Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/81

 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. 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.

In general, Germans did not insist with extreme pertinacity upon the retention of their own social customs, and wherever people of that nationality were intermingled with a larger number of Americans, the process by which they assimilated American habits of living, American social usages, and even ways of acting, speaking, and thinking was very rapid. In the schools of a Yankee neighborhood the children of German settlers, in many cases, could not be distinguished