Jason B. Kauffman

Last spring, I represented Mennonite Church USA at my first Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online board meeting. GAMEO is “the most trusted online source for information on Anabaptist groups around the world” with articles on “Anabaptist-related congregations, denominations, conferences, institutions and significant individuals, as well as historical and theological topics.”¹ Those familiar with GAMEO know that much of its content originated over fifty years ago with the publication of the four-volume Mennonite Encyclopedia (ME). Many updates were included in a fifth edition of ME, published in 1990, and over 4,000 more articles have been added since GAMEO went online in 1996.² But there are still a host of articles that were published in the 1950s and have not been updated since. For example, the entry for Orrville Mennonite Church, my home congregation, was authored by Harold S. Bender in 1959.

During the board meetings, we spent much time discussing how to encourage more people to get involved with GAMEO.³ As a public history project, GAMEO holds enormous potential to harness the collective knowledge of the global Anabaptist community. Janneken Smucker pointed this out in a recent blog post on crowdsourcing Anabaptist history. As she notes, one of the biggest challenges for a public history project lies in “cultivating an enthusiastic community of participants.” But is that all it takes? In a search for answers to this question, I started to think about what went on behind the scenes during the fourteen years it took to produce the original ME, one of the most well-known, inter-Mennonite public history projects.⁴ What accounted for its success and what, if anything, can the project teach us about doing public history in 2018?⁵ I spent time looking at some of the project files of the ME at the MC USA Archives (Elkhart) and here’s what I came up with.⁶

Mennonite Encyclopedia Writer’s Acceptance Card (MC USA Archives)

First, a public history project requires extensive planning and the dedication of a core group of leaders. As Smucker noted in her blog, enthusiastic communities of participants do not cultivate themselves. Before the project began, the ME editorial board enlisted the support of an international group of editorial consultants. The board also developed criteria for article topics and assembled a list of potential contributors. Managing editor Melvin Gingerich then mailed thousands of letters to prospective authors to invite their participation and supply writing instructions. The finished product included over 13,000 articles contributed by more than 2,700 writers. Like its predecessor, GAMEO has also benefitted from strong leadership. Sam Steiner, Marlene Epp, Richard Thiessen, Bert Friesen, Susan Huebert, and many others have given years to the project, commissioning or writing new articles, updating old ones, and editing submissions. While both projects have enjoyed broad participation, neither would have been possible without heavy involvement from a core of dedicated individuals. For example, over half of the content of the original ME was generated by just eight people.⁷ My guess is that a similar scenario is true for GAMEO.

Celebration of the Mennonite Encyclopedia, 4th Volume, August 11, 1959: Left to right: Cornelius Krahn, Harold S. Bender, Melvin Gingerich. (MC USA Archives)

Second, a successful public history project requires institutional support. While the ME was under production, the three top-ranking editors—Bender, Krahn, and Gingerich—enjoyed the full support of their employers. In fact, Goshen College and Biblical Seminary, Bethel College, and the Mennonite Research Foundation allowed each to devote up to one quarter of their time to the project. Lead editors for the GAMEO project have never had their duties written into their job descriptions, but several institutions have given critical support. For example, Conrad Grebel University College provided computer equipment and web hosting early on and the Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies in Winnipeg supported the digitization of volumes one through four of the ME.⁸ Most recently, the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism provided an institutional home for GAMEO under the direction of general editor John D. Roth.

Emily Horsch Bender’s time sheet while working on Mennonite Encyclopedia. (MC USA Archives)

Finally, a successful public history project requires sustained financial support. The ME was underwritten from the beginning by three denominational publishers, which covered the cost of labor, travel, and office expenses. Aside from wages paid to the three lead editors, Elizabeth Horsch Bender earned wages as a translator and assistant editor (often on under-reported hours) as did dozens of secretaries and typists.⁹ Over fourteen years, the three publishers paid just under $40,000 in editorial expenses.¹⁰ Adjusted for inflation, this amount is equivalent to roughly $370,000 in 2018.¹¹ The publishers also bore the cost of printing and binding all four volumes. That figure came to $91,000.¹² In the final year of the project, A.J. Metzler anticipated that returns on sales would cover the printing and binding costs but none of the editorial costs and only part of the selling costs. In other words, the Mennonite Publishing House lost a significant amount of the money it invested in the project. He concluded, “While the justification of this investment would be fully defended by our historians and scholars, it may be questioned by others.”¹³ GAMEO operates on a yearly budget of about $4,000. Like the ME, it relies upon financial support from Anabaptist-related institutional sponsors in the United States and Canada. As with the ME’s 2700 writers, GAMEO authors do not receive compensation. Unlike the ME, however, GAMEO cannot pay its editors and relies upon smaller-scale contributions from a wider variety of sponsors.

