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TRADITION AND CONTINUITY: ONE SOCIETY THAT SURVIVED By HAROLD JANTZ Among the dozens, indeed hundreds of societies that Americans of Ger- man descent have founded in every state of the union, the most popular were the social ones, often with the added flavor of music or gymnastics, Gesangvereine or Turnvereine. Actually "turner" became a new word in the American language. The oldest and most lasting ones were the charit- able societies, established in colonial or early federal times and continuing to the present day in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and elsewhere. The rarest of the German-American associations, however, and the most imperilled were the historical societies. They seldom lasted more than twenty or thirty years before they gently faded away. Why was this and why is it that our own Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland is the first ever to reach the hundred mark? The question is simple, the answer not nearly so simple, and it might be interesting to try to find out, by comparison and otherwise, what factors were involved to make it possi- ble for us to come together this evening to celebrate the centennial of our Society. The first such society to make a decisive impact upon American his- torography was the "Pionier-Verein" of Cincinnati, Ohio, founded shortly after the Civil War, in 1868, and publishing a periodical Der deutsche Pionier, from 1869 to 1887, not a merely local journal, but one interested in all aspects of German Americana from all parts of the United States. Cincinnati, "the Queen City of the West," was a good starting point, not simply because of its large German population, but because of the large proportion of those who were leading citizens, prominent in the cultural and intellectual life of the city and beyond that in the social, journalistic, economic, and political life, including a mayor and various other leaders in commerce, manufacture, medicine, law, and engineering—just like Balti- more. So why only Cincinnati? why not St. Louis or Milwaukee, or other cities that enjoyed equal advantages? There were no professionally trained historians; the society and its periodical were in the hands of gifted ama- teurs, up to and including its most prominent editor, Heinrich Armin Rattermann, who allowed his insurance business to ride along on its own momentum and became an almost full-time historian of the Germans on the American scene. By 1885/86 the society as a whole became a bit res- tive about the over-strong historical emphasis, as well as reluctant about [9] subsidizing it so heavily rather than pursuing the recreational aspects more extensively. This produced a split in 1886. Rattermann tried to go on with another periodical, the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Magazin, which lived only a year. The last we hear about the Pionier Verein on its fun-loving way to perdition is that it celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary on May 22, 1893. The rest is silence. I do not know how much longer it lingered on, if at all. The year in which the Cincinnati society started coming apart, 1886, was the very year in which our Society started coming together. And this is more than mere coincidence. At the very first meeting of our Society Rattermann was one of the three non-Marylanders elected as correspond- ing member, soon joined by three more. And no one apparently has noticed that in the Rattermann Papers, now at Urbana, Illinois, there are three letters of 1886 from our first and long-time secretary, Frederick Philipp Hennighausen, and there is even an earlier one from his brother, our first vice president, then president, Louis Paul Hennighausen who, beyond his distinguished civic and legal career, was to become one of the most active contributors to the historical research on the Germans in Maryland and elsewhere. Addressed to him are also two Rattermann letters from 1912 and 1913. Another founding member who corresponded with Rattermann was the able and witty journalist and poet Edward F. Leyh. The most voluminous one was Herrmann Schuricht with forty-eight items; he also wrote the most voluminous work ever published in our Reports, his History of the German Element in Virginia, over four hundred pages, in two volumes comprising the four Reports from 1898 to 1901. Meanwhile, our Society was able to pass on the torch to two other societies founded with the same or similar purposes in mind. This hap- pened in large part because among the early members there were three who did not stay on in Maryland but went elsewhere and there became leaders in German-American studies. The Anglo-American of early colonial descent, Marion Dexter Learned, was the first Germanist of distinction to receive his Ph.D. degree from an American rather than a German university. For some years he stayed on as a teacher at the Johns Hopkins before he accepted a call to the University of Pennsylvania and there continued his work in German- American studies as the worthy successor of Oswald Seidensticker. His first articles had appeared in our fifth and sixth Reports. His