Ohio History Journal

The OHIO HISTORICAL Quarterly

VOLUME 66 ?? NUMBER 4 ?? OCTOBER 1957

 

 

 

 

Ohio's Germans, 1840-1875

By CARL WITTKE*

 

 

The great period of German immigration is long since past, and

the Germans have been diluted and absorbed, along with other

nationality groups, into a composite Americanism. A century ago

German immigrants, in number and quality, constituted one of the

most important elements in the American population. Most of them

were plain people, peasants, laborers, or craftsmen, motivated pri-

marily by the desire to get ahead in a new, free land of opportunity.

But among them also were men of education, culture, and social

status, political refugees of the abortive German revolutions of 1830

and 1848, romantic idealists, and champions of a political and eco-

nomic radicalism that often ran counter to prevailing American

standards of a century ago.

Ohio attracted a large share of the German immigration to its

rural areas and into the towns and cities. Pennsylvania Germans

moved westward to settle in a broad belt of counties south of New

England's Western Reserve. A much larger part of the German

immigration, however, came directly from Germany, and its impact

can be studied best by focusing attention upon several of the largest

Ohio cities.

The city directory of Cincinnati for 1825 listed only sixty-four

persons born in Germany. By 1850 there were 30,628, and twenty

years later just under 50,000, in a total population of 216,239. Into

 

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

school at Western Reserve University. His latest book is The German-Language Press

in America.

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340    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

the Cincinnati of Daniel Drake, Frances M. Trollope and Moncure

D. Conway, with its New England and Virginia elements, flowed

a Teutonic tide which mingled with and helped reshape the Anglo-

American character of the Queen City of the West. In 1835 there

were fifteen German families in Cleveland; the census of 1870

reported a German population of nearly 16,000. In 1843 Columbus

already had three German schools, two German military companies,

and two German charitable organizations. Its south side was known

as a "Little Germany," inhabited by thrifty, hard-working craftsmen

and storekeepers, who built more homes than were being constructed

in any other section of the city. In 1850 Ohio had 111,257 Germans,

more than double the number of Irish, their closest competitor.

Twenty years later the German element constituted nearly half of

the state's foreign born.

Before the end of the Civil War a certain German stereotype

became fixed in the minds of many native Americans. It became

customary to represent the Germans with heavy beards and mus-

taches, and wearing soft felt hats rather than the high stiff hats

popular in America at the time. The native population quickly

recognized that German bakers, tanners, tailors, and other crafts-

men, trained in the rigid apprentice system of Europe, made depen-

dable workmen and were making a substantial contribution to the

economic development of the United States. German drug stores

were a guarantee of reliability, for only German pharmacists had

been trained in the fundamentals of chemistry. In Akron, Ferdinand

Schumacher, as early as 1854, peddled oatmeal in glass jars, and

developed a company which was one of the forerunners of the

present-day Quaker Oats Company. In Cleveland, Koch and Loeb,

in the 1840's, were making suits, linen dusters, and Alpaca coats,

and laying the foundations for the Joseph and Feiss Company, one

of the largest clothing manufacturers in the country.

Dozens of such examples of competence, thrift, and success can

be cited, but these characteristics were sometimes submerged in the

popular stereotype which represented the German as a gemutlich

burgher, sitting in a beer garden with a stein of foaming lager beer

before him, and a long pipe between his teeth, and listening to the

music of a German band. Cincinnati's German community lay north

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OHIO'S GERMANS, 1840-1875      341

 

of the canal and was known as "Over the Rhine," an area of beer

gardens and concert halls and flourishing breweries. As late as 1890

a visitor reported that here the air had "a savory odor of Limburger,

the aroma arising from a wienerwurst can, [and] the vapors . . .

from . . . sidewalk drains," and here one heard the "tortured

strains of murdered Strauss, Offenbach, or other composers" of the

fatherland. "Over the Rhine," in Cincinnati, and in the German

sections of other cities, German craftsmen and storekeepers built

little frame and brick houses flush with the sidewalks, and planted

their backyards, fenced in with lattice-work, with flowers and vege-

tables.

