THE 1880’S IMMIGRATION AND OUTLAWS

Herbert Quick, who was of Dutch extraction, considered his family Americans since he was born here as had his father been. His description of the German immigrants invasion of our area, may at first, seem offensive to those who descended from the German race, but he ends his dissertation by praising the Germans for their hard work, and ability to assimilate into the fabric which is now America. 

“The German immigrants who began to come in as soon as the railways reached us, brought in their children a new element in my boy life. It so happened that with some of these German boys I was as intimate as with the American youngsters. 108 The German boys were mainly good, honest, unspoiled children of the goose-herd type from the shores of the North Sea. To step from the atmosphere of frontier Iowa to a land of wooden shoes and peasant simplicity gave me the spiritual experience of a trip to a foreign land and to a new moral world without leaving the farm. A part of the time I lived in the social and mental atmosphere of the peasants about Emden.” 

“When they came, these folks knew nothing of prairie life. They were possessed of the Nordic conceit which is now stimulating the production of so many books; but they made up for their initial Nordic refusal to adapt themselves by their unremitting industry, their high racial intelligence and their willingness to adopt the prevailing modes of agriculture when convinced that they were profitable.” 

“Our German neighbors, so far as my acquaintance went, all believed in witches. They followed our American customs of using the term ‘witch’ as a noun of common gender. One of them told me that ‘vunce in Chermany,’ on a bitterly cold day in winter, while he was thrashing grain with a flail in his master’s barn, a butterfly came fluttering through the place. How could that be, he asked when it was so cold?” 

“’It hatched out in the warm barn,’ I ventured.” 

“’It wasn’t a butterfly at all,’ he explained scoffingly. ‘De man ve vas vorkin’ for vas a vitch. He made himself into a butterfly so he could fly in to see if ve vas vorkin’ hart enough!’” 

“’Vunce in Chermany’ became to me the equivalent of the ‘Once upon a time’ of the fairy tales.” 

“To us rather primitive Yankees, as they called us, their courtship and marriages were a matter of astonishment, not to say scandal; as much so as the amatory conduct which accordingto Diedrich Knickerbocker, the young men of Connecticut endeavored, with some initial success, to introduce themselves among the maidens of the New Amsterdam Dutch. When one of our young Germans courted his flaxen-haired Fraulein, he made no effort to conceal the process. There was no assumption, as among us, that he had dropped in to talk about the weather or the Hessian fly in the wheat. He did not bring a pocketful of candies with mottoes on them to furnish a substitute for conversation between him and the girl until the men of the family pulled off their boots, set them by the stove and retired. No, our German swain, as often observed by me, sat in the family circle in the presence of the whole world, with his pipe in his mouth and his arm about the waist of his girl. He did this very much with the air of a knight planting his banner on the battlements, not so much for the pleasure of it as from a sense of duty, and as a sign of conquest. It was the thing to do, you know.” 

“I found that among them some remarkably good cooks and housewives; but for some reason this was far from the rule. I suppose that most of them had been living lives of deep poverty and economic depression in the old country, and they had the lack of cleanliness which usually goes with such poverty and depression. One could be brought to a nauseated realization of this by running with a thrashing machine which thrashed their grain.” 

“The presence of chickens and pigs in the house was common among them; and 109 they ate things which revolted us, both as a matter and manner of preparation. Doctor McCollum tells us that we Americans have gradually ceased to eat the best parts of the animals which furnish us our meat, and that the savage who devours all glands as well as the other internal organs is much better nourished than we. Our German friends did not equal the savages in utilizing the whole carcass; but they did consume things which we rejected. If one will consider the barrier which varying standards of food raise between peoples, he will be able to see how these things affected the attitude of those two classes of citizens toward each other.” 

“We found other and less debatable indictments against their habits. The sale of fine-toothed combs became brisk in our stores as soon as the German children began coming to school. So rare is the present necessity for this implement in America that I feel obligated to explain that the finetoothed comb was an instrument for removing lice from the hair. In that great division of the melting pot, the public school, the German and American pupils sat together; and from the fair German heads bowed over books with ours we got the parasites which called for the use of the fine comb…. 

“Our German neighbors rapidly grew prosperous. They came in a marvelously short time to be excellent farmers even under their new conditions. Their children went to the common schools, and especially along the margins of their settlements, mingled with the Yankee children, studied with them, played with them, fought with them: and American farmers exchanged work with German farmers, traded with him and with him discussed their common problems. Gradually the things in them which offended us disappeared, or were better understood and lost their offensiveness. They became used to us too.” 

“With their ascent from the intellectual and economic status of European peasants to that of independent American farmers, they shed the practices entailed on them by their old poverty. This would have been inevitable no matter where it might have taken place. For a long time intermarriages between them and us were unknown. As time passed they became frequent. abandoned their wooden shoes, and the German girl passed the stage of pulling up their skirts to get at the huge patchwork reticula which hung under her clothes from a belt around her waist. Dress, language, circles of acquaintance, politics, lodges, the common interests in roads and schools, farm organizations–a thousand things gradually produced forgetfulness of those early differences.” 

“The German neighborhoods in Iowa are now as American as the rest of the country. I believe that the assimilation is actually more complete than in the more purely German counties of Pennsylvania, where the American residence has existed for the better part of two centuries (now three). The melting pot does exist where the conditions are right–and it should exist.”