The year 1832, celebrated in Wisconsin history as the time when the
lead miners and other pioneers destroyed the power of the Rock River
Indians, was remembered by later-coming German immigrants for a very
different reason. It was toward the end of March in that year, the
place Trier (Treves), the ancient capital of the western “Cæsars,” a
city which is still rich in the massive ruins of its Roman foretime.
As the story goes, the boys of one form in the old _Gymnasium_ were
being entertained at the house of a professor, where, boy-like, they
were playing indoor games accompanied with much laughter and general
hilarity. Suddenly one of their younger classmates rushed breathless
into the room, exclaiming: “Goethe is dead!”[38] During the balance
of the evening, the less serious of the youngsters having returned to
their interrupted play, this boy engaged with his instructors in eager
discussion of Goethe’s life and writings.
The youth in question was Karl Marx, whose later history exhibits a
wide divergence from the exclusively literary career prophesied by
his boyhood scholastic interests. The classmate who is authority for
this incident continued in Marx’s company the _Gymnasium_ studies; he
then performed his one year minimum of military service, and having
secured some business experience sailed away as an immigrant to the
new world, settling on a Wisconsin farm. In the course of a long life
he often reverted to the story of Goethe, whose works, as well as
those of Schiller and Lessing, made a part of his home library. These
great names never failed to kindle his pride in the intellectual
achievements of the German people, whose governments at the time of
his emigration in 1841 seemed to him a compound of despotism and
inefficiency.[39]
Doubtless there were Germans of the immigration to Wisconsin who
knew not Goethe, or if in a hazy way they did know who he was, had
no intellectual right to judge his merits. But the more intelligent
were sure to possess some knowledge of the writings of their greatest
poet and of lesser men who still were great in the world’s estimation.
Hence it was that Germans who at that period went to the new world,
while acknowledging by their flight the political, economic, and social
obstacles to a successful life in Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, Westphalia,
or Luxemburg, were always able to maintain a self-respecting attitude
when confronted with the pretensions of those Americans who were
unsympathetic, jingoistic, or boastful. German immigrants might grant
much to superior cleverness, to the stupendous achievements of a
liberty loving race, domiciled in a peaceful continent and dowered with
free lands and boundless opportunity; but they remembered that _William
Tell_ and _Faust_ and _The Laocoön_ were written by Germans.
Though many immigrants were far from being literary, they doubtless
possessed, on the average, a knowledge of German masterpieces
fully equivalent to the knowledge which Americans possessed of the
English Classics. For education was looking up, and while most of
the immigrants from German states, like those from other European
countries, were of the peasant class, which was usually the most
backward, still by 1840 nearly all were sure to have enjoyed some
systematic schooling. At an earlier period this might have been
otherwise. The condition of limited serfdom, removed but a generation
earlier, operated powerfully to neutralize such benevolent plans for
universal instruction as kings and ministers proclaimed. For the
peasants were directly subordinate to the local lords, who often felt
“that an ignorant labor supply was less likely to seek to better its
condition by demands upon them....”[40] The great national reform
movement which came to fruition after the close of the Napoleonic wars
swept away many of the disabilities of the common people, and developed
in Prussia and other states a system of universal education as the
surest means of national upbuilding.
The excellencies of the Prussian school system prior to 1840 became the
theme of flattering reports on the part of educators in many lands.
The celebrated philosopher Victor Cousin made it the basis for his
plan of educational reform in France; the Scotch, English, and Irish
discussed it; Horace Mann proclaimed it to the school authorities of
Massachusetts, and Calvin E. Stowe recommended it to the legislature of
Ohio. That system may not have possessed all of the virtues which the
ordinances quoted by Cousin imply.[41] Yet it had the one excellence to
which educationally all others are subsidiary--a well-trained teaching
force. Indeed, if there is anything which seems miraculous in the swift
and thoroughgoing transformation of school conditions in Prussia during
the first forty years of the nineteenth century, it is explained by
the provision which the state made for normal schools and the supply,
through their agency, of teachers enough to man all the schools. “In
the lowest school in the smallest and obscurest village,” says Horace
Mann, “or for the poorest class in overcrowded cities; in the schools
connected with pauper establishments, with houses of correction or
with prisons--in all these there was a teacher of mature age, of
simple, unaffected and decorous manners.” Mann also made it clear
that every such teacher was possessed of adequate scholarship and
special training for the work of the schoolroom.[42] Such a statement
could not be made at that time about Massachusetts, where popular
education was already two hundred years old, nor could it be made with
equal confidence of other German countries, though several of these
approximated the Prussian standard and most of them were earnestly
promoting education along the same lines and by the use of similar
means.
