The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War. - book reviews

This work by Bruce Levine provides a welcome and largely successful attempt to integrate immigration, labor and political history through a consideration of the role of radical German democrats in the Civil War era United States.

It opens with an excellent pair of chapters on the German background to the emigration, chapters which synthesize much of the latest literature on the subject and which provide the best short history now available in English. Given the importance of radical democratic, republican and social republican ideas to the work as a whole, Levine would have done even better if he had paid more attention to the broader international context of radical democratic and social republican agitators and organizations which had such a great impact on Germany in 1848-50 - and on German immigrants to the U.S. after 1850.(1) Still, he makes clear the inextricable political component of the mass migration following the failure of the 1848 revolutions and the mistake made by a generation of American historians who followed Marcus Lee Hansen's lead and assumed that only middle-class intellectuals were real forty-eighters.

If his synthesis of the literature on the German emigration is excellent, it pales before his treatment of the industrial development of the United States and the part played by German immigrants in that development. In the process, Levine provides a fine synthesis of a crop of local studies of industrialization with another crop of studies which focus on German immigrants. These studies have been produced by a generation of historians responding to the influences of Herbert Gutman and David Montgomery, but they have not been pulled together into a national context until now.

Levine's exploration of the roles played by religion and anti-religion in the creation of German-American communities is incisive, and his description of the development of the German-American labor movement in the 1850's is superb (his analysis of the often described 1850 NYC tailors' strike is the best yet). While much of the latter material has been covered by others in other contexts, Levine's integration of it with the broader context of U.S. labor and radical history makes his telling especially worthwhile.

In the long run, the book's strategy is to integrate the German-American experience through consideration of their role in the political realignments of the 1850's. The Turners and other radical 1848ers are followed as they made the transition from radical democrats in a European context, to Radical Republicans in an American one in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854. Levine explores the ways in which German-American radical democrats shared in the national experience of mobilizing over the slavery issue, and the ways in which their reactions were shaped by their German experience.

In the process, Levine is extremely sensitive to the variations in German-American politics and considers the roles played by German Democrats like August Belmont and Oswald Ottendorfer. Levine makes it clear that despite the myth that German-American voters elected Lincoln, Republicans won the support of only about a third of them and he goes a fair way towards explaining why that was the case though, in the end, he fails to really explain the strength of the German Democracy and tends to fall back on the German Republicans' notion that it was basically a result of the "limited mentality" of German-American voters who put anti-prohibition principles above anti-slavery ones).

Despite his sensitivity to differences among the German immigrants and the strength of his presentation of the broader American context, Levine does not do so well with differences within some groups of Anglo-Americans. The nativists of the Know-Nothing movement appear simply as a malign force hostile to the Germans. The pro-labor activists of the Know-Nothings and any relationships they might have had with the German-American labor movement are left unexplored, as are the ties which sometimes developed between Anglo-American and German-American anti-Catholics. The German-American role in the Know-Nothing interlude between the Whig and Republican parties has again been left for others to examine.

In a way, the greatest weakness of this work is its strongest point, the integration of German-American history with the Civil War crisis and the creation of the Republican coalition. In aiming the entire work in that direction, Levine undermines the possibility of integrating the German-American experience with the broader contours of American history through its influence on the American labor and radical movements. If the labor upsurge of 1886 or the larger pattern of immigrant radicalism had been the focal point aimed at, rather than the Civil War, Levine might have come up with an integration which would have been more representative of both the German-American and the American experiences in the longer run.

On the other hand, Hans Trefusse wants more attention paid to prominent German-American Republicans like Gustav Korner and Karl Schurtz, a very different (if more traditional) sort of synthesis. At the same time, Levine's approach could be criticized in diametrically opposed terms for only beginning to touch on the majority German-American experience of those who continued to vote for the Democratic Party.(2) Suffice it to say that there is much research yet to be done on the largest and most complex ethnic group in American history, and that Levine shouldn't have to bear the burden of our collective failure. He does what he set out to do and, as he does it very well indeed, we should simply be thankful for his fine synthesis.