A community patterned after Ephrata was founded in 1800 by Peter Lehman at Snow Hill, in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. It consisted of some forty German men and women living in cloisters but relieving the monotony of their toil and the rigor of their piety with music. As in Ephrata, there was a twofold membership, the consecrated and the secular. The entire community, however, vanished after the death of its founder.

When Beissel's Ephrata was in its heyday, the Moravians, under the patronage of Count Zinzendorf of Saxony, established in 1741 a community on the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania, named Bethlehem in token of their humility. The colony provided living and working quarters for both the married and unmarried members. After about twenty years of experimenting, the communistic regimen was abandoned. Bethlehem, however, continued to thrive, and its schools and its music became widely known.

The story of the Harmonists, one of the most successful of all the communistic colonies is even more interesting. The founder, Johann Georg Rapp, had been a weaver and vine gardener in the little village of Iptingen in Wuerttemberg. He drew upon himself and his followers the displeasure of the Church by teaching that religion was a personal matter between the individual and his God; that the Bible, not the pronouncements of the clergy, should be the guide to the true faith, and that the ordinances of the Church were not necessarily the ordinances of God. The petty persecutions which these doctrines brought upon him and his fellow separatists turned them towards liberal America. In 1803 Rapp and some of his companions crossed the sea and selected as a site for their colony five thousand acres of land in Butler County, Pennsylvania. There they built the new town of Harmony, to which came about six hundred persons, all told. On February 15, 1805 they organized the Harmony Society and signed a solemn agreement to merge all their possessions in one common lot.[16] Among them were a few persons of education and property, but most of them were sturdy, thrifty mechanics and peasants, who, under the skillful direction of Father Rapp, soon transformed the forest into a thriving community. After a soul stirring revival in 1807, they adopted celibacy. Those who were married did not separate but lived together in solemn self-restraint, "treating each other as brother and sister in Christ."[17] Their belief that the second coming of the Lord was imminent no doubt strengthened their resolution. At this time, also, the men all agreed to forego the use of tobacco—no small sacrifice on the part of hard-working laborers.

The region, however, was unfavorable to the growth of the grape, which was the favorite Wuerttemberg crop. In 1814 the society accordingly sold the communal property for $100,000 and removed to a site on the Wabash River, in Indiana, where, under the magic of their industry, the beautiful village of New Harmony arose in one year, and where many of their sturdy buildings still remain a testimony to their honest craftsmanship. Unfortunately, however, two pests appeared which they had not foreseen. Harassed by malaria and meddlesome neighbors, Father Rapp a third time sought a new Canaan. In 1825 he sold the entire site to Robert Owen, the British philanthropic socialist, and the Harmonists moved back to Pennsylvania. They built their third and last home on the Ohio, about twenty miles from Pittsburgh, and called it Economy in prophetic token of the wealth which their industry and shrewdness would soon bring in.

The chaste and simple beauty of this village was due to the skill and good taste of Friedrich Reichert Rapp, an architect and stone cutter, the adopted son of Father Rapp. The fine proportions of the plain buildings, with their vines festooned between the upper and lower windows, the quaint and charming gardens, the tantalizing labyrinth where visitors lost themselves in an attempt to reach the Summer House—these were all of his creation. Friedrich Rapp was also a poet, an artist, and a musician. He gathered a worthy collection of paintings and a museum of Indian relics and objects of natural history. He composed many of the fine hymns which impress every visitor to Economy. He was likewise an energetic and skillful business man and represented the colony in its external affairs until his death in 1834. He was elected a member of the convention that framed the first constitution of Indiana, and later he was made a member of the legislature. Father Rapp, who possessed rare talents as an organizer, controlled the internal affairs of the colony. Those who left the community because unwilling to abide its discipline often pronounced their leader a narrow autocrat. But there can be no doubt that eminent good sense and gentleness tempered his judgments. He personally led the community in industry, in prayers, and in faith, until 1847, when death removed him. A council of nine elders elected by the members was then charged with the spiritual guidance of the community, and two trustees were appointed to administer its business affairs.

Economy was a German community where German was spoken and German customs were maintained, although every one also spoke English. As there were but few accessions to the community and from time to time there were defections and withdrawals, the membership steadily declined[18]; but while the community was dwindling in membership it was rapidly increasing in wealth. Oil and coal were found on some of its lands; the products of its mills and looms, of its wine presses and distilleries, were widely and favorably known; and its outside investments, chiefly in manufactories and railroads, yielded even greater returns. These outside interests, indeed, became in time the sole support of the community for, as the membership fell away, the local industries had to be shut down. Then it was that communistic methods of doing business became inadequate and the colony ran into difficulties. An expert accountant in 1892 disclosed the debts of the community to be about one and a half million dollars. But the outside industrial enterprises in which the community had invested were sound; and the vast debt was paid. The society remained solvent, with a huge surplus, though out of prosperity not of its own making. When the lands at Economy were eventually sold, about eight acres were reserved to the few survivors of the society, including the Great House of Father Rapp and its attractive garden, with the use of the church and dwellings, so that they might spend their last days in the peaceful surroundings that had brought them prosperity and happiness.

Lead me, Father, out of harm To the quiet Zoar farm If it be Thy will.

So sang another group of simple German separatists, of whom some three hundred came to America from Wuerttemberg in 1817, under the leadership of Joseph Bimeler (Baeumeler) and built the village of Zoar in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. They acquired five thousand acres of land and signed articles of association in April, 1819, turning all their individual property and all their future earnings into a common fund to be managed by an elected board of directors. The community provided its members with their daily necessities and two suits of clothes a year. The members were assigned to various trades which absorbed all their time and left them very little strength for amusement or reading. Their one recreation was singing. The society was bound to celibacy until the marriage of Bimeler to his housekeeper; thereafter marriage was permitted but not encouraged.

In 1832 the society was incorporated under the laws of Ohio, and until its dissolution it was managed as a corporation. A few Germans joined the society. No American ever requested admission. Joseph Bimeler was elected Agent General and thereby became the chosen as well as the natural leader of the community. Like other patriarchs of that epoch who led their following into the wilderness, he was a man of some education and many gifts. He was the spiritual mentor; but his piety, which was sincere and simple, did not rob him of the shrewdness necessary to material success. His followers were loyally devoted to him. They built for him the largest house in the community, a fine colonial manor house, where he dwelt in comparative luxury and reigned as their "King." When he died in 1853 he had seen the prosperity of his colony reach its zenith. It remained small. Scarcely more than three hundred members ever dwelt in the village which, in spite of its profusion of vines and flowers, lacked the informal quaintness and originality of Rapp's Economy. The Tuscarawas River furnished power for their flour mill, whose products were widely sought. There was also a woolen mill, a planing mill, a foundry, and a machine shop. The beer made by the community was famous all the country round, and for a time its pottery and tile works turned out interesting and quaint products. But one by one these small industries succumbed to the competition of the greater world. At last even an alien brew supplanted the good local beer. When the railroad tapped the village, and it was incorporated (1884) and assumed an official worldliness with its mayor and councilmen, it lost its isolation, summer visitors flocked in, and a "calaboose" was needed for the benefit of the sojourners!

The third generation was now grown. A number of dissatisfied members had left. Many of the children never joined the society but found work elsewhere. A great deal of the work had to be done by hired help. Under the leadership of the younger element it was decided in 1898 to abandon communism. Appraisers and surveyors were set to work to parcel out the property. Each of the 136 members received a cash dividend, a home in the village, and a plot of land. The average value of each share, which was in the neighborhood of $1500, was not a large return for three generations of communistic experimentation. But these had been, after all, years of moderate competence and quiet contentment, and if they took their toll in the coin of hope, as their song set forth, then these simple Wuerttembergers were fully paid.

The Inspirationists were a sect that made many converts in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland in the eighteenth century. They believed in direct revelations from God through chosen "instruments." In 1817, a new leader appeared among them in the person of Christian Metz, a man of great personal charm, worldly shrewdness, and spiritual fervor. Allied with him was Barbara Heynemann, a simple maid without education, who learned to read the Scriptures after she was twenty-three years of age. Endowed with the peculiar gift of "translation," she was cherished by the sect as an instrument of God for revealing His will.

To this pair came an inspiration to lead their harassed followers to America. In 1842 they purchased the Seneca Indian Reservation near Buffalo, New York. They called their new home Ebenezer, and in 1843 they organized the Ebenezer Society, under a constitution which pledged them to communism. Over eight hundred peasants and artisans joined the colony, and their industry soon had created a cluster of five villages with mills, workshops, schools, and dwellings. But they were continually annoyed by the Indians from whom they had purchased the site and were distracted by the rapidly growing city of Buffalo, which was only five miles away!

