Miscellaneous History

Can you imagine making a trip to any candy counter without seeing a Hershey's chocolate bar? An icon to chocolate lovers, that glossy brownpaper-wrapped bar of milk chocolate got its start in 1900 when Milton Hershey sold his Lancaster Caramel Co. for $1 million in cash. As part of the sale, Hershey retained a portion of the old factory that contained chocolate-making equipment. That same year, he introduced the first Hershey's chocolate bars. In 1901, sales totaled $622,000.

Two years later, Hershey began construction of his own factory in Derry Church, Pennsylvania. But he did not simply open a factory: He started an industry-before the mass-produced Hershey's chocolate bar was available, milk chocolate was enjoyed only by the upper classes. He also built (i town-Hershey's chocolate factory was more than just a building. He laid out streets around it called Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue, and constructed houses nearby for his employees to rent or buy. A street railway connected his cornfield at Derry Church with five other towns; besides providing milk and water to Hershey, the towns also had rail links to ports and so to major consumer markets.

The factory finally started chocolate production in 1905, and by that time Hershey had several hundred workers on staff. By 1906, the town was renamed Hershey, and the man for whom it was named went on to make sweet history.

While each generation has always seemed to be entering a new age, there are evidences today that we are facing an era more revolutionary than most in the past. According to the Christian chronology, we are approaching the second millenium; but we recognize how little of the history of the world or of man we can comprehend in this narrow sliver of time. We see that there has been a major shift of values, a major reshuffling of self-evident truths, and the requirement for rapid and painful adaptation about every two centur- ies. In the 14th century, the Renaissance changed the outlook of western man from heaven to earth; in the 16th century, the old world for the first time learned of the existence of the new, in the 18th century the idea of consensus or democracy challenged the tradition of absolutism or aristocracy; and in the 20th century science and technology have opened to view new physical worlds and have so altered human ecology that race survival begins for the first time to acquire more importance than individual or group survival. One might expect at such a time that the old minor loyalties to religions or nations or cultures or geographic locations would weaken, but the opposite seems to be happening. As the general threats from a- tomic war or world over-population increase, the more firmly do people cling to their parochial but familiar group identities. There has thus been a surge of what we may call the "new tribalism," reaching its most strident form in black nationalism; but observable also in all parts of the world, from Wales to Vietnam.

Because of the renewed interest of many people in "ethnicity" or cultural pluralism - that is, the effort of self-conscious groups to get along with each other within the confines of a larger political society, I propose to talk to you tonight primarily about the problems historians encounter in dealing with such a group, rather than about the group itself. My subject, of course, is the Pennsylvania Germans; but my concern is how the modern historian should deal with a self-conscious minority. The day of ignorant innocence has long passed when popular mythology in predominantly English America would sustain such simple cliches as the servile blacks, the dirty Irish, the dumb Dutch, the greedy Jews, the heathen Chinese and the rest of the long string of defamatory epithets which entered the local vocabulary whenever any of these groups entered rapidly into the domain of another. In place of attributing good or bad qualities to any cultural group as a whole, modern scholars have entered into much more detailed and complex analyses of minority groups and the reactions which have taken place within the so-called melting pot in the United States. The first step is to become much more exacting about the identity of those to whom any group label is to be applied. Starting at the top, we may observe a tendency to refer to citizens of the United States as Americans - a title properly re- served to all inhabitants of the American continents, rather than as United Staters, which is precise and does not lump Fidel Castro and Dwight D. Eisenhower as fellow citizens. And with such think- ing we must begin with the term "Pennsylvania Germans." Do we mean all the people of Germany who came to live in Pennsylvania? Or all who spoke German? Or who met a dozen other criteria? Let us look at the problem.