biography of Francis Daniel Pastorius, the founder of Germantown in 1688, and his monograph series, Americana-Germanica and German-American Annals placed him in first rank in his time. While he was still at the Hopkins, the Pennsylvania Germans decided to form their own historical society and so in 1891, five years after our foundation, Learned went north as our- delegate to the founding assembly of the Pennsylvania German Society. [ 10 ] But alas, like Seidensticker, he could not become a regular member because he was not a "direct descendant of early German or Swiss emigrants to Pennsylvania." Despite such provincial nonsense and self-restriction of effort to within its own borders, the new society flourished, with a mem- bership of five hundred and more, making valuable contributions to state history. Its last Proceedings were published in 1947, but its Publications are continuing into the present, and prospectively the society will be able to celebrate its centennial in 1991. By contrast, the Maryland society, a much smaller one in a much smaller state with a much lower concentration of German settlers, did from the beginning welcome Anglo-Americans and others into its membership, not only such leaders as Marion Dexter Learned and Henry A. Wood, but also some who were simply interested in things German and enjoyed the good fellowship of the Society. True, some of them, despite their British names, did also have German ancestry, as did Mayor and Governor Theodore R. McKeldin. Good politician that he was, he carefully distinguished among his various clubs and never was so absent-minded as to appear at our annual meetings in his kilts. One of our more recent Ph.D.s in Germanics at the Hopkins is of purely Irish descent and unmistakably Irish name. Let us call him Jim O'Neill. I was able to recommend him not only as a fine scholar and great teacher but also for his genius in organization and human relations. When he went Far West to his first, and permanent job, he soon discovered that the city surrounding his university had a most unusual and fascinating German background. He soon also found an old German society there, slowly ebbing away, until he joined it and injected new life into it. Thus there should be no raised eyebrows if it should hap- pen that the president of a German-American society is called Jim O'Neill or Mike O'Grady or Bill Sullivan. Footnote: by now, relatively early, he is not only a dean, but the dean of arts and sciences at his university. Wide perspectives again were visible at the founding of the fourth notable German American historical society at the turn of the century, the one in Illinois. It was founded mainly by Chicago citizens and with the same aims as the Pioneers and the Marylanders: an interest in local as well as country-wide German Americana, a study of the serious as well as non-serious manifestations connected with it, and an enjoyment of the company of like-minded members. The new society and its publication did very nicely during its first decade, but then along came an originally Baltimorean phenomenon, Julius Goebel, who raised it to distinction. Julius Goebel began his colorful American career at the Johns Hopkins University, 1885-88, joined our Society in its first year, and made his first contribution to it in commenting upon a manuscript of 1780 that he had found among the Francis Lieber Papers at the university. It remained unpublished because soon thereafter he embarked on his mobile career [11] from coast to coast and back again. After autocratic President David Starr Jordan fired him from Stanford University, Teddy Roosevelt saw to it that he obtained a position at Harvard (Bismarck was also a pen pal), and from there his transcontinental career pendulum returned to dignified mid position and he settled permanently in the midland prairies that sur- round the University of Illinois at Urbana. Through a number of pur- chases, large and small, including the Rattermann books and papers, the library there became one of the chief repositories for German Americana, and after 1911, when Goebel became editor of the Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblätter, this Chicago publication became a leader in its field, with several articles and monographs that remain important to this day. Almost to the end of his life, in 1931, he remained editor, and his periodical lasted only one further year. Its last remains were gathered together in a final slim volume in 1937, and this is the last we hear of the "Deutsch- Amerikanische Historische Gesellschaft von Illinois." And what happened to our own society during all these years? It nearly came to an early end about the turn of the century, in part, possibly, ex- hausted by the publication of Herrmann Schuricht's History of the Ger- man Element in Virginia. There was enough momentum left to publish a respectable fifteenth annual Report in 1901 of sixty pages, with valuable historical material. But then the Society lapsed into a long silence till 1907/08 and a still longer one till 1929. We know that life was still stirring since in 1907 there were published in continuing pagination the sixteenth to twenty-first