German-Americans and Americans
I have been greatly interested in an article in the May Century. It was by Prof. Edward A. Ross, of the University of Wisconsin, the title being The Germans in America. You know why, of course. My father was born in Germany, and came over in 1850. About ten years ago Hugo Münsterberg had an article in the Atlantic on the same subject, in which he tried to explain the antagonism existing between native-born Germans and Americans. His argument summed itself up in the statement that the German considers the American no gentleman, and the American considers the German no gentleman. But why? I was willing enough to believe him because of a curious experience of my childhood. I can remember the incident perfectly, though it is many years since it happened. I was in the fifth grade, and the girl who figured prominently therein—her name was Siddons, by the way, and most appropriately, for she spelled tragedy to me—had called out on the street to a little boy who was carrying my books home for me, “Aw, George, do you like the Dutch? George is going with a Dutchman!”
George was certainly no cavalier, for he dropped my books, mumbled something, and was off, while I continued on my dazed, bewildered way, wondering what it was all about. Children learn so quickly to keep their deepest hurts to themselves that I doubt whether I should ever have mentioned it at home had it not been for this same bewilderment. My mother was indignant, not, it seems, because I had had names flung at me in scorn, but because it was the wrong name! “You are not Dutch. You are German, and proud of it,” she said, holding her head a little higher. Pressed for an explanation, she revealed that my father had been born in Germany, “but you must never, never be ashamed of that,” she added earnestly. “Your father was an educated, cultured gentleman.” I was then taken into our little library with its crowded shelves climbing to the ceiling, and shown volumes of Schiller, Goethe, Lessing in German, Tauchnitz editions of the great English writers, books of philosophy and history, and shelves full of Hayden, Beethoven, and Mozart. “He was a graduate of a German university,” said mother, “and you must pay no attention to these foolish children whose parents never even saw an American university.” All very well, but had my mother been German herself? No, indeed, so she could hardly realize what it meant to be an alien and an outcast. Many times during that hard year, while the detested Siddons crossed my unwilling path would I have bartered an educated and cultured German forbear for any kind of American, be his lowly occupation what it might. Later that year a little French girl, Dunois by name, came into our grade. Joy! Here was another alien who would be a companion in misery. But to my great surprise she was courted and flattered by this same Siddons and the two became bosom friends. The Dunois père kept a small, unsavory restaurant in a side street, but the glamour of his “Frenchness” was an aureole compared to the stigma of my “Dutchness.” That is still something of a mystery to me, but the article in the Century explains in part the cause of this attitude among unthinking Americans. Prof. Ross says:
“Between 1839 and 1845 numerous old Lutherans, resenting the attempt of their king to unite Lutheran and Reformed faiths, migrated hither.... The political reaction in the German states after the revolution of 1830, and again after the revolution of 1848, brought tens of thousands of liberty-lovers.” And again he says of these political exiles that they “included many men of unusual attainments and character.... These university professors, physicians, journalists, and even aristocrats aroused many of their fellow-countrymen to feel a pride in German culture, and they left a stamp of political idealism, social radicalism and religious skepticism which is slow to be effaced.”
Possibly one reason for American antagonism to these earlier, superior settlers was the fact that they did somewhat despise American culture and hold rather closely to their own German ways of thinking. I remember in my childhood, in my own home, that although we had Harper’s Young People and St. Nicholas, we also had English Chatterbox—I rather fancy as a corrective to Americanisms to be found in the other magazines. You know Germans in their own land today do not wish for American governesses to teach their children English; it must be Englishwomen. All our toys were sent for from the beloved Fatherland, and beautiful toys they were, too. We had a system of Froebel with all his methods established in our own home, long before the middle western cities dreamed of a public kindergarten. This deep distrust of American methods and culture could not help but impress Americans unfavorably; they would retaliate with the cry of Dutchman, perhaps. Prof. Ross goes on to say:
“Germans brought a language, literature, and social customs of their own, so that although when scattered they Americanized with great rapidity wherever they were strong enough to maintain church and schools in their own tongue they were slow to take the American stamp.” So much for those earlier immigrants. The case is vastly different with the later tides of immigration. “After 1870,” he writes, “the Teutonic overflow was prompted by economic motives, and such a migration shows little persistence in flying the flag of its national culture. Numbers came, little instructed.” In the words of a German-American, Knortz, “nine-tenths of all German immigrants come from humble circumstances and have had only an indifferent schooling. Whoever, therefore, expects pride in their German descent from these people who owe everything to their new country and nothing to their fatherland, simply expects too much.”
Well, then! If they no longer pride themselves on being German, and are easily assimilated by the second generation, we should expect to see the slight stigma of being of German descent removed by this time. But is it? Not long ago I had occasion to attend a Bach revival and the beautiful passion music was played and sung. One of my friends remarked, “You have to get used to this music before you can appreciate it,” and I retorted condescendingly, “I don’t; I have heard it from childhood. This is the kind of music we sing in the Lutheran church.” This same friend later, guiding my tottering steps through the mazes and pitfalls of society in the “most aristocratic suburb of New York,” said hesitatingly, “I don’t think I’d mention it, especially to people in general, that I was a Lutheran, if I were you.” Of course I was seized immediately with a perfectly natural desire to talk of it in season and out to everyone I met. Why not? Why not be a Lutheran as naturally as an Episcopalian or a Methodist? “Well, they are mostly Germans, you see.” But I don’t see, and I never have seen, although this article, enlightening and interesting, goes nearer to the reasons for such an attitude than anything else I have ever read.