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Category Archives: October 2011: German Americans in Congress

German Americans in Congress: An Interview with USCHS Founder Fred Schwengel

27 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by U.S. Capitol Historical Society in October 2011: German Americans in Congress, USCHS History

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Capitol, Congress, German Americans

–by Don Kennon

Congressman Fred Schwengel of Iowa (May 28, 1906 – April 1, 1993), the founding president of the United States Capitol Historical Society, was proud of his German heritage. His father immigrated to the United States from Germany in the early 1900s, just a few years before Fred was born on a farm near Sheffield, Iowa. In oral history interviews conducted by Frank van der Linden in the early 1980s, Congressman Schwengel recounted how he had been shaped by his German heritage. A few sample excerpts from those interviews follow.

Fred Schwengel in the Capitol’s rotunda, c. 1980s, with USCHS’ first publication, a guidebook to the Capitol.


Q. Mr. Schwengel, let’s start from the very beginning. Let’s start with your birth, and boyhood, and parents, all your background.

Schwengel: Well, I was born outside of Sheffield, Iowa, about three miles south and a little east of what was called the Bird Farm, May 28, 1906, I think. For some reason, they did not record my birth at the courthouse, so I am using that date as the correct date, which I believe it was. My father and mother were both immigrants from Germany. They knew each other in Germany. My mother came several years before my father. I have never established, for sure, that he came over here because of my mother. … He came from Westerstede, which is in the province of Oldenburg, not far from Bremen, probably about 70 kilometers.

Q. What was your father’s first name?

Schwengel: My father’s first name was Gerhardt.

Q. What was your mother’s name?

Schwengel: My mother’s name was Marguerite. She was known by the name of “Mattie” and her maiden name was Stover. The Schwengel name is interesting, also. I should insert that here. It is spelled the German way, “S-c-h-w-e-n-g-e-l.” The name “Schwengel” is really the bolster part of a wagon. I mention that because my family are descendants of the Zwingli family, the same family as Ulrich Zwingli, the Reformer. I believe, according to my father, that we were descendants of his brother. Ulrich, of course, was the great Protestant reformer at the time of Martin Luther, in Switzerland. It’s the Swiss version of spelling, “Z-w” instead of “S-c-h-w” as in German. My father was an interesting man, and it may be worthwhile to recall why he came to America. Both my parents were members of the Baptist church in Germany. That’s different, because normally Germans are either Lutheran or Roman Catholic. But my father came from a Protestant group that believed in the Free Church. I like to think, although I have not established this, that there is a direct line of thought dating back to Ulrich, because this was his belief.

. . .

Q. How did they happen to go to Iowa? Was it free land? Obviously fertile land?

Schwengel: Germans, if you know anything about them, are kind of clannish.
So, for some reason members of the family and friends came to Sheffield. That was a good farming area and it was fairly easy to get to by train in that period, soon after the Civil War. They were all Baptists, German Baptists, that came there. Later some Lutherans came there also. But the German Baptists congregated there. My father left after he had served two years in the Kaiser’s army. He did not believe in military service. He was drafted and forced to serve. He said many times that he wanted to raise a family in a place where they would not be drafted into the service, not required to give military service.
…

My father never lost his interest in religion. This is an interesting thing. We always had worship service every morning, in German, at breakfast time. We sat around the breakfast table. My father would have a Bible reading, and sometimes a little lesson with it. Well, there were days when you couldn’t go out and plow—it would rain or there would be a snowstorm, or something. That was the day we sat around the table and our father would talk to us. Often, he talked about how fortunate he was that he came to America so that we could be born in this great country. He talked about being involved. Immediately, when he came here, I later found out, he made application for citizenship. In five years he passed his examination and became a citizen. He was as proud as he could be to be a citizen of America. He told us about that very often. By this time we were in this country school, District Number Nine, West Fork township, Franklin County, and, by golly, as soon as he became a citizen, they elected him to the school board. You know, he never ceased talking about that—the recognition and opportunity he could have. This sort of thing didn’t happen in Germany. And yet we got the feeling that he was also proud of his German association.

