Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 16

 16.

A German America Emerges in Pennsylvania

We drove from Reading to Lancaster, through the heart of Pennsylvania. Both had once been almost purely German towns. Like most German town foundations, they have succumbed to Anglicizing influence. But the country still seems German today, although its settlement by Germans goes back two centuries.

As I drove past all the beautiful big clean homesteads - I wouldn't say farms - I couldn't help thinking of the words Benjamin Rush used to describe the German farms in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the 18th century.

"The farm of a German," he wrote, "is distinguished from the farms of his fellow citizens by the larger circumference of the barn, by the simple but enclosed shape of the house, by the height of its enclosures, the extent of its orchards, the fertility of its fields, the goodness of its meadows, and the general niceness and cleanliness of everything that belongs to it."

Yet the Germans who settled here during the 17th and 18th centuries were among those who had emigrated not at all in search of earthly wealth, but for the sake of their faith. There must be a strong truth in the biblical saying: "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you"; for it is always and everywhere found on earth that religious communities achieve astonishing economic success, even if they do not seek it at all.

(MAP.)

The early German settlements in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

(after Faust).

The more important places are underlined on the map.

The pious sense and strong religiosity of the Pennsylvania Germans produced a second effect: their tenacious adherence to the language and customs of their fathers. This is an experience that is repeated again and again: a minority that has been blasted into foreign folklore generally preserves its völkisch idiosyncrasy as well as its language only if it is of strong religiosity.

The most striking example of this is the French Canadians. The drop of French blood did not dissolve in the sea of Anglo-Saxon Canada, but remained pure to this day primarily because the Norman and Breton peasants and fishermen who emigrated to the Saint Lawrence did not want to pray to their God in any other language than that of their mothers and fathers.

Where in Pennsylvania something of the old piety has still been preserved, there one still speaks and understands Pennsylvania Dutch. We become especially aware of this when we now come to the old Ephrata Monastery, which was the center of the Dunker sect that still exists today. All around, the farms are German, German are the barns and stables, the gardens and trees. German was also the small town that suddenly lay before us in the clear winter sun. An old stone bridge led over a river glittering and twinkling in the light. Along the row of neat little houses rolled a horse-drawn milk cart, and out of the doors came women in ancient hoods, the likes of which are no longer visible in Germany. Also ancient was the German with which they greeted us, the Palatine-Swabian dialect, which is no longer heard in the Palatinate or in Swabia.

Even the gray-haired brother of the Dunker sect, who led us through the old monastery, gave his explanations in Pennsylvania Dutch at our request, although one could hear that he was used to doing this in English. For some words he also lacked the German expression. The German-Pennsylvanian dialect is a long-lived language. The connection with the motherland broke off too soon, and the former Swabians and Palatines developed in the Pennsylvanian forests, which they turned into fertile fields, into a separate tribe of the German people, with their own customs and language. The peasants with whom we talked had no idea of Germany, and even to the priest and teacher it was a concept without living content. Only for the sake of their religion and their God have these Pennsylvania Dutchmen held on to their folklore and language to this day.

The first settlers were, without exception, pious people. Their piety found expression only in their mother tongue, and so they clung tenaciously to it. As soon as the most urgent work of securing a livelihood was done, their first concern was the establishment of German churches and schools.

If they were suspected of this by their English-speaking fellow citizens, there were, of course, also economic reasons at play. Most of the Germans had come to the many as redemptionists who had to pay off their passage through years of contract work. But all of them, or almost all of them, managed to make a decent living, to become wealthy and influential.

One cannot even blame the English colonists if they became restless with time. After all, Pennsylvania was a British colony. But now thousands of Germans were coming into the country year after year, sometimes eight to ten thousand. Not only did they threaten to blur more and more the Anglo-Saxon character of the colony, but they began to form a very troublesome economic competition and eventually to seek political influence as well.

Not all Germans, after all, went to the backwoods on the Indian frontier; many remained in Philadelphia as craftsmen, as businessmen, as teachers, clergymen and doctors. They established factories, set up printing presses and published newspapers.

Indicative of the attitude of Pennsylvanians of English blood toward their German-born fellow citizens is the judgment of Benjamin Franklin, and indicative of the complete ignorance of the history of American Germanness itself is the judgment which Benjamin Franklin finds among us. I at least learned in school that he was one of the most important and noblest people of his time. That he did not take a very noble attitude towards his German-born fellow citizens, we did not hear a word about that.

But it was Franklin who agitated most bitterly against the Germans in Pennsylvania. He wrote to his friend Peter Collinson on May 9, 1768: "I fully share your opinion that certain measures are necessary with regard to the Germans. For I fear that great disturbances may one day arise among us through their carelessness, or ours, or both. Those who come here are generally the most stupid of their nation. Stupidity is often combined with great credulity when mischievousness wants to abuse them; on the other hand, with suspicion when honorableness wants to guide them on the right path.”