This threat of worldliness brought a revelation that they must seek greater seclusion. A large tract on the Iowa River was purchased, and to this new site the population was gradually transferred. There they built Amana. Within a radius of six miles, five subsidiary villages sprang up, each one laid out like a German dorf, with its cluster of shops and mills, and the cottages scattered informally on the main road. When the railway tapped the neighborhood, the community in self-defense purchased the town that contained the railway station. So when the good Christian Metz died in 1867, at the age of seventy-two, his pious followers, thanks to his sagacity, were possessed of some twenty-six thousand acres of rich Iowa land and seven thriving villages, comfortably housing about 1400 of the faithful. Barbara Heynemann died in 1883, and since her death no "instrument" has been found to disclose the will of God. But many ponderous tomes of "revelations" have survived and these are faithfully read and their naive personal directions and inhibitions are still generally obeyed. The Bible, however, remains the main guide of these people, and they follow its instructions with childish literalism. Until quite recently they clung to the simple dress and the austere life of their earlier years. The solidarity of the community has been maintained with rare skill. The "Great Council of the Brethren" upon whom is laid the burden of directing all the affairs, has avoided government by mass meeting, discouraged irresponsible talk and criticism, and, as an aristocracy of elders, has shrewdly controlled the material and spiritual life of the community.

The society has received many new members. There have been accessions from Zoar and Economy and one or two Americans have joined. The "Great Council," in its desire to maintain the homogeneity of the group, rejects the large number of applications for membership received every year. Over sixty per cent of the young people who have left the community to try the world have come back to "colony trousers" or "colony skirts," symbols of the complete submergence of the individual.

Celibacy has been encouraged but never enjoined, and the young people are permitted to marry, if the Spirit gives its sanction, the Elders their consent, and if the man has reached the age of twenty-four years. The two sexes are rigidly separated in school, in church, at work, and in the communal dining rooms. Each family lives in a house, but there are communal kitchens, where meals are served to groups of twenty or more. Every member receives an annual cash bonus varying from $25 to $75 and a pass book to record his credits at the "store." The work is doled out among the members, who take pride in the quality rather than in the quantity of their product. All forms of amusement are forbidden; music, which flourished in other German communities, is suppressed; and even reading for pleasure or information was until recently under the ban.

The only symbols of gayety in the villages are the flowers, and these are everywhere in lavish abundance, softening the austere lines of the plain and unpainted houses. No architect has been allowed to show his skill, no artist his genius, in the shaping of this rigorous life. But its industries flourish. Amana calico and Amana woolens are known in many markets. The livestock is of the finest breeds; the products of the fields and orchards are the choicest. But the modern visitor wonders how long this prosperity will be able to maintain that isolation which alone insured the communal solidarity. Already store clothes are being worn, photographs are seen on the walls, "worldly" furniture is being used, libraries, those openers of closed minds, are in every schoolhouse, and newspapers and magazines are "allowed."

The experiences of Eric Janson and his devotees whom he led out of Sweden to Bishop Hill Colony, in Illinois, are replete with dramatic and tragic details. Janson was a rugged Swedish peasant, whose eloquence and gift of second sight made him the prophet of the Devotionalists, a sect that attempted to reestablish the simplicity of the primitive church among the Lutherans of Scandinavia. Driven from pillar to post by the relentless hatred of the Established Church, they sought refuge in America, where Janson planned a theocratic socialistic community. Its communism was based entirely upon religious convictions, for neither Janson nor any of his illiterate followers had heard of the politico-economic systems of French reformers. Over one thousand young and vigorous peasants followed him to America. The first contingent of four hundred arrived in 1846 and spent their first winter in untold miseries and privations, with barely sufficient food, but with enough spiritual fervor to kindle two religious services a day and three on Sunday. Attacking the vast prairies with their primitive implements, harvesting grain with the sickle and grinding it by hand when their water power gave out, sheltering themselves in tents and caves, enduring agues and fevers, hunger and cold, the majority still remained loyal to the leader whose eloquence fired them with a sustaining hope. Thrift, unremitting toil, the wonderful fertility of the prairie, the high price of wheat, flax, and broom corn, were bound to bring prosperity. In 1848 they built a huge brick dormitory and dining hall, a great frame church, and a number of smaller dwellings. Improved housing at once told on the general health, though in the next year a scourge of cholera, introduced by some newcomer, claimed 143 members.

In the meantime John Root, an adventurer from Stockholm, who had served in the American army, arrived at the colony and soon fell in love with the cousin of Eric Janson. The prophet gave his consent to the marriage on condition that, if at any time Root wished to leave the colony, his wife should be permitted to remain if she desired. A written agreement acknowledged Root's consent to these conditions. He soon tired of a life for which he had not the remotest liking, and, failing to entice his wife away with him, he kidnaped her and forcibly detained her in Chicago, whence she was rescued by a valiant band of the colonists. In retaliation the irate husband organized a mob of frontiers folk to drive out the fanatics as they had a short time before driven out Brigham Young and his Mormons. But the neighbors of the colonists, having learned their sterling worth, came to the rescue. Root then began legal proceedings against Janson. In May, 1850, while in court the renegade deliberately shot and killed the prophet. The community in despair awaited three days the return to life of the man whom they looked upon as a representative of Christ sent to earth to rebuild the Tabernacle.

Janson had been a very poor manager, however, and the colony was in debt. In order quickly to obtain money, he had sent Jonas Olsen, the ablest and strongest of his followers, to California to seek gold to wipe out the debt. Upon hearing of the tragedy, Olsen hastened back to Bishop Hill and was soon in charge of affairs. In 1853 he obtained for the colony a charter of incorporation which vested the entire management of the property in seven trustees. These men, under the by-laws adopted, became also the spiritual mentors, and the colonists, unacquainted with democratic usages in government, submitted willingly to the leadership of this oligarchy. A new era of great material prosperity now set in. The village was rebuilt. The great house was enlarged so that all the inhabitants could be accommodated in its vast communal dining room. Trees were planted along the streets. Shops and mills were erected, and a hotel became the means of introducing strangers to the community.

Meanwhile Olsen was growing more and more arbitrary and, after a bitter controversy, he imposed celibacy upon the members. This was the beginning of the end. One of the trustees, Olaf Jansen, a good-natured peasant who could not keep his accounts but who had a peasant's sagacity for a bargain, wormed his way into financial control. He wanted to make the colony rich, but he led it to the verge of bankruptcy. He became a speculator and promoter. Stories of his shortcomings were whispered about and in 1860 the peasant colony revolted and deposed Olaf from office. He then had himself appointed receiver to wind up the corporation's affairs, and in the following year the communal property was distributed. Every member, male and female, thirty-five years of age received a full share which "consisted of 22 acres of land, one timber lot of nearly 2 acres, one town lot, and an equal part of all barns, houses, cattle, hogs, sheep or other domestic animals and all farming implements and household utensils." Those under thirty-five received according to their age. Had these shares been unencumbered, this would have represented a fair return for their labor. But Olaf had made no half-way business of his financial ambitions, and the former members who now were melting peacefully and rather contentedly into the general American life found themselves saddled with his obligations. The "colony case" became famous among Illinois lawyers and dragged through twelve years of litigation. Thus the glowing fraternal communism of poor Janson ended in the drab discord of an American lawsuit.

In 1862 the followers of Jacob Hutter, a Mennonite martyr who was burned at the stake in Innsbruck in the sixteenth century, founded the Old Elmspring Community on the James River in South Dakota. During the Thirty Years' War these saintly Quaker-like German folk had found refuge in Moravia, whence they had been driven into Hungary, later into Rumania, and then into Russia. As their objection to military service brought them into conflict with the Czar's government, they finally determined to migrate to America. In 1874 they had all reached South Dakota, where they now live in five small communities. Scarcely four hundred all told, they cling to their ancient ambition to keep themselves "unspotted from the world," and so have evolved a self-sustaining communal life, characterized by great simplicity of dress, of speech, and of living. They speak German and refrain entirely from voting and from other political activity. They are farmers and practise only those handicrafts which are necessary to their own communal welfare.

While most of these German sectarian communities had only a slight economic effect upon the United States, their influence upon immigration has been extensive. In the early part of the last century, it was difficult to obtain authentic news concerning America in the remote hamlets of Europe. All sorts of vague and grotesque notions about this country were afloat. Every member of these communities, when he wrote to those left behind, became a living witness of the golden opportunities offered in the new land. And, unquestionably, a considerable share of the great German influx in the middle of the nineteenth century can be traced to the dissemination of knowledge by this means. Mikkelsen says of the Jansonists that their "letters home concerning the new country paved the way for that mighty tide of Swedish immigration which in a few years began to roll in upon Illinois and the Northwest."

The Shakers are the oldest and the largest communistic sect to find a congenial home in America. The cult originated in Manchester, England, with Ann Lee, a "Shaking Quaker" who never learned to read or write but depended upon revelation for doctrine and guidance. "By a direct revelation," says the Shaker Compendium, she was "instructed to come to America." Obedient to the vision, she sailed from Liverpool in the summer of 1774, accompanied by six men and two women, among whom were her husband, a brother, and a niece. This little flock settled in the forests near Albany, New York. Abandoned by her husband, the prophetess went from place to place, proclaiming her peculiar doctrines. Soon she became known as "Mother Ann" and was reputed to have supernatural powers. At the time of her death in 1784 she had numerous followers in western New England and eastern New York.

