The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin/4
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!"[1] 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.[2]
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...."[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] 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.[6]
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.[7] 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."[8] Wherever Germans gathered together—and Sunday, since it was the weekly holiday, was their day for assembling—there was singing and dancing, usually accompanied by the drinking of beer or wine to stimulate hilarity. This drinking was not necessarily excessive, because most Germans were moderate in their appetites for alcohol, some were unable to spend much, and all were economical (sparsam). The dances differed from those favored in this country, being mainly "round dances," and the standards of decorum in the relations of the sexes were different also. No wonder that, when German families settled in groups near our own people, Yankee fathers and mothers often shook their heads doubtfully in contemplating the influence upon their children of these unfamiliar social customs.
It is probable that the vigor with which among this resilient people amusements were carried on had a definite relation to the intensity, monotony, and sordidness of the labor from which they were a recoil. At all events, with more leisure on week days and an opportunity to do his work under pleasanter conditions, the German readily adapted himself to a type of relaxation which was less boisterous and more genteel. His work and his living being what they were, it is doubtful if anything better in the form of amusements could have been expected of him. Travelers from England and America, on their visits to Germany, were impressed with the wholesomeness of the Sunday picnics, the rambles through the forests, the frolics on the village greens and in the parks adjacent to the towns and cities.[9]
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.[10] 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.
Footnotes
[edit]37 J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers.
38 The death of Goethe occurred on the twenty-second of March. The news must have taken several days in travel.
39 Prussians were apt to console themselves for the pusillanimity of King Frederick William III by harking back to the really strong if ruthless monarchy of Frederick the Great, familiarly spoken of as Der Alte Fritz.
40 Guy Stanton Ford, Stein and the Era of Reform in Prussia, 1807-1815 (Princeton, N. J., 1922), 185.
41 Victor Cousin, Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia. Translated by Sarah Austin. London, 1834.
42 See Life and Works of Horace Mann (Boston, 1891), iii, 346 ff.
43 Cf. Franklin's views on the comparative thrift of English and of German laborers, and note his tentative explanation of the difference. The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin (compiled and edited by John Bigelow, New York and London, 1887), ii, 291 ff. Letter to Peter Collinson, dated Philadelphia, 9 May, 1753.
44 By writers like Samuel Laing, in his Notes of a Traveller on the Social and Political State of France, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy, and Other Parts of Europe (London, 1854), especially 108-115.
45 Life and Works of Horace Mann (Boston, 1891), iii, 346 ff. See also Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (New York, 1907), i, 40.
46 See William Howitt, Rural and Domestic Life of Germany (London, 1842), passim. That portion of Carl Schurz's work (see note 8 ante) which describes his boyhood life at Liblar throws much light on the amusements indulged in by the people. There is a delightful account of the Schützenfest, or marksmanship contest, on pages 45-48 and pages 81-83.
47 Albert Bernhard Faust, The German Element in the United States (Boston, 1909), ii, 472.