Images.

1. Plaque.



2. View of Garden.



3. Statue in garden.

One of the lectures at the festival was by Dr. Bill Roba, a history instructor at Scott Community College. The title of his lecture was “German-American Influences On Bix.” The Quad City Times of July 28, 2007 provided a summary of Dr. Roba’s remarks. The complete article by Mary Louise Speer follows.

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German heritage influenced Bix's music

By Mary Louise Speer | Saturday, July 28, 2007

So much is known about Bix Beiderbecke, the talented young cornet and piano player who wowed audiences during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.

Bill Roba, a history instructor at Scott Community College, highlighted lesser known facts of the German-American influences on Bix during an afternoon of seminars Friday given by jazz experts at the Clarion Hotel, Davenport.

The topics ranged from “Copying Bix” by Albert Haim to “Bix and New Orleans” by Bruce Boyd Raeburn as well as free range discussions with Phil Schaap and Randy Sandke.

The series was offered by the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Society as part of the 2007 Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival.

“I don’t think this is an aspect of Bix we give much thought to, but he had a German heritage,” said seminar emcee Steve Trainor.

Certainly the world Bix lived in, and his family and education, influenced his outlook on life and music. In the early 1920s radio played an increasingly important role in helping people get acquainted with musical styles they might not have been exposed to elsewhere.

“Of the 8 million Germans who came to America, 40 percent of them came to the Midwest and this would have an influence on Bix’ music,” Roba said.

Possibly the most important person and influence on Bix was his grandmother Louise Beiderbecke.

Bix’ grandparents, Louise and Charles Beiderbecke, were very much a part of the German society in west Davenport. They lived in a mansion in that end of town with access to German-flavored attractions such as Schuetzen Park with its popular music offerings and the Turner Hall.

Bix’ first music lessons even came from German-American teachers.

His mother Agatha Beiderbecke, on the other hand, was very much an American mom and their family lived in the “more American east side of Davenport,” Roba said.

Agatha played the organ at the family’s church, First Presbyterian Church of Davenport.

The Beiderbecke family was well thought of in Davenport and, Roba said, World War I (1914-18) must have caused some moments of private agony.

During Bix’ time at Davenport (now Central) High School, the anti-German sentiment spilled over into a textbook burning that was evidently countenanced by faculty.

“We need to use some educated guesses that this must have had some effect on Bix since he was just starting high school,” Roba said.

The high point of high school for Bix was performing with his quartet and taking time to savor music events happening in the world around him. He liked keeping up with the latest musical trends, Roba said.

Eventually his love for the emerging musical form of jazz would propel him into the greater world with influences on his music from New Orleans jazz players and especially jazz saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer.

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In the last 15 minutes of his lecture, Dr. Roba went on at length about Bix’s arrest of April  22, 1921. He provided some new pieces of information. Preston Ivens, the father of Sarah, the girl allegedly involved in the incident, had a brother killed in World War I. Furthermore, Dr. Roba informed the audience that Preston Ivens was a strong advocate of the “100 percent American” movement prevalent as the US entered World War I.

Dr. Roba suggested that the reason for Bix being enrolled in Lake Forest Academy in the Fall of 1921 was the alleged incident of April 21, 1921. Available documentation on the arrest is provided in

http://www.network54.com/Forum/27140/message/978897881/The+Available+Documentation

There are other plausible explanations: Bix's academic work was very poor in high school - he 
had failing grades in 9 of the 23 courses he took in 1918-1921: a failing rate of 39 %; Bix did 
not graduate from high school at the same time as his classmates; Bix was frequently absent 
from school in 1918-1921: 154 days in the academic years 1918-1919, 1919-1920, and 
1920-1921. I will admit that the alleged incident with Sarah Ivens could have been a contributory 
factor for the decision to enroll Bix in Lake Forest Academy. However, there is no evidence that 
it was the major reason, and in fact that it was a factor at all. As a matter of record, the relations 
of Bix with his family were quite close in the summer of 1921.

Towards he end of his lecture, Dr. Roba asked what had happened to all the money that Bix earned as a professional musician. Dr. Roba suggested that Bix was paying back the money that his father had paid Preston Ivens to drop the charges against Bix. This is sheer fabrication, and there is not a single shred of evidence for this outrageous supposition. It is well known that Bix was rather careless with money (once Jimmy McPartland asked him for a $10 loan, and Bix gave him $100) and that he lost quite a bit of money in the market crash (investments made for him by his sister; see liners by George Avakian in “The Bix Beiderbecke Story,” set of three Columbia LPs).

I searched for Preston Ivens in ancestry.com. Preston R. Ivens married young. The 1910 US Census finds him at age 18, occupation dealer for real estate business, living in Chestertown, Maryland with his wife Mary, age 18, and son Preston R., age 1. In 1917, Preston Ivens registered for the draft. He lived in Philadelphia with his wife and three children. He described himself as of medium height, stout, brown eyes, brown hair and bold.  In 1920, Preston, age 28, occupation merchant in grocery store, resided in Philadelphia, PA, lived with his wife Mary, age 28, son Preston R., age 10, son William H., age 9, and daughter Sarah A., age 4. Preston Ivens and family moved to Davenport in 1921, where Mr. Ivens enrolled at the Palmer School of Chiropractic. From the SSDI, I learned that Preston Ivens was born on Jul 15, 1891 and died in Houston, Texas, in June 1969. His son, also named Preston, was born on Sep 7, 1909 and died in July 1969.