In 1787 they founded their first Shaker community at Mount Lebanon. Within a few years other societies were organized in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Connecticut. On the wave of the great religious revival at the beginning of the nineteenth century their doctrines were carried west. The cult achieved its highest prosperity in the decade following 1830, when it numbered eighteen societies and about six thousand members.

In shrewd and capable hands, the sect soon had both an elaborate system of theology based upon the teachings of Mother Ann and also an effective organization. The communal life, ordaining celibacy, based on industry, and constructed in the strictest economy, achieved material prosperity and evidently brought spiritual consolation to those who committed themselves to its isolation. Although originating in England, the sect is confined wholly to America and has from the first recruited its membership almost wholly from native Americans.

Another of these social experiments was the Oneida Community and its several ephemeral branches. Though it was of American origin and the members were almost wholly American, it deserves passing mention. The founder, John Humphrey Noyes, a graduate of Dartmouth and a Yale divinity student, conceived a system of communal life which should make it possible for the individual to live without sin. This perfectionism, he believed, necessitated the abolition of private property through communism, the abolition of sickness through complete cooeperation of the individual with God, and the abolition of the family through a "scientific" cooeperation of the sexes. The Oneida Community was financially very prosperous. Its "stirpiculture," Noyes's high-sounding synonym for free love, brought it, however, into violent conflict with public opinion, and in 1879 "complex marriages" gave way to monogamous families. In the following year the communistic holding of property gave way to a joint stock company, under whose skillful management the prosperity of the community continues today.

The American Utopias based upon an assumed economic altruism were much more numerous than those founded primarily upon religion but, as they were recruited almost wholly from Americans, they need engage our attention only briefly. There were two groups of economic communistic experiments, similar in their general characteristics but differing in their origin. One took its inspiration directly from Robert Owen, the distinguished philanthropist and successful cotton manufacturer of Scotland; the other from Fourier, the noted French social philosopher.

In 1825 Robert Owen purchased New Harmony, Rapp's village in Indiana and its thirty thousand appurtenant acres. When Owen came to America he was already famous. Great throngs flocked to hear this practical man utter the most visionary sentiments. At Washington, for instance, he lectured to an auditory that included great senators and famous representatives, members of the Supreme Court and of the Cabinet, President Monroe and Adams, the President-elect. He displayed to his eager hearers the plans and specifications of the new human order, his glorified apartment house with all the external paraphernalia of selective human perfection drawn to scale.

For a brief period New Harmony was the communistic capital of the world. It was discussed everywhere and became, says its chronicler, "the rendezvous of the enlightened and progressive people from all over the United States and northern Europe." It achieved a sort of motley cosmopolitanism. A "Boat Load of Knowledge" carried from Pittsburgh the most distinguished group of scientists that had hitherto been brought together in America. It included William Maclure, a Scotchman who came to America, at the age of thirty-three, ambitious to make a geological survey of the country and whose learning and energy soon earned him the title of "Father of American Geology"; Thomas Say, "the Father of American Zooelogy"; Charles Alexander Lesueur, a distinguished naturalist from the Jardin des Plantes of Paris; Constantine S. Rafinesque, a scientific nomad whose studies of fishes took him everywhere and whose restless spirit forbade him remaining long anywhere; Gerard Troost, a Dutch scientist who later did pioneer work in western geology; Joseph Neef, a well-known Pestalozzian educator, together with two French experts in that system; and Owen's four brilliant sons. A few artists and musicians and all sorts of reformers, including Fanny Wright, an ardent and very advanced suffragette, joined these scientists in the new Eden. Owen had issued a universal invitation to the "industrious and well disposed," but his project offered also the lure of a free meal ticket for the improvident and the glitter of novelty for the restless.

"I am come to this country," Owen said in his opening words at New Harmony, "to introduce an entire new state of society, to change it from the ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system, which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contests between individuals."[19] But the germs of dissolution were already present in the extreme individuality of the members of this new society. Here was no homogeneous horde of docile German peasants waiting to be commanded. What Father Rapp could do, Owen could not. The sifting process had begun too late. Seven different constitutions issued in rapid succession attempted in vain to discover a common bond of action. In less than two years Owen's money was gone, and nine hundred or more disillusioned persons rejoined the more individualistic world. Many of them subsequently achieved distinction in professional and public callings. Owen's widely advertised experiment was fecund, however, and produced some eleven other short-lived communistic attempts, of which the most noted were at Franklin, Haverstraw, and Coxsackie in New York, Yellow Springs and Kendal in Ohio, and Forestville and Macluria in Indiana.

Fourierism found its principal apostle in this country in Arthur Brisbane, whose Social Destiny of Man, published in 1840, brought to America the French philosopher's naive, social regimen of reducing the world of men to simple units called phalanxes, whose barrack-like routine should insure plenty, equality, and happiness. Horace Greeley, with characteristic, erratic eagerness, pounced upon the new gospel, and Brisbane obtained at once a wide circle of sympathetic readers through the Tribune. Thirty-four phalanxes were organized in a short time, most of them with an incredible lack of foresight. They usually lasted until the first payment on the mortgage was due, though a few weathered the buffetings of fortune for several years. Brook Farm in Massachusetts and the Wisconsin phalanx each endured six years, and the North American phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey, lasted thirteen years.

Icaria is a romantic sequel to the Owen and Fourier colonies. It antedated Brisbane's revival of Fourierism, was encouraged by Owenism, survived both, and formed a living link between the utopianism of the early nineteenth century and the utilitarian socialism of the twentieth. Etienne Cabet was one of those interesting Frenchmen whose fertile minds and instinct for rapid action made France during the nineteenth century kaleidoscopic with social and political events. Though educated for the bar, Cabet devoted himself to social and political reform. As a young man he was a director in that powerful secret order, the Carbonari, and was elected to the French chamber of deputies, but his violent attitude toward the Government was such that in 1834 he was obliged to flee to London to escape imprisonment. Here, unmolested, he devoted himself for five years to social and historical research. He returned to France in 1839 and in the following year published his Voyage en Icarie, a book that at once took its place by the side of Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Cabet pictured in his volume an ideal society where plenty should be a substitute for poverty and equality a remedy for class egoism. So great was the cogency of his writing that Icaria became more than a mere vision to hundreds of thousands in those years of social ferment and democratic aspirations. From a hundred sources the demand arose to translate the book into action. Cabet thereupon framed a constitution and sought the means of founding a real Icaria. After consulting Robert Owen, he unfortunately fell into the clutches of some Cincinnati land speculators and chose a site for his colony in the northeastern part of Texas. When the announcement was made in his paper, Le Populaire, the responses were so numerous that Cabet believed that "more than a million cooeperators" were eager for the experiment.

In February, 1848, sixty-nine young men, all carefully selected volunteers, were sent forth from Havre as the vanguard of the contemplated exodus. But the movement was halted by the turn of great events. Twenty days after the young men sailed, the French Republic was proclaimed, and in the fervor and distraction of this immediate political victory the new and distant Utopia seemed to thousands less alluring than it had been before. The group of young volunteers, however, reached America. After heart-rending disillusionment in the swamps and forests of Louisiana and on the raw prairies of Texas, they made their way back to New Orleans in time to meet Cabet and four hundred Icarians, who arrived early in 1849. The Gallic instinct for factional differences soon began to assert itself in repeated division and subdivision on the part of the idealists. One-half withdrew at New Orleans to work out their individual salvation. The remainder followed Cabet to the deserted Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois, where vacant houses offered immediate shelter and where they enjoyed an interval of prosperity. The French genius for music, for theatricals, and for literature relieved them from the tedium that characterized most co-operative colonies. Soon their numbers increased to five hundred by accessions which, with few exceptions, were French.

But Cabet was not a practical leader. His pamphlet published in German in 1854, entitled If I had half a million dollars, reveals the naivete of his mind. He wanted to find money, not to make it. The society soon became involved in a controversy in which Cabet's immediate following were outnumbered. The minority petulantly stopped working but continued to eat. "The majority decided that those who would not work should not eat ... and gave notice that those who absented themselves from labor would be cut off from rations."[20] As a result, Cabet, in 1856, was expelled from his own Icaria! With 170 faithful adherents he went to St. Louis, and there a few days later he died. The minority buried their leader, but their faith in communal life survived this setback. At Cheltenham, a suburb of St. Louis, they acquired a small estate, where proximity to the city enabled the members to get work. Here they lived together six years before division disrupted them permanently.

At Nauvoo in the meantime there had been other secessions, and the property, in 1857, was in the hands of a receiver. The plucky and determined remnant, however, removed to Iowa, where on the prairie near Corning they planted a new Icaria. Here, by hard toil and in extreme poverty, but in harmony and contentment, the communists lived until, in 1876, the younger members wished to adopt advanced methods in farming, in finance, and in management. The older men, with wisdom acquired through bitter experience, refused to alter their methods. The younger party won a lawsuit to annul the communal charter. The property was divided, and again there were two Icarias, the "young party" retaining the old site and the "old party" moving on and founding New Icaria, a few miles from the old. But Old Icaria was soon split: one faction removed to California, where the Icaria-Speranza community was founded; and the other remained at Old Icaria. Both came to grief in 1888. Finally in 1895 New Icaria, then reduced to a few veterans, was dissolved by a unanimous vote of the community.

