CHAPTER III

... the lonely and the lovely BrideWhom we have wedded, but have never won.

The truth of this shows in the way the wandering Irish still shun the lands under the British crown. Most of the inviting frontier left on our continent lies in western Canada. Already the opportunities there have induced land-hungry Americans to renounce their flag at the rate of a hundred thousand in a single year. Yet the resentful Irish turn to the narrower opportunities of what they regard as their land of emancipation.During a recent nine-year period, while the English and the Scotch emigrants preferred Canada to "the States," eleven times as many Irish sought admission in our ports as were admitted to Canada, although Canada's systematic campaign for immigrants is carried on alike in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Very likely the Irish exodus is a closed chapter of history. Ireland's population has been shrinking for sixty years, and she has now fewer inhabitants than the State of Ohio. People are leaving the land of heather twice as fast as they are abandoning the land of the shamrock. The early marriage and blind prolificacy that had overpopulated the land until half the people lived on potatoes, and two-fifths dwelt in one-room mud cabins, are gone forever, and Ireland has now one of the lowest birth-rates in Europe. Gradually the people are again coming to own the ground under their feet; native industries and native arts are reviving, and a wonderful rural coöperative movement is in full swing. The long night of misgovernment, ignorance, and superfecundity seems over, the star of home rule is high, and the day may soon come when these home-loving people will not need to seek their bread under strange skies.

During its earlier period, Irish immigration brought in a desirable class, which assimilated readily. Later, the enormous assisted immigration that followed the famine of 1846-48 brought in many of an inferior type, who huddled helplesslyin the poorer quarters of our cities and became men of the spade and the hod. After the crisis was past, there again came a type that was superior to those who remained behind. Of course the acquiescent property-owning class never emigrated, and those rising in trade or in the professions rarely came unless they had fallen into trouble through their patriotism. But of the common people there is evidence that the more capable part leaked away to America. The Earl of Dunraven testifies:

Those who have remained have, for the most part, been the least physically fit, the most mentally deficient, and those who correspond to the lowest industrial standard.... For half a century and more the best equipped, mentally and physically, of the population have been leaving Ireland. The survival of the unfittest has been the law, and the inevitable result, deterioration of the race, statistics abundantly prove.

Owing to this exodus of the young and energetic, Ireland has become the country of old men and old women. An eighth of her people are more than sixty-five years old as against an eleventh in England. In half a century the proportion of lunatics and idiots in the population of Ireland rose from one in 657 to one in 178. In 1906 the inspector of lunatics reported:

The emigration of the strong and healthy members of the community not alone increases the ratio of the insane who are left behind to the general population, but also lowers the general standard of mental andbodily health by eliminating many of the members of the community who are best fitted to survive and propagate the race.

He may not have known that, compared with the rest of our immigrants, the Irish have twice their share of insanity. The commissioners of national education, after pointing with pride to half a century's great reduction of illiteracy, add:

The change for the better is remarkable when it is remembered that it was the younger and better educated who emigrated ... during this period, while the majority of the illiterate were persons who were too old to leave their homes.

A close study of two hundred workingmen's families in New York City showed the average German family thirty dollars ahead at the end of the year while the average Irish family of about the same income had spent ten dollars more than it had earned. Charity visitors know that the Irish are often as open-handed and improvident as the Bedouins. A Catholic educator accounts for the scarcity of Irish millionaires by declaring that his people are too generous to accumulate great fortunes. They are free givers, and no people are more ready to take into the family the orphans of their relatives. In a county of mixed nationalities there will be more mortgages and stale debts against Irish farmers than against any others. In a well-paid class ofworkers there will be more renters and fewer home-owners among the Irish than among any other nationality of equal pay. Less habitually than others do the Irish make systematic provision for old age. They depend on the earnings of their children, who, indeed, are many and loyal enough. But if the children die early or scatter, the day-laborer must often eat the bread of charity. A decade ago the Irish were found to be relatively thrice as numerous in our almshouses as other non-native elements. In the Northeast, where they formed a quarter of the foreign-born population, they furnished three-fifths of the paupers. In Massachusetts, and in Boston as well, they were four times as common in the almshouses as out of them, although, to be sure, a part of this bad showing is due to more of them being aged. Nor do their children provide much better for the future. In Boston, those of Irish parentage produce two and one-half times their quota of paupers. In both first and second generations the frugal and fore-looking Germans there have less than a tenth of the pauperism of the Irish, while in 1910 in the country at large the tendency of the Irish toward the almshouse was nearly three times that of the Germans. Dr. Bushee, who has investigated the conditions in Boston, says:

It cannot be said that the ordinary Irishman is of a provident disposition; he lives in the present and worries comparatively little about the future. He is not extravagant in any particular way, but is wastefulin every way; it is his nature to drift when he ought to plan and economize. This disposition, combined with an ever-present tendency to drink too much, is liable to result in insecure employment and a small income. And, to make matters worse, in families of this kind children are born with reckless regularity.