Consider first some of the polarities of view. In the 1700's, newcomers to the North Atlantic seaboard called themselves and were called "emigrants," signifying that their cultural association remained at the place from which they had come. The word "immigration," meaning coming to rather than from a place, did not enter into writings in the United States until Jedediah Morse published his American Geography in 1789, the year the United States Constitution went into effect. In 1809 a traveller from Europe noted that the only new word forced on the English language by the United States was the term "immigrant," for until this country came into existence, no one had ever known of a place to which people wanted to go; they moved always to escape some local horror; that is, movement meant flight to Europeans, whereas it came to mean sanctuary in the United States. The emigrant was the founder of a new society in a vacant new land, identified with the place he had left; and Crevecoeur and all the earlier writers spoke only of "emigrants." But by 1789 a receiving society had been reared, and the term immigrant implied that some alien bearer of a foreign culture would have to adjust to the mores he found in the new land.'

Take another term reflecting similar polarity: acculturation or deculturation. C. Vann Woodward, speaking at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in April, 1969, noted that "The Assimilation of European ethnic groups in America throughout the history of immigration has involved both deculturation-the shedding of foreign ways; and acculturation-the adoption of new values and customs." A great controversy has raged around the comparative weight of these forces in creating a national culture ever since Crevecoeur, in 1782, originated the melting pot theory of American nationality. Said he: "Whence came all these people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, has arisen ... What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love of a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him. His country now is that which gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence ... He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced." This is the root of that theory, given academic life by Frederick Jackson Turner, which proclaimed that all uniquely American qualities grew from the native soil; that European background had to be forgotten before a United States citizen could be born. Another view asserts the opposite: that it was not the land, but the combination of imported cultures which created what was distinctive among people raised in the United States.

Thus the question of acculturation or deculturation opens up different answers. Does acculturation mean that it is best for each immigrant group to keep its own distinctive ways, and to become part of a federation of cultures which would distinguish the total community, or does it mean that newcomers should be stripped of old habits, as Crevecoeur suggested, and pressed into conformity with the ways of the existing society?

Most modern historians doubt that very much old world tradition and culture ever dissolved in the mythical melting pot, but that important value systems peculiar to each immigrant group persisted in the group for many generations, affected by but not destroyed by the society and the geography of the United States. To capsule this idea, we might take the report of a social service worker: "Not yet Americanized: still eats sauer kraut."

Some observers like to point out that the United States has no history except in terms of immigrating minority groups - that every inhabitant except the Indian aborigines brought in a culture foreign to the region; and that American as well as United States history is no more or less than immigration history. And immigration history, according to Vann Woodward, "has also been a story of fierce struggles to assert and maintain ethnic interests and identity. One key element in that struggle has been the group's sense of its past. Each immigrant group of any size established its historical societies and journals in which filiopietism has free rein ... These assertions of group pride in a common past, mythic or real, have accompanied a strong urge for assimilation and integration into the larger society." The anthropologists state that "the extent to which the past of a people is regarded as praiseworthy, their own self-esteem wili be high and the opinion of others will be favorable."

Let me now look more particularly at the problems which the so-called Pennsylvania-Germans bring to the door of the historian. The traditional material about these people may be brought to sharp focus by a few quotations. Thomas Penn wrote: "This Province has for some years been the asylum of the distressed Protestants of the Palatinate, and other parts of Germany, and I believe it may with truth be said that the present flourishing condition of it is in a great measure owing to the industry of these people; and should any discouragement divert them from coming hither, it may well be apprehended that the value of your lands will fall, and your advances to wealth be much slower; for it is not altogether the goodness of the soil, but the number and industry of the people that make a flourishing country."

A century later, Eli Bowen wrote of the Lancaster County Germans: "Virtuous, honest, and industrious, theyconstitute decidedly the most substantial and respectable class of the people . ." Such statements could be amplified from the writings of many travellers and local observers.

