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Academic
historians, as a rule, prefer to observe time's ragged pageant
from a safe distance. Carl Wittke, though his objectivity
was impeccable and his relentless pursuit of the facts at
times astonishing, wrote from a rather different perspective.
The very title of his monumental history of the nation's immigrants,
We Who Built America, suggests the pride and passion
he brought to his subject as the son of immigrants who grew
up at a time when “hyphenated” Americans were looked
down upon and even suspect.
A
nationally respected scholar, Wittke was also an outspoken
champion of civil rights in an era when other academics shied
from taking public positions. When the campus workers of Oberlin
College were struggling in the 1940s to unionize, Wittke,
a professor of history and dean of the college, championed
their cause. Indeed, according to such reliable sources as
his long-time secretary Thea Johnson and Cleveland historian
Thomas F. Campbell, who did his dissertation under Wittke,
his passionate involvement may have cost him the presidency
of Oberlin.
Wittke,
who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, at the turn of the 19th century,
had performed in minstrel shows during his student days at
Ohio State University. In the preface to Tambo and Bones
(1930), a history of the American minstrel stage that
was praised by the African-American poet James Weldon Johnson,
he admitted to “happy memories of the burnt-cork semi-circle.”
The experience had fostered in him “an abiding interest
and a real love” for the culture of a downtrodden people-from
its folk songs and spirituals to cakewalking ballads and the
unaccompanied harmonizing of pick-up quartettes in black barbershops.
“Here is a music,” he wrote, “which voices
the joys and sorrows, the longing, the fatalism, the aspirations
and the sufferings of one of the most musically gifted peoples
of the earth.” He took pains to point out important differences
between “the stage Negro” and individuals of African-American
descent.
As
the son of a German immigrant-his father Carl Wilhelm had
come to Columbus in 1889, three years before young Carl's
birth-Wittke himself had experienced ethnic bigotry in the
anti-Hun hysteria that swept America during the First World
War. “For the German element in the United States,”
he wrote in 1936 in German-Americans and the World War,
[the war] initiated a period of emotional crisis, conflicts
of loyalties, misunderstandings, persecutions, tragedy which
few of their fellow citizens appreciated.” German was
banned from Ohio schools, and German books were burned.
The
Wittkes must have taken comfort from the fact that their son
had earned not only his bachelor's degree from OSU (1913),
but also a master's in history from Harvard (1914). By the
time German-Americans appeared, he had also earned
a doctorate (1921) from Harvard, published five books-including
a highly praised History of Canada (Knopf, 1928) and
a life and times of George Washington written in German (Bremen,
1933)-to say nothing of more than 30 scholarly articles. OSU
had appointed Wittke to its history faculty as soon as he
completed his Ph.D, four years later naming him full professor
and chairman of the department. German-Americans and the
World War was widely admired for its rigorous research.
Wittke had, among other things, demolished the popular myth
that German-Americans had conspired against American neutrality
in the 1916 elections.
His
continued exploration of little-read German-American periodicals
and personal documents from the second half of the19th century
would result in a series of ground-breaking books: Against
the Current: The Life of Karl Heinzen: 1809-1880 (1945);
Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-eighters in America
(1952), which showed the formative influence of the aborted
uprising of 1848 in Germany on many immigrants; and The
German Language Press in America (1957). The first of
these, published even as Americans were reveling over the
defeat of Hitler, challenged the stereotype of Germans as
a brutish, lockstep people fostered by anti-Nazi propaganda.
Heinzen had been a courageous crusader against censorship,
militarism and reactionary repression in Germany in the years
leading up to the abortive1848 uprising; he had emigrated
to America in 1850 in search of a more just society, only
to find himself back on the barricades, this time as a radical
abolitionist and an advocate for women's rights and many other
political, economic and social reforms. Wittke himself, an
ardent champion of free speech, had addressed the City Club
of Cleveland during the war and would later speak vigorously
against red-baiter Joseph McCarthy.
But
the book that made his reputation was published in 1939. We
Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant opened many
eyes in the both scholarly and lay communities, as to what
Wittke argued was the real epic of America: the story of the
“forgotten thousands who have helped to build this nation.”
In opposition to those who saw immigrants as a “problem”
that could only be cured by assimilation and Americanization,
Wittke stood up for the value of human diversity and then-radical
idea known as “cultural pluralism.” Delving deeply
into contemporary sources, including foreign-language newspapers,
he exposed the shadowy history of immigration restriction,
while exploring the contributions of various groups of “Americans
Who Missed the Mayflower” (the title of a talk he liked
to give).
In
1948 Wittke joined the faculty of Western Reserve University
as professor of history and dean of the graduate school; he
became chairman of the history department in 1952. Somehow,
he found time to write four more books-including an eye-opening
history of The Irish in America-and a score of articles.
By now a scholar of national reputation, he was asked to be
general editor of a six-volume History of the State of
Ohio. In 1959, he was named Elbert J. Benton Distinguished
Professor of History; in 1962, vice president of the university.
Unlike many scholars preoccupied with publishing, however,
Wittke, insisted on teaching at least one course every semester.
After he retired in 1963 as chairman emeritus of the university,
the institution established a Carl F. Wittke Award for Distinguished
Undergraduate Teaching.
In
retirement, Carl Wittke was to write one more book, The
First Fifty Years: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1916-1966.
The local focus of the subject surprised no one. In a collection
of essays entitled In the Trek of Immigrants by 16
leading historical scholars presented to Wittke in 1964, O.
