Speech on "In search of German-Americans - Impact and Limits of German Immigration to the United States",
Deutscher Verein at Lower East Tenement Museum
New York, March 19, 2008

Dear Ruth Abrams, dear Paul Grosse,
friends, ladies and gentlemen,

“Immigration is the sincerest form of flattery.”
Perhaps you know this quote by Jack Paar, once the famous host of NBC´s “The Tonight Show,” which, nowadays, is hosted by Jay Leno.
Assuming Mr. Paar was right, we Germans must have flattered the United States a great deal: As the 2000 U.S. Census Bureau survey on the ancestry of U.S. citizens shows, the relative majority of Americans – 15.2 % - state that they have German ancestors.

I thank the Deutsche Verein, the second-oldest Herrenclub in New York, for inviting me to speak on this topic, and I thank Ruth Abrams and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum for having us. There is, I think, no greater place to speak about German immigration to the U.S. than in this room, the German Schneider family’s beer saloon on famous Orchard Street. This area was one of the focal points of German immigration at the end of the 19th and the beginning of 20th centuries.
Before I start my lecture, let us have a look at this map. In 2000, German ancestry predominated in 23 states, including every state in the Midwest, the majority of the states in the West, and one state in the South. Strikingly, the East Coast states do not have a predominantly German-descended population. However, this demographic distribution applies at the state level only, as there are of course large German “islands” in New York and Pennsylvania.

For more than half of the U.S., it seems that basically we are all German somehow. Some like to speak of 45 million or even 60 million German-Americans. But before we overstate the importance of German immigration, allow me to correct some myths.