We must therefore regard the generation of the German exodus from
which Wisconsin profited so largely in the later 1840’s and the
1850’s, as almost universally literate and usually well grounded in
the rudiments of an education. The intelligent, reading, writing, and
slow but careful figuring German peasant immigrants constituted the
best testimonial to the efficacy of German systems of instruction for
the common people. The _Gymnasia_, the _real Schule_, the universities,
sent forth representatives of the highest German culture to honor
the learned professions, the literary, philosophical, and scientific
circles of America.
On the basis of formal school instruction alone, the historian of early
Wisconsin would be compelled to assign first place in social fitness to
the immigrants from Germany. Neither the Irish, the English, nor even
the Yankee pioneers on the average had enjoyed as thorough a training
as had Prussians, Saxons, Hessians, or Badeners. Yet, school training
is never all there is of education, and it may constitute but a small
portion of it. No one questions that the social character of Prussian
and other German peasants was far higher in 1840 than it had been in
1800, and this was due to a variety of causes, of which schooling was
only one. In part it was due to the abolition of serfdom, in part to
the reorganization of municipal life; also, largely to the religious
agitation of the period, to the movements for political reform, and
especially to the widespread, momentous, and gripping spirit of
nationalism.
Nevertheless, despite their superb educational equipment plus other
incentives, the Prussians still seemed to intelligent American
observers in a very retarded social condition. Horace Mann, who wrote
most enthusiastically of their schools and was sympathetic toward the
Germans in every respect, in a passage of almost classic force and
beauty written in 1843, tells us why education in Prussia accomplished
for the people so much less than one might expect. For one thing,
he says, the pupils left school too early--at the age of fourteen,
which was their time for beginning regular and heavy work. Then, too,
books for further self-instruction were lacking. There was in Prussia
nothing analogous to the Massachusetts district school libraries.
“But,” he continues, “the most potent cause of Prussian backwardness
and incompetency is this--when the children come out from the school
they have little use either for the faculties that have been developed,
or for the knowledge that has been acquired. Their resources have not
been brought into demand; their powers are not roused or strengthened
by exercise. Our common phrases, ‘the active duties of life’; ‘the
responsibilities of citizenship’; ‘the stage, the career, of action’;
‘the obligations to posterity’;--would be strange sounding words in
the Prussian ear.... Now, although there is a sleeping ocean in the
bosom of every child that is born into the world, yet if no freshening,
life-giving breeze ever sweeps across its surface, why should it not
repose in dark stagnation forever.” The bill of particulars with which
the great educator clinches his indictment of the Prussian system,
while it aims to describe accurately only the then existing condition
in Prussia, might be equally applicable to almost any other absolutist,
paternalistic state. All responsibility for the people’s welfare was
assumed by the monarch, who in turn was actively aided by a hierarchy
of officials in state and church, in the central government and the
local administrative areas.
Of this officialdom, particularly in its military and civil aspects,
the nobility was not merely the corner stone but the essential part
of the structure. The church, loyal to its traditions, was much more
democratic, men of every class being found in each of its official
grades. The newly developed educational system gave to the common man
another significant opportunity, since teaching candidates were drawn
in large numbers from the middle and lower classes, and were given
at public expense the training necessary to fit them for permanent
positions in the various types of schools. On the whole, however, life
beyond the school, which among Americans of that day commonly yielded
the major part of education, was in Prussia far less fruitful. For, the
American, whose formal schooling had been limited, was sure to multiply
its efficacy many times through the intensely original character of his
activities. In these he was apt to employ everything he had learned,
and constantly to learn more for the sake of applying the new knowledge
to challenging situations.