In the German household the hard-working Hausfrau lived in

relative contentment within the four walls of her home, where she

cleaned and scrubbed and brought up children, and prepared such

foreign dishes as pigs feet, smoked sausage, sauerbraten, and sauer-

kraut, or delicacies like cinnamon kuchen, apple dumplings, and

cheese cake, which long since have found an honored place in

America's culinary literature.

The men sought recreation in taverns, where they played pinochle,

skat, and euchre. On Sundays they brought their families to the beer

gardens, to listen to strains of familiar music, and to sip their

foaming brew, "ever and again shaking it round their glasses with

the peculiar circular motion which none but the German can impart

to the beverage he loves." Rutherford B. Hayes found it politically

advantageous to stop in regularly for his Schoppen of beer in one of

Cincinnati's leading beer gardens, and George B. Cox, notorious Re-

publican boss, was a regular patron of Wielert's Garden, which was

equally renowned for good music and good beer. In Columbus,

Volwinkel's beer hall offered its patrons band music, beer, pretzels,

and "perfect gesellschaft under gas lights that rivalled the moon."

By 1850 Cincinnati was one of the nation's great brewing and

distilling centers, and ten years later it had over two thousand places

where drinks were sold. Highly trained brewmasters from Germany

practiced their art in other cities, like Cleveland, Columbus, Sandusky,

and Toledo, and brewing and wine-making were for decades a

monopoly of the Germans.

Beer, Gemutlichkeit, and the wide-open Sunday are still asso-

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342    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

ciated in the minds of many Americans with the German stereotype.

Yet there always were Germans who resented studying the character

of Cincinnati solely through the bottom of a beer glass. Christian

Esselen, a university-trained young idealist who published his peri-

odical, the Atlantis, for a brief period in Cleveland, referred to the

inhabitants "over the Rhine" as devoid of all interests except free-

dom to drink beer, and believed that the Germans had sunk to a

lower social scale in the United States than in their homeland. Many

years later Professor Hugo Munsterberg, Germany's gift to Harvard's

psychology and philosophy departments, in an article in the Atlantic

Monthly, described the bulk of his fellow countrymen as shabbily

dressed, rude sauerkraut eaters whose life revolved almost wholly

around beer, pipes, and skat playing.

Most Germans have always combated what they called Puritan

Sabbatarianism. As they contrasted the pleasures of the Continental

Sunday with the American Sabbath, they concluded that in the

United States "the rest of Sunday" is "the rest of the tomb." They

resisted every white-ribboned temperance crusader, and denounced

them as "narrow-minded Puritans" and "fanatical Methodists."

"Teetotalism," they insisted, was utterly incompatible with "personal

liberty."

In the decade before the Civil War a city like Cincinnati simply ig-

nored local ordinances which provided for Sunday closing. Its large

German element insisted that "blue bellied Presbyterians" could

not degrade Americans into "a race of psalm singers." In Cleve-

land the moral forces of Yankeedom were locked in battle with the

German voters in several municipal elections, and in 1872, when the

city administration tried to close the saloons on Sunday, the Germans

paraded through the town with beer kegs. At Lied's Garden the flag

was hauled down to half-mast and wrapped in mourning, and a

German saloonkeeper loaded a table, which he put up before his

place of business, with pitchers of ice water, milk, and lemonade

and a Bible.

Interesting and amusing and generally truthful as such repre-

sentations of the German group may be, they deal with only one

side of the story, and to confine the account of life in Ohio's Ger-

man communities to this phase of German-Americanism would be

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OHIO'S GERMANS, 1840-1875     343

 

to overlook completely the many intellectual and cultural contribu-

tions which the German immigration made to America a century

ago. The vast majority of the newcomers, although plain people

who were attracted to the United States by cheap homesteads and

good wages in "the common man's Utopia," nevertheless had im-

bibed much of the culture of the fatherland. Along with them came

enough intellectuals sufficiently interested in the things of the mind

and spirit to provide the leadership necessary to weld their fellow

immigrants into an influential social group.

