rch festivals with
German cookery and _Kuchen_, and their weddings and christenings were
enlivened but rarely debauched with generous libations of lager beer
and wine. In the Middle West were whole regions where German was the
familiar language for two generations.

There were three strata to this second German migration. The earlier
courses were largely peasants and skilled artisans, those of the
decade of the Civil War were mostly of the working classes, and
between these came the "Forty-eighters." Upon them all, however,
peasant, artisan, merchant, and intellectual, their experiences in
their native land had made a deep impression. They all had a
background of political philosophy the nucleus of which was individual
liberty; they all had a violent distaste for the petty tyrannies and
espionages which contact with their own form of government had
produced; and in coming to America they all sought, besides farms and
jobs, political freedom. They therefore came in humility, bore in
patience the disappointments of the first rough contacts with pioneer
America and its nativism, and few, if any, cherished the hope of going
back to Germany. Though some of the intellectual idealists at first
had indefinite enthusiasms about a _Deutschtum_ in America, these
visions soon vanished. They expressed no love for the governments they
had left, however strong the cords of sentiment bound them to the
domestic and institutional customs of their childhood.

This was to a considerable degree an idealistic migration and as such
it had a lasting influence upon American life. The industry of these
people and their thrift, even to paring economy, have often been
extolled; but other nationalities have worked as hard and as
successfully and have spent as sparingly. The special contribution to
America which these Germans made lay in other qualities. Their artists
and musicians and actors planted the first seeds of aesthetic
appreciation in the raw West where the repertoire had previously been
limited to _Money Musk_, _The Arkansas Traveler_, and _Old Dog Tray_.
The liberal tendencies of German thought mellowed the austere
Puritanism of the prevalent theology. The respect which these people
had for intellectual attainments potently influenced the educational
system of America from the kindergarten to the newly founded state
universities. Their political convictions led them to espouse with
ardor the cause of the Union in the war upon slavery;