The contrast between the average Prussian’s life and the average
American’s life was sharp and decisive. The boy leaving school at
fourteen in Frederick William’s country was thrust at once into a
routine of severe labor, controlled by others. Either he might be on
a farm, where his duties were fixed by custom and minutely directed
by parent or employer; or he might be apprenticed to a trade which
would give him seven years under an exacting master. Assuming that
he remained in his native region, his career thenceforth would be
determined with the minimum of personal effort. The American boy whose
schooling stopped at an early age might go west and start a new farm
home in a new environment, with every incentive toward employing his
best powers to win unusual success; he might go to the city and engage
in some business; attend school to prepare for a profession; or settle
down on the ancestral acres under social and economic conditions which
called for almost continuous readjustments, and kept his mind on the
stretch to bring these about.
The governmental arrangements in America were inherently educational;
in Prussia they were the reverse, save when, with revolutionary fury,
the people rose to seek their destruction or reform. In Prussia, says
Horace Mann, “the subject has no officers to choose, no inquiry into
the character or eligibility of candidates to make, no vote to give.
He has no laws to enact or abolish. He has no questions about peace or
war, finance, taxes, tariffs, post office, or internal improvements to
decide or discuss. He is not asked where a road shall be laid, or how a
bridge shall be built, although in the one case he has to perform the
labor and in the other to supply the materials.... The tax gatherer
tells him how much he is to pay, the ecclesiastical authority plans a
church which he must build; and his spiritual guide, who has been set
over him by another, prepares a creed and a confession of faith all
ready for his signature. He is directed alike how he must obey his King
and worship his God.”
The schools of Prussia inculcated religion and morality as sedulously
as they taught geography, singing, and writing, the methods used
being highly praised by American pedagogical experts. This universal
insistence on the ethical content of life could not fail to produce
results more or less in harmony with the aims of great ethical
philosophers, like Kant of Königsberg, a teacher of the learned whose
“categorical imperative,” popularized in that epoch, has not yet gone
into the philosophical discard. The average German immigrants of the
1840’s knew little of Kant or the Kantian school of ethics. But of
honesty, truthfulness, and fidelity to the plighted word they knew
much, because those were practical virtues with which in school if not
at home all were indoctrinated. Thrift and industry were additional but
fundamental virtues which were widely diffused. It is hard for an empty
sack to stand upright. The reason why in America a German’s note was
more often worth face value than that of some other classes was because
the German usually labored unceasingly and saved what he earned, thus
enabling him to meet his obligation.[43]
They were not all saints, these Germans, and in the matter of personal
morality the Prussians particularly seem in those days to have deserved
much of the criticism directed against them.[44] However, it is not
necessary to regard even the Prussians as more lax than most other
continentals, and their character is always explainable as a vulgarized
aping of the low if gilded immoralities of court and aristocracy.
Matters of this sort do not lend themselves readily to statistical
inquiry. But it can hardly be doubted that in France, Prussia, Austria,
or any other country of continental Europe the private morals of the
common people were better on the whole than those of the upper classes.
In America, where immigrants from those countries came into contact
with a self-governing people of simple habits and prevailingly high
ideals of personal conduct, though with numerous individual divergences
from the type, sharp attention was bound to be directed to this feature
in the character of foreigners, and the Germans attracted their full
share of suspicion and disfavor from the stricter sort of Americans.
Such suspicions were heightened by certain social customs of the
Germans to which Americans reacted adversely. Sunday amusements were
all but universal among them. Travelers in Germany dwell upon the
gaiety observed in the villages, or in the city parks and the beer
gardens, the distinctive costumes of different localities lending
color and interest to the scenes. Music was cultivated in every
German community; all Germans could sing and a large proportion could
perform on musical instruments. One was “as certain to see a violin
as a blackboard in every schoolroom.”[45] Wherever Germans gathered
together--and Sunday, since it was the weekly holiday, was their day
for assembling--there was singing and dancing, usually accompanied by
the drinking of beer or wine to stimulate hilarity. This drinking was
not necessarily excessive, because most Germans were moderate in their
appetites for alcohol, some were unable to spend much, and all were
economical (_sparsam_). The dances differed from those favored in this
country, being mainly “round dances,” and the standards of decorum in
the relations of the sexes were different also. No wonder that, when
German families settled in groups near our own people, Yankee fathers
and mothers often shook their heads doubtfully in contemplating the
influence upon their children of these unfamiliar social customs.
