THE GERMANS
Thomas Sowell
ETHNIC AMERICA: A HISTORY
Thomas Sowell
Basic Books, 1981
Chapter Two
THE GERMANS
MORE THAN 25 million Americans are of German ancestry, This is more than for any other ethnic group except descendants of people from the British Isles, who originally colonized the country and who now number 29 million. Germans are the largest group to immigrate to America. They have played important roles in American history, and not merely because of their numbers. American industry, education, military defense, eating and recreational patterns all reflect the contributions and influence of German Americans. The very language of the country reflects that influence, in such words as kindergarten, delicatessen, frankfurters, and hamburgers. The Conestoga wagons in which American pioneers first crossed the great prairie were created by Germans. So was the Kentucky rifle of the frontiersman. The Christmas tree was a German tradition that became an American tradition.
The leading American optical firm—Bausch and Lomb—was created by Germans, as were all of the leading brands of American beer. Suspension bridges and the cables that hold them were both created by a German-American engineer. Iron, steel, automobiles, pianos, lumber, chocolate bars, and petroleum are among the many products in which Americans of German ancestry were pioneers and dominant figures. The German military tradition gave the United States some of its leading generals down through history.
Large-scale immigration from Germany to the United States has not been concentrated in a few decades, like immigration from other countries, but has occurred in many different eras of American and German history. There were German communities in colonial America, and Germans were a significant proportion of all immigrants to the United States throughout the nineteenth century. More than 100,000 people emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1852 and in 1952, and in many other years in between. There were fluctuations in the size of the immigration—varying with conditions in the United States and in Germany—but the flow has remained substantial for nearly two centuries. At various periods of history, the flow has been predominantly immigrants, at other times refugees. Sometimes the immigrants have been predominantly Catholic, and sometimes predominantly Protestant. The regional origins of this emigration in Germany have also differed. The net result is that German Americans have been a highly diverse group—not only by such usual indications as class, religion, or region, but also differing greatly by how many generations they have been American.
A very substantial portion of the German immigration to America occurred when there was no Germany. It was not until 1871 that Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, Mecklenburg, Hesse, and other Germanic states were united by Bismarck to form the nation of Germany. However, the German language is recorded as far back as 750 AD and Germanic peoples—who do not include the Huns—as far back as the first century BC. In the early days of the Roman Empire, the Germans were among the barbarian warriors on the northern frontier described by Julius Caesar. Over the centuries, through the shifting fortunes of war and politics, as well as migrations, some Germanic people acquired the civilization of the Romans, and ultimately influence in the Roman Empire. In the later empire, German soldiers replaced Romans in the Roman legions, which were now often commanded by German generals, who were sometimes de facto rulers behind figurehead Roman emperors ..
At the same time, other German peoples on the northern frontiers of the empire continued to be a major menace to its existence. Many of the great battles in the declining phase of the Roman Empire were battles of Germans against other Germans. Within the empire, Germans were never fully accepted or fully assimilated. Intermarriage between Romans and Germans was forbidden. The Roman aristocracy referred to Germans as "blond barbarians" and denounced them for "the stink of their bodies and their clothing." To some extent, Germans themselves were apologetic about their racial origins. Other Germans simply returned the resentment and hatred that Romans felt toward them.
More than a thousand years of history—and the evolution of language, culture, and peoples—elapsed between these early Germans and the people who began immigrating to colonial America. Modern Germany—even before it became a nation—was in the forefront of Western civilization in science, the arts, music, literature, and philosophy. It was the home of Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, and Leibniz. Technology and craftsmanship were German hallmarks. Zeiss and Voigtlander were renowned names in optics long before they (and other German names) became famous in the later era of photography.
Germans, once disdained as inferior barbarians by the Romans, now easily surpassed the achievements of Italy, where "the glory that was Rome" had become only a memory and a bitter mockery of Italian weakness, disunity, and lagging technology and economy. In a still later era, the German ancestry that some had felt ashamed of in Roman times was to become an object of worship under Hitler and the Nazis.
Emigration from the German states (and later the German nation) ebbed and flowed with historic events. The German states of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were separately ruled by petty princes and were in a state of turmoil. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation had created religious refugees in both Catholic and Protestant German states, and the Thirty Years' War disrupted their economies, as well as reduced the total German population by about one-third. A severe winter in 1708-09 destroyed the German wine industry for years to come." In short, the domestic problems that often stimulate emigration were present in the German state. However, there were also restrictions and prohibitions on emigration, which led to much internal migration instead.
Later, in the eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries, the currents of the French Revolution, the conquests of Napoleon, and the Restoration of autocratic rule by the Congress oi Vienna after Waterloo all profoundly affected German emigration. About half the overseas German emigrants of the post-Waterloo era went to South America, but from 1830 until World War I, most German overseas emigration was to the United States—as high as 90 percent or more in some years.
The rise of liberal and radical opposition to German autocracy led to the abortive Revolution of 1848, after which many fled to escape persecution, or in despair of achieving greater freedom, or simply to find greater social and economic opportunity elsewhere. Nearly a million Germans moved to the United States during the decade of the 1850s.
The presence of German settlements facilitated the movement of more Germans to the same country, and indeed often to the same region or city. But this depended on the good or bad experiences of earlier emigrants. The South American experiences of early German emigrants provided warnings to others in Germany to change their destinations.
There were reductions of immigration to the United States associated with the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War in Europe, and especially World War I. But in between, German immigration to America was massive. During the decade of the 1880s, about a million and a half Germans moved to the United States. In the twentieth century, there were usually more immigrants to Germany than emigrants from Germany." Even after the Nazi regime carne to' power in 1933, repatriated Germans exceeded those leaving.