In extenuation, let it not be forgotten that at home the earlier Irish immigrants had lived under perhaps a more demoralizing social condition than that from which any other of our immigrants have come. Fleeing from plague and starvation, great numbers were dumped at our ports with no means of getting out upon the land. What was there for them to do but to rush their labor into the nearest market and huddle sociably together in wretched slums, where, despite their sturdy physique, they fell an easy prey to sickness and died off twice as fast as they should? They lived as poorly as do the Russian Jews when first they come; but, being a green country-folk, they understood less than do the town-bred Jews how to withstand the noxious influences of cities and slums.

Certainly, along with their courage and loyalty, the Irish did not bring the economic virtues. Straight from the hoe they came, without even the thrift of the farmer who owns the land he tills. Many of them were no better fitted to succeed in the modern competitive order than their ancestors of the septs in the days of Strongbow. In value-sense and foresight, how far they stand behind Scot, Fleming, or Yankee! In the acquisitive mêlée most of them are as children compared withthe Greek or the Semite. An observant settlement worker has said:

The Irish are apt to make their occupation a secondary matter. They remain idle if no man hires them; but not so the Jew. If he can get no regular employment, it is possible to gather rags and junk and sell them.... If employed under a hard master, he still works on under conditions that would drive the Irishman to drink and the American to suicide until finally he sees an opportunity to improve his condition.

We must not forget that Irish development had been forcibly arrested by the selfish policy of their conquerors. In the latter part of the seventeenth century the English Parliament, at the behest of English graziers and farmers, put an end to Ireland's cattle-trade to England, then to her exportation of provisions to the colonies. Afterward came export duties on Irish woolens, and, later, complete prohibition of the exportation of woolens to foreign countries. "Cotton, glass, hats, iron manufactures, sugar refining—whatever business Ireland turned her hand to, and always with success—was in turn restricted." The result was that the natural capacity of the people was repressed, the growth of industrial habits was checked, and the country was held down to simple agriculture under a blighting system of absentee landlordism. Still, we cannot overlook the success of the Scottish Lowlanders in Ulster under the same strangling discriminations, nor forget that the 3500 German Protestant refugeeswho were settled in Munster in 1709 prospered as did their brother refugees in Pennsylvania, and became in time much wealthier than their Celtic neighbors.

A thousand years ago an Irish scholar, teaching at Liège, acknowledged his love for the cup in his invocation to the Muses, and addressed a poem to a friend who, being the possessor of a great vineyard, understood "how to awaken genius through the inspiration of the heavenly dew."

It is this same "heavenly dew"—whose Erse nameusquebaugh, we have pronounced "whisky"—that, more than anything else, has held back the Irish in America. The Irishman is no more a craver of alcohol than other men, but his sociability betrays him to that beverage which is the seal of good fellowship. He does not sit down alone with a bottle, as the Scandinavian will do, nor get his friends round a table and quafflager, as the German does. No "Dutch treat" for him. He drinks spirits in public, and, after a dram or two, his convivial nature requires that every stranger in the room shall seal friendship in a glass with him. His temperament, too, makes liquor a snare to him. Where another drinker becomes mellow or silent or sodden, the Celt becomes quarrelsome and foolish.

Twenty years ago an analysis of more than seven thousand cases of destitution in our cities showed that drink was twice as frequent a causeof poverty among the Irish cases as among the Germans, and occurred half again as often among them as among the native American cases. Among many thousands of recent applications for charity, "intemperance of the bread-winner" crops out as a cause of destitution in one case out of twelve among old-strain Americans; but it taints one case out of seven among the Irish and one case out of six among the Irish of the second generation. In the charity hospitals of New York alcoholism is responsible for more than a fifth of all the cases. Drink is the root of the trouble in a quarter of the native Americans treated, in a third of the Irish patients, and in two-fifths of the cases among the native-born of Irish fathers. Contrast this painful showing with the fact that one Italian patient out of sixty, one Magyar patient out of seventy, one Polish patient out of eighty, and one Hebrew patient out of one hundred is in the hospital on account of drink!

In the quality of their crimes our immigrants differ more from one another than they do in complexion or in the color of their eyes. The Irishman's love of fighting has made Donnybrook Fair a byword; yet it is a fact that personal violence is six or seven times as often the cause of confinement for Italian, Magyar, or Finnish prisoners in our penitentiaries as for the Irish. Patrick may be quarrelsome, but he fights with his hands, and in his cups he is not homicidal,like the South Italian, or ferocious, like the Finn. Three-fifths of the Hebrew convicts are confined for gainful offenses, but only one-fifth of the Irish. Among a score or more of nationalities, the Irish stand nearly at the foot of the list in the commission of larceny, burglary, forgery, fraud, or homicide. Rape, pandering, and the white-slave traffic are almost unknown among them. What could be more striking than the fact that more than half of the Irish convicts have been sent up for "offenses against public order," such as intoxication and vagrancy! One cannot help feeling that the Celtic offender is a feckless fellow, enemy of himself more than of any one else. It is usually not cupidity nor brutality nor lust that lodges him in prison, but conviviality and weak control of impulses.