The Germans were a social people and seized upon every oppor-

tunity to arrange outings or picnics. For a time German communities

made more of the Fourth of July than native Americans, for to them

Independence Day was more than an occasion to satisfy their gre-

garious instincts--it was a day to commemorate because it marked

the establishment of the liberty and equality which had brought

them to America. In 1844 the Germans of Columbus celebrated the

Fourth with a cannonade, a parade of military companies and bands,

games for young and old at the picnic ground, and a huge banquet,

at which a large picture of Washington looked down upon the

assembled guests. Ten years later an effort to get the native Amer-

icans of Columbus to join with the Germans in a Fourth of July

celebration proved unsucceessful, although the Germans provided

the food and the Americans the fireworks. The next year's cele-

bration ended in a bloody street riot.

Two or three dances a week were regularly advertised by German

societies in the local press, and on one occasion the Columbus

Westbote carried announcements for six in one week. In 1859 the

Germans celebrated the Schiller centennial all over America. Col-

umbus marked the event with a two-day festival, which began with

exercises in Thalia Hall, the first German theater in the capital city,

decorated for the occasion with evergreens and portraits of Schiller

and Goethe. There were children's pageants, speeches by local cele-

brities, and songs by the Columbus Mannerchor, and the festivities

closed with the Wilhelm Tell overture, a play, and an elaborate

banquet.

Like other immigrant groups the Germans loved military com-

panies, which enabled them to parade in gaudy uniforms and meet

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344   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

regularly on drill days devoted as much to conviviality as to martial

exercises. Several such German companies from Columbus and

Cincinnati volunteered for the Mexican War. When Louis Kossuth,

the hero of the Hungarian revolution of 1848, visited Cincinnati,

he was greeted by a military parade, led by German cavalry, riflemen,

sharpshooters, and the Steuben Guard, and their bands. In Columbus

the Hungarian liberator was welcomed by German grenadiers and

a company of artillery, which fired an artillery salvo at the break of

day, and the day's demonstrations ended with a midnight serenade

by a German singing society. Lincoln passed through Cincinnati in

1861 on his way to Washington and was welcomed by the Steuben

Artillery and a German jager company. When war came, German

military companies from many Ohio communities volunteered in

corpore to defend the Union.

One of Ohio's best-known Civil War outfits was the Ninth Ohio

Volunteers, recruited almost entirely among the Germans of Cincin-

nati, and commanded by R. L. McCook, with August Willich, a

German refugee of 1848 who had published a socialist labor paper

in Cincinnati, the second in command. The men reported in the

white linen jackets of the German turner societies, and their com-

mander drilled them while still dressed in civilian clothes, wearing

a stove-pipe hat and with only a sword to distinguish him from his

men. Of the nine thousand men who entered the army from Cuya-

hoga County, the Germans contributed over twenty-five percent. In

a number of Ohio companies and in several regiments, all commands

were originally given in German. The patriotic record of the Ger-

mans in the Civil War need not be retold here. It greatly modified

the attitude of many native Americans toward their adopted fellow

citizens.

The German theater owed much to the intellectuals of the German

immigration of the 1850's who eagerly tried to lift the level of

theatrical performances from the low comedy and farces of earlier

years to productions of the great German masters. In Cincinnati,

Frederick Hassaurek, youthful veteran of the Vienna revolution,

and Karl Obermann founded a German theater which gave four

performances a week. On the eve of the Civil War the Cincinnati

Enquirer commented that the monopoly enjoyed by German drama

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OHIO'S GERMANS, 1840-1875     345

 

in the Queen City was challenged only by the minstrel shows. The

Enquirer was especially flattering in its comments about the attention

and interest of the audiences from "over the Rhine." The German

theater in Cincinnati did not recover from the effects of the Civil

War until 1879. In their later years the financial resources of German

theater companies were often disastrously affected by sporadic en-

forcement of Sunday closing ordinances. In Columbus and Cleveland

the arrival of the "Forty-Eighters," political refugees of the German

revolution, raised the standards and improved the repertoire of the

German theater by insisting on better stage settings, putting an end

to smoking during the performances, and abolishing the dances

which had followed the show as an inducement to get people to

attend.

