Part 13

The visit over, we take the little boat for the battery, crowding through a mass of men who look up to the guarded roof where their loved ones are detained. “Tate Tateleben” comes the painful cry of the little children, and one envies the man at the gate who on the morrow may answer these cries and give the children to their fathers and the wives to their husbands; who may unite those who have been divided by long years and a wide sea.... But what if he cannot answer the cry of the children?

The “man at the gate” need not be envied for the hard, daily task which awaits him; the task of opening or shutting the gates, of saying: “This one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.”

Clear and vivid before his eyes constantly stands the law, commanding him, on his allegiance, to refuse admission, not merely to those physically or morally tainted in such degree as to endanger the nation’s life, but to those “persons likely to become a public charge.” He is not responsible for the law. He is responsible for its execution, even though his decisions sometimes are not less hard for himself than for those who find the gates shut against them.

Not merely the dangerous elements are refused admission, but those who for reasons of ill health of mind or body, or inability to work, are likely to prove a hindrance rather than a help.]

It requires a buoyant spirit, a steady hand, a tender heart, and a resolute mind. He must be both just and kind, show no preferences and no prejudices, guard the interests of his country and yet be humane to the stranger. To be able to say of “the man at the gate” that he accomplishes this in a very large measure is not scant praise; and if here and there his judgment is questioned, it simply proves that he is as human as his critics.

VII

THE GERMAN IN AMERICA

The past had its apprehensions about its various problems no less than the present has, and our forefathers looked upon the non-English speaking immigrants much as we look upon them to-day. No doubt they spoke of them as an undesirable class.

Many of us remember when the German and the Scandinavian immigrants who came, received no heartier welcome than we now give the Slav, the Italian and the Jew.

This large tide of immigration from among our non-English speaking races had its beginning long before there was a Castle Garden or Ellis Island, and shortly after the Pilgrims and Puritans laid the foundations for their colonies at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Upon the path made by English Quakers, came in 1682 the first German immigrants. They were Mennonites, a Protestant sect which manifested in its tenets many of the faults and virtues of both Quakers and Puritans.

They sailed up the shallow Delaware Bay, where a Penn, who was “mightier than the sword,” had subdued the savages by his gentle spirit and had made the flat shores peaceful for the habitation of these strangers. They settled in what is now called Germantown, and soon their little cottages were surrounded by gardens where the rosemary wafted its fragrance on the air, and where no doubt the cabbage lifted its astonished head above the ground, little dreaming that some day it would be “monarch of all it surveyed.”

In some points these Germans out-Puritaned the Puritans; for while it is said that the Puritans did not kiss their wives on the Sabbath, these German Puritans did not kiss their wives at all. That they brought with them noble ideals is proved by the fact that they were the first people on this continent to oppose slavery, and sent to the Quakers a petition to that effect. It contains the following quaint paragraph: “If once these slaves (wch they say are so wicked and stubborn men) should joint themselves, fight for their freedom and handel their masters & mastrisses, as they did handel them before; will these masters & mastrisses tacke the sword at hand & warr against these poor slaves, licke we are able to believe, some will not refuse to doe? Or have these negers not as much right to fight for their freedom, as you have to keep them slaves?”

The Germans were also the first among us to legislate against the vice of intemperance, and may be said to be the first Prohibitionists, a fame which the modern German immigrant does not care to share with them.

One of the most ideal men of this time was Francis Daniel Pastorius, a man who combined in himself all the graces and virtues of his noble race; he was a lover of science and the finer pleasures, and was a mystic who yearned for the closer communion with God. Pietists, Tunkers, and others followed the Mennonites in the eighteenth century; and Pennsylvania was soon dotted by communities in which these strangely garbed people lived their peculiar and simple lives. To name them all would require much space, and to describe their peculiarities would fill a book. The Schwenkfelders, the Moravians, and the Amish were the most important among the later arrivals, and Germany seemed to have exhausted her ability to produce sects after their departure. Encouraged by good Queen Anne, Lutherans and Roman Catholics came later, and these were neither so pious nor so intelligent as their predecessors; but were the advance guard of that vast horde of peasantry which ceased not its coming for nearly two centuries, which moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio, from there southward along the Mississippi to Louisiana, and northward to Wisconsin and Minnesota, and which was a great factor in redeeming the wilderness and making it to “blossom as the rose.”

Thousands of these peasants were sold into a semi-slavery as Redemptionists, and thousands more laid down their lives in the attempt to blaze paths through the forest and make the fever-stricken plains habitable. Wherever they went they created wealth by their unremitting industry, and by their skill in cattle-raising and farming, so that where an English-speaking farmer starved and was forced to move westward, they stayed and dug riches out of the neglected soil.

To-day, in travelling through this country, one can almost invariably detect the German farm; and the German farmer is everywhere the standard of excellence.

These immigrants were not idealists like their forefathers, but were content to worship God as did their fathers, and by the honest sweat of their brows eat the fruit from their own “vine and fig tree.” In 1848, when the breath of freedom grew into a wind-storm, there came involuntary immigrants, political exiles of whom the late Carl Schurz is the best known, if not the best example. They were all educated men, many of them real scholars, and whatever German culture there is among the Germans to-day in our cities is in a large measure due to their influence and example. They and their descendants are our real German aristocracy, and in the German centres of Cincinnati and Milwaukee they form the select society.