* * * * *

In 1854 Victor Considerant, the French socialist, planted a Fourieristic phalanx in Texas, under the liberal patronage of J.B.A. Godin, the godfather of Fourierism in France who founded at Guise the only really successful phalanx. A French communistic colony was also attempted at Silkville, Kansas. But both ventures lasted only a few years. Since the subsidence of these French communistic experiments, there have been many sporadic attempts at founding idealistic communities in the United States. Over fifty have been tried since the Civil War. Nearly all were established under American auspices and did not lure many foreigners.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: As is usual among people who pride themselves on their peculiarities there were variations of opinion among these sects which led to schisms. The Mennonites contained at one time no less than eleven distinct branches, among them the Amish, Old and New, whose ridiculous singularity of dress, in which they discarded all ornaments and even buttons, earned them the nickname "Hooks and Eyes." But no matter how aloof these sects held themselves from the world, or what asceticism they practiced upon themselves, or what spiritual and economic fraternity they displayed to each other, they possessed a remarkable native cunning in bargaining over a bushel of wheat or a shoat, and for a time most of their communities prospered.]

[Footnote 16: Under the communal contract, which was later upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States, members agreed to merge their properties and to renounce all claims for services; and the community, on its part, agreed to support the members and to repay without interest, to any one desiring to withdraw, the amount he had put into the common fund.]

[Footnote 17: Communistic Societies of the United States, by Charles Nordhoff, p. 73.]

[Footnote 18: The largest membership was attained in 1827, when 522 were enrolled. There were 391 in 1836; 321 in 1846; 170 in 1864; 146 in 1866; 70 in 1879; 34 in 1888; 37 in 1892; 10 in 1897; 8 in 1902, only two of whom were men; and in 1903, three women and one man. The population of Economy, however, was always much larger than the communal membership.]

[Footnote 19: The New Harmony Movement, by G.B. Lockwood, p. 83.]

[Footnote 20: Icaria, A Chapter in the History of Communism, by Albert Shaw, p. 58.]



CHAPTER V

THE IRISH INVASION

After the Revolution, immigrants began to filter into America from Great Britain and continental Europe. No record was kept of their arrival, and their numbers have been estimated at from 4000 to 10,000 a year, on the average. These people came nearly all from Great Britain and were driven to migrate by financial and political conditions.

In 1819 Congress passed a law requiring Collectors of Customs to keep a record of passengers arriving in their districts, together with their age, sex, occupation, and the country whence they came, and to report this information to the Secretary of State. This was the Federal Government's first effort to collect facts concerning immigration. The law was defective, yet it might have yielded valuable results had it been intelligently enforced.[21]

From all available collateral sources it appears that the official figures greatly understated the actual number of arrivals. Great Britain kept an official record of those who emigrated from her ports to the United States and the numbers so listed are nearly as large as the total immigration from all sources reported by the United States officials during a time when a heavy influx is known to have been coming from Germany and Switzerland.

Inaccurate as these figures are, they nevertheless are a barometer indicating the rising pressure of immigration. The first official figures show that in 1820 there arrived 8385 aliens of whom 7691 were Europeans. Of these 3614, or nearly one-half, came from Ireland. Until 1850 this proportion was maintained. Here was evidence of the first ground swell of immigration to the United States whose subsequent waves in sixty years swept to America one-half of the entire population of the Little Green Isle. Since 1820 over four and a quarter million Irish immigrants have found their way hither. In 1900 there were nearly five million persons in the United States descended from Irish parentage. They comprise today ten per cent of our foreign born population.

The discontent and grievances of the Irish had a vivid historical background in their own country. There were four principal causes which induced the transplanting of the race: rebellion, famine, restrictive legislation, and absentee landlordism. Every uprising of this bellicose people from the time of Cromwell onward had been followed by voluntary and involuntary exile. It is said that Cromwell's Government transported many thousand Irish to the West Indies. Many of these exiles subsequently found their way to the Carolinas, Virginia, and other colonies. After the great Irish rebellion of 1798 and again after Robert Emmet's melancholy failure in the rising of 1803 many fled across the sea. The Act of Union in 1801 brought "no submissive love for England," and constant political agitations for which the Celtic Irish need but little stimulus have kept the pathway to America populous.

The harsh penal laws of two centuries ago prescribing transportation and long terms of penal servitude were a compelling agency in driving the Irish to America. Illiberal laws against religious nonconformists, especially against the Catholics, closed the doors of political advancement in their faces, submitted them to humiliating discriminations, and drove many from the island. Finally, the selfish Navigation Laws forbade both exportation of cattle to England and the sending of foodstuffs to the colonies, dealing thereby a heavy blow to Irish agriculture. These restrictions were followed by other inhibitions until almost every industry or business in which the Irish engaged was unduly limited and controlled. It should, however, not be forgotten that these restrictions bore with equal weight upon the Ulster settlers from Scotland and England, who managed somehow to endure them successfully.

Absentee landlordism was oppressive both to the cotter's body and to his soul, for it not only bound him to perpetual poverty but kindled within him a deep sense of injustice. The historian, Justin McCarthy, says that the Irishman "regarded the right to have a bit of land, his share, exactly as other people regard the right to live." So political and economic conditions combined to feed the discontent of a people peculiarly sensitive to wrongs and swift in their resentments.

But the most potent cause of the great Irish influx into America was famine in Ireland. The economist may well ascribe Irish failure to the potato. Here was a crop so easy of culture and of such nourishing qualities that it led to overpopulation and all its attendant ills. The failure of this crop was indeed an "overwhelming disaster," for, according to Justin McCarthy, the Irish peasant with his wife and his family lived on the potato, and whole generations grew up, lived, married, and passed away without ever having tasted meat. When the cold and damp summer of 1845 brought the potato rot, the little, overpopulated island was facing dire want. But when the next two years brought a plant disease that destroyed the entire crop, then famine and fever claimed one quarter of the eight million inhabitants. The pitiful details of this national disaster touched American hearts. Fleets of relief ships were sent across from America, and many a shipload of Irish peasants was brought back. In 1845 over 44,821 came; 1847 saw this number rise to 105,536 and in the next year to 112,934. Rebellion following the famine swelled the number of immigrants until Ireland was left a land of old people with a fast shrinking population.

There is a prevailing notion that this influx after the great famine was the commencement of Irish migration. In reality it was only the climax. Long before this, Irishmen were found in the colonies, chiefly as indentured servants; they were in the Continental Army as valiant soldiers; they were in the western flux that filled the Mississippi Valley as useful pioneers. How many there were we do not know. As early as 1737, however, there were enough in Boston to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, and in 1762 they poured libations to their favorite saint in New York City, for the Mercury in announcing the meeting said, "Gentlemen that please to attend will meet with the best Usage." On March 17, 1776, the English troops evacuated Boston and General Washington issued the following order on that date:

Parole Boston

Countersign St. Patrick

The regiments under marching orders to march tomorrow morning. By His Excellency's command.

Brigadier of the Day

GEN. JOHN SULLIVAN.

Thus did the Patriot Army gracefully acknowledge the day and the people.

In 1784, on the first St. Patrick's Day after the evacuation of New York City by the British, there was a glorious celebration "spent in festivity and mirth." As the newspaper reporter put it, "the greatest unanimity and conviviality pervaded" a "numerous and jovial company."

Branches of the Society of United Irishmen were formed in American cities soon after the founding of the order in Ireland. Many veterans of '98 found their way to America, and between 1800 and 1820 many thousand followed the course of the setting sun. Their number cannot be ascertained; but there were not a few. In 1818 Irish immigrant associations were organized by the Irish in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to aid the newcomers in finding work. Many filtered into the United States from Canada, Newfoundland, and the West Indies. These earlier arrivals were not composed of the abjectly poor who comprised the majority of the great exodus, and especially among the political exiles there were to be found men of some means and education.

America became extremely popular in Ireland after the Revolution of 1776, partly because the English were defeated, partly because of Irish democratic aspirations, but particularly because it was a land of generous economic and political possibilities. The Irish at once claimed a kinship with the new republic, and the ocean became less of a barrier than St. George's Channel.

"The States," as they were called, became a synonym of abundance. The most lavish reports of plenty were sent back by the newcomers—of meat daily, of white bread, of comfortable clothing. "There is a great many ill conveniences here," writes one, "but no empty bellies." In England and Ireland and Scotland the number of poor who longed for this abundance exceeded the capacity of the boats. Many who would have willingly gone to America lacked the passage money. The Irish peasant, born and reared in extreme poverty, was peculiarly unable to scrape together enough to pay his way. The assistance which he needed, however, was forthcoming from various sources. Friends and relatives in America sent him money; in later years this practice was very common. Societies were organized to help those who could not help themselves. Railroad and canal companies, in great need of labor, imported workmen by the thousands and advanced their passage money. And finally, the local authorities found shipping their paupers to another country a convenient way of getting rid of them. England early resorted to the same method. In 1849 the Irish poor law guardians were given authority to borrow money for such "assistance," as it was called. In 1881 the Land Commission and in 1882 the Commissioner of Public Works were authorized to advance money for this purpose. In 1884 and 1885 over sixteen thousand persons were thus assisted from Galway and Mayo counties.

