Germans in Wisconsin

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“GOOD OLD IMMIGRANTS OF YESTERYEAR” WHO DIDN’T LEARN ENGLISH: GERMANS IN WISCONSIN

MIRANDA E. WILKERSON JOSEPH SALMONS Western Illinois University University of Wisconsin–Madison

abstract: One myth about language and immigration in North America is that nineteenth-century immigrants typically became bilingual almost immediately after arriving, yet little systematic data has been presented for this view. We present quantitative and qualitative evidence about Germans in Wisconsin, where, into the twentieth century, many immigrants and their descendants remained monolingual, decades after immigration had ceased. Even those who claimed to speak English often had limited command. Quantitative data from the 1910 Census, augmented by qualitative evidence from newspapers, court records, literary texts, and other sources, suggest that Germans of various socioeconomic backgrounds often lacked English language skills. German continued to be the primary language in numerous Wisconsin communities, and some second- and third-generation descendants of immigrants were still monolingual as adults. Understanding this history can help inform contemporary debates about language and immigration and help dismantle the myth that successful immigrant groups of yesterday owed their prosperity to an immediate, voluntary shift to English.

In the debates now raging over language and immigration, it is widely asserted by media commentators, members of the general public, and even scholars that earlier immigrants learned English quickly and that their children came to prefer it overwhelmingly over their imported or “heritage” languages. This view has recently been exploited as part of an effort to fault contemporary immigrants for purportedly not learning English fast enough. In fact, while considerable research has investigated the languages immigrants have brought to the United States over the centuries and the process of language shift to English, we ﬁnd a striking gap when it comes to understanding when and how well these immigrants initially learned English. In this article, we ﬁrst offer an overview of some popular and scholarly misconceptions about the learning of English among earlier immigrants. We then present quantitative evidence on the learning of English among ethnic

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Germans in Wisconsin from the 1910 U.S. Census. The basic picture is one of considerable German-only monolingualism. This view is then underpinned with direct and indirect reports from an array of qualitative sources. The full range of evidence shows that into the twentieth century, many immigrants, their children, and sometimes their grandchildren remained functionally monolingual many decades after immigration into their communities had ceased. We conclude with a word about the implications of the evidence for current political discussions in the United States about language and immigration.

THE STAKES: WHY THIS MATTERS

Crawford (2000, 6) succinctly (and skeptically) summarizes a popular view about language in the United States: “Today’s immigrants refuse to learn English, unlike the good old immigrants of yesteryear.” Adults often have difficulty acquiring new languages, of course, and it is impossible to control for many variables in their language learning, even things as basic as age of first real exposure to English. So, immigrant children reflect a more realistic gauge of mastery of English, and we will focus on them here. Some well-known research has shown the first part of this popular view to be false, presenting evidence for the rapid shift to English among contemporary immigrants, such as Spanish speakers. For instance, Veltman (1988, 44) writes about Spanish-speaking immigrant children:

Consider, for example, the language shift process of a hypothetical group of children aged 5–9 when they arrived in the United States. After an average stay of only nine months, 70 percent will speak English on a regular basis. After an average stay of four years, nearly all will speak English regularly, and 30 percent will have adopted English as their usual preferred language. After approximately nine years of residence, 60 percent will have been anglicized; after 14 years, 70 percent will have been anglicized and 10 percent will have abandoned the use of Spanish as a daily language.

Similarly, Portes and Schaufﬂer (1996) point out in their survey of 2,660 eighth- and ninth-grade students in Miami (Dade Co., Fla.) and Fort Lauder- dale (Broward Co., Fla.) schools that the evidence on the degree to which second-generation youth learn English is “unequivocal”:

For the sample as a whole, 73 percent report that they are able to speak, understand, read, and write English “very well” and an additional 26 percent “well.” This leaves the sum total of those knowing little or no English at just 1 percent. [437]

This and related evidence suggest that today’s immigrants are learning Eng- lish as fast as they can, and their children are not only learning English, but

are rapidly abandoning the languages of their parents. The most familiar exceptions to this are small, quite well-established groups like Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites, who continue to use Pennsylvania Dutch and teach it to their children, and many Hasidic Jews, who do the same with Yiddish. But note that both of these communities are today bilingual (Louden 2006)—people learn English early and most use it regularly. This issue reaches far beyond the usual scholarly realm, into public discussion and debate. For instance, one prominent commentator, Michael Reagan (2006), recently wrote:

All across the U.S., hordes of immigrants . . . are chattering away in their native language and have no intention of learning English—the all-but-ofﬁcial language of the United States where they now live. Can you blame them? They are being enabled by all those diversity fanatics to defy the age-old custom of immigrants to our shores who made it one of their ﬁrst priorities to learn to speak English and to teach their offspring to do likewise. It was a case of sink or swim. If you couldn’t speak English you couldn’t get by, go to school, get a job, or become a citizen and vote.

If we strip away the bombast—like why “hordes of” people speaking a language other than English are “chattering away” rather than just “talking,” or what the role of “diversity fanatics” might be in “enabling” how and what immigrants speak—Reagan makes two concrete assertions about history in this passage. First, those “good old immigrants” were compliant and sought to assimilate as quickly as possible, and as part of that they learned English immediately; in contrast, today’s immigrants have no intention of learning it. Second, the old immigrants had to know English to survive, with the implica- tion that we now coddle immigrants by providing them with ofﬁcial documents and other social and health services in languages other than English.1 Similar views are widespread in the general public and often appear in letters to the editors of major newspapers, including those in Wisconsin, where awareness of immigrant heritage is very high. For instance, the June 22, 1997, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Crossroads sec., p. 5) ran a set of letters (all, as it happens, by people with German-sounding surnames) complaining about recent arrivals to the state. The ﬁrst describes the writer’s father as “having immigrated from Germany in his teens. He . . . learned English and quickly became a citizen” (Keith Kramer). The next refers to the story that prompted these letters: “One woman has been here for 23 years, according to the article, and hasn’t even bothered to learn our language!” (Denise Ingeman). In outreach talks about language and immigration and other public forums, we have often heard this narrative repeated: my ancestors mastered English quickly and without help; why can’t these new immigrants do the same?

