This paper explores the identity formation process from the perspective of festival and commemoration. Public memory -- the root and substance of ethnic identity -- is created, sustained, and altered yet again by one's participation in festive culture. As the body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a society or a group define itself, public memory is inevitably focused on concerns of the present.1 This is no less true today than it was at the turn of the 20th century, the period of this paper. As my principal case study, I depart somewhat from the other papers in these proceedings and examine Swiss Germans in the southern Wisconsin community of New Glarus. Though these immigrants from the canton Glarus region of Switzerland would have hardly considered themselves German, their experiences shared much in common with neighbors from Bavaria or Pomerania. Settled by transplanted Swiss immigrants in the years surrounding Wisconsin's 1848 statehood, New Glarus offers an ideal setting for the study of public memory. Recurrent and widely attended nineteenth- and early twentieth-century festivals earned for the small farming community its reputation as the site of ethnic memory for the surrounding region. Among many such events, I have chosen two commemorations to document the invention of a Swiss-German ethnic identity before the first world war -- the 60th anniversary commemoration of the so-called Swiss "colony" in 1905 and the 70th anniversary ten years later.

Such reflexive expressions of group connectedness were hardly unique to the southern Wisconsin Swiss.2 Indeed, scarcely can a community be found in the Midwest -- be it settled by Germans, Swedes, Yankees, or a rich combination of groups -- that did not set aside time from harvesting corn or managing its shipment to market for a celebration of heritage.3 New Glarus, in this respect, was typical of many large and small ethnic communities across the region; what was unusual, however, was the intensity and persistence of what one writer in 1905 called the Swiss community's "impulse to celebrate."4

By their very nature, such public displays of memory "select out, concentrate, and interrelate themes of existence -- lived and imagined -- that are more diffused, dissipated and obscured in the everyday."5 Moreover, the performative element involved in cultural displays is the crucial medium through which, as Paul Connerton puts it, societies remember. What we envision as our public or collective memory is established through performance in commemorative festivals, by the act of making a landscape, and in the process of reading a travel book. In each case, meaning is achieved through doing -- by performance. Characterized by a higher than usual degree of reflexivity, "performances play an essential (and often essentializing) role in the mediation and creation of social communities." Whether those communities are organized areound bonds of nationalism, ethnicty, class status, or gender, the study of performance forces one to analyze more critically the agents of, and audience for, traditions' invention.6 At times contradictory and, at other times, complementary, three core themes or symbols emerged that shaped the period's festival discourse: the homeland; the pioneer; and the notion of progress.

These crucial "themes of existence" emerged not from a mysterious Zeitgeist, but from the social and economic context of the late nineteenth century. As Victor Turner has pointed out, it is crucial to unlock the "field of meaning in which a celebratory object has its potential for arousing thought, emotion, and desire."7 Thus, after describing the two festivals that are my focus, I then turn to an examination of the economic and social contexts for the commemoration. I argue, in essence, that economic modernization clashed with a growing anti-modernism that cherished tradition and social insularity.

Following a well-established format, the warm August day in 1905 began with greetings and a welcoming of festival guests at the train station to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the community's founding. The twenty-one "packed coaches" carried thousands of visitors, swelling the village's ranks to more than 10,000. Two central events, interspersed between the customary speeches and musical performances, drew the record crowds and showcased what one newspaper called "a confusion of the foreign and the American at New Glarus": one, an enactment of a Glarner Landsgemeinde and, two, a series of tableaux that graphically united Swiss and American history with lived memory.8

In the Swiss historic (and contemporary) political climate, the Landsgemeinde has become the performative symbol of Swiss freedom. The Landsgemeinde is the hallmark of the strength of the canton and individual voter rights, though exclusively male until 1971. As Benjamin Barber points out, the Landsgemeinde is to Swiss culture what a bill of rights or a declaration of freedoms is to an Anglo-American political tradition: the core signifier of democratic freedom. Unlike a flag or a document upon which a higher court or legislature votes, however, the Landsgemeinde is an inherently participatory and performative symbol.9 The enactment of such an event would have held special poignancy for the descendants of the earliest colonists, for it was in such an open air meeting in the village of Schwanden in canton Glarus 60 years ago that the emigration plan was first proposed and then acted upon.10