On the other hand, at the same time that Thomas Penn was praising the German settlers, Governor Robert Hunter Morris was writing that German immigration ought to be restricted because these immigrants "have been forsome time composed of a great Mixture of the Refuse of their People," and the province was being deluged with the inmates of the German jails." Benjamin Franklin, smarting from the financial failure of his German language newspaper enterprise, the Zeltang, wrote: "Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements and by herding together establish their language and manners to the Exclusion of Ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglicizing them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs anymore than they can acquire our complexion?"

I have thus offered the obvious - statements about the Pennsylvania Germans by those who admired them and those who disparaged them. They do not sound like the same people. Rather than to discredit Penn or Franklin summarily, the historian asks the question - were they talking about the same groups? A very little research shows that they were not-that all kinds of different people with very different qualities have been covered under the blanket label, Pennsylvania German. Rather than examine the commenta- tors, let us examine their terminology and ask: how many distinct and definable groups may come under this rubric? We start with the awkward realization that there was no German nation until 1871, so that any immigrant from that geographic area of Europe prior to 1870 would have no national loyalty comparable to an Englishman, a Dutchman or a Swede. Gottleib Mittelberger's Journey to Pennsylvania, 1750 to 1755, relates that travellers down the Rhine between Heilbronn and the seaports in Holland had to stop at 36 different custom houses, have their baggage examined,- and pay fees to this number of petty principalities en route. The migrants spoke a Germanic language, but were not Germans politically; rather they were Wurtemburgers, Alsatians, Swabians, and residents of Hesse, Baden, Schleswig, Rhenish Prussia, Westphalia, Hannover, Oldenburg and the Palatinate. In Switzerland they came from Zurich, Aargau, Basel and Bern. Their loyalties corresponded more to the loyalty of people today to their counties rather than to their state or nation.

We can readily identify most of the groups who have been called Pennsylvania German, but having concluded this exercise we have not established a single self-conscious minority with a unified culture, but rather a dozen cultures with the same language stem. We may begin with the first-comers, the people from Krisheim and Krefeld who followed Francis Daniel Pastorius to Philadelphia and Germantown in the 1680's and became the original Pennsylvania Germans, though they were Holland Dutchmen. Then came the Mennonite and Amish migrants from Switzerland to Lancaster County in 1710 and 1718. In rapid succession from then until the revolutionary war came other sectarians from specific European locations: Beissel's Baptist Brethren, Mack's Dunkers, Zinzendorf's Moravians from Moravia to Georgia and then to Pennsylvania, the war-driven Palatines who fled to London, to the Hudson river valley, and at last down the Susquehanna to Berks County, the Schwenkfeldians, the Reformed and the Lutheran church people, arriving not as con- gregations in the way of the sectaries, but more usually as single families. At first they paid their way and took up land on arrival; later either by choice or by fraud, they pledged to work out the cost of their passage and became an indentured servant class.

Folk myth has placed all these people on the farms of the Pennsylvania German belt, from Easton to Chambersburg, where they made the land bloom and turned Pennsylvania into the breadbasket of the colonies. They clubbed resources, bought worn out farms of the careless Scotch-Irish, and projected their farmways into the valleys of present day Union, Snyder, Northumberland and Centre Counties. This is all true, but too much of a stereotype. It omits all those Germans who were abominable farmers, but proved out as craftsmen of all kinds, from shoemakers to glassworkers. We find colonial German astronomers, theologians, botanists, scientists, gun- smiths, surgeons, inventors, mechanics, carpenters, masons, copper- smiths, ironmasters, and construction engineers in numbers pro- portionately as large in colonial Pennsylvania as those of any other national origin group.

By 1776, the Germans in Pennsylvania already represented a complex mixture of religion, vocation, dialect, and prior location in Europe - not at all a self-conscious or a united minority. In fact, in the region of Pennsylvania these people occupied, they constituted a vast majority; their non-English tongue practically excluded from their region those who could not communicate in German. We have seen the reaction of Benjamin Franklin when he found himself a stranger among people west of Philadelphia. The Hessians mainly remained after the Revolution, and the trek from Germany now slacked off until the 1820's, largely because of the Napoleonic Wars. The main qualities of the German groups to this point seem to have been their language, and their Protestant religion, though many varieties existed in each category. Those who farmed acquired the reputation of being very good farmers, but it would not be a fact to speak of the Germans in colonial Pennsylvania as only a group of farmers, or more attached to farms than any other group. This would apply only to the Amish and the Mennonites, a small minority of the total.

