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.