The social institutions of Wisconsin, based on the earlier Yankee and southwestern immigrations, were profoundly influenced by the German immigration of the late forties and the fifties of last century. Milwaukee, the center of German influence (the _Deutsche Athen_), became a city in which the German language was spoken and read by many English speaking persons, in order to facilitate communication and trade with the numerically dominant German element. The Germans maintained advanced schools for instruction in both English and German; their parochial schools were conducted mainly in German; the immigrants themselves felt no compulsion to learn English, and their children, in many cases, however well educated, spoke the language of the country with very imperfect accent. The universal respect in which the German language was held, and the extent to which it was affected by others than Germans, provided an admirable social soil for the development of German music and the cultivation of German literature. Hardly had the immigrants established themselves when, in 1847, they founded at Milwaukee their first singing society, which was followed three years later by the famous and far-reaching _Musikverein_. A German theater followed promptly, and became a permanent feature of Milwaukee’s intellectual life.[47] The _Turnverein_ fostered in America Father Jahn’s conception of athletics, while restaurants and beer gardens gave an old world, continental atmosphere to public recreation. Holidays assumed a German aspect. The _Christ Child_ displaced _St. Nicholas_ not alone in Milwaukee, but in scores of towns, villages, and hamlets, and innumerable farm homes scattered over Wisconsin. The joyous German _Weinacht_ made way easily against the more somber Puritan Christmas, which, however, had already brightened a good deal in its progress from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century.