German Immigration to the US and Wisconsin
(TTT Workshop)

How independent were German communities in the Midwest?

· In the mid- to late-19th c., funding of services was overwhelmingly local: 86% of tax was local in Wisconsin in 1860 (HW II:157-58).

· Germans tended heavily to intermarry, 7 of 8 among immigrants and children of immigrants (HW). Even in Milwaukee, one commentator calls marriage between Germans and Americans “negligible.”

How when did these communities become ‘Americanized’?

By 1902, Hense-Jensen & Bruncken (1900–02, II:254) describe the transition from an utterly German character of parts of Milwaukee to the emergence of a new, less German feel:

Noch um das Jahr 1870, ja selbst zehn Jahre später, gab es gewisse Wards der damals nicht sehr großen Stadt Milwaukee, in welchen man kaum ein englisches Wort auf der Straße hörte, und die Verkaufsläden beinahe ohne Ausnahme neben dem englischen auch ein deutsches Aushängeschild hatten. Nicht wenige bedeutende Geschäftsfirmen bedienten sich zum großen Theil in ihrer Korrespondenz der deutschen Sprache. Diese Eigenthümlichkeiten “Kleindeutschlands” sind jetzt fast ganz und gar verschwunden.

[Roughly: even in 1870, indeed even 10 years later, there were wards in the still not large city of Milwaukee in which one hardly heard an English word on the street and stores almost without exception had a German sign in addition to an English one. No small number of important businesses use German in a large part of their correspondence. These characteristics of ‘Little Germany’ have almost entirely disappeared.]

Note the curve of German-speaking immigration over time. The numbers go up and down a number of times from the mid-19th c. until the turn of the present century, when they drop off for good:

1882 250,000 +

1892 120,000 (approx.)

1895 30,000 (approx.) (Walker 1964)

A rough conservative estimate of speaker numbers is the sum of the number of German-born residents and the number of children of two parents born in Germany:

Total population	1,693,330
German-born	259,819	15.34%
Children of 2 Gm-born parents	293,039	17.31%
Estimated German speakers	552,858	32.65%

A look at some key institutions/domains:

Religion
Jensen (1971) has argued that “religion was the fundamental source of political conflict in the midwest.”

Midwestern Catholicism was, of course, a multiethnic affair, in Wisconsin including large Polish, French and Irish populations (see Rippley 1985:43-45 and references therein). While in the mid-19th century united against the common enemy of Nativism, according to some accounts, the groups comprising American Catholicism split when the Irish began to oppose language maintenance as a barrier to unity across ethnic groups.

By the 1890’s a struggle had begun within the Church which resulted in downplaying ethnic identity. The first meeting of German-American Catholics in 1887 dwelt largely on preserving their ethnic heritage and language (Amerikanisch-deutsche Katholiken Versammlung 1887:27). Tension is quite apparent, as speakers talk of “gewissen gehässigen Vorurtheilen” and stressing repeatedly that they as German-American Catholics were “echt deutsch und echt katholisch zugleich … und obendrein hierzulande auch gute Amerikaner.” [Roughly: both truly German and truly Catholic, and on top of that in this country good Americans.]

Hofman (1966:139) has aptly described the various Lutheran churches of Europe, and later America, as “national in character”. Mergers eventually eroded that for some communities, but not for others.

In the conservative Missouri Synod, a very large group in Wisconsin, one observer noted in 1901 that “the change in language is not only impending but is in actual and accelerated progress at the present time” (Graebner 1965:98). (Similar patterns exist in other Lutheran immigrant groups, like Norwegians.)

Education

In education, like elsewhere, early Wisconsin provided a situation that allowed relatively easy maintenance of immigrant minority languages (HW II: 162-65). Here are the key characteristics in Wisconsin:

· a “highly localized system of common schools”;

· a state superintendent who had “little power except that of persuasion”;

· an imported tradition of church schooling from German-speaking Europe and Norway.

