Cincinnati

Cincinnati is considered the the most Teu­tonic of American cities. Germans shaped Cincinnati’s development from its earliest years. The frontier Ohio River fort Losan- tiville (1788) was strategic as German Bap­tists, or “Dunkers,” who had come to Pennsylvania in 1719 and settled upriver at Columbia.

Germans made up 5 percent of the city in 1830 when immigration from Germany as well as from the East Coast escalated. The German population jumped from 23 to 27 percent from 1840 to 1850. Friedrich Hecker, German nationalist and hero of the failed 1848 revolution, arrived to cheering crowds in New York and then Cincinnati, where he settled, serving as a magnet for thousands of fellow Forty- Eighters.

Cincinnati became the nation’s second- largest industrial city, its population swelled by arrivals from the Rhineland, Baden- Wurttemberg, and Bavaria. Working-class newcomers settled north of the center and east of the Miami-Erie Canal in 110 blocks dense with three-story brick tenements, townhouses, and shops intermingled with gardens and punctuated by church spires.

Germans who had been truck farmers around the city’s periphery made Pleasant Ridge a suburb, attracting more Germans with life centered on the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the 1870s. They moved up the Millcreek Valley into Cor- ryville, annexed to Cincinnati in 1870. From 1870 to 1890, German immigration numbers were high. The city had the na­tion’s third-largest Germanic population, 45 percent, in 1900; only Hoboken (55.7 percent) and Milwaukee (64 percent) had a greater concentration of German residents. Twelve percent, or 38,308 of the 325,902 Cincinnatians, had been born in Germany. In 1900, the city listed over 200 German physicians and 167 lawyers, along with prominent industrialists, businesspeople, and politicians (Hurley 1982, 104). After World War I, immigration nearly stopped. During World War II and after, only a small number of German Jews who fled Nazi Germany; Danube Swabians, Pomera­nians, and Silesians; and others displaced by Soviet occupation made their way to the city. The 1970 U.S. Census revealed Ger­man as the native language of 55,000 out of the city’s 451,455.

Political Influence

David Ziegler won election as council pres­ident in 1802 as the village was incorpo­rated, before it became a city. Martin Baum was elected mayor in 1807 and 1812. The city printed ordinances in German in the 1830s. Admitted to the bar in 1849, Jo­hann Bernhard Stallo (1823-1900), who arrived from Oldenburg in 1839, became a Court of Common Pleas judge. After com­ing under attack from the nativist Know- Nothing Party in the 1840s, many Ger­mans joined the new Republican Party after 1856.

Germans won many political offices. Gustav Tafel (1830—1908) was born in Munich and settled with his grandparents in Cincinnati in 1849. After working as a printer, he became the Volksblatt (People’s Newspaper) city editor in 1855 while studying law. Admitted to the bar in 1858, he served as colonel in the 9th Ohio, before he won election to the state legislature in 1866. Elected mayor in 1897 on a “fusion- ist” ticket to modernize the water and sewer systems, he served one term, until 1900.

Wielert’s Pavilion (1873), the leading beer garden, provided a Stammtisch (round table) as headquarters for George B. Cox, the Republican “boss” dominating local politics from 1884 to 1912, when Rudolph K. “Rud” Hynicka and August Herrman took over the “machine.” Political groups also met in the Germans’ Central Turner Hall behind Wielert’s.

Charles Fleischmann (1835—1897), a German Jew who got rich from distilling liquor and yeast production, founded the Market National Bank, served as Ohio governor William McKinley’s adviser, and became a prominent philanthropist. His son Julius (1872—1925) served as mayor (1900—1905), pledging businesslike man­agement. He began free kindergartens in public schools and built the first public bathhouse in 1904.

