1945 Andrew A. Miller

1945  Andrew A Miller, my father’s many abilities, Martin and Martha Miller family, a hunting accident, schooling and   Clarence Zuercher, Martin’s addiction and gifts, a family of singers and music, Andrew’s Christian conversion, family separation and the ban; higher education, Edward Yoder and World War II, Karl and Arthur Compton and Hiroshima.

From my infancy in the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, my father Andrew was a successful small 80-acre Ohio farmer. He and my mother Mattie paid off the Hummel place farm near Berlin, and then we moved to an 80-acre farm east of Holmesville which they cultivated with a small dairy, hogs, chickens, horses and a big garden, similar to other small rural farmers of that time. What seemed to distinguish my father when as a child I became aware of him was that he could do about everything else too.

This admiration is natural for a small child’s awareness, but I thought I had more claims for my father than most. Andrew was first a farmer, but he was also an avid reader, a writer for religious periodicals, an editor of Herald der Wahrheit, a book seller (a bookstore called Goodwill Book Exchange), an amateur musician (singing and playing the guitar and other instruments), roofing and spouting contractor, and a mister-fix-it with any tool. And these were all projects, before the mid-fifties after which many new ones were added every several years. When he and Mattie moved to the Hummel farm in the mid-forties he was in a strong farming phase, even though very little in his family background would have prepared him for this vocation. If my mother Mattie came from the landed yeoman farmer Schlabachs, my father Andrew’s Millers came from a financially impoverished mother-led family of trades and craftsmen who tried to keep food on the table on a three-acre plot and an alcoholic father.

Andrew’s father Martin gave some support to the family by working on the county roadways, much of the time as a machine or grader operator. For many years he drove a Galion road grader or a maintainer, as it was called. In the winter he would cut wood with my father Andrew and brothers Dan and Raymond and also helped him in some hunting and trapping, selling the fur pelts of mink and muskrats. Still Martin’s work seemed to keep him away from home generally a week at a time, and one has some sense of an absentee father.

One of the most memorable events in Martin’s life was when he lost his arm in a hunting accident at age 45. Martin with sons Andrew and Raymond (then 12 and 6 years old) went rabbit hunting, and the gun went off by accident, shooting himself through the elbow. This traumatic event, what with Martin being a bleeder, involved the surgery of removing a part of the arm inside the small house. The children were taken to a next room with the local bishop comforting them, they sang hymns and Andrew said that he saw an angel was sitting on a corner dresser watching over them. In any case Martin lost his arm three inches below the elbow, and became known to the neighbors as One-Armed-Mart.  This tragic event seemed to so define Martin and Martha’s family that during the summer of 2011 when several hundred descendants gathered for a reunion, the details of this accident with all its shock and pain took center stage in telling the family story.

My father recalls that “two years later, as a 14-year-old I took my dad’s place cutting brush and building roads by hand labor through the middle of the winter under President Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration and the National Recovery Act. Every worker got 50 cents an hour, plus surplus food from the government, and you did not have to be poor to get a job.”  One other element about Martin which gave a sad coloration to the family and surely factored into the family’s poverty was Martin’s alcoholism. This was an embarrassment and was not discussed openly by many in the family, but my mother and father mentioned it candidly, especially as a cautionary story on the damage drunkenness does to a family’s well being.

As a boy Andrew seemed to get respite from the family in school and by his love of learning, reading and writing.  He attended the one-room Wise’s school, made friends with the Mennonite John Beechy’s children, especially Mark, and was a teacher’s favorite with his ease in learning.  Andrew was a good student with report cards which show lot of Bs and As and some Cs. His first two grades were with teacher Etta Engle; Grades three and four with Boyd W. Miller and the rest of his schooling with Clarence (C.F.)  Zuercher. Andrew had a special affection for the acclaimed rural teacher and naturalist Zuercher from whom he also learned to play the guitar. And Martin encouraged his son in school, even attending the school’s evening entertainment programs, lit with gas lanterns. After his eight grades, Andrew took some German classes at the Berlin High School in the evenings, and often mentioned his regret that he could not continue further schooling. Andrew and his teacher Zuercher went on nature hikes, hunting and trapping with each other. Andrew literally had a back 40 acres of woods behind the little house and yard along what is now State Route 557 between Berlin and Charm. And they had the Doughty Valley stream with mink and muskrats to trap and explore on the other side of the road.

And to the family, he became a stand-in for his absentee father; he was soon working away from home, bringing income as did his older sisters, Ada and Nora, and his younger sisters and brothers would do: Esther, Mae, Raymond, Ida, Daniel, Ruth and Betty. As a young parent, Andrew would write on “drunkard fathers” noting the harm to innocent children. He wrote: “Perhaps only these children who by experience know what it is to see their worried mother draw the window blinds aside and gaze searchingly out into the darkness and stillness of the night for the one whom she entrusted her earthly life and happiness to—only to expect an intoxicated husband at a late hour. Horrible!” One has the clear impression Andrew is reflecting on his own Friday night experience with his mother. In any case, Andrew also turned inward, becoming a loner; besides his mother and later his wife Mattie, he seemed to have few close friends, either in youth or as an adult.

