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  • The Ethnicity of Ohio's Strength Culture
  • John D. Fair (bio)

Ohio, perhaps more than any other state, served as a conduit in the nineteenth century for the westward movement of Americans seeking to escape the overcrowded eastern seaboard.1 After the War of 1812, with fertile lands opening west of the Appalachians, public officials were eager to attract immigrants to fill a population vacuum. No small portion of these newcomers was from Central and Eastern Europe, especially Germans, who streamed across the Allegheny Plateau into the Till Plains, descended the Ohio River, or entered the lake ports.2 As a result, a corridor of German settlements emerged from Cincinnati in the southwest to Toledo in the northwest parts of Ohio. These sites became the basis for a belt of Germans, largely from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, who occupied a two-hundred-mile swath that extended to the Mississippi River. They were reinforced by another wave of German immigrants after the 1848 revolutions in Europe and by a potpourri of nationalities who sought jobs along the newly urbanized Erie lakefront at the end of the century.3 The German community was distinguished by such place names as Berlin, Hanover, and Potsdam, but the largest concentration was in Cincinnati where Germans increased from 5 percent in [End Page 5] 1830 to 41 percent in 1900.4 But by the twentieth century, Cleveland replaced the "Queen City" of the West as "Ohio's most ethnic city."5 The number of foreign-born in Cleveland (speaking over forty languages) increased from 97,095 in 1890 to 196,170 in 1910, making it literally a collage of central, southern, and eastern European nationalities.6

It was the Germans, however, who planted the seeds of ethnicity. About half of Ohio's foreign-born residents were German by the 1850s. German Ohioans more than doubled in number from 1850 to 1890, and German was the dominant ethnic group in thirty-seven of Ohio's eighty-eight counties from 1850 to 1950.7 Most notable was their distinctive cultural proclivities. Civic-minded people, they formed improvement societies, patronized the arts, and bonded through spirited beer-drinking and singing fests.8 Evidence of this "cohesive spirit" abounded, notes William Downard, in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine district; Germans patronized "its many saloons, beer halls, beer gardens, concert halls, and amusement places, while the breweries … kept the supply of beer flowing."9 That these ethnic traditions did not long persist into the next century may be attributed to a natural blending of Germans into America's mainstream. It was hastened, however, by the anti-Teutonic sentiments generated by the First World War and the onset of Prohibition, leading Kathleen Conzen to conclude that the "tribal idols as we once knew them are lost to the tribe for good" and that "most, along with most of those who once worshipped them, are now irretrievably ensconced in the larger cave that is American culture itself."10

All traces of German culture, however, were not obliterated in the American melting pot. Not unlike the persistence of place names, America's preference for German-style beer, musical compositions, and even the Ph.D., suggests the possibility of subliminal influences on American culture, particularly in a state of so much Teutonic presence as Ohio. "To what extent," one author queries, "the Turner societies and other German American social clubs actually became a venue for cultural exchange between Germans, Americans and other immigrant groups has not been thoroughly investigated."11 [End Page 6] Despite the early presence of turnvereins (gymnastics clubs), few scholars mention them, and usually only in relation to Union regiments in the Civil War or as centers of socialism or free-thinking philosophy.12 None emphasize their strength and fitness component, a tradition that originated with Father Friedrich Ludwig Jahn's national regeneration movement during the Napoleonic era in Prussia and proved highly exportable. The Cincinnati Central Turners (1848) was the first of many such societies in American cities where pursuit of bodily excellence was no less important than intellectual development.13 "The significance of the German emphasis on the building of individual strength and on physical development," estimates Kenneth Dutton in...

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