After A Nazi Salute Goes Viral, A Town Stands By Its Boys
, at the exclusive, liberal Sidwell Friends School, which prides itself on diversity and is where former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama sent their children.
Indeed, in Baraboo the potential of decontextualized viral content to rend the American social fabric had been fully realized. Here was a traumatized community that in a desperate attempt to ward off the narratives of the national culture war had done lasting damage to itself.
So Zolper drove over that night, sat in the Dwyers’ living room, and apologized. He told them the whole story: the raised fist, the open palm, the gesture he had meant as an ironic joke given the situation and not because he hated Jewish people.
Inside the halls of Baraboo High School, though, students badly wanted to talk about what had happened, what was happening, and what would happen. Because of a rash of anonymous threats, the school suspended open campus, meaning students couldn’t leave for lunch; some parents held their children out of school, fearing for their safety. Despite the extraordinary circumstances, no school administrator addressed the students in an official capacity.
Rumors about Blue spread from students to their parents and quickly throughout town. Most damagingly, many Barabooians came to believe that Blue himself had surfaced the photo, for fame or money or both. Students claimed that Blue had been asking for photos from the steps in the days before the image went viral, which was technically true.
Dr. Mueller is Lori Mueller, the Baraboo School district administrator. She was in a difficult position: accountable to families who sought to protect their children's safety and college prospects, teachers who were under a siege of vituperative and threatening phone calls, and the demands of the outside world that something be done to punish the boys.
Under the national spotlight, as phones at her office rang continuously with angry callers, Mueller seemed “overwhelmed,” as one Baraboo parent put it to me. According to Mark Schauf, the Baraboo police chief, the school district and the city had hired separate crisis PR firms. The firms appeared to have instituted something just short of omertà. No employee of the Baraboo School District or the city of Baraboo agreed to speak to me in any capacity.
Phillip Zolper tried many of the above. As a senior, he had started training as an emergency medical technician, and after the photograph went viral, he seemed to be attempting civic triage. After he apologized to Dwyer and her family, Zolper kept talking. He apologized to more members of the Jewish community in Baraboo. And he started holding small meetings of what he called “the 63” — the boys in the photograph.
Meanwhile, slowly, local institutions had started to act, but not always in reassuring ways. Lori Mueller had sent a letter to parents on November 12 stating that “the school district and local authorities continue to investigate ... how and why this photo was taken.” This was slightly misleading. It was true that Schauf led an investigation, but it was primarily focused on the barrage of violent threats to the school.
It was true that punishing the boys could present serious challenges, including potential litigation by parents.
“Marcy and Buddy have worked so hard and been so proactive,” she told me. “If they hadn’t, what would be happening?” Nancy Peidelstein moved to Baraboo in 1983 with her husband. A self-described “peacenik” from the North Chicago suburbs, she had honeymooned in the city, and she fell for the area’s forested synclines and the oak-ringed Devil’s Lake. A painter, she thought it would be a good place to raise a family.
Peidelstein also told me about the intolerance. Letters to the editor in the local paper and passing comments made it “clear that many people around us felt that being Jewish was not sufficient when it came to having a relationship with God.” If intolerance in Baraboo was a cycle, it seemed to start young. A woman in Baraboo, who spoke to me on the condition that I not use her name, is the mother of two biracial children at Jack Young Middle School, which feeds Baraboo High. She said her daughter came home from school one day complaining that a boy in her class would stare at her and say, “Black. Black. Black.” The mother complained to school administrators, who promised to talk to the boy.
And they propagate themselves. A few weeks after the viral photograph, Eva Huffaker, now with her twin brother Zach the only Jews in Baraboo High School, sat minding her business. A boy stood up, eyeballed her, and raised his arm in the Sieg Heil. A joke. Soon after, she was talking with friends in a classroom. She mentioned that she enjoyed the taste of burnt marshmallows. “Just like your ancestors,” another boy responded. A joke. Marcy Huffaker complained to the school.
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