Part 14

Another thing which this vast German population has failed to impress upon our cities is the love of law and order which characterizes it in its native home, and almost without exception it stands arrayed against any attempt to curtail the privileges of the saloon; while lawmakers, and officials, are usually kept from enforcing existing laws by their fear of the German vote. One of the Milwaukee beer-brewers with whom I talked in regard to his influence upon local politics naively said: “No, we have no influence upon politics at all, but if a sheriff or a judge should try to enforce laws against our saloons, he would simply lose his head.” The fact is that a certain phase of municipal life is completely controlled by the brewing interest in nearly every city where the German element plays a political part, and that element always rallies to the support and defence of the brewers. It is a strange but general experience that the German immigrant is immediately arrayed against the temperance element; this is due in no small measure to the facts that his first lodging-place is usually connected with a saloon; that the German newspaper almost always ridicules temperance effort and misinterprets the motives of its leaders, and, lastly, that designing politicians make their slogan, “personal liberty,” synonymous with “beer at any time and anywhere.” Only very recently a large portion of the German population of Chicago was the leading element in a mass-meeting in which over ten thousand people took part, demanding the granting of special licenses to dance-halls; a precedent which would be as illegal, as dangerous.

Nevertheless, the German is a law-abiding citizen, although he has never been convinced that temperance laws are either wise or just; and that, in spite of the fact that his own Fatherland is making strenuous efforts in that direction, and that temperance societies are coming to be as numerous in Germany as they are in America, but much more sensible in their agitation than with us. The average German comes, willing enough to obey all the laws, and, if he has proper environment, develops quickly into the best kind of citizen.

Neither in Milwaukee nor elsewhere did I find that the Church, whether Lutheran or Roman Catholic, had kept pace with the intellectual development of the home Church, nor has it come to feel its social responsibility to the community. The German Lutheran pastors, in certain synods, are often more exclusive than the Catholic priests in their unwillingness to coöperate with other churches for the public good; and while the churches in Germany are the most progressive on the continent, here they are the most conservative, and correspondingly inactive in the affairs which move society. Certain synods of the Lutheran Church, and those the most prosperous, hold to the Augsburg Confession more tenaciously than Luther ever did, and believe that beside that Church there is no Church, and outside of that creed no salvation.

I attended a Lutheran church one Sunday evening when it was crowded largely by young people, all of them wage-earners in the lower walks of life. The whole burden of the sermon of nearly forty-five minutes’ length was the thought that salvation is not in morality or merit or good deeds, but that the only thing necessary to it is a proper definition of the nature of Jesus Christ. There was not one ethical note in the whole sermon, and if it is a fair sample of that man’s discourses, his flock of more than fifteen hundred souls is feeding upon barren pasture. When I called upon a Lutheran pastor who was pointed out to me as a liberal, I found, upon asking him to define his liberality, that it turned entirely upon social habits and had nothing to do with theology. “I want to drink my beer whenever I want to,” was the article in his creed that had driven him into the arms of a more liberal synod.

Among the Germans of the Northwest there is a good deal of infidelity, fostered by the Turner societies; but they are languishing and dying, and with them dies the unbelief. I was told in Milwaukee by a business man that the disappearance of those societies is due to the fact that men of affairs discovered that it was poor business policy to belong to them, because it arrayed against them the conservative church element, and that the cessation of infidel agitation is not a sign of more faith, but simply a sign of more common sense. One free-thinking paper is still published in Milwaukee; but its constituency is gradually growing smaller, and the lecturers on infidelity, of whom there used to be many, have dwindled to one or two. They find it hard to make a living out of a thing that has no life. Yet the German immigrant contributes positive good to this nation’s life; he brings usually a sound body, and while seldom intellectual, he is nearly always intelligent. He is scrupulously honest in business affairs, and has elevated the business morals of his community. By his love of music he has robbed the social life in America of some of its sternness; and the German singing societies are known not so much for the artistic quality of their performance, as for keeping alive the spirit of good fellowship.

