THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE RELIGIOUS BILDUNGSBÜRGERTUM IN THE QUEEN CITY: RACE AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN CINCINNATI’S GERMAN DENOMINATIONAL NEWSPAPERS, 1830-1862 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY MICHELE MOSSER FERRIS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2020 For Alex, who gave me the courage to begin, and Paul, who was with me at the end Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... iv Definition of Terms ...................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Guarding the German Volk Against American Acculturation ................................................. 39 Chapter 2. Bringing the Racialized Discourse of Bildung to America .................................................... 105 Chapter 3. Civilizing Mission vs. Restoration of the Urvolk ................................................................... 167 Chapter 4. Using Bildung to Track the End Times .................................................................................. 233 Chapter 5. Transnational Contributions to Defining the German Volk .................................................... 299 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 330 iii Acknowledgements No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of a continent, a part of the main... -- John Donne, “Meditation XVII,” Devotions upon Emergent Occasions When I proposed this project, I envisioned it as a cultural history; however, as I began to research and write, the archives dictated that this would become an intellectual history. As such, I am deeply indebted to all the women and men who theorized the categories of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and philosophy before my project was ever conceived. Those people include my readers—Curtis J. Evans, Paul Mendes-Flohr, and Kathleen Neils Conzen—whose influence on my intellectual journey cannot be quantified. Their support of my multidisciplinary translation project encouraged me to keep reading when I was deep in the research trenches, struggling to clearly articulate the ideas that were formulating in my head in both German and English. I would like to thank the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture for offering a myriad of events at the University of Chicago to foster conversations between scholars and students of American culture. The Center also funds the course “The Multidisciplinary Study of American Culture,” taught by then-director Eric Slauter, in which I experienced the fruitful intercourse that can occur when members of a wide variety of disciplines sit at the same table to discuss common interests. Participating in this course early in my graduate career gave me the confidence to attempt a dissertation with multidisciplinary ramifications. My research took place over the course of three summers in several libraries in the Cincinnati area. I am indebted to all of the librarians who saw the value in retaining German- language newspapers from the antebellum era, despite not being German speakers themselves. Thank you for your interest in my project and for tracking down supporting materials that are iv infrequently requested and often difficult to locate. This includes the librarians at the Cincinnati Public Library, the Klau Library at Hebrew Union College, and especially the Beeghly Library at Ohio Wesleyan University. My undergraduate work in German Studies at Wake Forest University was pivotal to my decision to pursue a German-language project and providentially apt for my archives. Who would have guessed that the senior seminar that year, covering German Romanticism and an introduction to Bildung, would be foundational to my reading of the denominational newspapers for my doctoral dissertation? I am obliged to Grant P. McAllister, who challenged us with such heady German intellectual thought and enlivened it with his enthusiasm. I am also grateful for the members of the Religions in America Workshop at the University of Chicago Divinity School, who offered constructive feedback on several of the chapters. We were all learning together how to be better scholars and colleagues, and I am thankful for your friendship and support. Lastly, I cannot sufficiently thank my friends and colleagues from the University of Chicago History Department, whom I met in class and who thereafter enriched my personal and intellectual life with their presence. Thank you for sharing your lives with me and making my Chicago sojourn so memorable. Together we all form a piece of the continent we call life. v Definition of Terms Assimilation vs. Acculturation For this project, these two terms are understood to be two different processes. Assimilation was described by Robert Park and other sociologists of the 1920s and 1930s as a linear process that takes three generations to complete. First, immigrants arrive in America and they maintain their ethnic identity. Next, their children begin to take on some of the cultural habits (clothes, food, holidays, language, religion) of Americans, but they also retain some of their parents’ ethnic identity. Finally, the immigrants’ grandchildren have adopted all of the American customs—they are fully assimilated Americans. Scholars have been refining this three-stage model of linear assimilation in many ways: by describing a nonlinear path, by rejecting the 3-generation rule, and (especially in light of transnationalism) by thinking about contact and exchange of cultural habits and resistance to full assimilation, as well as describing types of assimilation (political, economic, structural, etc.) rather than full assimilation. Acculturation can be thought of as a cultural type of assimilation, in which people adopt enough of the cultural habits of the receiving nation to be recognized as belonging to that nation. I mean something entirely different for this project when I describe the Germans’ understanding of acculturation. I start from the definition of “culture” that is given below. For the Bildungsbürgertum, culture was an unchangeable part of a human being, meaning that culture could not be adapted or adopted. Acculturation could not mean what Parks described; by changing one’s clothing and eating habits, by celebrating different holidays and learning a new language, one changes only exterior elements. For the German Romantics, when the imperialists conquered indigenous people and prevented them from expressing their culture, the imperialists weren’t just asking them to adopt new habits—they were forcing the indigenous vi people to experience a kind of cognitive dissonance and a breakdown necessarily occurred. Because the Germans believed that humans act according to an internal drive that is unique to every culture, when a people is prevented from acting according to its cultural essence or nature and forced to act in an unnatural way, the cultural essence or Volkgeist of the people is destroyed and replaced by something imposed on them externally. The indigenous people could never recover their cultural essence, and as a result, the indigenous people could not progress any further in their development as a Volk. That Volk was considered to be corrupted. There is no concept of assimilation or intersectionality for the Bildungsbürgertum. So there is a tension in this project between the Anglo-Americans’ encouragement of the immigrants to acculturate (adopt American cultural habits so that they “fit in”) and the staunch resistance of the Bildungsbürger to acculturation because they will lose their German essence or Volkgeist—they will no longer be German. The Germans were not worried about having to change their habits; they believed acculturation would destroy their nature. Bildung Bildung is a philosophical concept that originated in Germany in response to Enlightenment thought. It has gone through several distinct phases of development, and in the early-nineteenth century it was adapted by German Romantics to describe a program of cultural progress. Wilhelm von Humboldt reformed the German educational system using the tenets of Bildung when he created programs to train a new middle class of civil servants, or Bildungsbürgertum. Individual members of this class were called Bildungsbürger. Bildung was also used to create a Volk identity for the German-speaking people, who lacked a national identity before 1871. By claiming that there was a German “spirit” or essence—that there existed a German Volkgeist—the German intellectuals encouraged all vii Germans to self-reflect on that Volkgeist and to create cultural artifacts that embody a uniquely German spirit. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the goal or Bildungsideal was to culturally progress by engaging in activities such as producing art, writing literature, and recovering ethnic history. Biological Determinism This term has been popularized through the work of Stephen Jay Gould. It is succinctly defined by the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism as “the notion that there is a simple relationship between inherent (genetic) features of human beings and their position