States, although nothing in its business or residence portion suggests
the Germany across the sea and, with sixty per cent. of its population
German, it has not impressed upon the city the best things which we
usually associate with that nationality. The intellectual life of its
people does not receive that stimulus which one might expect; and
whatever German culture there is outside of the ever-diminishing circle
of the “forty-eighters” has been transplanted by Americans who have
travelled and studied in the Fatherland. The few Germans who try to
bring the Germany of America in touch with its glorious heritage across
the sea, usually fail most miserably. The cry I most often heard from
them was, “The idealists are dead, and the dollar reigns supreme.”
With a few exceptions, neither the German stage nor the German newspaper
has been able to keep alive that intellectual spirit; and, as a rule,
the German population falls below the American in its desire to keep in
touch with the intellectual life of Germany. “We have two kinds of
Germans in Milwaukee: soul Germans and stomach Germans, and the latter
are in the vast majority,” said a keen observer; and it does seem that
the national spirit rallies around social usages rather than around the
things which make Germany a world power in the noblest sense. The
editors upon whom I called were all intent upon telling me how great
their papers were and how many subscribers they had, and I could not go
beyond the business point with any of them, although I wasted two hours
upon one, trying to get a glimpse of his German soul; but if I saw it at
all, it had the American dollar-mark written all over it. Upon the
social side the German is abnormally developed, and to be a “good
fellow” is to him a high ideal. He usually belongs to numberless lodges
and societies, in few of which he receives any intellectual stimulus. He
retains his convivial habits and frequents the saloon, but is seldom
intemperate, although the American treating habit often works havoc with
his frugality.
That I have not misjudged the situation is proved by the fact that
similar conclusions have been reached by eminent German scholars who
have recently visited the United States.
Prof. K. Lamprecht, of the University of Leipsic, who has recently
published his notes under the title “Americana,” says: “Have the Germans
done much besides having a large share in making the soil tillable? A
visit to the great cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee compels to the
sad answer, no.
“The Germans, capable as they are, in their separate and narrower
activities have not held together and have been overcome by others;
overcome to the degree that they still make the stupid “Dutchman” the
target for their jokes. One need only to see the part he plays in the
American farce to be convinced of this. He is the man who is always too
late, who always wants much and at last gets but little, and who in
spite of the fact that he is portrayed as good natured, is laughed at.
This caricature tells some truth and is the product of some observation.
“Intellectually he does not stand very high; (the Negro also learns
reading and writing), but in intense thinking he is outdistanced by the
Englishman and presumably by the Slav also.
“Whoever has visited the beer gardens of Milwaukee, especially the
unfortunate Pabst Park, that pattern of stupidity, must say to himself
that a people which enjoys such things as are here offered, is not
capable of intellectual competition in America.
“Still sadder is the lack of political discernment. One need not speak
of the corrupt condition of American politics. If the Germans had really
had the desire they could greatly have improved the political morals of
the United States. That they did not use their opportunity is due
largely to the fact that when the early German immigrants came to us,
their country was not politically ripe; nevertheless they may be accused
of not having kept pace with the citizens of the mother country, who,
under more difficult conditions have reached a very high political
development. The common people from whom our immigrants sprang, now have
large powers in directing the political well-being of the Fatherland
under less favourable conditions. This is also true in regard to the
German intellectual development with which the German-American has not
kept in touch and to which he is now very slowly awaking.”
Another thing which this vast German population has failed to impress
upon our cities is the love of law and order which characterizes it in
its native home, and almost without exception it stands arrayed against
any attempt to curtail the privileges of the saloon; while lawmakers,
and officials, are usually kept from enforcing existing laws by their
fear of the German vote. One of the Milwaukee beer-brewers with whom I
talked in regard to his influence upon local politics naively said: “No,
we have no influence upon politics at all, but if a sheriff or a judge
should try to enforce laws against our saloons, he would simply lose his
head.” The fact is that a certain phase of municipal life is completely
controlled by the brewing interest in nearly every city where the German
element plays a political part, and that element always rallies to the
support and defence of the brewers. It is a strange but general
experience that the German immigrant is immediately arrayed against the
temperance element; this is due in no small measure to the facts that
his first lodging-place is usually connected with a saloon; that the
German newspaper almost always ridicules temperance effort and
misinterprets the motives of its leaders, and, lastly, that designing
politicians make their slogan, “personal liberty,” synonymous with “beer
at any time and anywhere.” Only very recently a large portion of the
German population of Chicago was the leading element in a mass-meeting
in which over ten thousand people took part, demanding the granting of
special licenses to dance-halls; a precedent which would be as illegal,
as dangerous.