So what can a comparison of the ME and GAMEO teach us about doing public history in the digital age? Of course not all public history projects are cut from the same cloth. The ME was a massive project. Many other public history projects, including GAMEO, function successfully on a much smaller scale. Moreover, most public history projects in 2018 do not result in the publication of a four-volume book series, so printing and binding costs are not part of the equation. Since GAMEO lives online, the annual budget mostly covers the cost of webhosting and IT support and email makes communication among editors and with authors much more rapid and less costly than it was for ME staff.

In light of these difference, one might question the usefulness of comparing the ME with GAMEO and other current efforts to do public history. However, since much of the content of the ME was generated by 2,700 contributors, I think it is possible to draw some useful conclusions, especially in light of current efforts to crowdsource digital history projects. For me, the comparison highlights the enormous amount of work that goes on behind the scenes. The ME would not exist without the labor and expertise Elizabeth Bender gave to translations or the thousands of hours given by secretarial staff. Similarly, digital history projects like the University of Iowa’s DIY History require huge amounts of work behind the scenes. Before crowdsourcing could begin, the university invested time, labor, and resources to scan documents, store them, and develop specialized transcription software. It’s no coincidence that such an expansive project is hosted by a major public research university.

Much has been made of the “tremendous amount of work” that Bender, Krahn, and Gingerich invested in the creation of the ME.¹⁴ This is certainly true, but it didn’t hurt that they were being paid for their labor. As Conrad Stoesz pointed out in response to Smucker’s blog post, in the Anabaptist world we live in a time of “soft support for our…archival institutions” and, I would add, historical endeavors in general. This makes the volunteer efforts of GAMEO’s lead editors all the more impressive. They have given years of dedicated service to the project and created a valuable resource for anyone with access to the internet.

If you find GAMEO useful, I encourage you to give some money to support the project.¹⁵ Better yet, help us update old articles (beginning with many of the copious links included in this post) and generate new content. Please contact me or one of the other editors if you want to get involved. I would also welcome archivists, librarians, historians, and anyone else to weigh in on my conclusions and continue a conversation on the best ways to do Anabaptist public history in the digital age. Let’s get to work!

The last year has been full of discussion about collective memory and ownership of historical truth. Last summer I had to explain what “public history” meant to many people as I prepared to start a master’s program in the discipline. These days I’m just as likely to hear, “We need that now.”

Societal and political debates about history have coalesced in the last few months around the concept of commemoration through monuments. Statues of Confederate generals have been torn down or shrouded, and a statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore was just defaced. Here in Philadelphia, a months-long “Monument Lab” has kicked off with—among other pieces—a statue of an Afro pick incorporating a fist in the same plaza as a controversial monument to former mayor Frank Rizzo.

I’ve watched the unfolding conversation with interest but with critical distance. Others are saying things far smarter and more meaningful than I could. The National Council on Public History made a valuable contribution, for instance, with a special virtual edition of The Public Historian, re-running essays on monumentalism and memory around the world and across time. To date, one of the best proposals I’ve heard for Confederate monuments is that they all be piled up in one place to convey the volume of metal and concrete and stone that supported white supremacy.

I’ve begun to try to think about which monuments I support. Many monuments lack nuance and do not invite conversation. A bronze man on a horse doesn’t ask any questions, but makes powerful statements about power. As a historian, these are problematic characteristics, even if it weren’t true that monuments in the United States are overwhelmingly dedicated to white men over all other types of people. When President Trump asked on Twitter if monuments to Washington and Jefferson were next on the agenda for debate, someone on my social media feed acknowledged that the president accidentally posed the most relevant public history question of the year.

Looking closer to (metaphorical) home, what have Anabaptists, my people, commemorated? I struggled, initially, to think of any. Then I remembered the many sculptures that decorated the campus of Goshen College, my alma mater. I remembered Esther and Michael Augsburger’s “Guns into Plowshares” in Washington, DC (which is moving again). A Google search alerted me to a variety of Mennonite monuments scattered throughout Canada and Europe. I came across Paul Epp’s monuments across Eastern Europe to Anabaptist persecution, including a particularly haunting piece in Zaporizhia, Ukraine, that depicts a family over a mantle, the human forms in negative space in the granite, the voids representing disappeared Mennonites throughout the former USSR.

In this field, too, I find others far ahead of me. James Urry explored the history of Mennonite monumentalism a decade ago in the Conrad Grebel Review.¹ Urry traces the resistance of Anabaptist communities to statuary, a form they associated with nationalism, up until the nineteenth century. Early in that century, Menno Simons began to be included (along with Calvin and Luther) in several monuments to the Protestant Reformation, and around 1861, a marker was proposed (and rejected) to mark the three hundredth anniversary of Simons’ death.

