Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/83

Rh many served the cause of liberal government on the local plane.

The name of Schurz was one to conjure with, as American politicians were quick to discover. He figured prominently in Wisconsin state politics only a few years, but as a national leader his influence in attaching the Germans to the causes he advocated was especially strong in this state, which claimed him as her own. Schurz's high character and attainments, coupled with his political successes in this country, were a source of pride to thousands of Wisconsin Germans who shared not at all his revolutionary views. Enough that, like Goethe, he was a great German, and that he had gained the respect and confidence of large sections of the American people. It ministered to the self-respect of the average German settler to feel that his people had contributed something of value to the life of the nation and state.

Later arrivals from Germany, and especially from Prussia, brought with them an intense pride of nationalism and enthusiasm for German achievement in the wars against Austria and against France. The difference in attitude between immigrants of 1880 and those of forty years earlier was antipodal. Many of the former had served in the victorious wars and abounded in military incidents and in stories of Bismarck, of Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Crown Prince Frederick William (Unser Fritz). These men obviously belonged to a new generation of Germans, and they have exerted a powerful influence upon our recent history. But the Germans who deserve special recognition along with the Yankees, as founders of the commonwealth and its institutions, are those of the earlier immigrations from a Fatherland which as yet was united only in culture, while politically its states remained dissevered.