Kapp, Friedrich b.April 13, 1824; Hamm (Westphalia), Prussia d. October 27, 1884; Berlin, Prussia
Kapp established the history of Germans in America as a field for serious scholarly study. Through his activities and writings, he played a role in political developments in both Germany and the United States.
His publications remain important sources of, and guides to, German perceptions of America, as well as American perceptions of Germany.As a young man, Kapp, like many of his progressive contemporaries, found the philosopher Friedrich Feuerbach’s materialist critique of religion compelling. After study at the University of Berlin, he was within weeks of completing an internship in the judicial branch of the Prussian bureaucracy—the prerequisite to his goal of becoming an attorney—when the Revolution of 1848 began. He resigned his position and hurried to Frankfurt am Main. Working as a journalist, he covered the attempt of representatives from much of central Europe to establish a German nationstate. He ranged himself with the radicals seeking a democratic republic.
When they were defeated militarily, Kapp fled Germany. Still committed to revolution but abandoning hope of its proximate arrival, he sailed to America in early 1850. Disembarking virtually penniless, he initiated a remarkable and lucrative career in New York. He continued his journalistic activities, developed a flourishing law practice, and worked on a number of historical studies. These include books on the history of slavery in the United States, the history of Germans in New York State, the history of German immigration to America, biographies of generals Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben and Johann de Kalb, an examination of the relationship of Frederick the Great of Prussia to the United States, and a study of the hiring out of troops to Great Britain by German princes during the American Revolution.
Together with Carl Schurz, Kapp became one of the best-known notables of the German American community.
The two and other Forty-Eighters played a prominent role in the development of the Republican Party. From 1866 to 1870 Kapp served as commissioner of immigration in New York, exposing many scandals in the migrant trade.Despite his success in the States he was restless. When in 1862 Prussia amnestied the Forty-Eighters, he seriously considered returning permanently. Even without a successful revolution, many changes favored by liberals were occurring in Germany. More subtly, he was, like many a radical of 1848, becoming more conservative. He no longer viewed a republic as the sine qua non. Having shed his early radicalism, he saw the German bourgeoisie as becoming stronger and more self-confident. He regarded the mass of the population as fickle and unreliable. Like many other German intellectuals, in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, he felt uncomfortable in America. Some of his most damning judgments of America appear in his correspondence. After a year in New York he wrote to a friend that America had a jump on Europe only with respect to political forms; in every other way America was behind Europe. He viewed Americans as still entrapped by religious superstition. Although he conceded that America had much to offer lower-class European immigrants, he was convinced that an educated, upper-middle-class German like himself would never feel at home in the United States. As he wrote in a letter in 1856: “The United States is a country for the small, unsophisticated [unwissenden] farmer who has no ideals other than to gobble down bacon every day and for the businessman who wants at all costs to get rich. Every U.S. harbor should have a sign reading ‘No admittance except on business’” (Kapp 1969, 22).
Finally, in 1870 he concluded negotiations for a position in Germany that would secure his financial independence while permitting him to devote most of his time to politics. He obtained seats on the boards of several German banks.
For a decade he served in the Reichstag and other parliamentary bodies. Although like most liberals he appreciated many Bismarckian reforms, he continued to believe that on balance the “Iron Chancellor’s” influence was deleterious. Kapp predicted it would take generations to repair the damage done by the authoritarianism and servility fostered by Otto von Bismarck. When the National Liberal Party split in 1880, he joined the dissidents who formed what became a series of small left-liberal parties. A substantial part of his political activity in Germany pertained to the United States. On the basis of his knowledge of American immigration, he proposed changes in German emigration laws, and he was frequently consulted by German politicians and officials in dealings with the American ambassador, the first of whom, the historian George Bancroft, Kapp knew well from the States.Walter Struve
See also Bancroft, George; Forty-Eighters; Schurz, Carl; Steuben, Frederick Wilhelm von; Travel Literature, Germany-United States
References and Further Reading
Kapp, Friedrich. Vom radikalen Fruhsozialisten des Vormarz zum liberalen Parteipolitiker des Bismarckreichs: Briefe 1843—1884. Ed. with an introduction by Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1969.
Snell, John L, and Hans A. Schmitt The Democratic Movement in Germany, 1789— 1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1976.
Zucker, A. E., ed. The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German Revolution of1848. New York: Russell and Russell, 1967.