Nevertheless, the German is a law-abiding citizen, although he has never
been convinced that temperance laws are either wise or just; and that,
in spite of the fact that his own Fatherland is making strenuous efforts
in that direction, and that temperance societies are coming to be as
numerous in Germany as they are in America, but much more sensible in
their agitation than with us. The average German comes, willing enough
to obey all the laws, and, if he has proper environment, develops
quickly into the best kind of citizen.
Neither in Milwaukee nor elsewhere did I find that the Church, whether
Lutheran or Roman Catholic, had kept pace with the intellectual
development of the home Church, nor has it come to feel its social
responsibility to the community. The German Lutheran pastors, in certain
synods, are often more exclusive than the Catholic priests in their
unwillingness to coöperate with other churches for the public good; and
while the churches in Germany are the most progressive on the continent,
here they are the most conservative, and correspondingly inactive in the
affairs which move society. Certain synods of the Lutheran Church, and
those the most prosperous, hold to the Augsburg Confession more
tenaciously than Luther ever did, and believe that beside that Church
there is no Church, and outside of that creed no salvation.
I attended a Lutheran church one Sunday evening when it was crowded
largely by young people, all of them wage-earners in the lower walks of
life. The whole burden of the sermon of nearly forty-five minutes’
length was the thought that salvation is not in morality or merit or
good deeds, but that the only thing necessary to it is a proper
definition of the nature of Jesus Christ. There was not one ethical note
in the whole sermon, and if it is a fair sample of that man’s
discourses, his flock of more than fifteen hundred souls is feeding upon
barren pasture. When I called upon a Lutheran pastor who was pointed out
to me as a liberal, I found, upon asking him to define his liberality,
that it turned entirely upon social habits and had nothing to do with
theology. “I want to drink my beer whenever I want to,” was the article
in his creed that had driven him into the arms of a more liberal synod.
Among the Germans of the Northwest there is a good deal of infidelity,
fostered by the Turner societies; but they are languishing and dying,
and with them dies the unbelief. I was told in Milwaukee by a business
man that the disappearance of those societies is due to the fact that
men of affairs discovered that it was poor business policy to belong to
them, because it arrayed against them the conservative church element,
and that the cessation of infidel agitation is not a sign of more faith,
but simply a sign of more common sense. One free-thinking paper is still
published in Milwaukee; but its constituency is gradually growing
smaller, and the lecturers on infidelity, of whom there used to be many,
have dwindled to one or two. They find it hard to make a living out of
a thing that has no life. Yet the German immigrant contributes positive
good to this nation’s life; he brings usually a sound body, and while
seldom intellectual, he is nearly always intelligent. He is scrupulously
honest in business affairs, and has elevated the business morals of his
community. By his love of music he has robbed the social life in America
of some of its sternness; and the German singing societies are known not
so much for the artistic quality of their performance, as for keeping
alive the spirit of good fellowship.
Unfortunately, the German falls an easy prey to the prevailing
materialistic spirit, and when he worships mammon he becomes the most
ardent of devotees. Then he has no time for his “Gesangverein,” nor for
anything else which is not utilitarian, and “Geldmachen,” the making of
money, is his great ideal. In his home life he still emphasizes those
virtues which have given inspiration to the German poets’ best songs.
His wife is, even in America, the model “Hausfrau”; for “she looketh
well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of
idleness.” Yet the Woman’s Club has touched her also, and the
“Kaffeeklatsch,” with its innocent neighbourhood gossip, has given way
to the formal reception and kindred social delusions. The German has
been the prime factor in dispelling the Puritan idea of the Sabbath,
which to many is a positive evil, but may at least be considered a mixed
good. Still, he ought not to bear the blame alone, for the average
American was ready to have his Sabbath broken for him and has easily
followed into the breach; just as it often takes four or five grown
persons to escort one child to the circus, so one may find four or five
natives at every Sunday base-ball game, helping the German to amuse
himself.
The disintegrating process has also been stimulated by the American
tourists who annually cross the ocean, and who, during their visits in
Continental Europe, leave much of the Puritan spirit behind them--too
much for their own good and the good of their country.
The German has not largely contributed to the deepening of the religious
life of the nation, although wherever he enters the life of the church
he makes its expression more honest. The one thing which he hates
desperately is hypocrisy, and because of that he guards himself very
jealously and seldom speaks of his religious experiences. The German
Methodist and Evangelical Churches, which are of the emotional type, are
not only failing to grow, but are perceptibly becoming smaller. This is
to be deplored, because they developed a somewhat deep if rather narrow
Christian character, and strove to counteract the cold and more formal
spirit of the majority of their brethren in other communions.
The German in America has not produced many great men, but he has filled
this country with good men, which is infinitely better. The cause of the
dearth of prominent German-Americans is due to the fact that they blend
more quickly than any other foreigner (except the Scandinavian) with the
nation’s life, especially if the German reaches any kind of eminence;
and the effect which he has upon the life of the nation is difficult to
trace just because of that.
