The answer is eight, seven of them were American (Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley) while the eighth, Emil Frey, was president of Switzerland in 1894. He was born in the canton of Basel-Land and educated in Germany at the University of Jena. Emigrating to Illinois, he joined the Union army at the outbreak of the war. He was captured at the Battle of Gettysburg and confined to Richmondâs notorious Libby Prison, a former tobacco warehouse, where he had to survive on a diet of rats while being held in solitary confinement. After the war, he returned to Switzerland where he became active in national politics and served as the countryâs first ambassador to the United States (1882â88). Another immigrant from Basel-Land, Henry Wirz followed a very different career path. After marrying a widow, he moved to the South where, among other transient jobs, he worked as an overseer on a Louisiana plantation. He joined the Confederate army and eventually became commander of the large prisoner-of-war camp near Andersonville, Georgia. He was executed for the war crimes of neglect and physical abuse shortly after the warâs end in 1865.
Frey was part of a large exodus of liberals who left Switzerland and Germany after the constitutional upheavals of the 1830s and 1840s. Several years before his birth in 1838, the canton of Basel had a brief armed conflict between urban and rural forces that resulted in its division into the separate cantons of Basel-Stadt and Basel-Land. Sectional differences between the more conservative Catholic and more liberal Protestant cantons over the nature of their Confederation resulted in a full-scale civil war in 1847. The Catholic inner cantons formed the Sondernbund (âSeparatist Leagueâ) but were defeated after a several-week campaign against federal troops. A new constitution was approved the following year, one strongly modeled on its American predecessor that greatly strengthened the powers of the central government and created the first provision for national citizenship. Freyâs father had been politically active in Basel politics and gave asylum to Friedrich Hecker, a leader of the liberal forces in the neighboring German state of Baden who was forced to flee after the suppression of the 1848 revolution there. Hecker moved on to Illinois where he became active in Republican politics and in 1861 raised a regiment of German-speaking immigrants. Other liberals who went to America were Carl Schurz and the parents of Peter Altgeld who was later elected governor of that state. Their bedrock republican values included a passionate commitment to the abolition of slavery. George Washington Carver was named after his âUncleâ George Carver , another German immigrant who had Anglicized his family name of âSchneider.â Carver hired men to rescue the boy after he and his family were kidnapped by Arkansas slave-hunters. In the years after the Civil War they supported the reform wing of the party and successfully enacted a program of progressive legislation on the city and state levels throughout the Midwest, one that was affectionately dubbed âsewer socialism.â
To âDie Neue Weltâ
The first Germans and Swiss who arrived in America had been spiritually motivated. The Protestant Movement had split into many different denominations over issues of doctrine and practice; the more radical wanted to emulate the communal spirituality of early Christianity by rejecting such holdovers from Catholicism as ecclesiastical organization and child baptism. They held views that were anathema to their orthodox neighbors and suffered imprisonment, exile, and death. Escaping this persecution by the Lutheran and Swiss Reformed Churches, they sought a new home where they could practice their non-conforming beliefs without state interference.
The Moravian Brethren came first. Their teachings were handed down from Jan Hus, an early religious dissident who was executed for heresy by the Catholic Church. After a period of success as a vehicle for Czech independence, his movement was defeated by the Hapsburgs and forced to go underground. In the early eighteenth century, its last adherents (âthe Hidden Seedsâ) accepted the invitation of Count Nicolaus von Zinzendorf to relocate to his estate in Saxony. He was a Lutheran nobleman deeply influenced by Pietism, the new movement that downplayed theological dogma in favor of an emotional engagement with the Inner Light that was to be found in every human being. Their numbers grew and their universalist ethos led to far-ranging missionary ventures. Finding the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania a congenial destination, Zinzendorf founded the town of Bethlehem as the Moravian base of operations for converting the local Lenni Lenapes. Labeled the âDelawareâ by the English, the tribe was the main branch of the Algonquian-speaking peoples who inhabited the mid-Atlantic coast and came under increasing pressure from American colonists to surrender their lands. Most of them went west to the Ohio Territory where they were ministered by the missionary David Zeisberger. He started several settlements for Christian tribal members who adopted a European life-style along with his Moravian pacifism and piety. Glowing reports induced Swiss Anabaptists known as Mennonites and Amish to follow the Moravians to Pennsylvania. Separated linguistically from their neighbors who called them âDutchâ (âDeutschâ), they followed strict communal codes of conduct and prospered as farmers. As their numbers grew, groups splintered off and formed new communities in Ohio and Indiana.
Another non-conforming group that chose to leave Germany was the Harmony Society founded by the self-styled prophet, George Rapp. He preached that Christâs Second Coming was imminent and would inaugurate a new Kingdom of God on Earth. Rappâs eclectic religious philosophy was strongly influenced by the mystical writings of Jacob Böhme and Emmanuel Swedenborg. Besides contributions to the new science of metallurgy and mine safety, Swedenborg wrote detailed accounts of heaven and hell based on his self-induced visionary trance-states. He lived for awhile amidst Londonâs sulfuric miasma where he attracted followers who started the Church of the New Jerusalem. William Blake affiliated with it before criticizing its teaching in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The most famous of its American members was John Chapman, who was better-known as âJohnny Appleseed.â After the American Revolution, he moved from New England to the Ohio Territory which he crisscrossed for years planting the seeds that became the orchards that produced a valuable regional commodity and a booming hard cider industry. He earned the respect of both white settlers and Native Americans for his generosity and non-violent, nature-loving personality. He fostered frontier literacy by leaving Swedenborgian tracts with the families with whom he stayed; his natural rapport with children was an intuitive anticipation of the âkindergartenâ (âchildrenâs gardenâ) philosophy that would soon be imported from Germany. His balancing of the useful and the spiritual was the formula for success that was applied by the Rappites and the later-arriving Church of the New Inspiration in the farming/craft communities that they started at New Harmony, Indiana and Amana, Iowa.