Let us first look more closely into the methodology of the census survey. Allow me to outline two aspects:
First, there is the lack of a thorough definition of “ancestry”, that is, what degree of relationship did respondents have to their German ancestors?
Second, multiple answers were permitted in the survey.
This shows that there are some myths about German ancestry, German immigration and its influence on the U.S. These need to be clarified and I will try to do so.
To begin with, there are indeed a great number of U.S. citizens with German roots. Almost 43 million people, or 15 percent of the population, consider themselves to have at least one German ancestor, and thus, German was the most commonly identified ancestry in the 2000 census. As I said, this is the only figure that is known. What is unknown is whether those roots are already several hundreds years distant and if this declaration is only some kind of diffuse feeling or a traceable fact. While I agree that 45 million to 60 million is a huge number, in the case of many of those millions, the German ties are not that close. Recent surveys show that a large proportion of those claiming German ancestry have no special knowledge of Germany or its role in Europe today. We can speak of 45 million Americans with German ancestry, but it would be an overstretch to speak of 45 million or even 60 million “German Americans.”
Let me address another myth that has persisted for 200 years - until today. I am speaking of the legend that German lost out by a hair on becoming the official language of the U.S. The man who cast the deciding vote for English is said to have been Frederick Augustus Conrad Muehlenberg, of German descent, the eponym of the so-called Muehlenberg Legend.
Muehlenberg (1750 – 1801) was an American minister of the Lutheran Church and a politician of German ancestry who became the very first Speaker of the United States House of Representatives for the First Congress (1789-1791) and for the Third Congress (1793-1795), too. – and as such, one of the two signers of the Bill of Rights. Although he attended the University of Halle, Germany, where he studied theology, he was born in Trappe, Pennsylvania. However, his father, Henry Muehlenberg, was an immigrant from Germany. While Frederick Augustus Conrad Muehlenberg is one of the best-known German-Americans, his family is no less remarkable. His father is considered the founder of the Lutheran Church in America. His brother, Peter, was a General in the Continental Army.
Like the Loch Ness monster, the “Muehlenberg Legend” emerges again and again to new supporters who contribute to its validity. Of course, English was the language of the colonialists, against whom the American people successfully revolted. Is it, therefore, unthinkable that the fledgling United States decided to adopt a language other than English after its founding?
Yes, it is, because this disregards the fact that the United States was nevertheless deeply indebted to the English, the Irish and the Scottish. To illustrate this, among the Founding Fathers of the Nation there was no one of German ancestry, while seven founding fathers were born in England, Ireland or Scotland. German immigrants comprised only about nine percent of the total U.S. population in 1830.
In fact a vote for an official language never took place on either a federal or a state level. Actually, the United States has no statutory official language at all. English has been used on a de facto basis, owing to its status as the country's predominant language.
Be that as it may, like most legends, this one has a core of truth to it. On January 9, 1794, a group of German immigrants from Virginia submitted a petition to the House of Representatives demanding that laws be translated into German. They argued that this would help immigrants who had not yet learned English to become more quickly acclimated in their new homeland. The petition was voted down in the House of Representatives 42 to 41, and thus, indeed, by a hair. Funny enough, the Speaker Frederick Augustus Conrad Muehlenberg abstained from the vote. But afterwards he declared, "the faster the Germans become Americans, the better it will be." This became a famous quotation. Among the German settlers, this sentiment led to a certain bitterness that helped the Muehlenberg Legend grow into celebrated folklore a generation later.
Less known is that one of the first printed versions of the Declaration of Independence was published in German on the 9th of July 1776.
And, by the way, there were a few states that had their laws translated into German until sometime around the outbreak of the First World War. But aside from this, the influence and impact of the German language is limited to numerous German words that have penetrated American English: Weltschmerz and Angst, Ursprache and Zeitgeist, Kindergarten and Leitmotiv, Reinheitsgebot and Pils.
So let me return to the facts: While the 400th anniversary of the landing of Germans in this country will be commemorated in April, and thus occurred in 1607, when the first scientist, the botanist and doctor, Johannes Fleischer of Breslau, arrived in Jamestown, the first significant numbers of Germans did not arrive until the 1680s, in New York and Pennsylvania. The first durable “Germantown” colony was founded in 1683. Heavy, and thus flattering, German immigration to the U.S. started to develop 150 years later and continued until the time of the First World War. During this period almost 6 million Germans arrived in this country, most seeking economic opportunity, others religious or political freedom. Germans therefore form the largest group of immigrants to the U.S., outnumbering the Irish and the English. Major causes for the exodus from Germany were overpopulation, destructive wars, the ruin of small industries through factories, and the failure to achieve political freedom in Germany. It is thus important to point out that German immigrants were not the Lafayettes or the Rockefellers (the latter is said to have German ancestry dating to the 1600s). Far from it! They were economic refugees, many having little more than their clothes when they arrived at these shores. Most immigrants became farmers, not only in traditional agriculture but also in wine and fruit cultivation.
As you know, more than a few Germans stayed here in New York. Many of them settled right around here, on the Lower East Side and in the East Village. Known as “Klein-Deutschland,” the Lower East Side, as a German-American neighborhood, was the first of the giant, urban, foreign-language settlements that came to characterize American cities in later years. It was the prototypical urban immigrant community. Between 1855 and 1880, “German” New York was the third-largest German-speaking city in the world, with only Berlin and Vienna having more German speakers. The neighborhood was situated around Tompkins Square, just a couple of blocks uptown, in today’s East Village, and was named “White Place” by its residents. “Klein-Deutschland” came to an end, it literally drowned, in 1904, when the sidewheel passenger ship “General Slocum” caught fire and sank on the East River. The boat had been chartered by the Lutheran St. Marks Church for $350 and had more than 1,300 Germans from Klein-Deutschland aboard; 1,021 people perished, mostly women and children. No disaster had claimed more lives in New York prior to 9/11. The General Slocum disaster was the end of Klein-Deutschland. It was a trauma from which the German immigrants in New York never recovered.