    "Few Englishmen understand the German language, and therefore these Germans cannot, either through the newspapers or from the pulpit, exert any influence on the English and remove such prejudices which they may possess. The German pastors have very little influence on the English, who, it seems, take pleasure in abusing these pastors and dismissing them for very trivial causes. Unaccustomed to freedom, the Germans do not know how to make proper use of it. They are not under any ecclesiastical control; but, as must be admitted, they behave devotedly enough toward the bourgeois government, which may hopefully remain so in the future. I still remember how the Germans at first modestly refused to interfere in our elections. Now, on the contrary, they come in hordes to win everywhere except in one or two counties. Few of their children living in the country understand English. They obtain many books from Germany, and of the six printing presses located in the province, two are entirely German, two are half German and half English, and only two are entirely English. They maintain a German newspaper. Half of all German advertisements, though intended for the general public, are printed in German and English. The bulletin boards in the streets have inscriptions in both languages, in some places only in German. Lately, they are beginning to write all their bonds and other legal documents in their own language. This is allowed, although in my opinion it should not be, by the courts, where German business is increasing so much that it is necessary to keep interpreters constantly. I believe that in a few years it will be necessary to employ such interpreters also in the official assembly, in order to make clear to one half of the legislators what the other is saying. In short, unless, as you wisely suggest, the flow of immigration to other colonies can be diverted, I fear that the Germans will soon so outnumber us that, in spite of all our advantages, we shall be unable to preserve our language. Yes, our government may become questionable."

This letter typifies the Anglo-Saxon way of thinking, which rejects as stupid and inferior what is precisely not Anglo-Saxon. In one breath, Franklin complains that the German settlers in Pennsylvania are stupid and ignorant, and that they import so many books and maintain so many printing presses.

But that was the crux of Franklin's antagonism. It was business, not political. He, the later leader in the struggle for independence, in which the Germans were his best comrades-in-arms, was at least as hostile to the British authority as were the Pennsylvania Germans. But they were too industrious and too capable, and therefore too dangerous competitors of Mr. Franklin. He was then primarily a book printer. In his printing office the German sectarians of Pennsylvania had their devotional books printed. As long as the Germans allowed this, Benjamin Franklin was thoroughly pro-German, even going so far as to publish a German newspaper himself, the "Philadelphia-Zeitung."

The Germans of Pennsylvania, however, were of the opinion that they did not need an Anglo-Saxon for this, but could do it themselves. They were by no means newcomers to the printing and press business. A German, Peter Zenger, had dared the first fight for freedom of the press in New York. The second printing press in Pennsylvania was set up in the Ephrata monastery. It had been built entirely by the pious brethren. Germans established the first paper mill. The first Anglo-American printing house of Franklin and Bradford in Philadelphia was very soon followed by the German one of Christoph Saur in Germantown.

Saur started with a calendar, which he soon followed up with a newspaper, which, however, had a very lengthy title. It read, "Der Hoch-Deutsch Pennsylvanische Geschichtsschreiber oder Sammlung wichtiger Nachrichten aus dem Natur- und Kirchenreich." The paper consisted of only four pages and was to be published quarterly. But such was its success that it soon came out monthly and then even semi-monthly. Benjamin Franklin's German newspaper, however, folded for lack of readers. So it is understandable that he railed against the German language and German printers and thought that the Germans in Pennsylvania had better learn English to subscribe to his "Pennsylvania Gazette."

At that time, two hundred years ago, efforts were already underway to reduce German immigration or at least to divert it to other colonies. These efforts would probably have been successful if the economic boom that the colony of Pennsylvania owed to the Germans had not been too obvious. Thus, for the first time, on January 2, 1738, the British governor rejected all requests for restriction of German immigration that came to him with the words:

"This province has for many years been the asylum for unfortunate Protestants from the Palatinate and other parts of Germany. I believe I can say with full justification that the present prosperous condition of the province is largely due to the diligence of these people. Should they be discouraged by anything from coming here further, it may be safely assumed that the value of your lands will be less and your road to prosperity much slower. For it is not merely the goodness of the soil, but the number and diligence of the people, which produce the prosperity of a country."

About the importance of the German language for America, however, the Surgeon General of the American Army, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a pure-blooded Anglo-American, declared after the end of the War of Independence: "Do not quarrel with them (the Germans) for their adherence to their German language. It is the channel through which the knowledge and inventions of one of the wisest nations in Europe flow into our country."

When, toward the end of the 18th century, the thirteen colonies set out to sever the ties that bound them to the English mother country, there were, of their two million white inhabitants, 226,000, or a little more than ten out of a hundred, were Germans. In Pennsylvania, however, the proportion of German blood in the population was a full third. Here, therefore, there would have been at least the possibility of anchoring German language and customs in the constitution and public life.

Pennsylvania could have become a German country, had not the Germans themselves, in all too great loyalty, first to the Crown, then to the Quakers, finally to their Anglo-Saxon fellow citizens, renounced it. A hundred years after the landing of the "Concord," the ethnic Germans were so strong and influential that a motion could be made in the state assembly to make German the official language. The vote resulted in a tie. The speaker of the assembly, himself a German, decided in favor of English.