German Jew Frederick S. Spiegel (1858—1925) was a one-term Republican mayor (1914-1915). Born in Prussia and educated in a Westphalia gymnasium, he came via Alabama and graduated from the Cincinnati Law School while editing the Freie Presse (Free Press). He entered public service in positions including chairman of the Public School Committee on German language. While a judge of the Superior Court (1902-1913), Spiegel headed several Vereine (associations). Backed by the wan­ing Cox machine, George Puchta (1860­1937), born in Cincinnati of German-born parents and a machine tools businessman, won the mayorality (1916-1917) with the largest plurality ever. Preoccupied with looming war, Puchta organized a munici­pal war council to support the federal effort before returning to his business.

Despite the Germanophobia during and after World War I, long-assimilated German American civic leaders regained prominence in politics after World War II. Edward Nicholas (Eddie) Waldvogel (1895-1954), a Catholic born in the city with a resume of public positions and civic service, was elected mayor in 1953. Eugene Ruehlmann, a Western Hills lawyer of Ger­man descent, was mayor from 1967 to 1971 and championed urban renewal. Gerald Norman (Jerry) Springer (1944-), the child of German Jewish parents who fled from Nazi Germany to New York, moved to Cincinnati after he had received a law degree in 1968. The liberal Democrat served on the City Council, had an interim mayoral term in 1974, and won election as mayor (1977-1978) before going on to a career as a TV talk show host.

Diverse Religion

Local Germans were religiously divided— freethinkers, various Protestant sects, Catholics, and Jews. German and Swiss fol­lowers of Ulrich Zwingli founded Cincin­nati’s first German Protestant congrega­tion, St. Johannes Kirche (Saint John’s Church) in 1814 and built a Gothic church in 1868, later called St. John’s Uni­tarian.

German liberals fought with orthodox Catholics and Protestants. Stallo led free­thinkers in the legal fight to keep the Bible and hymns out of public schools in the 1830s. Celebrating Christmas in the Ger­man way was opposed by many Anglo- Saxon Protestants. A radical, anticlerical Socialist from Vienna, Frederick Has- saurek, became a leader of the Freiman- nerverein (Freemen’s Society). His anti­Catholic attacks inflamed Turners to demonstrate against the papal nuncio’s 1853 visit.

Wilhelm Nast (1807-1899), born in Stuttgart, immigrated in 1828 and con­verted to Methodism, bringing it to Cincinnati in 1835. He edited the weekly Der Christliche Apologete (The Christian Apologist) (1839-1894) to promote funda­mentalism, Sabbatarianism, and temper­ance. Cincinnati became the home of Ger­man Methodism.

Northern Germans built the Deutsche Evangelische St. Paulus Kirche (St. Paul’s Evangelical Church, 1850), with its steeple topped by a gilded rooster. The Deutsch Evangelisch Reformierte Salem’s Kirche (Salem Evangelical Reformed Church, 1856) erected a German Gothic brick church in 1867, with its spire topped by a gilded Angel Gabriel. Concordia Lutheran (later Prince of Peace) built a brick Gothic church in 1871. Philippus Evangelical and Reformed Lutheran (1891) had a golden fist with finger pointing to heaven atop its church.

German Catholics founded Holy Trin­ity parish, including a school, in 1834. The Swiss-born priest Johann Martin Henni (1805-1881) founded St. Marien Kirche (St. Mary’s Church) in 1842. German ar­chitect Franz Ignatz Erd built it, then the largest in the Ohio Valley, with stained glass from Bavaria and German paintings.

Although the city had only 150 Jews in 1830, an influx of 10,000 came from Ger­many by the 1860s. Most of the newly ar­rived migrants settled in the West End. Leaders championed “modernized” laws and ritual. Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900) left Bohemia for the United States in 1846.

He settled in Cincinnati in 1854 and made the city a center for Reform Judaism. Wise worked with the K. K. Ben Yeshurun (Children of God) synagogue, which was the home to the Minhag America prayer book and rabbinical education. Together with Rabbi Max Lilienthal, he published The Israelite (1854) and Die Deborah (1855—1903). They established rabbinical training at the Hebrew Union College (1876), which ordained the first American rabbis in 1883. Emphasizing “religious community” and ethical monotheism rather than the law “not adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization,” they minimized ritual, held the Sunday rather than Saturday Sabbath, integrated women in family pews, and had mixed choirs. They eliminated keeping kosher and cultural traits that would make them “stand out” from the mainstream.

