Ohio History Journal


The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

VOLUME 68 ?? NUMBER 1 ?? JANUARY 1959

 

 

 

 

Friedrich Hassaurek:

Cincinnati's Leading Forty-Eighter

 

By CARL WITTKE*

 

 

 

THE ABORTIVE GERMAN REVOLUTIONS OF 1848 and 1849

led to an exodus of political refugees from Europe to the

United States which was unique in the history of American

immigration. Among the German immigrants who crossed

the Atlantic in the 1850's in quest of greater economic

opportunities and political liberty, there were a significant

number of journalists, lawyers, and other professional men,

men with a good education and social standing, who were

able to assume political and cultural leadership for their

fellow immigrants in America and provide a cultural leaven

and a vitalizing intellectual transfusion for the entire German

immigration. In the 1850's, when nativism was rampant in

the United States and the foreign-born were on the defensive,

the "Forty-Eighters," as the political refugees were known,

furnished a proud and aggressive leadership for the German

group. They were convinced that they had a mission in

America to counteract the blighting effects of Puritanism

and to inject the more liberal views of the European En-

lightenment, and it was during their ascendancy that the

 

* Carl Wittke is chairman of the department of history and dean of the graduate

school at Western Reserve University. He is the author of a number of books on

the German immigrant in the United States.