The German-Americans: An Informal History (review)

book reviews275 ganization and the ways in which a primarily antiemigrationist church body handled its deviant Bishop. (Nor does the book explain the occasional shifts in position of The Christian Recorder, the church's newspaper .) A more significant difficulty is the understandable conceptual confusion in the author's use of "nationalism" and "emigrationism." Although at several points he implies that black nationalism need not be accompanied by emigration sentiment, he usually merges the two tendencies indiscriminately. Consequently, he assumes Bishop Turner's nationalism had drifted down, undistilled, to the black emigrationists, although the bulk of his evidence points to the economic and social factors "pushing " blacks from the South. Economic factors and a desire to establish a home in a black "fatherland" could certainly go hand-in-hand: whether they always did is another question. These criticisms aside, Bhck Exodus is a thoroughly-documented and readable study which successfully challenges the traditional view that blacks have always attempted to integrate themselves into the larger American society. Floyd J. Miller Oberlin College The German-Americans: An Informal History. By Richard O'Connor. ( New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1968. Pp. xii, 484. $8.95. ) "The purpose of this," writes the author on page five, "is to attempt a discovery of what social and historical impact the German-American has made on the United States—admittedly not as a scholarly exercise, because the author leaves that task to the academic historians and social scientists, but as an informal inquiry into the subject." Such coyness not only makes serious criticism of the work seem churlish, but it also misleads the reader by deflecting attention from what is wrong with this book on its own level. This "informal history" fails on two grounds. Firstly, its aim, though lofty and one which would also appeal to scholarly historians, remains unfulfilled. Secondly, O'Connor's disclaimer of serious intent does not, alas, assure the reader that the end product will be entertaining. His early qualification may excuse him from exhaustive research or penetrating analysis, but it does not excuse poor organization , warmed-over anecdotes, padding, and sloppiness. Obviously meant to cash in on the lode so profitably mined by Stephen Birmingham in his recent, semifictional Our Crowd, O'Connor's book lacks the polish of Birmingham's which, though shameless regarding facts, was strong on style and focus. O'Connor never even offers what should have been his first item of business—a working definition of the "German-American." Judging from the book, he includes under his ethnic umbrella just about everyone who ever had a single ancestor or relative who once was exposed to things German. How else can one justify 276civil war history the attention O'Connor gives to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (whose paternal grandmother was "German"), to Grace Kelly ("whose mother is of German descent"), or to Victor Herbert (whose mother took a German for a second husband ) ? Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian Jew, becomes one of O'Connor's "German-Americans" apparently because he spoke German and settled in St. Louis! Even author O'Connor can pass for a "German-American," as he dedicated the book "To my Hessian great-grandfather." O'Connor's chapter on German-American Jews provides a good example of his essential dilletantism. August Belmont, the Rhenish-born banker-politician-sportsman-socialite, is given major space (eight errorstrewn pages) in the section even though he never made a move to identify himself with the Jewish community; but Jacob H. Schiff and Louis D. Brandeis, two towering figures in German-American Jewry, are not even mentioned. Furthermore, it makes no sense to mention the Jewish background of Belmonts, Seligmans, Ochses, and Strauses, and to omit it when discussing (at some length) Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Oscar Hammerstein I, and Charles P. Steinmetz. Occasionally, O'Connor puts individuals aside long enough to talk about issues and movements, such as the periodic German emigration to the United States, German-American settlements and neighborhoods, and German-American reactions to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the two World Wars. But even here his treatment is merely a rehash, and not a lively one at that. The author may have intended this book...