An unfriendly critic writing from Gottingen once remarked that

wherever three Germans congregated in the United States, one

opened a saloon so that the other two might have a place for their

quarrels. However exaggerated and slanderous that characterization

may be, there can be no doubt that wherever Germans settled they

organized singing societies to sing the folk songs and practice the art

songs of their nation. The first German singing society of Cincinnati

rehearsed as early as 1838 in the dance hall of the Rising Sun Tavern,

"over the Rhine." In 1846 a German workmen's organization of

Cincinnati took the bold step of incorporating female voices in its

singing society, and thereupon was able to present Haydn's Creation

in full. In 1856 the German-American Cecilia Society of Cincinnati

sang Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Haydn under the direction of F. L.

Ritter.

The first German singing society of Cleveland dates from 1848

and was directed by a political refugee who soon left to join the

gold rush to California. In 1850 the singers had to disband their

organization and the majority joined the singing section of the local

German Freethinkers' Society. The Mannerchor of Columbus was

founded in 1848 and is still in existence. The Columbus Liederkranz

was organized in 1866. Akron had its Liedertafel, and there were

other German singing societies in the more important cities of the

state. Today the German singing societies of Cincinnati and Colum-

bus are among the oldest in the country.

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346    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

Before long the number of choral organizations was sufficient to

support the annual Sangerfeste for which the Germans became

famous in the United States. At these gatherings German singers

gathered from a wide area to compete for prizes, and to enjoy the

convivialities of the occasion. The first Sangerfest in America was

held in Cincinnati in 1849. Twelve years later the city had to provide

a special building for the two thousand singers who attended. Mus-

ical events of this kind were partly responsible for Cincinnati's

famous May Festival, which Theodore Thomas brought to a high

level of artistry in the 1870's.

In 1852 Columbus was host to a Sangerfest which was ushered in

by artillery fire and a parade and which, in addition to its musical

activities, included a picnic, an athletic spectacle, and drills by Ger-

man militia companies. Seven years later in Cleveland twenty-four

singing societies presented Alessandro Stradella, an operatic favorite

of the Germans, and the program featured a mass chorus of four

hundred voices. At the close of the musical activities the singers

paraded to a picnic ground, escorted by the turner society, German

light dragoons, and an artillery company. On another occasion a

Cleveland audience of over five thousand attended a concert directed

by Hans Balatka, a guest conductor from Milwaukee. The mass

chorus presented parts of Mozart's Magic Flute and the orchestra

played the overtures from Wilhelm Tell and Martha. It is not with-

out significance to point out that German Jews participated in these

musical events, as they did in all the cultural activities of the German

immigration, and the German-Jewish press usually carried detailed

accounts of the Sangerfeste.

German singing societies had to be largely rebuilt after the Civil

War. By 1874, however, the Sangerfest was in full bloom again.

Cleveland had erected a special "Temple" for the occasion. The

sessions continued for an entire week; high-priced soloists and the

New York Philharmonic Orchestra were engaged; the governor

came to open the music festival; and the city's streets were decorated

with German and American flags. Newspaper critics admitted that

the programs were excellent, but criticized the visitors for manifest-

ing a greater interest in social activities than in the more serious ob-

jectives of the convention. A bar had been installed under the orch-

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OHIO'S GERMANS, 1840-1875      347

estra pit of the concert hall and after the conclusion of each concert,

many hours were spent there under the mellow patronage of Bacchus

and King Gambrinus.