The New Glarus Landsgemeinde consisted of two components. First, before a nostalgic, simulated Swiss backdrop, costumed community members re-created the 1845 Schwanden Landsgemeinde by reading the names of the original colonists and the names of the survivors and by "re-enacting incidents of the trip."11

The second component used the unique forum to raise initiatives of "matters of local interest." Five measures were proposed and voted upon: better rail connections; the construction of an "old settlers monument"; a good roads initiative; lower taxes for farmers; and that limburger cheese, the chief product from the region, be "declared legal tender for the payment of all debts and a medium of exchange throughout the district." Although clearly presented with tongue firmly in cheek, this last measure possessed a serious side; namely, it called attention to the widely fluctuating market price for the cheese, a condition that affected nearly every working family in the county.12

The second central event of the day utilized the tableaux format to illustrate scenes of well-known Swiss and American history, as well as the history of the colony. Important members of the community -- the bank president, newspaper editor, physician, and leading merchants -- donned the costumes that were rented from Milwaukee to silently and motionlessly create the Lebende Bilder, or living pictures. Wilhelm Tell and his son Walter reappeared, as did the Swiss hero Winkelried. They were followed by a scene unique to the Swiss colony: an American historical tableaux that featured the landing of Columbus; the rescue of Captain Smith by Pocahontas; Washington leading his forces at Valley Forge; and Lincoln freeing the slaves. The tableaux that stands out, and the one that launched the afternoon program, depicted the lives of the colonists. Here, scenes representing key moments in the migration story stood alongside Wilhelm Tell and George Washington.13

The mixture of American and ethnic history was a common theme of historic tableaux of this period.14 Milwaukee's German-American Day Celebration of 1890, for example, labored to intertwine German and American history by featuring tableaux of German Art and History along side William Penn and George Washington.15 Of central concern here, however, is the increasing influence of the local, or vernacular memory.

Taken together, the Landsgemeinde and tableaux provided more than simply entertainment; they afforded festival organizers a valuable educational function. For one, the celebration was specifically designed, as one account put it, "to illustrate how things are done in the canton of Glarus." The Landsgemeinde "brought home to the children of the fatherland, a vivid picture of life in the old home country."16

The importance of creating such a vivid picture became ever more acute with the passage of time. Indeed, as the community aged and distanced itself (in time) from the actual settler's lives, few of the "old gray ones" were still around to attest to their experiences. One reporter summed the situation nicely when he wrote that "the present generation of New Glarus knows but little of the founders of this colony of Swiss people, and the privations that the pioneers were called upon to undergo."17 Thus did it become necessary to depart from previous festive occasions where didactic orations and speeches dominated; now, more participarty means were required to teach the lessons of the past.

Far from a neutral goal, this educational function carried with it a moral imperative. In his speech to the Festgaste, John Luchsinger provided a historical background by recounting the hardships endured in canton Glarus, the difficult journey, and the arduous few decade in the new world. He reminded his audience that while strides in agricultural production have brought increasing wealth, "it was the poverty of the colonists that held them together thus insuring the success of the settlement."18 The eradication of poverty was surely an unmitigated good, but what if it actually diluted that most prized of all virtues -- community? The enactment of the Landsgemeinde and the tableaux provided a reminder of the virtues of simplicity and poverty that flew in the face of the progressive narrative that otherwise dominated the day's oratory. Progress fused with an anti-modernism to create a charged festive atmosphere, symbolized best, perhaps, by the figure of Wilhelm Tell.19

A crucial feature of both commemorative ceremonies was its performative nature. The Landsgemeinde, in particular, involved literally hundreds of men20 coming together in a temporally and spatially bounded space for the explicit purpose of enacting an annual ritual from their collective past. This reflexive cultural expression -- standing in a central meeting square and voting on measures of local importance -- was one that most would have only known second hand. However distant the voters themselves may have been from the homeland Landsgemeinde, the New Glarus performance provided the means of communicating a vitally important social memory: the ways of life in a country that at one time had been home, and now was becoming ever more distant. It is precisely the enactactment of such commemorative ceremonies that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained. No better vehicle of transmitting those images and recollections could have been devised than the Landsgemeinde and historic tableaux.21

The only measure advanced by the 1905 "mock" Landsgemeinde to pass from the ethereal to the concrete took the form of a ten foot tall granite monument that immediately became central to the community's pioneer iconography. The monument's unveiling, dedicated to the rapidly fading memory of the community's pioneer founders, became the central event of the second commemorative festival I wish to discuss. Like previous commemorations, the 70th anniversary emerged from the complex dialogue between progress, the homeland, and the local past; it's form, however, differed significantly.

