How German Is American?
SETTLING IN AMERICA
According to the U.S. Census conducted in 2000, 42.8 million
Americans identified themselves as being of German
ancestry, representing 15.2% of the total U.S. population.
By comparison, the next largest group, Irish Americans, comprised
10.8% of the population, while African Americans and Americans of
English background each accounted for just under 9%. It is estimated
that between 1800 and the present over seven million German-speakers
emigrated to the U.S., the majority of whom arrived
between about 1840 and 1914, with the peak period coming in the
early 1880s. In the nineteenth century many of these immigrants settled
in the states of the Upper Midwest, an area known to this day as
America’s “German Belt.”
The map reproduced here shows the distribution
of European-born German-speakers (“natives of the Germanic
nations”), based on the 1890 census. The different shades of brown
indicate varying densities of persons born in German-speaking territories:
the darkest color shows 20 individuals or more per square mile,
the lightest color shows fewer than 1/2 per square mile, and no color
at all shows a total aggregate population of fewer than two persons
per square mile. The map does not reveal information about the proportion
of Germans vis-à-vis other groups, and a greater density of
Germans in some areas may be largely a sign of a greater total population
density there. Nevertheless, what one understands at a glance
is that German-born immigrants were concentrated in cities as well as
in the countryside from New York City in the east to Minnesota in the
west and from the Great Lakes region south to the Ohio River. But
there were also other German areas, including parts of Texas,
California, and the state of Washington. At this time a number of
centers of German-speaking culture emerged as immigrants established German schools, churches, theaters, and publishing houses.
Today, over a century after the census from which this demographic
information was taken and therefore approximately four generations
later, the descendants of these immigrants have become less likely to
identify with their German heritage. This is reflected in a marked
increase in the number of respondents who reported their ancestry
in the latest census as simply “American”: in 2000 “American
Americans” accounted for 7.2% of the total population, a 63%
increase over 1990. While this trend may well be evidence of the “submergence” of German-American identity referred to above,
twice as many Americans still do identify with their German roots.
What motivated these seven million German-speakers to
come to America? Historians have identified a complex
mix of factors underlying immigration generally, largely
economic ones. On the one hand, socioeconomic distress in many
areas of German-speaking Central Europe periodically “pushed”
migrants westward; on the other, the “pull” of new opportunities in
America was considerable. Most immigrants were attracted by the
promise of financial security in the form of sufficient property that
one could legally own and pass on to one’s descendants. In the nineteenth
century this meant one thing above all else for rural dwellers, including the majority of the German-speaking immigrants: land.
According to traditional accounts of immigration in places like rural Wisconsin, German settlers were drawn to landscapes that
resembled the areas they came from in Europe, especially heavily
wooded ones, and were more fastidious and ultimately successful
stewards of the land than the Yankees. The symbolic and practical
importance of the forest in German culture, especially during the
nineteenth century, did much to reinforce this romantic view of
German settlers. Americans of older stock were seen as more eager to
make a quick buck rather than invest large amounts of time and
resources in their land; this stereotype endures to the present in
images of enterprising but somewhat rootless Americans. However, recent scholarship
on nineteenth-century immigration has
shown that local practical realities were
more important in guiding Germans to
choose where to settle than any innate cultural
inclinations. To be sure, some evidence
does support the view that German settlers valued a varied landscape
and were generally less likely to move once they had established
themselves in a particular location. And certainly popular narratives
about Germans and their closeness to their land endure.
Image courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society, WHi-24505.
The romance of the American frontier is illustrated by the log-shaped
card above whose purpose was to attract Germans to northern
Wisconsin. During the nineteenth century the Federal Land Grant
Program played a major role in promoting the expansion of the
American nation. It accomplished this in part by granting land to railroad
companies that promised to build along proposed routes;
these, in turn, raised funds for railroad construction by selling some
of the land. The Wisconsin Central Railroad, incorporated in 1877,
hired W. H. Bartell beginning in the 1870s to serve as its land agent;
by 1881 he is said to have sold as much as 10,000 acres. Bartell
engaged the Milwaukee lawyer K. K. Kennan to serve as his repre-
sentative in Switzerland, and published brochures in German and
English praising the advantages of Wisconsin land. It is important to
note that virtually every American frontier state had agents in Europe
to promote emigration, and many states also had offices in New York
to assist new arrivals.
The two-sided log-shaped card is one of Bartell’s advertisements;
on it one can read in German that “our German friends would do
very well to send this card to one of their acquaintances in Europe
and mention to them [sic] that they could receive valuable information
about the state of Wisconsin free of charge by sending their
address to K. K. Kennan in Basel.” The English text, apparently for
those already living in the U.S., states that one could get information
by writing to the land commissioner of the Wisconsin Central
Railroad in Milwaukee. The image on the front of the card would
seem to speak to Germans bound culturally and practically to forested
landscapes: looking at a scene framed by a sturdy oak log, we view
a homestead on recently cleared, though by no means denuded,
land. The cow grazing in a pasture hints that dairy products and
meat will be available. In the background the undisturbed woodland
endures, demarcated by a fence, an important New World way of
indicating property boundaries. Front and center we are drawn to
the classic American log cabin, whose origins, interestingly, may be
traced back to Northern and Central Europe.
During the nineteenth century, German-speaking immigrants
were usually not the first people of European descent to settle
on the American frontier. In the case of Wisconsin, Germans
were preceded by the French and the Yankees. This meant that
German-speakers were less likely to be directly involved in the physical
and cultural displacement of the continent’s original inhabitants, the
Native Americans. Nevertheless, one intriguing and very much unfinished
chapter in the long history of European-American relations deals
with the contacts, real and imagined, between Germans and Indians.
David Zeisberger (1721–1808), a native of German-speaking
Moravia, spent his life as a missionary of the Moravian (Herrnhuter)
Church, working mainly in Pennsylvania and Ohio with various
Indian groups. His extensive writings on Native cultures and languages,
several of which he spoke fluently, remain invaluable sources
of information for scholars today. The reproduction on this page
shows Zeisberger, as portrayed in 1862 by the Alsatian-American
immigrant artist, Christian Schussele (1824–1879).
Image courtesy of the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA, <www.moravianarchives.org>.
In part because of contacts between German-speaking immigrants
and Native Americans, Germans back home developed a fascination
with Indians that has continued unabated to the present. In the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, hundreds of fictionalized treatments
of American Indians appeared in Germany, the best known of which
are the novels of Karl May (1842–1912), whose only visit to
America—in 1908—came after he had completed most of his works.
Today, there are an estimated 200 “Indian clubs” in Germany whose
members don feathers and war paint and “recreate” traditional Native ceremonies. An important corrective to these activities is the Native
American Association of Germany, e.V., founded in Kaiserslautern in
1994 by Lindbergh Namingha, a former U.S. serviceman and member
of the Hopi Tribe. Back in the U.S., the novelist Louise Erdrich (b.
1954), whose mother is Ojibwa Indian and father German-American,
has thematized German-Indian cultural contact to great acclaim.
Next: Building Communities
[This booklet is available in PDF format:
http://mki.wisc.edu/HGIA/HGIA_booklet.pdf ]
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