It is certain that no immigrant is more loyal to wife and child than the Irishman. Out of nearly ten thousand charity cases in which a wife was the head of the family, the greatest frequency of widowhood and the least frequency of desertion or separation is among the Irish. In only eighteen per cent. of the Irish cases is the husband missing; whereas among the Hebrews, Slovaks, Lithuanians, and Magyars he is missing in from forty to fifty per cent. of the cases. But the sons of Irish, with that ready adaptation to surroundings characteristic of the Celt, desert their wives with just about the same frequency as men of pure American stock; namely, thirty-six per cent., or twice that of their fathers.

Thirty years ago, when the Irish and the Germans in America were nearly equal in number, there were striking contrasts in the place they took in industry. As domestic servants, laborers, mill-hands, miners, quarrymen, stone-cutters, laundry workers, restaurant keepers, railway and street-car employees, officials and employees of government, the Irish were two or three times as numerous as the Germans. On the other hand, as farmers, saloon-keepers, bookkeepers, designers, musicians, inventors, merchants, manufacturers, and physicians, the Germans far outnumbered the Irish. Where artistic skill is required, as in confectionery, cabinet-making, wood-carving, engraving, photography, and jewelry-making; where scientific knowledge is called for, as in brewing, distilling, sugar-refining, and iron manufacture, the Irish were hopelessly beaten by the trained and plodding Germans.

For a while, the bulk of Irish formed a pick-and-shovel caste, claiming exclusive possession of the poorest and least honorable occupations, and mobbing the Chinaman or the negro who intruded into their field. But the record of their children proves that there is nothing in the stock that dooms it forever to serve at the tail-end of a wheelbarrow. Take, for instance, those workers known to the statistician as "Female bread-winners." Of the first generation of Irish, fifty-fourper cent. are servants and waitresses; of the second generation, only sixteen per cent. Whither have these daughters gone? Out of the kitchen into the factory, the store, the office, and the school. In the needle trades they are twice as frequent as Bridget or Nora who came over in the steerage. Five times as often they serve behind the counter, seven times as often they work at the desk as stenographer or bookkeeper, five times as frequently they teach. One native girl out of twelve whose fathers were Irish is a teacher, as against one girl out of nine with American fathers. The Irish girls of the second generation are twice as well represented as the native-born German girls. Evidently it will not be long before they have their full share of school positions. In thirty leading cities eighteen per cent. of the teachers are second-generation Irish; and there are cities where these swift climbers constitute from two-fifths to a half of the teaching force.

'Tonio or Ivan now wields the shovel while Michael's boy escapes competition with him by running nimbly up the ladder of occupations. As compared with their immigrant fathers, the proportion of laborers among the sons of Irishmen is halved, while that of professional men and salesmen is doubled, and that of clerks, copyists, and bookkeepers is trebled. The quota of saloon-keepers remains the same. There is no drift into agriculture or into mercantile pursuits. In the cities the Irish suffer little from the competition of the later immigrants because, thanks to theirpolitical control, they divide among themselves much of the work carried on by the municipality as well as the jobs under the great franchise-holding corporations. So far, the strength of the Irish has been in personal relations. They shine in the forum, in executive work, in public guardianship, and in public transportation, but not in the more monotonous branches of manufacture. In the colleges it has been noted that the students of Irish blood are strong for theology and law, but show little taste for medicine, engineering, or technology.

irishDistribution of Irish and natives of Irish Parentage—1910

Distribution of Irish and natives of Irish Parentage—1910

Among the first thousand men of science in America the Irish are only a fourth as well represented as the Germans, a fifteenth as well as the English and Canadians, and a twentieth as well as the Scotch. This backwardness is in part due to the overhang of bad conditions; and the compilers of the table very properly suggest that "the native-born sons of Irish-born parents may not be inferior in scientific productivity to other classes of the community." The same comment may be made on the fact that of the persons listed in "Who's Who in America," two per cent. were German-born, another two per cent. were English-born, but only one per cent. came from the land of Erin.

No doubt the peaks of Celtic superiority are poetry and eloquence. Their gifts of emotion and imagination give the Irish the key to humanhearts. They are eloquent for the same reason that they are poor technicians and investigators, for the typical Celt sees things not as they really are,but as they are to him.

The Irishman still leans on authority and shows little tendency to think for himself. In philosophy and science he is far behind the head of the procession. Even when well-educated, he thinks within the framework formed by certain conventional ideas. Unlike the educated German or Jew, he rarely ventures to dissect the ideas of parental authority, the position of woman, property, success, competition, individual liberty, etc., that lie at the base of commonplace thought. Here, again, this limitation by sentiment and authority derives doubtless from the social history of the Irish rather than from their blood. They have been engrossed with an old-fashioned problem—that of freeing their country. Meanwhile, the luckier peoples have swept on to ripen their thinking about class relations, industrial organization, and social institutions.

