Let the crimes of the east ne’er encrimson thy name,
Be freedom, and science, and virtue, thy fame.
It need not be supposed that all Yankees who came to Wisconsin or other western states were familiar with these glowing lines. But it is almost certain that, in the common schools of Yankeedom, most of them had thrilled to the matchless cadences of Webster’s reply to Hayne. What more was needed, by way of literary support, to a pride of country which, if a trifle ungenerous to others, was based on facts all had experienced.
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!”[38] 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.[39]
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....”[40] 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.