Q. You say he spoke German in the worship service. Did he learn English, too?

Schwengel: Oh, yes, he did, but in the home we all talked German. In fact, he had a sign printed, and framed just outside the main door, as you walked in you read it, there it hit you:

“KINDER, HIER VIR DEUTSCH GESPROCHEN” “CHILDREN, HERE WE SPEAK GERMAN.”

And he meant it! I kind of resented that, because, when I started school in the country school, I could not speak the American language.

Schwengel returned to Iowa after graduating from college and teaching for a few years. This early 1940s shows him (3rd from left) with the Jaycees, one of several benevolent organizations to which he belonged.

Fred, of course, learned English and went on to high school—leaving home and boarding with neighbors because his father objected to him going to school when his brothers stayed home to work on the farm. After attending college, teaching history and civics in high school, establishing a successful insurance practice, and entering politics, Fred and his father would reconcile. As these brief excerpts reveal, Fred would come to understand the influence of his German heritage and his father’s immigrant experience on his own development. As a member of Congress in 1962, Fred Schwengel would lead the effort to establish the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. The Society plans several programs to observe its 50th Anniversary in 2012. Among them will be posting the complete audio recordings and print transcripts of Fred Schwengel’s oral history interviews. Look for those in early 2012 at www.uschs.org.

German American Exhibit Open in Russell Building

25 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by Lauren Borchard in October 2011: German Americans in Congress

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We’ve put up a few posts about our current exhibit, Helping Shape America: German Americans in the U.S. Congress from 1789 to the Present; this iteration focuses on the 1st and 112th Congresses. If you want to know more about the Muhlenbergs than myth–debunking, come by the Russell Senate Office Building near the Capitol this week.

Sen. Russell keeps an eye on the sun-dappled installation.

The exhibit is housed in the 2nd-floor Russell Rotunda, and congressional office buildings are open the public (just be prepared to go through a metal detector).  It’s there till midday Friday, October 28, so this is a great chance to check it out.  It’s free!  If you go, let us know what you think in the comments here.

The rotunda provides a grand setting for the exhibit.

The Russell Senate Office Building is located near Union Station and is bounded by Constitution and Delaware Avenues and 1st and C Streets NE.  Because the Senate is not in session this week, only some of the building entrances are open. The one on Constitution near 1st is a good bet.

Read the post about the Peter Muhlenberg trading his ministerial robes for an army uniform? This panel explores that story. Other panel topics range from the entire Muhlenberg clan to current German American members of Congress.

German Americans in the U.S. Congress: 19th Century

18 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by U.S. Capitol Historical Society in October 2011: German Americans in Congress

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Congress, German Americans, House, railroads, Texas politicians

–by Joanna Hallac

As you must all know by now (and if you don’t, you do now!), we at the U.S. Capitol Historical Society in collaboration with the German-American Heritage Museum recently unveiled our joint exhibit on German Americans in the first and 112th federal congresses. It was on display in the Cannon Rotunda from October 4th through the 7th and will make its way over to the Russell Rotunda for the week of October 24th before being displayed at the German-American Heritage Museum in December, and finally becoming a traveling exhibit after that. While we’ve posted a few times about this exhibit, offering previews and excerpts of the information contained in the panels, we thought it might be a nice change to look at some of the many German Americans who served in the Congress in the 19th and 20th centuries. I found a number from which to choose, with one in particular catching my attention—Gustav Schleicher.

Schleicher was born to a cabinetmaker in Darmstadt, Hesse in 1823. Schleicher went to school for and trained as a civil engineer assisting in German railroad construction. Schleicher and another man, Dr. Ferdinand L. Herff, were leaders of a group of intellectuals who immigrated to Texas and founded a commune, Bettina (after the German literary figure, Bettina von Amim), along the Llano River in 1847. The main thrust of the community was to prove the truth of communism and to offer a path of hope in the wake of spreading revolutions throughout Europe, culminating in the unsuccessful 1848 revolutions in the German confederation and elsewhere in Europe. The community experiment, not surprisingly, failed and left Schleicher disillusioned.

