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On the Trail of The Immigrant

<h2>VII THE GERMAN IN AMERICA</h2> THE past had its apprehensions about its various problems no less than the present has, and our forefathers looked upon the non-English speaking immigrants much as we look upon them to-day. No doubt they spoke of them as an undesirable class. Many of us remember when the German and the Scandinavian immigrants who came, received no heartier welcome than we now give the Slav, the Italian and the Jew. This large tide of immigration from among our non-English speaking races had its beginning long before there was a Castle Garden or Ellis Island, and shortly after the Pilgrims and Puritans laid the foundations for their colonies at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Upon the path made by English Quakers, came in 1682 the first German immigrants. They were Mennonites, a Protestant sect which manifested in its tenets many of the faults and virtues of both Quakers and Puritans. They sailed up the shallow Delaware Bay, where a Penn, who was “mightier than the sword,” had subdued the savages by his gentle spirit and had made the flat shores peaceful for the habitation of these strangers. They settled in what is now called Germantown, and soon their little cottages were surrounded by gardens where the rosemary wafted its fragrance on the air, and where no doubt the cabbage lifted its astonished head above the ground, little dreaming that some day it would be “monarch of all it surveyed.” In some points these Germans out-Puritaned the Puritans; for while it is said that the Puritans did not kiss their wives on the Sabbath, these German Puritans did not kiss their wives at all. That they brought with them noble ideals is proved by the fact that they were the first people on this continent to oppose slavery, and sent to the Quakers a petition to that effect. It contains the following quaint paragraph: “If once these slaves (wch they say are so wicked and stubborn men) should joint themselves, fight for their freedom and handel their masters & mastrisses, as they did handel them before; will these masters & mastrisses tacke the sword at hand & warr against these poor slaves, licke we are able to believe, some will not refuse to doe? Or have these negers not as much right to fight for their freedom, as you have to keep them slaves?” The Germans were also the first among us to legislate against the vice of intemperance, and may be said to be the first Prohibitionists, a fame which the modern German immigrant does not care to share with them. One of the most ideal men of this time was Francis Daniel Pastorius, a man who combined in himself all the graces and virtues of his noble race; he was a lover of science and the finer pleasures, and was a mystic who yearned for the closer communion with God. Pietists, Tunkers, and others followed the Mennonites in the eighteenth century; and Pennsylvania was soon dotted by communities in which these strangely garbed people lived their peculiar and simple lives. To name them all would require much space, and to describe their peculiarities would fill a book. The Schwenkfelders, the Moravians, and the Amish were the most important among the later arrivals, and Germany seemed to have exhausted her ability to produce sects after their departure. Encouraged by good Queen Anne, Lutherans and Roman Catholics came later, and these were neither so pious nor so intelligent as their predecessors; but were the advance guard of that vast horde of peasantry which ceased not its coming for nearly two centuries, which moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio, from there southward along the Mississippi to Louisiana, and northward to Wisconsin and Minnesota, and which was a great factor in redeeming the wilderness and making it to “blossom as the rose.” Thousands of these peasants were sold into a semi-slavery as Redemptionists, and thousands more laid down their lives in the attempt to blaze paths through the forest and make the fever-stricken plains habitable. Wherever they went they created wealth by their unremitting industry, and by their skill in cattle-raising and farming, so that where an English-speaking farmer starved and was forced to move westward, they stayed and dug riches out of the neglected soil. To-day, in travelling through this country, one can almost invariably detect the German farm; and the German farmer is everywhere the standard of excellence. These immigrants were not idealists like their forefathers, but were content to worship God as did their fathers, and by the honest sweat of their brows eat the fruit from their own “vine and fig tree.” In 1848, when the breath of freedom grew into a wind-storm, there came involuntary immigrants, political exiles of whom the late Carl Schurz is the best known, if not the best example. They were all educated men, many of them real scholars, and whatever German culture there is among the Germans to-day in our cities is in a large measure due to their influence and example. They and their descendants are our real German aristocracy, and in the German centres of Cincinnati and Milwaukee they form the select society. While these men were idealists politically, they were in a large degree materialists religiously, and planted the seed of Marxian Socialism and of infidelity among their countrymen. One whole colony in Minnesota made it one of its tenets not to have a church or even to mention the name of God, and the little city of New Ulm bore that distinction for a great many years; but in spite of the most diligent efforts to keep God and the churches out of their town, several houses of worship have been built in late years. While much skepticism still prevails, the younger generation almost as a