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Depression
The Courage of My Parents
My parents’ 20th-century struggles may offer hope in today's pandemic.
Posted April 26, 2020
To pass the time during the coronavirus shutdown, I have been watching the 2014 documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. The segments on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Great Depression, and World War II have been especially compelling, and they have led me to ponder how my parents' lives were changed by those global crises.
As we confront the new global crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, the experiences of my parents might provide a useful perspective.
My parents came of age in the Great Depression, and each suffered family traumas that marked their characters. After the United States entered World War II in 1941, my father served with the U.S. Army in Europe and my mother with the American Red Cross in western Canada.
By the time I was born, in the middle of the post-war baby boom, my parents—who met after the war—appeared to have put those experiences behind them to concentrate on raising my older brother and me and finding their way as a married couple with a family.
When my brother and I were children, my father would occasionally tell war stories at bedtime, but he chose only anecdotes that made us laugh. From his descriptions, the army sounded a lot like summer camp.
One favorite tale concerned the private who, during basic training, squirreled away his breakfast oranges in his footlocker. His perfectly constructed fruit pyramid was discovered during a surprise barracks inspection; needless to say, demerits followed. As my father told the story, it was one more hilarious scene in the great human comedy of army life.
It took me decades to comprehend what my parents actually went through during those two fearful periods in U.S. history. Much of my understanding has evolved only recently, as I have assembled facts I had known but never really put together before.
My father grew up near Boston, the third of four boys in a close and loving middle-class family. Their circumstances changed dramatically when his father, a department store buyer, died of a heart attack in 1928 when my father was 15.
The onset of the Depression in 1929 further strained the family. My grandmother found work as a bookkeeper, but my father was so affected by his father’s death that he developed behavioral problems and fell behind in school.
In desperation, my grandmother sent him to live with her sister in New Hampshire. Remarkably, the move succeeded; my father excelled in high school and was accepted to the University of New Hampshire—the first in his family to attend college. A few years later, he enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Boston University, intent on becoming a history professor.
My mother was born in a small town in Vermont; her father owned a stylish men’s and women’s clothing store downtown and managed the local municipal auditorium. He booked performers such as Paul Robeson, Will Rogers, and John Philip Sousa to edify their quiet corner of New England.
My mother’s happy childhood as the third of four children in a prosperous family was shattered by the Depression. The clothing store foundered, the auditorium was forced to shut its doors, and the family scraped by for several years in what appears to have been genteel poverty.
She had barely turned 22 when Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, bringing the U.S. into World War II.
My mother followed her elder sister into the American Red Cross. Her younger sister joined the WAVES, and her brother, the eldest sibling, became a sergeant with the U.S. Army Air Force. Miraculously, they all survived.
For his part, my father’s World War II service was far more harrowing than his bedtime stories suggested.
He was 29 and in graduate school when he was finally tapped by the U.S. Army, having been rejected twice because of his extraordinarily poor vision. The army sent him to Officer Candidate School based on his academic background, and then into the Corps of Engineers.
During the war, he was promoted to captain—an accomplishment he was quietly proud of. But whenever my brother and I pressed him for details, he told us only that his battalion spent the war “blowing up bridges so the Germans couldn’t cross and building bridges so the Allies could cross.”
Decades after he died in 1983, I learned from researching my father’s battalion just how dangerous their work was. It took place in the last 18 months of the war, along a route that stretched across northern France, into and across Germany, and on into Austria.
My father described the events of early May 1945—days before the war ended in Europe—in an October 1945 letter he wrote from Austria to his Boston University professor. I recently found this letter among his papers; it is searing proof that his lighthearted stories concealed terrible, haunting memories.
“The 11th Armored Division made the breakthrough into Austria,” he wrote, “and I was by accident the third American to enter the Mauthausen Concentration Camp, which is near Linz, Austria, and I have never been so shaken emotionally in my life. It seemed to me and still does as if my very soul were sick.
“I saw all the horrors that have been reproduced for you in movies and pictures of the more famous camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald. All of these camps followed the exact same pattern of grisly sadistic torture that must have been a deliberate, high-level policy of extermination by the cruelest means that man ever practiced on his fellow man.”
Reading these words in my father’s handwriting 75 years after the tragic day he described left me shaken and haunted, too—but also thoughtful.
The pandemic we are living through now is admittedly terrifying: It is hard to feel anything but great fear about a virus that is highly contagious, potentially lethal, and transmissible by people who show no symptoms but can still be infected.
Even those at the top of the economic ladder have had their lives upended, and millions more worldwide at the bottom of that ladder are in misery, which is likely to get even worse before conditions improve.
As strange as it may seem, however, learning about the historic trials my parents faced—and the courage with which they faced them—gives me hope. Perhaps they were ordinary people, but history pressed them to act in extraordinary ways, and they did.
My hope is also strengthened by a reflection from Eleanor Roosevelt included in The Roosevelts.
It promises no swift escape from our current calamity—just as there was no swift escape from the dark times she survived. Instead, this remarkable woman provides encouragement for what I expect will be the many hard weeks and months ahead.
“I think I’m pretty much of a fatalist,” she said. “You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.”
I like to think my parents would agree.
Copyright © 2020 by Susan Hooper