German Cultural Life

An 1838 law introduced German into public schools. Cincinnati’s Germans used and preserved their language at home while speaking English in the outside world, thus making their urban culture bilingual. Al­though Die Ohio Chronik (The Ohio Chronicle) began publishing in 1826, most Germans read the Tagliches Cincinnatier Volksblatt (Daily Cincinnati People’s Paper, 1836), the only German daily in the United States for almost a decade. There were three other German papers by 1850. Unionists preferred the Arbeiterzeitung (Worker’s News Paper); radicals liked the Republikaner (Republican). A radical, anti­clerical Socialist, Frederick Hassaurek, fled to Cincinnati from Vienna in 1848 to pub­lish Hochwachter (The High Watchman) “an organ for intellectual enlightenment and social reform.” He later became editor of the Volksblatt, which remained the major newspaper until World War I, survived only by the Freie Presse (Free Press, 1874).

Stallo fostered the German Reading and Culture Society (1844) after studying at St. Xavier College. German Freiman- nervereine (freethinkers’ societies) orga­nized Das Deutsche Institut (The German Institute, 1846), staging four plays a week until the Civil War. Stallo promulgated Hegelian philosophy through a study circle and the publication of his own books The General Principles of the Philosophy of Na­ture (1848), State Creeds and Their Modern Apostles (1872), and Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1881), earning renown in Germany as his era’s most significant philosopher of science.

Heinrich Arminius Rattermann (1832—1923), who immigrated from Ankum in 1846, edited the monthly Der Deutsche Pionier (The German Pioneer, 1874—1885), which was published by the city’s largest association (1869—1887), making it a top journal of German Ameri­can culture and history. He also edited the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Magazin (German American Magazine) and contributed to literary life by writing forty-four books, hundreds of articles, and countless poems.

Friedrich Hecker organized the first American Turnverein (Turner Society, 1848) in Cincinnati to foster “refined hu­manity” through physical exercise and in­tellectual development, which had the motto Mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body). This concept goes back to the founder of the modern German Turnerbewegung (Gymnasts Movement), Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who in 1811 amid Napoleonic invasions articulated a philoso­phy to prepare for democratic freedom. Hecker opened a small Turnhalle (Turner Hall) in 1850 and then the large, central Turnhalle in 1859 with an athletic club, a concert room, and theater.

Germans formed the Schutzenverein (Shooting Club) in 1831. Civil War veter­ans expanded the association, incorporated in 1868 with 250 members, each holding $500 in stock to buy a hill northwest of the city as a shooting park, or Schutzenbuckel. Opened as a public beer garden, it had beer and wine cellars, a dance pavilion, swings, and bowling alleys. Germans held their an­nual Schutzenfest there until 1873.

From the Haydn Society in 1822 and first Mannerchore (male chorus) in 1838, Germans enriched urban life with dozens of singing societies, bands, and orchestras. The first annual Sangerfest (singing festival) took place in 1849. Crowds enjoyed music of the German masters at the Lowengarten (Lion Garden, 1860—1872). Clara Baur (1835-1912), born in Wurttemberg, founded a Conservatory of Music in 1867 that was modeled after the Stuttgart Con­servatory. Rattermann helped found the American Sangerbund (Association of Singing Clubs), wrote German opera li­brettos, and hosted a salon for intellectuals. The city’s Sangerbunds built the Sanger Fest-Halle (1870) opposite Washington Park, with a seating capacity of 5,000. Ger­mans crusaded to expand the use of their language in public schools. The Board of Education formed the German English Normal School in 1871 to train German- language teachers. By 1890, about half of all students studied German, although it was optional. The system had 175 German teachers in elementary schools and four in high schools by 1900, who reached over 18,000 pupils. Dr. Heinrich H. Fick (1849-1935), who came to Cincinnati in 1864, became assistant superintendent in 1901 and headed the German English Normal School until he retired in 1915. Fick devised a bilingual curriculum, the “Cincinnati Plan,” used in many cities along with his textbooks.