With his Celtic imagination as a magic glass, the Irishman sees into the human heart and learns how to touch its strings. No one can wheedle like an Irish beggar or "blarney" like an Irish ward boss. Not only do the Irish furnish stirring orators, persuasive stump-speakers, moving pleaders, and delightful after-dinner speech-makers, but they give us good salesmen and successfultraveling-men. Then, too, they know how to manage people. The Irish contractor is a great figure in construction work. The Irish mine "boss" or section foreman has the knack of handling men. The Irish politician is an adept in "lining up" voters of other nationalities. More Germans than Irish enlisted in the Union armies, but more of the Irish rose to be officers. In the great corporations Americans control policy and finance, Germans are used in technical work, and Irishmen are found in executive positions. The Irish are well to the fore in organizing labor and in leading athletics. "Of two applicants," says a city school superintendent, "I take the teacher with an Irish name, because she will have less trouble in discipline, and hits it off better with the parents and the neighborhood."

Whatever is in the Irish mind is available on the instant, so that the Irish rarely fail to do themselves justice. They keep their best foot forward, and if they fall, they light on their feet. They succeed as lawyers not only because they can play upon the jury, but because they are quick in thrust and parry. They abound in newspaper offices because their imagination enables them to keep "in touch" with the public mind. The Irishman rarely attains the thorough knowledge of the German physician; but he makes his mark as surgeon, because he is quick to perceive and to decide when the knife discloses a grave, unsuspected condition.

The Irishman accepts the Erse proverb, "Contention is better than loneliness." "His nature goes out to the other fellow all the time," declares a wise priest. The lodge meeting of a Hibernian benevolent association is a revelation of kindness and delicacy of feeling in rough, toil-worn men. A great criminal lawyer tells me that if he has a desperate case to defend, he keeps the cold-blooded Swede off the jury and gets an Irishman on, especially one who has been "in trouble." Bridget becomes attached to the family she serves, and, after she is married, calls again and again "to see how the childher are coming on." Freda, after years of service, will leave you off-hand and never evince the remotest interest in your family. The Irish detest the merit system, for they make politics a matter of friendship and favor. In their willingness to serve a friend they are apt to lose sight of the importance of preparation, fitness and efficiency in the public servant. Hence they warm to a reform movement only when it becomes a fight on law-breakers. Then the Hibernian district attorney goes after the "higher-ups" like a St. George. When the Irish do renounce machine politics, they become broad democrats rather than "good government" men.

Imaginative and sensitive to what others think of him, the Celt is greatly affected by praise and criticism. Unlike the Teuton, he cannot plod patiently toward a distant goal without an appreciative word or glance. He does his best when heis paced, for emulation is his sharpest stimulus. The grand stand has something to do with the Irish bent for athletic contests. Irish school-children love the lime-light, and distinguish themselves better on the platform than in the classroom. Irish teachers with good records in the training-school are less likely than other teachers to improve themselves by private study.

"The Irish are wilder than the rest in their expression of grief," observes the visiting nurse, "but they don't take on for long." The Irishman is less persistent than others in keeping up the premiums on his insurance policy, the payments on his building-and-loan association stock. He is quick to throw up his job or change his place in order to avoid sameness. "My will is strong," I heard a bright-eyed Kathleen say, "but it keeps changing its object; Gunda [her Norwegian friend] issodetermined and fixed in purpose!" There is a proverb, "The Irishman is no good till he is kicked," meaning that he is unstable till his blood is up. Once his fighting spirit is roused, he proves to be a "last ditcher." As a soldier, he is better in a charge than in defense, and if held back, he frets himself to exhaustion.

A professor compares his Celtic students to the game trout, which makes one splendid dash for the fly, but sulks if he misses it. A bishop told me how his prize-man, an Irish youth, sent to Paris to study Hebrew, was amazed at the prodigious industry of his German and Polish chums. "I never knew before," he wrote, "what studyis." A settlement worker comments on the avidity with which night-school pupils in Irish neighborhoods select classes with interesting subjects of instruction, and the rapidity with which they drop off when the "dead grind" begins. Their temperament rebels at close, continuous application. The craftsman of Irish blood is likely to be a little slapdash in method, and he rarely stands near the top of his trade in skill. The Irishman succeeds best in staple farming—all wheat, all cotton, or all beets. With the advent of diversified farming, he is supplanted by the painstaking German, Scandinavian, or Pole. Work requiring close attention to details—like that of the nurseryman, the florist, or the breeder—falls into the hands of a more patient type. In banking and finance, men of a colder blood control.

The word "brilliant" is oftener used for the Irish than for any other aliens among us save the Hebrews. Yet those of Irish blood are far from manning their share of the responsible non-political posts in American society. Their contribution by no means matches that of an equal number of the old American breed. But, in sooth, it is too soon yet to expect the Irish strain to show what it can do. Despite their schooling, the children of the immigrant from Ireland often become infected with the parental slackness, unthrift, and irresponsibility. They in turn communicate some of the heritage to their children; so that we shallhave to wait until the fourth generation before we shall learn how the Hibernian stock compares in value with stocks that have had a happier social history.

IrelandImmigration from Ireland 1821-1910

Immigration from Ireland 1821-1910

More than 5,250,000 people have been contributed to our population by Germany in the last ninety years. Deducting the Poles from eastern Prussia, and counting Germans from Russia, Austria, Bohemia, and eastern Switzerland, we have, no doubt, received more than 7,000,000 whose mother-tongue was the speech of Luther and Goethe. It is probable that German blood has come to be at least a fourth part of the current in the veins of the white people of this country, so that this infusion alone equals the total volume of Spanish and Portuguese blood in South America.