Unfortunately, the German falls an easy prey to the prevailing materialistic spirit, and when he worships mammon he becomes the most ardent of devotees. Then he has no time for his “Gesangverein,” nor for anything else which is not utilitarian, and “Geldmachen,” the making of money, is his great ideal. In his home life he still emphasizes those virtues which have given inspiration to the German poets’ best songs. His wife is, even in America, the model “Hausfrau”; for “she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.” Yet the Woman’s Club has touched her also, and the “Kaffeeklatsch,” with its innocent neighbourhood gossip, has given way to the formal reception and kindred social delusions. The German has been the prime factor in dispelling the Puritan idea of the Sabbath, which to many is a positive evil, but may at least be considered a mixed good. Still, he ought not to bear the blame alone, for the average American was ready to have his Sabbath broken for him and has easily followed into the breach; just as it often takes four or five grown persons to escort one child to the circus, so one may find four or five natives at every Sunday base-ball game, helping the German to amuse himself.

The disintegrating process has also been stimulated by the American tourists who annually cross the ocean, and who, during their visits in Continental Europe, leave much of the Puritan spirit behind them--too much for their own good and the good of their country.

The German has not largely contributed to the deepening of the religious life of the nation, although wherever he enters the life of the church he makes its expression more honest. The one thing which he hates desperately is hypocrisy, and because of that he guards himself very jealously and seldom speaks of his religious experiences. The German Methodist and Evangelical Churches, which are of the emotional type, are not only failing to grow, but are perceptibly becoming smaller. This is to be deplored, because they developed a somewhat deep if rather narrow Christian character, and strove to counteract the cold and more formal spirit of the majority of their brethren in other communions.

The German in America has not produced many great men, but he has filled this country with good men, which is infinitely better. The cause of the dearth of prominent German-Americans is due to the fact that they blend more quickly than any other foreigner (except the Scandinavian) with the nation’s life, especially if the German reaches any kind of eminence; and the effect which he has upon the life of the nation is difficult to trace just because of that.

The coarse, the crude and the low, retain their national stamp, while the finer and better soon become part of us. Some of us seem to know the German best and judge him most from the standpoint of the saloon and all it implies; but I have almost always found him industrious, intelligent, honest, frugal, patriotic, and God-fearing--noble qualities for American citizenship. If he has not risen to the highest which he is capable of reaching, and if he does not exert his influence for the best in all directions, it is not due to the fact that he is not willing to do it; but because he could not rise much higher than the highest marked out for him by the native citizens, or because he could not quite comprehend that this money-making, materialistic Yankee had ideals which he was trying honestly to realize.

If we misjudge the German, he misjudges the American and rates him much lower than he deserves. This has robbed him of a higher standard for himself and made him exaggerate our national weaknesses, imitating which has created a peculiar combination of character which does scant justice to himself or to his American neighbour. When he revisits his Fatherland, these weaknesses manifest themselves most; and then his adopted Fatherland comes in for a good share of the blame for his lack of manners. The following incident illustrates this point. In the lobby of a fashionable hotel in Berlin a German-American of this type was expectorating tobacco-juice with the exactness and frequency of an adept. To a German who called his attention to this nuisance, he replied: “Everybody does that in America.” He needs to know the American and value him as he deserves, and he ought to know that which he does not seem to, that the making of money is to the true American, after all, not the greatest of achievements; that the hypocrisy with which he charges him in his religious life is less frequent than he thinks it is, and that the national ideal is slowly but surely gaining ascendency. He ought also to know that, more than any other foreigner, he has impressed upon us both his strength and his weakness, and that we are growing quite definitely Teutonic. It is for us to find out what this strength is and to appropriate it more; and it is for him to grow conscious of his weakness and eliminate it from his social life, that he may become indeed one of the strongest pillars of this Republic, which already, like the coming Kingdom, is made up of “every nation and kindred and tribe and people under heaven.”

