These ethnic-American leaders often began their public careers by defending what others saw as parochial German interests. But very quickly they illustrated Tocqueville’s central principle that participation in American civic life, understandably driven by parochial interests at first, often leads to a wider patriotism. Ethnic politicians must form coalitions to advance the interests of their constituents. They must use the rhetoric and symbols, and generally obey the rules, of the common civic culture.
In the city of Buffalo in the 1830s and 1840s, German Protestants tried to establish a public school in which some instruction would be in German as was permitted in several states.84 Having just come to Buffalo in the 1830s, the Germans were fragmented by differences in religion and regional background. The religious difference was particularly important, because German Catholics were less interested in having German taught in the public schools than in gaining support for their parochial schools, although both won the city council’s agreement to publish its proceedings in German. The immediate battle over the creation of a neighborhood school that offered instruction in German was lost, because of the Protestant-Catholic split; but as a result of the campaign two German immigrants became active in the Democratic party and the political influence of German-Americans in Buffalo generally increased.85
Francis Grund saw that influence growing elsewhere. Germans were so numerous in Pennsylvania in the early 1830s that he thought none but a German-American would have a chance at being elected governor. In Ohio, Maryland, Illinois, and New York, Germans were voting in increasing numbers. In New York City, he noted regarding the mayoral election that “the German vote becomes a matter of great solicitude with politicians of all ranks and persuasions.”86 German newspapers (thirty alone in Pennsylvania) were full of political news. Grund himself wrote a campaign biography of presidential candidate William Henry Harrison.87
The Anglo-American nativists of the 1850s did not appreciate attempts by Germans to advance their cultural and linguistic interests in the name of Americanism. The Massachusetts idea was still strong, not only in New England but also among transplanted New Englanders in the Midwest. In his farewell address, George Washington had said the Americans were united by “the same religion, manners, habits and political principles.” But now there were a great many people whose manners and habits, and in some cases religion, were different. Nativists saw those differences as compromising their capacity for Americanization. But under the rules of naturalization and the political system, nothing could stop Germans from claiming an American identity as their own. Phillip Schaff, an immigrant active in the movement to Americanize the German church for more than thirty years in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote in 1855 that “the American’s digestive power is really astonishing. How many thousands and millions of Europeans has his stomach already received! And yet he has only grown firmer and healthier thereby.”88 He saw that “over this confused diversity there broods after all a higher unity.”89
Abraham Lincoln, with his considerable experience in electoral politics, observed in 1860 that even though the immigrants of his time, the largest group of which were German, could not identify personally with the Revolution and the early days of the republic, they felt “a part of us …” because “when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that ‘we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel … that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence,” and, Lincoln concluded, “so they are.”90
Lincoln already had become friends with Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who helped to organize the new Republican party in Wisconsin in 1856, only four years after he had arrived. Still not a citizen, Schurz was almost elected lieutenant governor of that state in 1857. He would later serve as a diplomat, a general, as a U.S. senator, and as secretary of the interior. In 1859, he was invited to give a speech in Boston’s cradle of revolution, Faneuil Hall; he spoke as a newly naturalized citizen and in a thick German accent on “True Americanism.”
In the heartland of the Americanist movement and aware of Massachusetts’s preoccupation with Catholic immigration, Schurz praised the founding myth of the U.S. as an asylum for those seeking freedom and opportunity regardless of their nationality or religion. He proudly claimed the heritage of Bunker Hill, Charlestown, Lexington, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin as his own, and asserted that the nation had been founded as a “great colony of free humanity which has not old England alone but the world for its mother country.” “True Americanism,” he maintained, is based on belief in “that system of government, which makes the protection of individual rights a matter of common interest.”91 This idea, “liberty and equal rights common to all,” said Schurz, was the incentive for all immigrants, including Irish Catholics, to love their adopted country. “Around the banner of liberty … all the languages of civilized mankind are spoken, every creed is protected, every right is sacred.”92
The German story of ethnic-Americanization would be repeated in roughly the same manner by all other major ethnic groups who came voluntarily. A minority of immigrants and their children would separate themselves from the mainstream and live in small ethnic enclaves for at least two or three generations. A large majority, after establishing ethnic churches, fraternal and mutual aid associations, and ethnic economic networks, would begin to participate in the wider economic marketplace and in the arenas of American politics, and become strongly patriotic in the process.
By the mid-twentieth century, German-Americans would become the only large ethnic group to disappear as a serious ethnic political force, partly because of anti-German sentiment during the First World War but also because of the passage of time and extensive intermarriage. Yet from the earliest days of the republic through the nineteenth century, no immigrant-ethnic group, including the Irish, had a larger ethnic press.
Between 1862 and 1945, forty-three German-born Americans were elected to Congress; most had worked their way through the civic culture as elected officials in their home towns or states.93 In examining the careers of seven who were explicitly German-American leaders when they ran for office, Willi Paul Adams found that
the “ethnic” politician who … wanted to be an effective servant of his constituency could not limit himself to act as ambassador of the ethnic group that voted him into office. He had to participate fully in the all-American political game, and he was likely to be forced by his hometown newspapers to explain his moves to his constituents, and by doing so he educated them in American ways. By achieving the ultimate, getting a World’s Fair to your home town, as St. Louis Congressman Richard Bartholdt did in 1904, you scored a point for your group by doing something for the whole community.94
Politicians like Bartholdt were quintessential examples of ethnic-Americanization. Representing German-American sensibilities and interests to a wider audience, they expressed and taught the principles of the civic culture to their own constituents. It was Bartholdt who persuaded Congress to appropriate money to erect a statue of General von Steuben, a hero of the Revolution, across from the White House next to those of Lafayette and Rochambeau so that future generations would be “reminded of what the men of German blood had contributed to the cause of American independence.”95 The example was repeated on a lesser scale in the naming of streets, squares, and smaller monuments in cities and towns throughout the country after Poles, Jews, Italians, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, African-Americans, and now Hispanics and East Asians to symbolize