The Colonial Era
The earliest German immigration to America carne in the form of individual Germans among the Dutch who, in 1620, settled New Amsterdam, which later became New York. They were predominantly from peasant or artisan backgrounds or were people who had worked in cottage industries. Some were also soldiers of the Dutch West Indies Company, carrying on a long tradition of German mercenary soldiers. Later, in the seventeenth .century, William Penn made a tour of Germany in 1677 to recruit immigrants for his colony of Pennsylvania. Religious toleration in Pennsylvania was a special attraction to those Germans whose religion differed from that of their respective established churches in their regions of Germany. Pennsylvania thus attracted the first sizable German communities in America, largely from the Rhineland region.
In 1683, thirteen Mennonite families established Germantown in Pennsylvania, now part of Philadelphia. Many other German religious denominations and sects followed, including Calvinists, the Amish, and others virtually unknown to the larger society. In 1742, Heinrich Muhlenberg arrived and became the organizer of the Lutheran church in America and also founder of a prominent family whose achievements included creation of Muhlenberg College, an outstanding institution in Pennsylvania.
Thus began the "Pennsylvania Dutch"—Dutch being in this case an American mispronunciation of the word Deutsch for German. By 1745, there were an estimated 45,000 Germans in Pennsylvania. Most settled out on the frontier as it existed at that time, in order to acquire cheap land within their meager means. This made them vulnerable to Indian attacks, especially because of the reluctance of the colonial government to provide defense. Control of the government was largely in the hands of pacifist Quakers living safely in Philadelphia.
In 1709, Germans established Neuberg—now called Newburgh—on the Hudson River, and then spread north into the Mohawk Valley. As in Pennsylvania, this was frontier territory, subject to Indian raids. The Germans of the Mohawk Valley region came as indentured servants—people bound by contract to work for a certain number of years (usually three to seven) to pay off the cost of their transportation to America. At least half of the white population of colonial America, came this way. It was a scheme first tried with German and Swiss immigrants and later spread to the Scotch, the Irish, and others.
The Germans who settled in the Mohawk Valley came as indentured servants of the British government, which paid half their transportation and settlement costs. More so than other groups, Germans left their home in groups, ranging from whole families to whole communities. The early German immigrants—both in New York and in Pennsylvania—came from the Palatinate, a small region in the southwestern part of Germany, along the Rhine. Sixteen families of Palatines also settled in New Bern, North Carolina, in 1710. Eighteenth-century South Carolina also carried on a brisk trade in German indentured servants from the Palatinate.
Usually, a boat trip of several weeks on the Rhine to Holland preceded their transatlantic voyage. Then began their ocean travel, on wind-driven ships, averaging between eight and ten weeks on the water. Indentured servants were packed into small, ill-ventilated quarters on small ships perpetually pitching on the Atlantic waves, producing widespread seasickness among the passengers. The weakness and dehydration produced by seasickness made the ill-fed passengers particularly vulnerable to disease. Contemporary observers described the scenes below decks, "some sleeping, some spewing," some "devoured with lice," some "beset with boils, scurvy, dysentery, many cursing themselves and others." At night, there were "fearful crys" and the groaning of "sick and distracted persons," some of whom were "tumbling over the rest, and distracting the whole company .... " These were the more or less normal conditions. In extreme cases of ships delayed at sea by weather, the suffering and the casualties could be worse. In 1749, two thousand Germans died at sea on voyages to Philadelphia alone.
After a vessel docked in an American port, potential buyers of the passengers' indenture contracts came aboard. The indentured servants were brought out of their quarters, walked up and down to let the buyers see them, and sometimes feel their muscles and talk to them to form some opinion of their intelligence and submissiveness. Sometimes a middleman called a "soul driver" would buy a group of servants and then walk them through the countryside, selling their contracts here and there as opportunity allowed. The society of the time attached no moral stigma to this trade in human beings, and it was openly engaged in by individuals of the highest rank and renown. George Washington purchased the contracts of indentured servants to work at Mt. Vernon, just as he owned slaves. As late as 1792, the new American government devised a plan to import indentured German labor to help construct the city of Washington.
Deaths on the ocean voyage were so widespread among the Germans that many children were orphaned by the time the ships finally reached America. These orphans were either adopted by relatives in America or apprenticed out to someone to learn a trade. One of these German orphans, John Peter Zenger, was apprenticed to a printer and in later years went on to establish his own newspaper. In 1734, his editorial criticisms of the governor of New York led to his being arrested and tried for libel. His acquittal was one of the landmarks in the development of the doctrine of freedom of the press.
Like helpless people everywhere, the indentured servants were preyed upon by the dishonest. Some ship captains provided inadequate food or sold them into longer periods of bondage than actually required to work off the cost of their transportation. Germans who could not understand English were especially vulnerable.
Many Germans left their homes with no plans to become indentured servants, but found that the mounting costs of travel to Holland and then across the Atlantic were more than they had bargained for. Others had family or friends in America whom they expected (or hoped) would pay their fare, and when this failed to happen, they were sold into indentureship. The term "redemptioner" was used to describe the kind of person who came looking to have his fare redeemed in one way or another, although there was no distinction made between such people and other indentured servants after both found themselves in that status.
And yet, they kept coming—and generally in ever larger numbers. The Germans arriving in the port of Philadelphia alone in the 1740s and 1750s added up to more than 60,000 people, conservatively estimated. An estimated one-half to two-thirds of these were indentured servants. Although indentured servants were subject to many of the restrictions and punishments that applied to slaves—including corporal punishment—they did have a few legal rights during their years of indentures hip, and those years did come to a conclusion. Often indentured servants received a modest payment in cash or in kind upon reaching the time for freedom, and many were given land. This was not always the best or the safest land. In the Mohawk Valley or in western Pennsylvania, for example, it was land in frontier areas, near Indians unhappy at seeing their ancestral lands invaded. Many whites who settled in such areas were killed or carried off into bondage by the Indians.
