The New World Meets the Old: German-Americans and the Temperance Struggle in Ohio, 1870 - 1875
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Abstract
AbstractNiles Sorensen. The New World Meets the Old: German-Americans and the Temperance Struggle in Ohio, 1870 – 1875 (Under the Direction of Dr. John David Smith) In the middle decades of the nineteenth century more than 3,000,000 immigrants arrived on American shores from the provinces and principalities that comprised the German Confederation. Most arrived seeking economic opportunities, others fled to escape political persecution. While they shared a foundational German language, regional dialects separated them. Moreover, they arrived harboring the same provincial, religious and class animosities that animated life in Germany. Survival in their new homeland against the ever-present specter of nativism, driven largely by the racial, economic and class conflicts that split the nation, required German immigrants to construct their common ethnicity. This study compares and contrasts how German immigrants negotiated their place in their adopted homeland’s society within the context of American life at the mid-point of the nineteenth century and how the threat posed to the immigrants’ deep cultural attachment to "public festivity" helped to define German-American ethnicity. The struggle pitted the European ideology of "liberal nationalism," a belief system articulated by Enlightenment philosophers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, against American reform movements largely informed by a post-millennial strain of Puritanism that was an outgrowth of the Second Great Awakening. The twenty-five years between 1850 and 1875 saw an increasingly militant temperance movement, one that moved beyond simple principle of moral suasion that characterized it over the course of the previous quarter century to a movement that sought restrictive legislative reforms banning outright the sale and manufacture of a wide range of alcoholic beverages. In the eyes of Ohio’s German-Americans, the temperance movement presented an existential threat to their right to "public festivity," a common element of their culture that united them all – Catholics and Protestants, Bavarians and Prussians, the conservative "Grays" and the radical "Greens." While the confrontation between German-Americans and temperance reformers took place across the Midwest in the early-to mid-1870s, the size of the German-American community in Ohio, particularly in Cincinnati, and the zeal of the reformers render it an ideal observation point. The Ohio legislature adopted the nation’s first post-war prohibitory legislation in 1870, directly threatening the German-Americans’ festive culture. A bitter fight in the state’s 1873 - 1874 constitutional convention over whether or not the state had the right to license the sale of alcohol offered a sharp contrast between the opposing sides. Finally, Ohioans launched the nationwide Women’s Temperance Crusade of 1873 – 1874, a movement that eventually spawned the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The exploration of contemporary newspaper accounts, memoirs of reformers, official records of the proceedings of Ohio’s constitutional convention, and an examination of German-American voting patterns in the middle decades of the nineteenth century offers a clear lens into the confrontation between German-Americans and native-born reformers committed to shaping a "moral" America. These sources reveal how the German immigrants’ struggle to retain their right to public festivity helped shape the development of a German-American ethnicity in the United States. The present study argues that the battle that began in Ohio in 1870 with the passage of the Adair Liquor Law provided the nascent foundation for the establishment of today’s German-American identity.