whole has turned to its God. The modern German immigrant comes pressed neither by hunger nor by his conscience, but most often to escape irksome military service, or drawn by the German “Wanderlust” which carries him beyond the mountains of his Fatherland into all corners of the earth, although emigration from Germany increases and decreases, as the economic times are good or bad. On board ship he is the jolliest of passengers, and you will find him at the bar in the morning for his beer and late at night in the smoking-room with a crowd of jovial men and women, singing the songs of the Fatherland, which grow sadder as he grows jollier. He carries with him an exalted opinion of his own country, and has fully made up his mind not to let anything crowd out his love for it, so that when New York Harbour with its vastness and beauty rises before him he insists that it is not half as big or as beautiful as the harbour at Hamburg, and only at the sight of the sky-scrapers does he acknowledge our superiority. I once stood before mighty Niagara with one of these subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm, and, with a deprecating shrug of his shoulders, he said: “Ve gots dem in Shermany too.” This attitude towards our country lasts a long time, and is lost only when success comes. The German immigrant invariably has a good common-school education, although not always possessed of culture, and, if he has it, he does not find much of it among those with whom his lot is cast. A young chemist whom I met grew so despondent at the sight of his German boarding-house, and at the lack of manners among the boarders that he returned to Germany two weeks after he landed. Not many such young men come, and few of such who come succeed, for the “hustle and bustle,” the common tasks to be performed, and the common people whom they must meet as equals, repel them. The weaning from aristocratic notions, the being thrown into the hopper without being asked, “Who are you, and who are your parents?” are painful processes, and only the fit survive. Although the process is slow, it is sure. A young man who has come to this country to study our way of doing business was employed in a large department store in Chicago as a bundle-boy. At first he politely addressed the elevator man thus: “Vill you blease let me off on de second floor?” but within two months he said imperatively, “Second”; and he was on the road towards complete Americanization. The city of Milwaukee is probably the most German city in the United States, although nothing in its business or residence portion suggests the Germany across the sea and, with sixty per cent. of its population German, it has not impressed upon the city the best things which we usually associate with that nationality. The intellectual life of its people does not receive that stimulus which one might expect; and whatever German culture there is outside of the ever-diminishing circle of the “forty-eighters” has been transplanted by Americans who have travelled and studied in the Fatherland. The few Germans who try to bring the Germany of America in touch with its glorious heritage across the sea, usually fail most miserably. The cry I most often heard from them was, “The idealists are dead, and the dollar reigns supreme.” With a few exceptions, neither the German stage nor the German newspaper has been able to keep alive that intellectual spirit; and, as a rule, the German population falls below the American in its desire to keep in touch with the intellectual life of Germany. “We have two kinds of Germans in Milwaukee: soul Germans and stomach Germans, and the latter are in the vast majority,” said a keen observer; and it does seem that the national spirit rallies around social usages rather than around the things which make Germany a world power in the noblest sense. The editors upon whom I called were all intent upon telling me how great their papers were and how many subscribers they had, and I could not go beyond the business point with any of them, although I wasted two hours upon one, trying to get a glimpse of his German soul; but if I saw it at all, it had the American dollar-mark written all over it. Upon the social side the German is abnormally developed, and to be a “good fellow” is to him a high ideal. He usually belongs to numberless lodges and societies, in few of which he receives any intellectual stimulus. He retains his convivial habits and frequents the saloon, but is seldom intemperate, although the American treating habit often works havoc with his frugality. That I have not misjudged the situation is proved by the fact that similar conclusions have been reached by eminent German scholars who have recently visited the United States. Prof. K. Lamprecht, of the University of Leipsic, who has recently published his notes under the title “Americana,” says: “Have the Germans done much besides having a large share in making the soil tillable? A visit to the great cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee compels to the sad answer, no. “The Germans, capable as they are, in their separate and narrower activities have not held together and have been overcome by others; overcome to the degree that they still make the stupid “Dutchman” the target for their jokes. One need only to see the part he plays in the American farce to be convinced of this. He is the man who is always too late, who always wants much and at last gets but little, and who in spite of the fact that he is portrayed as good natured, is laughed at. This caricature tells some truth and is the product of some observation. “Intellectually he does not stand very high; (the Negro also learns reading and writing), but in intense thinking he is outdistanced by the Englishman and presumably by the Slav also. “Whoever