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More remarkably, the same basic views can be found among scholars who work on language and immigration. With regard to German immigrants, for example, some version of it has been adopted by modern scholars from Kloss (1977) to Nicolini (2004, 84–85). Typically, the view is that immigrants, German-speaking in the cases at hand, quickly mastered English but only abandoned German later, accounting for their many German-speaking descendants across the Midwest and Texas down to the present. These two examples both focus on Low German speakers from the North (emphasis ours, in both cases):2

Die meisten deutschen Migranten des 19. Jahrhunderts waren monolingual niederdeutsch aufgewachsen und hatten die englische Sprache bis zum Zeitpunkt der Aus- wanderung nicht erlernt. Sofern die Auswanderer als Eltern beim Niederdeutschen blieben, wuchsen ihre Kinder during die Integration in die englischsprachige Umgebung bilingual auf. ‘Most German immigrants of the 19th century had grown up as monolingual speakers of Low German and had not acquired English at the time of immigration. Inasmuch as the parents remained speakers of Low German, their children grew up bilingual through their integration into the English-speaking community’[Jacob 2002, 78; translation and emphasis ours]

Wisconsin’s German-speaking immigrants came from nearly all areas of Germany. . . . Many spoke the North German dialects known as Low German or Plattdeutsch. . . . Most speakers of Low German could understand the standard language, but they were unaccustomed to speaking it. It was too far removed from their own dialect. . . . There are countless reports that among speakers of different German dialects, the English language soon became the easiest and most available means of communicating. Only in urban areas of eastern Wisconsin, along the shores of Lake Michigan, was Standard German in wider use among German immigrants and their descendants. [Eichhoff 1985, 233–34; emphasis ours]

Here and in a range of similar sources, earlier immigrants are often simply assumed to be bilingual almost instantly and often to have become English monolingual quickly. They have been discussed and studied overwhelmingly in terms of maintenance or loss of their native tongues, seldom if ever in terms of their learning and mastery of English. Despite how widespread such views seem to be, we have not found any systematic data presented on the learning of English in such communities (though see the related and relevant work by Labov 1998 and Kamphoefner 1994). We simply aim to evaluate such claims against available data. For this pur- pose, Germans in the Upper Midwest represent a promising testing ground, as a group often regarded as a classic example of “good old immigrants.”3

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND LANGUAGE SHIFT

Before turning to census data, though, let us note the most directly relevant aspects of the history of German immigrants to Wisconsin and of the eventual shift of these speakers to English. Beginning in 1839, large numbers of immigrants from German-speaking Europe came to and settled in Wisconsin, especially the areas stretching south of Green Bay and east of Madison, with additional notable settlements in central Wisconsin, as in the Wausau area.4 Over time, German settlement spread from the southeast both westward and northward across the state. Most German speakers arrived before Germany became a political entity in 1871 (Wisconsin Cartographers’ Guild 1998, 18; Ostergren 1998, 152; among others), and in many communities much of the population arrived in a relatively quick and compact wave, with only a relative trickle following in later years after community formation. Estimates suggest that in the late nineteenth century over half a mil- lion people, more than a third of all Wisconsinites, spoke some variety of German natively, in addition to many semispeakers and nonnative speakers (Seifert 1993; Salmons 2005a). A full range of German language institutions—churches and other religious institutions, public and parochial schools, newspapers, clubs and associations, for instance—were established throughout this area.5 Though they were easily the largest immigrant group in the state, they often lived in close proximity to other immigrant groups, who generally arrived after the Germans: Dutch, Polish, and Irish especially in the east and Norwegians especially in the west, for instance. “Yankees” (as Anglo-Americans are still often called in the region) were a presence essentially everywhere, while contacts with indigenous populations were notable in central Wisconsin. In a series of articles, Salmons (2002, 2005a, 2005b) has laid out a view of language shift from German to English in Wisconsin, arguing that it was the process of “verticalization,” as direct control over local institutions steadily yielded to the power of state, regional, or national ones, that drove shift in core communities. By the post–Civil War period, shift had begun in the largest urban areas and among speakers who lived outside of predomi- nantly German-American communities. Little has been published dealing with the time between then and World War I, and most traditional sources have focused almost obsessively on the role of “anti-German sentiment” in the World War I era in language shift, especially in the switch from German to English in institutional settings. Salmons presents evidence from an array of sources showing that shift had begun in even core German-speaking communities by the beginning of the twentieth century, while institutional use continued long after World War I, and even after World War II, particularly,

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for example, in churches and in the press. He maintains that World War I served as a catalyst or accelerant for a process already under way but was neither a cause of shift nor the end of German as an institutional language in Wisconsin. By 1990, the U.S. Census shows that only 61,929 people, 1.36% of Wisconsin’s population, reported German as “home language,” and by 2000 the number of home users had fallen to 48,409. Some of these speakers are clearly descendants of early settlers, so that language shift remains in a real sense incomplete today.

