The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [29]
But it was also a fearful time. The Korean War had started, introducing a new era of Cold War tensions. In April 1951, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death as Communist spies. These years would be dominated by international tensions and technological changes that arrived at a breathtaking, sometimes terrifying pace. But like generations of immigrants before them, Harry and Johanna were undeterred by the uncertainties of the future. They knew hardship firsthand, and they arrived with the intention of building a good life for themselves in this new land.
Harry and Johanna’s families had scraped together enough money for the first-class passage that was to be their honeymoon, but when the young couple arrived in America, they had only $160 between them. The six-day crossing had been rough, and Harry had spent most of it curled up belowdecks feeling seasick. Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from New York City, was a loud, clanging urban port. As they debarked, it was hard for the young newlyweds not to be overwhelmed by the unfamiliar sights and sounds. Before arriving in Hoboken, Harry and Johanna had passed through Ellis Island, where immigration inspectors had cleared their papers and performed a brief medical exam. At the port in Hoboken, the customs inspectors cracked the lid of the small wooden crate that held all of the young couple’s belongings—they did not have much. Harry and Johanna stood by as an inspector prodded at its meager contents. Harry’s worn leather saddle and his tall riding boots took up much of the space. The inspector made no comment and closed the lid. The official proceedings complete, Harry and Johanna stepped off the ship into their new homeland without a backward glance.
Before the war, it would have been unthinkable that Harry, the oldest son of a prosperous brewer, would someday be standing with his wife on the dock in Hoboken with little more than his hopes and dreams and one small wooden crate. But for the war, Harry’s future would have been assured. No one who saw them that day, walking tentatively through the port, would have imagined that this young man had shown such an exceptional gift for horses that he had already ridden before the queen of Holland. The couple’s clothes were plain, they spoke little English, and they carried little with them, but they had a bright look in their eyes. Although somewhere, deep in that crate, lay a single photo album from home, right from that first day in Hoboken, the couple kept their eyes fixed on the future. They boarded the train south, headed toward a new life that they were determined to embrace.
Their patron, Bill McCormick, grew tobacco on a farm outside of High Point, North Carolina. The sharecroppers’ deal seemed more than generous to Harry and Johanna. Accustomed to tiny Dutch farms, the new immigrants saw the large tobacco fields stretch out to the horizon with promise. The sharecropping system was simple: the owner gave the aspiring farmer land to work, housing, and enough capital to plant, expecting him, in turn, to split his profits fifty-fifty. In the sleepy rural area, life seemed to roll along as it had for nearly a century. The sharecropping system dated back to the post–Civil War period, when white farmers had leased fields to newly freed slaves, capitalizing on their labor without sharing ownership of the land. Tobacco farms were not highly mechanized: they commonly used mules in the fields, horses for general farm work, and large amounts of manpower.
Harry (front, right) carries the flag of St. Oedenrode in the parade to celebrate the queen of Holland’s return from exile in 1945. (illustration credits 7.1)
But after the Second World War, the American farm economy had started going through tumultuous changes. In the postwar boom times, many black sharecroppers had left the land and migrated to industrial jobs in the North. Already 1950 was shaping up as a weak year for farmers, with overall profits down 10 percent nationwide. With the recent technological advances, production