The three day event nearly did not get off the ground. It was decided belatedly that the celebration would involve more than merely a quiet church service and that local businesses would, for the first time, play a central and visible role. Previously, businessmen participated, but in cooperation with regional farmers, doctors, and cheese makers as co-performers in musical groups and as co-organizers. Although held at New Glarus, earlier festivals reflected concerns and interests of people from the far reaches of the region. This festival, however, was taken over at the last minute by local business interests with the results being a far more complicated organizational structure than was the case in earlier events. In addition to the executive committee, chaired by the Bank of New Glarus president, other committees included those for finance, music, stage, decoration, reception, advertising, amusements, and parade. The only board not to be made up of businessmen was the "committee on decoration," comprised of local New Glarus women.22

The increased organizational complexity reflected, in turn, a more ambitious multi-day affair that tidily segmented the key celebratory components into neat parcels. Considerably removed from the integration of the secular and religious that traditionally defined festival, this celebration cordoned off the oppositions into separate spheres. Sunday's celebration, for instance, "devoted solely to church purposes," while the following day was "devoted to memorial purposes" and included music, speeches, and a parade. Among the more than thirty automobiles carrying visitors came the entourage of Governor Emanual Philipp. The newly elected governor, a second generation Swiss-American from Sauk County, became the first non-local dignitary to officially visit and speak at a New Glarus festival. Interspersing Swiss-German with English, the conservative politician praised his kinsmen for their diligence and fortitude in making it on their own^.23

The central event took place early in the day as the crowd proceeded with the formal unveiling of the pioneer monument. Accompanied by the music of two bands and the ringing of church bells, and set against the three flags of the United States, Switzerland, and canton Glarus, the throng gathered at the monument for commemorative speeches. S.A. Schindler, the President of the day, conveyed the hope that "this monument [may] be a new spur to new impulses in the development of this town and enliven anew the spirit of perseverance, of home, of diligence and of faithfulness of their pioneers."24 Rather than merely looking backward, organizers hoped that the monument would also propel the community forward by suggesting the central messages of the migration story to the festival-goers.

For all the enthusiasm surrounding the monument's dedication, organizers had a difficult time drumming up the support necessary for its construction. Village President T.C. Hefty submitted his halfhearted approval that "the people of New Glarus and surroundings have awakened in a measure at least, to a sense of appreciation and acknowledgment [to build] this beautiful monument." Summoning the audience to emulate the virtues of the pioneers, the monument reminded the crowd, in concrete form, the messages implicit in the parade earlier that day: to recall both the distance and the connection of today's generation to the pioneers.

The foreign once again blended with the American as the Monroe Band played a somber "Star Spangled Banner" to accompany the official unveiling of the monument. The monument, unveiled at the critical site of the first log cabin and amid the graves of the earliest settlers, took the form of a male Swiss immigrant. Looking southward, the direction of the immigration trek, his pose may well be considered "stern and humble" as he bears little resemblance to either the classical sculpture or the heroic forms traditionally associated with war.25 The monument, a memorial to the immigration of ordinary people into Wisconsin's rugged driftless region, takes the representational form of an ordinary immigrant. Dressed in everyday work clothes the granite pioneer stands above the pedestal, on which the names of the 25 original colony's male family heads are inscribed.