However they came to America, and whatever their vicissitudes en route or after arriving, the early German settlers quickly established a reputation for hard work, thoroughness, and thriftiness. German farmers cleared frontier land more thoroughly than others and made it more productive. They often began by living in sod houses, then log cabins, then finally stone farmhouses. Their farm animals were not allowed to roam free but were also housed, in huge barns like those of their homeland. In the late eighteenth century, a contemporary observed:
“A German farm may be distinguished from the farm of the other citizens of the state, by the superior size of their barns; the plain, but compact form of their houses; the height of their inclosures; the extent of their orchards; the fertility of their fields; the luxuriance of their meadows, and a general appearance of plenty and neatness in everything that belongs to them."
Most of the early German immigrants had none of the highly developed scientific, technical, or intellectual skills associated with German achievements in the vanguard of Western civilization. What they did have were the discipline, thoroughness, and perseverance that made such achievements possible. They were renowned as "the nation's best dirt farmers." The highly successful German farmers were paralleled by the achievements by German skilled craftsmen in colonial America. Glassmaking was—and is—a skill associated with German Americans. The first paper mill was also set up by a German. The first Bible published in America was printed by a German, in the German Ianguage.
The Pennsylvania Dutch were un-German in two respects: they were pacifists and distrusters of government. As Palatines, they were descendants of people from a province that had suffered especially severe and repeated devastations by contending armies during the Thirty Years' War. They were also refugees from autocratic tyranny and religious persecutions. Moreover, the religious freedom of Pennsylvania—rare even in America at that time—had disproportionate attraction to pious and pacific religious sects.
Germans of that era took Iittle or no interest in government or politics. The early German settlers lived in self-isolation in farming communities made up of people of a particular religious denomination. They were socially separate from the larger society and internally separated by numerous religious divisions. The English language and the culture of the British settlers had little influence within the areas settled by Germans. They imported books from Germany and published newspapers and preached sermons in German. With the passage of time, English slowly began to creep in, often with German sentence structure, to produce a peculiar local dialect known as Pennsylvania Dutch. The most isolated of these German settlers were—and are—the Amish, who today still live in farm communities very much like those of the early settlers. Pious religious people who dress in old-fashioned black clothes, the Amish avoid modern ways, drive horse-drawn black carriages, and keep their children out of public schools as a means of preserving their way of life.
With the passage of time, most German settlers spread out geographically, learned to speak Enqlish, and both absorbed and contributed to American culture. Philadelphia scrapple, German chocolate cake, cole slaw, and sauerkraut were among their many contributions to American cooking. German farming settlements spread north and south through the great fertile valleys of the Appalachian mountain range. By fhe late eighteenth century, there was an almost unbroken chain of German frontier settlements stretching from the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York down through western New Jersey, central Pennsylvania, western Maryland, on down through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, through the Piedmont region of the Carolinas, and into Savannah, Georgia.
Names scattered through this region still reflect those early German settlements. Upstate New York has communities with such names as Palatine Bridge, Germantown, New Hamburg. and Rhinebeck, as well as a region of the Mohawk Valley known as German Flats. New Jersey has its German Valley area and Pennsylvania its Heidelberg, Germantown, Muhlenberg Park, and King of Prussia. Maryland has its Frederick and cities named for early German settlers, Hagerstown ,and Creagerstown. The name of the German province of Mecklenburg was repeated in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, and the village of New Mecklenburg in Virginia. Not all the communities established by Germans had German names. Harper's Ferry in Virginia, Bethlehem in Pennsylvania, and Hope Settlement and Ebenezer in Georgia were among many German communities with non-German names.
As the German farming communities spread down through the Appalachian valley near the frontier, they found themselves often near the Scotch-Irish, who were frontiersmen par excellence. The Scotch-Irish often led the way into the untamed wilderness, hunting, fishing, clearing land, and fighting Indians, with the Germans and others following after the area became more settled.
The Germans and the Scotch-Irish were very different in temperament arid behavior and generally kept quite separate from each other, even in adjacent settlemerits. The Germans were noted for their order, quietness, friendliness, steady work, frugality, and their ability to get along with the Indians. The Scotch-Irish were just the opposite—quick-tempered, hard drinking, working intermittently, saving little, washing little, and constantly involved in feuds among themselves or with the Indians. Religious differences also divided them. The early German settlers were usually pious Lutherans, Calvinists, and other strict Protestant sects that avoided strong language or strong drink, while the Scotch-Irish were Presbyterians and were given to hard liquor and language that pious people considered blasphemous. After a century of sharing hundreds of miles of the great valleys of the Appalachian range, there was still little racial intermixture between the Germans and the Scotch-Irish.
About half of all the Germans in colonial America lived in Pennsylvania. Not all of these were farmers. Skilled workers were almost as numerous as farmers. They not only performed a variety of tasks; they developed new products as well. Germans in the Pennsylvania Dutch country near Conestoga Creek produced a wagon for hauling farm produce, a wagon that was destined to play a major role in the later settlement of the western United States. The Conestoga wagon was a large and rugged vehicle, covered by canvas draped over high, arching hoops. It was eleven feet high, twenty-six feet long (counting the wagon tongue), weighed about 3,000 pounds, and required six strong horses to pull it." In the eighteenth century, there were "great files of these enormous wagons lumbering into Philadelphia along the Lancaster Road, sometimes a hundred or more a day. Although originally designed by German farmers to carry their produce to market, the covered wagons proved useful for many other purposes. In 1755, they were used by the British to carry military supplies during the French and Indian War. Later, the American army used the covered wagons during the Revolutionary War. The most famous role of the covered wagons came still later—transporting American pioneers across the great plains of the West toward the Pacific Ocean. These were the wagon trains that braved the elements, forded the rivers, and pulled into circles to fight off Indians.
The Pennsylvania Dutch also developed a hunting rifle that was to play a very different role from that intended by these German pacifists. Unlike most European muskets of the time, German weapons had spiral grooves (called rifling) inside the barrel to produce greater accuracy. Some of these rifled muskets were brought to Pennsylvania by German immigrants. Here they developed a new rifle, with a very elongated barrel for even greater accuracy. This product of German craftsmen in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was originally known as the Pennsylvania rifle. But it acquired fame in the hands of frontier sharp-shooters like Daniel Boone and then became known as the "Kentucky Rifle." It later proved very effective in the guerrilla warfare used by Americans against the British during the Revolutionary War.