The German Turnfeste and Schutzenfeste provided another outlet

for the gregarious instincts of the German population. The turner

movement, founded in 1811 in Berlin, when Prussia was under the

heel of Napoleon, became an effective instrument for the develop-

ment of German patriotism and nationalism. Its original purpose,

to build sound bodies through systematic physical exercises, was

soon expanded to include the building of a genuine political liber-

alism. The turner movement was one of the most important causes

of the German revolution of 1848, and many turners fought under

Sigel and Hecker in Baden, on the barricades of Dresden, and in

the streets of Frankfurt.

Political refugees of 1848 revived the turner movement in the

United States, and put such stress upon its liberal and radical tradi-

tions that the turner societies became centers of German radicalism

in America. The first Turngemeinde in the United States was organ-

ized in Cincinnati in October 1848, when Friedrich Hecker, the

incurable romantic of the German revolution, happened to be

visiting friends in that city. Fourteen Cincinnati Germans responded

to his call and began setting-up exercises in a vacant lot. Two years

later they dedicated their first little turner hall; by 1851 the society

was able to support a small library, a male chorus, and a monthly

publication.

In Columbus the first Turnverein was established in 1851; the

still prosperous Cleveland Socialer Turn Verein dates from 1867.

Membership in turner societies was open to all, and included a con-

glomeration of ardent nationalists, sober, middle-of-the-road Ger-

man-American burghers, socialists, avowed infidels, and many who

joined solely for social reasons. But the original goal of the organi-

zation was to develop a more "refined humanity," and to insist upon

complete freedom to reform the political, economic, and religious

patterns of America. Thousands of turners became radical aboli-

tionists and volunteered in such numbers for service in the Union

army that in many areas their societies had to be virtually rebuilt

after the Civil War.

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348    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

The Turnfeste, which began in the 1850's, developed into gigantic

festivals, attended by turners who came from considerable distances

to demonstrate their physical prowess. These spectacles usually

began with parades in which the marchers wore the white jackets

and red ties characteristic of the turner clubs. There were torchlight

processions, lusty renditions of turner and student songs, gymnastic

competitions that generally ended with great tableaux, banquets,

with endless toasts, and on the last day, the presentation of an opera

and a grand ball. Prizes were awarded not only for physical feats

but also for original essays, poems, and musical compositions. The

turner organizations of Ohio figured prominently in the national

Turnfeste. Moreover, in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, and else-

where, the turner, after the Civil War, became interested in getting

physical education courses and instruction in the German language

into the curricula of the public schools. They were so successful in

several Ohio cities that, in German neighborhoods, instruction in the

first grade was in German and children of native Americans un-

familiar with the language were expected to acquire it.

Closely akin to the militia companies and turner societies were

the organizations of German sharpshooters (Schutzenvereine),

whose members competed in shooting galleries for prizes. The

Schutzenverein was a direct importation from Germany, and grew

rapidly after 1848. The competition in marksmanship sometimes

continued for as much as a week, and ended, as in Germany, with a

parade, a banquet, oratory, and an elaborate ceremony to crown a

King of the Sharpshooters. Annual local competitions were held

in Columbus as early as 1853, and six years later the Columbus

Schutzenverein started its own building, with ceremonies that began

with the breaking of a bottle of beer over the cornerstone.

The political refugees of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848-49

boldly announced that they would not become mere "culture fer-

tilizer" in a raw, new land, where, as in the Western Reserve of Ohio,

even a Christmas tree erected in a German church was regarded

as a "heathenish custom," "a plain case of idolatry," and a "grovel-

ing before the shrubs." Many "Forty-Eighters" stubbornly refused

to discard "the intellectual achievements of a thousand years . . .

for the culture of the primeval forest." In the New Germany across

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OHIO'S GERMANS, 1840-1875       349

 

the sea they hoped to introduce and preserve German art, music,

literature, philosophy, and science to combat the gloom of Puritans,

"square-headed sectarians, and temperance fanatics." Above all, they

were committed to disseminating a spirit of rationalism and enlight-

enment in a land suffering from what they regarded as the clerical

tyranny of the American churches. The extremists opposed Sunday

laws, the opening of public gatherings with prayer, the exemption

of church property from taxation, and Bible reading in the schools.