The very ordinariness of the pioneer monument is indicative of a trend common to commemorations after the Civil War. Vernacular memory, unregulated by governmental and economic elites, encouraged the construction of memorials of ordinary people and ways of life. No longer were such structures dedicated solely to the memory of an individual leader or an abstract virtue, but the collective memory of "prototypical Americans" in large and small communities were given concrete form. In the ethnic mosaic of the late-19th and early-20th century Midwest, the iconography of the pioneer achieved dominance.26

The final day of the commemoration severed the link to the past even further as it brought in such popular diversions as baseball games, water fights, races, sports, and dances." To these events were added new attractions such as a merry-go-round, a "moving pictures" show, and lunch stands at various places in the village. Perhaps the most "traditional" event of the day was the customary sigh of relief that "despite the fact that all nationalities attended and that drinks flowed in abundance, the festival took place with considerable calm and without incidence."27

At more than any other commemorative festival, the tension between a belief in the virtues of progress, the values of pioneer ancestors, and the memory of a distant homeland came into bold relief in 1915. Numerous elements of the festival's form signified an increasingly modern celebratory structure: the arrival of dignitaries outside the community including the State's governor; the systematic segmentation of the religious from the purely secular events; the intrusion of commercial amusements; and the complicated nature of the monument's fund raising. And yet, upon further reading, each of these elements could be taken as a means to reinforce nostalgia for the past. For instance, the choice of Governor Philipp as the keynote speaker could be seen not only as an attempt to reach out to state institutions, but also as a way to express pride in being Swiss. Likewise, the inclusion of leisure activities did not come at the expense of either religious ceremonies or somber homages to the pioneers, but rather as additions to the "serious" events.

The three-day festival's content, similarly, reflected this ambiguity. Speeches and songs alternated between admiration for the struggles of the earliest pioneers and awe at the distance that today's generation has put between them and the colonists of 1845. This ambivalence took a concrete shape as well. Standing in front of the modern and emphatically non-Swiss looking church, the pioneer monument would seem to be signaling a farewell to the settlement age. The large brick church, "an imposing edifice," replaced the old church that had been built by the early settlers. Built by a local Swiss immigrant and with its plastered walls and "queer belfry," the old church was the only structure in town that bore a distinctive "old world" stamp and its demolition took from the community its "only piece of Swiss architecture." By contrast, the large, Anglo-owned construction firm from nearby Janesville built the new church -- shown here in the 1930s -- at a cost of 16,000 with no regard for Swiss building traditions.28

The timing of the memorial's construction -- and, more generally, the event in sum coincided with the inevitable loss of what the monument was intended to signify. The community was coming to age and, while it was to maintain relative social and cultural isolation for another two decades, the living memory of the immigration was near its end. The evening before the celebration, Henry Trumpy, the oldest of the remaining pioneers, died, giving somber pause to the unveiling.29 As David Lowenthal correctly notes, "the memorial act implies termination. We seldom erect monuments to ongoing events or to people still alive."30 The monument served to anchor collective remembering in a condensed, tangible, and fixed site -- properties at odds with the ever changing, and intangible nature of public memory. As it turned the pioneer into concrete, the monument ossified the memory of emigration. It was indicative of a general anxiety in the early 20th century about memory, and in particular of its loss in ethnic place.31

Importantly, the ambiguities experienced in each festival were being felt at the level of everyday life in the realm of social and economic relations. These tensions, in turn, greatly influenced the rhetorical strategies employed throughout the festivals. Here, I wish to more closely examine the "fields of meaning" that furnish the material context for such a complex series of festival displays. Each gave rise to the apparent "confusion of the foreign and American" at the community's commemorations. The rapid economic transformation that turned the New Glarus area into the most prosperous agricultural region of the state provided the first "field of meaning," while the second was found in the village's social insularity, in its role as an anti-modern retreat from these changes.

More so than virtually any other community in the State at the time, Swiss farmers in the region surrounding New Glarus had ample reason to feel pride in their economic success. Data gleaned form Joseph Schafer's monumental work on agricultural production in turn-of-the-century Wisconsin show the material side to the community's rhetoric of progress. In 1880, farmers in the township of New Glarus performed ably, but not exceptionally, achieving a middle rank among towns in the southern portion of the state. However, twenty-five years later in 1905, the district catapulted to first place in wealth and productivity. And, by 1920 the gap between New Glarus township and the rest of the state widened at a rate that the otherwise staid Schafer enthusiastically called "little less than thrilling".32

This tremendous surge in wealth and productivity can be attributed to the coming of the "industrial revolution of dairying" to the region, and to New Glarus township in particular. The organization of dairy associations and boards of trade, combined with Wisconsin's overall improved economic-geographic position in a national and global market, as well as improved transportation facilities at the local level contributed to the capitalist transformation of the countryside. The critical element of this rural industrialization, however, was the factory system of making cheese, an innovation that Frederick Merk once called Wisconsin's equivalent of the cotton gin in the south and the reaper in the western wheat states.33