1910 U.S. CENSUS

The 1910 Census provides a detailed snapshot of life and, to a lesser extent, language half a century after immigration had slowed greatly or ceased in many parts of eastern Wisconsin. That particular census asked whether each person ten years of age and older in a household could speak English and, if not, that census takers document the language spoken. We draw on this resource for records from nine townships in seven counties across southeastern and into central Wisconsin.

data collection and analysis. We analyzed digitized census images from townships in counties known for heavy German immigration during the mid-1800s and some (notably Sheboygan and Marathon counties) where immigration continued later into the century. These counties are indicated on the map of Wisconsin, in figure 1.6 While these particular counties were chosen for their distribution across the areas of heavy German settlement in the state, townships were selected for greater diversity. We included mostly rural areas (i.e., farming communities), but also urban areas (i.e., nonfarm- ing communities), like Sauk City and Sheboygan. Before moving on, let us underscore the difficulties inherent in the notion of “German” as used in the census: in most of these communities, the native tongues of most “Germans” were actually related West Germanic languages. In several, like Hamburg (Marathon Co.), Pommersch or Pommeranian Low German was the home language, while many in Kiel (Manitowoc Co.) spoke Northern Low Saxon, and the population of Belgium (Ozaukee Co.) consisted in large part of immigrants from what is now Luxembourg with their own distinctive variety. Typically, members of these communities were bilingual in their native tongues and some form of Standard German, which was used in institutions including school, church, press, and official meetings. At some points in their history, these communities have been considered by others and have considered themselves “German,” though that is often

figure 1 County Map of Wisconsin

1. Adams 5. Brown 11. Columbia 29. Juneau 51. Price 2. Ashland 6. Buffalo 12. Crawford 30. Kenosha 52. Racine 3. Barron 7. Burnett 13. Dane 31. Kewaunee 53. Richland 4. Bayﬁeld 8. Calumet 14. Dodge 32. LaCrosse 54. Rock 9. Chippewa 15. Door 33. Lafayette 55. Rusk 16 4 10. Clark 16. Douglas 34. Langlade 56. Saint Croix 2 26 64 17. Dunn 35. Lincoln 57. Sauk 7 66 58 19 18. Eau Claire 36. Manitowoc 58. Sawyer 44 51 21 19. Florence 37. Marathon 59. Shawano 55 49 3 38 38. Marinette 60. Sheboygan 35 34 61 39. Marquette 61. Taylor 56 9 40 17 43 40. Menominee 62. Trempealeau 37 59 15 48 18 10 41. Milwaukee 63. Vernon 31 47 72 50 69 45 5 20. Fond du Lac 42. Monroe 64. Vilas 6 62 27 21. Forest 43. Oconto 65. Walworth 70 71 8 36 42 1 22. Grant 44. Oneida 66. Washburn 32 29 39 24 20 60 23. Green 45. Outagamie 67. Washington 63 11 24. Green Lake 46. Ozaukee 68. Waukesha 53 57 14 67 46 12 25. Iowa 47. Pepin 69. Waupaca 25 13 28 68 41 26. Iron 48. Pierce 70. Waushara 22 52 27. Jackson 49. Polk 71. Winnebago 33 23 54 65 30 28. Jefferson 50. Portage 72. Wood

no longer the case. Since our focus here is on knowledge of English, we will not pursue these issues here, but see Horner (2006) on identity in the Luxembourgish community of Ozaukee County. The 1910 Census schedules listed residents by household and according to their relationship to the head of the household (see, e.g., figures 2 and 3). Other information was recorded for each resident, including residence, personal description, nativity, citizenship, occupation, education, owner- ship of home, and so on. Of particular importance for the present study is naturally the language respondents reported for column 17, “Whether able to speak English; or, if not, give language spoken.”7 Identifying those who listed “German” here was the first, and exclusionary, step of a two-step analysis.8 Since on the census form the ability to speak English was relevant only to those ten and older, we note that children were eliminated from the data set before any analysis was conducted.9 In the second step of the analysis, two further variables were considered for those respondents who reported German as the language they spoke (column 17), namely (1) the place of birth reported for column 12 (“Place of birth of this Person”) and (2) the occupation reported for column 18 (“Trade or profession of, or particular kind of work done by this person, as spinner, salesman, laborer, etc.”). Since the bulk of German immigration had happened in the mid-nineteenth century, if these “good old immigrants” behaved as claimed in many sources, one would find a lack of knowledge of

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/83/3/259/229704/ASp83.3.1Wilkerson-Salmons.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 266 american speech 83.3 (2008) figure 2 Reproduction of a 1910 Census Page from the Township of Hustisford the Township of a 1910 Census Page from Reproduction

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/83/3/259/229704/ASp83.3.1Wilkerson-Salmons.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 “Good Old Immigrants of Yesteryear”: Germans in Wisconsin 267 figure 3 Enlarged Portions of a 1910 Census Page from Hustisford Displaying Two Families with Second-Generation GermanEnlarged Portions Monolinguals Displaying Two Hustisford of a 1910 Census Page from The young woman in line 3, whose parents are both Wisconsin-born, are note: The young woman in line 3, whose parents is listed as German monolingual.

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English not among them, but mostly or only among recent arrivals to the state, such as Slovaks and Poles, who were often still new to Wisconsin in 1910 (Ostergren 1998, 155). However, initial analysis of the 1910 data re- veals that this was distinctly not the case, as shown in table 1. Here we display the frequency counts of reported languages among adults, converted into percentages, broken down by township.10 Although the majority of adult residents from the nine townships reported an ability to speak English, large numbers of residents did not. For example, of the adults, 24% in Hustis- ford, 22% in Schleswig, and 21% in Hamburg reported being monolingual speakers of German. Again, this comes half a century after large-scale German immigration to many communities had ceased, with the majority of immigrants in these communities arriving before 1880. To illustrate this point very speciﬁcally for those who reported not speaking English, table 2 displays the frequency counts of adult monolingual speakers of German from “Germany” (that is, leaving aside those from Russia, Switzerland, and so on), who came to the United States prior to the years 1860 and 1880, converted into percentages. (We leave aside American-born monolinguals for the moment.) In nearly every township, the majority of monolinguals from Germany had arrived before 1880. In fact, a clear majority arrived before 1860 in two townships, Brothertown (with 60%) and Belgium (with 70%). Even in central Wiscon- sin’s Marathon County, where immigration began and ended much later, almost half had arrived in Hamburg prior to 1880. What this means for the learning (or nonlearning) of English here is telling: after 50 or more years of living in the United States, many speakers in some communities remained

table 1 Self-Reported Language of Adults in a Survey of Townships in Central to Southeastern Wisconsin in 1910