The Revolutionary War and Independence
While other Americans split into Tory supporters of England and revolutionaries for independence in 1776, German Americans split into pacifists and revolutionaries. Mennonites and other German religious sects would not fight, but some paid extra taxes instead or engaged in medical or other duties consistent with their status as conscientious objectors. However, the largest denominations among Germans, the Lutherans and the Reformed, had no prohibitions against the military, and many Germans from these groups fought in the revolution.
There were about 300,000 Germans in the American colonies—about 10 percent of the total population. Shortly after the war began, a volunteer company of Germans formed in Charleston, South Carolina, and four companies of infantry formed from the Germans around Reading; Pennsylvania. A German regiment was raised in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Four battalions of Germans were recruited in the Mohawk Valley. Germans served not only in the ranks but also in the highest levels of the American army. Peter Muhlenberg, son of the founder of the American Lutheran church, rose to become a general in the American army. General von Steuben came from his native land for the express purpose of fighting in the Revolutionary War. He served with Washington at Valley Forge, and has been credited with introducing military discipline into the new American army. Turning undisciplined civilians into professional soldiers was a formidable task, and von Steuben was known to curse in both German and French—and to ask his aide to curse for him in English! Yet as drill-master of the American army, he succeeded in creating an army capable of defeating professional British troops. General von Steuben also helped plan the successful siege of Yorktown.
A number of other military officers came from the German states to America to fight in the Revolutionary War. One of these was Baron de Kalb; who died fighting while others fled at the Battle of Camden in South Carolina. One of the most dramatic fighters was a German-American woman named Maria Ludwig, who traveled with her husband, a gunner in the American army, and carried pitchers of water to soldiers in battle. She was nicknamed Molly Pitcher, and won fame by taking her husband's place at a cannon after he had been wounded. The inspiring example of her bravery was recognized by George Washington after the battle.
The British brought nearly 30,000 German mercenary soldiers to the colonies to try to put down the American rebellion, These were not individual volunteers but soldiers sold or rented to the British by the rulers of various German principalities. More than half came from the little state of Hesse-Cassell, so all German mercenaries in the Revolutionary War were lumped together by Americans as "Hessians."
Some of these soldiers deserted to the American side during the war, and some remained in the United States after the war, settling in existing German communities. Just over half of the "Hessians" returned home." Somewhere between 5,000 and 12,000 eventually became American citizens. One of these soldiers, named Kuester, was an ancestor of General George Custer, the Indian fighter.
Although the Germans were not numerically prominent in politics, there were some prominent German political figures. The first governor of Georgia was a German, Johann Adam Treutlen. So was the first treasurer of the United States, Michael Hillegas. The most prominent of these early German statesmen was from the Muhlenberg dynasty in Pennsylvania—Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg, first Speaker of the House of Representatives and as such one of the two men to sign the Bill of Rights. Another member of the family, William Augustus Muhlenberg, later served in Congress for nine years.
Another German American of the colonial period who achieved renown was John Jacob Astor, who came to the United States in 1783, at the age of twenty. He was the son of a butcher, had little education, and arrived with only twenty-five dollars and a few flutes. He became a fur trader and, a quarter of a century after his arrival, organized the American Fur Company, as well as speculating in New York real estate. Both activities proved highly profitable, and his fur company became the leading such enterprise in the Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountain region, and ultimately the Pacific Northwest. His trading post in Oregon was the first American settlement on the Pacific Coast. He became the richest man in America, leaving an estate estimated at about 20 million dollars.
Nineteenth-Century Immigrants
There was little emigration from Germany in the early years of the new American nation. It was 1828 before there were as many as a thousand German immigrants arriving in America in one year. But by 1832, there were more than 10,000, and by 1836, there were more than 20,000. This was still only a foretaste of the massive emigration from Germany that was to surpass 50,000 in 1846 and surpass 200,000 in 1854.
Initially, this emigration was from the same region of Germany as the earlier emigration of the colonial era. But with the passing decades, a more regionally, socially and intellectually diversified German population arrived in the United States. They also became more regionally dispersed in a growing America. In the years 1830 through 1834, virtually all overseas German emigrants were from southwest Germany, but a decade later, only about one-third were from that region, and in the 1860s, less than one-sixth of the German emigrants were from that regton. Since the overwhelming bulk of all Germans who emigrated overseas during this era went to the United States, similar proportions would apply to German immigrants to America.
Many factors lay behind the rising emigration from Germany: the easing of emigration restrictions in the German states, dwindling farm size in those regions (such as the Palatinate) where land was subdivided among heirs rather than being entailed whole to a single heir, the elimination of common village land to the detriment of peasants, and unemployment among artisans caused by the rise of the factory system and by the competition of British goods after trade was resumed following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Despotism in the German states after the nobility was restored by the Congress of Vienna also provoked both uprisings and emigration. There were also many enthusiastic accounts of life in America written in German and circulated in Germany by literally dozens of German authors.
Letters from relatives in the prosperous German-American farming communities likewise spread information and enthusiasm about the United States in Germany. The replacement of sailing ships by steamships in the middle of the nineteenth century also made America more accessible. More than 5 million Germans immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century—more than from any other country. About three-quarters of all the German immigrants in the early 1820s were men, suggesting initially a tentative or exploratory kind of immigration. Later, the emigrants from Germany included large proportions of children, indicating that whole families were now coming to America with the intention of making this their home.
The occupations of the immigrants varied somewhat from province to province and from decade to decade. The earlier immigration continued to be heavily peasant farmers from southwest Germany. As of the 1840s, about half of the immigrants were peasants and day laborers. In the middle and later nineteenth century, there were rising numbers of industrial workers and artisans, reflecting both the regional changes in the immigration sources and the rising importance of industry in Germany as a whole. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the proportion of German immigrants from an agricultural background declined from about one-third in the early 1870s to little more than one-fourth in the mid 1890s. There was a corresponding rise in the proportions that had worked in industry, commerce, and trade. Still, as late as 1900, most of the farmers in America were of German ancestry.