Long before the great Irish famine of 1846-47 America appeared like a mirage, and wondering peasants in their dire distress exaggerated its opulence and opportunities. They braved the perils of the sea and trusted to luck in the great new world. The journey in itself was no small adventure. There were some sailings directly from Ireland; but most of the Irish immigrants were collected at Liverpool by agents not always scrupulous in their dealings. A hurried inspection at Liverpool gained them the required medical certificates, and they were packed into the ships. Of the voyage one passenger who made the journey from Belfast in 1795 said: "The slaves who are carried from the coast of Africa have much more room allowed them than the immigrants who pass from Ireland to America, for the avarice of captains in that trade is such that they think they can never load their vessels sufficiently, and they trouble their heads in general no more about the accommodation and storage of their passengers than of any other lumber aboard." When the great immigrant invasion of America began, there were not half enough ships for the passengers, all were cruelly overcrowded, and many were so filthy that even American port officials refused a landing before cleansing. Under such conditions sickness was a matter of course, and of the hordes who started for the promised land thousands perished on the way.[22]

Hope sustained the voyagers. But what must have been the disappointment of thousands when they landed! No ardent welcome awaited them, nor even jobs for the majority. Alas for the rosy dreams of opulence! Here was a prosaic place where toil and sweat were the condition of mere existence. As the poor creatures had no means of moving on, they huddled in the ports of arrival. Almshouses were filled, beggars wandered in every street, and these peasants accustomed to the soil and the open country were congested in the cities, unhappy misfits in an entirely new economic environment. Unskilled in the handicrafts, they were forced to accept the lot of the common laborer. Fortunately, the great influx came at the time of rapid turnpike, canal, and railroad expansion. Thousands found their way westward with contractors' gangs. The free lands, however, did not lure them. They preferred to remain in the cities. New York in 1850 sheltered 133,000 Irish. Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Albany, Baltimore, and St. Louis, followed, in the order given, as favorite lodging places, and there was not one rapidly growing western city, such as Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, that did not have its "Irish town" or "Shanty town" where the immigrants clung together.

Their brogue and dress provoked ridicule; their poverty often threw them upon the community; the large percentage of illiteracy among them evoked little sympathy; their inclinations towards intemperance and improvidence were not neutralized by their great good nature and open-handedness; their religion reawoke historical bitterness; their genius for politics aroused jealousy; their proclivity to unite in clubs, associations, and semi-military companies made them the objects of official suspicion; and above all, their willingness to assume the offensive, to resent instantly insult or intimidation, brought them into frequent and violent contact with their new neighbors. "America for Americans" became the battle cry of reactionaries, who organized the American or "Know-Nothing" party and sought safety at the polls. While all foreign elements were grouped together, indiscriminately, in the mind of the nativist, the Irishman unfortunately was the special object of his spleen, because he was concentrated in the cities and therefore offered a visual and concrete example of the danger of foreign mass movements, because he was a Roman Catholic and thus awakened ancient religious prejudices that had long been slumbering, and because he fought back instantly, valiantly, and vehemently.

Popular suspicion against the foreigner in America began almost as soon as immigration assumed large proportions. In 1816 conservative newspapers called attention to the new problems that the Old World was thrusting upon the New: the poverty of the foreigner, his low standard of living, his illiteracy and slovenliness, his ignorance of American ways and his unwillingness to submit to them, his clannishness, the danger of his organizing and capturing the political offices and ultimately the Government. In addition to the alarmist and the prejudiced, careful and thoughtful citizens were aroused to the danger. Unfortunately, however, religious antagonisms were aroused and, as is always the case, these differences awakened the profoundest prejudices and passions of the human heart. There were many towns in New England and in the West where Roman Catholicism was unknown except as a traditional enemy of free institutions. It is difficult to realize in these days of tolerance the feelings aroused in such communities when Catholic churches, parochial schools, and convents began to appear among them; and when the devotees of this faith displayed a genius for practical politics, instinctive distrust developed into lively suspicion.

The specter of ecclesiastical authority reared itself, and the question of sharing public school moneys with parochial schools and of reading the Bible in the public schools became a burning issue. Here and there occurred clashes that were more than barroom brawls. Organized gangs infested the cities. Both sides were sustained and encouraged by partisan papers, and on several occasions the antagonism spent themselves in riots and destruction. In 1834 the Ursuline convent at Charlestown, near Boston, was sacked and burned. Ten years later occurred the great anti-Irish riots in Philadelphia, in which two Catholic churches and a schoolhouse were burned by a mob inflamed to hysteria by one of the leaders who held up a torn American flag and shouted, "This is the flag that was trampled on by Irish papists." Prejudice accompanied fear into every city and "patented citizens" were often subject to abuse and even persecution. Tammany Hall in New York City became the political fortress of the Irish. Election riots of the first magnitude were part of the routine of elections, and the "Bloody Sixth Ward Boys" were notorious for their hooliganism on election day.

The suggestions of the nativists that paupers and criminals be excluded from immigration were not embodied into law. The movement soon was lost in the greater questions which slavery was thrusting into the foreground. When the fight with nativism was over, the Irish were in possession of the cities. They displayed an amazing aptitude for political plotting and organization and for that prime essential to political success popularly known as "mixing." Policemen and aldermen, ward heelers, bosses, and mayors, were known by their brogue. The Irish demonstrated their loyalty to the Union in the Civil War and merged readily into American life after the lurid prejudices against them faded.

Unfortunately, a great deal of this prejudice was revived when the secret workings of an Irish organization in Pennsylvania were unearthed. Among the anthracite coal miners a society was formed, probably about 1854, called the Molly Maguires, a name long known in Ireland. The members were all Irish, professed the Roman Catholic faith, and were active in the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The Church, the better class of Irishmen, and the Hibernians, however, were shocked by the doings of the Molly Maguires and utterly disowned them. They began their career of blackmail and bullying by sending threats and death notices embellished with crude drawings of coffins and pistols to those against whom they fancied they had a grievance, usually the mine boss or an unpopular foreman. If the recipient did not heed the threat, he was waylaid and beaten and his family was abused. By the time of the Civil War these bullies had terrorized the entire anthracite region. Through their political influence they elected sheriffs and constables, chiefs of police and county commissioners. As they became bolder, they substituted arson and murder for threats and bullying, and they made life intolerable by their reckless brutality. It was impossible to convict them, for the hatred against an informer, inbred in every Irishman through generations of experience in Ireland, united with fear in keeping competent witnesses from the courts. Finally the president of one of the large coal companies employed James McParlan, a remarkably clever Irish detective. He joined the Mollies, somehow eluded their suspicions, and slowly worked his way into their confidence. An unusually brutal and cowardly murder in 1875 proved his opportunity. When the courts finished with the Mollies, nineteen of their members had been hanged, a large number imprisoned, and the organization was completely wiped out.

Meantime the Fenian movement served to keep the Irish in the public eye. This was no less than an attempt to free Ireland and disrupt the British Empire, using the United States as a fulcrum, the Irish in America as the power, and Canada as the lever. James Stephens, who organized the Irish Republican Brotherhood, came to America in 1858 to start a similar movement. After the Civil War, which supplied a training school for whole regiments of Irish soldiers, a convention of Fenians was held at Philadelphia in 1865 at which an "Irish Republic" was organized, with a full complement of officers, a Congress, a President, a Secretary of the Treasury, a Secretary of War, in fact, a replica of the American Federal Government. It assumed the highly absurd and dangerous position that it actually possessed sovereignty. The luxurious mansion of a pill manufacturer in Union Square, New York, was transformed into its government house, and bonds, embellished with shamrocks and harps and a fine portrait of Wolfe Tone, were issued, payable "ninety days after the establishment of the Irish Republic." Differences soon arose, and Stephens, who had made his escape from Richmond, near Dublin, where he had been in prison, hastened to America to compose the quarrel which had now assumed true Hibernian proportions. An attempt to land an armed gang on the Island of Campo Bello on the coast of New Brunswick was frustrated; invaders from Vermont spent a night over the Canadian border before they were driven back; and for several days Fort Erie on Niagara River was held by about 1500 Fenians.[23] General Meade was thereupon sent by the Federal authorities to put an end to these ridiculous breaches of neutrality.

Neither Meade nor any other authority, however, could stop the flow of Fenian adjectives that now issued from a hundred indignation meetings all over the land when Canada, after due trial, proceeded to sentence the guilty culprits captured in the "Battle of Limestone Ridge," as the tussle with Canadian regulars near Fort Erie was called. Newspapers abounded with tales of the most startling designs upon Canada and Britain. There then occurred a strong reaction to the Fenian movement, and the American people were led to wonder how much of truth there was in a statement made by Thomas D'Arcy McGee.[24] "This very Fenian organization in the United States," he said, "what does it really prove but that the Irish are still an alien population, camped but not settled in America, with foreign hopes and aspirations, unshared by the people among whom they live?"