From its rise in the thirties until after our Civil War, the stream of immigrants from Germany fluctuated with religious and political conditions on the other side of the Atlantic rather than with economic conditions on this side. Between 1839 and 1845 numerous Old Lutherans, resenting the attempt of their king to unite the Lutheran and the Reformed faiths, migrated hither from Pomerania and Brandenburg. The political reaction in the German states after the revolution of 1830, and again after the revolution of 1848, brought tens of thousands of liberty-lovers.In 1851, in a book of advice to intending immigrants, Pastor Bogen of Boston set forth as the chief inducement to migrate thefreedomthe Germans would enjoy in America—freedom from oppression and despotism, from privileged orders and monopolies, from intolerable imposts and taxes, from constraint in matters of conscience, from restrictions on settling anywhere in this country of "exhaustless resources."

The political exiles famous as the "Forty-eighters" included many men of unusual attainments and character, who almost at once became leaders of the German-Americans, exercising an influence quite out of proportion to their numbers. These university professors, physicians, journalists, and even aristocrats, aroused many of their fellow-countrymen to feel a pride in German culture, and they left a stamp of political idealism, social radicalism, and religious skepticism which is slow to be effaced.

Thanks to theHausfrauideal for women and to the militarist demand for recruits, the German people has until recently persevered in a truly medieval fecundity. Despite an outflow of 6,500,000 between 1820 and 1893, population has doubled in seventy years and trebled in a hundred. Prince Bülow complains that "the Poles of eastern Prussia multiply like rabbits, while we Germans multiply like hares." The fact is, a generation ago the Germans, too, were multiplying like rabbits. This is the reason why during the seventies and eighties, although political conditionshad much improved, great numbers of farm-laborers, female servants, handicraftsmen, small tradesmen, and other members of the humbler classes, streamed out of crowded Germany in the hope of improving their material condition. The peasant living on black bread and potatoes heard of and longed for the white bread and fleshpots of the American West. Although the overwhelming majority of the 1,500,000 Germans who immigrated during the eighties represented the lower economic strata, they came in with fair schooling, considerable industrial skill, and, on an average, three times as much money as the Slav, Hebrew, or South European shows to-day at Ellis Island.

The German influx dropped sharply as soon as the panic of 1893 broke out, and when, after four and a half years of economic submergence, this country struggled to the surface, the tide of Teutons was not ready to flow again. America's free land was gone, and ruder peoples, with lower standards of living, were crowding into her labor markets. In the meantime, Germany's extraordinary rise as a manufacturing country, her successes in foreign trade, and her wonderful system of protection and insurance for her labor population, had made her sons and daughters loath to migrate oversea. The immigration from Germany into the United States is virtually a closed chapter, and has been so for twenty years. Such Germans as now arrive hail chiefly from Austria and Russia.

No other foreign element is so generally distributed over the United States as the Germans. A third of them are between Boston and Pittsburgh, fifty-five per cent. live between Pittsburgh and Denver, seven per cent. are in the South, and five per cent. are in the far West.

In the South they are more numerous than any other non-native element. They predominate, except in New England, where the Irish abound; in States along the northern border, into which filter many Canadians; in the Dakotas, where the Scandinavians lead; in the Mormon States, with their many converts from England; and in Louisiana and Florida, with their Italians and Cubans. In Milwaukee nearly half the people are of German parentage, in Cincinnati a quarter, in St. Louis a fifth. A third of the Germans are in the rural districts, whereas all but a sixth of the Irish are in cities. Whether one considers their distribution among the States, their partition between city and country, or their dispersion among the callings, the Germans will be found to be the most pervasive element so far added to our people.

Unlike the Irish immigrants, the Germans brought a language, literature, and social customs of their own; so that, although when scattered they Americanized with great rapidity, wherever they were strong enough to maintain churches andschools in their own tongue they were slow to take the American stamp. For the sake of their belovedDeutschtum, about the middle of the last century the promoters of this migration dreamed of creating in the West a German state where Germans should hold sway and hand down their culture in all its purity. Missouri, Illinois, Texas, and later Wisconsin, seemed to hold out such a hope. But the immigrants would not remain massed, the Yankees pushed in, and "Little Germany" never found a place on the map.

After 1870 the Teutonic overflow was prompted by economic motives, and such a migration shows little persistence in flying the flag of its national culture. Numbers came, little instructed, or else bringing a knowledge of Old Testament worthies rather than of German poets, musicians, and artists. In the words of a German-American, Knortz: "Nine-tenths of all German immigrants come from humble circumstances and have had only an indifferent schooling. Whoever, therefore, expects pride in their German descent from these people, who owe everything to their new country and nothing to their fatherland, simply expects too much."

