Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/72

 The establishment of a German theater was a matter of course, and its performances, which indeed deserved much praise, proved so attractive that it became a sort of social center.

It is true, similar things were done in other cities where the Forty-Eighters had congregated. But so far as I know, nowhere did their influence so quickly impress itself upon the whole social atmosphere as in the “German Athens of America,” as Milwaukee was called at the time. It is also true that, in a few instances, the vivacity of this spirit ran into attempts to realize questionable or extravagant theories. But, on the whole, the inspiration proved itself exhilaratingly healthy, not only in social, but soon also in the political sense.

From Milwaukee I went to Watertown, a little city about 45 miles further west. One of my uncles, Jacob Jüssen, of whom I have spoken in my childhood recollections as the burgomaster of Jülich, was settled there with his family, among whom were two married daughters. Thus I dropped there into a family circle which was all the more congenial to me as this was the one of my uncles I had always been most fond of. The population of Watertown was also preponderantly German—not indeed so much impregnated with the Forty-eight spirit as were the Milwaukeeans, although in Watertown, too, I found a former university student whom in September, 1848, I had met as a fellow-member of the Students' Congress at Eisenach, Mr. Emil Rothe, and several other men who had taken part in the revolutionary movements of the time. Among the farmers in the neighborhood, who did their trading at Watertown, there were many Pomeranians and Mecklenburghers, hard-working and thrifty people, who regularly began with the roughest kind of log-cabin for a home, and then in a few years evolved from it, first the modest frame dwelling, and then the more stately brick-house—the barn, however, always