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The Ties That Bind: A History of Mennonite Migration to America
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10023 |
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CULTURE
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| Issue
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4 / 1986 |
10,087 Words |
| Author
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Richard MacMaster
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In one of the most popular films of 1985, a police officer fled from corrupt fellow policemen who wanted to kill him and found a hiding place in an Amish community. Witness contrasted the peaceful fields of rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with the dark and dangerous Philadelphia cityscape. Hardworking and life-affirming Amish people contrasted sharply with the isolation and hostility of city dwellers.
The scriptwriter and director of Witness were not the first to see Amish and Mennonite ways as symbols of a simpler and more wholesome America. Thousands of tourists come to Lancaster County every year to see "the plain people" and to glimpse their traditional way of life.
The slow pace of Amish and Mennonite buggies on a country road in Iowa, Indiana, or Virginia is a reminder of a world we have lost. They seem to preserve the values of an earlier America. Mennonite families who bring produce and baked goods to farmers' markets in Pennsylvania and Ontario have a well-deserved reputation for high quality and fair prices. Amish quilts are sought by collectors for their careful workmanship. Amish and Mennonite craftsmen do honest work.
Even the most casual observer can sense the strength of Amish and Mennonite family life and the ties that bind neighbor to neighbor. Few people today practice mutual aid and neighborly assistance as they do. Driving along a country road, you may have seen Amish or Mennonite farmers raising a new barn to replace one destroyed by fire. Volunteers from the Mennonite Disaster Service helped clean up after the floods in Virginia and West Virginia in November 1985 as soon as the roads were open. They are always on hand when floods, tornados, and hurricanes strike.
Like the Lancaster County tourists, the streetwise detective in the film peered into a world that remained alien to him. He found the Amish community and its values inspiring, but he left them in the end for the world to which he belonged. Many Americans and Canadians respect the plain people's reluctance to take on modern ways and their refusal to fight in wars, precisely because--as the U.S. Supreme Court put it in January 1986--"they are outside the mainstream of American life." Amish values are a kind of living history lesson, not an alternative for us, so we are comfortable with them.
Most Americans and Canadians know little more about the Amish and Mennonites than did the Philadelphia detective in the film. They have seen bearded men and bonneted women, entire families dressed in "plain" and unadorned clothing of nineteenth-century cut, and they know that they do not drive cars or use modern farm equipment.
The reality is more complex. Although the Amish and Mennonites hold on to many values that seem to be those of the American past, they are not caught in a time warp. Not all of the 40,000 Amish or the nearly 300,000 Mennonites in North America are farmers. Like other Americans and Canadians, they are moving off the land for many reasons. A 1985 survey of Mennonite college students in Kansas revealed that nearly all their parents grew up on farms, but only a third of the students had farm backgrounds, and fewer than one in five expected to go into farming after graduation.
Mennonites practice medicine and law in Washington,
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