VIII

THE SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANT

The steerage of an English vessel on which the Scandinavian immigrants travel is not the forbidding place usually found on the steamers which sail from Continental ports. The passengers have cabins assigned to them, their meals are served in human fashion, and the general appearance of everything is in keeping with that of the travellers who come from the best peasant stock of Europe. The Scandinavian peasants bear no taint of past slavery; and as far back as their “Saga” reaches, they were freemen.

When the new light which first shone at Wittenberg travelled northward, it found ready entrance into Swedish hearts, and Scandinavia has ever been the bulwark of Protestantism, so that wherever its story is written, the name of Gustave Adolphe has a prominent place. With scarcely any exception the Scandinavian immigrant is a Protestant, a confessed adherent of some church, and in most cases an ardent worker and worshipper. Repeatedly during services on shipboard I have found that every Scandinavian present took an active interest in it, and on the Sabbath the number of Bible readers and students was astonishingly large. There is practically no illiteracy among them and the steerage passenger who read nothing on his journey was an exception; the quality of the reading was also remarkable, for on one journey I counted among fifty books, nine of Sheldon’s “What would Jesus do?” and only fourteen novels of a purely secular character.

The demeanour of the Scandinavian immigrant is quiet, unobtrusive, almost melancholy; and when he sings it is always in a minor key, his folk-song having the dreaminess of the Orient and being as far removed from the jig of his Irish fellow traveller as the North is from the South. He is homesick from the time he steps on board of ship until he reaches his home “in the land where there is no more sea”; and the asylums of the Northwest are full of Scandinavian men and women who have sunk into hopeless melancholia because of homesickness. Yet in spite of this most of the immigrants remain in America and more than any other foreigner blend completely into the national life.

There is scarcely such a thing as a second generation of Scandinavians, although the first generation never loses its love and longing for fair “Scandia.” A great many who come know the English language or at least some words, and being in touch here with a spirit which is as serious as their own it is no wonder that they remain, and become merged in the national life. Not one who comes is a pauper, although not a few are poor; yet nearly all are rich in a heritage of health and character which unfortunately they do not always retain on this side of the Atlantic. In fact it is proved that the second generation is weaker physically, and many of the older immigrants claim that it has lost much moral fibre also. This complaint which I have heard from all foreigners about their descendants is largely due to the natural tendency to overrate the past and to underrate the present. It is also true that the second generation undervalues the heritage which the parents brought with them from across the sea; and in not a few cases because of that, it becomes morally and spiritually bankrupt.

FAREWELL TO HOME AND FRIENDS

Close of kin to us are the Scandinavians, not only in race, but in thought and in ideals. More than any other element do they blend quickly and thoroughly with our national life.]

I have seldom seen Scandinavian immigrants of more than middle age, and most of them are young men and women between eighteen and thirty-six. Some remain in the large cities of the East where they are valued as servants, gardeners and dairymen, more of them drift to Jamestown, N. Y., as mechanics; but the large majority of immigrants go to the Northwest where they have been “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” where they have turned the sod of far stretching acres towards the sun and where their cattle graze upon a thousand hills. They like the melancholy plains of the Dakotas; the cold winters remind them of their own far North, and if any strange country ever grows to them like home it certainly is this hospitable region in whose mills and factories, beginning at Chicago and ending in that West which each day comes nearer to the true East across the Pacific, they are toilers, skilled labourers and trusted foremen.

I have yet to find the shop where they are not liked; although their less industrious fellow workmen of other nationalities call them treacherous--a word which they themselves do not quite understand; but which means that the Scandinavians “get ahead,” and that is often cause enough to give them a bad name. In all my dealings with them I have found them frank and generous, and while playing farmer in order to know them better, my fellow labourer has many a time hitched the horses for me, or shovelled my portion of the corn, and when he found that I was only a make-believe farmer did not betray my confidence.