Returning to the overall question of the impact of Germans on the United States, let us consider two major elements of a possible impact: first, the impact of individual Germans and second, developments in the United States on which German immigrants might have exerted a particular influence.
When it comes to naming famous German-Americans, we are quick to recognize names of people who themselves immigrated from Germany or whose parents had come from across the Atlantic. We meet them in everyday life, at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel or the Levis Jeans Shop, when we use Heinz ketchup, when we cross Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge, listen to a concert in Steinway Hall, fly on a Boeing jet, watch a movie starring Marlene Dietrich or with Doris Day, etc., etc. These people were Germans or of German ancestry, but what impact did their “Germanness” have? They dissolved into the melting pot of the United States, they assimilated more quickly and more completely than many other immigrants. Even though we meet these names every day and everywhere, we are at times in search of German – Americans. They were the perfect immigrants and became true Americans. Especially when it comes to the question of political impact, we have to acknowledge that in relation to the enormous numbers of German immigrants, the number of well-known politically active German-Americans is scant. The vast wave of German immigration to this country seems to have left no mark on American politics.
But this is both true and untrue.
Aside from Frederick Augustus Conrad Muehlenberg, the first speaker of the House of Representatives, whom I have already discussed, there are only three German – Americans who may be said to have had an immediate and direct influence on U.S. politics.
Allow me to highlight them. Perhaps you can even guess who they are by their most famous quotations… Let’s see.
“As I unsheathed my sword to defend these states, I did so, determined that only death would force me to lay it down.”
You are right, this quotation is from Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin von Steuben (1730 –1794), better known as General von Steuben, namesake of the annual Steuben Parade.
Born in Magdeburg, Germany, von Steuben was a German-Prussian army officer. During the Seven Years' War, he served primarily as a staff officer. The army was greatly reduced in size by the end of the war, and von Steuben was one of many Prussian officers suddenly without work. Benjamin Franklin, the U.S. ambassador in Paris, who complained about the number of people who wanted recommendations from him to friends in America, did recommend von Steuben to George Washington. Steuben was accepted, in part also because he renounced accepting a salary until the war was won.
He then served as inspector general of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. He trained the soldiers, who at that point were greatly lacking in proper clothing, in full military dress, swearing and yelling at them up and down in German and French. Therefore, he is credited with teaching the Continental Army the essentials of military drill and discipline, and of helping guide it to victory. He also wrote the book that became the standard United States drill manual until the War of 1812 (“the Blue Book”), and served essentially as General George Washington's chief of staff in the final years of the war. From the purely military point of view, he was probably the most important foreigner among Washington’s generals, although he was of course eclipsed by the flamboyant Lafayette, an important political ally and friend to Washington. Steuben is one of four European military leaders who assisted the Americans during the Revolution who is honored with a statue in Lafayette Square, just north of the White House in Washington, D.C.

Onto the next quotation: who said this?
“Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right, when wrong to be put right.”
“The fatherland was closed to me. England was to me a foreign country, and would always remain so. Where then? - ‘To America,’ I said to myself. … Ubi libertas, ibi patria.”
Carl Schurz, the German revolutionary, American statesman and reformer, and the Union Army general in the American Civil War, who in 1869 became the first German-born American elected to the United States Senate and in 1877 the 13th United States Secretary of the Interior. By the way, his wife Margarethe Schurz and her sister Bertha von Ronge were instrumental in establishing the “kindergarten” system in the United States.
Schurz was born in Liblar (now Erftstadt) on March 2, 1829, the son of a schoolteacher. He entered the University of Bonn, where he became a revolutionary in July 1852 and moved to America having already fled from Germany to England after the failure of the revolution. Schurz is probably the best-known of the Forty-Eighters, those German emigrants who moved to the United States after the failed liberal revolutions.
I will speak more of him and his influence later on, so let me only cite Claude M. Fuess, who sizes up Carl Schurz rather well in his book Carl Schurz, Reformer:
“For forty years or more he was the self-constituted but exceedingly useful incarnation of our national conscience. … Historians have been forced to admit that he was right on most issues; and even when he was wrong, he was sincere. Naturally he did not make himself popular, but he did, without being at all sanctimonious, become a mighty spiritual force.” Upon his retirement in 1881, Schurz moved to New York City, where he died in 1906. Schurz is memorialized in numerous places around the United States, e.g. Carl Schurz Park in New York City. By the way, when the creation of a German-American parade, now called the Steuben Parade, was first being discussed, Carl Schurz was debated as a possible patron, but the committee ultimately settled on von Steuben.
I will introduce one last German-American celebrity by his own words:
“The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault.”
“Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes. There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.”
And here a citation from his time in office:
“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”
Okay, that was an easy one. Henry Kissinger. He is certainly one of the most famous living German-Americans. Kissinger was born in 1923 in Fuerth, Germany, as Heinz Alfred Kissinger. In 1938, fleeing Nazi persecution, he came to New York City and became an American citizen in 1943. He attended Harvard University. From 1969-1975 he was assistant National Security Advisor to President Nixon. He served as the 56th Secretary of State of the United States from 1973-1977 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for helping to establish a ceasefire and U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