Gustav Schleicher portrait (Llano County Museum, Texas)

In 1850 Gustav Schleicher moved to San Antonio, where he and some others began the Guadalupe Bridge Company with the goal of building a toll bridge across the Guadalupe between San Antonio and New Braunfels, as well as building the San Antonio and Mexican Gulf Railway. In 1852, Schleicher became an American citizen, and in 1853-54 he was elected to serve in the House of Representatives of the Fifth Texas Legislature. Following his stretch in the Texas House, Schleicher would involve himself in numerous business ventures, acquiring vast swaths of land and cofounding the San Antonio Water Company in 1858 and Alamo College in 1860, as well as serving in the Senate of the Eighth Texas Legislature from 1859-1861.

Prior to the Civil War, Schleicher often allied himself with Democrats such as Sam Houston in supporting the Union, but after secession that would change as he became an advocate of the secessionist movement and a Captain in the Confederate Army. He also tried and failed several times to recruit an entire company of fellow Germans for Sibley’s Brigade (Sibley, a Confederate brigadier general, put together several regiments for a campaign turned debacle in New Mexico during the Civil War). After the war, Schleicher practiced law in San Antonio; in 1866, he was one of the incorporators of the Columbus, San Antonio, and Rio Grande Railroad, serving as the engineer for the construction of the Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific Railway, which ran from Indianola to Cuero (he founded the town of Cuero as a way station and moved there in 1872).

In 1874, the Democratic Party nominated Gustav Schleicher (he did not solicit the nomination) and subsequently elected him to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives representing Texas’s Sixth District. According to the Texas State Historical Association, his first order of business was the installation of an elevator in the House; more importantly, however, he became very well known for his well-researched and well-considered opinions on such issues as the restoration of the gold and silver standards and his support for the protection of the Texas frontier with Mexico. In his first term he served on the committees of Indian Affairs and Railroads and Canals, while in his second term he added a seat on the Committee on Foreign Affairs to his résumé. As he was getting ready to run for reelection in 1878, he received a strong challenge from someone in his own party due to his somewhat unpopular position on a stable currency, nearly losing reelection after a long and bitter campaign (sound familiar to anyone who follows politics today?). Sadly, however, Schleicher never got the chance to take his seat for his third term, passing away suddenly in Washington, D.C. on January 10, 1879.

Despite starting out on the far left of the political spectrum in his experiment with the Bettina commune, he soon learned the downsides to such a collectivist doctrine outside of the theoretical world and spent the remainder of his life as a conservative, in fact maintaining most German immigrants were as well. Gustav Schleicher was a hugely popular figure in both Texas and Washington; he was laid to rest with much pomp and circumstance in the U.S. National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas, and Schleicher County in West Texas is named in his honor.

The contributions made by German Americans to American society and specifically to the United States Congress cannot be overstated—Gustav Schleicher is merely another example. And while many German immigrants originally settled in places throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia in particular, it is interesting to see that later generations sought new opportunities in places like Texas too. Be sure to stay tuned as we continue to add to this series in our blog, examining more German American members of Congress from both the 19th and 20th centuries and the many positive things they have added to our American experience. If you’re interested in reading more about Schleicher or any other important Texas historical figure, visit the Texas State Historical Association website at: http://www.tsahonline.org.

Since we’ve weighed in about some of the prominent German Americans who have served in Congress, why don’t you tell us which German immigrant or German American (not necessarily an elected official) do you think has most positively impacted American society?

German Americans in Congress: More Muhlenbergs

14 Friday Oct 2011

Posted by U.S. Capitol Historical Society in October 2011: German Americans in Congress

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Congress, German Americans, history, Muhlenberg, myth, robe

–by Don Kennon
Last month we wrote about the “Muhlenberg myth”that wrongly posits Frederick Muhlenberg cast the deciding vote against making German the official language of the US. As part of our October theme, German Americans in Congress, we’ll continue with another rumor or myth that swirls around Peter Muhlenberg, Frederick’s brother and fellow minister and member of Congress.

Portrait of John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, oil on canvas, by unidentified artist (Collection of the Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Penn.)

