Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/40

 in the revolutionary outbreak of 1849. He afterwards rose to prominence in the War of the Rebellion. Among his regular boarders were several political exiles. These two circumstances made the “Constanzer Hof” a favorite resort of the German refugees then still numerous in New York. Almost every evening there was a gathering of them in the tap-room, where there were noisy political discussions in true German beer-house style. They dwelt upon the Fatherland as well as the United States, and I listened to them with intense interest. That the talk about Germany was very bitter and angry was not surprising to me, in view of the high tide of reaction that had set in; but it astonished and puzzled me to hear likewise violent denunciations of the United States as a sham land of liberty, of its institutions as republican only in form, of the material attractions for European immigrants as a humbug—with other like expressions of grievous disappointment. Among the loudest declaimers in this strain was an individual called Professor Boehm, who supported himself as a writer for the local German press, and who spoke with a deep, gruff voice and snappish sort of delivery. He seemed surcharged with bitterness against the American Republic, and broke out into roaring diatribes against it on the slightest provocation. His prejudices amounted to a kind of monomania, and they were known all over New York. It was considered an amusement to hear him hold forth, and devices were resorted to, such as purposely opposing his views, in order to provoke outbursts on his part. This man did not know a single American, hardly ever saw anything of New York beyond the two or three streets through which his daily round took him, had never been outside of the city, and yet railed continually against everything American. This was an extreme case, but the minds of nearly all the refugees whom I heard express themselves were affected the same way. I need hardly say that, not knowing any better, I was much discouraged by their unfavorable judgment