Nearly two decades later, an obelisk was raised to Simons in Friesland, purportedly on the site of his first teaching after leaving the Catholic church. Similar obelisks were erected in Russian Mennonite colonies over the next generation before such commemorative forms seemingly lost wide approval. “Instead,” writes Urry, “the opening of new schools, hospitals, and other institutional structures seemed sufficient to mark the steady march of progress in the Mennonite world.”

The next phase of Mennonite monumentalism, Urry argues, took place in the United States and Canada as Mennonite settlers joined other North American settlers in commemorating westward expansion. Canadian Mennonites of Russian origin marked the centennial of the 1870s wave of immigration, just as in the United States polities big and small geared up for the bicentennial celebration. Interestingly, Urry notes that many of the most fervent supporters of the 1970s Canadian commemorations were immigrants from the 1920s.

Another generation passed before the next form of Mennonite monuments were erected. These include Paul Epp’s monuments, and were spurred by tours and conferences in the Ukraine that revealed the extent to which evidence of Mennonite colonies had largely been erased. The statues generally commemorated specific events such as massacres or persecution, but Urry seems to argue that the erasure of colony-built environments was also a motivating factor. He focuses his analysis on one particular monument—which resembles a gravestone and marks the site of a 1919 massacre at Eichenfeld-Dubowka, north of Khortitsa, Ukraine—and makes a compelling argument about monumentation in this vein:

[This monument] clearly indicates some of the problems in trying to mark a complex past event in a singular stone memorial. At one level its message might appear simple: it is a memorial to the victims of a savage massacre who have lain in mass, unmarked graves until the stone was erected and unveiled. But the memorial is also supposed to mark not just a single event and its victims…

The fact that a number of people were murdered in such a terrible manner, on the date stated on the stone and detailed in the book, is not in question. But why the deaths occurred in this particular village, to this group of people, and at this particular time is something that must be interpreted and explained. The explanation in press releases provided at the memorial’s unveiling, and the more detailed account given in the later booklet, are simple and inadequate. We are presented with simple dichotomies of good and evil, with innocent Mennonite victims and guilty perpetrators. Such stark oppositions have little explanatory power in understanding such complex events.

Urry completes his analysis with the recent trend of memorial trees, grown from the seeds of ancestors still planted in European soil. These living monuments seem more in line with early Anabaptist iconoclasm (and indeed, Urry argues, earlier pagan forms of commemoration) but I feel the monuments still lack context and nuance.

Rather I would suggest that Mennonite monumentalism has recently, like global monumentalism, embraced more polyvalent forms that offer space for debate and nuance. The Eichenfeld-Dubowka tablet that Urry analyzed was dedicated in 2001. Eight years later—and two years after Urry’s essay—another Paul Epp monument, the family in negative space described above, was unveiled. By embracing an evocative visual language rather than an engraved message, this latter monument represents the new monumentalism, perhaps best represented by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by Maya Lin. These memorials reject the (literal and metaphorical) monolith form of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century monuments in favor of aesthetics more representative of current movements in public art and landscape architecture. Another example that comes to mind within the Anabaptist context is this monument at the center of a roundabout in Paraguay.

Photo by Ben Goossen

The result of this aesthetic shift is an openness to interpretation. Monuments are still not neutral, yet these commemorations allow space for people to bring a variety of experiences to them and come away with a sense of reflection (in the case of the Vietnam wall, this reflection is literal).

The line between public art and public monument can be sticky. A memorable presentation by Frank G. Pérez at the National Council of Public History 2017 conference described how attempts to diversify the monumental landscape in El Paso with public artwork faced countless obstacles. Monuments to conquistadors were unquestioned, but new sculptures elicited complaints about aesthetics and logistics. I suspect one of the factors that separates “monument” from “public art installation” in most people’s minds is choice of material (e.g. stone, unpainted metal). I look forward to Philadelphia’s Monument Lab’s exploration of that liminal space.

Meanwhile, the monolith has not gone away. Each year is a new opportunity to mark an anniversary of something or other. For Anabaptists in North America, many of those mark first settlements in an area. Many of these will take the form of a plaque or stone marker. I encourage families seeking to mark their persistence in the land to think carefully and critically about the statements that these monuments make. What was this land before your ancestors came here? Whose land was it?

On the global scale, Mennonite World Conference is gearing up for the five-hundredth anniversary of the first rebaptisms in Zurich. In Mennonite Life, Ben Goossen has argued, persuasively, that Anabaptists should embrace a more polyvalent origin story that spans from apostolic times to the present and includes the global church. Like monuments, other kinds of commemoration can tend to reify established narratives rather than providing context or provoking dialogue.

I have learned in the last couple months that monuments can spark debate, but sometimes only after years of organized opposition. Historians are in a position to contextualize the origins of these obelisks and busts, to tell the stories of how and why they came to be there. I think, however, that some monuments are effective because they invite questions and emotions as well as marking an event or movement. Let’s have more questions, more reflection, and fewer white men on horses.