Illinois
Germans began to settle in Illinois shortly after it became a state in 1818. Major waves of immigration occurred between 1830 and 1860, and by 1860 German-born constituted 7.65 percent of the state’s population.
By 1890 Illinois was second only to New York in the size of its German population. Their large numbers made them a significant factor in the state’s politics, because they were perceived by the major political parties as a “swing” group in critical elections. The German element was at its strongest in the 1880s and 1890s, and developed an impressive array of cultural institutions. Their strength began to ebb after 1890, as earlier immigrants and their offspring assimilated and the flow of newcomers declined. The anti-German fervor of World War I left its impact on Illinois Germans, but many German institutions persisted until well after World War II.Although some Germans arrived in the United States as early as the War of 1812, they first began to come in large numbers during the 1830s. Arriving by water, they settled in rural areas near the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. One of the heaviest areas of German settlement in Illinois was the region east of the Mississippi opposite St. Louis, Missouri. A colony of educated and professional Germans, known as the “Latin farmers,” came in the 1830s and settled near Belleville. Other German migrants followed the Great Lakes. Germans were arriving in Chicago soon after it was established as a village (1833) and found their way to rural townships north and west of the city. The city had its first German church in 1844 and established its first German newspaper, the Illinois Staatszeitung (Illinois Public News), in 1848.
The great wave of emigration from Germany in the late 1840s and early 1850s coincided with the coming of the railroads, and many Germans sought farms in lands made accessible by the railroads across the northern part of the state.
The remarkable growth of Chicago by 1860 attracted many newly arrived Germans as workers and artisans. The political controversies of the 1850s, stirred up both by nativist agitation and by the question of slavery expansion, pulled the Germans inevitably into the turmoil. Before 1854 they had normally followed the Jacksonian Democrats, who offered protection to the immigrant against nativist attacks. But after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which potentially opened new areas of the west to slavery, many Germans began to desert the Democratic Party of Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, the primary author of the act. The new Republican Party that emerged by 1856 began to bid for the German vote. Among converts to the new party was the acknowledged leader of the Illinois Germans, Gustave Philipp Koerner, an attorney who had settled near Belleville in the 1830s and had become a state supreme court justice and, in 1852, the Democratic lieutenant governor. Another leader who turned Republican was Francis Hoffmann, aLutheran pastor from rural Cook County who turned to banking in Chicago and would become the Republican lieutenant governor during the Civil War. Other leadership came from the refugees of the 1848 revolutions; the most active Forty-Eighter was George Schneider, who edited the Illinois Staatszeitung.
The Republicans never completely won over the Germans, although a majority of them probably voted for Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election. The Germans as a group remained politically divided for the rest of the century. The identification of some Republicans with the liquor Prohibition movement drove many Germans toward the Democratic side. A major political event affecting Germans was the passage in 1889 by the Republican-controlled state legislature of the Edwards Law, which established compulsory education, but specified that only schools in which the language of instruction was English would be allowed. The outcry against the law helped the Democrats make political gains among the Germans in the 1890s. The first Democratic governor to be elected since before the Civil War was the German-born John Peter Altgeld, who served from 1893 to 1897.
In post—Civil War Chicago, a political machine led by German-born Anton Hesing, normally Republican, controlled much of the German vote there. However, the tide of new immigrants that peaked in the 1880s included many industrial working-class Germans, some tending toward various forms of radicalism and socialism. A crucial turning point for radical Germans was the Haymarket riot of 1886, in which eight policemen and an unknown number of bystanders died. Those tried and convicted for murder and conspiracy were mostly anarchists with German names. Many Germans turned away from socialism and radicalism, although Germans’ political allegiances remained very fluid in the early twentieth century. As the second generation of Germans became more upwardly mobile, the culture of the German workingmen’s movement began to wither away.
Much of the new German immigration at the end of the nineteenth century concentrated in the northern part of the state, and particularly in Chicago. The earlier German communities in the southern part of the state received fewer newcomers. Increasingly the new immigrants came from the northern and eastern sections of the German states, rather than the southern and western German origins of the pre—Civil War migration. The census figures of 1890 showed the German-born population near its peak, counting 338,382 residents in the state, amounting to 8.8 percent of the total population (U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office 1895). Over half of the German-born population was in Chicago and its environs (Cook County). The city’s most concentrated German district stretched to the north and northwest from the city’s center, and included German stores, churches, social organizations, and mutual aid societies. By 1900, however, Germans were beginning to disperse into virtually all sections of the city. Chicago’s very visible “German America” would come under attack, first by the Prohibition movement, and second by anti-German sentiment at the time of World War I.
Many Germans avoided the attacks by deserting German organizations, and some organizations changed their German names to English ones. The strength of German institutions had begun to decline even before the war, but many survived until well after World War II. By 1950 the numbers of German-born residents, not replenished in very great numbers, stood at 96,517, only 1.1 percent of the state’s population (Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia Library, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/sta ts/histcensus/. Accessed May 2005). In Chicago, Poles had replaced Germans as the largest European ethnic group.James M. Bergquist
See also Altgeld, John Peter; Chicago; Forty- Eighters; Haymarket; Illinois Staatszeitung; Koerner, Gustave Philipp; World War I and German Americans
References and Further Reading
Holli, Melvin G., and Peter d’A. Jones, eds.
Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995. Keil, Hartmut, and John B. Jentz, eds.
German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850—1910: A Comparative Perspective. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1983.
------. German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I.Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988.
Koerner, Gustave. Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, 1809—1896; Life-Sketches Written at the Suggestion of his Children. 2 vols. Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch, 1909.
Pierce, Bessie L. A History of Chicago. 3 vols. New York: Knopf, 1937-1957.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office. Report on the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1895, Pt. I, pp. cxxviii, 16.