But it’s unfair to define my father’s family too much with Martin’s addiction, Martin was also a person who felt deeply, loved his children, had deep religious sentiments, and loved music. Toward the end of his life, he gave up drinking, and died as an honorable Christian member of the Amish church. The children remembered his regularly visiting neighbors, especially the widows and widowers and reading the Bible. He gave warm greetings to the young children when he returned from work, lifting them up to his face and being the emotionally engaged father of talented children: craftsmen and musicians. Martin’s children were respected in the neighborhood and church community, and aside from being good workers who helped provide for the family, they were artistically oriented and musicians. They seemed to learn to play about every type of instrument from guitar to harmonica.

Martin often sang  around the house and in the morning when he got up early, getting the fire going, the children would hear him singing German hymns and the English gospel songs such as “All the Way my Savior Leads me,” then common among their pietistic and revivalist Christian neighbors. Later in life Betty and her family would sing these songs with my father around my father’s Lookout Camp fires, and I often heard Nora singing them with her family at Shipshewana when I would visit her on Sunday afternoons in the 1990s. Andrew’s sister Ruth learned to play the guitar in the barn, among straw bales. She said that they had instruments in the house, but at church council meeting, the church elders would tell Martin that he would need to get them out of the house and have his children under control. So he had the children take the guitars and instruments into the barn. But with time they moved back into the house, until the next council meeting and then the instruments would go out again-- for a while. Andrew said this father’s own standard was that music should be “uplifting and honoring to God.”

One of the most consequential and lasting events in my father’s life was a Christian conversion experience at age seventeen. Although never an adolescent given to rowdy behavior and rebellion against his family and community, this experience seemed to be a crisis personal experience of feeling sinful,  alienated and estranged from God as often experienced in the Protestant evangelical tradition. For most of my father’s life, this crisis experience, being converted, was a defining mark of Christianity. People were divided into those who had had this kind of conversion experience and those who did not. It was not that other categories such as denominations, church membership, baptism, and ethical living were unimportant. But Andrew generally considered them secondary to this basic internal spiritual experience. For my father it was a matter of the heart which elicited prayer, devotion, ethical living, and Bible reading. In a speech he gave to the Amish mission group in 1953, he said “he did not read anything but the precious Book itself for six months after his conversion; for fear that he would lose the new-found bliss that flooded his soul.” So important was this experience to him.

As a child, it was hard for me to get a fair reading on my father’s family, given that we were cut off from that side of the family during our growing up years when my parents moved to Holmesville and joined the Mennonites, hence were in the ban. The positive side of the ban, also called shunning, for a bonded Christian community is that this clear boundary nurtures the unity and interdependence of the church community and its members. As an adult I recognize this value and respect this boundary maintenance as a part of the health of the Amish church. But for a young child, there is also a cost to family loneliness and separation. My father may have added to the Amish Millers’ defensiveness by becoming a missionary during these years, feeling that the traditional Amish were spiritually asleep and needed to be awakened to more expressive evangelical spirituality and witnessing.

My parents never made us feel like victims because of the ban, at the same time that they were certainly not supporters of it. For example, when my cousin Esther Troyer married Melvin Miller in 1957, our family was invited to the wedding. When it came time to eat, Esther’s mother Ada came out to our family and told her brother Andrew that a separate table was set for us in the basement. I suppose this may have taken on an additional personal element because the wedding was at our old Hummel place west of Berlin. My father’s response was okay, Mattie and children let’s go, there are other places to eat at Berlin and Holmesville. We left and nothing much more was said; we simply stayed out of my father's family circles. On balance, one notes that the Martin and Martha Miller family has had a good Amish retention rate, with eight of the ten living children remaining in the Amish church.

Andrew had a number of informal names during his life; the one I knew best during my growing up years was Mart Andy (Martin Miller’s son Andrew), hence I was sometimes called Mart Andy’s Levi. He himself used various signatures such as Andrew, A.A. (Andrew Alvin), and simply Andy. In the 80s when he owned a music store (Miller Music), gave music lessons, wrote songs, and recorded cassettes, he became known as Music Andy. In those later decades my father turned to music to re-interpret his family origin as a Holmes County version of the virtuous Appalachian mountain family. If in the forties and fifties, my father was Andrew, now he was clearly Andy, to paraphrase Loretta Lynn, a road grader’s son. He wrote a song called “Holmes County Ohio” which evokes a cottage on a hillside, evening sounds of the whip-poor-will, barefooted boys running through clover, all without radio or TV, juke boxes, and all singing “In the Sweet By and Bye.” The hard-scrabble economic conditions of the Miller family were recompensed by the down-home philosophy, “that life consists not in the abundance of possessions,” but of being “a close-knit family with lots of love.”

