More than 5,250,000 people have been contributed to our population by Germany in the last ninety years. Deducting the Poles from eastern Prussia, and counting Germans from Russia, Austria, Bohemia, and eastern Switzerland, we have, no doubt, received more than 7,000,000 whose mother-tongue was the speech of Luther and Goethe. It is probable that German blood has come to be at least a fourth part of the current in the veins of the white people of this country, so that this infusion alone equals the total volume of Spanish and Portuguese blood in South America.

From its rise in the thirties until after our Civil War, the stream of immigrants from Germany fluctuated with religious and political conditions on the other side of the Atlantic rather than with economic conditions on this side. Between 1839 and 1845 numerous Old Lutherans, resenting the attempt of their king to unite the Lutheran and the Reformed faiths, migrated hither from Pomerania and Brandenburg. The political reaction in the German states after the revolution of 1830, and again after the revolution of 1848, brought tens of thousands of liberty-lovers. In 1851, in a book of advice to intending immigrants, Pastor Bogen of Boston set forth as the chief inducement to migrate the freedom the Germans would enjoy in America—freedom from oppression and despotism, from privileged orders and monopolies, from intolerable imposts and taxes, from constraint in matters of conscience, from restrictions on settling anywhere in this country of "exhaustless resources."

The political exiles famous as the "Forty-eighters" included many men of unusual attainments and character, who almost at once became leaders of the German-Americans, exercising an influence quite out of proportion to their numbers. These university professors, physicians, journalists, and even aristocrats, aroused many of their fellow-countrymen to feel a pride in German culture, and they left a stamp of political idealism, social radicalism, and religious skepticism which is slow to be effaced.

Thanks to the Hausfrau ideal for women and to the militarist demand for recruits, the German people has until recently persevered in a truly medieval fecundity. Despite an outflow of 6,500,000 between 1820 and 1893, population has doubled in seventy years and trebled in a hundred. Prince BÜlow complains that "the Poles of eastern Prussia multiply like rabbits, while we Germans multiply like hares." The fact is, a generation ago the Germans, too, were multiplying like rabbits. This is the reason why during the seventies and eighties, although political conditions had much improved, great numbers of farm-laborers, female servants, handicraftsmen, small tradesmen, and other members of the humbler classes, streamed out of crowded Germany in the hope of improving their material condition. The peasant living on black bread and potatoes heard of and longed for the white bread and fleshpots of the American West. Although the overwhelming majority of the 1,500,000 Germans who immigrated during the eighties represented the lower economic strata, they came in with fair schooling, considerable industrial skill, and, on an average, three times as much money as the Slav, Hebrew, or South European shows to-day at Ellis Island.

The German influx dropped sharply as soon as the panic of 1893 broke out, and when, after four and a half years of economic submergence, this country struggled to the surface, the tide of Teutons was not ready to flow again. America's free land was gone, and ruder peoples, with lower standards of living, were crowding into her labor markets. In the meantime, Germany's extraordinary rise as a manufacturing country, her successes in foreign trade, and her wonderful system of protection and insurance for her labor population, had made her sons and daughters loath to migrate oversea. The immigration from Germany into the United States is virtually a closed chapter, and has been so for twenty years. Such Germans as now arrive hail chiefly from Austria and Russia.

DISTRIBUTION THROUGHOUT THE STATES

No other foreign element is so generally distributed over the United States as the Germans. A third of them are between Boston and Pittsburgh, fifty-five per cent. live between Pittsburgh and Denver, seven per cent. are in the South, and five per cent. are in the far West.

In the South they are more numerous than any other non-native element. They predominate, except in New England, where the Irish abound; in States along the northern border, into which filter many Canadians; in the Dakotas, where the Scandinavians lead; in the Mormon States, with their many converts from England; and in Louisiana and Florida, with their Italians and Cubans. In Milwaukee nearly half the people are of German parentage, in Cincinnati a quarter, in St. Louis a fifth. A third of the Germans are in the rural districts, whereas all but a sixth of the Irish are in cities. Whether one considers their distribution among the States, their partition between city and country, or their dispersion among the callings, the Germans will be found to be the most pervasive element so far added to our people.

