Carl Wittke, Historian, 1892–1971
1963 CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE FOR LITERATURE
 Academic historians, as a rule, prefer to observe time’s ragged pageant from a safe distance. Carl
Wittke, though his objectivity was impeccable and his relentless
pursuit of the facts at times astonishing, wrote from a rather
different perspective. The very title of his monumental history of the
nation’s immigrants, We Who Built America, suggests the pride
and passion he brought to his subject as the son of immigrants who grew
up at a time when “hyphenated” Americans were looked down upon and even
suspect.
A nationally respected
scholar, Wittke was also an outspoken champion of civil rights in an
era when other academics shied from taking public positions. When the
campus workers of Oberlin College were struggling in the 1940s to
unionize, Wittke, a professor of history and dean of the college,
championed their cause. Indeed, according to such reliable sources as
his long-time secretary Thea Johnson and Cleveland historian Thomas F.
Campbell, who wrote his dissertation under Wittke, his passionate
involvement may have cost him the presidency of Oberlin.
Wittke,
who grew up in Columbus, Ohio, at the turn of the 19th century, had
performed in minstrel shows during his student days at Ohio State
University. In the preface to Tambo and Bones (1930), a
history of the American minstrel stage that was praised by the
African-American poet James Weldon Johnson, he admitted to “happy
memories of the burnt-cork semi-circle.” The experience had fostered in
him “an abiding interest and a real love” for the culture of a
downtrodden people—from its folk songs and spirituals to cakewalking
ballads and the unaccompanied harmonizing of pick-up quartettes in
black barbershops. “Here is a music,” he wrote, “which voices the joys
and sorrows, the longing, the fatalism, the aspirations and the
sufferings of one of the most musically gifted peoples of the earth.”
He took pains to point out important differences between “the stage
Negro” and individuals of African-American descent.
As
the son of a German immigrant—his father Carl Wilhelm had come to
Columbus in 1889, three years before young Carl's birth—Wittke himself
had experienced ethnic bigotry in the anti-Hun hysteria that swept
America during the First World War. “For the German element in the
United States,” he wrote in 1936 in German-Americans and the World War, “[the war] initiated a period of emotional crisis, conflicts of
loyalties, misunderstandings, persecutions, tragedy which few of their
fellow citizens appreciated.” German was banned from Ohio schools, and
German books were burned.
The
Wittkes must have taken comfort from the fact that their son had earned
not only his bachelor’s degree from OSU (1913), but also a master’s in
history from Harvard (1914). By the time German-Americans appeared, he had also earned a doctorate (1921) from Harvard, published five books—including a highly praised History of Canada (Knopf, 1928) and a life and times of George Washington written in
German (Bremen, 1933)—to say nothing of more than 30 scholarly
articles. OSU had appointed Wittke to its history faculty as soon as he
completed his Ph.D, four years later naming him full professor and
chairman of the department. German-Americans and the World War was widely admired for its rigorous research. Wittke had, among other
things, demolished the popular myth that German-Americans had conspired
against American neutrality in the 1916 elections.
His
continued exploration of little-read German-American periodicals and
personal documents from the second half of the19th century would result
in a series of ground-breaking books: Against the Current: The Life of Karl Heinzen: 1809–1880 (1945); Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-eighters in America (1952), which showed the formative influence of the aborted uprising of 1848 in Germany on many immigrants; and The German Language Press in America (1957). The first of these, published even as Americans were reveling
over the defeat of Hitler, challenged the stereotype of Germans as a
brutish, lockstep people fostered by anti-Nazi propaganda. Heinzen had
been a courageous crusader against censorship, militarism and
reactionary repression in Germany in the years leading up to the
abortive1848 uprising; he had emigrated to America in 1850 in search of
a more just society, only to find himself back on the barricades, this
time as a radical abolitionist and an advocate for women's rights and
many other political, economic and social reforms. Wittke himself, an
ardent champion of free speech, had addressed the City Club of
Cleveland during the war and would later speak vigorously against
red-baiter Joseph McCarthy.
But the book that made his reputation was published in 1939. We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant opened many eyes in both the scholarly and lay communities, as to what
Wittke argued was the real epic of America: the story of the “forgotten
thousands who have helped to build this nation.” In opposition to those
who saw immigrants as a “problem” that could only be cured by
assimilation and Americanization, Wittke stood up for the value of
human diversity and the then-radical idea known as “cultural
pluralism.” Delving deeply into contemporary sources, including
foreign-language newspapers, he exposed the shadowy history of
immigration restriction, while exploring the contributions of various
groups of “Americans Who Missed the Mayflower” (the title of a talk he
liked to give).
In 1948 Wittke
joined the faculty of Western Reserve University as professor of
history and dean of the graduate school; he became chairman of the
history department in 1952. Somehow, he found time to write four more
books—including an eye-opening history of The Irish in America—and a score of articles. By now a scholar of national reputation, he was asked to be general editor of a six-volume History of the State of Ohio. In 1959, he was named Elbert J. Benton Distinguished Professor of
History; in 1962, vice president of the university. Unlike many
scholars preoccupied with publishing, however, Wittke, insisted on
teaching at least one course every semester. After he retired in 1963
as chairman emeritus of the university, the institution established a
Carl F. Wittke Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching.
In retirement, Carl Wittke was to write one more book, The First Fifty Years: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1916-1966. The local focus of the subject surprised no one. In a collection of essays entitled In the Trek of Immigrants by 16 leading historical scholars presented to Wittke in 1964, O.