Township/County/District English German Other a Total Hustisford, Dodge (18) 965 76% 310 24% 2 <1% 1,277 Schleswig, Manitowoc (38) 843 78% 238 22% 0 — 1,081 Hamburg, Marathon (83) 555 78% 152 21% 2 <1% 709 Kiel, Manitowoc (20) 813 82% 177 18% 0 — 990 Germantown, Washington (132–33) 1,114 81% 253 18% 7 <1% 1,374 Sheboygan (Ward 6), Sheboygan (116) 1,072 71% 259 17% 170 11% 1,501 Sauk City, Sauk (157) 616 86% 97 14% 0 — 713 Brothertown, Calumet (3) 905 92% 71 7% 8 <1% 984 Belgium, Ozaukee (81) 1,103 89% 89 7% 43 4% 1,235

a. This category includes adults who reported a language other than English or German or who did not report a language at all.

table 2 Reported Date of Immigration for Adult German Monolingual Speakers from Germany in a Survey of Townships in Central to Southeastern Wisconsin in 1910

Township/County/District Pre-1860 Pre-1880 Unknowna Total Hustisford, Dodge (18) 42 22% 111 59% 17 9% 188 Schleswig, Manitowoc (38) 53 36% 111 75% 12 8% 149 Hamburg, Marathon (83) 5 4% 56 47% 4 3% 120 Kiel, Manitowoc (20) 37 26% 77 54% 1 <1% 144 Germantown, Washington (132–33) 31 22% 78 56% 4 3% 139 Sheboygan (Ward 6), Sheboygan (116) 15 6% 70 35% 7 4% 200 Sauk City, Sauk (157) 14 23% 45 73% 0 — 62 Brothertown, Calumet (3) 18 60% 24 80% 1 3% 30 Belgium, Ozaukee (81) 46 70% 58 88% 1 2% 66 a. Years of immigration for these residents went unrecorded.

monolingual. This finding provides striking counterevidence to the claim that earlier immigrants learned English quickly. Up to this point, we have not considered residents who reported knowledge of English. Many, or even most, of them were surely bilingual in German and English, not monolingual speakers of English since (1) in many households, only one parent or one child reported speaking English, indicating the “home” language was almost surely German, and (2) households with German monolinguals were geographically dispersed among households claiming only English speakers in the broader community.11 At the same time, reporting “English” for census purposes in no way meant that someone possessed native-like competence in English. First, these claims were not systematic; residents with rudimentary English skills may have reported “English” when asked about language. Certainly, given the elusiveness of the question (i.e., column 17), it is likely that respondents may have felt they had a speaking ability, albeit limited, and reported English. Remarkably, we have evidence linking an individual claiming to speak Eng- lish for census purposes to a court case in which the same individual shows limited proficiency in English (see the section on court cases below). Second, without recourse to any more specific and definable criteria, enumerators presumably took people’s word for it.12 In fact, we expect underreporting of monolingualism most of all due to the rising tide of (increasingly virulent) anti-immigrant sentiment during this period, even in Wisconsin. We are not aware of evidence that shows that people claiming to be monolingual actually could use English with any degree of facility.

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who were the monolingual speakers of german? As noted at the outset, the census data contain much more information than just the raw number of monolinguals. We sifted for evidence on the question of the extent to which immigrants and their offspring had to know English to survive or, if not to survive, to function in mainstream nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century America. In particular, we looked at where German monolinguals were born in addition to the types of jobs they had in their respective communities. Unlike the previous analysis, where we considered the number of German monolinguals in relation to the number of English speakers in a given township, we restricted this analysis to include only those adults who were recorded as German monolinguals. Table 3 reports the distribution of German monolinguals by birthplace. As shown in the first column, considerable numbers of monolinguals were U.S.-born, which already indicates that place of birth alone cannot account for the high percentage of German monolinguals in the first analysis, as shown by the figures for Germantown (with 43%), Schleswig (with 36%), Hustisford (with 35%), and Brothertown (with 34%). Although not shown here, many of these monolinguals reported U.S.-born, usually Wisconsin-born, parents, revealing that monolingual speakers of German were sometimes even third-generation Wisconsinites, another compelling piece of evidence suggesting that German did not merely linger, but continued to flourish in these communities.13 Some might well expect to find that monolinguals lived at the fringes of society or existed only in the most isolated communities. For example, one might imagine that German thrived only among those working largely as farmers, laborers, or servants, whereas those working as merchants and tailors undoubtedly had to know English to prosper, since business depended on contact with a broader English-speaking public. To test this assumption,

table 3 Self-Reported Monolingual Speakers of German in a Survey of Townships in Central to Southeastern Wisconsin in 1910 by Birthplace

Township/County/District U.S. Overseas Total Germantown, Washington (132–33) 110 43% 143 57% 253 Schleswig, Manitowoc (38) 85 36% 153 64% 238 Hustisford, Dodge (18) 108 35% 202 65% 310 Brothertown, Calumet (3) 24 34% 47 66% 71 Belgium, Ozaukee (81) 20 23% 69 77% 89 Hamburg, Marathon (83) 28 18% 124 82% 152 Kiel, Manitowoc (20) 31 18% 146 82% 177 Sheboygan (Ward 6), Sheboygan (116) 28 11% 231 89% 259 Sauk City, Sauk (157) 11 11% 86 89% 97