For the more radical among them, separation of church and state

meant the annihilation of the church as a state within a state.

The vast majority of German immigrants belonged to the Catholic,

Lutheran, or Reformed churches, and even the Methodists made

many converts among them. Although the anti-clerical radicalism

of an able and noisy minority never fastened its grip upon the masses

of the German immigration, who wanted no truck with the "beer-

fogged skepticism" of these "pioneers of heathenism," the German

element remained badly divided because of the activities of a voci-

ferous minority, and suffered for years from the hostility and pre-

judices which the radicals aroused among native Americans.

The foci of freethinking radicalism were to be found in German

"Free Congregations," or freethinkers' societies. These organizations

rejected every form of ritual, clericalism, dogmatism, and super-

naturalism, and upheld the right of men to be atheists, agnostics,

pantheists, or anything else they wished--so long as they observed

the basic moralities. In this new Kulturkampf in America the leaders

fought hard, and often unwisely and intolerantly, to substitute an

enlightened humanism for the "dogmas of priestcraft" and super-

stition. They were indiscriminately labeled as infidels by their Amer-

ican critics.

In their meetings the freethinkers' clubs developed something of

a ritual of their own, which stressed lectures and discussions of

morality, science, literature, and other disciplines calculated to enrich

and liberate the human spirit. They established private schools in

Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other cities to make freethinkers of their

children. The group in Cincinnati owned a hall, supported singing

and dramatic sections, a mutual insurance society, and a woman's

auxiliary, and met regularly on Sunday for lectures and debate. The

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350    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

Cleveland organization in the early 1850's had two hundred mem-

bers, who sponsored dramatics, gymnastics, a German-English

school, and debates, and annually celebrated the birthday of Tom

Paine and the martyrdom of Robert Blum, the hero of 1848. In 1854

ten Ohio cities sent delegates to a convention in Cincinnati to draw

up a "Platform of the Free Germans of Ohio." Besides the usual

anti-clerical pronouncements, the document advocated the abolition

of slavery and the repeal of the fugitive slave law, a ten-hour day,

free homesteads, public education, inheritance taxes, a mechanics

lien law, and an end of capital punishment. A year earlier Cincin-

nati Germans had advocated a primary democracy for the United

States, and in 1859 German radicals joined with Negroes in Cincin-

nati to honor John Brown.

The extreme radicalism and intolerant anti-clericalism of the

German minority explain in part the nativist reaction against the

heavy European immigration of the 1850's. Political nativism was

a mixture of unadulterated bigotry and some sound reasons for

objecting to the abuses connected with completely unrestricted

immigration. The spearhead of its attack was directed against the

Catholic Irish, but the Germans by no means escaped unscathed.

In Cincinnati in 1853 the anti-clericalism of the freethinkers'

society was fanned into violence by unrelenting attacks in Has-

saurek's Hochwachter upon Archbishop Gaetano Bedini, a visitor

in the city, whom German radicals described as the "Bloodhound

of Bologna," because of his alleged responsibility for the execution

of Italian revolutionary patriots in 1849. On Christmas Day hun-

dreds of German freethinkers and radicals marched upon the resi-

dence of the archbishop of Cincinnati, where Bedini was a guest,

carrying an effigy of the noted Italian clergyman swinging from a

gallows. In the riot that ensued, which the Germans blamed on

the Irish police and a mayor whom they described as a "tool of

the priests," one man was killed and several were injured. Conser-

vative papers, like the Columbus Westbote, blamed the Germans

for the incident, and the Cleveland Germania denounced the

"patent reformers" whose activities were bringing the entire Ger-

man immigration into disrepute. Incidents of this kind served only

to feed the fires of nativism against all the foreign-born.

