German Immigration
The 19th century was a time of rapid growth and change in America. It was a century of Westward expansion, and the building up of new cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. It was a time where people from far off places packed up their belongings and sought out new opportunities as they immigrated to the United States. Immigrants brought with them their cultural backgrounds, traditions, and traits to their newly adopted land. The Irish, Italian, German, Polish, British, and Jewish were just a few of the different cultures that dominated the United States in the 19th century.The largest group of immigrants that came to the United States in all but three of the years between 1854 and 1894 were the Germans. By the end of the 1800s over five million Germans arrived and during the 1900s another two million came. The German immigrants came from a wide geographic area and for several different reasons (19th Century, 1998, para. 1). German immigration into the United States was a big movement during the 18th and 19th centuries and the Germans left their native land for several reasons. Upon their arrival into the United State they faced difficult challenges and had obstacles to overcome.
The number of Catholic emigrants, particularly of Catholic priests and members of religious orders, increased dramatically following Bismarck's Kulturkampf (1871 - 1887), the power struggle between the Prussian state and the Catholic Church. Some were the intellectual leaders of this rebellion, but most were impoverished Germans who had lost confidence in its government's ability to solve the country's economic problems" (German, 2002). They have had brilliant writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Louise Erdrich, and extraordinary athletes such as Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig. A small, but influential, segment of the German immigration of this period was a group known as Forty-eighters. In 1839 over 1,000 Old Lutherans emigrated to avoid the forced unification of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia. Immigration to the United States was happening from several European countries during the nineteenth century. German immigrants also left Germany for religious reasons. Political-motivated reasons for leaving their homeland continued through the 1840s. This also made it easier to adjust to the cultural change and to overcome significant assimilation problems. They came to this country in hopes of finding fertile soil to build homes and grow crops on. Germans also liked to socialize with fellow Germans, so if a German worked with Americans or immigrants from other countries, he or she tended to spend his or her free time with people of the same background (other Germans). The dream of most of the German immigrants in the 18th and 19th centuries was to own a farm, debt-free. Once they settled in the United State, they put forth an inordinate influence on German-American affairs and on national issues. Both in urban and rural settings, Germans held an equally high profile as businessmen and shopkeepers, and in the final third of the century also as skilled laborers. They would take up city residence initially, to build up a savings of 50 to 150 dollars.
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