Ethel Thomas Herold (1896-1988) was an ordinary person caught up
in extraordinary
circumstances--a woman whose sense of patriotic duty took her from
small-town Wisconsin to the Philippines in 1922. There, with but a
couple of brief interruptions, she would spend the next
thirty-seven years, including three in a Japanese internment camp
during World War II. In "Citizen of Empire," Theresa Kaminski uses
Ethel's experiences of war and imperialism to explore a unique
example of how those enormous forces helped shape Americans'
notions of citizenship and patriotism in the first half of the
twentieth century.
As Kaminski's absorbing narrative reveals, Ethel's views of active
patriotism began to form early on when her oldest brother became a
schoolteacher in the Philippines in 1901 at the end of the
Spanish-American War. After college and marriage, Ethel and her
husband Elmer Herold went to the islands to teach in the public
schools--a way, in her view, of spreading American ideals abroad.
She quit teaching in 1927 to start a family but continued to
support U.S. imperialism through her colonial household and club
work. Her comfortable expatriate life fell apart, however, when the
Japanese attacked the Philippines in 1941: the colonial elite were
now powerless prisoners. After the war, wishing to help the people
who had supported them during the occupation, Ethel and Elmer
Herold stayed in the islands, but after Philippine independence
came in 1946, they increasingly found themselves strangers in a
place they had long called home. In 1959 the couple returned to
Wisconsin, where Ethel remained politically active and saw the
solution
to America's Cold War problems in the conservative wing of the
Republican Party.
Ethel Thomas Herold was a woman of forceful personality. Marked
most notably by her strongly held views on patriotism and
citizenship, her transpacific life offers a remarkable
instance of how the personal and political came together during
the "American century."
Theresa Kaminski is professor of history at the University of
Wisconsin-Stevens Point and the author of "Prisoners in Paradise:
American Women in the Wartime South Pacific."
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