The Yankee and the Teuton in WisconsinSchafer, Joseph
History
The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin
Schafer, Joseph
Germans -- Wisconsin; Wisconsin -- Social life and customs
By way of summary, we may say that as a land seeker the Yankee’s range
exceeded that of the German. Both clung to the lake ports as their
market base. But the Yankee’s optimism painted for him a roseate future
based on an experimental knowledge of material development for which
the German’s imagination was largely unprepared. The New Yorker had
witnessed, in his home state, the almost miraculous transformation
of rural conditions through the construction of a system of canals;
and canal building affected Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Ohio only less
profoundly than the Empire State. To the Yankee, therefore, who cast
his lot in the favored lands of Wisconsin it seemed that nothing could
halt the march of improvement. The chief point was to obtain prompt
possession of the right kind of farm. Having this, he could count on
doing a big agricultural business as a wheat grower, which promised
generous financial rewards. But if for any reason he failed to get the
right kind of farm, if improvements were unexpectedly dilatory, or if
the land ceased to respond to his demand for wheat and more wheat, he
“sold out” with slight compunction and went elsewhere, confident of
success on a new frontier, especially the great wheat plains. To him
land was a desirable commodity, but by no means a sacred trust.
The German, on the other hand, came from a land of very gradual change.
Although agricultural conditions there were actually considerably
modified in the first half of the nineteenth century, he still, for
the most part, looked upon his dwindling patrimony as the basis, not
of a money making business, but of a livelihood. If, by the combined
labor of all members of the household, the family could be fed,
clothed, and sheltered, the heavy obligations to church and state
redeemed, and a few _gulden_ sequestered for times of emergency, the
peasant was content. His land was his home. It had been his father’s,
grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s. The original estate was parted into
ever more and smaller divisions, as generation succeeded generation,
until the tracts of many holders were at last too small to support the
families. These had no choice but to sell and go to the city, or go to
America. This condition was one of the most general economic causes
of the large German immigration to this and other states. When the
German farmer, or other German, came to Wisconsin and bought a piece of
land, one purpose dominated his mind--to make a farm for a home, and
establish a family estate. In the beginning it did not occur to him
to speculate in land, although in this as in other things he proved
an apt pupil. Accustomed to a very limited acreage, he was not like
the Yankee ambitious to secure a large domain. Habituated to intensive
tillage, a partly made farm having ten or twelve acres of cleared land
was to him an ample equipment for making a living in agriculture.
Enlarging fields meant a surplus and mounting prosperity. If he took
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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