Reports, in a few pages each, with a number of interesting articles appended, and with the twenty-second report, for 1908, tacked on at the end, even though the volume was dated 1907. Among the articles was the most remote one of all, on the tune between 1529 and 1555, when the Welser family of Augsburg was in possession of the Veneuzela territory and attempted to settle it. The author of the article was Otto Schönrich, at that time, 1904, U.S. district judge in Puerto Rico. Another article, closer to home, was presented in 1907 by Louis P. Hennighausen and con- cerned the eminent Baltimore sculptor William Henry Rinehart. This is apparently the only article in the Reports on a Maryland German artist, even though, for example, the brilliant sculptor, painter, and caricaturist Adalbert John Volck was a member of our society and in artistic circles is still held in high esteem. His versatility went well beyond the artistic sphere; indeed the Maryland Historical Society has labelled him a Renais- sance man. There was no membership list until 1906. There for the first time we find the name of the Baltimorean Albert Bernhardt Faust, even though by then he was already at Cornell University, well after his years of gradu- ate study and teaching at the Johns Hopkins University. He first attracted attention with his mongraph on the mysterious Charles Sealsfield, who had [ 12 ] been the runaway Austrian monk Karl Postl, and had come to the United States in the 1820s. Sealsfield wrote some of the livelist early novels and stories about life along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Red Rivers, in Louisiana and the new republic of Texas, with vivid delineations ranging from the frontiersmen to the more or less cultivated plantation owners on to the socialites of New York and Saratoga. Then in 1907 came Faust's com- prehensive two volumes on The German Element in the United States, still a useful basic book and the point of departure for subsequent scholars who deepened and broadened phases of his work and went on to new vistas. His archival work, alongside Learned's, is also of prime importance, not to mention his numerous other activities in the field and the honors he received. For our Society he was apparently, along with the founders and other citizens, one of the forces that helped keep it alive. Though far away, he retained his membership and in the bleak year of 1911 he delivered the twenty-fifth anniversay address, which was not printed until the Report of 1929. Ernest J. Becker in his historical sketch of the Society, 1953, tells us that aside from the officers there were only eight members present on this historic occasion. The Society seems entirely to have forgotten to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary in 1936, even though there was an annual meeting, but for the sixtieth, in 1946, Faust again was the speaker, this time for a much larger audience, reflecting on "German-American Historical Societies: Their Achievements and Limitations." His address was not printed till 1953, but previously in 1950 the twenty-seventh Report was dedicated to Faust on his eightieth birthday. Long before this, however, the Society was well on its way to recovery. Signs of this came in the Report of 1929, when such new names appear as William Kurrelmeyer, who was to become the long-time president of the Society, from 1937 to 1951, having for eleven years previously been a member of the executive committee. Here also appears Ernst Feise, notable for his conviviality and for the literary talents that he also put at the service of the Society, and then such non-academic personalities as Henry Louis Mencken and Otto H. Francke, the one world famous, the other most precious to us for his gentle, good-humored leadership. Ten years later, in 1939, came the next Report, the twenty-fourth, and during that decade there was a further influx of members who were im- portant in the continued life of the Society: Charles F. Stein, Jr., already the treasurer, Adolf E. Zucker, soon to be established as the top scholar and leader in the field, also Augustus J. Prahl, with his likewise dis- tinguished contributions, and Robert Lee Slingluff, Jr., all four, along with Otto H. Francke, destined to become successively presidents of the Society. The next Report, the twenty-fifth, appeared three years later, in 1942, and thenceforward there were to be no more long lapses foreboding oblivion. The important new name on the membership list was that of [13] Dieter Cunz, who had been commissioned by the Society to write the his- tory of The Maryland Germans. He did so in a most exemplary fashion, and since its publication in 1948 the book has retained its authoritative- ness. By then there were fifty seven members, by 1950 there were seventy three plus nine corresponding members, and among them many a further person whose contributions to the Society deserve to be honored, notably our beloved William T. Snyder, Jr. Therewith, if I may be paradoxical, we come to the end of our past and the beginning of our present, and here too there would be many a name that should be mentioned among the movers and doers. It