The "Forty-eighters" had given a great stimulus to all German forms of life,—schools, press, stage, festivals, choral societies, and gymnastic societies,—but since the passing of these leaders and the subsidence of the Teutonic freshet,Deutschtumhas been on the wane. German newspapers are disappearing, German-Americanbooks and journals become fewer, German book stores are failing, German theaters are closing, and the surviving German private schools may be counted on the fingers. Probably not more than ten per cent. of the children of German parentage hear anything but English spoken at home. Champions ofDeutschtumadmit sadly that nothing but a strong current of immigration can preserve it here. The spreading German-American National Alliance is bringing about a marked revival, but hardly will it succeed in persuading the majority of its people to lay upon their children the burden of a bi-lingual education. It is the apparent destiny of the descendants of the myriads of Germans who have settled here to lose themselves in the American people, and to take the stamp of a culture which is, in origin at least, eighty per cent. British.

It is no small tribute to the solvent power of American civilization that the stable and conservative Germans, who, as settlers in Transylvania, in Chili, or in Palestine, among the Russians on the lower Volga, or among the Portuguese in southern Brazil, are careful to keep themselves unspotted from the people about them, have proved, on the whole, easy to Americanize. Years ago, Prof. James Bryce, just back from Ararat, after noting the purity of the German culture preserved by the Swabian colony in Tiflis, added:

It was very curious to contrast this complete persistence of Teutonism here with the extremely rapid absorption of the Germans among other citizens whichone sees going on in those towns of the Western States of America, where—as in Milwaukee, for instance—the inhabitants are mostly Germans, and still speak English with a markedly foreign accent.... Here they are exiles from a higher civilization planted in the midst of a lower one; there they lose themselves among a kindred people, with whose ideas and political institutions they quickly come to sympathize.

The leanness of his home acres taught the German to make the most of his farm in the New World. The immigrant looked for good land rather than for land easy to subdue. Knowing that a heavy forest growth proclaims rich soil, he shunned the open areas, and chopped his homestead out of the densest woods. While the American farmer, in his haste to live well, mined the fertility out of the soil, the German conserved it by rotating crops and feeding live stock. In caring for his domestic animals, he set an example. Just as the county agricultural fair, and the state fair as well, is the development of the Pennsylvania-GermanJahrmarkt, and the "prairie schooner" is the lineal descendant of the "Conestoga wagon," so the capacious red barns of the Middle West trace their ancestry back to the big barn which the Pennsylvania "Dutchman" provided at a time when most farmers let their stock run unsheltered.

Thanks partly to good farming and frugal living, and partly to the un-American practice of working their women in the fields, the Germanfarmers made money, bought choice acres from under their neighbors' feet, and so kept other nationalities on the move. This is the reason why a German settlement spreads on fat soil and why in time the best land in the region is likely to come into German hands. Unlike the restless American, with his ears ever pricked to the hail of distant opportunity, the phlegmatic German identifies himself with his farm, and feels a pride in keeping it in the family generation after generation. Taking fewer chances in the lottery of life than his enterprising Scotch-Irish or limber-minded Yankee neighbor, he has drawn from it fewer big prizes, but also fewer blanks.

In quest of vinous exhilaration, our grandfathers stood at a bar pouring down ardent spirits. It is owing to our German element that the mildlagerbeer has largely displaced whisky as the popular beverage, while sedentary drinking steadily gains on perpendicular drinking. Because the toping of beer has from time immemorial been interwoven with their social enjoyments, and because beer, unlike whisky, makes wassailers fraternal rather than wild and quarrelsome, the Germans, supported by the Bohemians, have offered, in the name of "personal liberty," the most determined opposition to liquor legislation. They may renounce the bowl, but taken away it shall not be! In their loyalty to beer, these Teutons out-German their cousins in the Fatherland, who are of late turning from the national beverage at an astonishing rate. Atthe World's Fair in St. Louis a number of American scholars who had studied of yore in German universities gave a luncheon to the visiting German economists. Out of respect for their guests, the hosts all filled the mugs of their student days; but, to their astonishment, the Germans called unanimously for iced tea!

The influence of the Germans in spreading among us the love of good music and good drama is acknowledged by all. But there is a more subtle transformation that they have wrought on American taste. The social diversions of the Teutons, and their affirmance of the "joy of living," have helped to clear from our eyes the Puritan jaundice that made all physical and social enjoyment look sinful. If "innocent recreation" and "harmless amusement" are now phrases to conjure with, it is largely owing to the Germans and Bohemians, with their love of song and mirth and "having a good time." Few of the present generation realize that fifty years ago the principal place of amusement in the American town, although as innocent of opera as a Kaffirkraal, called itself the "opera-house," in order to avoid the damning stigma the reigning Puritanism had attached to the word "theater."