ASSIMILATION WITH NEW NEIGHBORS

Unlike the Irish immigrants, the Germans brought a language, literature, and social customs of their own; so that, although when scattered they Americanized with great rapidity, wherever they were strong enough to maintain churches and schools in their own tongue they were slow to take the American stamp. For the sake of their beloved Deutschtum, about the middle of the last century the promoters of this migration dreamed of creating in the West a German state where Germans should hold sway and hand down their culture in all its purity. Missouri, Illinois, Texas, and later Wisconsin, seemed to hold out such a hope. But the immigrants would not remain massed, the Yankees pushed in, and "Little Germany" never found a place on the map.

After 1870 the Teutonic overflow was prompted by economic motives, and such a migration shows little persistence in flying the flag of its national culture. Numbers came, little instructed, or else bringing a knowledge of Old Testament worthies rather than of German poets, musicians, and artists. In the words of a German-American, Knortz: "Nine-tenths of all German immigrants come from humble circumstances and have had only an indifferent schooling. Whoever, therefore, expects pride in their German descent from these people, who owe everything to their new country and nothing to their fatherland, simply expects too much."

The "Forty-eighters" had given a great stimulus to all German forms of life,—schools, press, stage, festivals, choral societies, and gymnastic societies,—but since the passing of these leaders and the subsidence of the Teutonic freshet, Deutschtum has been on the wane. German newspapers are disappearing, German-American books and journals become fewer, German book stores are failing, German theaters are closing, and the surviving German private schools may be counted on the fingers. Probably not more than ten per cent. of the children of German parentage hear anything but English spoken at home. Champions of Deutschtum admit sadly that nothing but a strong current of immigration can preserve it here. The spreading German-American National Alliance is bringing about a marked revival, but hardly will it succeed in persuading the majority of its people to lay upon their children the burden of a bi-lingual education. It is the apparent destiny of the descendants of the myriads of Germans who have settled here to lose themselves in the American people, and to take the stamp of a culture which is, in origin at least, eighty per cent. British.

It is no small tribute to the solvent power of American civilization that the stable and conservative Germans, who, as settlers in Transylvania, in Chili, or in Palestine, among the Russians on the lower Volga, or among the Portuguese in southern Brazil, are careful to keep themselves unspotted from the people about them, have proved, on the whole, easy to Americanize. Years ago, Prof. James Bryce, just back from Ararat, after noting the purity of the German culture preserved by the Swabian colony in Tiflis, added:

It was very curious to contrast this complete persistence of Teutonism here with the extremely rapid absorption of the Germans among other citizens which one sees going on in those towns of the Western States of America, where—as in Milwaukee, for instance—the inhabitants are mostly Germans, and still speak English with a markedly foreign accent.... Here they are exiles from a higher civilization planted in the midst of a lower one; there they lose themselves among a kindred people, with whose ideas and political institutions they quickly come to sympathize.

INFLUENCE OF THE GERMANS IN AMERICA

The leanness of his home acres taught the German to make the most of his farm in the New World. The immigrant looked for good land rather than for land easy to subdue. Knowing that a heavy forest growth proclaims rich soil, he shunned the open areas, and chopped his homestead out of the densest woods. While the American farmer, in his haste to live well, mined the fertility out of the soil, the German conserved it by rotating crops and feeding live stock. In caring for his domestic animals, he set an example. Just as the county agricultural fair, and the state fair as well, is the development of the Pennsylvania-German Jahrmarkt, and the "prairie schooner" is the lineal descendant of the "Conestoga wagon," so the capacious red barns of the Middle West trace their ancestry back to the big barn which the Pennsylvania "Dutchman" provided at a time when most farmers let their stock run unsheltered.

Thanks partly to good farming and frugal living, and partly to the un-American practice of working their women in the fields, the German farmers made money, bought choice acres from under their neighbors' feet, and so kept other nationalities on the move. This is the reason why a German settlement spreads on fat soil and why in time the best land in the region is likely to come into German hands. Unlike the restless American, with his ears ever pricked to the hail of distant opportunity, the phlegmatic German identifies himself with his farm, and feels a pride in keeping it in the family generation after generation. Taking fewer chances in the lottery of life than his enterprising Scotch-Irish or limber-minded Yankee neighbor, he has drawn from it fewer big prizes, but also fewer blanks.