While these names are famous throughout the country, I wonder if the influence of German immigration to the U.S. in general is as widely recognized. It should be, because the influence of German immigrants on important issues was much greater than the limited number of – politically – famous names leads us to expect.
And here I do not want to expound on -- it would be to long -- the question of how
· Germans influenced the development of certain branches of the food industry as well as the cattle and steel industry as well as electrical engineering.
· The importance of some German architects to landmark buildings, such as Girard College, the U.S. Treasury, the Dome of the Capitol, the Congressional Library, the Waldorf-Astoria.
· The role of some artists, such as Bierstadt, Leutze, and Nahl on American landscape and frontier painting, which opened the eyes of the American public to the beauty of their own country, etc.

Let us, instead, have a look at the influence on crucial questions of American politics: the abolition of slavery, the invention of ethnicity, women’s rights, the labor movement, and even prohibition.
No issue was as painful for the United States as that of slavery. The five-year Civil War almost led to the permanent secession of the southern states fewer than 100 years after the formation of the United States. German – Americans, as an ethnic group, and important German-American individuals, have from the start played an important role in the abolition of slavery up to the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
We know that the founding fathers had differing views of slavery: some strongly against it, others inwardly split, others again, like Thomas Jefferson, more inclined to accept the necessity of this evil. But even before the founding of the United States, the earliest protest against slavery in American history that I know of, was that of the Germantown settlers, no later than 1688. The settlers and their leader, Francis Daniel Pastorius, were appalled by the incompatibility of slavery with Christianity and its resemblance to serfdom in Europe. For them the “liberty of conscience” and the right to practice any religion they wished had been the most compelling reason to leave the Old World, where those freedoms did not exist for the most part. How could the same people that had suffered oppression oppress those who were of a black color?
Even though this did not yet change the fate of African-Americans in general, it set the standard for German religious communities. None of them would ever engage in slave-holding, and almost all secular German communities lived up to the Germantown declaration as well.
Later, during the 19th century, with their ethnic consciousness raised by an assertive German-language press, Germans became a potent political force. Veterans of the failed political revolution of 1848 in the German states, especially Carl Schurz, again, and Karl Theodor (Charles) Follen, the first professor of German at Harvard, determined to achieve their liberal agenda in America, many of them as founders or editors of newspapers. Follen lost his professorship at Harvard in 1935 due to his outspoken abolitionist beliefs. When he died in 1940, his friends were unable to find any church in Boston willing to hold a memorial service on his behalf due to his abolitionist positions. (Charles Follen, by the way, was claimed by some as the first to introduce to the U.S. the German custom of the decorated Christmas tree). Slavery was the most visible contradiction of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and of a nation of free institutions, and it frequently came under their editorial fire.
The German repudiation of slavery continued, like a leitmotif, prior to and throughout the Civil War. Only the North represented democracy to the German-Americans. ( It offered the ideal of equal opportunity for the little man and held no man bound to a station or class of citizenry such as that which slavery imposed on the black man in the South. ) Moreover, in the South, the landed “aristocracy” continued to thrive in a manner that reminded lowly German immigrants of the European nobility system they had fled.
Among German-Americans, Schurz was outstanding. In 1856, he settled in Watertown, Wisconsin, and immediately came to prominence in the Republican Party of Wisconsin. When the Republican Party emerged as the principal opponent of the Democrats, who were increasingly identified with slaveholders, he had no trouble deciding where his loyalty lay. Schurz reached out to Abraham Lincoln, who later even became his friend. Schurz at once realized that in Lincoln he would have an ally against slavery and that this alliance would give him the opportunity to succeed. He therefore became a vigorous campaigner for Lincoln in 1859. Devoting all his spare energy to the campaign, he addressed audiences throughout the nation. His speeches were generally still in German, but he was becoming well known, and the Republicans discovered that they had enlisted an orator of unusual ability. With his rising influence, Schurz got through to Lincoln himself concerning anti-slavery policy. And he delivered to him the German-American vote for his Republican victory in 1860. The German-Americans lent their support in large numbers and thus constituted an important element in the party’s success. They demonstrably held the balance of power in Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. These states cast all or part of their electoral votes for Lincoln , so that it was easy to conclude that German-American enthusiasm had been decisive.
Personally, Schurz spared no effort in convincing President Lincoln that the time was right to come out openly in favor of emancipation. The adoption of the antislavery policy not only stamped the Civil War clearly as a war against slavery but it also gave the antislavery forces in Europe the upper hand in support of the Union cause.
The fact that German-Americans in particular were appalled by slavery had another, less recognized impact: It constituted an identifiable common ground for the vast plurality of German-Americans. Even though we do not recognize German-Americans as a “real” ethnic group within America today, some calling them the “unvollendete Volksgruppe”, they represented such a group at least during several decades of American history.
Schurz recognized this as an opportunity during the campaigns and in this connection he developed the technique that was to be his chief contribution to American political life, the appeal to ethnic factors. In promising Abraham Lincoln that he would “deliver” the German vote, he was the first to introduce ethnicity into a presidential election. (And when, following the elections, he accepted the post of Ambassador to Spain - he would have preferred France or Italy – he demonstrated that he was quick in building U.S. traditions still alive today: one of which is rewarding or awarding individuals helpful in the campaign with ambassadorial posts).

