Part 6

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.

THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN

JOSEPH SCHAFER

V. SOCIAL HARMONIES AND DISCORDS

The “Sons of the Pilgrims” of Milwaukee held in December, 1850, their customary banquet to celebrate the historic landing on Plymouth Rock. The occasion was one which stimulated the flow of oratory and the display of quaint Yankee humor and sparkling wit. Among the toasts, some of which embodied genuine wisdom, was the following: “Our adopted state. She has gathered her sons from many lands and given them all a home amid her bounty and her beauty. May the elements of strength and greatness peculiar to each be here transplanted and united to form a perfect commonwealth.”[48]

The sentiment was notably generous, voiced as it was by one out of the many and diverse population elements, and we now see that it was also prophetic. But the attainment of the ideal here advanced was not to result from an effortless, unconscious process. Much history is involved in the relations of Yankee and Teuton--to say nothing of other stocks--which reveals a general tendency to helpful coöperation, but presents, on the other hand, episodes marked by animosity, jealousy, and social estrangement. If there were social harmonies, there were also discords.

As early as 1850 Milwaukee contained more Germans than Yankees. Out of an aggregate population of 20,059 the census taker had designated 3880 as natives of the New England states and New York, while 5958 were born in Germany. The entire American element (aside from natives of Wisconsin, who were children of the foreign born as well as of the American born) amounted to 5113, while the number of foreigners was 12,036. Of these, more than 3000 were Irish and about 1300 English. Thus the German was numerically the dominant social factor in the city.

Nevertheless, in all but numbers the Yankee element remained, as it had been from the beginning of the town’s growth, in a position of acknowledged leadership. There would be no difficulty in proving that socially, industrially, and commercially the places of power were occupied by the “down-easters,” while in politics, although their control was being challenged from one side or another, they were still far from recognizing a master.

Yankees were the promoters of those far-reaching improvements, like the various plank roads, and especially the railroads, which were destined to unite the extensive new settlements with Milwaukee and thus guarantee the future greatness of the city. They were largely engaged in the carrying trade on the Lakes. They controlled the flour milling business, the leading industry of the city, in which was concentrated probably more capital than was invested in all other lines of manufacturing carried on at that time. They were also prominent in wholesale merchandising and owned the most pretentious retail stores.

Their general preëminence in the professions was undisputed. They had most of the lawyers, a large proportion of the physicians, the editors of English language papers, the Protestant clergymen, the teachers. Public opinion, with a reservation to be stated presently, was mainly of their making, both in the city itself and--through the agency of a widely read newspaper press--in the state at large. On all questions affecting public education, social morality, health, and recreation, as well as business or industry, the American portion of the community was very apt to mass behind Yankee leadership; and the English speaking section of the foreign population was not averse to doing the same, at least under ordinary circumstances. Often, indeed, such was the prestige of the Yankees, their initiative was followed unquestioningly by American and foreigner alike.

But the weight of numbers being with the Germans, the bulk of whom did not speak or read English--though there were numerous exceptions,--it was natural that there should have developed a community leadership within their own group, and such leadership would be determinative in cases of divergence from American ideas. The presence of this great body of non-English speaking persons, clothed with political power and wielding also a goodly share of economic power, especially as manifested in consumption, tended in itself to generate a more amiable attitude and more moderate policies on the part of the dominant class.

For the Germans were a coherent, prosperous, and growing element in the city. They began coming in 1839, and during the succeeding decade the annual accretions waxed gradually larger. After the revolution of 1848 the tide of emigration, especially from the countries and provinces along the Rhine, was swollen to unprecedented proportions, Milwaukee and the whole state profiting largely therefrom. But, already before 1850 Milwaukee’s streets, business places, and homes were so habituated to German speech, that most visitors unhesitatingly described it as a German city. “In the colony of Herman alone,” wrote Carl de Haas in 1848, “among all the United States is the population so preponderantly German.”[49] This writer also says, as do other chroniclers of his race, that not alone the speech of his country, but also the national habits and customs prevailed exceedingly in Milwaukee; that the Americans made many concessions to the Germanism of the environment--merchants, for example, learning the language themselves, or at least keeping clerks in their establishments who could speak it, in order to attract German trade.

The emigration which began in 1839 as a religious movement, a congregation of Old Lutherans fleeing the pressure of the illiberal policy of Prussia’s king, was continued thereafter mainly from economic and social motives. An examination of the census schedules of 1850 for Milwaukee reveals its general character better than volumes of reminiscent testimony. The census shows that, among the 5958 Germans in the city, 1165 (if the count is accurate) were craftsmen. There were house carpenters, ship carpenters, smiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, cabinet makers, masons, plasterers, painters, brickmakers, tailors, shoemakers, saddlers, watchmakers, coppersmiths, silversmiths and goldsmiths, barbers, bakers, brewers, cigar makers, musicians, sailors, and many more. In contrast to the large number of craftsmen, those employed at common labor numbered only 461, while the aggregate of those who may be described as business men was 248. A total of 45 persons fall in the class of professional men. Many, even of the laborers, possessed some property, thus showing that they were of a substantial, home-making type. A good many of the craftsmen owned homes, some of the business men were possessed of real estate to an appreciable extent, and there were a very few capitalists whose properties were valued at from $20,000 to $50,000.

The significance to the city of having among the population so large a body of thoroughly trained and skilled artisans cannot readily be overstated. It toned up all building operations and enabled them to keep pace with the city’s rapidly growing needs; it facilitated the establishment and expansion of industries depending upon a full supply of skilled labor; it gave the city a fine body of industrious, well paid residents as homemakers and citizens--at a time when American artisans were very prone to seek land and raise farm produce. American business and industrial leaders in Milwaukee appreciated the German craftsmen who contributed largely to the prosperity of the city; and the same may be said of the common laborers.