Many of the German immigrants of the nineteenth century sought the frontier, for its cheap land, as their predecessors had done in the eighteenth century. However, the frontier itself had moved farther west by now. Those who came in the nineteenth century tended to settle in the upper Mississippi and Ohio valleys, as those of a century earlier had settled in the Appalachian valleys. German farmers tended to settle along the rivers and lakes of the region and to seek wooded areas, which provided them with building materials and fuel. They were disproportionately concentrated along the rivers—the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio, the Miami, and the Kentucky—and along the south shores of the Great Lakes.
The increasingly urban portion of the new wave of immigration created large concentrations of Germans in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and other cities of the region. There were also smaller communities founded by and composed largely of Germans, and carrying such names as Frankfort (Kentucky), Berlin (Wisconsin), and Westphalia (Michigan). Ohio had its Frankfort and Berlin also, as well as Dresden, Potsdam, Strasburg, and other communities with German names—including the inevitable Germantown, which also appeared in Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Tennessee, as it had a century earlier in Pennsylvania.
As in the East, the more pious religious sects gave their communities biblical names—Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Canaan, for example, in Ohio. Sometimes the first settlers of a particular community were from a specific region of Germany. Frankfort, Kentucky was founded by people from Frankfurt in Germany, and Grand Island, Michigan, was first settled by Schleswig-Holsteiners.
Access to the upper Midwest was provided by the Mississippi and its connecting waterways. Many Germans sailed from the French port of Le Havre, which imported cotton from New Orleans. Shipping that existed primarily to carry cotton in one direction was utilized by the Germans to travel in the opposite direction. This was true not only for crossing the Atlantic but also for travel within the United States. Following in reverse the route of cotton shipments, the German immigrants landed at New Orleans and then sailed up the Mississippi on boats that had brought cotton to New Orleans from the Mississippi Valley region. Others reached the same region across northern routes from the eastern port cities to the Great Lakes, and some carne by train.
Whereas the German immigration of the eighteenth century had been concentrated in Pennsylvania, and then in a band stretching north and south along the Appalachians, by the middle of the nineteenth century, more than half of all German-born persons in America lived in the upper Mississippi and Ohio valleys, concentrating in the states of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri. This was still true as late as 1900, when about a million and a half German-born people lived in that region, out of a total German-born population of about two and a half million in the country as a whole at that time. The total German origin population—German-born plus native Americans of German ancestry—was about 8 million in 1900.
Germans were also a part of the pioneering settlers into the Pacific Northwest. An estimated one-fourth of the people in Oregon today are of German ancestry. In 1857, Germans founded Anaheim in southern California, near Los Angeles. There, they established the cultivation of oranges, long a dominant crop in that region.
Whether in a rural or an urban setting, concentrations of Germans perpetuated the German language and German culture for generations. Often this reflected residential as well as cultural isolation. In nineteenth-century Milwaukee, German residential patterns involved minimal neighborhood contact with either natives or Irish. Buffalo, New York, had an even higher degree of residential separation of Germans. Germans in Baltimore likewise lived in their own world, cut off from their American surroundings. In Cincinnati, Germans were concentrated in an area known as "Over the Rhine." Hermann, Missouri (near St. Louis), was known as "Little Germany," and its street names were written in German. In Texas as well, “Germans did not mingle much with the American population," and the two groups observed each other from a distance, "with unfeigned curiosity, often tempered with mutual contempt.”
In mid-nineteenth-century America in general, according to a contemporary, a German settlement typically "becomes a nucleus of a pure German circle, which is born, marries, and dies within itself, and with the least possible mixture of Anglo-Americans. Mid-century America had 27 daily German-language newspapers in 15 cities, and well over two hundred other publications in German. Cincinnati alone had four German newspapers. German-language publications continued to flourish on into the early twentieth century, when there were nearly 3.5 million readers for 49 monthly publications, 433 weekly publications, and 70 daily publications.
Many features of the German culture besides language were brought to America. With the passing generations, as the German language slowly faded away, many of the cultural features of German-American life became features of American life in general. Along with the Christmas tree, the frankfurter, the hamburger, and beer became fixtures of the American way of life. Like many ethnic foods, the hot dog was an improvisation in America (like chop suey and chow mein among the Chinese), rather than a direct import from the homeland. German street vendors selling cooked wieners in nineteenth-century Cincinnati produced the combination roll and frankfurter that became famous as the all-American hotdog. Oatmeal was also created by a nineteenth-century German American and was perhaps as widely used although not nearly so popular as the hotdog.
German urban workers in the nineteenth century brought many skills with them. They were carpenters, bakers, blacksmiths, butchers, shoemakers, printers, and tailors, among their many skilled occupations. Half or more of all employed Germans were skilled manual workers in mid-century Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, New York; Jersey City, and Boston. A substantial additional number were in non-manual occupations. Very few were unskilled laborers—less than half the proportion found among the Irish in the same cities. In mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, only 14 percent of the German workers were day laborers, the occupations of from one-half to two-thirds of the Irish in the same city.
Many German immigrants brought with them skills required for brewing beer—and the concentrated German population provided a large market for it; American brews did not satisfy them. In Milwaukee, where more than one-third of the population was German around the middle of the nineteenth century, German breweries began appearing in the late 1840s. Like other new businesses, they went through financial difficulties at first, but by 1860, there were a number of successful German breweries in Milwaukee, bearing such names as Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz and Miller. The heavy concentration of Germans in and around St. Louis likewise provided a market for the establishment of a German brewery there by Anheuser-Busch, producers of Budweiser beer.