has visited the beer gardens of Milwaukee, especially the unfortunate Pabst Park, that pattern of stupidity, must say to himself that a people which enjoys such things as are here offered, is not capable of intellectual competition in America. “Still sadder is the lack of political discernment. One need not speak of the corrupt condition of American politics. If the Germans had really had the desire they could greatly have improved the political morals of the United States. That they did not use their opportunity is due largely to the fact that when the early German immigrants came to us, their country was not politically ripe; nevertheless they may be accused of not having kept pace with the citizens of the mother country, who, under more difficult conditions have reached a very high political development. The common people from whom our immigrants sprang, now have large powers in directing the political well-being of the Fatherland under less favourable conditions. This is also true in regard to the German intellectual development with which the German-American has not kept in touch and to which he is now very slowly awaking.” Another thing which this vast German population has failed to impress upon our cities is the love of law and order which characterizes it in its native home, and almost without exception it stands arrayed against any attempt to curtail the privileges of the saloon; while lawmakers, and officials, are usually kept from enforcing existing laws by their fear of the German vote. One of the Milwaukee beer-brewers with whom I talked in regard to his influence upon local politics naively said: “No, we have no influence upon politics at all, but if a sheriff or a judge should try to enforce laws against our saloons, he would simply lose his head.” The fact is that a certain phase of municipal life is completely controlled by the brewing interest in nearly every city where the German element plays a political part, and that element always rallies to the support and defence of the brewers. It is a strange but general experience that the German immigrant is immediately arrayed against the temperance element; this is due in no small measure to the facts that his first lodging-place is usually connected with a saloon; that the German newspaper almost always ridicules temperance effort and misinterprets the motives of its leaders, and, lastly, that designing politicians make their slogan, “personal liberty,” synonymous with “beer at any time and anywhere.” Only very recently a large portion of the German population of Chicago was the leading element in a mass-meeting in which over ten thousand people took part, demanding the granting of special licenses to dance-halls; a precedent which would be as illegal, as dangerous. Nevertheless, the German is a law-abiding citizen, although he has never been convinced that temperance laws are either wise or just; and that, in spite of the fact that his own Fatherland is making strenuous efforts in that direction, and that temperance societies are coming to be as numerous in Germany as they are in America, but much more sensible in their agitation than with us. The average German comes, willing enough to obey all the laws, and, if he has proper environment, develops quickly into the best kind of citizen. Neither in Milwaukee nor elsewhere did I find that the Church, whether Lutheran or Roman Catholic, had kept pace with the intellectual development of the home Church, nor has it come to feel its social responsibility to the community. The German Lutheran pastors, in certain synods, are often more exclusive than the Catholic priests in their unwillingness to coöperate with other churches for the public good; and while the churches in Germany are the most progressive on the continent, here they are the most conservative, and correspondingly inactive in the affairs which move society. Certain synods of the Lutheran Church, and those the most prosperous, hold to the Augsburg Confession more tenaciously than Luther ever did, and believe that beside that Church there is no Church, and outside of that creed no salvation. I attended a Lutheran church one Sunday evening when it was crowded largely by young people, all of them wage-earners in the lower walks of life. The whole burden of the sermon of nearly forty-five minutes’ length was the thought that salvation is not in morality or merit or good deeds, but that the only thing necessary to it is a proper definition of the nature of Jesus Christ. There was not one ethical note in the whole sermon, and if it is a fair sample of that man’s discourses, his flock of more than fifteen hundred souls is feeding upon barren pasture. When I called upon a Lutheran pastor who was pointed out to me as a liberal, I found, upon asking him to define his liberality, that it turned entirely upon social habits and had nothing to do with theology. “I want to drink my beer whenever I want to,” was the article in his creed that had driven him into the arms of a more liberal synod. Among the Germans of the Northwest there is a good deal of infidelity, fostered by the Turner societies; but they are languishing and dying, and with them dies the unbelief. I was told in Milwaukee by a business man that the disappearance of those societies is due to the fact that men of affairs discovered that it was poor business policy to belong to them, because it arrayed against them the conservative church element, and that the cessation of infidel agitation is not a sign of more faith, but simply a sign of more common sense. One free-thinking paper is still published in Milwaukee; but its constituency is gradually growing smaller, and the lecturers on infidelity, of whom there used to be many, have dwindled to one or two. They find it hard to make a