German Americans created an exten­sive cultural and social network that was not well liked by their Anglo-Saxon neigh­bors. Germans faced hostility from the American Protestant Society, which dis­liked the recreational “Continental Sun­day,” called “a high carnival of drunken­ness,” and championed temperance to counter the German culture of beer. Ger­mans successfully rallied against the “Puri­tan Sabbath” and Sunday closing laws: “Kamf gegen die Sabbathfrommelei” (Bat­tle against the Puritan Sabbath). The 1890 Cincinnati City Directory listed 1,810 sa­loons, only a few non-German. For those living in cramped domestic quarters and even for the prosperous with parlors, such places provided informal, recreational “liv­ing rooms” as well as community centers.

Cincinnatians, including women and children, consumed 40 gallons of beer a year per capita in 1893, 24 over the na­tional average. They drank during vaude­ville at Hubert Heuck’s Volkstheater (Peo­ple’s Theater, 1875). Georg Rapp’s Highland House (1876) had panoramic views from its Mount Adams restaurant, beer garden, picnic grounds, concert hall, theater, and bowling facilities inside and outdoors for 8,000 at a time. Moritz Eich­ler’s ornate Clifton House had extensive gardens, plus a concert hall and hotel. In that heyday, seventeen beer gardens staged concerts—Hildebrand’s, Kissell’s, Schick- ling’s, and others. Wielert’s Pavilion (1873), the most fashionable, boasted an immense interior and beer garden lined with busts of Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Wolfgang

Goethe, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Jo­hann Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Friedrich Schiller, and Franz Schubert. Michael Brands’s orchestra was the nucleus of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (1895).

All prospered until World War I and its aftermath squelched Cincinnati’s Ger­man culture for decades. Most Germans who arrived after World War II assimilated quickly, even more so than those before, al­though the Verein der Donauschwaben (So­ciety of Swabs from the Danube) cele­brated its first festival in 1956. Cincinnati hosted the Forty-first National Saengerfest in 1952. The roster of Cincinnati Sym­phony conductors reveals ongoing German influence—Fritz Reiner, Eugene Goossens, Max Rudolph, Thomas Schippers, and Michael Gielen. Even Jesus Lopez-Cobos, director in the 1990s, had been music di­rector of the Berlin Opera before he came to Cincinnati.

Shaping the City

From frontier days, Germans shaped the city’s infrastructure. Merchants formed the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Com­pany in 1846, hiring engineer John Augus­tus Roebling and his firm to build the first bridge over the Ohio River. Amos Shinkle, a coal merchant, expedited the project fi­nancially and politically in 1856. Con­struction stalled during the panic of 1857, as Irish workers quit and the Civil War in­tervened. The world’s longest suspension bridge was completed in 1866 as 120,000 people, over half of Cincinnati’s popula­tion, walked across it.

Andrew H. Ernst helped found the Cincinnati Horticultural Society (1843), which was responsible for major urban beautification, especially after the 1852 ar­rival of Prussian landscape gardener

A view from Covington, Kentucky, shows the Roebling suspension bridge spanning the Ohio River to Cincinnati. (Corbis)