cannot have escaped the attention of anyone who has come to our annual meetings since the mid 60s, or even glanced at the membership lists, that the com- plexion of our Society has changed radically, and for the better. Not only are our meetings more decorative and more colorful, the ladies among us have also risen to high activity and achievement, to the extent that we can hardly understand how we got along without them all those previous years (we almost didn't, of course). I observed the same thing happening about the same time at the American Antiquarian Society and the Massa- chusetts Historical Society, even though somewhat more slowly and re- luctantly, as befits venerable institutions now approaching their two hun- dreth anniversary. It was about this time that I was more than usually active in both societies, presenting such papers as the one on "The View from Chesapeake Bay: An Experiment with the Image of America," a not too serious set of observations about the Germans of the previous century and our own who came to America with their big bundle of prejudices and presumptions and used these points of departure for declaring what they thought they had observed—this in contrast to the exceptional few who took a direct look at America and saw what was really there, especially in Baltimore, people like Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and Robert Wesselhoeft, and in our time and from a different view, Carl Zuckmayer. By coincidence this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian So- ciety for 1969 simultaneously with the contribution of another member of our Maryland German society, the Hopkins historian of medicine Richard H. Shryock; and I may add that there is another member of our Society who is likely to be elected to membership there. On the new presence of women, the first shock waves reverberated through the old traditional men's colleges when the GIs returned to school after World War Two, this time with their wives and infants. We were at Princeton and witnessed the great outdoor commencement in front of venerable Nassau Hall. There were the old alumni back for their class reunions, some of them bachelors in more than one sense of the word, and then there was something that no Princetonian had ever seen before: [ 14 ] colorfully dressed young women wheeling baby carriages to a good vantage point from which they could observe their husbands receiving their diplo- mas. Unforgettable remain the alumni countenances frozen with shock and bewilderment. But to return to our original question: What, aside from this revolu- tion, has enabled our Society to reach the age of one hundred? Luck and longevity are two of the answers. Some of the founders and early mem- bers just kept on keeping on, into their eighties and nineties, one even to over a hundred (often with sons and grandsons joining them) until the young movers and doers of the 1920s and 30s were able to put new life and vigor into its activities. Even when in the first decades of the century the old guard produced too few new historical papers, they kept on holding their meetings, continuing their verbal history, and enjoying each other's company. What did it matter if the annual Report ceased being annual? Some one would be sure to come along seven years later, or twenty two years after that, to let the world know in print what had happened in the meantime. Here is a third reason for survival: congeniality plus non- compulsiveness; if there is no human dynamo around to keep things humming, the next best thing is to relax and take it easy, not worry about deadlines, and know that it will all turn out alright anyway. Two of our aster organiations foundered under the remorseless compulsion to issue a printed volume year after year after year, and in each case, when the human dynamo, Rattermann or Goebel, ceased operating and could not be replaced, the end was not far away. Only when the organization has a very large membership, headquarters, and paid staff, as in the case of the Pennsylvania German Society, can it go on relentlessly, but even it became outwardly impersonal after 1947, ceased issuing its Proceedings, and simply affixed its name to its series of Publications. Albert Faust was probably right when he observed in 1946 that our Society "is fortunate in not being required by its constitution to publish serial publications at stated intervals. . . . That is a good principle guaranteeing survival." And it has. Our present editor, Klaus Wust, took over from Dieter Cunz in 1959 for the thirtieth Report, and with the fine support he has received from other members of the Society, he is continuing to issue our Reports over two or three-year intervals in a most expert fashion, while at the same time continuing with his own scholarly writings—all this in the spare time left over from his exacting profession. And here is a further point: we are continuing as a society of amateurs— amateurs in the original and best sense of the word, here for the love of it, for the fellowship of the congenial and like minded. The Society was founded by amateurs, first from Baltimore and environs, soon and impor- tantly from