Indeed, when a 1854 law clearly mandated instruction in English, Germans ignored it, something possible because of these factors. Decades later, though, this situation was upset considerably by a kind of “English only” clause in an 1889 law providing for public education, the so-called Bennett Law:

An Act Concerning the Education and Employment of Children (The Bennett Law)

“No school shall be regarded as a school under this act unless there shall be taught therein, as part of the elementary education of children, reading, writing, arithmetic and U.S. history in the English language.”

Ebert & Zurstadt (1930:2): Vergleichen wir den gegenwaertigen Stand der deutschen Sprache in unsern Kreisen mit dem vor einem Jahrzehnt, so finden wir, dasz sich in den meisten Gegenden ein bedeutender Umschwung vollzogen hat. Die englische Sprache hat die deutsche verdraengt. Das sieht man auch in unsern Schulen. Waehrend frueher die Anfaenger zum groszen Teil die deutsche Sprache sprechen oder doch verstehen konnten, so ist jetzt das Gegenteil der Fall. Die Landessprache ist die Muttersprache der Kinder geworden. Es gibt allerdings noch Sprachinseln, in denen die alte Ordnung herrscht, doch wird dieser Zustand an solchen Orten sich mit der Zeit aendern.

Press
Wisconsin had over 500 newspapers/periodicals in German.

Milwaukee: Many German papers/periodicals had circulations from 10,000, to well over 100,000: Acker- und Garten-bau Zeitung, Deutsch-Amerikanische Gewerbe- und Industrie-Zeitung, Das Goldene Buch, Der Hausfreund, Milwaukee-Herold, Kinder-Post, Des Kleinhändlers Advokat, Der Landwirth, Die Rundschau, Der Wöchentliche Seebote, Die Wahrheit, Vorwärts.

Outline: History of Wisconsin German-American Newspapers & Periodicals

Year	#	Comments
1876	29
1880	38
1882	Peak of German immigration
1883	53	Rise in all kinds of publications.
1890	89	Near-peak in number; decline begins.
1895	85	Few new papers are founded after this time.
1910	75	Most rapid decline in numbers occurs.
1920	43	Mergers, loss of supplements, etc.
1925	30
1929	20
1934	12	Mostly religious, specialty publ’s, few newspapers

Numbers excerpted from Arndt (in Arndt & Olson 1965:806).

Circulation of selected Wisconsin German-language papers, 1910–1920

Newspaper	1910	1920
Appleton Gegenwart	7425	5300	(1919)
Appleton Volksfreund	7650	4657
Die Wahrheit	1250	1236
Marshfield Wochenblatt	1750	1500
Dodge Co. Pionier	2600	2400
Green Co. Herold	1525	1660
Deutsch-Amerikaner	1175	1000
Wisc. Telegraph	2250	1000
Pt Washington Zeitung	1130	750
Sauk City Pionier-Presse	900	890
Volksbote-Wochenblatt	1450	1525
National Demokrat	2750	3200
Wisc. Wochenblatt	1500	9800
Watertown Weltbürger	2925	2680
Total	36280	37598

The decline of the immigrant press: Some traditional views.

(1) German-language press was primarily a transitional phenomenon, fed directly by immigration, declined soon after the flood of immigration dried up. (See Marzolf 1979 on the Danish press in the U.S.)

(2) It was a tool to integrate new immigrants into American society, declined after serving that function. (See Soltes 1924 on Yiddish press.)

(3) The press was directly/indirectly forced out of business by government pressure before/during/after WW I. (Nollendorfs 1988, Wittke 1936)

Two more reasons:

(4) Economics of small-circ. newspapers, other structural social changes

(5) Later, loss of readers, due ultimately to shift of speakers to English

Some resources

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Buchheit, Robert H. 1985. “German Language Shift in the Nebraska District of the Missouri Synod from 1918 to 1950.” Yearbook of German-
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Conzen, Kathleen Neils. 1976. Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City. Cambridge: Harvard
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Conzen, Kathleen Neils. 1990. Making Their Own America: Assimilation theory and the German peasant pioneer. German Historical Institute,
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Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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