As voters, the Germans have shown little clannishness. Their partizanship has not been bigoted, and by their insistence on independent voting they have perplexed and disgusted the politicians. Before 1850, they saw in the Democratic party the champion of the liberties for thesake of which they had expatriated themselves. But when the slavery issue came to be overshadowing, the "Forty-eighters" were able to swing them to the newly formed Republican party, to which, on the whole, they have remained faithful, although in some States their loyalty has been much shaken by prohibition. On money questions the Germans have been conservative. Bringing with them the notion of an efficient civil service, they have despised office-mongering and have befriended the merit system. No immigrants have been more apt to look at public questions from a common-welfare point of view and to vote for their principles rather than for their friends. If by "political aptitude" is meant the skill to use politics for private advantage, then in this capacity the German must be ranked low among our foreign-born.

germansDistribution of Germans and natives of German Parentage—1910

Distribution of Germans and natives of German Parentage—1910

In the way of civil and political liberty, the Germans added nothing to the old-English heritage they found here; but in freedom of thought their contribution has been invaluable. Where there is no church, state, or upper class to hold it in check, the community is likely to show itself imperious toward the nonconformist. The New England Puritan, who was oak to any civil authority that he had not helped to constitute, was a reed before the pressure of community opinion. The sturdy Germans flouted this tyrannysanstyrant. At a time when the would-be-respectable American stifled under a pall of conventionality in regard to religion and manners, they asserted theright to think and speak for themselves without incurring loss or ostracism. Then, too, the scholarly German immigrant imparted to us his sense of the dignity of science and its right to be free, although, to be sure, this spirit has been fostered among us chiefly by Americans who have studied in German universities. On the whole, in the way of intellectual liberty, the university-bred Liberals of 1848 had as much to offer as they gained in the way of political liberty.

At the outbreak of the Civil War the Germans, with their deep detestation of slavery, played no small rôle. In the South, those of later immigration opposed the Confederacy; in the North their leaders lined them up solidly in support of the Union. About 200,000 Germans enlisted in the Union army, more than there were of Irish volunteers, although the Irish were more numerous in the population of the loyal States. The militia companies formed among the Germans in Missouri, especially in St. Louis, were pivotal in saving that State for the Union. The military knowledge of Prussians who had seen service in the old country was valued, sometimes over-valued, in the earlier stage of the conflict. The all-German divisions of Steinwehr and Schurz, after being roundly, perhaps unjustly, abused for not holding Jackson at Chancellorsville, fought well at Gettysburg and distinguished themselves in the "battle among the clouds."

Probably no compliment has ever been bestowed on the Germans in America that did not contain the words "industrious and thrifty." Nor is it surprising that the members of a race so forelooking and reflective rarely sink into the mire of poverty. In 1900, the Germans were 25.8 per cent. of our foreign-born, and three years later it was found that only 23.3 per cent. of the foreign-born in our almshouses were Germans. For the country at large, we have no means of comparing the German with the American in his ability to take care of himself; but studies made in Boston showed that the proportion of Boston Germans in the city almshouse was half that of the English in that city, one-sixth of that of the Scotch, and only one-tenth of that of the Irish. In the state charitable institutions of Massachusetts, Germans make a better showing than Celts, but not so good a showing as Scandinavians and Americans.

To the various relief agencies in Boston, Germans apply less often than any other of the English-speaking immigrants. The analyst of Boston's foreign-born is struck by the small number of Germans and Scandinavians who seek aid, and says:

Occasionally, it is true, idle and shiftless families are found among both these peoples; but on the whole they are industrious and thrifty, and less hopeless poverty is found among them than among almost any of theother foreign immigrants.... The Germans are without doubt the best type of immigrants which has settled in Boston.

In our cities, no other element has so large a proportion of home-owners, and in the care of the home they surpass all other nationalities save the Swedes.

The saturation of the social life of our Germans with the amber beverage, as well as their hostility to prohibition, prepares us to find alcoholism very common among the disciples of St. Gambrinus. The fact is, however, that in point of sobriety hardly any North European makes so good a record as the German. A few years ago an analysis of 2075 charity cases showed that drink as the cause of poverty occurred only one-half as often among the German cases as among the Irish, and two-thirds as often as among native American cases. In the charity hospitals of New York, the proportion of German patients treated for alcoholism is only half as large as that of the English and the native Americans, and only a third as great as that of the Irish. The charity workers in our cities report that "intemperance of the bread-winner" is less often found to be the cause of destitution among the German applicants than among those of any other North-European nationality. Among alien prisoners only one German of twenty-two was committed for intoxication as against one out of threeIrish, one out of four French Canadians, one out of five Scotch, and one out of eight Scandinavians. On the other hand, the victims of drink are far more numerous among them than among the Italians, Magyars, Jews, and Syrians. These peoples, vine-growers and wine-bibbers from time immemorial, have had the chance to get drunk many thousand years longer than the Celts and Teutons; hence they have been more completely purged of their alcoholics. While a light beverage like beer produces fewer sots and wrecks than the "water of life" so grateful to the Northern palate, it produces a vast unreported stupefying and deterioration; so there is good reason why the German drinking customs are being sloughed off in the Fatherland at the very moment they are being warmly defended in America.

The striking thing about the abnormality of the Germans is its normality in amount. Among the foreign-born, the Germans have just about their due share of insanity, neither less nor more. Likewise, the marked feature of German crime in this country is simply its featurelessness. Among the twelve thousand-odd aliens in our prisons, the German prisoners run a little above the average in their bent for gainful offenses and a little below the average in their crimes of violence. In their leaning to other offenses they come close to the mean. Among the twenty nationalitiesthat figure in the police arrests of Chicago, the German stands, with respect to almost every form of misconduct, near the middle of the list. The French and the Hebrews stand out in bad eminence as offenders against chastity, the Italians lead in murder and blackmail, the Americans in burglary, the Greeks in kidnapping, the Lithuanians in assault, the Irish in disorderly conduct. But the German lacks distinction in evil, never coming near either the top or the bottom of the scale in predilection for any form of crime. On the whole, his criminal bent is very close to that of the native American.

