Michele Bachmann Lies About Her Own Family History To Sound More Iowan
But Bachmann's admiration of history revisionists wasn't the thing that really caught my attention in her speech at the conference. It was her detailed account of her family history, aimed at emphasizing her Iowa roots to this audience of Iowans. It was when Bachmann said she was a 7th generation Iowan, descended from Norwegians who immigrated to Iowa in the 1850s, that I started paying attention, simply because it would be mathematically improbable for Bachmann, who is in her mid-fifties, to be the 7th generation descended from people who immigrated in the 1850s, unless each of her direct ancestors had had a child when they were extremely young.* After catching this one obvious lie, I just couldn't resist doing a little fact checking on the rest of Bachmann's story. What I found was that Bachmann's version of her family's history was as much a work of fiction as anything found in one of David Barton's books. She wants the people of Iowa to see her as one of them, so she simply changed her family history. Here's the video of Bachmann telling her story: Here's the transcript:
Since Bachmann said her great-great-great grandparents, whose names she provided, emigrated from Norway to Iowa in the 1850s, I searched the 1860 federal census for them. I started by searching for a Melchior Munson in Iowa, but came up empty. But, since unfamiliar foreign first names like Melchior were often misspelled or Americanized when written down by census workers, I didn't think it was unusual not to find him on the first shot. So I tried Martha Munson, Melchior's wife, since Martha was a common name that wouldn't be misspelled. Still nothing. So I broadened my search to include sound-alike last names for Munson, in case it was their last name that was misspelled. Still nothing. Giving my search one last shot, I removed all search parameters except the first name Martha and the last name Munson, including any sound-alike last names. It was only then that I found Melchior and Martha -- but not in Iowa. They were in Wisconsin.(1) So, there went that part of Bachmann's 'Iowanizing' of her family history. Her great-great-great grandparents hadn't gone from Quebec to Iowa. They had settled in Wisconsin. And what about all those hardships that Bachmann says her ancestors persevered through during their first few years in Iowa -- the worst winter in fifty years, the worst flooding in forty-two years, the worst drought that anyone had ever recorded, and a plague of locusts to boot? Well, obviously, none of this happened in Iowa, because her ancestors weren't in Iowa. And it didn't happen in Wisconsin either. This all happened in the Dakota Territory. That's where Melchoir and Martha Munson and their children were from 1861 to 1864.(2) Like many Norwegian immigrants who had settled in Wisconsin, the Munsons set out for the Dakota Territory once Congress made it a territory in 1861. A number of early histories of the Dakota Territory document that the winter of 1861-1862 was a bad one, which led to flooding when the ice in the Missouri River broke up and blocked the river in the spring of 1862; that the summer of 1863 was very dry, but the settlers still had a good harvest; and that 1864 was the year of the severe drought and the year that grasshoppers came. According to the 1870 book Outlines of History of the Territory of Dakota, the flood in the spring of 1862 caused the settlers to have to temporarily evacuate, and specifically mentions Elk Point, which is where the Munsons had settled, as being among the places that had an especially good harvest that year, with "all kinds of crops yielding bountifully,"(3) and "The year 1863 was very dry in Dakota, but notwithstanding the drouth, wherever crops were planted and well tended, they yielded well."(4) An 1881 book, History of Southeastern Dakota, provides a more detailed account of the weather and natural disasters that occurred in 1862 and 1864.