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OHIO'S GERMANS, 1840-1875    351

 

In 1855 members of a Columbus singing society, returning from

a Sangerfest, were attacked by nativist rowdies, and several weeks

later, when the Germans were returning from a Fourth of July

picnic, they were showered with stones, marchers and bystanders

began to fire revolvers, and a number of casualties resulted. The

local police searched the German neighborhood without proper

warrants, and a howling mob shouted "kill the damn Dutch." In

the same "bloody year" Cincinnati nativists drove a little band of

German musicians from a tenement house and then marched, with

fife and drum, to attack the Germans "over the Rhine." The latter

met their assailants with gunfire from the windows of their homes,

and threw up barricades in the streets, behind which the Saarsfield

Guards and other militia companies, joined by a number of Irish,

rallied to repel the nativist invasion. Election day riots were com-

mon in Ohio during these unhappy years, and on several occasions

German saloons were raided and ballot boxes destroyed. But

nativism soon had its day and was largely dissolved in the patriotic

response of the foreign-born in defense of the Union in 1861.

The German vote was too important in Ohio to be long ignored

by either major party. As early as 1834 the Jacksonians distributed

campaign literature among the Pennsylvania Germans in Ohio,

and in 1832 Jackson's bank veto was widely circulated in German

translation. There were special German meetings during the fam-

ous log-cabin campaign of 1840. In 1844 the Democrats put out a

campaign biography of James K. Polk in the German language.

In the election of 1860 the German vote may well have been de-

cisive in the northwestern states. Hassaurek of Cincinnati spoke

for two and a half hours to the Cleveland Germans on behalf of

Lincoln, and August Thieme, perhaps Cleveland's leading German

intellectual, stumped Ohio for the Republicans. Carl Schurz, whom

Lincoln described as "the foremost among the Republican orators,"

and whom the Democratic Plain Dealer of Cleveland denounced as

"a red republican," with a black heart, came into the state in 1860 to

try to garner the German vote for the Republican party.

The leaders of the German element were quick to demand

political plums for services rendered at the polls, and Lincoln

appointed a number of Ohio Germans to public office. After the

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352   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

war German veterans had the same claim as other soldiers on the

gratitude of the country. By 1871 both parties in Ohio were nom-

inating Germans for the office of lieutenant governor. In 1872

leading Ohio Germans figured prominently in the proceedings of

the Liberal Republicans, who met in Cincinnati to plan a revolt

against "Grantism," although many Germans had difficulty swal-

lowing Horace Greeley, a "teetotaller," as the party's candidate.

Subsequently, in the long drawn out controversy over greenbacks,

free silver, and sound money, which reached a crisis in Ohio in the

gubernatorial contest of 1875 between Rutherford B. Hayes and

"Fog Horn Bill" Allen, the German vote again appeared decisive.

Advocates of sound money, such as Charles Francis Adams, Char-

les Nordhoff, Murat Halstead, and Whitelaw Reid, thought it

necessary to bring Schurz into Ohio, following his flattering

reception in Germany, to make nine speeches to the Ohio Germans

on the money question. His address in the turner hall in Cincinnati

in 1875 was a notable exposition of the intricacies of the currency

problem, and the Republicans carried the state by about five thousand

votes. In 1877 Hayes made Schurz his secretary of the interior.

