Buffalo
At any one time during the second half of the nineteenth century, about 1 percent of the German immigrants living in the United States resided in Buffalo, New York. Though advocates of German culture in the United States such as Karl Heinzen and Theodore Sutro berated the community in Buffalo for its lack of theater and literary culture, Buffalo’s community was one of the wealthiest and most politically prominent emigrant German communities in the world.
Today, however, there is no sign of a German community within the city limits.Pennsylvania Germans such as Martin Mittag and Samuel Helm settled along the eastern shore of Lake Erie as early as the 1790s. But John Kuecherer, a water carrier who arrived from Baden in 1817, was commemorated later as the city’s pioneer German. After the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, Buffalo became a commercial center and a stopover for immigrants and goods heading west. The German population grew rapidly. German immigrants established their first church, St. John’s Lutheran, in 1829, and their first newspaper, Der Weltburger (The Cosmopolitan), in 1837. Breweries, incorporated Vereine (clubs), distinctly German Catholic churches, and a Lutheran seminary were all established before the European revolutions of 1848 sent many more settlers to the city.
The Germans incorporated themselves fairly successfully into the city, winning privileges and accepting responsibilities. They purchased much of the city’s east side, which according to Buffalo’s Commercial Advertiser on June 12, 1857, was as American as the “Duchy of Hesse Cassel.” The timing and extent of their immigration served to unseat nativist politicians, help compete with rival Anglo-Americans in Fourth ofJuly festivals, and win a special reception when President-elect Abraham Lincoln visited the city in 1861. German households also sent a higher proportion of young men into the Civil War than the city’s Irish and Anglo-Americans, though not as high a percentage as African Americans.
One German battery led by Michael Wiedrich won special distinction in the war and acclaim at home. City officials integrated the teaching of the German language into the curriculum of the primary schools in 1866.In 1873, a local physician declared that the Germans of Buffalo had become a great power. Respected more than before and ever more numerous, the Germans began to assume a position of leadership in the city itself. In 1871, the city’s Germans celebrated the unification of Germany with a festival declared by the Buffalo Post on May 30 to have been the most “grand, imposing, glorious, and never-to-be-forgotten demonstration” in the city’s history. Two years later, the mobilization of the city’s German Vereine (clubs) overturned a movement to eliminate the German program in the schools. One of the Verein leaders, Philip Becker, subsequently was elected mayor of Buffalo in 1875, 1885, and 1887. By World War II, Buffalo had elected nine German American mayors, more than any other major city in the United States. In 1904, an east side basketball team, appropriately called the “Germans,” won what amounted to the world championship title during the St. Louis Olympic competition. By World War I, the German banks, hospitals, and churches in the city’s skyline attested to the significance of a German element that during the late 1870s crested in influence, accounting for half of the city’s population.
But with the decline of nativism and an increase in working-class unrest, the solidarity of the city’s Germans also dissipated in the 1870s. Marxist newspapers such as the Die Arbeiterstimme am Erie (The Worker’s Voice on Erie) in 1878 and the Buffaloer Arbeiter Zeitung (Buffalo Workingman’s News, 1885-1918) called for a revolution that would overthrow the government and the capitalist order. German Catholicism that had begun in Buffalo as a vocal attempt in the 1840s and 1850s to wrest the city’s largest church from French pioneers and Irish bishops became more conservative and inner- directed by the 1870s.
By 1900, German Catholicism in Buffalo was an empire marked by numerous otherworldly gothic spires, hundreds of Vereine, about twenty primary schools, and a population greater than the Mormon element of Salt Lake City. The clubs of the more liberal Germans also advanced, with the culmination of their work being the building of a new music hall for the city in 1883. Many leading Germans, such as Jacob Schoellkopf, the first businessmen to win the right to harness the power of Niagara Falls, and Philip Becker acquired impressive degrees of power financially, politically, socially, and even in denominational affairs. They helped lead a city that was a pioneer in the development of electrical energy and had more per capita millionaires than any other by 1900.By the early 1900s, amid signs of achievement, there was also a growing sense of disappointment among the city’s German leaders. The immigrants were dying off. Leading Vereine of the nineteenth century, such as the Turnverein, the Liedertafel, and the German Young Men’s Association dropped precipitously in membership. A leading soap manufacturer, William Lautz, declared that the teaching of German in the public schools had been a failure and that the “strange drama” of language loss had occurred in many German families. In the face of these realities, however, Germanophiles staged a wakeup call to German Buffalo. In 1904, a coterie of professionals tied to the German department of the public schools, the city’s German hospitals, and its German banks instituted the city’s first German Day and formed a federation that affiliated with the German American Bund, formed three years before in Philadelphia.
