Just Folks

Just Folks was a summer work program administered under the Office of American Absorption that sent Jewish boys from cities to work for farm families far from home. Its stated purpose was to introduce urban youth to rural life and encourage their incorporation into wider American society; in the Roth family, the experience became a test of what that promise meant. Sandy Roth returned from Kentucky proud of his drawings and his adventure, then became a public advocate for the program. His father, Herman Roth, saw the same scheme as a means of separating children from their parents and weakening Jewish solidarity. The dispute made Just Folks a small-scale encounter between official language about opportunity and a family’s fear of what assimilation might cost.

Administrative Design and Public Rationale

The Office of American Absorption described Just Folks as a volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life. The agency’s broader stated mission was to encourage religious and national minorities to become more incorporated into American society. By the spring of 1941, however, the program appeared to be directing its attention chiefly toward Jewish children. It sought to send hundreds of Jewish boys, aged twelve to eighteen, away from their cities and schools to work for eight weeks as field hands and day laborers with farm families hundreds of miles from home.

Recruitment took place through schools as well as the agency. Notices appeared at Chancellor Avenue School and at Weequahic High School, whose students were almost entirely Jewish. In April, an Office of American Absorption representative addressed boys twelve and older about the program. Sandy brought an application home that evening; it required a parent’s signature. The process thus presented participation as a choice, while placing the decision directly inside family life. Parents were asked to authorize a substantial separation whose duration and distance gave it more weight than an ordinary summer job.

The program’s promise of incorporation also carried a particular implication in its setting. The families of Weequahic lived in a Jewish neighborhood where, by 1940, adults and children commonly spoke American English, and outward signs of Old World religious observance were not part of everyday life for most residents. Against that background, the proposition that Jewish boys needed an experience of the heartland in order to participate more fully in national life could sound less like a neutral description of their circumstances than a judgment about their belonging. The program’s language of opportunity did not settle that question; it made the meaning of opportunity a point of dispute.

Sandy Roth’s Summer in Kentucky

Sandy’s interest was concrete and personal. He wanted to live on a farm, go to Kentucky, and draw tractors, barns, and animals. Herman Roth answered that the boys would be doing farm labor, including tasks such as carrying animal waste and spreading manure, rather than spending their days drawing. Sandy accepted that possibility as part of the experience. For him, the work did not cancel the appeal of seeing America beyond his familiar surroundings.

Sandy left on June 30, 1941, for a summer apprenticeship with a Kentucky tobacco farmer. The departure was emotionally difficult: he had never been away from home, the family was living through unusual uncertainty, Herman objected to what the Office of American Absorption implied about Jewish citizens, and Alvin Roth was already serving with the Canadian army and a continuing source of worry. Aunt Evelyn had encouraged Sandy and supported his application. Herman had eventually allowed his son to go, in part because he did not want to make an already uncertain situation more difficult.

The family’s disagreement had been explicit before Sandy left. Herman believed Just Folks was the first step in a plan to separate Jewish children from their parents and erode the solidarity of Jewish families. Aunt Evelyn rejected his fearfulness and argued that his children should not be prevented from encountering unfamiliar people and places. Her support was not merely private encouragement: she was then the executive assistant to Lionel Bengelsdorf, who had become the Office of American Absorption’s first director for New Jersey. Her position gave Sandy’s application an advocate with access to the program, while making the political disagreement with Herman harder to separate from a family quarrel.

During the summer, Sandy wrote once a week to report that he was well and describe life on the farm. His brief notes mentioned the heat and farm activities, while his letters’ most substantial feature was often the drawing he sent home. He pictured pigs, dogs, lambs, and barns; one pig, he noted, weighed more than three hundred pounds, and another drawing accompanied a report that Mr. Mawhinney had taken thirty lambs to the stockyards. These particulars showed the farm through the eye of a young artist. They also answered, in a quiet and practical way, Herman’s prediction that the work would leave his son too exhausted to draw: Sandy kept making art after his laboring days.

From Participant to Recruiter

When Sandy returned to Newark in late August, Aunt Evelyn accompanied the family to Pennsylvania Station to meet him. Herman would have preferred that she stay away, but he again yielded to her influence. The trip home marked not an end to the dispute but the beginning of Sandy’s public role. On the evening of the family’s dinner with Lionel Bengelsdorf, the rabbi presented Sandy’s experience as an example of Jewish participation in national life. He described the boys in Just Folks as models for Jewish children and adults, and connected their willingness to enter unfamiliar settings with the president’s vision of America.