The Irishman today is an integral part of every large American community. Although the restrictive legislation of two centuries ago has long been repealed and a new land system has brought great prosperity to his island home, the Irishman has not abated one whit in his temperamental attitude towards England and as a consequence some 40,000 or 50,000 of his fellow countrymen come to the United States every year. Here he has been dispossessed of his monopoly of shovel and pick by the French Canadian in New England and by the Italian, Syrian, and Armenian in other parts of the country. He finds work in factories, for he still shuns the soil, much as he professes to love the "old sod." A great change has come over the economic condition of the second and third generation of Irish immigrants. Their remarkable buoyancy of temperament is everywhere displayed. Bridget's daughter has left the kitchen and is a school teacher, a stenographer, a saleswoman, a milliner, or a dressmaker; her son is a clerk, a bookkeeper, a traveling salesman, or a foreman. Wherever the human touch is the essential of success, there you find the Irish. That is why in some cities one-half the teachers are Irish; why salesmanship lures them; why they are the most successful walking delegates, solicitors, agents, foremen, and contractors. In the higher walks of life you find them where dash, brilliance, cleverness, and emotion are demanded. The law and the priesthood utilize their eloquence, journalism their keen insight into the human side of news, and literature their imagination and humor. They possess a positive genius for organization and management. The labor unions are led by them; and what would municipal politics be without them? The list of eminent names which they have contributed to these callings will increase as their generations multiply in the favorable American environment. But remote indeed is the day and complex must be the experience that will erase the memory of the ancient Erse proverb, which their racial temperament evoked: "Contention is better than loneliness."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: The immigration reports were perfunctory and lacking in accuracy. Passengers were frequently listed as belonging to the country whence they sailed. An Irishman taking passage from Liverpool was quite as likely to be reported English as Irish. Large numbers of immigrants were counted who merely landed in New York and proceeded immediately to Canada, while many thousands who landed in Canada and moved at once across the border into northern New York and the West did not appear in the reports.]

[Footnote 22: According to the Edinburgh Review of July, 1854, "Liverpool was crowded with emigrants, and ships could not be found to do the work. The poor creatures were packed in dense masses, in ill-ventilated and unseaworthy vessels, under charge of improper masters, and the natural results followed. Pestilence chased the fugitive to complete the work of famine. Fifteen thousand out of ninety thousand emigrants in British bottoms, in 1847, died on the passage or soon after arrival. The American vessels, owing to a stringent passenger law, were better managed, but the hospitals of New York and Boston were nevertheless crowded with patients from Irish estates."]

[Footnote 23: Oberholtzer, History of the United States since the Civil War, vol. 1, p. 526 ff.]

[Footnote 24: Thomas D'Arcy McGee (1825-1868), one of the leaders of the "Young Ireland" party, fled for political reasons to the United States in 1848, where he established the New York Nation and the American Celt. When he changed his former attitude of opposition to British rule in Ireland he was attacked by the extreme Irish patriots in the United States and in consequence moved to Canada, where he founded the New Era and began to practice law. Subsequently, with the support of the Irish Canadians, he represented Montreal in the Parliament of United Canada (1858) and was President of the Council (1862) in the John Sandfield Macdonald Administration. When the Irish were left unrepresented in the reorganized Cabinet in the following year, McGee became an adherent of Sir John A. Macdonald, and in 1864 he was made Minister of Agriculture in the Tache-Macdonald Administration. An ardent supporter of the progressive policies of his adopted country, he was one of the Fathers of Confederation and was a member of the first Dominion Parliament in 1867. His denunciations, both in Ireland (1865) and in Canada, of the policies and activities of the Fenians led to his assassination at Ottawa on April 7, 1868.]



CHAPTER VI

THE TEUTONIC TIDE

As the Irish wave of immigration receded the Teutonic wave rose and brought the second great influx of foreigners to American shores. A greater ethnic contrast could scarcely be imagined than that which was now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular burlesque representations of both types. The one was the opposite of the other in temperament, in habits, in personal ambitions. The German sought the land, was content to be let alone, had no desire to command others or to mix with them, but was determined to be reliable, philosophically took things as they came, met opposition with patience, clung doggedly to a few cherished convictions, and sought passionately to possess a home and a family, to master some minute mechanical or technical detail, and to take his leisure and his amusements in his own customary way.

The reports of the Immigration Commissioner disclose the fact that well over five and a third millions of Germans migrated to America between 1823 and 1910. If to this enormous number were added those of German blood who came from Austria and the German cantons of Switzerland, from Luxemburg and the German settlements of Russia, it would reach a grand total of well over seven million Germans who have sought an ampler life in America. The Census of 1910 reports "that there were 8,282,618 white persons in the United States having Germany as their country of origin, comprising 2,501,181 who were born in Germany, 3,911,847 born in the United States both of whose parents were born in Germany, and 1,869,590 born in the United States and having one parent born in the United States and the other in Germany."[25]

The coming of the Germans may be divided into three quite distinct migrations: the early, the middle, and the recent. The first period includes all who came before the radical ferment which began to agitate Europe after the Napoleonic wars. The Federal census of 1790 discloses 176,407 Germans living in America. But German writers usually maintain that there were from 225,000 to 250,000 Germans in the colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence. They had been driven from the fatherland by religious persecution and economic want. Every German state contributed to their number, but the bulk of this migration came from the Palatinate, Wuerttemberg, Baden, and Alsace, and the German cantons of Switzerland. The majority were of the peasant and artisan class who usually came over as redemptioners. Yet there were not wanting among them many persons of means and of learning.

Pennsylvania was the favorite distributing point for these German hosts. Thence they pushed southward through the beautiful Shenandoah Valley into Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and northward into New Jersey. Large numbers entered at Charleston and thence went to the frontiers of South Carolina. The Mohawk Valley in New York and the Berkshires of Massachusetts harbored many. But not all of them moved inland. They were to be found scattered on the coast from Maine to Georgia. Boston, New York City, Baltimore, New Bern, Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah, all counted Germans in their populations. However strictly these German neighborhoods may have maintained the customs of their native land, the people thoroughly identified themselves with the patriot cause and supplied soldiers, leaders, money, and enthusiasm to the cause of the Revolutionary War.

Benjamin Rush, the distinguished Philadelphia physician and publicist, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in 1789 a description of the Germans of Pennsylvania which would apply generally to all German settlements at that time and to many of subsequent date. The Pennsylvania German farmer, he says, was distinguished above everything else for his self-denying thrift, housing his horses and cattle in commodious, warm barns, while he and his family lived in a log hut until he was well able to afford a more comfortable house; selling his "most profitable grain, which is wheat" and "eating that which is less profitable but more nourishing, that is, rye or Indian corn"; breeding the best of livestock so that "a German horse is known in every part of the State" for his "extraordinary size or fat"; clearing his land thoroughly, not "as his English or Irish neighbors"; cultivating the most bountiful gardens and orchards; living frugally, working constantly, fearing God and debt, and rearing large families. "A German farm may be distinguished," concludes this writer, "from the farms of other citizens by the superior size of their barns, the plain but compact form of their houses, the height of their enclosures, the extent of their orchards, the fertility of their fields, the luxuriance of their meadows, and a general appearance of plenty and neatness in everything that belongs to them."[26] Rush's praise of the German mechanics is not less stinted. They were found in that day mainly as "weavers, taylors, tanners, shoe-makers, comb-makers, smiths of all kinds, butchers, paper makers, watchmakers, and sugar bakers." Their first desire was "to become freeholders," and they almost invariably succeeded. German merchants and bankers also prospered in Philadelphia, Germantown, Lancaster, and other Pennsylvania towns. One-third of the population of Pennsylvania, Rush says, was of German origin, and for their convenience a German edition of the laws of the State was printed.

After the Revolution, a number of the Hessian hirelings who had been brought over by the British settled in America. They usually became farmers, although some of the officers taught school. They joined the German settlements, avoiding the English-speaking communities in the United States because of the resentment shown towards them. Their number is unknown. Frederick Kapp, a German writer, estimates that, of the 29,875 sent over, 12,562 never returned—but he fails to tell us how many of these remained because of Yankee bullets or bayonets.

The second period of German migration began about 1820 and lasted through the Civil War. Before 1830 the number of immigrants fluctuated between 200 and 2000 a year; in 1832 it exceeded 10,000; in 1834 it was over 17,000; three years later it reached nearly 24,000; between 1845 and 1860 there arrived 1,250,000, and 200,000 came during the Civil War.

There were several causes, working in close conjunction, that impelled these thousands to leave Germany. Economic disturbances doubtless turned the thoughts of the hungry and harassed to the land of plenty across the sea. But a potent cause of the great migration of the thirties and forties was the universal social and political discontent which followed in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. The German people were still divided into numberless small feudalities whose petty dukes and princes clung tenaciously to their medieval prerogatives and tyrannies. The contest against Napoleon had been waged by German patriots not only to overcome a foreign foe but to break the tyrant at home. The hope for constitutional government, for a representative system and a liberal legislation in the German States rose mightily after Waterloo. But the promises of princes made in days of stress were soon forgotten, and the Congress of Vienna had established the semblance of a German federation upon a unity of reactionary rulers, not upon a constitutional, representative basis.