Although the most successful mid-nineteenth-century German-American businesses tended to be those serving the special tastes of German immigrant communities, with the passage of time numerous other German firms arose, serving the larger American society. Sometimes this was because the product itself spread into the larger society—frankfurters and beer being classic examples—but more often because Germans had the technical skills and managerial abilities to produce something that was in general demand. For example, in 1849 a German immigrant optician named John Jacob Bausch and a German immigrant businessman named Henry Lomb established the optical firm of Bausch and Lomb, which eventually became the world's largest lens manufacturer producing lenses for eyeglasses, cameras, microscopes, binoculars, and other optical devices. Another German immigrant, John Augustus Roebling, brought engineering and architectural skills that enabled him to invent wire cable and to use it in building the first suspension bridges—including the Brooklyn Bridge. Piano building was another area in which the skills the Germans brought to America are still reflected in such well-known German-American names as Steinway and Knabe.
Nineteenth-century German immigrants and their offspring were responsible for establishing leading businesses in many American industries. A German immigrant named Frederick Weyerhaeuser went from lumberyard worker to founder of his own lumber products firm, which remains today one of the largest in its industry. A second generation German American named Henry J. Heinz began marketing food products that he grew in his garden while still in his teens. This developed into the H. J. Heinz Company, which sold even more than the "57 Varieties" of food products that became its advertising slogan. The wide range of industries that German skill and entrepreneurship helped develop is suggested by such names as Studebaker and Chrysler in the automobile industry, Wurlitzer Organs, Steuben glass, the Wanamaker department store chain, and Rockefeller in petroleum and other industries. These were not German big businessmen who became American big businessmen. They were typically people from modest beginnings, whose skill found opportunities to flourish in America.
One of the most important social changes wrought by German immigrants was their promotion of numerous forms of innocent public family entertainment. Music, picnics, dancing, card playing, swimming, bowling, and other physical activities are among the American pastimes, now taken for granted, but introduced or promoted by Germans in the nineteenth century. The Germans organized marching bands, symphony orchestras, and singing groups of all sorts.
Previous generations of Americans—including previous generations of German Americans—regarded organized recreation with puritan suspicion and participation in them on Sunday as sinful. The saloon, games, and other pastimes were relegated—in theory at least—to the sinners and the riffraff. But nineteenth-century German beer gardens, unlike American saloons, were places where the whole family went on Sunday to hear music and eat pretzels; and parades, plays, and gymnasium sports were considered good clean fun at any time. These German pastimes were viewed with shock and suspicion at first. But eventually, the Germans' "jovial, yet orderly" activities, their "hearty and harmless diversions," made an impression on other Americans, leading to a growing acceptance and wider practice of a more relaxed attitude toward recreation, even on Sunday. As an observer noted in 1883:
“The German notion that it is a good thing to have a good time has found a lodgment in the American mind. Except in isolated rural localities where the Teutonic immigration has not penetrated, there is no longer any such feeling about dancing, social garnes, and dramatic performances as was almost universal among respectable people thirty years ago.”
The German head start in such activities as music and gymnasium sports continued to be reflected in many ways, long after these became general American activities. It was perhaps significant that one of America's first Olympic swimming champions (in the 1920s) was of German ancestry—Johnny Weissmuller, later better known for playing Tarzan in the movies. The first woman to swim the English Channel was also a German American—Gertrude Ederle. While these were individual achievements of a later era, they were also products of a long tradition that Germans brought to the United States in the nineteenth century. German traditions also produced many prominent American musical figures. These included the famous composer of march music, John Philip Sousa. Germans were also prominent in the manufacture of musical instruments, especially the piano.
Education was another area in which Germans made contributions that helped shape American institutions. Both the kindergarten and the university originated ainong Germans in Europe. German immigrants created the first kindergartens in America. A kindergarten established in a small Wisconsin community in 1855 has been credited as being the first in the United States. In 1873, the first American public school system to have kindergarten was in St. Louis—a center of German population—and nearly all the early kindergarten teachers were German. Germans also actively promoted the introduction of physical education and vocational education into American schools.
Both German Lutherans and German Catholics established parochial schools in nineteenth-century America. Other Germans established their own private schools as well. These were pioneering efforts at a time when the idea of universal education was by no means universally accepted. Even after public schools emerged, the German schools were usually better. Germans remained one of the most education-conscious ethnic groups, although German farmers—like farmers generally—sometimes had their doubts about "book learning."
The Germans were organizers—whether of lodges, bowling clubs labor unions, businesses, singing groups, orchestras, schools, theater groups, or churches. They organized gymnastic clubs called Turnvereine, throughout the United States, stressing athletic activity, patriotism, and mental development. Germans did little political organizing, however. Politics never became a consuming interest of German Americans. They were among the targets of nativist political attacks during the Know-Nothing era of the 1820s, but these attacks centered mostly on the Irish, and the whole episode was relatively short-lived.
Germans were actively opposed to the laws and campaigns to outlaw drinking, being allied with the Irish on this issue, and were opposed to Sunday "blue laws" that forbade many innocent pastimes. But aside from such issues, Germans were not heavily involved in politics—certainly not on the scale of the Irish, nor with anywhere near the success of the Irish.
Earlier generations of Germans had been almost all Protestant, partly because the British government turned back German Catholics trying to immigrate to the American colonies. In the nineteenth century, most German Americans were either Catholics or Lutherans. The German Lutherans in the eastern seaboard states represented an earlier immigration that had, over the generations, adopted ideas and practices of other American religious denominations, practices that were considered unacceptable by the more orthodox Lutherans arriving from Saxony in the nineteenth century and settling in the midwestern German areas. These later arriving German Lutherans founded their own Missouri Synod, with more conservative religious doctrines.
German Catholics often found themselves in conflict with Irish Catholics, who increasingly dominated the American hierarchy. The Irish considered themselves more Americanized than the Germans, and therefore rightfully in charge of the church's efforts to acculturate them. The Germans, however, considered themselves more educated than the Irish and resented having their parishes run by "Irish ignoramuses." Ultimately, the pope himself had to intervene to restore peace. Over the years, German, Polish, and other Catholics began to have churches and schools manned by priests and nuns of their own ethnicity.