In quest of vinous exhilaration, our grandfathers stood at a bar pouring down ardent spirits. It is owing to our German element that the mild lager beer has largely displaced whisky as the popular beverage, while sedentary drinking steadily gains on perpendicular drinking. Because the toping of beer has from time immemorial been interwoven with their social enjoyments, and because beer, unlike whisky, makes wassailers fraternal rather than wild and quarrelsome, the Germans, supported by the Bohemians, have offered, in the name of "personal liberty," the most determined opposition to liquor legislation. They may renounce the bowl, but taken away it shall not be! In their loyalty to beer, these Teutons out-German their cousins in the Fatherland, who are of late turning from the national beverage at an astonishing rate. At the World's Fair in St. Louis a number of American scholars who had studied of yore in German universities gave a luncheon to the visiting German economists. Out of respect for their guests, the hosts all filled the mugs of their student days; but, to their astonishment, the Germans called unanimously for iced tea!

The influence of the Germans in spreading among us the love of good music and good drama is acknowledged by all. But there is a more subtle transformation that they have wrought on American taste. The social diversions of the Teutons, and their affirmance of the "joy of living," have helped to clear from our eyes the Puritan jaundice that made all physical and social enjoyment look sinful. If "innocent recreation" and "harmless amusement" are now phrases to conjure with, it is largely owing to the Germans and Bohemians, with their love of song and mirth and "having a good time." Few of the present generation realize that fifty years ago the principal place of amusement in the American town, although as innocent of opera as a Kaffir kraal, called itself the "opera-house," in order to avoid the damning stigma the reigning Puritanism had attached to the word "theater."

As voters, the Germans have shown little clannishness. Their partizanship has not been bigoted, and by their insistence on independent voting they have perplexed and disgusted the politicians. Before 1850, they saw in the Democratic party the champion of the liberties for the[55]
[56]
[57] sake of which they had expatriated themselves. But when the slavery issue came to be overshadowing, the "Forty-eighters" were able to swing them to the newly formed Republican party, to which, on the whole, they have remained faithful, although in some States their loyalty has been much shaken by prohibition. On money questions the Germans have been conservative. Bringing with them the notion of an efficient civil service, they have despised office-mongering and have befriended the merit system. No immigrants have been more apt to look at public questions from a common-welfare point of view and to vote for their principles rather than for their friends. If by "political aptitude" is meant the skill to use politics for private advantage, then in this capacity the German must be ranked low among our foreign-born.

In the way of civil and political liberty, the Germans added nothing to the old-English heritage they found here; but in freedom of thought their contribution has been invaluable. Where there is no church, state, or upper class to hold it in check, the community is likely to show itself imperious toward the nonconformist. The New England Puritan, who was oak to any civil authority that he had not helped to constitute, was a reed before the pressure of community opinion. The sturdy Germans flouted this tyranny sans tyrant. At a time when the would-be-respectable American stifled under a pall of conventionality in regard to religion and manners, they asserted the right to think and speak for themselves without incurring loss or ostracism. Then, too, the scholarly German immigrant imparted to us his sense of the dignity of science and its right to be free, although, to be sure, this spirit has been fostered among us chiefly by Americans who have studied in German universities. On the whole, in the way of intellectual liberty, the university-bred Liberals of 1848 had as much to offer as they gained in the way of political liberty.

THE GERMANS IN THE CIVIL WAR

At the outbreak of the Civil War the Germans, with their deep detestation of slavery, played no small rÔle. In the South, those of later immigration opposed the Confederacy; in the North their leaders lined them up solidly in support of the Union. About 200,000 Germans enlisted in the Union army, more than there were of Irish volunteers, although the Irish were more numerous in the population of the loyal States. The militia companies formed among the Germans in Missouri, especially in St. Louis, were pivotal in saving that State for the Union. The military knowledge of Prussians who had seen service in the old country was valued, sometimes over-valued, in the earlier stage of the conflict. The all-German divisions of Steinwehr and Schurz, after being roundly, perhaps unjustly, abused for not holding Jackson at Chancellorsville, fought well at Gettysburg and distinguished themselves in the "battle among the clouds."

THE GERMANS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE

Probably no compliment has ever been bestowed on the Germans in America that did not contain the words "industrious and thrifty." Nor is it surprising that the members of a race so forelooking and reflective rarely sink into the mire of poverty. In 1900, the Germans were 25.8 per cent. of our foreign-born, and three years later it was found that only 23.3 per cent. of the foreign-born in our almshouses were Germans. For the country at large, we have no means of comparing the German with the American in his ability to take care of himself; but studies made in Boston showed that the proportion of Boston Germans in the city almshouse was half that of the English in that city, one-sixth of that of the Scotch, and only one-tenth of that of the Irish. In the state charitable institutions of Massachusetts, Germans make a better showing than Celts, but not so good a showing as Scandinavians and Americans.