For the rest, Germans shaped their own ethnicity in part by reacting to the assimilation norm held out to them by American society. Within the process of integration, they struggled and argued over how best to integrate. Was the optimal point of integration the one at which a German-American is indistinguishable from a native? Was the so-called “mania to Americanize” the right way? Was it unfair to the need of the new homeland for national unity to maintain German cultural distinctiveness?
Maybe the German-Americans found the answer in this quotation by Christian Essele: “What is it,” he queried, “that permits us to pursue our own most German ways and habits in a land in which we or our fathers were not born, whose language is not ours? It is the grand concept of eternal and inalienable human rights, which was set down in the Declaration of Independence, the legal basis of this great Republic.” They might have agreed that the national character of the United States was not yet determined, inasmuch as the nation was founded on a purely political basis and settled by people from every part of the globe. Hence, the romantic nationalist argument for cultural conformity was fallacious.
Even if it were possible to strip oneself of one’s nationality, as Gustav Strude noted, it would not be advantageous for the new homeland: he who readily throws away one set of values will as readily throw away another, becoming a slave to the highest bidder. But above all, the German-Americans acknowledged that Americans would never learn to respect Germans and accord them equality until Germans learned to respect themselves and their culture, and that meant cultivating differences rather than routing them out.
It is therefore, maybe, no surprise that it also was a German from Pennsylvania, Oswald Seidensticker, who was the first to dig deeper into questions of ethnicity, also collecting the documents of early German settlers, putting ethnicity on a more scientific basis.
When the United States entered World War I, many Americans of German descent were reluctant to acknowledge their German heritage and some preferred to emphasize their non-German backgrounds. But as the census of 2000 showed, Americans now readily identify themselves as being of German ancestry. With the Second World War more than 60 years in the past, there are still, or perhaps again, German-Americans in this country whose ethnic background shapes their identity and influences the way they lead their lives.
It was the aforementioned German-born Charles Follen who first recognized that the emancipation of African-Americans would and must inevitably lead to women’s emancipation. William Lloyd Garrison of “The Liberator” and the African-American intellectual leader Frederick Douglass joined him later on. As you all know, the women’s rights movement is generally said to have begun in the 19th century as people increasingly adopted the perception that women were oppressed in a male-centered society. Originally it focused on the promotion of equal contract and property rights for women and the opposition to chattel marriage and ownership of married women (and their children) by their husbands.