The German Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were noted for their ability to get along with the Indians they encountered in their frontier and near-frontier settlements. Relatively few Germans settled in the South, and fewer still became slaveowners. Those areas of the South where German Americans and the Scotch-Irish were heavily settled—notably the Piedmont region—were less repressive toward blacks than other parts of the South, both before and after emancipation. Moreover, the few antislavery publications in the-South were concentrated in that same region. In the North, Germans were strong opponents of slavery. While most German voters were Democrats into the 1840s, they switched to the newly formed Republican party in the 1850s, when slavery became a heated political issue. The large German element in Missouri has been credited with keeping that state from joining the Confederacy when the Civil War erupted.
When the Civil War came, Germans fought on both sides, depending on where they lived, and most Germans were in the North. However, German support was more than a matter of geography and the military draft. Even before the draft was instituted, about 4,000 Germans in Pennsylvania volunteered for the Union Army, as did about 6,000 in New York State. Whole regiments of Germans were created, with their commands being given in the German language. An estimated 300,000 German Americans joined the Union Army. There were more than 500 German-born Union officers, including nine major generals and several brigadier generals.
The most famous German American of the Civil War era was Carl Schurz. He was one of that small but prominent element known as the "Forty-Eighters" —liberal, radical, and democratic refugees from the abortive German Revolution of 1848, which had sought to unite Germany as a republic. They and their democratic ideas were controversial in mid-century America. Carl Schurz agitated against slavery before the Civil War, and he and other "Forty-Eighters" helped to rouse German Americans to the political support of Abraham Lincoln before the war and to join the military service after hostilities began. Schurz eventually became a general in the Union Army and after the war made a celebrated report on conditions in the South during Reconstruction. Although Schurz was sent to make his survey by President Andrew Johnson, by the time the report was completed, Johnson attempted to suppress the report, which he considered too favorable to Blacks and too unfavorable to southern whites. But this attempt at suppression only guaranteed the report's place in history. Schurz's postwar activities included editing a German-language newspaper in St. Louis, serving as a United States Senator from Missouri and later Secretary of the Interior, where he urged more humane treatment of the Indians. Later, he became editor of the New York Evening Post and Harper's Weekly.
The leading political cartoonist of the nineteenth century was a German-American artist named Thomas Nast. He was praised by Lincoln for his pro-Union cartoons during the Civil War. It was Nast who originated the elephant and the donkey as symbols of the Democratic and the Republican parties and who first drew Santa Claus as the chubby, white-bearded figure known today. Nast's greatest fame came as caricaturist of Boss Tweed, head of the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. Tweed considered these cartoons more dangerous than editorial attacks: "I don't care so much what the papers write about me—my constituents can't read; but, damn it, they can see pictures! Nast's cartoons about the Tweed machine were so widely known that the fleeing Tweed was captured in Spain because someone recognized him from these cartoons.
Germans continued prominent in American science, medicine, and invention. German pharmacists were unique because they were trained in chemistry. Germans founded the pharmaceutical company now known as Merck. A German immigrant named Charles P. Steinmetz, a crippled man barely four feet tall, became famous for his scientific genius, which helped shape the history of electricity. The General Electric Corporation was built around this man and his many patented inventions
The Twentieth Century
By the beginning of the twentieth century, German Americans were in an enviable position. They were, by and large, a prosperous people and to some extent an accepted and respected people, becoming more Americanized and at the same time seeing much of their culture adopted by other Americans. Frankfurters, German chocolate cake, beer, kindergarten, gymnasiums, and universities were now all American institutions, and the German language was widely taught in American schools. These happy developments were rudely changed by the anti-German feelings that swept the United States when World War I began.
Even before America became directly involved as a combatant in 1917, the United States was flooded with anti-German propaganda, especially from Britain, which had the advantage of presenting its viewpoint in the language used by most Americans. Anti-German feeling among Americans was not confined to Germany, but extended quickly to the whole German culture and to German Americans, many of whom were sympathetic to their former homeland. German books were removed from the shelves of American libraries, German-language courses were canceled in the public schools, readers and advertisers boycotted German-American newspapers. Wedding marches by Wagner were removed from marriage ceremonies. The term "Hun" was applied to all Germans (although the Huns were not in fact a Germanic people). President Woodrow Wilson spoke disparagingly of "hyphenated Americans" with supposedly divided loyalty—a cutting remark affecting many American ethnic groups and leaving a legacy of emotional response to the use of hyphens in designating them.
German Americans responded in many ways to these attacks. Some defended themselves and their loyalty to the United States. Some changed their names. Some German-American organizations dropped all reference to Germany in their titles. "German-American" banks became "North American" banks. The Germania Life Insurance Company of New York became the Guardian Life Insurance Company. German-American newspapers began to die out.
When the United States entered World War I against Germany, German Americans evidenced no divided loyalties. Thousands fought in the American Army against Germany, armies led by General John J. Pershing, a German American whose family name had once been spelled Pfoerschin.
Socially, German Americans assimilated slowly in the early twentieth century and more rapidly later on. Most Germans married other Germans in the 1920s, according to data from various parts of the country. In the period from 1908 to 1912, more than two-thirds of all Germans in New York City married other Germans, and in Wisconsin during the same year, just over four-fifths of Germans married other Germans, as was the case also in Nebraska at about the same time. Nor was this a matter of a lack of other ethnic groups. In New York City, Germans were less than 10 percent of the population. By the 1920s, intermarriage had increased so that only about three-fifths of Germans still married other Germans in Nebraska, Wisconsin, and New York State. The same was true of New Haven by 1930, but in other places, most Germans continued to marry other Germans on into the 1960s. Nationally, by 1969 only about one-third of German husbands were married to German wives.