Adolph Strauch (1822—1883), who de­signed estates in the new suburb of Clifton, redeveloped Spring Grove as a garden cemetery, and then created the city’s first public parks in 1870 and 1872. Their friend, Andreas (Andrew) Erkenbrecher, founded the Association for the Acclimati­zation of Rare Birds. Supported by the local German press and advice from the Berlin zoologist Alfred Edmund Brehm, Erkenbrecher incorporated the Cincinnati Zoological Society (1873), modeled after the Frankfurt Zoo. Strauch advised Ger­man designer Theodore Findeisen on the layout. Animals were sent by Carl Hagen- beck in Hamburg. The nation’s second zo­ological gardens opened in 1875, twice the size of that in Philadelphia, which had opened the year before. Hagenbeck’s agent, Sol Stephan, helped spawn other American zoos, promoting Hagenbeck’s idea of bar­less enclosures. Johann (John) Hauck, a brewer who came from Bergzabern in the

Palatinate in 1852, saved the bankrupt zoo after Erkenbrecher’s death in 1885.

Architects Alfred Fellheimer and Stew­art Wagner designed Union Terminal (1933), an art moderne masterpiece with an infundibuliform (funnel-shaped) inte­rior, to handle 216 trains per day. Wein­hold Reiss, born in Karlsruhe in 1886 and trained in art in Munich, designed its huge mosaic murals of Ohio settlement, trans­portation, and local industrial workers, ex­ecuted by the Ravenna Mosaic studios of Berlin and New York. Some of them were moved to the airport in 1973.

German Beer Breweries

Immigrants imported the process of lager- ing beer developed in the 1830s by Gabriel Sedlmayr in Munich and Anton Dreher in Vienna, which used chilled processing to produce a carbonated brew lighter than English beers. By 1840, eight small Cincin­nati breweries made Lagerbier. As more Germans immigrated, breweries grew to eleven in 1848, sixteen in 1856, and thirty- six in 1860, including six of the nation’s twenty largest by 1870. Local production soared from 354,000 barrels (1 barrel holds 32 gallons) in 1870 to 656,000 in 1880 to 1,115,000 in 1890.

Christian Moerlein (1853) opened a barrel factory in 1862, which became the city’s largest brewery by the 1880s, with buildings of German Romanesque Revival “round-arched style” in three Over-the- Rhine blocks. After Moerlein installed an ice machine in 1876, annual production leaped from 60,000 to 98,000 barrels. Mo- erlein opened a pioneering bottling plant in 1895 to ease shipment problems, adver­tising Old Jug-Lager Krug Bier as “Exhila­rating, Stimulating, Re-Juvenating, Whole­some, Delicious and Pure.” Its reputation spread nationally in the 1890s, producing 350,000 barrels of “National Export” and “Old Jug Lager.”

Conrad Windisch joined Gottlieb and Henry Muhlhauser to found the city’s second-largest brewery in 1866, producing 175,000 barrels a year by 1890. Louis Hudepohl and Fred Kotte bought the Koehler Brewery in 1885. It had a hundred employees and annual production of 40,000 barrels in 1902 when Hudepohl died, leav­ing the business to his wife and five daugh­ters, who carried on, shifting to make near beer and soft drinks during Prohibition and thus preserving one of the city’s only three surviving breweries. Daughter Celia and her husband John O. Hesselbrock revived and automated it in 1932 as Hudepohl-Schoen- ling. Their Christian Moerlein brand be­came the first American beer to pass Ger­many’s rigid purity law, the Reinheitsgebot, in 1983 (Hurley 1982, 190).

World War I and Its Impact The Deutscher Staatsverband (German State Association) held its annual picnic in Chester Park on August 1, 1914, when Cincinnati’s German American population learned about the outbreak of war. After a telegram was read that announced the dec­laration of war by Germany, all partici­pants sang “Die Wacht am Rhein” (The Watch on the Rhine). Many recent emi­grants supported imperial Germany’s poli­cies, but the German American establish­ment embraced American patriotism. The Freie Presse assailed Woodrow Wilson’s neu­trality and the German-Austrian-Hungar­ian Aid Society raised funds for “iron” for the Central Powers.

