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| Format | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Author, Analytic | Gross, Stephen J. |
| Title, Analytic | The Battle Over the Cold Spring Dam: Farm-Village Conflict and Contested Identity among Rural German Americans |
| Journal Title | Journal of American Ethnic History |
| Date of Publication | Fall 2001 |
| Volume ID | 21 |
| Issue ID | 1 |
| Location in Work | 83-117 |
| URL | |
| Notes | Includes bibliographical notes. |
| Abstract | "The final disposition of the dam involved significant negotiation and litigation and ultimately the state’s supreme court decided the case. But for local residents, the conflict mobilized support structured along lines of kinship and German regional origins, and “parish pump politics” based on alliance systems, nurtured by past wrongs and preserved by long memories informed the controversy. The patience of participants, though, was tested by the long wait for a court decision, and some men, who apparently had a low tolerance for talk, attempted on a few occasions to end the controversy by more dramatic and violent action. If this story, then, is about politics, it is about a special kind of politics often played by rural people, a politics structured by the tension between the local and the larger world and one in which participants simultaneously distrust and yet still attempt to use distant sources of power to promote local autonomy. The extent to which this style of politics promotes vigilantism and incorporates the use of violence has in recent years excited significant scholarly contention; however, in this case the periodic outbursts of violence reflect a style of politics born of a specific ethos originating in peasant Germany and kept alive in the homogeneous and relatively isolated ethnic environment of rural Minnesota. This ethos and the moral world it governed was increasingly challenged by village growth and economic development, and the conflict over the dam needs to be understood as part of a larger struggle over basic political rules and behavior." |
| MKI Terms | German Americans -- Minnesota/ Farm life/ Minnesota -- Stearns County/ Catholics/ Politics/ Rural life & conditions |