As the 19th century progressed, Germans continued to arrive in great numbers, but now included the German Jews who engaged in the type of trade they had known in the old country. They became peddlers and storekeepers, and sometimes craftsmen who set up home manufactures. After the Civil War, German artisans and professional men, many of them Catholics, came to Pennsylvania, settling in cities and taking up active roles in city government, and in the professions as university teachers, lawyers, doctors, preachers and businessmen. These came mainly from east Germany, though many also came from Bavaria and Hamburg. After the Franco-Prussian War, these Germans brought an overpowering devotion to the fatherland, an emotion never known by most earlier immigrants from the region. Berlin meant nothing to the colonial Mennonites or Lutherans, but it was the center of world culture to men like Dr. Richard Schiedt who came to teach Chemistry at Franklin and Mar- shall College in the early 1900's and did his best to promote neutrality or alliance of the United States with Kaiser William II in the period 1914-1917. He was suspect as a "hyphenated-American" or "German-American" in those unhappy years, but was he a Pennsylvania German? Technically, yes, though entirely different in his qualities and relationships from descendants of the earlier peasant stock whom Dr. Schiedt - a self-appointed aristocrat - held in utter contempt. German artisans of this latter era worked in the coal mines, became a major part of the highly skilled textile work force, and settled wherever society had become highly industrialized, particularly around St. Louis and Milwaukee, but also in Philadelphia, Allentown, Reading and Lancaster. We are inclined to think of the Germans in terms of beer and pretzels, German bands, German Beneficial Unions, and German craftsmen, but these identifying symbols would not set apart from others the Pennsylvania Germans of 1750, 1800 or 1850. They would prove useful only to generalize about Germans coming to Pennsylvania since the days of the American Civil War, and would apply to immigrants from Meeklenberg, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Prussia. Here is the problem the historian faces. What can he say about Pennsylvania Germans? The best answer would seem to be, never use the term because it has too many contradictory meanings; speak only in specific terms that can be tied down to specific meaning. But this brings unhappiness. We have the problem here of people who wish to share and relish by association the admirable and worthy deeds of people with whom they can identify by language or familial origin, like the virtuous peasant, but they do not wish to associate with others of the same language and familial origin whom they dislike, like the arrogant militant of 1915. But the historian, if honest, must offer both or none.

A second historical problem raised by the Pennsylvania Germans is the alleged language barrier and the assumed paucity of records. I suggest numexous research topics to my graduate students which require a reading knowledge of German printing and script, and they back away as fast as they can. I think that neither the difficulty of the language nor the lack of records are valid reasons for the failure of graduate students to work in this field more actively. The real reason, I suspect, is that the students foresee no professional utility in examining this minority group. Many are now rushing into the study of the Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Arabic and Swahili languages, I think more from current faddism and job-placement hopes than from intellectual commitment. My point is that the language barrier is merely an excuse rather than a reason for the failure of students to research in Pennsylvania German documents. As to the scarcity of documents, nothing could be further from the truth. The Moravian Archives and those of Mennonite, Lutheran, Reformed and Evangelical Churches are full of unexplored material. The Pennsylvania German newspapers of a century ago are storehouses rarely entered. A great deal of Pennsylvania material, written in German, lies in central European libraries and church archives. The difficulty is that Pennsylvania Germans have established themselves securely enough in the larger society that they have no group need to bolster their self-confidence by historical mytihmaking and filiopietism in which minorities commonly engage. Books on the importance of Negro heroes and the centrality of blacks in the development of mankind are written today partly because the blacks feel the need, and partly because the writers foresee large sales and profits. These factors also motivate far Eastern studies, but would not challenge present day Germans living in Pennsylvania. Thus, it appears that not much historical work is in progress on this minority group at present because neither the minority group nor the larger society express much need for it.