we reviewed the types of occupations reported by monolinguals in five townships. We selected Hustisford, with a high percentage of reported monolinguals, and Belgium, with a low percentage of reported monolinguals, as well as three that were intermediate in this regard, Kiel, Germantown, and Sheboygan (Ward 6) (see table 1). We left aside some occupations for which monolingualism would be less surprising because of relative isolation or social status, such as farm and/or other labor, factory work, and domestics, such as housekeeper, servant, janitor. In addition, we eliminated instances of retirement, “own income,” and/or none (no occupation) from this review.14 Unfortunately, some entries listed for occupation were illegible so that part of the range of occupations among monolinguals in these townships is lost, but those we could decipher are reported in table 4. To the extent we can trust the data, German did not act at all as a barrier to opportunity in the workforce. In Hustisford, Germantown, and Kiel, monolinguals worked in a variety of settings, not only as farmers and laborers, but as stonemasons, blacksmiths, cheese makers, tailors, and butchers, not to mention preachers, teachers, and foremen. In an urban setting such as Sheboygan, monolinguals were similarly widely distributed across occupations. Not entirely unexpect- edly, we do see a decline in the diversity of jobs held by monolinguals in the township of Belgium, a farming community which only had 7% German monolinguals. The conclusion, then, from these data appears to be first that these particular immigrants hardly “made it one of their first priorities to learn

table 4 A Sampling of Self-Reported Occupations among Adult Monolinguals in Four Townships in Wisconsin in 1910

Hustisford Germantown Kiel Sheboygan Belgium Professional Teacher (Music) Teacher Clergyman Preacher Trades/ Blacksmith Blacksmith Teamster Teamster Crafts Tailor Seamstress Tailor Tailor/Sewer Stonemason Stonemason/ Stonemason/ Cobbler Beekeeper (House) Mason Contractor Contractor Cheese Maker Bartender Cheese Maker Painter Butcher Laundress Laundress Carpenter Carpenter Wagon Driver Florist Cabinet Maker Gateman Yard Foreman Surveyor Commerce Peddler Manufacturer Clerk Merchant Retail Merchant Salesman

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to speak English and to teach their offspring to do likewise.” Second, monolinguals were hardly consigned to the fringes of society life, but their ranks included even teachers and preachers, high-status positions and arguably the cultural pillars of these communities.

QUALITATIVE EVIDENCE

The census has the inherent problem of applying a binary question to a scalar phenomenon, namely treating knowledge of languages as yes/no questions. Given that and its general unreliability, one might doubt the census data, except that a whole range of stories in German newspapers, Wisconsin court cases, portrayals in German-language literature, and other sources demonstrate that English language skills were lacking in these same German communities. These sources then support the conclusions suggested by census data.

direct reports of monolingualism. Some reports of monolingual Germans are quite direct and apparently unambiguous. During its history, Wisconsin has been home to well over 500 German-language newspapers and periodicals (Salmons 2002), which document community life, including illustrations of German monolingualism. For example, Kraiss (2006) quotes a story from March 28, 1918, in which a Dodge County newspaper reports the story of a 47-year-old man, born and raised in Sheboygan County, who went to court and was unable to respond to simple questions in English from the judge or his lawyer—a clear case of a Wisconsin-born German monolingual. As we will see below, monolingual German speakers found their way into Wisconsin courts in many other instances. Scheben (1932, 271) noted the following in an article on nineteenth- century immigration to Wisconsin from the Eifel district in Rhenish Prussia (emphasis ours):15

Wie stark hier die deutsche Stellung war, ergibt sich z.B. aus folgendem: In den nördlichen counties Milwaukee und Ozaukee bildeten die Deutschen oft fast die ganze Bevölkerung und hatten so eine feste religiöse Organisation, daß sie die Frage der Erhaltung der Muttersprache zu einem Streitpunkt machten. . . . Englisch war auch für ihre gewöhnliche Unterhaltung nicht nötig: jeder, mit dem sie zusammenkamen, konnte Deutsch wenigstens so gut wie Englisch. Für Ozau- kee County ist bezeugt, daß die irischen Familien, welche verstreut unter den Deutschen wohnten, Deutsch konnten. Deutsch war auch für lange Jahre die Spielplatzsprache der öffentlichen Schule. ‘Just how strong the position of the Germans was here becomes apparent for example from the following: In the northern counties of Milwaukee and Ozaukee the Germans

comprised almost the entire population and had such a strong religious organization that even the question of retaining the native language became a point of conten- tion. . . . English was not even necessary for their day-to-day interactions: every person they came into contact with could speak German at least as well as English. In Ozaukee County there is evidence that the Irish families who lived scattered among the Germans could speak German. German was also for many years the language of the playgrounds at many public schools.’ [translation and emphasis ours]

Such stories are familiar from talking to inhabitants of the most heavily German-American areas of eastern Wisconsin and other sources, including the report of other groups learning German. As exemplified below in the discussion of court cases involving monolingual German speakers, we find numerous reports of “Yankees” who spoke German with native or native-like proficiency. Other, later reports help us trace the demise of the old situation, the end of German monolingualism. The last stage, we presume, was one which is still reported by living members of some of these same communities today: children grew up without knowledge of English until they went to school, where they learned it, but often still as a subject rather than a medium of instruction. The following quotation from a curricular program for German- language Lutheran schools in the Midwest exemplifies this:

Vergleichen wir den gegenwärtigen Stand der deutschen Sprache in unsern Kreisen mit dem vor einem Jahrzehnt, so finden wir, dass sich in den meisten Gegenden ein bedeutender Umschwung vollzogen hat. Die englische Sprache hat die deutsche verdrängt. Das sieht man auch in unsern Schulen. Während früher die Anfänger zum großen Teil die deutsche Sprache sprechen oder doch verstehen konnten, so ist jetzt das Gegenteil der Fall. Die Landessprache ist die Muttersprache der Kinder geworden. Es gibt allerdings noch Sprachinseln, in denen die alte Ordnung herrscht, doch wird dieser Zustand an solchen Orten sich mit der Zeit ändern. ‘If we compare the current state of the German language in our circles with that of a decade ago, we find that in most areas, a significant change has taken place. English has displaced German. One sees that in our schools too. While earlier be- ginners mostly could still speak or at least understand German, the situation is now the opposite. The language of the land has become the language of our children. There are still language islands where the old order still holds, but this situation will change in such places with time.’ [Ebert and Zurstadt 1930, 2; translation and emphasis ours]