Other German-speaking immigrants came with the countryâs lucrative business opportunities in mind. John Sutter came of age in Basel-Land but left to lead a peripatetic life that took him to the Mexican province of California where he founded the colony of âNew Helvetia.â His dreams of becoming a grandee were dashed after gold was discovered at his saw mill and his property was overrun by squatters. He spent the rest of his life lobbying the federal government for compensation under the provisions of his original Mexican land grant. To be near the politicians in Washington, he moved east to a Moravian town in Pennsylvania where he died. The Gold Rush of 1849 attracted thousands of people from around the world. Most never hit the mother-lode but some did find it at the cash-register. Levi Strauss moved to San Francisco to set up the West Coast branch of his familyâs dry goods business and made their fortune after securing a patent on blue jeans. Before discovering ancient Troy, Heinrich Schliemann had worked as a banker in Sacramento where he obtained his US citizenship. Railroads were soon linking all sections of the country and accelerating the nationâs economic development. Immigrants escaping poverty in the Swiss canton of Glarus settled in Wisconsin where they introduced their native cheese-making styles. In near-by Milwaukee, Frederick Pabst helped make the city synonymous with the German-style pilsner beers that gained in popularity and national market share.
The German Influence
Americaâs cultural life during the nineteenth century was more strongly stamped âGermanâ than many people now realize. Its dramatic demotion occurred in 1917 after the United States joined the Allies and 100 percent American patriots went on a hysterical anti-German campaign.1 This ran the gamut from assaults on life and liberty, to the dropping of German-language courses and the boycotting of German composers. Until then, German had been the countryâs most-spoken second language and a requirement for those studying mathematics, philosophy, and science. Choral music played a significant role in Lutheran church services and immigrant German musicians filled the seats of orchestras across the country. By the 1880s, the operas of Richard Wagner surpassed Rossiniâs in popularity with the ticket-buying public. German literature, especially the works of Goethe , appealed to this same educated middle class. One noticeable social consequence of this appreciation was the frequency of the name âMargaret,â the heroine of Faust One, which became one of the most common names for girls in the country.
Goethe and other Romantic writers argued for an âaesthetics of enchantment.â Reacting to the one-sided bias of the reigning rationalist philosophy, they emphasized the role of imagination and intuition in the cognitive process. They coined the term anschauung to refer to a technique that aimed to âlook intoâ in the objects of the visual world with an âinner eyeâ and discern their invisible patterns. To validate this approach, they turned to the sacred texts of the Hindoos, especially the Bhagavad-Gita, that were becoming widely available in the West. This transatlantic phenomenon influenced the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote in his poem âBrahmaâ that âI am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn that Brahmin sings.â Realizing that reality was far more fluid than most people imagined, the Romantics wanted to find a place for soul in a world increasingly defined in the exclusively mechanistic terms of commerce and the laboratory.
This Romantic philosophy permeated German science as well as art. It was central to the life-work of Alexander von Humboldt (1769â1859), the worldâs most famous scientist before his reputation was eclipsed by that of Charles Darwin. His expeditions spanned a life-time. While in his thirties, he ascended the upper reaches of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. The measurements he took helped redraw the map of South America; his massive collection of flora and fauna included samples of curare and guano, the dried sea-bird droppings found in quantity on islands off Peru. It became the locus of an international commercial frenzy after it was found to be the worldâs best source of fertilizer. His physical stamina and mental acuity were legendary and Emerson dubbed him the âNapoleon of Travelers.â At the age of sixty, he was invited by the Czar Nicholas I to conduct an expedition across the Russian steppes to Siberia.
He was the last great scientific generalist before the age of specialization. His fields of study ranged from meteorology, volcanology, ocean currents, to human geography and colonial economics and sociology. Committed to the Enlightenment ideal of Liberty, he was a vocal critic of slavery and advised Simon Bolivar on the need for South American independence. On his return trip to Europe, Humboldt stopped off in Philadelphia and Washington, D C where he met Thomas Jefferson with whom he shared information about conditions in the Spanish empire. All this activity initiated a global network of correspondents who for decades updated him on their latest scientific findings. He synthesized these findings but knew that the Linnean method of classification was a necessary tool but one too static for understanding the dynamic interrelationships being discovered throughout the planetâs intricate web-of-life.
Humboldt showcased this research and holistic approach in the multi-volume Kosmos. He adopted his title from the word used by ancient Greek philosophers for what has been defined as âthe assemblage of all things in heaven and earth, the universality of created things constituting the perceptible world.â2 As an Enlightenment intellectual, his explanation of the natural world did not require âGodâ in any theological sense but depended on identifying the organizing principles operating within its many operating systems. Humboldt was adamant that the perceiving consciousness of the observer had to be included in the scientific process. âHe argued that the natural historian had the duty to re-create in the reader â through the use of artful language â aesthetic experiences of the sort the naturalist himself had undergone in his immediate encounters with nature.â3 He wanted to include the insights that could be realized by the perceiving self of the observer. This heightened state of consciousness was registered by an inner eye with a vividness that amplified the stimuli recorded by the rods and cones of the physical eye; in so doing, perception becomes vision. The book was translated into numerous languages and went through many editions, both legitimate and pirated, on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote for a growing international readership with a philosophy that captured the interest of such differing creative temperaments as Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. ...