The coarse, the crude and the low, retain their national stamp, while
the finer and better soon become part of us. Some of us seem to know the
German best and judge him most from the standpoint of the saloon and all
it implies; but I have almost always found him industrious, intelligent,
honest, frugal, patriotic, and God-fearing--noble qualities for American
citizenship. If he has not risen to the highest which he is capable of
reaching, and if he does not exert his influence for the best in all
directions, it is not due to the fact that he is not willing to do it;
but because he could not rise much higher than the highest marked out
for him by the native citizens, or because he could not quite comprehend
that this money-making, materialistic Yankee had ideals which he was
trying honestly to realize.
If we misjudge the German, he misjudges the American and rates him much
lower than he deserves. This has robbed him of a higher standard for
himself and made him exaggerate our national weaknesses, imitating which
has created a peculiar combination of character which does scant justice
to himself or to his American neighbour. When he revisits his
Fatherland, these weaknesses manifest themselves most; and then his
adopted Fatherland comes in for a good share of the blame for his lack
of manners. The following incident illustrates this point. In the lobby
of a fashionable hotel in Berlin a German-American of this type was
expectorating tobacco-juice with the exactness and frequency of an
adept. To a German who called his attention to this nuisance, he
replied: “Everybody does that in America.” He needs to know the American
and value him as he deserves, and he ought to know that which he does
not seem to, that the making of money is to the true American, after
all, not the greatest of achievements; that the hypocrisy with which he
charges him in his religious life is less frequent than he thinks it is,
and that the national ideal is slowly but surely gaining ascendency. He
ought also to know that, more than any other foreigner, he has impressed
upon us both his strength and his weakness, and that we are growing
quite definitely Teutonic. It is for us to find out what this strength
is and to appropriate it more; and it is for him to grow conscious of
his weakness and eliminate it from his social life, that he may become
indeed one of the strongest pillars of this Republic, which already,
like the coming Kingdom, is made up of “every nation and kindred and
tribe and people under heaven.”
VIII
THE SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANT
The steerage of an English vessel on which the Scandinavian immigrants
travel is not the forbidding place usually found on the steamers which
sail from Continental ports. The passengers have cabins assigned to
them, their meals are served in human fashion, and the general
appearance of everything is in keeping with that of the travellers who
come from the best peasant stock of Europe. The Scandinavian peasants
bear no taint of past slavery; and as far back as their “Saga” reaches,
they were freemen.
When the new light which first shone at Wittenberg travelled northward,
it found ready entrance into Swedish hearts, and Scandinavia has ever
been the bulwark of Protestantism, so that wherever its story is
written, the name of Gustave Adolphe has a prominent place. With
scarcely any exception the Scandinavian immigrant is a Protestant, a
confessed adherent of some church, and in most cases an ardent worker
and worshipper. Repeatedly during services on shipboard I have found
that every Scandinavian present took an active interest in it, and on
the Sabbath the number of Bible readers and students was astonishingly
large. There is practically no illiteracy among them and the steerage
passenger who read nothing on his journey was an exception; the quality
of the reading was also remarkable, for on one journey I counted among
fifty books, nine of Sheldon’s “What would Jesus do?” and only fourteen
novels of a purely secular character.
The demeanour of the Scandinavian immigrant is quiet, unobtrusive,
almost melancholy; and when he sings it is always in a minor key, his
folk-song having the dreaminess of the Orient and being as far removed
from the jig of his Irish fellow traveller as the North is from the
South. He is homesick from the time he steps on board of ship until he
reaches his home “in the land where there is no more sea”; and the
asylums of the Northwest are full of Scandinavian men and women who have
sunk into hopeless melancholia because of homesickness. Yet in spite of
this most of the immigrants remain in America and more than any other
foreigner blend completely into the national life.
There is scarcely such a thing as a second generation of Scandinavians,
although the first generation never loses its love and longing for fair
“Scandia.” A great many who come know the English language or at least
some words, and being in touch here with a spirit which is as serious
as their own it is no wonder that they remain, and become merged in the
national life. Not one who comes is a pauper, although not a few are
poor; yet nearly all are rich in a heritage of health and character
which unfortunately they do not always retain on this side of the
Atlantic. In fact it is proved that the second generation is weaker
physically, and many of the older immigrants claim that it has lost much
moral fibre also. This complaint which I have heard from all foreigners
about their descendants is largely due to the natural tendency to
overrate the past and to underrate the present. It is also true that the
second generation undervalues the heritage which the parents brought
with them from across the sea; and in not a few cases because of that,
it becomes morally and spiritually bankrupt.
[Illustration: _From stereograph copyright--1905, by Underwood &
Underwood, N. Y._
FAREWELL TO HOME AND FRIENDS
Close of kin to us are the Scandinavians, not only in race, but in
thought and in ideals. More than any other element do they blend quickly
and thoroughly with our national life.]