What is most astonishing here is the date: by the 1930s, of course, we are generations, almost a century, away from immigration in typical Midwestern German “language islands.” The children referred to above surely acquired English after they arrived at school, and we are unaware of Germans who,

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having been born in Wisconsin so late, remained monolingual through adulthood.

court cases. A set of legal cases in Wisconsin from around the turn of the twentieth century involved individuals who were, or claimed to have been, swindled by fast-talking salesmen who persuaded them to sign contracts in English they could not read. In some instances, we can establish with great likelihood a connection between individuals in those court cases and the census. In most cases, the victims appear not to have been proﬁcient in English, but in one court case, from August 1902, the German in question reported being English-speaking on the 1910 Census. George Ruppold,16 a farmer from Walworth County, Wisconsin, reported that in September of 1898 a stranger came to his property asking his permission to put up sample lightning rods on his farmhouse. He explained to Ruppold that he would have to sign a paper and pay $2, but if he could convince his neighbors to allow their houses to be rodded too, he would drop the $2 charge. In his testimony, Ruppold, who was 36 years old in 1902, described his family and his knowledge of English as follows:

My family consists of my wife and a little boy not quite 4 years old. My wife and I are Germans. I was about 17 years old when I came to this country. I can read and write English very little. I can sign my name. I can’t understand reading and writing in English, if it is shown to me. I don’t understand the meaning of it. My wife’s education in English is very poor. She can’t understand as much as I do. [State of Wisconsin, In Supreme Court, August Term 1902, Appeal from Circuit Court, Walworth County, p. 10, sec. 28]

According to Ruppold, the stranger who came to his house falsely represented himself as a German and, in Ruppold’s words, “spoke German as well as I could; and talked very nice, I believed him” (11). Ruppold believed that the document he had signed was an insurance policy—in the case that his house was damaged by lightning after the rods were installed—but, instead of a policy, he had signed a promissory note of $137 with an interest rate of 8% after the due date. Ruppold explained his misunderstanding in this way:

I told the last of the strangers that were there that I didn’t read English. I told them that twice, I think. When I told them that they read it off some way to me, but I couldn’t understand. They read it so fast. They said this paper was all right; that I get the money if the house burned down. I believed that, I believed it was a policy. [17–18]

In sum, court evidence strongly suggests Ruppold could not function in English although he reported English for census purposes, as did his entire family in 1910. At the very least, he was illiterate in English (but surely liter- ate in German, given education norms there and his age at immigration),

conducted business with the salesmen in German (not their native language), and was married to someone with less knowledge of English than he had. This supports the point above that census data seem apt to under- rather than overestimate German monolingualism, to an unknown extent.

literary texts. Less direct but still important evidence comes from German- language literary texts. These often portray not only those just off the ship, Grünhorns (‘green horns’), or rural bumpkins as lacking good knowledge of English. Three examples, two of them from Wisconsin and another from Texas, illustrate this point. The ﬁrst comes from a short story published in 1911 by Alfred Ira, the pen name of Albert Friedrich Grimm. “Ein hoffnungsloser Fall” (‘A hopeless case’) takes place in a Lutheran seminary in northern Illinois. The whole story revolves around the failure of the seminary students and faculty to untangle the meaning of the English word doggone, where leading hypotheses included “talk on!” That word is attested since 1828 (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dic- tionary [2003], 11th ed., with later dates in other dictionaries), and became widely known in the mid- to late nineteenth century. We assume, then, that it was not particularly obscure vocabulary by the turn of the century, when the story appears to be set. The seminary includes a club for those with inadequate command of English, and much of the story’s humor comes from poking fun at the less-than-perfect knowledge of English among the most erudite faculty and students. The powerful impression throughout the story is one of English as a truly foreign language—no native speakers of English appear and no effort is made to consult one about the mystery of doggone. Crucially, the faculty and students are in no sense isolated or marginal within their communities, and their position is prototypically high status. A non-Wisconsin example of a high-status, American-born German monolingual comes from a Texas German play, written by the editor of a German-language newspaper, Trenckmann, and published in 1903. One character, Adelgunde Wüster, the daughter of the richest family in town and married to a wealthy but uncouth farmer/rancher, chastises her daughter for addressing her in English:

Sprich Deutsch, mein Kind! Du weißt ja, ich verstehe kein Englisch und hasse das rohe Kauderwelsch. ‘Speak German, my child! You know well that I don’t understand English and hate that raw gibberish.’

Here, gender probably plays a role, since her husband not only speaks English, but code-switches wildly (see Goss and Salmons 2000). Moreover, the play presents a situation of rapid shift, with, as this example illustrates,

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Adelgunde’s own children sometimes needing to be pressed to use German with her. Our second Wisconsin example comes from Julius Gugler’s nineteenth- century play For Mayor Gottfried Buehler (now reprinted in Kluge 2007; see also Goss and Salmons 2000 for discussion of other distinctive linguistic aspects of the play). Our focus is not on the characters with the most clearly limited English skills but, rather, the very prominent main character. Buehler is, as the title suggests, a candidate for mayor of what is obviously Milwaukee. Here is part of Gugler’s own description of how the main character should speak:

Seine Sprechweise ist die so vieler Deutscher in den Vereinigten Staaten: unscharfe Aussprache, Anklang an das Mittel- und Süddeutsche, untermischt mit spezifisch englischen Wendungen und Brocken. Wo letztere erscheinen, sollen sie, ohne besondere Betonung—wie selbstverständlich—in seinen Reden zum Ausdruck kommen. Das Englische, das er zu sprechen hat, soll der deutsche Schauspieler, sofern ihm die englische Sprache nicht geläufig ist, sorgfältig zu erlernen suchen. Je näher der Schauspieler deutscher Zunge dem richtigen Englisch kommt und je sichtlicher seine Anstrengung wird, um so stärker wird die Wirkung sein. Denn Buehler ist einer jener Deutschen, die trotz langjährigen Aufenthalts in Amerika des Englischen nicht ganz Herr geworden sind. Einem im Lande geborenen deutschen Schauspieler wird diese Rolle, oder vielmehr der englische Theil derselben, weniger gelingen. ‘His way of speaking is like that of so many Germans in the United States: unclear pronunciation, the ring of Central and Southern German, mixed in with specific English turns of phrase and phrases. Where the latter appear, they should be expressed in his speeches without special emphasis as if they were natural. The German actor, unless the English language is familiar to him, must diligently try to acquire the English that he has to speak. The closer the German actor comes to that of proper English and the more visible his effort becomes, the stronger the effect will be. For Buehler is like many a German, who, despite many years in America, has yet to master English. A native-born German actor will be less successful with this role or rather with the English part of it. [translation ours]

In the play, we see Buehler’s language abilities come to center stage, so to speak, in his campaign. At a campaign event, there is a call for Buehler to speak, and the question of whether he should speak in German or English is raised, with a group of “Yankees” urging English, in order to embarrass him. (At the same time, several Anglo characters speak German, some very well, as indicated by Gugler’s descriptions of how characters should speak, like the one for Buehler quoted from above.) The meeting decides that Buehler should speak English, and he drains his glass of beer, then begins:

Fellow Citizens and Friends! . . . Most of you here I knew since you was babies! I grew up among you, and while you learned your A B C, I studied the great principles of our free government!

While Buehler speaks English fluently, it is not the variety we might expect in this setting. The subject-verb agreement above is typical of immigrant letters and widespread in the region at the time (Salmons 2008), and the use of was for were with a plural subject is a well-documented feature of col- loquial or regional English in the nineteenth century (Montgomery 2001, 145–46). Buehler, as a mayoral candidate, used an informal construction in a formal speech, making a sociolinguistic rather than a structural mistake. But the word order of the first sentence represents a nonstandard form characteristic of nonnative English (though see “Yiddish fronting”), and the aspectual usage sounds like a Germanism: English typically uses the present perfect here, have known (but see Quirk et al. 1985, 539, n. b). While one of Buehler’s supporters, Dutch Pete, claims that Buehler spoke German and English equally well, “one at least as well as the other,” this level of English might be surprising for a mayoral candidate in the state’s largest city as the turn of the century neared. Surely, evidence from literary texts must be treated with special care (see the discussion of this point in Goss and Salmons 2000), but here it fits neatly with an array of independent sources, quantitative and qualitative: German monolingualism and limited command of English were hardly uncommon, even among the elite of the ethnic German community.

CONCLUSION

Germans in the Upper Midwest are often portrayed as “model immigrants,” including with regard to their rapid learning of English. If we actually examine the available evidence, we find that these particular “good old immigrants” hardly fit the stereotype that they learned English quickly. Indeed, they did not just retain German in limited domains alongside English, but they often remained monolingual many decades and sometimes even a couple of generations after large-scale immigration had ceased. Monolinguals, whether born here or abroad, were not limited to the margins of community life but participated actively in a remarkably broad range of economic and social institutions. Even prominent individuals and professionals sometimes lacked solid English skills well into the twentieth century. Even as late as the 1930s, we find reports of (presumably monolingual) German-speaking children coming to school (see the Ebert and Zurstadt quote above), though our focus has, of course, been on adults who were unable to speak English. This is in striking contrast to the contemporary situation even in the most heavily Spanish-speaking community. Portes and Schauffler (1996, 442) conclude their study on children of immigrants in Miami with this assessment:

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English is alive and well in Miami. This is the American city most heavily affected on a relative basis by recent immigration and, hence, the one where the demise of English dominance, so feared by nativist organizations, should be most evident. Our results indicate that such fears are unfounded. Second-generation youth not only report widespread competence in English, but also demonstrate on [sic] unambiguous preference for it in everyday communication. Children raised in the core of the Spanish-speaking Miami community (those attending bilingual private schools) are actually the most enthusiastic in their preference for the language of the land. These results indicate that, contrary to nativist fears, what is at risk is the preservation of some competence in the languages spoken by immigrant parents. Given that foreign language knowledge is a valuable intellectual asset, the rapid transition toward monolingualism represents a loss to the individual and to the community as a whole.

In short, even in the most intense immigration settings, immigrants today are learning English and abandoning their native tongues very quickly, contrary to popular misconceptions. We have presented a range of evidence here indicating that widespread claims about language learning among “good old immigrants of yesteryear” prove equally false. Their ongoing monolingualism does not appear to have constituted any threat to American society or values. These conclusions, surely, should inform debates about language and immigration in the United States and beyond. The social, economic, and political circumstances of immigrant monolingualism have changed today, but an understanding of the contemporary situation certainly beneﬁts from a clearer picture of the history of language use and language learning among this immigrant population. Kamphoefner (1996, 159) reminds us that contemporary policy makers would do well to recall that “children of German immigrants who grew up speaking German suffered no great economic disadvantages over those who grew up speaking English,” a ﬁnding from the 1940 Census records. At the very least, that history needs to be more accurately represented in scholarly and public discourse.