the whole of Maryland with its varied German American tradi- tions since colonial days, soon also from Washington and surroundings, [15] deep into Virginia, not long afterwards also to north, south and westward, where surprising connections and filiations continue to turn up. To the businessmen and professionals the academicians were soon added and con- tributed to the whole in important ways, but they never took over, indeed never wanted to take over. The Society was just too good as it was, too pleasant to want to change it. And those of us who heard Francis Stein's Bicentennial address a decade ago could be glad that the historical side had not been taken over by the college professors. And those who have served on the executive committee could be equally glad. Indeed, the best con- tinuity we can hope for is the active amateur, with his love, his imagina- tion, his eager delving, his minute care, exploring yet another aspect of our history that has been treated too generally or even entirely neglected. Even those of us behind the no-longer-ivied walls remain amateurs, because our academic research often goes into quite different fields, even back into the Middle Ages or Antiquity or Baroque art or the Chinese theatre. After a century or more of research in Maryland-German relations and, more widely, in American-German relations, can there possibly be any- thing more of any importance that remains to be done? Most emphatical- ly, yes. One need merely look at the recent series of Reports to see that some of the most interesting and important research is just now under way. For the purpose of this evening's address I looked through the earlier pub- lications, from the beginning, and I found that a number of our early mem- bers, from their rich store of knowledge often let drop a remark or a hint by the way on a subject that they themselves had no time or inclination to pursue, one that no one since has looked into, one that is eminently worth looking into. I have already mentioned Francis Lieber and the earlier document of 1780 that Julius Goebel found among his papers. Apparently it remains unpublished to this day, and so does much else that concerns Lieber. To be sure, as one of the most distinguished of German Americans, Lieber has been the subject of many a book and article, but these are main- ly concerned with his work as a political scientist and his studies of the fundamentals of American and international law. But he was, beyond that, so versatile and interesting a person, with such a wide range of associates, that a study of him as a German American, and particularly a Southerner, should be eminently worth while. The two great repositories for his books and papers are in California at the Henry E. Huntington Library and right here at the Johns Hopkins Library. I was drawn down to his state of South Carolina through an earlier per- sonality of Revolutionary and Federal times, and this by one of the strang- est chains of co-incidence that could be imagined. It eventually came to involve Lafayette just at the time when Goethe was most interested in him and also to involve that most fascinating and adventurous of early Ger- man Americans, Justus Erich Bollmann, about whom much has been writ- ten and much remains to be written. [16] Some years ago, during a research trip in southwest Germany, I stopped by at Ulm to refresh old memories. I could not resist walking into an old bookshop and walking out again with a book of 1802 entitled (in German) Letters of a Young Scholar to his Friend. They are the 1770s letters of Johannes von Müller who was destined to become the greatest of the Swiss historians and they were to a friend who also became famous, Carl Victor von Bonstetten. On the train out of Ulm I leafed through the volume and found repeated references to a Francis Kinloch from South Carolina, then living and studying at Geneva in close contact with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bonnet as well as with Müller. At the outbreak of the American Revolu- tion Kinloch after much travel and soul searching decided to return to join the revolutionary forces. Soon after his return he and his uncle Benjamin Huger met Lafayette on his arrival, brought him to safety on the latter's plantation at the Georgia border, and started him on his long journey to Washington's headquarters. Now this uncle Benjamin Huger had a son who was named Francis Kinloch Huger and who in the early 1790s went to Europe to study medicine, first in London, later in Vienna. Meanwhile Lafayette had joined the French Revolution, became commander-in-chief of the French army resisting the invasion of the allied forces opposing the revolution, this at the time when Goethe was at the front as an observer. There came the Reign of Terror, and in quick succession Lafayette's laying down his command, seeking refuge in the Netherlands, being taken prisoner and incarcerated, eventually at Olmütz on the Bohemian border. At the time another American happened to be in Vienna; it was Justus Erich Bollmann. He plotted with young Huger to liberate Lafayette, and their plot would probably have been successful if Lafayette had not