Vigilance and Vigilantes

Preacher Harder fought a more than thirty year battle after arriving in Canada with the Russian Mennonite immigration wave of the twenties to preserve an old communal way of life. The principal fortress for his battle was the Mennonite Brethren Church at Yarrow in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. There he found his niche and became not only the “High Priest” of his family as this book indicates but the High Priest and Chief Enforcer of the laws of the village theocracy his church created during my time there. Directly or indirectly he also sanctioned certain brawnier church members as vigilantes to mete out appropriate discipline in the church basement and elsewhere to backsliders among children of church families they sought out in late evening hours. Some of my village friends of the early forties described them to me as the Gestapo.

In spite of all those efforts, even in that seemingly isolated village of the 1930’s and 1940’s when I grew up, Yarrow became the graveyard of that way of life. In retrospect it seems to me that Preacher Harder in his search for a congenial congregation after arrival in Canada ought to have associated himself with the Holdeman Mennonites, a sect founded by John Holdeman in the State of Ohio in the mid-nineteenth century, about at the same time as our Mennonite Brethren sect separated from the mainstream Mennonite Church in Russia. When I visited my Holdeman cousins in Kansas in 1985 they continued to be more successful at keeping the strict culture of their church than any of the MB churches I have known in recent years in Canada.

The book is A Generation of Vigilance, the biography of Johannes Harder and his wife Tina, written by retired Saskatchewan University history professor and author, T. D. Regehr and published by the CMU Press of Winnipeg at the behest of the Yarrow Research Committee and the editor of its Yarrow history, Leonard Neufeldt. After advised of the book’s publication I picked up my copy of the book, glanced at it briefly and found it somewhat hard to revisit those Depression days again.

The reason for that ambivalence lies in the differences between my family’s personal and church relationships and those of so many others who have written generally positive histories and memoirs about those early Yarrow days and the heyday of the Mennonite Brethren Church there under Harder’s leadership. I grew up and went to school with the two oldest of Harder’s sons and experienced his invasive influence on our family. I remember him as a stern but approachable gentleman of the old school. I was not one of his fans. Still, any resentment I may have had about the treatment of my parents by the church in the Harder days has never stayed with me. Harder and his fellows in the church were no more able then to accept the changing culture, than I am able to accept much of today’s overly permissive culture.

Those differences went back many years. Firstly, my father’s family still had German citizenship after several generations in Russia. Being of military service age Dad was interned as an enemy alien from 1914 to 1918 and our family patriated to Germany as Red Cross refugees in 1919/20 with 4 Russian born children. Later, after correspondence with my mother’s Holdeman Mennonite cousins in Kansas they emigrated to Halstead in that state with travel assistance arranged by the cousins (thus their later dispute with the Yarrow Church about its levy for a share of the CPR reiseschuld), arriving in that community in December 1922. After four upwardly mobile years there but with differences between my parents continuing as it had almost since their marriage in 1910, my family again became what I have called “Footloose and Rootless in America”, eventually arriving at Yarrow by car on December 7, 1928, some 14 months before the younger Harder family arrived there in January 1930.

Until my reading of Vigilance I had never made myself familiar with the detailed and restrictive rules and regulations insisted on by Harder and the closed committee he led for those who wished to maintain Yarrow MB Church membership. It explains much about the trauma experienced by our so frequently non-conforming family members with the incompatibility between my parents and the already Americanized ways of my three surviving Russian born brother and sisters, in their late teens in those years. The following excerpts from the first edition of my memoirs as I tried to write them more than 20 years ago, will illustrate the differences.

We moved into our new 14’x20’ shack on the 4 acre Yarrow farm at the dyke in 1934, starting bare bones scrambling for food and shelter in the depths of the Great Depression. The advantages of our “great American dream” experience, already lost in five short years, left us as “poor white trash” among our contemporaries of the closed religious society of Depression Yarrow. Many of the more recent CPR and MCC sponsored immigrants who found their way to Yarrow during this period were hungrier, in the sense that they were more anxious to recover the lost glories of their pre-revolutionary villages in Russia. Many were more aggressive, harder working, more cohesive and less sensitive to the express or implied criticism of the larger English speaking community all around.

Most Yarrow adults in that time had no wish to be absorbed in the surrounding English-Canadian culture. Even Yarrow’s geography conspired to isolate its closed society from the surrounding community. The closed triangle created by the Sumas prairie, the BC Electric Railway tracks and the Vedder Canal, allowed the church centred immigrants to drop their spoor around the village like a badger around its hole. Those few of the original “Canadian” settlers who stayed on, whose homes and farms hugged the old Road along the lower slopes of Vedder Mountain, like the Siddals, the Eckerts, the Belroses, and the Knoxes, (Mr. Knox, not a fan of the Mennonites or their settlement, had been heard to prophesy, “they’ll all drown down there, and I hope they do!”) were tolerated as outside functionaries or adopted as resource people. Most had well established homes and orchards, and were a source of free fruit, tree and shrub cuttings, berry plants, employment and credit for the new settlers.

