On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

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.