The Germans brought us much more in the way of industrial skill and professional training than the Irish; besides, they were much more successful in planting themselves upon the soil. They tended far more to farming and manufacturing, far less to domestic and personal service and transportation. The second generation shows no marked drift away from the farm. In 1900, three-fifths of all brewers in the country were Germans, a third of the bakers and cabinet-makers, a fifth of the saloon-keepers and butchers, a sixth of the hatters, tailors, and coopers, and a seventh of the musicians and teachers of music. Yet only one male bread-winner out of nineteen was a German.

The sons of Germans are a sixteenth of our male labor force; but they furnish a quarter ofthe trunk-and-satchel makers, a fifth of the bottlers, stovemakers, and engravers, and a sixth of the upholsterers, bookbinders, paper-box makers, butchers, brewers, and brass-workers. In our cities the German baker, tailor, butcher, cabinet-maker, or engraver is quite as characteristic and familiar a figure as the Irish drayman, fireman, brakeman, section boss, street-car conductor, plumber, or policeman.

The immigrant German women begin rather higher in the scale of occupation than the Irish, but their daughters do not rise in life with such amazing buoyancy as do the daughters of the Irish. Between the first-generation and the second-generation Germans the proportion of servants and waitresses falls from a third of all female bread-winners to a quarter. For the Irish the drop is from fifty-four per cent. to sixteen per cent. The second-generation Germans do not show such an advance on their parents as do the second-generation Irish, who bob up like corks released at the bottom of a stream.

Physically the German is strong, but often too stocky for grace. A blend with the taller and thinner American is likely to give good results in figure. Being slow in response, he makes a poor showing in competitive sports. His forte is gymnastics rather than athletics, and he is to be found in the indoor, sedentary trades rather than in the active, outdoor callings. Not often willyou come upon him riveting trusses far up on the skyscraper or the railway bridge. His pleasures he takes sitting rather than moving, so that he haunts summer-garden and picnic-ground rather than base-ball diamond and bowling-alley. For all his traditional domesticity, he is a sociable soul, and will lug off his entire family to a public resort, when an American would prefer a pipe by the fireside. He is fond of the table, and loves to enjoy talk, music, or drama while eating and drinking. In comparison with the native Americans, or the Celts from the British Isles, the Germans in America have the name of being materialistic. If this be true, it is doubtless due to the small representation among them of that noble leavening type that has made the spiritual greatness of Germany. Any one who has lived in the old country knows that there is a kind of German that one rarely sees among our fellow-citizens. Of such were the "Forty-eighters"; but as their influence fades, the idealism they fanned dies down, and visitors from the Fatherland complain that America has stamped its dollar-mark all over the souls of their kinsmen here. Professor Hugo Münsterberg, an impartial observer, judges that "the average German-American stands below the level of the average German at home."

But if he chases the dollar, let us grant that he does it in his own way. Honest and stable, he puts little faith in short-cuts to riches, such as "scream" advertising, commercial humbug, "faked" news, thimblerig finance, or politicalgraft. He does not count on skipping many rungs in the ladder of success. German business enterprises grow slowly, but if you probe them, you find a solid texture. The German is hard-headed, and is not easily borne off his feet by the contagion of example. To speculative fever and to made panic he is rather immune. Because he is less mobile than the American and does not shift from one thing to another, he is more apt to gain skill and turn out good work. Then, too, he is not so keen to get on that he does not find the artist's enjoyment and pride in the practice of his craft. In a word, the Germans act in American society as a neutral substance moderating the action of an overlively ferment. For the universal eagerness to be "wide awake" and "up to date" has deposed habit, tradition, and external authority as lords of life among us.

The German is lasting in his sympathies and his antipathies and leisurely in his mental processes. It takes him long to make up his mind and longer to get an idea out of his head. In his thinking he tries to grasp more things at a time than does the Celt. Not for him the simple logic that proceeds from one or two outstanding factors in a situation and ignores all the rest. He wants to be comprehensive and final where the Latin aims to be merely clear and precise. It is this very complexity of thought that makes the German often silent, his speech heavy or confused. But just this relish for details and this passion for thoroughness make him a born investigator.This is why, on the practical side, the German-American has most distinguished himself in work that calls for long and close observation, such as gardening, viticulture, breeding, forestry, brewing, and the chemical industries.

Thirty years ago there was an outcry that the Germans were introducing into this country the virus of anarchism and socialism. It is now clear that German socialism, instead of being a shattering type of thought, is in fact highly constructive. However bold and iconoclastic he may be in his thinking, the German, with his respect for authority, his slow reaction to wrong, and his love of order and system, is a conservative by nature. The children of revolutionary immigrants are milder than their fathers were; and the German-Americans are now very far from leading the van of radicalism.

Back to Index Next