I have seldom seen Scandinavian immigrants of more than middle age, and
most of them are young men and women between eighteen and thirty-six.
Some remain in the large cities of the East where they are valued as
servants, gardeners and dairymen, more of them drift to Jamestown, N.
Y., as mechanics; but the large majority of immigrants go to the
Northwest where they have been “hewers of wood and drawers of water,”
where they have turned the sod of far stretching acres towards the sun
and where their cattle graze upon a thousand hills. They like the
melancholy plains of the Dakotas; the cold winters remind them of their
own far North, and if any strange country ever grows to them like home
it certainly is this hospitable region in whose mills and factories,
beginning at Chicago and ending in that West which each day comes nearer
to the true East across the Pacific, they are toilers, skilled labourers
and trusted foremen.
I have yet to find the shop where they are not liked; although their
less industrious fellow workmen of other nationalities call them
treacherous--a word which they themselves do not quite understand; but
which means that the Scandinavians “get ahead,” and that is often cause
enough to give them a bad name. In all my dealings with them I have
found them frank and generous, and while playing farmer in order to know
them better, my fellow labourer has many a time hitched the horses for
me, or shovelled my portion of the corn, and when he found that I was
only a make-believe farmer did not betray my confidence.
With such experiences and with such high esteem of the Scandinavian, I
joined a party of young Swedes who were travelling from Chicago to the
Northwest. They were disgusted by that city, by its moral and physical
filth, its noise and its few glimpses of God’s heaven, and I
congratulated them upon going to Minneapolis which I described in
glowing terms as a clean and godly city in which an American population
of New England descent combined with this wholesome Scandinavian element
in making a model city. Eager to have America shine to them in its very
best light I offered myself as their guide through the city, an offer
which they readily accepted. We had scarcely stepped out of the Union
Depot before I wished that I had not said anything about the godliness
of Minneapolis; for we were set upon by thugs, fakirs and lewd women in
such numbers and in such a disgusting manner that I thought for a moment
I had struck the Bowery in its palmiest days. Dozens of squares around
the depot and deep into the heart of the city were filled by brothels of
the most disgraceful kind; pictures were displayed in show windows and
in the open porticos of museums which would make a Paris street gamin
blush, and the whole city seemed to be stricken by some fatal disease.
Policemen were neither ornamental nor useful, city detectives were
employed by gamblers to hustle the fleeced stranger out of town, the
mayor, the sheriff and who knows who else were in league with gamblers
and thieves, while vice was everywhere rampant and did not even have to
defy the law for there was no law.
Newspaper men whom I interviewed, told me that Minneapolis was
considered by travelling men the “toughest” town this side of Butte,
Montana. Ministers said that they were helpless and many told me that it
was none of their or my business; officials were paralyzed, the mayor
was a fugitive from justice, the chief of police was about to be sent to
the penitentiary for safe keeping; and all of them agreed that these
conditions were in no small measure due to the Scandinavian population
which was not fitted for public responsibility.
I had just come from Jamestown, N. Y., which has about the same
population of Scandinavians, where they had elected a Swedish mayor who
gave great satisfaction, where many offices were held by Swedes, and
where I had heard no such complaints.
In Minnesota generally, no taint attached itself to such Scandinavians
as Knute Nelson, Lind and others who had served in high offices in state
and nation; therefore I was shocked, puzzled and disappointed. I found
the common verdict in Minnesota to be: “We can’t trust the Swedes in
public offices;” and the number of defaulting county and city treasurers
of Scandinavian nationality (especially Swedish) who spent a few years
in Stillwater prison, makes the generally accepted estimate of the high
character of the Swede as a citizen waver not a little.
If this estimate be true it may be due first of all to the Swedish
churches, which have not as a rule, in common with a large share of the
American churches, sufficiently emphasized the fact that “righteousness
exalteth a nation,” and that it can become exalted only through a
righteous citizenship. The Lutheran churches have been busy preaching
doctrines and have been so eager to maintain the Augsburg confession
that they have not laid much stress upon upholding the spirit of the
Sermon on the Mount and all that it means for the Kingdom of God. The
“Mission Friends,” as a large body of Swedish Christians calls itself,
has been so busy in common with Methodists and Baptists, doing
evangelizing work, and building up its local church membership, that it
has forgotten that it has something to do with saving the state or the
city.
The second cause may be ascribed to the clannish feeling fostered by
cunning politicians, which makes these people vote for a Scandinavian no
matter what his character is, just because he is one of their own. In
this as in the first case I do not wish it to appear that the
Scandinavian is a sinner above all others, but he has been remarkably
unfortunate in the character of the officials whom he has chosen, and it
will take a great deal of repentance and general betterment to make the
people of Hennepin County unsuspicious of the Scandinavian office
seeker.