in the con- fusion of the moment ridden off in the wrong direction and been recaptured. These events came to be the great European and American sensation of late 1794 and early 1795, involving not only the press but also many of the leading men on both sides of the Atlantic. One little mistake made long ago by a German American historian was to infer that Bollmann's com- panion was also of German descent and that his real name was Franz Huger. Actually the Hugers were French Huguenot exiles. The sequel for me was that I went on to locate over one hundred un- published letters from Francis Kinloch to Johannes von Müller up to the latter's death in 1809. This was an embarassment of riches, since I already had more to do in the American German field than I could possibly take care of. But fortunately I found an able and well informed scholar on loca- tion with whom I have been collaborating, and so these well written, in- teresting, and revealing letters should soon reach print. What still remains to be done is to find the return letters from Johannes von Müller. Are they still in a trunk in the attic of a plantation house or townhouse of the Deep South? Or were they too, like so much else, the victims of the Civil War or other accident or human neglect? [ 17 ] The one field of German American cultural studies in which nearly every- thing needs to be done (or done over again) is the field of art, particularly of painting. It is not only that the earlier historians had too limited a per- sonal knowledge of it and of the critical consensus of those times, it is also because just in the past few decades there has been such a radical revision both of material knowledge and of critical opinion that the field of Ameri- can art itself has become a virtually new one, or, in part at least, a revised one, as in the case of the American luminists and impressionists, who were highly esteemed in their own day, forgotten in the mid-century decades, and now again are elevated to positions of importance. Thus one could in the good old days walk along Howard Street or attend an auction and come home with a painting of real quality but small value because it was by a forgotten artist. If one had chosen a painting purely for quality, without regard for name or fame, one simply had it carefully cleaned and restored by a real certified expert (not a self-proclaimed one), hung it in an ap- propriate place in one's home, and enjoyed it for the next twenty years or so until the rest of the world also discovered or rediscovered the artist. Then one had a bit of extra pleasure in watching the auction prices on his paintings rise, not infrequently to ten or a hundredfold of one's original cost, sometimes even absurdly more than that. Let me give just one ex- ample, a late one. For the American Bicentennial one of the addresses I delivered was at the beautiful new Museum of our Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts, where they were exhibiting the treasures of rare and even unique Americana that I had helped assemble at Wolfenbüttel the previous year. I had not been in Boston for some time and decided to stay on for a few more days. Walking along Commonwealth Avenue, I saw some interesting things in an antique shop, went in, and promptly forgot everything else when I saw an impressionist painting hanging over the owner's desk. He obviously loved it as much as I quickly learned to love it. But it was by Henry Ham- mond Ahl (A-H-L), and who had ever heard of Henry Hammond Ahl? It appeared that the dealer had had some unhappy experiences with people who bought names instead of paintings, and he had found that he could not readily sell it or another smaller painting by a mere Ahl. So the price quoted was a modest one. The two paintings remained with our restorer friend in New England who had little more to do than clean them carefully. By the time they reached us, the whole situation had changed. New York had rediscovered this German-American artist from New England and found that the museums in Washington, Worcester, Portland, and else- where who had acquired his paintings during his lifetime had been right all along. This is only one of the German-American painters who have risen to new prestige during recent years, and there are still more of real quality awaiting the alert eye of the passing collector. Another much earlier German American, August Weidenbach, had had to [ 18 ] flee Berlin in 1848, just as his first one-man show was on exhibit there. Apparently with two other revolutionary youths he boarded ship and sailed for Baltimore. At any rate, we can see the three, playing cards, in the right foreground of the only known painting of the interior of an emigrant sail- ing ship of mid nineteenth century. Mother, babe, and two unruly young- sters occupy mid foreground, and an apparently very sick woman is in the left foreground with her husband helplessly hovering over her. Some twenty-odd figures of all ages and attitudes occupy middle and background of this steerage chamber, with light coming down the two stairways from the deck above. No verbal description can quite do justice to the over- crowding and hardships