Fritiof Ander noted that Wittke was more than an authority on the great
wave of humanity that had so enriched America. He was, said Ander, a
“grass roots” historian and a regionalist who “played a significant
role in reviving an interest in state and local history” and encouraged
and inspired others to mine that precious lode.
—Dennis Dooley |
America’s Minstrel Heritage
The troubadours of the
American burnt cork circle were utterly different from the minstrels of
other lands and earlier times. There was little in the American
minstrel show even remotely suggestive of the troubadours,
minnesingers, jongleurs and bards of medieval Europe, except perhaps a
genuine love for song and a common gift for improvising endless verses.
The theme of the American performer generally was quite different from
that of his European predecessors. All minstrels, to be sure, have sung
of lovable eyes and faithful hearts and the mist of moonlight evenings,
but the repertory of the blackface minstrel included so many additional
themes that minstrelsy became a distinctive American institution. The
burnt cork artist of the United States of the nineteenth century could
have originated in no other country in the world. His art was
indigenous to the United States, and from here it was introduced, with
only moderate success, to England, the Continent of Europe, and to
other parts of the globe. If it did not flourish elsewhere as it did in
the United States, the primary reason was that foreigners could not
understand or fully appreciate the peculiarly American conditions from
which this entirely new form of entertainment had sprung.
Often in ante-bellum days
the master, in quest of amusement and entertainment, [had] summoned
those of his slaves who were specially gifted as singers or dancers to
perform for him at the Great House, and on occasion he invited his
guests and friends to the performance. More often the Negroes danced
and sang because of their own innate and irrepressible fondness for
rhythmic and musical expression. As early as 1784, Thomas Jefferson, in
his famous Notes on the State of Virginia, described “the banjar,” which the slaves had brought with them from
Africa and which the Sage of Monticello believed to be the “origin of
the guitar.” . . . From the pathos and humor of the Negroes, their
superstitions and their religious fervor, their plaintive and their
hilarious melodies, their peculiarities of manner, dress and speech,
the white minstrel built his performance . . . . In the process . . .
the stage Negro became quite a different person from the model on which
he was formed.
—Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968)
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The Anti-German Hysteria
A seventeen
year old girl was dismissed from an Illinois school for refusing to
stand and sing “America.” Apparently, she had acted on the advice of
her German parents. Unusually provocative was the conduct of two
German-Americans who offered a pianist in a saloon twenty-five cents to
play the German national anthem . . . A patriotic celebration of
Germans in northern Ohio brought a hurried visit from the sheriff who
had received a report that the German flag was on display. He found it
to be the Stars and Stripes, but so old and patched that in the
distance the banner looked like a German flag. The sheriff who had come
to make arrests, dramatically raised his hat in salute to the flag, and
quietly departed for home. . . .
In Toledo, Ohio, a mob
marched through the German-American section to intimidate its
residents. Men were knocked down in the streets for failing to remove
their hats while the National air was being played . . . . A Home
Defense League was organized at Delphos, Ohio, and a vigilance
committee instituted a hunt through several counties for the editor of
a German-language paper who had wisely fled from the vicinity. Four
hundred men, in the dark of night, proceeded from house to house,
nailing up flags. The editor of the Delphos (Ohio) Herold was finally brought back from Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Trembling for his
life, he was forced to declare his loyalty in the public square. At
Coshocton a mob broke into sixteen homes and forced the “pro-Germans”
to yell, “To hell with the Kaiser,” and weekly meetings of the League
of American Patriots were instituted to keep the community steadfast in
its loyalty.
—German-Americans and the World War (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1936)
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America’s White “Slaves”
The problem of securing an
adequate labor supply for the manifold activities to be carried on in a
new land led to the introduction of white servitude in the colonies,
and thousands of immigrants, too poor to make their way to America by
other methods, came as “redemptioners,” or indentured servants.
Strictly speaking, indentured immigrants were those who had signed a
contract before embarking binding them to service for a specified
number of years to pay the cost of their transportation to and
maintenance in the colonies, whereas redemptioners were transported
without pay or indenture and might be “redeemed” by having friends or
relatives pay for their voyage within a certain number of days.
Otherwise, they too became indentured, and were sold into service by
the captain of the ship to the highest bidder. . . . That families were
often disrupted by these auction sales of white labor, and that the
immigrant was frequently a victim of the fraudulent practices of
sharpers, was perhaps inevitable.
Colonial newspapers contain many advertisements that throw light on this traffic in indentured servants . . . . The American Weekly Mercury for May 22, 1729, advertised the arrival from Scotland of “a parcel of
choice Scotch Servants; Taylors, Weavers, Shoemakers and Ploughmen,
some for five and others for seven years; Imported by James Coults.”
Schoolmasters were advertised as regularly as tailors and other
artisans, and seem to have brought a lower price . . . . Advertisements
for runaway indentured servants were fairly common, and laws for
apprehending those servants were passed by several colonies. The names
of Irish and English runaways seem to appear in the colonial papers
most frequently, and the names of Germans very seldom. This is not
necessarily a tribute to German steadiness or a comment on lack of
initiative. The difference may be accounted for by the difficulty the
Germans experienced with the English language. Occasionally,
advertisements were placed in Pennsylvania German papers to find out
the whereabouts of children who had been sold without the consent or
knowledge of their parents.
—We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1939)
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