German immigrants wrote home in the same vein. One of them, writing in 1820, said, “No family is so poor that it does not have at least two horses … the farmer lives in a situation which is infinitely superior to that of the German farmer of the same property.”68 A woman in Germantown, Pennsylvania, wrote her mother, “I wish you were all as well off as we are now: there is no want of meat and drink here.”69 Germans and other immigrants and their children were the beneficiaries of preemption, a well-established custom by 1800, which consisted of establishing a prior claim on public land by living on it and improving it, and by the Pre-emption Act of 1841, which for fifty years made it possible for any alien intending to become a citizen to preempt a 160-acre farm from the public domain, live on it, and work it, and then buy it at a price no higher than that set at public auction without the trouble of having to go to auction.
Other land acts followed, which made many Germans, among others, capitalists quickly. To bring settlers to Oregon and New Mexico, Congress passed the Donation Act in 1850 to give each citizen settler 320 acres (double the usual), 640 acres to married couples. Wanting to build four transcontinental railroads after the Civil War, the government made huge land grants to investors, who advertised in Europe for settlers to live alongside the line; and during the war, in 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act to give 160 acres anywhere in the public domain to any citizen or intended citizen who would farm the land for five years. Nothing gave immigrants a stake in American society so quickly as the ownership of land, and German and Scandinavian immigrant beneficiaries of such largess might have asked, as John Fisher, the English immigrant in Michigan did, “is not this a land in which one may be proud to be received as a citicen? … Is this not a land in which one may be happy to fix one’s destany?”70
Francis Grund noted that Germans depended upon Germans for their “principal means of support.”71 Independently owned farms constituted classic examples of family-capitalist organization, usually selling to other Germans what they could not use for themselves. Germans in the cities tended to extend their economic activities with other Germans in a system of ethnic networking that became common for all major immigrant groups in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was not difficult for Germans to succeed in trade, Grund found, because their countrymen preferred to patronize them over others. Although a relatively high proportion of German immigrants became farmers, a majority found work in cities, where families, cousins, and landsmen from the same town or region could work together in taverns and other food-related business such as baking, butchering, brewing and distilling. Other services were provided within the German community by restaurant keepers, barbers, dairymen, tailors, and a small number of professionals, such as musicians, teachers, and doctors.
As was true for the vast majority of workers in all large immigrant groups, the work was extremely hard, particularly for unskilled laborers in St. Louis or Detroit (the Irish absorbed most unskilled jobs in New York and Boston), and Germans, especially after the Civil War, formed German trade unions and took a large role in the International Working Men’s Association in America, established in 1869 as the branch of the first Communist international. But the vast majority of Germans and their children, like other immigrants, were capitalists par excellence, working, saving, investing as individuals and families, and using ethnic connections to help build a business, provide a service, or supply a need. Even industrial workers, skilled or unskilled, accepted the general American view that economic opportunities would be better for their children.72
Grund emphasized economic opportunity in explaining the obvious affection and loyalty that many Germans quickly gave to the U.S. when he asked rhetorically, “what Unites the citizens of a country more effectually than their common stakes of rights and property?”73 By holding out to all persons (meaning mainly white males) “without distinction of birth of parentage” the hope of acquiring property, the nation bound its newcomers to the polity. But Grund wrote much more about rights than economic opportunity. He was, like Tocqueville, fascinated by the American preoccupation with politics. He also saw the civic culture as pervasive. “Every town and village in America has its peculiar republican government, based on the principle of election, and is, within its own sphere, as free and independent as a sovereign state.… Freedom takes its root at home, in the native village or town of an American…. In every place, in every walk of life, an American finds some rallying point or centre of political attachment.”74 “The Americans,” wrote the German immigrant, “present the singular spectacle of a people united together by no other ties than those of excellent laws and equal justice.”75
John Quincy Adams wrote to a German baron that newcomers who “cast off the European skin, never to resume it” can expect as citizens “equal rights with those of the natives of the country.”76 Whatever Adams meant by casting off the European skin, he said nothing about abandoning the German language or giving up beer-drinking, or modifying the German Christmas (which soon became popular in America), or about converting from Lutheranism to Congregationalism. Voluntary pluralism was not only compatible with patriotism but reinforced it, as in the case of Dr. Jacob De La Motta, who extolled the Constitution and republican principles—in effect, the civic culture—because it guaranteed his freedom to be a Jew.
In the process of ethnic-Americanization, the Germans, as other immigrant groups would also do, not only created ethnic organizations based on American models, such as the volunteer fire militia companies and Masonic lodges, they also joined patriotic fraternal associations that included non-Germans, such as the Improved Order of Redmen, which preached “an ultra-patriotic Americanism connected with the republican iconography of the American Revolution.”77 Like other self-consciously Americanist organizations, the Improved Order of Redmen used the name and symbols of Indians, an ugly travesty from an Indian point of view, as a way by which immigrants could quickly claim common ground with other whites who had come before them.
An offshoot of an earlier organization, the order, with about nineteen tribes in Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, and about 1,300 members by 1844–1845, had by midcentury grown to forty-five tribes and 3,200 members. Americanist in rhetoric and symbol, it concentrated mainly on social and fraternal activities, paying benefits to members, widows, and orphans. It had a disproportionate number of German-American leaders, and by June 1850 seven of the sixteen active chapters in Philadelphia were composed of German-Americans, six of which conducted their affairs in German.78 Eventually, the German chapters split off to create their own Order of Redmen, a fraternity of German-Americans, because they resented efforts on the part of the Great Council to restrict the use of German and to dampen the enthusiasm of German-Americans for meeting in taverns and accompanying funeral processions with brass band music.79
The period 1830–1860 saw the emergence of ethnic-American leaders, persons tied by affection and culture to other immigrants and their children but who also participated broadly in American civic and political life. Victor Greene has identified several such immigrant leaders among the Germans. In Charleston, South Carolina, Johann Andreas Wagener became a real estate agent for Germans seeking property and a notary public to those needing official interpretation.80 He took the lead in building the Charleston German Society and participated in starting a German Masonic lodge, a group theater, and a charity association. But he also urged immigrants to be Americans and to utilize their political rights. Celebrating the American idea of self-government, he saw ethnic organizations as a way to make effective American citizens.
Charles Reemelin, a journalist and politician in Cincinnati in the 1840s, fought to preserve the German language and established the first German Society. By 1848 he had been elected three times to the Ohio legislature and served as a representative to the state constitutional convention, arguing always that the preservation of immigrant cultures and languages would make the newcomers more loyal to the nation’s democratic ideals.81
According to Greene, the most successful German-American leader in the 1840s and 1850s was Francis Arnold Hoffman of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Minister, teacher, journalist, banker, and politician and a successful recruiter of German immigrants for the