Although women had been making cheese for local consumption since the earliest days of the settlement, it was only with the introduction of the cheese factory (and the attendant decline of wheat growing) after the Civil War that large scale dairying fueled the region's economic engine. This significant shift -- from household to factory production -- reorganized the countryside with profound effects, foremost being increased and continuous milk production. So thick was the distribution of cheese factories in New Glarus that, by its peak in 1905, every crossroad of the township buzzed with the daily deliveries of milk to one of its 22 factories.34

Yet, as quickly as the cheese factory system came to the farmers of the immediate New Glarus region, so did it depart. Change came rapidly and completely. Green County continued to lead the way in production of foreign-type cheese for decades to come, but the site of the original cheese factories turned its attention to the even more remunerative enterprise of supplying milk for condenseries. The Swiss-owned Helvetia Milk Condensing Company from Highland, Illinois, chose New Glarus as the site of its new plant in 1910. The condensing plant -- brought to New Glarus through the ethnic ties fostered during festival times -- spurred even greater changes in the countryside as larger and more evenly timed paychecks together with increased milk production accompanied the ultimate demise of the local cheese factory system.35

While the New Glarus countryside was modernizing at stunning speeds, social change in the village advanced at a considerably slower rate, the period's second "field of meaning." True, villagers could point to improved sidewalks, a large, modern church building, and an English-language newspaper as evidence of its progress. But, on a deeper level, social relations changed more slowly.

Interactions between the Swiss and their neighbors proceeded at a snail's pace, due, in no small part, to the village's well-deserved reputation for clannishness. From the earliest accounts of the village until its centennial celebration after the Second World War, New Glarus maintained critical barriers to outsiders. Salesmen as late as the 1950s, for instance, stood little chance of doing any business with New Glarus merchants unless he spoke perfect Schwyzerdütsch, or Swiss-German.

Even more telling are rates of intermarriage between Swiss and non-Swiss. Data from the marriage records of the Swiss Reformed Church reveal that a Milwaukee reporter in 1905 was quite correct in his generalization that "there is little intermarriage of nationalities" in the Swiss-dominated region, a trend that was to persist for another fifty years. Indeed, nearly 90 percent of all marriages in the community for the hundred year period from 1851 until 1950 took place between partners of Swiss descent, thus reinforcing their tight ethnic boundaries.36

In conclusion, on the eve of America's entry into the Great War, New Glarus had established itself as the ethnic commemorative headquarters for the surrounding region. Swiss-Americans, whether born into the community or having arrived via a subsequent migration, flocked to the small, central place village for special commemorative events every ten years. The community welcomed its role as the "central point of gathering on all holidays and festivals" by creating increasingly complex festival organizations designed to mediate between diverse interests. Symbols of the homeland, the pioneer, and progress -- at once contradictory and complementary -- spoke to the community's fundamental themes of existence. Most importantly, New Glarus solidified its position as the place of memory and commemoration by providing an intangible, but valuable asset that was rapidly disappearing in the countryside around them: tradition.

That asset was maintained not by monetary concerns, but by the internal conflicts of the community itself, by its competing "fields of meaning." The small village, the site of the original settlement, became a sort of collective hometown for the modernizing farmers in its hinterland, as well as even less traditional kinsmen who departed the region altogether. The place, in essence, bound together the increasingly modern, and far-flung community through the performance of festival time and space. In their use of heartfelt historical orations, in their creation ceremonial landscapes and a historical monument, and by developing parades and performative events such as tableaux and the mock Landsgemeinde, the turn of the century commemorations bore considerable resemblance in form to the civic celebrations occurring across the country. Their content, likewise, increasing pointed toward the growing tension between progressivism and anti-modernism found in the more complex historical pageants of urban areas.37 The commemorations effectively reminded the ever more distant third generation of poverty's virtues, while reveling in the dizzying thrill of progress.

This paper is derived, with modifications, from chapter two in my Heritage on Stage: The Invention of Ethnic Place in America's Little Switzerland (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). I would like to thank Joseph Salmons for the kind invitation to participate in the Max Kade Institute's "Defining Tensions" Conference.

1. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). See also Maurice Halbwachs, The Social Frameworks of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 3-14.
2. My perspective on ethnicity and the importance of festivals and commemorations in the ever recursive creation and sustenance of that identity, is deeply indebted to Kathleen Neils Conzen, David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, Rudolph J. Vecoli, "The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.," Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1992): 3-41.
3. For an excellent case study of an urban group, see April Schultz, Ethnicity on Parade: Inventing the Norwegian American through Celebration (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
4. "Lands and Peoples: Swiss at New-Glarus," Our Times: A Weekly Journal of Current Events, October 21, 1905, 123-124.
5. Don Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15-16.
6. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Deborah A. Kapchan, "Performance," Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995): 479. I am grateful to Jack Kugelmass for this insight.
7. Victor Turner, "Introduction," in Victor Turner, ed., Celebrations: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 18.
8. "Das 60 jährige Jubiläumsfest ein grosser Erfolg!," Der Deutsch Schweizer Courier, August 22, 1905; "Swiss Hold Odd Celebration," Milwaukee Sentinel, August 17, 1905; "The Swiss Festival at New Glarus," Milwaukee Free Press, August 20, 1905; "New Glarus Celebrates," Madison Democrat, August 19, 1905;"Immense Crowd at New Glarus: Biggest Event in the History of Green County's Swiss Metropolis," Monroe Daily Journal, August 17, 1905; and "Big Crowd at New Glarus," Monroe Evening Times, August 16, 1905. The format of the day's events is recounted in a broadside from Der Deutsch Schweizer Courier, July 25, 1905, Documents Boxes, NGHSA.
9 . Benjamin R. Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 10-11.
10. Deutsch-Schweizer Courier, August 22, 1905; For an account of the Schwanden Landsgemeinde that sent nearly 200 emigrants to Wisconsin, see: Matthias Dürst, "Matthias Dürst's Travel Diary," in New Glarus 1845-1970: The Making of a Swiss American Town, ed. Leo Schelbert (Glarus, Switzerland: Kommissionsverlag Tschudi, 1970), 20-150; and John Luchsinger, "The Planting of the Swiss Colony at New Glarus, Wis.," Wisconsin Historical Collections 12 (1892):381-382.
11. Milwaukee Free Press, August 20, 1905; and Deutsch-Schweizer Courier, August 22, 1905 .
12. Milwaukee Free Press, August 20, 1905; Deutsch-Schweizer Courier, August 22, 1905; Monroe Evening Times, August 16, 1905. On the importance of limburger cheese to the region, see Glenn T. Trewartha, "The Green County, Wisconsin, Foreign Cheese Industry," Economic Geography 2 (1926): 298-308; J.M. Emery, "The Swiss Cheese Industry in Wisconsin," Wisconsin Magazine of History 10 (1926-1927): 42-52; Emery A. Odell, Swiss Cheese Industry (Monroe: Monroe Evening Times, 1936); Emery A. Odell, Eighty Years of Swiss Cheese in Green County (Monroe: Monroe Evening Times, 1949); and Gordon R. Lewthwaite, "Midwestern Swiss Migrants and Foreign Cheese," Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 34 (1972): 41-60.
13 . Broadside, July 25, 1905, Documents Box, NGHSA; Deutsch-Schweizer Courier, August 22, 1905; and Madison Democrat, August 19, 1905.
14. For a discussion of the tableaux's popularity in the United States, see David Glassberg's outstanding work, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 16-20.
15. Georg Meyer, The German-American: Program Dedicated to the Celebration of German-American Day (Milwaukee: Hake and Stern, 1890).
16. Milwaukee Free Press, August 20, 1905; and Monroe Daily Journal, August 17, 1905.
17. Dr. Geo. Seiler, "Nachklänge zum Koloniefest, ein Gruss den alten Grauen!," Der Deutsch Schweizer Courier, August 29, 1905. Reporter from the Madison Democrat, August 19, 1905.
18 . Luchsinger, quoted in Madison Democrat, August 19, 1905. Emphasis added.
19. For three relevant treatments of anti-modernism as it impinged on events such as the New Glarus 60th Anniversary, see T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens, 1994); and Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, 35-44.
20 As if to maintain further the authenticity of the Swiss Landsgemeinde, there is no evidence that women were permitted to take part in the commemorative ceremony. Women in Switzerland, of course, were only granted the right to vote on the federal level in 1971, with even more resistance at the local level that, in one canton, persists today. Kenneth D. McRae, Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies: Switzerland (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1983), 99-100.