The reaction against this bitter disappointment was led by the eager German youth, who, inspired by liberal ideals, now thirsted for freedom of thought, of speech, and of action. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a German patriot, organized everywhere Turnvereine, or gymnastic clubs, as a tangible form of expressing this demand. Among the students of the universities liberal patriotic clubs called Burschenschaften were organized, idealistic in their aims and impractical in their propaganda, where "every man with his bonnet on his head, a pot of beer in his hand, a pipe or seegar in his mouth, and a song upon his lips, never doubting but that he and his companions are training themselves to be the regenerators of Europe," vowed "the liberation of Germany." Alas for the enthusiasms of youth! In 1817 the Burschenschaften held a mass reunion at the Wartburg. Their boyish antics were greatly exaggerated in the conservative papers and the governments increased their vigilance. In 1819 Kotzebue, a reactionary publicist, was assassinated by a member of the Jena Burschenschaft, and the retaliation of the government was prompt and thoroughly Prussian—gagging of the press and of speech, dissolution of all liberal organizations, espionage, the hounding of all suspects. There seemed to remain only flight to liberal democratic America. But the suppression of the clubs did not entirely put out the fires of constitutional desires. These smoldered until the storms of '48 fanned them into a fitful blaze. For a brief hour the German Democrat had the feudal lords cowed. Frederick William, the "romantic" Hohenzollern, promised a constitution to the threatening mob in Berlin; the King of Saxony and the Grand Duke of Bavaria fled their capitals; revolts occurred in Silesia, Posen, Hesse-Cassel, and Nassau. Then struck the first great hour of modern Prussia, as, with her heartless and disciplined soldiery, she restored one by one the frightened dukes and princes to their prerogatives and repressed relentlessly and with Junker rigor every liberal concession that had crept into laws and institutions. Strangled liberalism could no longer breathe in Germany, and thousands of her revolutionists fled to America, bringing with them almost the last vestige of German democratic leadership.

In the meantime, economic conditions in Germany remained unsatisfactory and combined with political discontent to uproot a population and transplant it to a new land. The desire to immigrate, stimulated by the transportation companies, spread like a fever. Whole villages sold out and, with their pastor or their physician at their head, shipped for America. A British observer who visited the Rhine country in 1846 commented on "the long files of carts that meet you every mile, carrying the whole property of these poor wretches who are about to cross the Atlantic on the faith of a lying prospectus." But these people were neither "poor wretches" nor dupes. They had coin in their pockets, and in their heads a more or less accurate knowledge of the land of their desires. At this time the German bookshops were teeming with little volumes giving, in the methodical Teutonic fashion, conservative advice to prospective immigrants and rather accurate descriptions of America, with statistical information and abstracts of American laws. Many of the immigrants had further detailed information from relatives and friends already prospering on western farms or in rapidly growing towns. This was, therefore, far from a pauper invasion. It included every class, even broken-down members of the nobility. The majority were, naturally, peasants and artisans, but there were multitudes of small merchants and farmers. And the political refugees included many men of substantial property and of notable intellectual attainments.[27]

Bremen was the favorite port of departure for these German emigrants to America. Havre, Hamburg, and Antwerp were popular, and even London. During the great rush every ship was overcrowded and none was over sanitary. Steerage passengers were promiscuously crowded together and furnished their own food; and the ship's crew, the captain, the agents who negotiated the voyage, and the sharks who awaited their arrival in America, all had a share in preying upon the inexperience of the immigrants. Arrived in America, these Germans were not content to settle, like dregs, in the cities on the seacoast. They were land lovers, and westward they started at once, usually in companies, sometimes as whole communities, by way of the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, and later by the new railway lines, into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Iowa, where their instinct for the soil taught them to select the most fertile spots. Soon their log cabins and their ample barns and flourishing stock bespoke their success.

The growing Western cities called to the skilled artisan, the small tradesman, and the intellectuals. Cincinnati early became a German center. In 1830 the Germans numbered five per cent of its population; in 1840, twenty-three per cent; and in 1869, thirty-four per cent. Milwaukee, "the German Athens," as it was once called, became the distributing point of German immigration and influence in the Northwest. Its Gesangvereine and Turnvereine became as famous as its lager beer, and German was heard more frequently than English upon its streets. St. Louis was the center of a German influence that extended throughout the Missouri Valley. Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and many of the minor towns in the Middle West received substantial additions from this migration.

Unlike the Irish, the Germans brought with them a strange language, and this proved a strong bond in that German solidarity which maintained itself in spite of the influence of their new environment. In the glow of their first enthusiasm many of the intellectuals believed they could establish a German state in America. "The foundations of a new and free Germany in the great North American Republic shall be laid by us," wrote Follenius, the dreamer, who desired to land enough Germans in "one of the American territories to establish an essentially German state." In 1833 the Giessener Gesellschaft, a company organized in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, grew out of this suggestion and chose Arkansas as the site for its colony. But unfavorable reports turned the immigrants to Missouri, where settlements were made. These, however, never grew into a German state but merged quite contentedly into the prosperous American population.

A second attempt, also from Hesse, had a tragic denouement. A number of German nobles formed a company called the Mainzer Adelsverein and in 1842 sent two of their colleagues to Texas to seek out a site. The place chosen was ill-suited for a colony, however, and the whole enterprise from beginning to end was characterized by princely incompetence. Thousands of immigrants, lured by the company's liberal offers and glowing prospectus, soon found themselves in dire want; many perished of disease and hunger; and the company ended in ignominious disaster. The surviving colonists in Texas, however, when they realized that they must depend upon their own efforts, succeeded in finding work and eventually in establishing several flourishing communities.

Finally, Wisconsin and Illinois were considered as possible sites for a Germany in America. But this ambition never assumed a concrete form. Everywhere the Americans, with their energy and organizing capacity, had preceded the incoming Germans and retained the political sovereignty of the American state.

But while they did not establish a German state, these immigrants did cling to their customs wherever they settled in considerable numbers. Especially did they retain their original social life, their Turnvereine, their musical clubs, their sociable beer gardens, their picnics and excursions, their churches and parochial schools. They still celebrated their Christmas and other church festivals with German cookery and Kuchen, and their weddings and christenings were enlivened but rarely debauched with generous libations of lager beer and wine. In the Middle West were whole regions where German was the familiar language for two generations.

There were three strata to this second German migration. The earlier courses were largely peasants and skilled artisans, those of the decade of the Civil War were mostly of the working classes, and between these came the "Forty-eighters." Upon them all, however, peasant, artisan, merchant, and intellectual, their experiences in their native land had made a deep impression. They all had a background of political philosophy the nucleus of which was individual liberty; they all had a violent distaste for the petty tyrannies and espionages which contact with their own form of government had produced; and in coming to America they all sought, besides farms and jobs, political freedom. They therefore came in humility, bore in patience the disappointments of the first rough contacts with pioneer America and its nativism, and few, if any, cherished the hope of going back to Germany. Though some of the intellectual idealists at first had indefinite enthusiasms about a Deutschtum in America, these visions soon vanished. They expressed no love for the governments they had left, however strong the cords of sentiment bound them to the domestic and institutional customs of their childhood.

This was to a considerable degree an idealistic migration and as such it had a lasting influence upon American life. The industry of these people and their thrift, even to paring economy, have often been extolled; but other nationalities have worked as hard and as successfully and have spent as sparingly. The special contribution to America which these Germans made lay in other qualities. Their artists and musicians and actors planted the first seeds of aesthetic appreciation in the raw West where the repertoire had previously been limited to Money Musk, The Arkansas Traveler, and Old Dog Tray. The liberal tendencies of German thought mellowed the austere Puritanism of the prevalent theology. The respect which these people had for intellectual attainments potently influenced the educational system of America from the kindergarten to the newly founded state universities. Their political convictions led them to espouse with ardor the cause of the Union in the war upon slavery; and their sturdy independence in partisan politics was no small factor in bringing about civil service reform. They established German newspapers by the hundreds and maintained many German schools and German colleges. They freely indulged their love for German customs. But while their sentimentalism was German, their realism was American. They considered it an honor to become American citizens. Their leaders became American leaders. Carl Schurz was not an isolated example. He was associated with a host of able, careful, constructive Germans.

The greatest quarrels of these German immigrants with American ways were over the so-called "Continental Sabbath" and the right to drink beer when and where they pleased. "Only when his beer is in danger," wrote one of the leading Forty-eighters, "does the German-American rouse himself and become a berserker." The great numbers of these men in many cities and in some of the Western States enabled them to have German taught in the public schools, though it is only fair to say that the underlying motive was liberalism rather than Prussian provincialism. Frederick Kapp, a distinguished interpreter of the spirit of these Forty-eighters, expressed their conviction when he said that those who cared to remain German should remain in Germany and that those who came to America were under solemn obligations to become Americans.

The descendants of these immigrants, the second and the third and fourth generations, are now thoroughly absorbed into every phase of American life. Their national idiosyncrasies have been modified and subdued by the gentle but relentless persistence of the English language and the robust vigor of American law and American political institutions.

