No sooner do you set foot upon American ground than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamor is heard on every side, and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the satisfaction of their social wants. Everything is in motion around you; here the people of one quarter of a town are met to decide upon the building of a church; there the election of a representative is going on; a little farther, the delegates of a district are hastening to the town in order to consult upon some local improvements; in another place, the laborers of a village quit their plows to deliberate on the project of a road or a public school. Meetings are called for the sole purpose of declaring their disapprobation of the conduct of government; while in other assemblies, citizens salute the authorities of the day as the fathers of their country.52
Tocqueville discovered that what distinguished the American national spirit, character, and identity was not sectarian religion or ancestry but a culture of politics. The Americans were not a Protestant nation in the same sense that the French were a Catholic nation, or the Germans a folk. The unifying culture of the U.S. was not religious or racial but political.
One might expect an immigrant from England, someone whose language and political institutions were not dissimilar from those of the Americans, to grasp the idea of the civic culture, as did Frances Wright, a naturalized citizen, who said, “They are Americans who, having complied with the Constitutional regulations of the United States … wed the principles of America’s Declaration to their hearts and render the duties of American citizens practically in their lives.”53 Thousands of Germans sought to establish a new Germany in the American West, but most of them, and especially their children, became German-Americans who embraced and practiced the civic culture.
Between 1850 and 1900, the Germans, who settled principally on farms in the north central and middle Atlantic states, were never less than a quarter of all foreign-born,54 and during the First World War, when the principal enemy of the U.S. was Germany, they were the largest first-generation immigrant group. At the advent of the Second World War, again with Germany the enemy, there were more first- and second-generation Americans of German origin than of any other nationality.55 But by then, the vast majority of German-Americans were so assimilated that they were indistinguishable from the descendants of most English immigrants, except perhaps for their names, as in the case of two of the best known battle commanders, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
A German visitor, Francis J. Grund, who came from Bohemia in the early 1820s, wrote extensively on the process of ethnic-Americanization only three years after Tocqueville had written on democracy in America.56 He saw that Germans wanted to retain their ties to the German culture, observing that “there are now villages in the states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and even in the new state of Illinois, where no other language is spoken” but German.57 He noted that the thousands of immigrants coming annually did not disperse and mix with the Anglo-Americans, “but increased the settlements which are already established by their countrymen, or settle in their immediate neighborhood.” The Germans, Grund noted, “hardly feel that they are strangers in the land of their adoption,” because they developed the habit “of remaining together, and settling whole townships or villages,” making “their exile less painful” and enabling them “to transfer a part of their own country to the vast solitudes of the New World.”58
The newcomers “find friends, relatives,” Grund said, and establish social lives together based on newspapers, churches, schools, food, and the celebration of holidays. Having a substantial number of educated immigrants among them, most Germans lived within largely self-contained ethnic communities. Grund wrote that the newcomers might find that “their officers of justice will be Germans; their physicians and—if they should be so unfortunate as to need them—their lawyers. It will appear to them as if a portion of the land of their fathers had, by some magic, been transplanted to the New World.”59
Grund wrote about the Germans as if they had come from a common background in the Old Country. Actually, they were divided between Protestants and Catholics, spoke different dialects, and had different regional and political loyalties, but after a short time in the U.S. they went through a process of reconfiguration of their ancestral identity. Immigrants of different backgrounds found it was to their advantage to establish a new identity as ethnic-Americans, although the term obviously had not been invented. The process of reconfiguring their ancestral identity was one other groups would go through, too, including various Filipino and Chinese dialect groups, Italian paisani, and Jews from many national backgrounds. For all of them, the reconfiguration of identity became and still is a mechanism for bridging differences and enlarging common interests and habits. It was and is also a way of gaining protection against the surprises and dangers of the new environment, and of making claims within it.
The civic culture, with its principles of separation of church and state and the right of free speech and assembly, facilitated and protected the expression of ancestral cultural values and sensibilities and, in so doing, sanctioned the system of voluntary pluralism by which ethnic groups could mobilize their economic and political interests. In the cities, they formed workers’ associations, district and regional societies, fraternal orders, such as German-speaking lodges of the Masons, and Turnvereine (physical culture societies). German debating societies, amateur theatrical groups, and singing societies appeared in the 1830s and 1840s. Pre-Lenten carnivals, outdoor folk fests, and annual German Day celebrations became common. Summer beer gardens and German taverns became gathering places. By 1860, there was approximately one German tavern for every thirty German households in Milwaukee.60 The German churches and their parochial schools reflected the intention of Germans to remain true to their ancestral culture, and provided a basis for the establishment of the central-verein in 1855 as a national union of parish mutual benefit associations.61
Economic Self-Interest and Patriotism
The French immigrant Crèvecoeur wrote about the relationship of economic opportunity to national patriotism in the early 1770s, saying that newcomers “ought … to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born,” because “here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self interest.… From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample substance. [italics mine]—This is an American.”62
Most published letters from English and German and Scandinavian immigrants echoed that theme, and their individual economic success in the new land understandably promoted their love for it. Perhaps the immigrants who were disappointed in the new land did not write as often as those who were pleased. Probably as many as one-third of all immigrants went back to their homelands. Loneliness and illness were common. So was hostility from others. But many who remained told a story of opportunity and reward, as one English immigrant in Virginia did in 1818, writing, “If a man be industrious and steady, he reaps the fruit of his own labor.”63 From Paterson, New Jersey, came an immigrant’s report, “to us, who have long been half-starved in England, it appears like a continual feast … no fawning, cringing adulation here: the squire and the mechanic converse as familiarly as weavers do in England. We call no man master here.”64 An immigrant writing from Pennsylvania to his brothers and his sisters instructed them that “every industrious farmer may become a freeholder of the United States by paying eighty dollars, being the first installment for a quarter of a section of land; and though he has not a shilling left, he may easily gain as much off the land as will pay the other installments, before they become due. The land being his own, there is no limit to his prosperity; no proud tyrant can lord it over him.”65 Another man from Philadelphia told his family, “I can by my own labor (mind you) procure all the good that this world affords in eating, drinking or clothing; and not work above ten hours a day. For heaven’s sake, Father, do come and end your days in a country, where the labouring bee enjoys the honey which he collects.”66 A young man from a small town in Illinois wrote his mother, “I now sit down in a country, where fortune is within my reach. I suffered a little for