THIS IS THE FIRST OF FIVE WEB PAGES dedicated to the personal letters of Private First Class Emil "Porter" Thomas of Cleveland, Ohio to his fiancée Beatrice before, during, and after the year he was stationed in Nicaragua (April 1928—March 1929).  The original letters are housed in Alden Library of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.  I thank Alden Library for its kind permission to publish these letters here.  All text and images of the letters © Alden Library.   (Right: US Marines fresh off the USS Mississippi marching north from León to supervise the November 1928 elections, much as Emil Thomas did in April 1928.  From the US National Archives; see PHOTO-DOCS USNA2 PAGE 18 PHOTO 6 ). 

     The entire collection houses some 331 letters, comprising some 186,000 words, spanning a period of nearly four years (September 1925 to July 1929).  This homepage offers a critical introduction to the letters and the contexts of their production.  Pages 2 and 3 house the first 202 letters, most all written from the Marine base in Quantico VA.  Page 4 houses the next 73 letters, written in Nicaragua.  Page 5 houses the last 56 letters, written after his return from Nicaragua.

     I thank Thomas W. Walker for alerting me to the existence of these letters, and especially Douglas McCabe of the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections of Alden Library for his kind assistance during my research, including sharing the Library's transcription of every one of the collection's 331-some letters.  I am also indebted to the Dick Joyce Endowment at Lebanon Valley College for the financial assistance that made this research possible.

   The remainder of this Homepage for the Emil "Porter" Thomas Letters is divided into three parts:

1.  Links to PDF files of the entire collection.

2.  Background information Emil Thomas, his family, and his relationship to Beatrice.

3.  Critical reflections on interpreting this mass of material.

1.  The Entire Collection in PDF Files.  The entire collection is accessible via the following two PDF files:  for the original transcription kindly provided by Douglas McCabe, without any alterations, click HERE.  For a slightly revised transcription that dispenses with the filing information, reformats a bit, and makes each letter slightly easier to identify by date, click HERE.

2.  Background Information on Emil Thomas, His Family, and His Relationship to Beatrice.

      Emil “Porter” Thomas was born on 23 April 1906 in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Hungarian immigrants Paul and Pauline Thomas.  In Cleveland he attended West Technical High School, where in the ninth grade he met Beatrice Keeran (b. Dec. 1908).  After graduating from West Tech High, in June 1925 at age 19, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served for four years until his honorable discharge in July 1929.  Most of his military service he spent at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, VA.  On a brief tropical tour to Panama in 1925, he returned to Quantico where he began writing letters to Beatrice in an effort to win her hand in marriage; in mid-1926, she agreed, and the letter-writing courtship continued. 

     In March 1928 he shipped off to Nicaragua aboard the USS Oglala (61st Machine Gun Company, 11th Regiment), part of a larger Marine Corps detachment supervising the November 1928 elections that brought to power the Liberal General José María Moncada.  Setting foot in Nicaragua for the first time on April 1, 1928, he was in the country for 12 months, departing in early March, 1929.  In Nicaragua, he was stationed in León and Managua (April—June), Ocotal (8 July—14 September), and Telpaneca (14 September—4 November), where he served as “vice president” (suplente) for the Telpaneca electoral mesa.  After the November elections, he returned to Ocotal.  From January to March 1929, he served with the Voluntario forces mobilized by President Moncada to fight “banditry” in the northern mountains, where he had numerous "contacts" (military encounters) with the Sandinista rebels.

3.  Critical Reflections on Interpreting the Emil "Porter" Thomas Letters

     Anyone who has traveled away from loved ones for an extended period of time and written letters back home should find many deep resonances in this massive collection of personal letters.  First and foremost, these letters represent an extended courtship in a budding romance that Emil “Porter” Thomas hoped would turn into a happy marriage with the object of his desire, Beatrice.  Anything beyond that primary purpose are asides and fillers.

      In these 330-plus letters we see the full gamut of the author’s emotions – sadness and longing, hope and happiness, confusion and uncertainty, silliness and humor, aspirations and desires. Like a well-developed character in a rich and complex novel, they show Emil Thomas for the full human being he was – his virtues and vices, his seemingly boundless capacity for romantic love, his hopes and dreams, his frustrations and accomplishments, and – most important for our purposes here – his deeply internalized racism toward the “niggers” at home and the “spicks” and “gooks” of the tropics. 

     We see a man devoted to his sweetheart, to the Marine Corps, and to his fellow Marines, a man dedicated to self-improvement in various spheres – an accomplished mechanic and a talented musician (especially on the clarinet and violin).  We see him reading books, striving to educate himself, and expanding his mind by taking classes on mathematics, civil service, and other disciplines.  We even see his penmanship and command of the English language improve over the course of his four years of letter-writing.

     What makes this collection of letters so valuable for historians is that their author never intended that they be read by anyone other than his sweetheart Beatrice.  Allowing readers to see past the “official” discourse that saturates the “official” documentary record, these letters offer an unprecedented window on the raw, honest, unfiltered, often heart-wrenching reflections and ruminations of a typical Marine Corps “grunt” in Nicaragua at the height of the US occupation.  The letters comprise only one side of a two-way conversation, of course, though we do catch many hints about what Beatrice was writing back to him.

     For a historian of Nicaragua, the most valuable parts of these letters consist of Thomas’s observations about the natives, their culture, their racial characteristics, and their relationship to the US Marines. In a revealing linguistic shift, Thomas writes from Quantico about the “niggers” in Nicaragua. Once there, he realizes that Nicaraguans are “not niggers” but “half-breeds”:

“These people here aren’t niggers honey. I thought they were like in Haiti and Cuba but they aren’t. They are a mixture of Spanish and Indian I don’t like them though and they hadn’t better give me any reason at all to kill them cause I clean and oil my pistol every morning and I need Half breed hide to make a good suit case.” (April 1, 1928).

     From this point, Thomas stops calling Nicaraguans “niggers” and starts calling them “gooks,” a classic racial epithet for Asians that he probably picked up from veterans of the Marine Corps campaigns in China and the Philippines. He uses the term dozens of times; e.g., September 3, 1928:

“When the news of the bandits got out we had lots of fun watching the gooks clear the streets. They know better than to stay out cause in a time like that we don’t stop at anything and most of us are only to glad to have an excuse to bump off a few gooks.”

     There is no reason to suppose that Emil Thomas’s views on race were atypical.  Indeed, all the evidence suggests that Emil "Porter" Thomas represented an eminently typical white, working class young man growing up in the highly racialized, anti-immigrant context of the 1910s and 1920s, and that his Marine Corps comrades fully shared his racialized understanding of the world.  In sum, the voluminous letters of Emil Thomas's offer historians a rich, fascinating, unfiltered, and highly revealing look at the deep-seated racism and cultural arrogance that saturated Marine Corps culture during this period.

Above:  Douglas McCabe, Curator of Manuscripts, Arts & Archives, at the front entrance to Alden Library, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, December 2014.