It is probable that the vigor with which among this resilient people
amusements were carried on had a definite relation to the intensity,
monotony, and sordidness of the labor from which they were a recoil. At
all events, with more leisure on week days and an opportunity to do his
work under pleasanter conditions, the German readily adapted himself to
a type of relaxation which was less boisterous and more genteel. His
work and his living being what they were, it is doubtful if anything
better in the form of amusements could have been expected of him.
Travelers from England and America, on their visits to Germany, were
impressed with the wholesomeness of the Sunday picnics, the rambles
through the forests, the frolics on the village greens and in the parks
adjacent to the towns and cities.[46]
With all his sociability, joviality, and occasional levity, the German
was not devoid of an element of austerity. This was one secret of his
ability to achieve. Whatever the work might be, he settled himself to
its performance with a grim determination expressive of century-long
training. The mechanic, from his apprentice years, was habituated to
long hours of unremitting but improving toil. The farmer (_bauer_)
was a traditional daylight-saver and a night-worker besides, such
excessive labor being compulsory under the system of serfdom, when the
peasant’s time was levied upon to a very large extent by the lord. The
German schools inculcated similar habits of relentless application
to the work in hand, and even the government bureaus, under rigorous
task-masters like old Friedrich Wilhelm and his son Frederick the
Great, enforced compliance with the ideal of a patient, steady “grind”
which not inaptly typified the German in the eyes of other peoples. The
German often performed less work in the time consumed than an alert
Yankee would have performed in a shorter day; his tools and implements
were generally awkward and inefficacious; even in scholarship he not
infrequently took the long way around to reach his goal--but he usually
reached it because he had no notion of turning back or of stopping
at a halfway point on his job. Persistent rather than brilliant,
more industrious than inventive, the German toiled on, content if he
always had something to show for his labor. The contrast, in that
generation, between the German at work and the German at play is the
contrast between a man governed by an intense purpose to accomplish
a given task, whether interesting or not, and the same man intent on
accomplishing nothing with every physical, intellectual, and emotional
evidence of enjoying the process. Some men carry into their play the
morale which governs them in their work; others import into their work
the spirit of their play. In the case of the mid-nineteenth century
German the two aspects of his existence, work and play, differed in
spirit quite as much as in content.
The Germans had their Puritan sects, like the Moravians and other
pietists, whose attitude was distinctly other-worldly, to whom play
was a sedate if not a solemn activity. Such people disapproved of
dancing and beer drinking Germans quite as heartily as of profane
whiskey drinking and quarrelsome Americans or Irish. Individuals and
colonies of the pietistic classes passed into the emigrations, and
thus Wisconsin’s German population contained most of the elements to
be found at the same time in the German states. This illustrates one
difficulty in generalizing about social characteristics; there are so
many exceptions to be noted that the generalization loses much of its
validity.
Craftsmanship was a prevalent accomplishment among the Germans of
the early emigration. Every shipload of emigrants of which we have a
social analysis had a large proportion of craftsmen, who were either
established members of the city and village industrial class, or else
belonged to the peasantry and had learned a craft in order to improve
their status. Trades were learned exclusively under the apprenticeship
system, the candidate usually living in the master’s home and giving
service at the master’s will. When he reached the journeyman stage he
was privileged to find work for himself, a quest which though usually
fruitful in educational results often proved disappointing from a
monetary point of view. In those cases the journeyman was peculiarly
open to the temptation to emigrate. Arrived in this country, the
chances of finding employment in the line of his training varied.
Sometimes they were excellent, at other times poor, depending mainly
upon the craft represented. Carpenters were in great demand, as were
also blacksmiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, masons, bricklayers,
plasterers, and in general all representatives of the building trades
and of trades ministering to farmers. Others were in occasional demand.
