In general, Germans did not insist with extreme pertinacity upon the retention of their own social customs, and wherever people of that nationality were intermingled with a larger number of Americans, the process by which they assimilated American habits of living, American social usages, and even ways of acting, speaking, and thinking was very rapid. In the schools of a Yankee neighborhood the children of German settlers, in many cases, could not be distinguished by their manner of speech from the Yankee children. On the other hand, in communities made up wholly or mainly of Germans, the grandchildren continue to have trouble with the th sound in English words, and manifest other linguistic peculiarities. And this difference is merely symptomatic. To this day, it is easy to reconstruct, in case of the average person of German descent, the atmosphere in which he was brought up. If he comes from Milwaukee, or from some rural “Dutch settlement,” that fact is usually clear from a hundred trifling intimations. If he was brought up in a non-German community (so adaptable is the race), a change of name from the German Weiss to the English White, or from Schwartz to Black, would ordinarily suffice to disguise the fact that he is of German descent at all. Germans thus brought up are apt to have made their religious affiliations and their intimate social relationships harmonize with those of the leading American element of the community, so that these quite as much as their speech would tend to conceal their racial origin.
Wisconsin writers have made much of the fact that emigrating German revolutionists came to this state largely in 1848 and the years following. That fact, significant as bringing to Wisconsin Carl Schurz, who became the most noted liberal American statesman and publicist of German birth, has perhaps been overstressed. At least, it can safely be said that for every revolutionist disembarked at Milwaukee or Sheboygan or Manitowoc, probably a full score of plain, everyday, conventional Germans filtered into the state’s population during the same time. The important point about the revolutionists is not their relative numbers, but their character and the leadership they helped to supply in the affairs of the new commonwealth. Newspaper editors who possessed exceptional literary and scholastic attainments came from that class; some found their way into the legislature, and many served the cause of liberal government on the local plane.
The name of Schurz was one to conjure with, as American politicians were quick to discover. He figured prominently in Wisconsin state politics only a few years, but as a national leader his influence in attaching the Germans to the causes he advocated was especially strong in this state, which claimed him as her own. Schurz’s high character and attainments, coupled with his political successes in this country, were a source of pride to thousands of Wisconsin Germans who shared not at all his revolutionary views. Enough that, like Goethe, he was a great German, and that he had gained the respect and confidence of large sections of the American people. It ministered to the self-respect of the average German settler to feel that his people had contributed something of value to the life of the nation and state.
Later arrivals from Germany, and especially from Prussia, brought with them an intense pride of nationalism and enthusiasm for German achievement in the wars against Austria and against France. The difference in attitude between immigrants of 1880 and those of forty years earlier was antipodal. Many of the former had served in the victorious wars and abounded in military incidents and in stories of Bismarck, of Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Crown Prince Frederick William (Unser Fritz). These men obviously belonged to a new generation of Germans, and they have exerted a powerful influence upon our recent history. But the Germans who deserve special recognition along with the Yankees, as founders of the commonwealth and its institutions, are those of the earlier immigrations from a Fatherland which as yet was united only in culture, while politically its states remained dissevered.
THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN
Joseph Schafer
V. SOCIAL HARMONIES AND DISCORDS
The “Sons of the Pilgrims” of Milwaukee held in December, 1850, their customary banquet to celebrate the historic landing on Plymouth Rock. The occasion was one which stimulated the flow of oratory and the display of quaint Yankee humor and sparkling wit. Among the toasts, some of which embodied genuine wisdom, was the following: “Our adopted state. She has gathered her sons from many lands and given them all a home amid her bounty and her beauty. May the elements of strength and greatness peculiar to each be here transplanted and united to form a perfect commonwealth.”[48]
The sentiment was notably generous, voiced as it was by one out of the many and diverse population elements, and we now see that it was also prophetic. But the attainment of the ideal here advanced was not to result from an effortless, unconscious process. Much history is involved in the relations of Yankee and Teuton—to say nothing of other stocks—which reveals a general tendency to helpful coöperation, but presents, on the other hand, episodes marked by animosity, jealousy, and social estrangement. If there were social harmonies, there were also discords.
As early as 1850 Milwaukee contained more Germans than Yankees. Out of an aggregate population of 20,059 the census taker had designated 3880 as natives of the New England states and New York, while 5958 were born in Germany. The entire American element (aside from natives of Wisconsin, who were children of the foreign born as well as of the American born) amounted to 5113, while the number of foreigners was 12,036. Of these, more than 3000 were Irish and about 1300 English. Thus the German was numerically the dominant social factor in the city.