NOTES

Initial versions of this article were presented at the Language and Immigration II video conference, held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Freie Universität Berlin, and the Europa-Univer- sität Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder (January 2007) and for the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (March 2007), and then at the Society for German-American Studies, University of Kansas (April 2007). The last section grows from presentations by the second author originally held at the Universities of Bielefeld and Heidelberg (June 2005). In addition to

the audiences at those talks, we extend our thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful insights and suggestions on our original submission, as well as the following for comments and discussions on the topic: Kristine Horner, Rob Howell, Walter Kamphoefner, Cora Lee Kluge, Mark Louden, Felecia Lucht, Monica Ma- caulay, Maria Irene Moyna, and most especially Stewart Macaulay, but we alone are responsible for errors. 1. Walter Kamphoefner reminds us (pers. comm., May 2007) that until 1906, there was no test of English or civics as a condition of naturalization, and some twenty states, starting with Wisconsin in the territorial period, allowed “alien voting” without naturalization in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century (see Ueda 1980). 2. As discussed below, many varieties of German brought to Wisconsin, such as any of the Low German or Plattdeutsch dialects or Swiss German, are not mutually intelligible with Standard German. As a consequence, we will see, people labeled “German monolinguals” were in fact often bilingual in German and another, closely related Germanic language. One widespread view, held by Jacob (2002, 78) and Eichhoff (1985, 233–34) as observed in the text, is that Standard German was not widely known or used in many communities, especially Low German–speaking ones. The evidence we are aware of points in the opposite direction, suggesting that an American Standard German was widely known and used by many. Some evidence bearing on this is presented in Lucht (2007) for one Wisconsin community and Salmons and Lucht (2006) for Texas. 3. The linguistic setting of nineteenth-century immigrant Wisconsin differs strik- ingly from some parts of the contemporary United States in that an area like eastern Wisconsin had pockets of speakers of myriad languages. This patchwork of Germanic, Slavic, Finnish, Native American, and other languages might be taken to suggest a setting that would promote relatively fast shift, even though German speakers were most numerous and established communities of considerable size. As we have just noted, however, the popular focus on immigrant languages in the United States is seldom about recent arrivals from Poland, Somalia, or Korea. Instead, attention is concentrated overwhelmingly on Span- ish-speaking immigrants, especially those from Mexico and Central America. In many communities, Spanish is the single large immigrant language found today. We hope that this article might inspire comparative study of other immigrant communities, but that obviously lies well beyond the scope of a single article. 4. See Ostergren (1998) for the general picture of Euro-American settlement in Wisconsin and Schmahl (2000) for an excellent detailed study of one particular group of immigrants, the Rhine-Hessians of Sheboygan County and other areas. 5. Fessler (2004) treats the remarkably neglected topic of public (that is, publicly funded) German-English schools. 6. We primarily used Ancestry.com. This search engine taps into the largest online collection of (worldwide) genealogical and historical data, such as census, birth, marriage, and death records, just to name a few.

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7. The formulation of this question makes it difficult to determine what was meant by “to speak English” at the time of the 1910 Census schedules. We discuss this vague wording later on in this section. 8. Numerous Russians, Poles, Hungarians, and people of other national origins were German speakers, from the many “speech islands” scattered across Eastern Europe. Also, it is important to keep in mind that “Germany” did not exist as a political entity until 1871, after most migrants had arrived. 9. Enumerators were instructed to obtain information on the English ability from residents ten years and older only, as stated in paragraph 133 of “Instructions to Enumerators”: “This question applies to all person 10 years of age and over. If such a person is able to speak English, write English. If he is not able to speak English—and in such cases only—write the name of the language which he does speak, as French, German, Italian. If he speaks more than one language, but does not speak English, write the name of that language which is his native language or mother tongue. For persons under 10 years of age, leave the column blank” (U.S. Census Bureau 2002, 48–49). However, enumerators often recorded children’s ability to speak English, a routine oversight also documented by Labov (1998). 10. Townships were divided into enumeration districts, as indicated by the brack- eted numbers in the tables. These were recorded at the top of each page of the census schedules. Ancestry.com defines enumeration districts as subdivisions used by enumerators and/or other governmental representatives to partition the geography of an area beyond the county and/or township level. 11. Enumerators went from house to house to gather information on residents. This means that the proximity of households on census records implies, in most cases, that these households were neighbors. Such segregation applied particularly to newer arrivals to the township, for instance to the Italians, Slovenes, and Slovaks in Belgium, who were listed grouped together in the census schedules. 12. Interpreters were rarely consulted and were employed only in the most extreme cases. Paragraph 35 of “Instructions to Enumerators” states that “in the case of an occasional family that does not speak English or any language which you speak, you can usually get along without the aid of a paid interpreter. If you can not make the head of the family understand what is wanted, call upon some other member of the family; and if none of the family can understand, then, if possible, obtain the unpaid assistance of some neighbor of the same nationality.” 13. This situation is often associated with rural settings, which is generally consistent with our findings. A number of studies across many situations suggest that urban immigrants tend to acquire English faster than rural ones. See Kamphoefner (1994, 850–51) on evidence about Germans drawn from the 1940 Census. 14. According to paragraph 146 of “Instructions to Enumerators,” “own income” indicates that a person has no specific occupation but has an independent income upon which to live; according to paragraph 147 of “Instructions to Enumera- tors,” “none” refers to all persons who do not have an occupation and do not have an independent income (U.S. Census Bureau 2002, 50).

15. Much of Scheben’s work arose out of direct written correspondence with Dr. Joseph Schafer of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, who, in collabora- tion with the University of Bonn, carried out a project to collect letters written by immigrants in America to friends and family back in Germany. Taken as a whole, this collection of letters offers invaluable insight into the lives of German immigrants in America, particularly in Wisconsin, from about 1840 until the early 1930s. See Macha, Nikolay-Panter, and Herborn (2003). 16. Ruppold was spelled as Rappold in the 1910 Census although other criteria iden- tify him as the same individual in the court case (i.e., the same age, estimated birth year, home, and profession). In fact, similar misspellings are common: in another of the court cases on which we have data, the name of the respondent, Carl Drager, was misspelled once as Druger, and the name of a witness, Gotlieb Joecks, was spelled at times as Gotleib.

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