But it's not just where these events occurred that Bachmann is lying about in her revisionist version of her "Iwegian" family history. According to Bachmann, her ancestors "kept going, and they persevered, and they were people of faith." But did her faithful ancestors really persevere and keep going? Well, no. They were among the settlers written about in the History of southeastern Dakota who "abandoned the Territory for the purpose of making homes elsewhere." That's how Melchior and Martha Munson ended up in Iowa -- seven years after they came to America. By the time the Munsons abandoned the Dakota Territory in 1864, there was a well established Norwegian community in Chickasaw County, Iowa, so that's where they stopped and resettled. Clearly, Iowa was never the intended destination of Bachmann's great-great-great grandfather and grandmother when they left Norway in 1857, as she claims. Bachmann's revisionist version of her family history also makes it sound not only like her ancestors' original destination was Iowa, but that they were among the first Norwegians to venture there, and that the impetus for their decision to go there was a letter referred to as the "Muskego manifesto." This is a load of bull. First of all, the Muskego manifesto came from Wisconsin, not Iowa. Second, there were a hell of a lot more than "about eighty Norwegians that went ahead of" Bachmann's great-great-great grandparents. The eighty who signed this letter that, according to Bachmann, inspired her ancestors to follow were just eighty out of thousands of Norwegian immigrants who were already in Wisconsin. Norwegians began arriving in Wisconsin in 1836. By 1850, seven years before Bachmann's ancestors arrived, there were over 8,000 Norwegians in the state, and by 1860 there were about 44,000. And finally, the Muskego manifesto was written in 1845, twelve years before the Munsons decided to leave Norway. It was one of many letters written by Norwegian immigrants in the mid-1840s that were published in the newspapers in Norway. What was going on was a battle of pro-emigration and anti-emigration letters in the press. There were letters complaining about everything from taxes to rattlesnakes to Mormons, and imploring friends and relatives to forget about coming to America, and other letters, like the Muskego manifesto, disputing the claims in the anti-emigration letters and encouraging Norwegians to emigrate.(7) Besides the fact that these letters came from Wisconsin, and not from Iowa, are we seriously supposed to believe that this letter that Melchior and Martha Munson might have seen printed in a newspaper in 1845 is what made them suddenly decide to pick up and leave Norway twelve years later in 1857? This ludicrous connection is undoubtedly just something that Bachmann concocted after stumbling across the Muskego manifesto in her "research." Now, getting back to that 7th generation claim that made me suspicious of Bachmann's whole story in the first place. The Munsons were Bachmann's paternal grandmother's branch of the family. Bachmann's father, David John Amble, born in Minnesota in 1929,(8) was the son of Anna T. Munson. Anna T. Munson, born in Kansas in 1903, was the daughter of Thomas Wilhelm Munson. (Anna T. Munson lived in Iowa from 1905 until she married Bachmann's grandfather, Jesse Alvin Amble, in 1927, and moved to Minnesota, where he was born and raised.)(9) Thomas Wilhelm Munson, born in 1880 in Chickasaw County, Iowa, was the son of Halvor Munson.(10) (Thomas Wilhelm Munson moved to Kansas shortly after getting married in 1902, but moved back to Iowa in 1905, which is why Bachmann's grandmother, Anna, was born in Kansas.) Halvor Munson, born in Norway in 1846, was the son of Melchior and Martha Munson, and was one of their five children who immigrated to Wisconsin with them in 1857.(11) (Halvor Munson was fifteen years old when the family moved from Wisconsin to the Dakota Territory in 1861. He shortly thereafter joined the Union Army, and served for three years, after which he worked for the government for another three years. He did not move with his parents to Iowa in 1864, but moved there three years later in 1867.) So, no matter how you count it, Bachmann is not 7th generation. If you consider the first generation to be the first ancestor who was born in America, as most people do, Bachman would be 4th generation. If you allow for the ambiguity of the term "first generation" to include the immigrant ancestor, and count her great-great grandfather Halvor Munson, who came from Norway as a child, she's 5th generation. And if you count Melchior and Martha, she's 6th generation. Still one short of seven. In addition to lying about her family history in her speech in Iowa, Bachmann, who actually was born in Iowa, but moved to Minnesota as a child, also made it clear that she herself was an Iowan, saying, "I was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and grew up in Waterloo. I grew up in Cedar Falls." But during her 2008 campaign for reelection in Minnesota, when it was more advantageous for her to be a Minnesotan, her campaign website emphasized her Minnesota roots with a section on its "About" page titled "Rooted in Minnesota," which began, "Michele grew up in Anoka." If Bachmann's presidential aspirations don't work out and she has to settle for running for reelection to Congress, I wonder how her constituents in Minnesota will feel about her denouncing her Minnesota roots in favor of being an Iowan. *The standard used by genealogists for the average length of a generation is 24 years. Knowing that Bachmann's parents weren't teenagers when they spawned her, and even counting the immigrant ancestor as the 1st generation rather than the first American-born generation as the 1st generation, every generation preceding her father would have had to have had children as teenagers for her to be 7th generation, the chances of which are infinitesimally small. 1. 1860 Federal Census; Census Place: Utica, Crawford, Wisconsin; Roll: M653_1402; Page: 914; Image: 188; Family History Library Film: 805402. (Click here to view census page image.)
Michele Bachmann Lies About Her Own Family History To Sound More Iowan | 5 comments (5 topical, 0 hidden)
Michele Bachmann Lies About Her Own Family History To Sound More Iowan | 5 comments (5 topical, 0 hidden)
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