After the United States entered the war, Cincinnati’s police banned German in public meetings; and many Vereine were closed. The City Council anglicized thir­teen Germanic street names, from Bis­marck to Montreal, Berlin to Woodward, Hamburg to Stonewall, Bremen to Repub­lic, German to English, and so on. So did many families and societies. The German Mutual Insurance Company became Hamilton County Fire Insurance. Its statue of “Germania” was shrouded in black, draped with the American flag, then rechristened “Columbia,” with “E Pluribus Unum” inscribed on her cape. The Ger­man National Bank took the name Lin­coln. The Staatsverband became the Amer­ican Citizens League. Vigilantes destroyed German inscriptions on buildings. The Alien Property Custodian seized suspect German businesses.

The American Protective League en­forced a ban on German-composed music. The German Theater was closed. Public school students taking German dropped from 13,856 in 1916 to 7,546 in 1917. Ohio eliminated elementary German in 1918, firing most “Hun tongue” teachers and censoring those remaining. The library purged German books and periodicals from its shelves. Cincinnati’s Germans spoke En­glish in public and raised $95,000 for a 1918 Liberty Bonds Crusade. The Volks- blatt folded in 1919 after raids by federal agents; the Freie Presse held on until 1924. The last German-language church, Philip- pus Protestant, adopted English in 1921.

Prohibition seemed the coup de grace in 1920, closing twenty-six breweries and countless saloons and beer gardens. Wie- lert’s became the Gildenhaus Funeral Home. John Stenger’s restaurant, founded in 1893, closed and was not revived by his son until 1934. The Gambrinus Stock Brewery, founded by Christian Boss in 1867, folded in 1922.

A unified German community never recovered its prewar vibrancy. German was not taught in elementary schools; but six teachers gave lessons in the Central Turnhalle. The Catholic Kolping Society revived the shooting sport in 1923 through the Schuetzenclub. Fifteen churches had services in German in 1935 and used the language in Sunday schools. Amusement parks revived German Days in the 1930s; Coney Island attracted 38,000 for one in 1938. The German Lit­erary club met upstairs at the restaurant founded in 1872 by German-born baker Anton Grammer. The walls of this restau­rant were decorated with Wirtstube-sty∖e murals of Rhineland landscapes in the 1940s. Today, the Downtown Council at­tracts thousands to a mid-September Ok­toberfest of beer brats (bratwurst), metts (Mettwurst), and German music on Foun­tain Square. Even though the National Municipal League named Cincinnati an “All American City” in 1981, the city re­vived and retains its place as the most Teu­tonic of American cities.

Blanche M. G. Linden

See also American Civil War, German Participants in; Beer; Forty-Eighters; German Jewish Migration to the United States; Hecker, Friedrich; Judaism, Reform (North America); Landscape Architects, German American; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Roebling, John Augustus and Washington Augustus; Strauch, Adolph; Turner Societies; Verein; Willich, August von; Wise, Isaac Mayer

References and Further Reading

Clubbe, John. Cincinnati Observed: Architecture and History. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992.

Dobbert, Guido A. The Disintegration of an Immigrant Community: The Cincinnati Germans, 1870-1920. PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1965.

Engelhardt, George W. Cincinnati: The Queen City, 1901. Cincinnati: Young and Klein, 1982.

Hurley, Daniel. Cincinnati: The Queen City. Cincinnati: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1982.

Sarna, Jonathan D., and Nancy H. Klein. The Jews of Cincinnati. Cincinnati: Center for Study of the American Jewish Experience, 1989.

Tenner, Armin. Cincinnati Sonst und Jetzt. Cincinnati: Mecklenburg and Rosenthal, 1878.

Tolzmann, Don Heinrich. The Cincinnati Germans after the Great War. New York: Peter Lang, 1987.

Tolzmann, Don Heinrich, ed. Festschrift: German-American Tricentennial Jubilee: Cincinnati 1983. Cincinnati: Cincinnati Historical Society, 1982.

Wimberg, Robert J. Cincinnati: Over-the- Rhine. Cincinnati: Ohio Book Store, 1987.