But, if a dyer, or a slater, or a cabinet maker, or a silversmith, or
a tile maker, or a weaver, or a wood carver happened to find himself
in America without a market for his peculiar skill, he always had the
resource of taking land and commencing as a farmer. Many craftsmen,
indeed, came with the set purpose of doing that immediately upon their
arrival; others contemplated a farming career after a period devoted
to their specialty. In some or all of these ways Germans trained as
craftsmen came to be widely distributed over the farming areas of
Wisconsin as well as among the cities, towns, and villages.
The possession of special skill in any line, like the possession of
special scientific knowledge, raises a man in social estimation, and
every trained worker properly regards himself with satisfaction as
being not quite “as other men are.” In addition to the social training
which came to him as an incident of his apprenticeship and journeyman’s
experience, the German craftsman often was able to challenge the
respect and admiration of his American neighbors by making articles of
cunning workmanship which to them seemed wonderful because they did
not understand the processes involved. Agriculture being regarded as
an unskilled occupation, the artisan farmer also was very apt to lord
it over the peasant farmer of his own nationality. Craftsmanship, in a
word, established a kind of rank among Germans in this country because
it was a recognized means of personal and social progress at home.
Statistics are impossible to procure, but the testimony of men and
women familiar with early conditions in Wisconsin proves that the
German population of the state in early days varied quite as widely
in social characteristics as did the American population, though
America had no distinctive peasant class. Accordingly, although in the
beginnings of American contacts with their Prussian or Westphalian
neighbors these were lumped together indiscriminately as “Dutchmen,”
differences soon began to emerge. In the course of a few years a
class of “fine old Germans” was recognized in almost every community
to supplement the well-known type of “fine old Yankee gentlemen.”
These select Germans were very apt to be men who had been trained as
craftsmen, or men who had enjoyed the advanced scientific or literary
instruction afforded in the higher schools and the universities of the
homeland. In the cities, especially Milwaukee, were many Germans who
had been prominent in business lines as well as in the professions.
The question has sometimes arisen why so many of the second-generation
Germans appear inferior in social character to their immigrant parents.
A hint of the reason is found in what has just been said. Whatever
elements of superiority were shown by the immigrant artisan-farmers or
the highly educated Germans, the social advantages accruing therefrom
were personal, and in a slightly developed western society could not
be handed on to the next generation. In the cities it frequently was
possible for men of high ideals and fine social status to provide
equivalent opportunities for their children. But not so on frontier
farms. There it was a rare case when an education or training like
that received by the father in the old country could be supplied.
Accordingly, the sons of the most intelligent, dignified, and worthy
German farmer, if they became farmers in succession, might perhaps
turn out mere farmers, with none of the graces or exceptional social
virtues of the parents, and little except the memory of a parent’s
high respectability to distinguish them from the farmer sons of the
clumsiest peasant.
However, this is but half the story. If the superior Germans reared
families incapable of remaining on their own social plane, other types
of Germans, who in their own persons counted for less, frequently
had the happiness to see their children advance to a position
perceptibly higher than their own. Natural gifts, industry, the social
opportunities which yield to the key of economic success availed much.
Sometimes the presence of a good school, a wise and helpful pastor or
some other worthy friend gave the necessary impulse. The process, in
fact, does not differ essentially from that which, throughout American
pioneer history, has enabled the deserving to press forward and
permitted the weak, indolent, or vicious to fall behind in the social
competition. It is impossible to say how many German families made a
step, or several steps, upward, and how many others slipped back. The
delinquents may perhaps exceed the meritorious in number, but probably
not, and the impression that the children of German immigrants shame
their parents is almost certainly an illusion which would be likely to
disappear if the facts were fully known.
The social institutions of Wisconsin, based on the earlier Yankee and
southwestern immigrations, were profoundly influenced by the German
immigration of the late forties and the fifties of last century.
Milwaukee, the center of German influence (the _Deutsche Athen_),
became a city in which the German language was spoken and read by
many English speaking persons, in order to facilitate communication
and trade with the numerically dominant German element. The Germans
maintained advanced schools for instruction in both English and
German; their parochial schools were conducted mainly in German; the
immigrants themselves felt no compulsion to learn English, and their
children, in many cases, however well educated, spoke the language of
the country with very imperfect accent.