To the various relief agencies in Boston, Germans apply less often than any other of the English-speaking immigrants. The analyst of Boston's foreign-born is struck by the small number of Germans and Scandinavians who seek aid, and says:

Occasionally, it is true, idle and shiftless families are found among both these peoples; but on the whole they are industrious and thrifty, and less hopeless poverty is found among them than among almost any of the other foreign immigrants.... The Germans are without doubt the best type of immigrants which has settled in Boston.

In our cities, no other element has so large a proportion of home-owners, and in the care of the home they surpass all other nationalities save the Swedes.

ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE GERMANS

The saturation of the social life of our Germans with the amber beverage, as well as their hostility to prohibition, prepares us to find alcoholism very common among the disciples of St. Gambrinus. The fact is, however, that in point of sobriety hardly any North European makes so good a record as the German. A few years ago an analysis of 2075 charity cases showed that drink as the cause of poverty occurred only one-half as often among the German cases as among the Irish, and two-thirds as often as among native American cases. In the charity hospitals of New York, the proportion of German patients treated for alcoholism is only half as large as that of the English and the native Americans, and only a third as great as that of the Irish. The charity workers in our cities report that "intemperance of the bread-winner" is less often found to be the cause of destitution among the German applicants than among those of any other North-European nationality. Among alien prisoners only one German of twenty-two was committed for intoxication as against one out of three Irish, one out of four French Canadians, one out of five Scotch, and one out of eight Scandinavians. On the other hand, the victims of drink are far more numerous among them than among the Italians, Magyars, Jews, and Syrians. These peoples, vine-growers and wine-bibbers from time immemorial, have had the chance to get drunk many thousand years longer than the Celts and Teutons; hence they have been more completely purged of their alcoholics. While a light beverage like beer produces fewer sots and wrecks than the "water of life" so grateful to the Northern palate, it produces a vast unreported stupefying and deterioration; so there is good reason why the German drinking customs are being sloughed off in the Fatherland at the very moment they are being warmly defended in America.

AMOUNT OF CRIME NORMAL AMONG GERMANS

The striking thing about the abnormality of the Germans is its normality in amount. Among the foreign-born, the Germans have just about their due share of insanity, neither less nor more. Likewise, the marked feature of German crime in this country is simply its featurelessness. Among the twelve thousand-odd aliens in our prisons, the German prisoners run a little above the average in their bent for gainful offenses and a little below the average in their crimes of violence. In their leaning to other offenses they come close to the mean. Among the twenty nationalities that figure in the police arrests of Chicago, the German stands, with respect to almost every form of misconduct, near the middle of the list. The French and the Hebrews stand out in bad eminence as offenders against chastity, the Italians lead in murder and blackmail, the Americans in burglary, the Greeks in kidnapping, the Lithuanians in assault, the Irish in disorderly conduct. But the German lacks distinction in evil, never coming near either the top or the bottom of the scale in predilection for any form of crime. On the whole, his criminal bent is very close to that of the native American.

WIDE VARIETY OF OCCUPATION

The Germans brought us much more in the way of industrial skill and professional training than the Irish; besides, they were much more successful in planting themselves upon the soil. They tended far more to farming and manufacturing, far less to domestic and personal service and transportation. The second generation shows no marked drift away from the farm. In 1900, three-fifths of all brewers in the country were Germans, a third of the bakers and cabinet-makers, a fifth of the saloon-keepers and butchers, a sixth of the hatters, tailors, and coopers, and a seventh of the musicians and teachers of music. Yet only one male bread-winner out of nineteen was a German.

The sons of Germans are a sixteenth of our male labor force; but they furnish a quarter of the trunk-and-satchel makers, a fifth of the bottlers, stovemakers, and engravers, and a sixth of the upholsterers, bookbinders, paper-box makers, butchers, brewers, and brass-workers. In our cities the German baker, tailor, butcher, cabinet-maker, or engraver is quite as characteristic and familiar a figure as the Irish drayman, fireman, brakeman, section boss, street-car conductor, plumber, or policeman.

The immigrant German women begin rather higher in the scale of occupation than the Irish, but their daughters do not rise in life with such amazing buoyancy as do the daughters of the Irish. Between the first-generation and the second-generation Germans the proportion of servants and waitresses falls from a third of all female bread-winners to a quarter. For the Irish the drop is from fifty-four per cent. to sixteen per cent. The second-generation Germans do not show such an advance on their parents as do the second-generation Irish, who bob up like corks released at the bottom of a stream.

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