Uncertainty reigned as the community found the United States increasingly hostile to Germany and inching toward an alliance with Great Britain and France. Some said that the community had emerged from the doldrums of the late nineteenth century. Outspoken pro-German groups like the Bund and the Haru- gari showed increases in membership, the circulation of local German newspapers grew, and the political power of the Germans appeared to be on the rise.
By the time of U.S. entry into World War I, Louis Fuhrmann was in his seventh year as mayor, the city had four parks with distinctly German names, and the number of students taking German in the public schools had reached its highest level. But a climactic disenchantment followed. Telling incidents, not widespread enough to inflame, raised the cost of remaining German. Patriotic hoodlums broke up a meeting of the Harugari. One Friedrich Winter was stabbed for buying a German newspaper. Pretensions of Germanic greatness had attained a mythic status. But Germany began to lose the war, and with its loss went the utility and prestige of having ties to it. During World War I, newspapers such as the Buffaloer Arbeiter Zeitung, the Demokrat (The Democrat—a Weltburger offshoot, 1837—1918), and the Freie Presse (Free Press, 1860-1914) folded. The local bund tried in vain to survive in 1918, after finally pledging support for the U.S. war effort. An Anglo-American graduate of Yale, George Buck, defeated Louis Fuhrmann, and many parks, hospitals, and banks lost their German names.Buffalo’s German American community emerged from the war with a single daily, the Volksfreund (People’s Friend, 1868-1954), the once proud Buffalo Orpheus, a number of regional societies, and a scattering of churches where the German language was still a mainstay. The breweries and brewer’s union that had maintained the German language in their transactions were decimated by Prohibition. The area once hailed as the “Great German East Side” now consisted of two neighbor- hoods—the Orchard and Schiller Park. Buffalo’s Polish community moved north into the German quarter, as many of German descent joined Americans of English and Irish descent in moving into neighborhoods on the far north and south sides.
As the older establishment of pioneers and liberals died, a new, more conservative German American culture emerged during the 1920s. Frank X. Schwab, a two-term German Catholic mayor (1922—1929), hosted German American leaders and helped revive the German Day celebration in 1922, four years before the return of that festival to Cincinnati.
Schwab’s Buffalo remained wet. The mayor fired the policemen who had enforced Prohibition and rewarded agents who helped destroy the Ku Klux Klan. When the Depression came in 1929, nostalgia flourished more conclusively. Four new German literary societies arose in Buffalo during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and associations such as the Herwegh singing society and the local alliance of Vereine reassembled. By the mid-1930s, it was not a lack of enthusiasm that concerned German American leaders but fanaticism. A pro-Nazi group, the Friends of the New Germany, emerged in Buffalo in 1933. Though the inner cadre of this group consisted of only about thirty-six young men and four women—almost all of them immigrants— they won sympathizers from many in the community who dreamed that the local Deutschtum (the German community) could be revived. In the early days, both Joseph Eltges, a German Catholic owner of the Volksfreund, and the scion of the wealthy Schoellkopf family Jacob Schoel- lkopf II, proffered time and public tributes on behalf of local Nazis.Public condemnation of Nazism and Germany itself, however, upstaged this second revival completely, and Buffalo’s Deutschtum fell from the rank of a nationality to a dispersed ethnic group. By the time Hitler plunged Europe into war in 1939, local Nazis were so hated that local German American politicians such as Frank Schwab and Edwin Jaeckle were agitating for their suppression. From 1941 to 1945, the U.S. Justice Department prosecuted local Nazis, while the Buffalo Federation of German Societies maintained a low profile. After the war, the Volksfreund appeared irregularly and no longer presumed to give advice to German speakers. The last German neighborhoods lost their character, and the oldest section, the Orchard, became a slum known as the Fruit Belt. Only a few German societies and churches persisted, with many accepting non-German members. Due to a remarkable decline in the city’s population in the late twentieth century and to a suburban exodus, there is today no recognizable German neighborhood in a city that 130 years before was half German.
Andrew Yox
See also Cincinnati; Friends of the New Germany; Hexamer, Charles J.; National German-American Alliance; Schwab, Frank X.
References and Further Reading
Gerber, David. The Making of an American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1825—1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Yox, Andrew. “Decline of the German- American Community in Buffalo, 1855-1925.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1983.
------. “The Parochial Context of Trusteeism: Buffalo’s Saint Louis Church, 1828-1855.” The Catholic Historical Review (October 1990): 712-733.
------. “Bonds of Community: Buffalo’s German Element, 1853-1871.” Coming and Becoming: Pluralism in New York State History. Ed. Wendell Tripp. Cooperstown: New York State Historical Association, 1991a, 185-208.
----------. “The Fall of the German-American
Community: Buffalo, 1914 to 1919.” Immigration to New York. Eds. William Pencak et al. Philadelphia: Associated University Presses, 1991b, 126-147.