If my father’s 1945 Holmes County Amish community had misgivings about higher education, some Mennonites had embraced schooling and formal education. In Scottdale, Pennsylvania, Edward Yoder had become a Latin and Greek scholar and earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He remained a nonresistant Christian pacifist as an editor at Mennonite Publishing House and wrote various pamphlets and booklets for the Mennonite and Amish young people who were serving in alternative camps called Civilian Public Service (CPS.). He wrote the definitive history of the Mennonites in Scottdale with a study called “Coming of the Mennonites to Westmoreland and Fayette County.” He also often took walking hikes with his young son Virgil and envisioned the local Mennonites taking care of the old Alte Menist Fayette County burial ground in Upper Tyrone Township which had become a weed and briar patch.

But we remember Edward Yoder mainly because of his journal, and on Groundhog Day of 1945, he confided in his journal that the Russian troops heading west were within 50 miles of Berlin. He feared that Europe would slide into chaos, with the American troops returning with “a hollow victory.” He thought the Europeans may make “an even bigger fool” of Roosevelt than they did of Woodrow Wilson a generation earlier.  He concluded, “Of course, one ought to be an optimist, so they say, yet even many an optimist wakes up to sad disillusionment in time.” Six weeks later, on March 26, 1945 Edward Yoder died; he was 42 years old.

Other descendants of the Amish Mennonites not only embraced higher education but became active participants on the national stage. Descendents of the Hessian Amish Mennonites were key participants in the Second World War; Germany surrendered in May of 1945, but the war in the Pacific continued. By the summer of 1945 American scientists had developed successful atomic bomb tests, and advising the government were outstanding physicists such Karl Compton (president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT) and his brother Arthur Holly Compton, the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics winner who had been director of the Metallurgical Laboratory of the Manhattan Project since 1941. Compton grew up in Wooster, Ohio, the son of Otelia Holly Augspurger and Elias Compton.

Otelia Holly Augspurger was raised among the Hessian Amish Mennonites in the Apostolic Mennonite Church of Trenton, Ohio, in Butler County near Cincinnati. This Amish Mennonite settlement was begun in 1819 by families from the Alsace Lorraine region between France and Germany.  Compton’s grandfather Samuel Augspurger was a conscientious objector during the Civil War and his ancestor, the immigrant Daniel Holly was a minister in the Hessian Church from 1841 until he moved to Illinois in 1848. Arthur Compton recalled that the immigrant Holly “reacted so vigorously against the effort of an army officer to impress him in military service that flight from France to Germany became necessary.”  On July 23, one day before President Harry S. Truman told Joseph Stalin of the USA’s intention to use the weapon against Japan, Wooster, Ohio, native Arthur Holly Compton, was asked: “Washington wants to know what you think?”

“What a question to answer! Having been in the very midst of these discussions, it seemed to me that a firm negative stand on my part might prevent an atomic attack on Japan. Thoughts of my pacifist Mennonite ancestors flashed through my mind. I knew all too well the destruction and human agony the bombs would cause. I knew the danger they held in the hands of some future tyrant. These facts I had been living with for four years. But I wanted the war to end. I wanted life to become normal again. I saw a chance for an enduring peace that would be demanded by the very destructiveness of these weapons. I hoped that by use of the bombs many fine young men I knew might be released at once from the demands of war and thus be given a chance to live and not to die.” Compton voted with J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, and on August 6, 1945, the American Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on the inhabitants of Hiroshima, Japan; by September 2 of that year, the Japanese government surrendered. 

Sources on my father’s family and come from oral conversations with family members and from “Some Memories and Reflections on the Mart [Martin] J. Miller and Martha (Mattie) Miller Family” in Jacob A. Miller Heritage and Story 1864-1983 (privately published family history by Dorothy Hostetler Raber of Berlin, Ohio, 1983, pages 4-5). Andrew’s song “Holmes County, Ohio, appears in this same publication. My father’s school grade cards are with John D. Roth at the Mennonite Historical Library of Goshen College. The quote on Andrew’s conversion experience comes from Witnessing (September-October, 1953, page 4), copies in the Andrew A. Miller Collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church. The “Drunkard Fathers” quote comes from an Andrew A. Miller publication called Christian Fellowship Review (March 14, 1954, page 4), copies in the Andrew A. Miller Collection in the Archives of the Mennonite Church. Edward Yoder’s journal entries come from Edward Yoder: Pilgrimage of a Mind (privately published, 1985, page 470). Yoder’s history is The Mennonites of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania (Scottdale: Scottdale Mennonite Church, 1942) appeared earlier in Mennonite Quarterly Review. I wrote a short note on Arthur Holly Compton in “Thoughts on my pacifist ancestors…” Mennonite Historical Bulletin (April, 1994, page 13); a longer version is in Atomic Quest (New York: Oxford, 1956, pages 206, 247). I originally ran across Compton in reading David McCullough’s Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992, page 441).