Fritiof Ander noted that Wittke was more than an authority
on the great wave of humanity that had so enriched America.
He was, said Ander, a “grass roots” historian and
a regionalist who “played a significant role in reviving
an interest in state and local history” and encouraged
and inspired others to mine that precious lode.
text
by
Dennis Dooley
Winner of the 1986
Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature
Summer
2004
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The
troubadours of the American burnt cork circle
were utterly different from the minstrels of other
lands and earlier times. There was little in the
American minstrel show even remotely suggestive
of the troubadours, minnesingers, jongleurs
and bards of medieval Europe, except perhaps a
genuine love for song and a common gift for improvising
endless verses. The theme of the American performer
generally was quite different from that of his
European predecessors. All minstrels, to be sure,
have sung of lovable eyes and faithful hearts
and the mist of moonlight evenings, but the repertory
of the blackface minstrel included so many additional
themes that minstrelsy became a distinctive American
institution. The burnt cork artist of the United
States of the nineteenth century could have originated
in no other country in the world. His art was
indigenous to the United States, and from here
it was introduced, with only moderate success,
to England, the Continent of Europe, and to other
parts of the globe. If it did not flourish elsewhere
as it did in the United States, the primary reason
was that foreigners could not understand or fully
appreciate the peculiarly American conditions
from which this entirely new form of entertainment
had sprung.
Often
in ante-bellum days the master, in quest of amusement
and entertainment, [had] summoned those of his
slaves who were specially gifted as singers or
dancers to perform for him at the Great House,
and on occasion he invited his guests and friends
to the performance. More often the Negroes danced
and sang because of their own innate and irrepressible
fondness for rhythmic and musical expression.
As early as 1784, Thomas Jefferson, in his famous
Notes on the State of Virginia, described
“the banjar,” which the slaves had brought
with them from Africa and which the Sage of Monticello
believed to be the “origin of the guitar.”
. . . From the pathos and humor of the Negroes,
their superstitions and their religious fervor,
their plaintive and their hilarious melodies,
their peculiarities of manner, dress and speech,
the white minstrel built his performance. . .
.In the process. . .the stage Negro became quite
a different person from the model on which he
was formed.
-Tambo
and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel
Stage (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968)
A
seventeen year old girl was dismissed from an
Illinois school for refusing to stand and sing
'America.' Apparently, she had acted on the advice
of her German parents. Unusually provocative was
the conduct of two German-Americans who offered
a pianist in a saloon twenty-five cents to play
the German national anthem. . . .A patriotic celebration
of Germans in northern Ohio brought a hurried
visit from the sheriff who had received a report
that the German flag was on display. He found
it to be the Stars and Stripes, but so old and
patched that in the distance the banner looked
like a German flag. The sheriff who had come to
make arrests, dramatically raised his hat in salute
to the flag, and quietly departed for home. .
. .
In
Toledo, Ohio, a mob marched through the German-American
section to intimidate its residents. Men were
knocked down in the streets for failing to remove
their hats while the National air was being played.
. . . A Home Defense League was organized at Delphos,
Ohio, and a vigilance committee instituted a hunt
through several counties for the editor of a German-language
paper who had wisely fled from the vicinity. Four
hundred men, in the dark of night, proceeded from
house to house, nailing up flags. The editor of
the Delphos (Ohio) Herold was finally brought
back from Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Trembling for his
life, he was forced to declare his loyalty in
the public square. At Coshocton a mob broke into
sixteen homes and forced the “pro-Germans”
to yell, “To hell with the Kaiser,”
and weekly meetings of the League of American
Patriots were instituted to keep the community
steadfast in its loyalty.
-German-Americans
and the World War (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State
Archaeological and Historical Society, 1936)
The
problem of securing an adequate labor supply for
the manifold activities to be carried on in a
new land led to the introduction of white servitude
in the colonies, and thousands of immigrants,
too poor to make their way to America by other
methods, came as “redemptioners,” or
indentured servants. Strictly speaking, indentured
immigrants were those who had signed a contract
before embarking binding them to service for a
specified number of years to pay the cost of their
transportation to and maintenance in the colonies,
whereas redemptioners were transported without
pay or indenture and might be “redeemed”
by having friends or relatives pay for their voyage
within a certain number of days. Otherwise, they
too became indentured, and were sold into service
by the captain of the ship to the highest bidder.
. . .That families were often disrupted by these
auction sales of white labor, and that the immigrant
was frequently a victim of the fraudulent practices
of sharpers, was perhaps inevitable.
Colonial
newspapers contain many advertisements that throw
light on this traffic in indentured servants.
. . .The American Weekly Mercury for May
22, 1729, advertised the arrival from Scotland
of “a parcel of choice Scotch Servants;
Taylors, Weavers, Shoemakers and ploughmen, some
for five and others for seven years; Imported
by James Coults.” Schoolmasters were advertised
as regularly as tailors and other artisans, and
seem to have brought a lower price. . . .Advertisements
for runaway indentured servants were fairly common,
and laws for apprehending those servants were
passed by several colonies. The names of Irish
and English runaways seem to appear in the colonial
papers most frequently, and the names of Germans
very seldom. This is not necessarily a tribute
to German steadiness or a comment on lack of initiative.
The difference may be accounted for by the difficulty
the Germans experienced with the English language.
Occasionally, advertisements were placed in Pennsylvania
German papers to find out the whereabouts of children
who had been sold without the consent or knowledge
of their parents.
-We
Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant (New
York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1939)
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