Some of the new settlers had natural advantages, though I never heard any of our family concede even at their lowest ebb, that some of their neighbours might be their “betters” with both physical and intellectual advantages that Mom and Dad had never acquired. Some had been proud owners of large estates in Russia. They were not simply run-of-the-mill villagers who had a house and barn on a small village holding with a “destine” or two of grain outside the village. There were those whose private holdings had rivalled those of the lesser Russian aristocracy, and some lived in Yarrow. Others were better educated in the old country than any of the Nickels. Most were prepared to use any available means to rebuild what they had lost because of the Godless red tide that swept away their riches and their independence.

Above all, though, almost all the villagers had an advantage the Nickels by now could not aspire to. That was the advantage of being unified in their families and in their church relationships. There was a great deal of hypocrisy, though no greater than that found in other social groupings, but publicly the large majority of the villagers accepted the sanctions of the church without question and the church took them to its bosom. Such was not the case with the Nickels. Though women could be dominant in the privacy of the home, they were “untertan” ruled by their husbands, in public. Families worked as units and children of large families most often put all their work and earnings in the family pot. Such togetherness did not work for us even though my oldest brother and sister helped Mom and Dad keep bread on the table.

Some five years after completing that memoir I wasted my time on a series of short stories about a fictional town, most of which turned out as poorly disguised autobiographical experiences. One I called A Tale About Differences: A story about Poplar Village. The following short excerpt may further explain my ambivalence about revisiting my Depression Era upbringing at Yarrow.

Years of attempted mediation by the preacher and other elders soon followed. The episodes of argument and prayer in that Depression shack when I was ten or eleven did more to turn me against religion than the rational influences of college training. The preacher rarely came alone. With one or two of the senior elders he often arrived at our small spread after we completed our evening chores. They invariably greeted me as fond uncles and talked to my parents most congenially; a neighbourly call to pass the time of day. They were never in a hurry in those days but we all knew why they were there.

During those visits, Mother sent me up the ladder to my attic bed as soon as she could and told me to go to sleep. When my rattling around stopped, what amounted to an attempted exorcism began. I never slept and the walls and attic floor were thin shiplap. The exact words, which by then had switched to the more formal High German of their Bible, were not all understandable but I knew exactly what was going on from scraping chairs and voice modulations. The preacher gently work his way around to Bible readings at the table and meditations. He always ended by relating those readings to the problem between my parents. Invariably a dialogue with my mother followed. Mother lacked formal education except for a few elementary grades of the church school in the old country. In spite of that handicap years of reading and thinking made her what I consider an exceptional Bible scholar for the times.

“Listen to the words of the Apostle,” Brother Martel intoned in his best pulpit manner. He was particularly fond of quoting from the fourteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. In his best High German and all the sonorous majesty he could muster, Martel read, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”

The story of the Harders, their backgrounds and their troubles and migrations after the Russian Revolution is by now a familiar one. Except for their generational connection to the Mennonite preaching ministry, their story is not unique. Nor is the story of their poverty stricken beginnings in Yarrow. It was common to many through the whole of the Depression era, except for the demands of Harder’s devotion to preaching and church leadership. Nevertheless, for those efforts the Harders were often rewarded when “God provided” in the form of gifts from grateful church members. Regehr also describes such hardships as cycling to the hop fields and the need to work away from home. That was true of many of the villagers. For many years my own father started out early in the morning after farm chores to ride his two-wheeler along the gravel mountain road to Vedder Crossing and on to the foot of Promontory Hill to work a full day at Bowman’s Sawmill, then back home for more chores, all the while suffering from a debilitating asthma condition. All able hands got as much year-round work as they could at the hop yards either on Sumas Prairie or at Sardis and everyone picked rhubarb when that crop was for a time in vogue, berries, tobacco and hops in season. At age 12 I biked five miles to the tobacco fields on rough gravel roads and often worked 12 hours for twenty cents an hour before biking home.

The religious governance instituted by Preacher Harder was another matter. From my very first memory of Sunday school experiences at the MB Church I had difficulty accepting the biblical mythology as presented in the church basement by Petrus Martens, one of the many preachers in residence who taught there when I was around seven. Except for a long period of rationalized association with the United Church, which I again relinquished many years ago, my conscience has not permitted me to speak a faith I can no longer even rationalize. Preacher Harder’s insistence on his interpretation of scripture requiring such MB Church rites as baptism by immersion strikes me as picayune and unreasonable rather than a reason for him to wish that he was young enough to start his own church after he failed to persuade senior conference councils to accept his urging in the matter as mentioned on page 193 of the book.

Generally speaking, I found the Harder story sad. In the end the preacher turned out to be more adaptable than his wife to the integration of his church and his people into the mainstream Canadian culture. Preacher Harder died too young and I cannot help but think that the emotional effect of his failure to stop the Canadianization of his church and his children had something to do with his deteriorating health. The absence of any contribution to his parents’ story from my one-time elementary school classmate, Siegfried Harder, called Fred in the book, is especially noticeable. Of the older boys when I knew them so long ago, I thought him the most like, and the most likely to emulate his father in his evangelical zeal.

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