It is probable that the vigor with which among this resilient people amusements were carried on had a definite relation to the intensity, monotony, and sordidness of the labor from which they were a recoil. At all events, with more leisure on week days and an opportunity to do his work under pleasanter conditions, the German readily adapted himself to a type of relaxation which was less boisterous and more genteel. His work and his living being what they were, it is doubtful if anything better in the form of amusements could have been expected of him. Travelers from England and America, on their visits to Germany, were impressed with the wholesomeness of the Sunday picnics, the rambles through the forests, the frolics on the village greens and in the parks adjacent to the towns and cities.[46]
With all his sociability, joviality, and occasional levity, the German was not devoid of an element of austerity. This was one secret of his ability to achieve. Whatever the work might be, he settled himself to its performance with a grim determination expressive of century-long training. The mechanic, from his apprentice years, was habituated to long hours of unremitting but improving toil. The farmer (bauer) was a traditional daylight-saver and a night-worker besides, such excessive labor being compulsory under the system of serfdom, when the peasant’s time was levied upon to a very large extent by the lord. The German schools inculcated similar habits of relentless application to the work in hand, and even the government bureaus, under rigorous task-masters like old Friedrich Wilhelm and his son Frederick the Great, enforced compliance with the ideal of a patient, steady “grind” which not inaptly typified the German in the eyes of other peoples. The German often performed less work in the time consumed than an alert Yankee would have performed in a shorter day; his tools and implements were generally awkward and inefficacious; even in scholarship he not infrequently took the long way around to reach his goal—but he usually reached it because he had no notion of turning back or of stopping at a halfway point on his job. Persistent rather than brilliant, more industrious than inventive, the German toiled on, content if he always had something to show for his labor. The contrast, in that generation, between the German at work and the German at play is the contrast between a man governed by an intense purpose to accomplish a given task, whether interesting or not, and the same man intent on accomplishing nothing with every physical, intellectual, and emotional evidence of enjoying the process. Some men carry into their play the morale which governs them in their work; others import into their work the spirit of their play. In the case of the mid-nineteenth century German the two aspects of his existence, work and play, differed in spirit quite as much as in content.
The Germans had their Puritan sects, like the Moravians and other pietists, whose attitude was distinctly other-worldly, to whom play was a sedate if not a solemn activity. Such people disapproved of dancing and beer drinking Germans quite as heartily as of profane whiskey drinking and quarrelsome Americans or Irish. Individuals and colonies of the pietistic classes passed into the emigrations, and thus Wisconsin’s German population contained most of the elements to be found at the same time in the German states. This illustrates one difficulty in generalizing about social characteristics; there are so many exceptions to be noted that the generalization loses much of its validity.
Craftsmanship was a prevalent accomplishment among the Germans of the early emigration. Every shipload of emigrants of which we have a social analysis had a large proportion of craftsmen, who were either established members of the city and village industrial class, or else belonged to the peasantry and had learned a craft in order to improve their status. Trades were learned exclusively under the apprenticeship system, the candidate usually living in the master’s home and giving service at the master’s will. When he reached the journeyman stage he was privileged to find work for himself, a quest which though usually fruitful in educational results often proved disappointing from a monetary point of view. In those cases the journeyman was peculiarly open to the temptation to emigrate. Arrived in this country, the chances of finding employment in the line of his training varied. Sometimes they were excellent, at other times poor, depending mainly upon the craft represented. Carpenters were in great demand, as were also blacksmiths, wheelwrights, millwrights, masons, bricklayers, plasterers, and in general all representatives of the building trades and of trades ministering to farmers. Others were in occasional demand. But, if a dyer, or a slater, or a cabinet maker, or a silversmith, or a tile maker, or a weaver, or a wood carver happened to find himself in America without a market for his peculiar skill, he always had the resource of taking land and commencing as a farmer. Many craftsmen, indeed, came with the set purpose of doing that immediately upon their arrival; others contemplated a farming career after a period devoted to their specialty. In some or all of these ways Germans trained as craftsmen came to be widely distributed over the farming areas of Wisconsin as well as among the cities, towns, and villages.