The German-language press was the spokesman and the mirror

for all phases of life in America's German communities and the

most effective instrument for maintaining the necessary contact

between the old country and the new in the critical years of read-

justment. Ohio's German-language press once ranked among the

most numerous and the most influential in the nation, and dozens

of Ohio communities were able to support at least a German

weekly. The first German-language paper was started in Lancaster

in 1807, to serve the Pennsylvania-German population of central

Ohio. The Columbus Westbote was founded in 1843; by 1860

Ohio had twenty-two German-language papers. Cincinnati in 1849

had four, edited in the next two decades by a galaxy of brilliant

editors, including such outstanding "Forty-Eighters" as Frederick

Hassaurek, August Willich, Johann Rittig, Gustav Tafel, and

others. The Cincinnati Volksblatt, established in 1836 and pub-

lished until World War I, for a time was the only German daily

in the United States. The Germania was Cleveland's first German

paper, but was soon overshadowed by the Wichter am Erie, founded

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OHIO'S GERMANS, 1840-1875     353

in 1852, and launched by a group of German liberals who called

themselves the "friends of progress." It was originally printed on

the press of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. August Thieme, a distin-

guished revolutionary of 1848 with a doctor's degree from a German

university, an intellectual aristocrat of independent mind and deep

convictions, served as editor until his death in 1879.

Various other papers, like the Columbia, the Deutsche Presse

and the Biene were published in Cleveland, but only the Wachter

survived. Toledo's first German paper was the weekly Ohio Staats-

zeitung. Other papers appeared in Dayton, Akron, Mansfield, Bucy-

rus, and other cities, and while many were weeklies, some were

dailies with considerable influence in their areas.

In 1848 Germans in the United States had welcomed the revolu-

tionary upheavals in the German states with considerable confidence

that they would result in a fatherland unified under a republican

form of government. Their high hopes were trampled under foot

by the heavy tread of Prussian grenadiers speedily mobilized to

defend monarchy and reaction. The liberal movement ended in fail-

ure. The events of 1870-71, in contrast with the disappointments of

1848, brought unadulterated satisfaction to the great majority of the

German element in the United States. The Franco-German War had

a tremendous impact upon America's German population.

The war with France was marked by a series of brilliant military

victories for the German armies as they swept on to capture Paris,

and after centuries of struggle for German unification, the German

Empire was established in 1871. Earlier dreams of a unified Germany

along more liberal lines were quickly forgotten in the adulation

poured on Bismarck and the Hohenzollern Kaiser. During the thril-

ling period of the Franco-German War the German element in the

United States probably achieved its greatest unity. Old differences

were forgotten in huge victory parades and peace celebrations in

Cleveland, Cincinnati, and other Ohio cities, and throughout the

land. Through all of them sounded a note of joy and satisfaction that

the unification of Germany had at last united the Germans of America

also. German-Americans were convinced that the establishment of

the new national state in Europe would help dissipate whatever

sense of inferiority they still felt as adopted citizens, and eradicate

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354   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

the remaining prejudices of the nativist period. German-Americans

seized upon the events of 1870-71 to demonstrate to native Amer-

icans "what Germans could do when they are united." "Before

long," concluded the editor of the Columbus Westbote, "the name

'Dutchman' may be changed into German."

While Ohio cities were being gradually transformed by the

immigrant tide, Teutons were spreading over the whole northern

and western map, and creating places as definitely German as Mil-

waukee, St. Louis, or Grand Island, Nebraska, and gaining recog-

nition through the triumphs of a Theodore Thomas and a Hermann

Raster of Chicago, a George Bunsen and a Friedrich Hecker of

Belleville, the Engelmanns of Milwaukee, Hermann Kiefer of

Detroit, Konrad Krez of Sheboygan, and dozens of others who

made their mark upon the intellectual and cultural life of the

emerging America. Three hundred and sixty-one men and women

born in Germany proper appear in the Dictionary of American

Biography.

The blend of Anglo-American and German cultures proceeded

harmoniously until World War I suddenly brought immeasurable

tragedy to millions of Americans of German blood who had never

dreamed of the possibility of a war between their adopted father-

land and the country of their origin. In the hysteria against all

things German which seized the United States in 1917 and 1918,

many of their cherished institutions and cultural monuments suf-

fered crushing attacks from which they have found it almost im-

possible to recover.

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