21. Richard Bauman, "Performance," in Richard Bauman, ed., Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centered Handbook (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 41-49.
22 . "Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Settlement of New Glarus," New Glarus Post, July 9, 1915; and "Coloniefest mit Erfolg durchgeführt," Der Deutsch Schweizerische Courier, August 17, 1915.
23. New Glarus Post, August 20, 1915.
24. New Glarus Post, August 20, 1915; and Der Deutsch Schweizerische Courier, August 17, 1915. Emphasis added.
25. On the use of a variety of sculptural forms for memorials, see the excellent work by James Young on the commemoration of the Holocaust: James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
26. David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 321-324; David Lowenthal, "Pioneer Museums," in Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 115-127; Barry Schwartz, "The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory," Social Forces 61 (1982): 374-402; and Bodnar, Remaking America, 28-35.
27. Der Deutsch Schweizerische Courier, August 17, 1915: "Trotzdem fast alle Nationen vertreten, und Getränke im Ueberfluß vorhalnden ware, verlief das Fest sehr ruhig und ohne Störungen." Two months later the community would not be so lucky. In late October of that year a group of 14 "Russian Pollocks," working on a paving project, got into a skirmish with local Swiss men, resulting in the death of one of the "Pollock" street workers. The non-Swiss work gang was removed from town the next day. "Shooting Fray Ends in Possible Fatality," New Glarus Post, October 22, 1915.
28. Madison Democrat, August 19, 1905; and Milwaukee Free Press, August 20, 1905. Walter Stuckey, The Hundredth Anniversary of the Swiss Evangelical and Reformed Church, New Glarus, Wisconsin (New Glarus, n.p., 1950).
29. Der Deutsch Schweizerische Courier, August 17, 1915
30. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 323.
31. For an excellent case study of Civil War monuments, many of which were built at roughly this same period and similar in both iconography and their role in public memory, see Kirk Savage, "The Politics of Memory: Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument," in Commemorations: The Politics of Public Memory, ed. John Gillis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 127-149. Also of importance is Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations 26 (1989): 7-25.
32. Data calculated from Wisconsin Domesday Book, Town Studies, vol. 1 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1924), 152-153, 155, 156. Quote from page 15.
33. Eric E. Lampard, The Rise of the Dairy Industry in Wisconsin: A Study in Agricultural Change, 1820-1920 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1963), 91-120; Frederick Merk, Economic History of Wisconsin During the Civil War Decade (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1916), 28; and Trewartha, "Foreign Cheese Industry." For a series of provocative essays on rural America's capitalist transformation, see: Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays on the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Anne Kelly Knowles explores these changes in the context of ethnicity in her Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio's Industrial Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
34 . John Luchsinger, "Report" in Transactions of the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1882-1883), 274. John Luchsinger, "The History of a Great Industry," Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (1899), 226-230. In his memoirs, John Luchsinger recalled that many of the early cheese makers, like himself, first learned the skill from his mother. John Luchsinger, "What America Has Meant to Me," Typeset Manuscript, n.d., Subject Files, NGHSA.
35. Lampard, Dairy Industry in Wisconsin, 236-241, 286-288. For the statement, see "Wrecking Crews Begin Pet Milk Demolition," New Glarus Post, n.d.(probably October 1973), Clippings Scrapbooks, NGHSA.
36. Derived and calculated from data in Dieter Brunnschweiler, New Glarus: Gründung, Entwicklung und heutiger Zustand einer Schweizerkolonie im Amerikanischen Mittlewesten (Zürich: Fluntern, 1954), 94-95. It is a common joke among New Glarners that, by eventually marrying into the community, "the Norwegians saved us from ourselves." Significantly, the date given for this inter-ethnic rescue is the early 1950s. The generalization about the unusually low rates of Swiss inter-marriage is based upon comparisons with other groups analyzed in the data-rich study by Richard M. Bernard: The Melting Pot and the Altar: Marital Assimilation in Early Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). See especially chapter two.
37. Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry, esp. chapters one and two.