Immigration to the American Midwest: "Immigrant Milwaukee" and "Ethnicity on Parade"

This research will examine two books on immigration to the American Midwest in the nineteenth century: Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836-1860, by Kathleen Neils Conzen, and Ethnicity on Parade, by April R. Schultz. The plan of the research will be to discuss both works with reference to the means by which dominant themes are developed, including the respective authors' use of primary sources.

Conzen's Immigrant Milwaukee focuses principally on the dramatic influx of German immigrants to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 25 years before the Civil War. The book is basically a chronicle of the development of a German community within a city that was itself being created, having been founded in 1826. The coping strategies that German immigrants engaged in to assure their economic survival and their identity as an ethnic community were part of a process of acculturation and assimilation into the dominant Anglo-American culture of the US, including active participation in the American political process. Irish immigration to Milwaukee was taking place at roughly the same time, in the wake of the potato famine in Ireland. Although the book's principal focus is on German immigrants, it identifies ethnic distribution and mixing of neighborhoods of Anglo-Americans, Irish, and Germans as part of a gradual Americanization of the entire community.

Ethnicity on Parade is structured primarily with reference to a single event that was organized to highlight the development of Norwegian immigrants to Ameri

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ilwaukee between 1836 and 1860 illustrates how a distinct cultural identity could be maintained even as the immigrants absorbed the irresistible American culture. Conzen notes the "historical accident . . . that [Milwaukee's] founding and the opening of Wisconsin to settlers coincided with the major flow of German emigration" (34). Consequently, the Germans could perceive themselves not only as immigrants but also as cofounders of an emerging city. Compare Schultz's description of the appropriation of the Norwegian-as-pioneer-builder image in the 1925 pageant as part of the construction of the ethnic narrative (79). Ethnic German concentration fostered the creation of assistance societies that included an ethos of a common purse to help new and possibly impoverished arrivals. From 1836 to 1846, a plurality of German immigrants had some little wealth and education; those who came in the decade following were comparatively poorer and less well educated, driven out of Germany by famine, economic depression, and to some limited extent the Revolution of 1848. The Irish immigrants that came to Milwaukee during this period were distinguished by extreme poverty, which owed something to the potato famine of the 1840s, and widespread illite

Category: History - I