After 1870 a great change came over the German immigration. More and more industrial workers, but fewer and fewer peasants, and very rarely an intellectual or a man of substance, now appeared at Ellis Island for admission to the United States.[28] The facilities for migrating were vastly increased by the great transatlantic steamship companies. The new Germans came in hordes even outnumbering the migrations of the fifties. From 1870 to 1910 over three and a quarter millions arrived. The highest point of the wave, however, was reached in 1882, when 250,630 German immigrants entered the United States. Thereafter the number rapidly subsided; the lowest ebb, in 1898, brought only 17,111, but from that time until the Great War the number of annual arrivals fluctuated between 25,000 and 40,000.

The majority of those who came in the earlier part of this period made their way to the Western lands. The Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and the Far West, still offered alluring opportunities. But as these lands were gradually taken, the later influx turned towards the cities. Here the immigrants not only found employment in those trades and occupations which the Germans for years had virtually monopolized, but they also became factory workers in great numbers, and many of them went into the mining regions.

It soon became apparent that the spirit of this latest migration was very different from that of the earlier ones. "I do not believe," writes a well-informed and patriotic Lutheran pastor in 1917, "that there is one among a thousand that has emigrated on account of dissatisfaction with the German Government during the last forty-five years." Humility on the part of these newcomers now gradually gave way to arrogance. Instead of appearing eager to embrace their new opportunities, they criticized everything they found in their new home. The contemptuous hauteur and provincial egotism of the modern Prussian, loathsome enough in the educated, were ridiculous in the poor immigrants. Gradually this Prussian spirit increased. In 1883 it could still be said of the three hundred German-American periodicals, daily, weekly, and monthly, that in their tone they were thoroughly American. But ten or fifteen years later changes were apparent. In 1895 there were some five hundred German periodicals published in America, and many of the newer ones were rabidly Germanophile. The editors and owners of the older publications were dying out, and new hands were guiding the editorial pens. Often when there was no American-born German available, an editor was imported fresh from Germany. He came as a German from a new Germany—that Prussianized Germany which unmasked itself in August, 1914, and which included in its dream of power the unswerving and undivided loyalty of all Germans who had migrated. The traditional American indifference and good nature became a shield for the Machiavellian editors who now began to write not for the benefit of America but for the benefit of Germany. Political scandals, odious comparisons of American and German methods, and adroit criticisms of American ways were the daily pabulum fed to the German reader, who was left with the impression that everything in the United States was wrong, while everything in Germany was right. Before the United States entered the Great War, there was a most remarkable unanimity of expression among these German publications; afterwards, Congress found it necessary to enact rigorous laws against them. As a result, many of them were suppressed, and many others suspended publication.

German pastors, also, were not infrequently imported and brought with them the virus of the new Prussianism. This they injected into their congregations and especially into the children who attended their catechetical instruction. German "exchange professors," in addition to their university duties, usually made a pilgrimage of the cities where the German influence was strong. The fostering of the German language became no longer merely a means of culture or an appurtenance to business but was insisted upon as a necessity to keep alive the German spirit, der Deutsche Geist. German parents were warned, over and over again, that once their children lost their language they would soon lose every active interest in Kultur. The teaching of German in the colleges and universities assumed, undisguised and unashamed, the character of Prussian propaganda. The new immigrants from Germany were carefully protected from the deteriorating effect of American contacts, and, unlike the preceding generations of German immigrants, they took very little part in politics. Those who arrived after 1900 refused, usually, to become naturalized.

The diabolical ingenuity of the German propaganda was subsequently laid bare, and it is known today that nearly every German club, church, school, and newspaper from about 1895 onward was being secretly marshaled into a powerful Teutonic homogeneity of sentiment and public opinion. The Kaiser boasted of his political influence through the German vote. The German-American League, incorporated by Congress, had its branches in many States. Millions of dollars were spent by the Imperial German Government to corrupt the millions of German birth in America. These disclosures, when they were ultimately made, produced in the United States a sharp and profound reaction against everything Teutonic. The former indifference completely vanished and hyphen-hunting became a popular pastime. The charter of the German-American League was revoked by Congress. City after city took German from its school curriculum. Teutonic names of towns and streets were erased—half a dozen Berlins vanished overnight—and in their places appeared the names of French, British, and American heroes.

But though the names might be erased, the German element remained. It had become incorporated into the national bone and sinew, contributing its thoroughness, stolidity, and solidity to the American stock. The power of liberal political institutions in America has been revealed, and thousands upon thousands of the sons and grandsons of German immigrants crossed the seas in 1917 and 1918 to bear aloft the starry standard upon the fields of Flanders against the arrogance and brutality of the neo-Prussians.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 25: According to the Census of 1910 the nationality of the total number of white persons of foreign stock in the United States is distributed chiefly as follows:

Germany 8,282,618 or 25.7 per cent Ireland 4,504,360 or 14.0 " " Canada 2,754,615 or 8.6 " " Russia 2,541,649 or 7.9 " " England 2,322,442 or 7.2 " " Italy 2,098,360 or 6.5 " " Austria 2,001,559 or 6.2 " "

Furthermore, the significance of the foreign born element in the population of the United States can be gathered from the fact that, in 1910, of the 91,972,266 inhabitants of the United States, no less than 13,515,836 or 14.6 per cent were born in some other country.]

[Footnote 26: An Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania.]

[Footnote 27: J.G. Haecker, a well-informed and prosperous German who took the journey by steerage in a sailing vessel in 1849, wrote an instructive description of his experiences. Of his fellow passengers he said: "Our company was very mixed. There were many young people: clerks, artists, musicians, architects, miners, mechanics, men of various professions, peasants, one man seventy-eight years old, another very aged Bavarian farmer, several families of Jews, etc., and a fair collection of children."]

[Footnote 28: There were three potent reasons for this migration: financial stringency, overpopulation, and the growing rigor of the military service. Over ten thousand processes a year were issued by the German Government in 1872 and 1873 for evasion of military duty. Germans who had become naturalized American citizens were arrested when they returned to the Fatherland for a visit on the charge of having evaded military service. A treaty between the two countries finally adjusted this difficulty.]



CHAPTER VII

THE CALL OF THE LAND

For over a century after the Revolution the great fact in American life was the unoccupied land, that vast stretch of expectant acreage lying fallow in the West. It kept the American buoyant, for it was an insurance policy against want. When his crops failed or his business grew dull, there was the West. When panic and disaster overtook him, there remained the West. When the family grew too large for the old homestead, the sons went west. And land, unlimited and virtually free, was the magnet that drew the foreign home seeker to the American shores.

The first public domain after the formation of the Union extended from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi. This area was enlarged and pushed to the Rockies by the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and was again enlarged and extended to the Pacific by the acquisition of Oregon (1846) and the Mexican cession (1848). The total area of the United States from coast to coast then comprised 3,025,000[29] square miles, of which over two-thirds were at one time or another public domain. Before the close of the Civil War the Government had disposed of nearly four hundred million acres but still retained in its possession an area three times as great as the whole of the territory which had been won from Great Britain in the Revolution.

The public domain was at first looked upon as a source of revenue, and a minimum price was fixed by law at $2 an acre, though this rate was subsequently (1820) lowered to $1.25 an acre. The West always wanted liberal land laws, but the South before the Civil War, fearing that the growth of the West would give the North superior strength, opposed any such generosity. When the North dominated Congress, the Homestead Law of 1862 provided that any person, twenty-one years of age, who was a citizen of the United States or who had declared his intention of becoming one, could obtain title to 160 acres of land by living upon it five years, making certain improvements, and paying the entry fee of ten dollars.

The Government laid out its vast estate in townships six miles square, which it subdivided into sections of 640 acres and quarter sections of 160 acres. The quarter section was regarded as the public land unit and was the largest amount permitted for individual preemption and later for a homestead. Thus was the whole world invited to go west. Under the new law, 1,160,000 acres were taken up in 1865.[30] The settler no longer had to suffer the wearisome, heart-breaking tasks that confronted the pioneer of earlier years, for the railway and steamboat had for some time taken the place of the Conestoga wagon and the fitful sailboat.

But the movement by railway and by steamboat was merely a continuation on a greater scale of what had been going on ever since the Revolution. The westward movement was begun, as we have seen, not by foreigners but by American farmers and settlers from seaboard and back country, thousands of whom, before the dawn of the nineteenth century, packed their household goods and families into covered wagons and followed the sunset trail.

The vanguard of this westward march was American, but foreign immigrants soon began to mingle with the caravans. At first these newcomers who heard the far call of the West were nearly all from the British Isles. Indeed so great was the exodus of these farmers that in 1816 the British journals in alarm asked Parliament to check the "ruinous drain of the most useful part of the population of the United Kingdom." Public meetings were held in Great Britain to discuss the average man's prospect in the new country. Agents of land companies found eager crowds gathered to learn particulars. Whole neighborhoods departed for America. In order to stop the exodus, the newspapers dwelt upon the hardship of the voyage and the excesses of the Americans. But, until Australia, New Zealand, and Canada began to deflect migration, the stream to the United States from England, Scotland, and Wales was constant and copious. Between 1820 and 1910 the number coming from Ireland was 4,212,169, from England 2,212,071, from Scotland 488,749, and from Wales 59,540.