With regard to the involvement of the German-Americans in the abolition of the slavery process, it is therefore less astonishing that the German-Americans also strongly influenced the women’s rights movement. Some German socialists adopted a feminist stance. Among them, Wilhelm Weitling, who immigrated to New York in 1846 after he broke with Karl Marx. His “Republik der Arbeiter” formally acknowledged women’s rights, and the labor societies he led in the States included a few women – among them Mathilde Giesler Anneke. Born the daughter of a wealthy Westphalian landlord and mine owner and divorced from her first husband, she quickly estranged herself from her class and married Fritz Anneke. Through the marriage Anneke became acquainted with current affairs and Friedrich Engels, Karl Marc, Georg Herwegh and Ferdinand Lassalle.

In New York, Mathilde Annke soon joined Weitling’s organization, and regularly lectured at workers’ vereins in New York City and Williamsburg on her view “that the social question could only be solved by emancipation of women.” In 1852 she published the first edition of the German-language “Frauen-Zeitung” (Women’s Gazette), a newspaper dedicated to gender equality. While the general public and almost the entire German-speaking press responded only with scorn and sneers, this effort brought her recognition from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. These were the frontrunners of the woman’s movement and she was to become one of them.
She engaged in the New York women’s community and delivered harangues against prohibition, nationalism, clericalism and gender inequality at the congress of the women’s movement and on countless other occasions. She also became vice-president of the woman suffrage association as, by the end of the 19th century, activism focused primarily on gaining political power, particularly the right of women to vote. They finally succeeded in 1919, with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In the process, Anneke became one of the frontrunners of abolitionism as well. She is therefore a perfect instance not only of the German-American women’s role in the women’s rights movement, but also of the fact that those affiliated with the women’s movement were, as a rule, abolitionists, too. It is only consistent that the female intellectual adherents - and often the male, too - to the failed political revolution of 1848 regarded the denial of equal rights both to slaves and women as a blatant betrayal of the Declaration of Independence and were determined to end it.

This brings me to my next field of German-American influence, which is - once again - linked to the values and promises of the home of the free and the way German-Americans interpreted these. Knowing the history of the very German labor movement, it is not surprising that the influence of German-Americans was considerable in the history of the Unites States in this field as well.
After and during the Industrial Revolution, “labor” was considered a commodity that would, in the long run, be governed solely and absolutely by the law of supply and demand. Most employers had the same feelings toward their workers as they did toward their machines: “When they are old and of no further use, they are to be cast into the street.” Among those whose voices called for protection of the rights of the workers were many German-Americans.
The German-American labor movement had its roots in New York and it contributed decisively to the success of the national labor movement in the U.S.
German-Americans like Samuel Gompers and Adolf Strasse became chairmen of the U.S.-American labor union association called the American Federation of Labor. And of course there was again Wilhelm Weitling. Weitling’s program was essentially to arm the proletariat, physically and intellectually, for the coming social revolution. Although Weitling himself failed, his efforts show that the activists were often radical in their standpoints - often towards the economic system at large. Nevertheless Weitling’s followers advocated many reforms, such as homestead legislation, the single tax, public libraries, adult education, a program of public works and protection against mortgage foreclosures - sadly the latter is quite a hot topic in these days again.
During the 19th century, the Socialist movement, which was deeply concerned with the labor movement in the United States, was almost entirely dominated by the Germans. The Civil War and the slavery issue pushed the movement into the background. However, the movement regained momentum as soon as the war was over. Especially as exiled German Socialists, driven out by Bismarck’s policies, were welcomed with open arms in the United States and invigorated the movement with new strength.
After several attempts to form a general Socialist organization, in 1877 the Socialist Labor Party of North America was founded, and this dominated the socialist movement for more than 20 years. Its membership was generally foreign, chiefly German. The New Yorker Volkszeitung, established in 1878 and edited by Dr. Adolph Douai, was the party’s organ and for years the leading Socialist paper in the United States. In 1889, there were at least eight important German Socialist dailies. The executive board of the First International in America consisted of three Germans and six others - all Europeans.