The universal respect in which the German language was held, and the
extent to which it was affected by others than Germans, provided an
admirable social soil for the development of German music and the
cultivation of German literature. Hardly had the immigrants established
themselves when, in 1847, they founded at Milwaukee their first singing
society, which was followed three years later by the famous and
far-reaching _Musikverein_. A German theater followed promptly, and
became a permanent feature of Milwaukee’s intellectual life.[47] The
_Turnverein_ fostered in America Father Jahn’s conception of athletics,
while restaurants and beer gardens gave an old world, continental
atmosphere to public recreation. Holidays assumed a German aspect. The
_Christ Child_ displaced _St. Nicholas_ not alone in Milwaukee, but
in scores of towns, villages, and hamlets, and innumerable farm homes
scattered over Wisconsin. The joyous German _Weinacht_ made way easily
against the more somber Puritan Christmas, which, however, had already
brightened a good deal in its progress from the seventeenth century to
the nineteenth century.
In general, Germans did not insist with extreme pertinacity upon the
retention of their own social customs, and wherever people of that
nationality were intermingled with a larger number of Americans, the
process by which they assimilated American habits of living, American
social usages, and even ways of acting, speaking, and thinking was very
rapid. In the schools of a Yankee neighborhood the children of German
settlers, in many cases, could not be distinguished by their manner
of speech from the Yankee children. On the other hand, in communities
made up wholly or mainly of Germans, the grandchildren continue to
have trouble with the _th_ sound in English words, and manifest other
linguistic peculiarities. And this difference is merely symptomatic. To
this day, it is easy to reconstruct, in case of the average person of
German descent, the atmosphere in which he was brought up. If he comes
from Milwaukee, or from some rural “Dutch settlement,” that fact is
usually clear from a hundred trifling intimations. If he was brought
up in a non-German community (so adaptable is the race), a change of
name from the German _Weiss_ to the English _White_, or from _Schwartz_
to _Black_, would ordinarily suffice to disguise the fact that he is
of German descent at all. Germans thus brought up are apt to have made
their religious affiliations and their intimate social relationships
harmonize with those of the leading American element of the community,
so that these quite as much as their speech would tend to conceal their
racial origin.
Wisconsin writers have made much of the fact that emigrating German
revolutionists came to this state largely in 1848 and the years
following. That fact, significant as bringing to Wisconsin Carl Schurz,
who became the most noted liberal American statesman and publicist of
German birth, has perhaps been overstressed. At least, it can safely be
said that for every revolutionist disembarked at Milwaukee or Sheboygan
or Manitowoc, probably a full score of plain, everyday, conventional
Germans filtered into the state’s population during the same time.
The important point about the revolutionists is not their relative
numbers, but their character and the leadership they helped to supply
in the affairs of the new commonwealth. Newspaper editors who possessed
exceptional literary and scholastic attainments came from that class;
some found their way into the legislature, and many served the cause
of liberal government on the local plane.
The name of Schurz was one to conjure with, as American politicians
were quick to discover. He figured prominently in Wisconsin state
politics only a few years, but as a national leader his influence in
attaching the Germans to the causes he advocated was especially strong
in this state, which claimed him as her own. Schurz’s high character
and attainments, coupled with his political successes in this country,
were a source of pride to thousands of Wisconsin Germans who shared
not at all his revolutionary views. Enough that, like Goethe, he was
a great German, and that he had gained the respect and confidence
of large sections of the American people. It ministered to the
self-respect of the average German settler to feel that his people had
contributed something of value to the life of the nation and state.
Later arrivals from Germany, and especially from Prussia, brought
with them an intense pride of nationalism and enthusiasm for German
achievement in the wars against Austria and against France. The
difference in attitude between immigrants of 1880 and those of forty
years earlier was antipodal. Many of the former had served in the
victorious wars and abounded in military incidents and in stories of
Bismarck, of Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Crown Prince Frederick William
(_Unser Fritz_). These men obviously belonged to a new generation of
Germans, and they have exerted a powerful influence upon our recent
history. But the Germans who deserve special recognition along with
the Yankees, as founders of the commonwealth and its institutions,
are those of the earlier immigrations from a Fatherland which as yet
was united only in culture, while politically its states remained
dissevered.