In searching information about Preston Ivens, I discovered that his grandson, Preston Ivens, III
lives in Sweet Water, Texas. I asked Gerri Bowers to call him and find out what he knew about 
Davenport and Bix. It turns out that he did not recognize the name Bix Beiderbecke and had, 
at best, a vague recollection that his grandfather had lived in Davenport. Gerri asked him if 
Sarah's daughter, who also lives in Texas, might have some information. Preston responded 
that he was in close contact with his cousin and that she would not be of much help either."

Dr. Roba's lecture on German-American influences on Bix prompted me to read about he status
of Germans in the US during and after World War I. Moreover, this point may have some
connection with Preston Ivens accusations of alleged acts by Bix. First I note that, according to 
Dr. Roba, Ivens had lost a brother in World War I and was  an advocate of the “100 % American”
movement. Second, I note that Ivens was living in Philadelphia when the US entered World War I.
I further note that Philadelphia was one of the centers for the movement that promulgated
“100 percent American” philosophy. 

The following information and quotes are from “Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity” by Russell A. Kazal, Princeton University Press, 2004. First, some general comments about the disappearance of German influences in the US. “The eclipse of German-American identity today is all the more startling, given its condition at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then, German Americans were perhaps the best-organized, most visible, and most respected group of newcomers in the United States. Germans, whose migration to America peaked in the 1880s, made up the largest single nationality among the foreign-born during the 1910s, greater in number than the Poles, Italians, and other southern and eastern Europeans of the ‘new immigration.’ The National German-American Alliance, a federation of ethnic associations, laid claim by 1914 to more than two million members. Before the First World War, the Germans were widely esteemed as ‘one of the most assimilable and reputable of immigrant groups’; a group of professional people surveyed in 1908 ranked German immigrants ahead of English ones and, in some respects, above native-born whites.” Part of the explanation for the decline in German influence lies in the entry of the US in World War I. “The most obvious relates to the contingencies of twentieth-century history. That century saw the United States fight two world wars against Germany and witnessed the genocide perpetrated by the Third Reich; it therefore left Americans with few incentives to identify with a German ancestry. Even before those events, institutional German America--which encompassed everything from secular gymnastic and singing societies to German Lutheran congregations and German Catholic national parishes--was unraveling. Historians such as John Hawgood once pointed to the intense nativist backlash that accompanied American intervention in World War I as the key to the destruction of this ethnic world.” The author then explains the essence of his book. “I address the issues of assimilation, pluralism, nationalism, and race that the German-American paradox raises by reconstructing the fate of that group in one such place: Philadelphia from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s.” and one of the reasons why he chose Philadelphia, “The National German-American Alliance, which rallied German associations across the country to resist assimilation, was founded in the city in 1901 under the leadership of a coterie of local middle-class activists. One of them, Charles J. Hexamer, served as the organization's president and guiding spirit until 1917.” He further writes in an explanation of the decline of German ethnic identity, “Today's marked submergence of German-American ethnicity owes a great deal to the anti-German backlash of the First World War, yet that was just one of several developments that came together during the 1910s and 1920s to reshape German Philadelphians' sense of self. Those developments also included the rise of a narrower, more conformist American nationalism that discredited older, pluralist views of the nation; a related tide of racialized nativism.” “The event that precipitated those developments was, rather, the First World War--the subject of part 3. Initially, the European war actually heightened the ethnic consciousness and unity of those Philadelphians of German background who remained within the Vereinswesen, as chapter 7 describes. Many middle-class activists, socialist workers, Catholics, and Lutherans rallied to Germany's defense between 1914 and 1916. Yet the neutrality period also saw a reaction among Anglo-Americans and other non-Germans against such ethnic activism, a backlash expressed in attacks on the national loyalty of ‘hyphenated Americans’ and, eventually, demands that they be ‘100 percent American.’ With America's entry into the war, this ‘antihyphen’ movement metamorphosed into an anti-German panic. What began as a suspicion of German Philadelphians as potential spies and saboteurs mushroomed into a general assault on German ethnic expression itself and on the very legitimacy of views of the nation--like the National Alliance's--that allowed for a degree of ethnic separatism and, hence, cultural pluralism. Fed in part by the federal government's effort to mobilize support for the war, the panic led to the destruction of the National Alliance, the ending of German instruction in the city's public schools, and the hounding of ordinary German Philadelphians, at times by mobs. As a result, the public expression of German ethnicity became virtually impossible during and immediately after the war and remained problematic thereafter.”

The environment for people of German descent in Davenport (Scott County) was not any better. According to
http://www.qcmemory.org/Default.aspx?PageId=242&nt=207&nt2=239

“In the decade before the United States entered the War, [this World War I] Anti-German sentiment rose to an almost ridiculous level, even in Scott County, where a considerable percent of the population were of Germanic descent.  Local ordinances were passed to prevent the German language from being spoken in public, pre-German books were removed from library shelves, and many citizens of German birth were rounded up and interrogated about their loyalty to the United States.  Many German businesses changed their names in order to show patriotism and to stay in business.” According to http://www.qcmemory.org/Default.aspx?PageId=226&nt=207&nt2=222  “September 7, 1918—Der Demokrat, Davenport’s German language newspaper, publishes its last issue due to anti-German sentiment during the years of World War I.” 

In view of all this information, it may be pertinent to ask, on the basis of Dr. Roba’s report that Mr. Preston R. Ivens had strong anti-German feelings in the years after World War I and espoused the “100 percent American” philosophy, is it possible that his accusations against Bix were somehow colored by his prejudices?

Uploaded Aug 17, 2007. I am grateful to Gerri Bowers for calling Preston Ivens, III

Uploaded August 23, 2007.