The following evening, Aunt Evelyn told the family that Sandy had been selected as the New Jersey program’s statewide recruiting officer. Of the one hundred boys from New Jersey who had gone away that summer, he was chosen to speak to eligible children and their families about the program and encourage applications. The selection turned a summer worker into an official public representative. Sandy’s own account of Kentucky, his drawings, and his standing with adults could now help persuade other families to participate.

Sandy later spoke at a synagogue in New Brunswick, where he described his farm experience to a congregation and displayed his drawings. Aunt Evelyn went with him, and Philip Roth was allowed to attend. Sandy’s public presentation was more than a report about farm work: he used pictures of President Charles A. Lindbergh to illustrate the administration’s program and policies. The portraits showed the president signing the Universal Conscription Act, advising on a fighter-bomber design, and relaxing at the White House with the family dog. Some of these works had been drawn at Aunt Evelyn’s request after Charles A. Lindbergh became president. Their content connected Sandy’s artistic talent to the administration he was promoting.

By the spring of 1942, Sandy’s work for Just Folks had given him an authority unusual for a boy his age. He was neat in appearance and carried himself with the composure of a much older person; younger neighborhood children looked up to him and hoped to qualify for Office of American Absorption programs. Philip understood that Sandy was not simply pretending to support the administration to protect his family. Having heard him address Jewish adults in the New Brunswick synagogue basement, Philip believed that Sandy was convinced by what he said and relished the attention. The program had offered him not just a summer away but a role in which he could be recognized as persuasive and important.

Family Conflict and the Program’s Wider Context

Herman continued to regard the program as a political instrument. He accused Aunt Evelyn of letting the family down and argued that Just Folks was meant to turn Jewish children against their parents. His fears did not remain abstract: Sandy’s enthusiasm and public activities changed the atmosphere at home. Philip began doing homework out of Sandy’s sight, while Herman told Bess Roth that the family’s private dissension resembled the division that, in his view, the program was intended to produce. Bess hoped that, with Alvin and Aunt Evelyn gone, the family could return to normal; Herman instead remained convinced that the policy threatened the bonds inside Jewish households.

Sandy’s separation from his parents also shaped the family’s handling of Alvin’s return. Nearly a year after Charles A. Lindbergh took office, Alvin came back to Newark from Montreal after serving with the Canadian army. Sandy’s Just Folks work had become prominent enough that the parents decided he should not mention it to Alvin before they could explain the situation themselves. The need to manage what one son knew about the other’s public role showed how a government program could continue to divide the family even after the summer placement had ended.

Just Folks belonged to a broader set of Office of American Absorption policies that made the boundary between voluntary opportunity and state intervention increasingly uncertain. Homestead 42, for example, offered relocation opportunities to selected employees, while maps and pins represented families and their assigned destinations. The Good Neighbor Project brought non-Jewish families into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. In the Roth household, these initiatives were understood as related efforts to weaken Jewish social and political solidarity. That interpretation should be distinguished from the programs’ public language of incorporation and enrichment, but it helps explain why Herman saw a farm placement as more than an individual boy’s summer choice.

A later account attributed to Anne Morrow Lindbergh further complicates the program’s official rationale. She described the Office of American Absorption’s early measures, including Just Folks and Homestead 42, as token programs that Charles A. Lindbergh initially regarded as limited enough to leave Jews essentially unharmed while appearing to answer pressure from Heinrich Himmler. In this account, the measures were part of an effort to forestall a demand for systematic marginalization, not evidence that the danger had disappeared. The program therefore occupies an uneasy position in the narrative: its activities could be experienced by Sandy as adventure, artistic opportunity, and public recognition, while remaining entangled with a government’s treatment of Jewish citizens.

Narrative Significance

Just Folks makes the conflict over American belonging intimate and measurable. Its policy operates through applications, schools, an eight-week placement, family consent, public recruitment, and the transfer of a boy’s story from the farm back to the city. Those procedures give the program the appearance of orderly benevolence, but they also draw the state into parental decisions and turn children into visible examples of assimilation. The friction lies not in whether Sandy gained something from his summer—his letters and later speeches show how much the experience mattered to him—but in the fact that his gain became an argument for a policy his father distrusted.

The program’s effect on Sandy is therefore inseparable from its effect on the family. It gives him a public voice and a following among younger children, while widening the divide between him and Herman and changing what Philip can comfortably say at home. In the wider story, Just Folks illustrates how a promise of entry into national life can coexist with pressure to leave familiar communities behind. Its most consequential result is not simply that a group of boys worked on farms, but that Sandy’s experience became both a persuasive public model and a private source of lasting division.