One of the most famous German Americans of the twentieth century was seldom identified ethnically, although he grew up in a home where German was the primary language spoken. He began inauspiciously as a delinquent whose parents committed him to a Catholic home for orphans and incorrigibles, from which he emerged several years later as a professional baseball player, still so young and naive that his teammates called him "the babe." His name was George Herman Ruth. As a young pitcher with the Boston Red Sox, Babe Ruth set an American League record for shutouts in a season by a left-handed pitcher—a record that still stands. His greatest fame came later with the New York Yankees, where he teamed up with another German-American player, Lou Gehrig, to form the most feared pair of hitters ever seen in the same lineup.
Of the ten highest slugging averages ever achieved in a season, seven are by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Of the ten highest totals of runs scored by a player in a season, the top six are by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Over a lifetime, the two players with the most runs batted in, in proportion to their times at bat, were Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. They were the heart of the great Yankee dynasties of the 1920s and 1930s. The Yankees had never won a pennant before Babe Ruth joined the team.
Among other German-American baseball stars, Honus Wagner was the best known. Generally considered the greatest shortstop in history, Wagner retired in 1917 with more hits, runs, and stolen bases than anyone else had ever made at that time. Numerically, however, Germans never dominated baseball as the Irish did in one era or blacks in another. Germans made their marks in gymnastic sports, notably swimming.
Individual Americans of German ancestry continued to reach notable positions in politics, but not on a large scale, nor as ethnic representatives. Herbert Hoover was the first president of German ancestry, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was the most recent. Senator William E. Borah became famous as an opponent of Woodrow Wilson's postwar foreign policy, and Senator Robert F. Wagner, Sr., put his name on the basic labor relations law, the Wagner Act, in 1935. His son, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., was best known for being mayor of New York.
Like the German refugees after the abortive Revolution of 1848, refugees in the 1930s tended to be of a liberal and democratic persuasion, which had its impact on both the German Americans and the American society in general. Unlike the German immigrants of the pre-World War I period, German Americans on the eve of World War II showed no strong pro-Germany feelings. A small pro-Nazi group—the German-American Bund—existed, largely in New York City, but it hardly spoke for German Americans as a whole. World War II saw another wave of anti-German feelings in the United States. The American Army that landed in Europe to help defeat Germany was commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. American military men of World War II of German ancestry included Admiral Chester Nimitz and General Carl Spaatz of the American Air Force, whose duties included bombing German cities.
GERMAN AMERICANS TODAY
After decades of assimilation, those Americans who still identify themselves to the Census Bureau as being of German ethnic origin may or may not be typical of the descendants of those people whose ancestors originated in Germany. In any event, individuals who considered themselves German Americans in 1972 constituted about 13 percent of the American population, and had incomes 11 percent above the national average. Only about 8 percent of German males were still farmers or farm laborers, as so many of their ancestors had been. The average ages and education of German Americans were virtually identical to the national average.
The real story of the German Americans is not so much what they have achieved for themselves as what they have contributed to the development of the United States—in industry, science, culture, military strength, and recreation. Americans of all racial and ethnic origins are a different people—and a more prosperous people—because of the many contributions of German Americans.
Dr. Thomas Sowell is the author of 28 books, as well as numerous articles and essays, covering a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism and social theory. He has held professorships in a variety of top universities. Dr. Sowell is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Thomas Sowell's "The Germans"
Elizabeth Wright
Issues and Views (A Black American Perspective)
You'd never know that more than 25 million Americans are of German ancestry, which is more than for any other ethnic group, except British descendants.
In his book, "Ethnic America," Thomas Sowell has an almost endless list of the contributions that Germans have made to this country. "From those covered wagons (Conestoga they were called) that pioneers used to cross the prairie, to the Kentucky rifle of the frontiersman, to the suspension bridge and the cables that hold them, to the leading optical and lens innovators, to piano building, and on and on."
The early immigrants developed and were influential in many crafts and had reputations as the most industrious workers. German farmers are credited with having cleared frontier land more thoroughly than others and made it more productive and efficient. Germans set up the first papermill, and the first Bible printed in America was printed by a German. For generations, German culture was a strong influence in this country. It's hard to believe that at one time the German language was widely taught in American schools.
In discussing the Germans, Sowell describes a feature that would not mean anything, say, back in the 1950s, but really hits home today: "One of the most important social changes wrought by German immigrants was their promotion of numerous forms of innocent public family entertainment. Music, picnics, dancing, card playing, swimming, bowling, and other physical activities were among the American pastimes, now taken for granted, but introduced or promoted by Germans in the 19th century.
The Germans organized marching bands, symphony orchestras, and singing groups of all sorts." The beer garden was actually a place where the whole family went on Sunday afternoons to "hear music and eat pretzels." Other Americans began to pick up on these public recreational activities and they eventually became normal pastimes.
The above, and many more positive aspects of German-American history will never be disseminated to the general public. A few years ago, PBS ran a documentary series about particular immigrant groups. The Italians were one, and I think the Irish was another, and the third group was the Germans. Well, the Italian documentary was just as you would expect, that is, their arrival in America, followed by their social and economic life as an ethnic enclave, their eventual assimilation into American society, their accomplishments, etc. Ditto for the Irish.
When they got to the Germans--and we're talking about a documentary on German-AMERICANS--they did not begin with boats arriving at the dock with the new immigrants. Guess how the first scene opened. With Hitler up on a podium, engaged in a tirade! Can you beat that? They didn't start in Europe for the other groups. For the others, the PBS producers remembered they were doing stories about AMERICANS. But for the Germans, they began not with, perhaps, a survey of the several Germanic states from which the immigrants came, or the small villages of their forebears. They began in the middle of this century (which had no relevancy to German immigration since that took place much earlier), and with Hitler, of all things! It was outrageous.
It had occurred to me previously, while studying the language, that Germans and references to things Germanic are virtually invisible in this society. But this PBS incident really brought home what I had suspected. Germans of any kind, Americans or not, will never, ever get a public hearing, except the most hostile and negative. They will forever be compelled to cringe and crawl and apologize for simply being alive--until Hell freezes over, and even after that.
Elizabeth WrightIssues and Views