. He must have known loneliness, too, in those times when he lived apart from his family in order to earn an income. We can look at the portrait your grandmother has collected and see all of these things in his face.

He also opens us to the pervasiveness of German civilization on American life, something that World War I erased from public awareness. Actually, I can speak of two major streams of German influence, the first being what we would consider Pennsylvania Dutch and including the Anabaptist traditions most visible now among the Amish, and a second, which settled largely in Midwestern cities and carried a deep sense of “good living,” meaning learning and progress. Eide Henry would have been part of that second movement, while many of my father’s ancestors were part of the first.

Sometimes we will glean background for our story from the most unexpectedly sources. One of my wife’s favorite books, for instance, is Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave America “The Joy of Cooking.” While Anne Mendelson is writing about her mother and grandmother, her opening chapter examines “The Golden Age of St. Louis,” which did “indeed – at least in a brief and glorious interval after the Civil War – seem one of the finest spots on earth to dwell … “ She then turns to Lebenskunstler, “as untranslatable as any word in the German language, which is saying a good deal. It implies a civilized command of living as an art form like singing or painting. German-English dictionaries lamely offer explanations like ‘one who appreciates the finer things in life.’ ‘Life artist’ is the baldly literal rendering, and perhaps as good as any.” Mendelson then goes to present the story of her genealogy in a thoroughly engaging manner, one that can be seen as a model for this enterprise. What interests us most, however, is the points where it overlaps on our own story. For instance, she mentions “Thousands of poor Irish had also come to the region, especially after the potato famine of 1845-46. They competed for work as laborers, artisans, and servants with large numbers of Germans fleeing comparable poverty.” And then she notes “a very different community brought by the abortive stirrings of liberal German nationalism after 1830 and more markedly 1848. They were articulate professionals, or sometimes minor nobility, who rejoiced in a particularly German marriage of cultural ideals, consciously enlightened convictions, and creature comforts.” At this point, it seems more likely that Eide Henry was one of those “fleeing comparable poverty,” yet he still would have been part of that mixture of German life in the city, with its “life artist” influence. While my mother probably had no idea of her Hopke ancestry, she always spoke of St. Louis in almost reverential tones; meanwhile, her mother – who married a Hopke descendant – strikes me as one who hungered for that “life artist” ideal, even though she had not been born into it.

Maybe you forget that St. Louis was once the largest and most important city west of the Appalachian mountains, after supplanting Cincinnati for the honor. Chicago took the lead only later. By 1860, Mendleson writes, St. Louis “had a population of nearly 161,000, and supported a small handful of theaters and a large handful of music societies (well populated with Germans), a library, the new St. Louis Academy of Sciences, Washington University, several foundries, the Pacific Railroad (stretching a magnificent 176 miles westward), a noisy range of political opinions, and sundry German- and English-language newspapers.”

She relates that a “traveler reaching St. Louis by steamer saw first the broad man-made plateau of city levees, swarming with teamsters’ wagons and lined with warehouses. The land rose to a modified grid of streets, orderly enough on paper but at most seasons of the year fed by an inexhaustible supply of mud reputed not to differ greatly from the St. Louis drinking water.” As a teamster, Eide Henry may well have been one of those with a wagon waiting at the wharf; we can imagine, too, what he said of the water.

Much of what I know about Eide Henry is thanks to your grandmother’s generous sharing of material she’s gathered for you. Along the way, she has also filled in large gaps in my knowledge of Eide Henry’s son-in-law, David W. Ward, and even my Munro ancestors from Scotland – all of which somehow come together in Pike County, Missouri, in what can be seen as the northern shadow of St. Louis. None of these people are among her own bloodlines, either, yet she has been faithful to the larger task of bringing their lives to the light.

How it all comes together is largely up to us. Jeremy, I hope you find much in this legacy that will inspire you, add perspective to your own life decisions, and give you an appreciation for the blessings we have because of their efforts.

I’ve spoken of Eide Henry as a remarkable character. I think we can add Patsy Lynn to that list, as well.

Best wishes in all you undertake, Cousin.