The possession of special skill in any line, like the possession of special scientific knowledge, raises a man in social estimation, and every trained worker properly regards himself with satisfaction as being not quite “as other men are.” In addition to the social training which came to him as an incident of his apprenticeship and journeyman’s experience, the German craftsman often was able to challenge the respect and admiration of his American neighbors by making articles of cunning workmanship which to them seemed wonderful because they did not understand the processes involved. Agriculture being regarded as an unskilled occupation, the artisan farmer also was very apt to lord it over the peasant farmer of his own nationality. Craftsmanship, in a word, established a kind of rank among Germans in this country because it was a recognized means of personal and social progress at home.
Statistics are impossible to procure, but the testimony of men and women familiar with early conditions in Wisconsin proves that the German population of the state in early days varied quite as widely in social characteristics as did the American population, though America had no distinctive peasant class. Accordingly, although in the beginnings of American contacts with their Prussian or Westphalian neighbors these were lumped together indiscriminately as “Dutchmen,” differences soon began to emerge. In the course of a few years a class of “fine old Germans” was recognized in almost every community to supplement the well-known type of “fine old Yankee gentlemen.” These select Germans were very apt to be men who had been trained as craftsmen, or men who had enjoyed the advanced scientific or literary instruction afforded in the higher schools and the universities of the homeland. In the cities, especially Milwaukee, were many Germans who had been prominent in business lines as well as in the professions.
The question has sometimes arisen why so many of the second-generation Germans appear inferior in social character to their immigrant parents. A hint of the reason is found in what has just been said. Whatever elements of superiority were shown by the immigrant artisan-farmers or the highly educated Germans, the social advantages accruing therefrom were personal, and in a slightly developed western society could not be handed on to the next generation. In the cities it frequently was possible for men of high ideals and fine social status to provide equivalent opportunities for their children. But not so on frontier farms. There it was a rare case when an education or training like that received by the father in the old country could be supplied. Accordingly, the sons of the most intelligent, dignified, and worthy German farmer, if they became farmers in succession, might perhaps turn out mere farmers, with none of the graces or exceptional social virtues of the parents, and little except the memory of a parent’s high respectability to distinguish them from the farmer sons of the clumsiest peasant.
However, this is but half the story. If the superior Germans reared families incapable of remaining on their own social plane, other types of Germans, who in their own persons counted for less, frequently had the happiness to see their children advance to a position perceptibly higher than their own. Natural gifts, industry, the social opportunities which yield to the key of economic success availed much. Sometimes the presence of a good school, a wise and helpful pastor or some other worthy friend gave the necessary impulse. The process, in fact, does not differ essentially from that which, throughout American pioneer history, has enabled the deserving to press forward and permitted the weak, indolent, or vicious to fall behind in the social competition. It is impossible to say how many German families made a step, or several steps, upward, and how many others slipped back. The delinquents may perhaps exceed the meritorious in number, but probably not, and the impression that the children of German immigrants shame their parents is almost certainly an illusion which would be likely to disappear if the facts were fully known.
The social institutions of Wisconsin, based on the earlier Yankee and southwestern immigrations, were profoundly influenced by the German immigration of the late forties and the fifties of last century. Milwaukee, the center of German influence (the Deutsche Athen), became a city in which the German language was spoken and read by many English speaking persons, in order to facilitate communication and trade with the numerically dominant German element. The Germans maintained advanced schools for instruction in both English and German; their parochial schools were conducted mainly in German; the immigrants themselves felt no compulsion to learn English, and their children, in many cases, however well educated, spoke the language of the country with very imperfect accent.
The universal respect in which the German language was held, and the extent to which it was affected by others than Germans, provided an admirable social soil for the development of German music and the cultivation of German literature. Hardly had the immigrants established themselves when, in 1847, they founded at Milwaukee their first singing society, which was followed three years later by the famous and far-reaching Musikverein. A German theater followed promptly, and became a permanent feature of Milwaukee’s intellectual life.[47] The Turnverein fostered in America Father Jahn’s conception of athletics, while restaurants and beer gardens gave an old world, continental atmosphere to public recreation. Holidays assumed a German aspect. The Christ Child displaced St. Nicholas not alone in Milwaukee, but in scores of towns, villages, and hamlets, and innumerable farm homes scattered over Wisconsin. The joyous German Weinacht made way easily against the more somber Puritan Christmas, which, however, had already brightened a good deal in its progress from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century.