The American Revolution propelled Frederick and Peter Muhlenberg to positions of prominence in the new nation. Frederick had no hesitations supporting independence. He returned to Pennsylvania in 1776 before New York was occupied by the British. In 1779-80 he was a delegate to the Continental Congress. He served in the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1780 to 1783, where he presided as its Speaker. Frederick wrote many letters and articles, in both English and German, supporting the revolution. In one letter during the darkest hours of the war, he exhorted his brothers to “be steadfast, rely on God, and our own strength, and endure courageously, then we shall after be sure of reaching our goal.”

As a minister, Frederick’s support of independence did not include military service. Peter, on the other hand, stepped down from the pulpit to take on the uniform of an officer in the Continental Army. There is a legend that he ended a sermon on January 21, 1776, in dramatic fashion, throwing back his black ministerial robe to reveal a military uniform.

c. 1880s painting of Peter's dramatic uniform reveal from the pulpit

Although there is no contemporary evidence to back up the story, it does reveal the importance of the clergy’s support for the revolution. The British even referred to such support as “the Black Robe Regiment.” The myth, however, was so powerful and persistent that Blanche Nevin’s 1889 granite statue of Muhlenberg in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection depicts him with the ministerial robe draped around his right arm and shoulder as he stands proudly in his military uniform.

Marble statue by Blanche Nevin of John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the United States Capitol (Architect of the Capitol)

From colonel of the 8th Virginia Regiment, Peter rose to the rank of brigadier general. As one of George Washington’s trusted commanders, he led his troops at several battles, including Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and Yorktown. After the war, Peter was elected to the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania and became its vice president in 1787. Both Peter and Frederick supported the drafting and ratification of the new US Constitution and served in the First Congress, which opened in 1789. Muhlenberg descendents continued to serve in the US Congress until the mid-twentieth century.

The robe in question on display at the Lutheran Theological Seminary (The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia)

History Detectives on PBS did a segment on a robe at the Lutheran Theological Seminary that may have belonged to Peter. They found no evidence of a dramatic disrobing in the pulpit, but learned that the robe could have belonged to Muhlenberg. A transcript of the segment is available here.

Have a favorite German American member of Congress? Know another myth about a Muhlenberg (Frederick and Peter had 9 more siblings)? Let us know in the comments.

Helping Shape America: German Americans in the U.S. Congress from 1789 to the present

04 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by U.S. Capitol Historical Society in October 2011: German Americans in Congress

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Capitol, Congress, German-American exhibit

–by Don Kennon

The U.S. Capitol Historical Society has joined with the German American Heritage Museum to create a new series of exhibits on the contributions of German Americans to the history of the United States Congress. The first of two planned exhibits tells the story of two of the first three German Americans in the First Congress—Frederick and Peter Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania—with information about the Congressional Study Group on Germany, the German-American Caucus, and current members of Congress with German ancestry.

The initial exhibit opens on October 4, 2011 in the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building where it will be on view through Friday, October 7. A second exhibit will follow in 2012 focusing on German Americans in the United States Congress in the 19th and 20th centuries. Both exhibits will travel in Germany and throughout the United States.

German immigrants were among the first settlers in 1607; over the next four centuries more than 7 million Germans followed. Today, 50 million Americans claim German ancestry. Like most immigrants to the United States, those from Germany came here seeking economic opportunity, religious freedom, and political liberty.

"First Federal Congress, 1789", by Allyn Cox located in the Capitol (Architect of the Capitol)

From the remarkable Muhlenberg brothers who provided political and military leadership during the American Revolution and then served in the First Federal Congress (1789-1791) to the members of German ancestry who serve in the current 112th Congress (2011-2013), German Americans have provided distinguished service in the national legislature.

Meeting of German American Caucus founders (May 2011), L to R: Congressman Charles Dent, Congressman Jim Gerlach (co-Chairman), Congressman Tim Holden (co-Chairman)

This 14-panel exhibit will tell their story. The U.S. Capitol Historical Society and the German American Heritage Museum gratefully acknowledge the donors who made the exhibit possible: Atlantik-Brücke E.V.; Deutsche Post DHL; Deutsche Welle; Draeger-Stiftung; Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, Washington, D.C.; United States Diplomatic Mission to Germany.

A web version of the exhibit will soon be posted on http://www.uschs.org, and our October theme on this blog will be German Americans in Congress.

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Fact-a-day from USCHS

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