the early emigrants had to endure. When I acquired the painting, it had been blackened by years of exposure and grime, and, before it was cleaned, it took a very strong light to penetrate the gloom and discover that there was a painting underneath it all, indeed one of the important historical documents of the age of emigration. Faust, like most other historians, could not do full justice to German- American art even for his own time, and one of the few gravely weak fea- tures of Dieter Cunz's The Maryland Germans is his treatment of the artists of this state. For a better and more copious understanding one has to turn to Rudolf Cronau, now nearly forgotten as an able historian of the German Americans and almost completely forgotten as an artist, especially of the Far West. He had bad luck: his Three Centuries of German Life in America (1909 and again 1924) appeared shortly after Faust's book; it was not as thorough and encompassing and did not gain as great a critical acclaim. The result was that scholars wrongly came to the conclusion that they could safely neglect it and rely solely on Faust—this to their great loss, for Cronau, from an entirely different background and point of view, has many insights in his book that were closed to Faust. And especially when it comes to art, he can write first-handedly and at times brilliantly about the German contributions. His other historical achievements are also considerable. Samuel Eliot Morison in his Columbus biography, for in- stance, honors him for the pioneer work he did on determining the landfall of Columbus, just where other historians had gone astray. Cronau's magnificent large folio volumes with colored lithographs of the scenic wonders of America make one wish to see his original drawings and paint- ings, but nowhere is there mention of them, not even in the most compre- hensive volumes on Western art. He also did a most impressive portrait of the great Indian chief, Sitting Bull, sometime after this warrior defeated General Custer and his men at Little Big Horn. Cronau apparently spent some time with Sitting Bull and his Sioux tribesmen, and the two men became good friends, so much so that the Indian chief learned to speak German. What happened perhaps was that he had conceived an antipathy against the English speakers after the bad treatment he and his people had received from them. By contrast, [ 19 ] here was a splendid warm-hearted paleface, with sonorous eloquent lan- guage pouring forth from him, and with mutual admiration uniting them. So why not turn to a language that would bring them even closer together and separate him even farther from his enemies? One can learn about this only from the long and interesting obituary of Cronau that appeared in the New York Herald-Tribune on October 28, 1939, obviously based on family information and his own reminiscences, oral or otherwise. To be sure, this does not make Sitting Bull a German American, but it would have made him eligible for honorary membership in the Society for the History of the Germans in the Dakotas, if someone out there had only established it. Let us close with a final glance at the founding years of the Society and see what they have to tell us. The very first paper published in the Reports was on "Jonathan Hagar, the Founder of Hagerstown," by Basil Sollers, and thenceforward the importance of Middle and Western Maryland was never forgotten. The second paper read before the Society and reported on in summary was on a German colonial homestead. The surprising thing is that the author was a woman, Mrs. Albert Leakin-Sioussat. So the mas- culine walls of Jericho had at least a dent put in them in the very first year, even though they came tumbling down much later. The third paper, by Charles J. Wiener, was on the earliest of the famous German Mary- landers, Augustin Hermann, to whom historians come back again and again without quite reaching definitive conclusions. One of the six first corre- sponding members, F. W. E. Peschau of Wilmington, North Carolina, spoke about the German settlers in North and South Carolina and Tennessee, especially about one Colonial German who "after many hardships, fur- nished the first map" of the Carolinas, just as Augustin Hermann did for Maryland. Many and diverse groups of Germans settled in North Carolina, and the influence of them and their descendants remains strong to the present day in politics, business, the professions, and the arts. Separate aspects have been studied, but a comprehensive survey is still lacking, the only distinct historical archives being those of the Herrnhuter, the Mora- vian Brethren at Winston Salem. The Maryland papers continue with a religious colony in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, the unveiling of the De Kalb statue at Annapolis, German emigration lists—in sum, the Society from the very beginning endeavored to open up perspectives in all directions and never settled down to a narrow provincialism. By their words and actions the founders set the tone for our Society that has prevailed to the present day. We do have a tradition, we do have continuity, and this one Society has survived. [20 ]