With such experiences and with such high esteem of the Scandinavian, I joined a party of young Swedes who were travelling from Chicago to the Northwest. They were disgusted by that city, by its moral and physical filth, its noise and its few glimpses of God’s heaven, and I congratulated them upon going to Minneapolis which I described in glowing terms as a clean and godly city in which an American population of New England descent combined with this wholesome Scandinavian element in making a model city. Eager to have America shine to them in its very best light I offered myself as their guide through the city, an offer which they readily accepted. We had scarcely stepped out of the Union Depot before I wished that I had not said anything about the godliness of Minneapolis; for we were set upon by thugs, fakirs and lewd women in such numbers and in such a disgusting manner that I thought for a moment I had struck the Bowery in its palmiest days. Dozens of squares around the depot and deep into the heart of the city were filled by brothels of the most disgraceful kind; pictures were displayed in show windows and in the open porticos of museums which would make a Paris street gamin blush, and the whole city seemed to be stricken by some fatal disease. Policemen were neither ornamental nor useful, city detectives were employed by gamblers to hustle the fleeced stranger out of town, the mayor, the sheriff and who knows who else were in league with gamblers and thieves, while vice was everywhere rampant and did not even have to defy the law for there was no law.

Newspaper men whom I interviewed, told me that Minneapolis was considered by travelling men the “toughest” town this side of Butte, Montana. Ministers said that they were helpless and many told me that it was none of their or my business; officials were paralyzed, the mayor was a fugitive from justice, the chief of police was about to be sent to the penitentiary for safe keeping; and all of them agreed that these conditions were in no small measure due to the Scandinavian population which was not fitted for public responsibility.

I had just come from Jamestown, N. Y., which has about the same population of Scandinavians, where they had elected a Swedish mayor who gave great satisfaction, where many offices were held by Swedes, and where I had heard no such complaints.

In Minnesota generally, no taint attached itself to such Scandinavians as Knute Nelson, Lind and others who had served in high offices in state and nation; therefore I was shocked, puzzled and disappointed. I found the common verdict in Minnesota to be: “We can’t trust the Swedes in public offices;” and the number of defaulting county and city treasurers of Scandinavian nationality (especially Swedish) who spent a few years in Stillwater prison, makes the generally accepted estimate of the high character of the Swede as a citizen waver not a little.

If this estimate be true it may be due first of all to the Swedish churches, which have not as a rule, in common with a large share of the American churches, sufficiently emphasized the fact that “righteousness exalteth a nation,” and that it can become exalted only through a righteous citizenship. The Lutheran churches have been busy preaching doctrines and have been so eager to maintain the Augsburg confession that they have not laid much stress upon upholding the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount and all that it means for the Kingdom of God. The “Mission Friends,” as a large body of Swedish Christians calls itself, has been so busy in common with Methodists and Baptists, doing evangelizing work, and building up its local church membership, that it has forgotten that it has something to do with saving the state or the city.

The second cause may be ascribed to the clannish feeling fostered by cunning politicians, which makes these people vote for a Scandinavian no matter what his character is, just because he is one of their own. In this as in the first case I do not wish it to appear that the Scandinavian is a sinner above all others, but he has been remarkably unfortunate in the character of the officials whom he has chosen, and it will take a great deal of repentance and general betterment to make the people of Hennepin County unsuspicious of the Scandinavian office seeker.

The very worst thing in our national life, the most corrupting thing in every way is this voting as Scandinavians or Hungarians, and not as Americans. It amounts in many cases to a kind of treason and deserves to be treated as such. The politicians and the political party which foster that sort of thing are in a small but very dangerous business which does more to hamper the American consciousness in the foreigner than any other thing I know of; and is to-day the great poison which needs to be eliminated from the national life. In nine cases out of ten the foreigner is made a scapegoat by designing politicians who give him a small office which pledges him to do an unfair and often a dishonest thing. In the Northwest it has brought a stigma upon the Swedes: a bad reputation which they do not deserve and which they must throw off for their own good and for the good of the country.