Another historical problem relating to the Pennsylvania Germans involves us again with the melting pot idea in American history, a concept once considered fundamental to the idea of the United States as a sanctuary for the oppressed, but of late relegated to the place of an inspirational myth. Historians in the past twenty years have more and more denied that the melting pot ever worked. The theory sounded fine, they allege, but it never in fact melted minorities or homogenized society. The national digestive tract failed to absorb and change into national energy the various minority groups ingested into the society. These groups remained what they had been, maintained their minority group consciousness as long as theyy could, but because of economic pressure generally tried to assimilate into the prevailing cultural pattern, or to de-ethnicize themselves themselves, as one student phrases it. Since the Civil War, the schools have played a major role in making it impossible, by the third generation, to distinguish between children of the different immigrant groups, unless there is a physical difference. Thus, one could tell white from black, but not German from English, or Nigerian from Senegalese. In Pennsylvania for almost a century and a half, English, Germans and Scotch-Irish did not form an amalgam in the regional melting pot, but retained their several separate cultural identities and stayed pretty much in their own staked-out localities. In short, they did not become a single, integrated population, but remained separate, competitive social structures housed under the same poli- tical roof. As the public schools became more widespread and the compulsory,system began, settling on English language and customs as the required curriculum, the cultural separatism of earlier years began to break down. This process, once started, was speeded by intermarriage between various national-origin and religious groups. Crevecoeur talked of a melting pot in 1782, but the phenomenon had just barely begun in Pennsylvania a century later; and by 1982 it may be recognized that cultural homogeneity in human society is not a feature to be sought or admired. The Pennsylvania Germans, and especially those whose religious principles have persuaded them to shut themselves off from the world, have retained an ancient cul- tural heritage with less distortion and change than perhaps any other minority group in the United States. Their resistance to the heatof the melting pot marks them as people full of self-confidence, who have not needed to borrow customs and mores from others to be loyal to the nation. Modern historians claim that national strength grows not from the imposition of a contrived or conventional culture upon all, but from the willingness of all the self-conscious eth- nic groups to jump beyond their own separate social patterns to acquiesce in a few larger and grander themes workable only in the national context. Thus the melting pot has ceased to be a national symbol and has been replaced by the ideas of cultural federalism or cultural pluralism.

In a final part of this talk, let me look at a common theme of Pennsylvania German meetings - that historians have neglected these people, have failed to give them adequate attention or bring before the public the significant contributions of Pennsylvania Germans to the larger society. Richard Shryock, in his delightful essay "The Pennsylvania Germans as Seen by the Historian," fully documents the statements that historians of the United States have either ignored or defamed the Pennsylvania Germans from the earliest publications of colonial times until the present. "While the Bostonians seem to have given the greatest offense," he wrote, "it can hardly be said that historians nearer home endeared themselves to the Pennsylvania Germans." Shryock noted that a good deal of historical investigation has been done by Pennsylvania Germans themselves, and that Germans in the old country were engaged in many studies of German influence in America, including Pennsylvania. But the overall insinuation of the essay is that the Pennsylvania Germans have not been given their fair share of attention in the form of scholarly publication. I thought that I would check up on this idea and test it.

In the entire nation, Germany supplied the largest number of immigrants between 1820 and 1950 - some six and a quarter million. In Pennsylvania, Germans comprised about one-third of the population at the end of the colonial era, and as they continued to come in at a faster rate than either the English or the Scotch-Irish in later years, we may assume that their proportion of the total pop- ulation remained about the same. The census figures, by gjving statistics only on native and foreign born, hide the national origin of everyone beyond the first generation immigrants. Of all the immigrant groups coming to the United States, the Germans, the Irish and the Jews have been written about most extensively. The first two, as the largest immigrant groups of the 19th century, have received literary attention proportionate to their numerical impor- tance. Colleges normally have not provided courses in anv ethnic minority groups. Out of 400 sample colleges, only 38 offered any kind of course work on minorities, and these generally appealed to a locally important minority group.