Chicago, with its many German inhabitants, developed into the center of conflict between capital and labor. After the famous Haymarket bombing of 1886, which was the climax of the wide-spread unemployment and labor unrest following the financial crisis of 1873, six of the ten leaders indicted were German. But it was also a German-born governor, John Peter Altgeld, who pardoned two of the prisoners, trying to shed light on the case and its biased sentence. Today the leadership of most big labor unions is no longer in the hands of German-Americans. However, it remains a field that is deeply affected by German-American influence. It is therefore once again an excellent example of how German-Americans contributed to the realization of some of the most important constitutional values. And it once again shows that most of the fields of influence were closely interlinked and that - like the Annekes - many German-Americans engaged in several issues at the same time. Coming to the end, let us finally get back to the German Reinheitsgebot and Pils, that is, to German-American influence during Prohibition. Undoubtedly the most significant source of tension and sense of separateness from the mainstream of American life for German-Americans was the matter of liquor laws and the related rise of Sabbatarianism. This was a fundamental cultural issue in the eyes of the German-Americans, a cultural issue that retarded their assimilation into American life. Many German-Americans wanted nothing to do with the puritanical tendencies of American society that urged prohibition and Sabbatarianism. The temperance issue did not fade away after the Civil War, as the German protest movement in St. Louis in 1866 indicates. And starting with the 1880s, the prohibition movement relentlessly gained momentum, and the campaign to make Missouri dry continued more or less unabated until the prohibitionists prevailed in 1919, after the Germans had lost World War I. As the prohibition movement grew in influence around the turn of century, so grew the German-Americans’ response to try to preserve their cultural values. In fact, the culmination of the efforts to preserve their way of life was the creation of the German-American Alliance, which developed into a national lobbying organization propagating the German-American view that the individual consumption of fermented and distilled spirits should be tolerated as a matter of personal liberty. The prohibition movement gave German-Americans a common foe, which forged a sense of solidarity within the German-American community that had never before existed. It was a cause that united the Germans, but mostly resulted in more local than federal political fallout. It is not well known that the future President Theodor Roosevelt, before he bounded off to glory, offered an assistant secretaryship of the Navy by the newly elected President McKinley, had been a rather unsuccessful Police Commissioner of New York. As such he declared war on Sunday sin. His campaign incensed the German community and was – in the end – not successful.

Now, what is the essence of the impact and limit of German immigration to the United States? I think, mainly three things:
First, while German-American influence should not be overrated, it is remarkable and there are certain fields where the United States of America would not be what it is today without German immigration.

Second, as concern the fields of influence -- abolition of slavery, women’s rights movement, labor movement and social and labor reforms, prohibition (and we could name more) and even the invention of ethnicity -- what stands out is that all of these fields have one thing in common: They are all about personal liberty, liberty of conscience, equality, and thus the values vested in the Declaration of Independence. So the German-Americans should be entitled to regard themselves - with at least a trace of pride - as among the true defenders of the home of the free and thus of those who brought back liberty, democracy and peace to Germany after the Second World War. And just allow me to add, we should live up to this stewardship.

Last but not least, it is no coincidence that I spoke about German influence during Prohibition. Obviously, the opposition prevailed because today we are standing in what is about to become again “Schneider’s Lager Beer Saloon” of the Tenement Museum and thus will give proof not only that prohibition was overcome but also a proof of a few good German “exports.”
I would like to take this opportunity to commend the Tenement Museum for its role in bringing to life the important contribution of German immigrants to their city. I hope that this effort finds the support of the German-Americans who have an interest in their history and would be happy if some of you would have their share in supporting this endeavor.