TEUTONIC TRAITS
Physically the German is strong, but often too stocky for grace. A blend with the taller and thinner American is likely to give good results in figure. Being slow in response, he makes a poor showing in competitive sports. His forte is gymnastics rather than athletics, and he is to be found in the indoor, sedentary trades rather than in the active, outdoor callings. Not often will you come upon him riveting trusses far up on the skyscraper or the railway bridge. His pleasures he takes sitting rather than moving, so that he haunts summer-garden and picnic-ground rather than base-ball diamond and bowling-alley. For all his traditional domesticity, he is a sociable soul, and will lug off his entire family to a public resort, when an American would prefer a pipe by the fireside. He is fond of the table, and loves to enjoy talk, music, or drama while eating and drinking. In comparison with the native Americans, or the Celts from the British Isles, the Germans in America have the name of being materialistic. If this be true, it is doubtless due to the small representation among them of that noble leavening type that has made the spiritual greatness of Germany. Any one who has lived in the old country knows that there is a kind of German that one rarely sees among our fellow-citizens. Of such were the "Forty-eighters"; but as their influence fades, the idealism they fanned dies down, and visitors from the Fatherland complain that America has stamped its dollar-mark all over the souls of their kinsmen here. Professor Hugo Münsterberg, an impartial observer, judges that "the average German-American stands below the level of the average German at home."
But if he chases the dollar, let us grant that he does it in his own way. Honest and stable, he puts little faith in short-cuts to riches, such as "scream" advertising, commercial humbug, "faked" news, thimblerig finance, or political graft. He does not count on skipping many rungs in the ladder of success. German business enterprises grow slowly, but if you probe them, you find a solid texture. The German is hard-headed, and is not easily borne off his feet by the contagion of example. To speculative fever and to made panic he is rather immune. Because he is less mobile than the American and does not shift from one thing to another, he is more apt to gain skill and turn out good work. Then, too, he is not so keen to get on that he does not find the artist's enjoyment and pride in the practice of his craft. In a word, the Germans act in American society as a neutral substance moderating the action of an overlively ferment. For the universal eagerness to be "wide awake" and "up to date" has deposed habit, tradition, and external authority as lords of life among us.
The German is lasting in his sympathies and his antipathies and leisurely in his mental processes. It takes him long to make up his mind and longer to get an idea out of his head. In his thinking he tries to grasp more things at a time than does the Celt. Not for him the simple logic that proceeds from one or two outstanding factors in a situation and ignores all the rest. He wants to be comprehensive and final where the Latin aims to be merely clear and precise. It is this very complexity of thought that makes the German often silent, his speech heavy or confused. But just this relish for details and this passion for thoroughness make him a born investigator. This is why, on the practical side, the German-American has most distinguished himself in work that calls for long and close observation, such as gardening, viticulture, breeding, forestry, brewing, and the chemical industries.
Thirty years ago there was an outcry that the Germans were introducing into this country the virus of anarchism and socialism. It is now clear that German socialism, instead of being a shattering type of thought, is in fact highly constructive. However bold and iconoclastic he may be in his thinking, the German, with his respect for authority, his slow reaction to wrong, and his love of order and system, is a conservative by nature. The children of revolutionary immigrants are milder than their fathers were; and the German-Americans are now very far from leading the van of radicalism.
Immigration from Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland, 1826-1910