Part 5

Because of their attitude on the liquor question, on Sunday laws, and other matters pertaining to the regulation of conduct, the Yankees have always been looked upon by other social strains as straight-laced and gloomy. In this judgment men have been influenced more than they are aware by the traditions of Puritanism which it was supposed the Yankees inherited. They recalled the story of how Bradford stopped Christmas revelers and sent them to work; they pictured Puritan children as forbidden to laugh and talk on the Sabbath day; and some may have heard the story of how Washington, while president, was once stopped by a Connecticut tithing man who must be informed why His Excellency fared forth on the Lord’s Day instead of resting at his inn or attending public worship.[32]

Two remarks may be made on this point. First, while Puritanism unquestionably had a somber discipline, there was not lacking even among Puritans the play instinct which persisted in cropping out despite all efforts of the authorities at repression. Second, the nineteenth century Yankees register a wide departure from early Puritanism in their social proclivities, and the difference was particularly marked in the West. Even church services were modified to fit the needs of the less resolute souls. Music became an important feature and it was adapted more or less to special occasions.[33] Sunday Blue Laws were gradually relaxed, though never abandoned in principle. Well-to-do city people allowed themselves vacation trips, visits to watering places, and to scenic wonders like Niagara Falls.[34] In town and country alike dancing became an amusement of almost universal vogue, though protested by some religionists, and rural neighborhoods found bowling such a fascinating game for men and boys that the almanac maker thought well to caution his readers against over-indulgence therein.[35] Ball playing, picnicing, sleighing, coasting, skating were among the outdoor sports much indulged in by Yankees, while family and neighborhood visiting, the quilting bee, donation parties, church socials, and the like furnished indoor recreation. The circus and the “cattle show” were events in the western Yankeeland equal in social significance to Artillery Day in Boston.

Thus, while it is true that Yankees were a sober people, of prevailingly serious mien and purpose, they were not averse to the relaxations of play and recreation. The question whether or not the Yankees were fun loving cannot be answered by yes or no. If we mean by fun the rollicking joviality characteristic of irresponsible, carefree folk, the answer is no. Many Yankees found their best fun in work or business. To the David Harum type, which was fairly numerous, a horse trade was more fun than a picnic. Some Boston merchants were so immersed in their business that, though very pious, they nevertheless spent Sunday afternoon going over their books and writing business letters.[36] Being serious minded, they tended to make their chief concern an obsession, and could hardly be happy away from it. But the majority were quite as ready to amuse themselves out of working hours, as are the Italians or other social stocks that have a reputation for fun and frolic.

The Yankees also found intellectual enjoyment in cultivating quickness of retort, in giving utterance to clever if homely aphorisms, and in a kind of whimsical humor. These traits emerge in their vernacular literature like “Major Jack Downing’s” _Thirty Years out of the Senate_, and especially Lowell’s _Biglow Papers_. “The squire’ll have a parson in his barn a preachin’ to his cattle one o’ these days, see if he don’t,” said one of “Tim Bunker’s” shiftless neighbors by way of summarizing the squire’s over-niceness in caring for his Jersey cows. “Ez big ez wat hogs dream on when they’re most too fat to snore”; “that man is mean enough to steal acorns from a blind hog”; “the coppers ain’t all tails”; “pop’lar as a hen with one chicken”; “quicker’n greased lightnin’”; “a hen’s time ain’t much”; “handy as a pocket in a shirt”; “he’s a whole team and the dog under the wagon”; “so thievish they had to take in their stone walls at night”; “so black that charcoal made a chalk mark on him”; “painted so like marble that it sank in water”--the above are all Yankeeisms of approved lineage and illustrate a characteristic type of Yankee humor. The example below is of a rarer sort. “Pretty heavy thunder you have here,” said the English Captain Basil Hall to a lounger in front of a Massachusetts tavern. “Waal, we do,” came the drawling reply, “considerin’ the number of the inhabitants.”

About the time that Yankees began to emigrate to Wisconsin a talented French writer, Michel Chevalier, gave the world a brilliant and on the whole favorable characterization of them. “The Yankee,” he says, “is reserved, cautious, distrustful; he is thoughtful and pensive, but equable; his manners are without grace, modest but dignified, cold, and often unprepossessing; he is narrow in his ideas, but practical, and possessing the idea of the proper, he never rises to the grand. He has nothing chivalric about him and yet he is adventurous, and he loves a roving life. His imagination is active and original, producing, however, not poetry but drollery. The Yankee is the laborious ant; he is industrious and sober and, on the sterile soil of New England, niggardly; transplanted to the promised land in the west he continues moderate in his habits, but less inclined to count the cents. In New England he has a large share of prudence, but once thrown into the midst of the treasures of the west he becomes a speculator, a gambler even, although he has a great horror of cards, dice, and all games of chance and even of skill except the innocent game of bowls.” Chevalier also says: “The fusion of the European with the Yankee takes place but slowly, even on the new soil of the west; for the Yankee is not a man of promiscuous society; he believes that Adam’s oldest son was a Yankee.”

The Yankee was not more boastful than other types of Americans, though his talent for exaggerative description was marked. Yet he had a pronounced national obsession and was uncompromising in his patriotism: “This land o’ourn, I tell ye’s got to be a better country than man ever see,” was put into a Yankee’s mouth by one of their own spokesmen and represents the Yankee type of mild jingoism. It is full cousin to that other sentiment which also this writer assigns to him:

Resolved, that other nations all, if set longside of us, For vartoo, larnin, chiverlry, aint noways wuth a cuss.[37]

These are but cruder expressions of ideas dating from the Revolutionary War, and of which Timothy Dwight, who was not a poet by predestination, gave us in verse a noble example:

Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, The queen of the world, and child of the skies! Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold, While ages on ages thy splendors unfold. Thy reign is the last, and the noblest of time, Most fruitful thy soil, most inviting thy clime; Let the crimes of the east ne’er encrimson thy name, Be freedom, and science, and virtue, thy fame.

It need not be supposed that all Yankees who came to Wisconsin or other western states were familiar with these glowing lines. But it is almost certain that, in the common schools of Yankeedom, most of them had thrilled to the matchless cadences of Webster’s reply to Hayne. What more was needed, by way of literary support, to a pride of country which, if a trifle ungenerous to others, was based on facts all had experienced.

THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN

JOSEPH SCHAFER

IV. SOME SOCIAL TRAITS OF TEUTONS

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.