Doctoral theses in history written between 1873 and 1960 have been catalogued.," This compilation lists 152 Ph.D. theses written about Pennsylvania, of which 6 relate to the Pennsylvania Germans. They are: Abdel Wentz's German Element in York County (Geo. Wash., 1914); James O. Knauss: Social Conditions Among the Pennsylvania Germans in the 18th Century (Cornell, 1918); Henry Smith: Mennonites in Pennsylvania (Chicago, 1907); Charles Gladfelter: Colonial Pennsylvania's Lutheran and Reformed Clergymen (Hopkins, 1952); William R. Steckel: Christopher Sauer (Stanford, 1949); and Emerson L. Derr: Governor Simon Snyder (Penn State, 1955).

Most of the outstanding scholarship on the Pennsylvania Germans has been published under the auspices and with the financial assistance of the Pennsylvania German Society. Such aid is common to nearly all minority groups since sales are generally limited to those who are members of the group.

But much writing on minority groups appears as articles in professional journals. A search of the index of the Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine revealed 57 index lines devoted to the English, 65 lines to the Scotch-Irish, and 88 lines given to the Germans and Pennsylvania Dutch. The index to the first seventy-five volumes of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography gave 29 lines of index to the English, 66 lines to the Scotch-Irish, and 156 lines to the Pennsylvania Germans. Thus, in these impor- tant state historical periodicals, the Pennsylvania Germans received more attention than the two other comparable population groups in Pennsylvania.

I next went to the University Library card catalogue to make comparisons. Here, because of the extent of the material, I carefully examined only the trays listing titles under the subject heading:

Pennsylvania German. These cards worked out to a ratio of about twenty to one, with twenty books dealing with some phase of the Pennsylvania German dialect - that is, books on linguistics, to every one volume dealing with the history, folklore or culture of the people.

To sum up, there seems to be no dearth of writing about the Pennsylvania Germans, and in comparison with the Scotch-Irish or English inhabitants of Pennsylvania, they seem to fare well. Careful historical studies pursued as doctoral theses offer a wide opportunity for studies in depth of Pennsylvania German culture and group dynamics, but historians have not been active in opening up these opportunities. I have not examined theses in sociology, but I would surmise that more attention has been given to Pennsylvania Germans in this discipline. Writers of scholarly historical articles have spent much more time and effort on the Pennsylvania Germans than on any,other major population group in the Commonwealth. And of all writings on these people, most have dealt with linguistics -the Pennsylvania German dialect, language, or whatever you wish to call it.

The sudden impact of demands on many disciplines to bring blacks into view as a minority group comparable to others of like size and influence, makes historians inquire into the modes of treatment which Germans, Scotch-Irish, English and others have sought and promoted about themselves. One of the major problems, as well as one of the important answers, is that the members of the group will normally produce the original body of writing about itself. The historical material thus brought out will be less than critical. It will deal with the days of suspicion, trial, ordeal, and final vindication; it will raise folk heroes and exalt the,contributions of members of the group to the larger society: contributions in war, in philanthropy, in ideas, in business, and in social invention; it will exaggerate somewhat, claim too much, and raise some doubts and ridicule outside the group while appealing to the vanity and pride of those inside. And ultimately it will stimulate critical restudy to re-assess the writings which the groups have produced. By this time it can be told as it is, for the necessary myths are deeply embedded and the group will continue to possess and cherish them, whatever doubts may later be raised about their authenticity.

The historian always faces a problem of timing. When is it appropriate to deal with the traditions of a minority group without endangering its self-confidence and self-respect? With regard to the Pennsylvania Germans, I would,say, at this juncture, the time is now.