The German Genius

Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; later, Leipzig, Bonn, and Heidelberg were more popular. On his visits there Everett never stopped buying books, which in the end formed the core of the German library at Harvard. This, says Albert Faust, was the beginning of the mass migration of German book collections to America (the “ Bücherwanderung ”). 37
    Carl Diehl estimates that between 9,000 and 10,000 Americans studied in Germany from 1815 to 1914, not least nineteen future college and university presidents. His figures show a slightly different picture, that four universities attracted the bulk of the students—Göttingen, Berlin, Halle, and Leipzig—while Heidelberg became popular later on. Most entered the philosophical faculties to study the humanities or the natural and social sciences, with a rapid decline in the theological faculties after 1850. The American influx was led by just two American institutions in the early years—Harvard and Yale, with 55 percent of the American students having been students at one or the other institution. 38
    Then, as the nineteenth century progressed, as an interest in history and science developed in the United States, as its own literature began to emerge, and as more graduates returned from Germany—some with PhDs—Germany’s universities grew even more in stature in the eyes of Americans, in particular their approach of linking teaching and research. * This later generation—from the end of the 1840s—was the first to import the ideal of German scholarship, advanced academic study as a recognized professional vocation, and it was these returning students who created the modern form of scholarship in the humanities in America. Diehl identifies such men as Francis Child and George Lane, who were to form the backbone of the German-trained faculty at Harvard, Basil Gildersleeve, the first philologist at Johns Hopkins, and William Dwight Whitney, the eminent Yale Sanskrit philologist, all of whom studied in Germany. To them may be added “a dazzling array of future college and university presidents, many of whom would be instrumental in creating the modern university in America.” Charles Eliot’s curriculum reform at Harvard in the 1870s and his promotion of graduate studies have generally been taken as the first indication of the emergence of the modern university system in the United States, but Diehl points out that, by that time, “there were at least nine professors of humanities out of the total Harvard faculty of twenty-three who had received advanced training in Germany.” 39 They had been influential in choosing Eliot in the first place, and he himself studied chemistry in Germany. By 1870 Yale also had a half-dozen German-trained professors in the humanities, including both the outgoing president, Thomas Dwight Woolsey, and the new one, Noah Porter. In fact, says Diehl, study in Germany had become a kind of graduate school for the graduates of American universities. “By 1850 many American universities made it publicly known that they would favor applicants with German training.” 40
    Around 750,000 German immigrants, known as the “Forty-Eighters,” entered the United States between the mid-1840s and the mid-1850s. Among Germans, having a “Forty-Eighter” among your ancestors is almost as notable as having an ancestor on the Mayflower is for English-speaking Americans. 41 In 1854, 215,000 Germans immigrated to America, a record beaten only in 1882, when 250,000 crossed the Atlantic.
    In the arts and humanities, German-Americans had their share of painters—Emmanuel Leutze ( Washington Crossing the Delaware ) and Albert Bierstadt ( In the Sierras )—and authors—Friedrich List ( Outline of a New System of Political Economy ) and Owen Wister ( The Virginian ). Among German-American philanthropist-businessmen were John Jacob Astor (born near Heidelberg in 1763) and Francis Martin Drexel (born in the Austrian Tyrol in 1792), who spent some years as a painter in South America before traveling north and founding a bank in Philadelphia in 1837 (the New York house, Drexel, Morgan, and Company was founded in 1850). John D. Rockefeller was descended from Johann Peter Rockefeller, who came from Germany and settled among the earliest New Jersey Germans. 42
    Overall, alongside the universities, the German influence on American life was felt most strongly in the early nineteenth century in music and journalism. The large German Protestant churches