living out of a thing that has no life. Yet the German immigrant contributes positive good to this nation’s life; he brings usually a sound body, and while seldom intellectual, he is nearly always intelligent. He is scrupulously honest in business affairs, and has elevated the business morals of his community. By his love of music he has robbed the social life in America of some of its sternness; and the German singing societies are known not so much for the artistic quality of their performance, as for keeping alive the spirit of good fellowship. Unfortunately, the German falls an easy prey to the prevailing materialistic spirit, and when he worships mammon he becomes the most ardent of devotees. Then he has no time for his “Gesangverein,” nor for anything else which is not utilitarian, and “Geldmachen,” the making of money, is his great ideal. In his home life he still emphasizes those virtues which have given inspiration to the German poets’ best songs. His wife is, even in America, the model “Hausfrau”; for “she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.” Yet the Woman’s Club has touched her also, and the “Kaffeeklatsch,” with its innocent neighbourhood gossip, has given way to the formal reception and kindred social delusions. The German has been the prime factor in dispelling the Puritan idea of the Sabbath, which to many is a positive evil, but may at least be considered a mixed good. Still, he ought not to bear the blame alone, for the average American was ready to have his Sabbath broken for him and has easily followed into the breach; just as it often takes four or five grown persons to escort one child to the circus, so one may find four or five natives at every Sunday base-ball game, helping the German to amuse himself. The disintegrating process has also been stimulated by the American tourists who annually cross the ocean, and who, during their visits in Continental Europe, leave much of the Puritan spirit behind them—too much for their own good and the good of their country. The German has not largely contributed to the deepening of the religious life of the nation, although wherever he enters the life of the church he makes its expression more honest. The one thing which he hates desperately is hypocrisy, and because of that he guards himself very jealously and seldom speaks of his religious experiences. The German Methodist and Evangelical Churches, which are of the emotional type, are not only failing to grow, but are perceptibly becoming smaller. This is to be deplored, because they developed a somewhat deep if rather narrow Christian character, and strove to counteract the cold and more formal spirit of the majority of their brethren in other communions. The German in America has not produced many great men, but he has filled this country with good men, which is infinitely better. The cause of the dearth of prominent German-Americans is due to the fact that they blend more quickly than any other foreigner (except the Scandinavian) with the nation’s life, especially if the German reaches any kind of eminence; and the effect which he has upon the life of the nation is difficult to trace just because of that. The coarse, the crude and the low, retain their national stamp, while the finer and better soon become part of us. Some of us seem to know the German best and judge him most from the standpoint of the saloon and all it implies; but I have almost always found him industrious, intelligent, honest, frugal, patriotic, and God-fearing—noble qualities for American citizenship. If he has not risen to the highest which he is capable of reaching, and if he does not exert his influence for the best in all directions, it is not due to the fact that he is not willing to do it; but because he could not rise much higher than the highest marked out for him by the native citizens, or because he could not quite comprehend that this money-making, materialistic Yankee had ideals which he was trying honestly to realize. If we misjudge the German, he misjudges the American and rates him much lower than he deserves. This has robbed him of a higher standard for himself and made him exaggerate our national weaknesses, imitating which has created a peculiar combination of character which does scant justice to himself or to his American neighbour. When he revisits his Fatherland, these weaknesses manifest themselves most; and then his adopted Fatherland comes in for a good share of the blame for his lack of manners. The following incident illustrates this point. In the lobby of a fashionable hotel in Berlin a German-American of this type was expectorating tobacco-juice with the exactness and frequency of an adept. To a German who called his attention to this nuisance, he replied: “Everybody does that in America.” He needs to know the American and value him as he deserves, and he ought to know that which he does not seem to, that the making of money is to the true American, after all, not the greatest of achievements; that the hypocrisy with which he charges him in his religious life is less frequent than he thinks it is, and that the national ideal is slowly but surely gaining ascendency. He ought also to know that, more than any other foreigner, he has impressed upon us both his strength and his weakness, and that we are growing quite definitely Teutonic. It is for us to find out what this strength is and to appropriate it more; and it is for him to grow conscious of his weakness and eliminate it from his social life, that he may become indeed one of the strongest pillars of this Republic, which already, like the coming Kingdom, is made up of “every nation and kindred and tribe and people under heaven.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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