While these men were idealists politically, they were in a large degree materialists religiously, and planted the seed of Marxian Socialism and of infidelity among their countrymen. One whole colony in Minnesota made it one of its tenets not to have a church or even to mention the name of God, and the little city of New Ulm bore that distinction for a great many years; but in spite of the most diligent efforts to keep God and the churches out of their town, several houses of worship have been built in late years. While much skepticism still prevails, the younger generation almost as a whole has turned to its God.

The modern German immigrant comes pressed neither by hunger nor by his conscience, but most often to escape irksome military service, or drawn by the German “Wanderlust” which carries him beyond the mountains of his Fatherland into all corners of the earth, although emigration from Germany increases and decreases, as the economic times are good or bad. On board ship he is the jolliest of passengers, and you will find him at the bar in the morning for his beer and late at night in the smoking-room with a crowd of jovial men and women, singing the songs of the Fatherland, which grow sadder as he grows jollier. He carries with him an exalted opinion of his own country, and has fully made up his mind not to let anything crowd out his love for it, so that when New York Harbour with its vastness and beauty rises before him he insists that it is not half as big or as beautiful as the harbour at Hamburg, and only at the sight of the sky-scrapers does he acknowledge our superiority. I once stood before mighty Niagara with one of these subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm, and, with a deprecating shrug of his shoulders, he said: “Ve gots dem in Shermany too.” This attitude towards our country lasts a long time, and is lost only when success comes.

The German immigrant invariably has a good common-school education, although not always possessed of culture, and, if he has it, he does not find much of it among those with whom his lot is cast. A young chemist whom I met grew so despondent at the sight of his German boarding-house, and at the lack of manners among the boarders that he returned to Germany two weeks after he landed. Not many such young men come, and few of such who come succeed, for the “hustle and bustle,” the common tasks to be performed, and the common people whom they must meet as equals, repel them. The weaning from aristocratic notions, the being thrown into the hopper without being asked, “Who are you, and who are your parents?” are painful processes, and only the fit survive. Although the process is slow, it is sure. A young man who has come to this country to study our way of doing business was employed in a large department store in Chicago as a bundle-boy. At first he politely addressed the elevator man thus: “Vill you blease let me off on de second floor?” but within two months he said imperatively, “Second”; and he was on the road towards complete Americanization.

The city of Milwaukee is probably the most German city in the United States, although nothing in its business or residence portion suggests the Germany across the sea and, with sixty per cent. of its population German, it has not impressed upon the city the best things which we usually associate with that nationality. The intellectual life of its people does not receive that stimulus which one might expect; and whatever German culture there is outside of the ever-diminishing circle of the “forty-eighters” has been transplanted by Americans who have travelled and studied in the Fatherland. The few Germans who try to bring the Germany of America in touch with its glorious heritage across the sea, usually fail most miserably. The cry I most often heard from them was, “The idealists are dead, and the dollar reigns supreme.”

With a few exceptions, neither the German stage nor the German newspaper has been able to keep alive that intellectual spirit; and, as a rule, the German population falls below the American in its desire to keep in touch with the intellectual life of Germany. “We have two kinds of Germans in Milwaukee: soul Germans and stomach Germans, and the latter are in the vast majority,” said a keen observer; and it does seem that the national spirit rallies around social usages rather than around the things which make Germany a world power in the noblest sense. The editors upon whom I called were all intent upon telling me how great their papers were and how many subscribers they had, and I could not go beyond the business point with any of them, although I wasted two hours upon one, trying to get a glimpse of his German soul; but if I saw it at all, it had the American dollar-mark written all over it. Upon the social side the German is abnormally developed, and to be a “good fellow” is to him a high ideal. He usually belongs to numberless lodges and societies, in few of which he receives any intellectual stimulus. He retains his convivial habits and frequents the saloon, but is seldom intemperate, although the American treating habit often works havoc with his frugality.

That I have not misjudged the situation is proved by the fact that similar conclusions have been reached by eminent German scholars who have recently visited the United States.

Prof. K. Lamprecht, of the University of Leipsic, who has recently published his notes under the title “Americana,” says: “Have the Germans done much besides having a large share in making the soil tillable? A visit to the great cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee compels to the sad answer, no.

“The Germans, capable as they are, in their separate and narrower activities have not held together and have been overcome by others; overcome to the degree that they still make the stupid “Dutchman” the target for their jokes. One need only to see the part he plays in the American farce to be convinced of this. He is the man who is always too late, who always wants much and at last gets but little, and who in spite of the fact that he is portrayed as good natured, is laughed at. This caricature tells some truth and is the product of some observation.

“Intellectually he does not stand very high; (the Negro also learns reading and writing), but in intense thinking he is outdistanced by the Englishman and presumably by the Slav also.

“Whoever has visited the beer gardens of Milwaukee, especially the unfortunate Pabst Park, that pattern of stupidity, must say to himself that a people which enjoys such things as are here offered, is not capable of intellectual competition in America.

“Still sadder is the lack of political discernment. One need not speak of the corrupt condition of American politics. If the Germans had really had the desire they could greatly have improved the political morals of the United States. That they did not use their opportunity is due largely to the fact that when the early German immigrants came to us, their country was not politically ripe; nevertheless they may be accused of not having kept pace with the citizens of the mother country, who, under more difficult conditions have reached a very high political development. The common people from whom our immigrants sprang, now have large powers in directing the political well-being of the Fatherland under less favourable conditions. This is also true in regard to the German intellectual development with which the German-American has not kept in touch and to which he is now very slowly awaking.”