by Elisa New
In 1790, when George Washington created the first United States consulate and dispatched the first trade envoy, no insider would have been surprised that the city he chose for this honor was the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. In addition to thumbing America’s now independent nose at Britain’s king, his action embodied commercial good sense as well as poetic justice. As uncowed by England ’s royal prerogatives as by any German prince’s, the cities of the Hansa had long conducted themselves with perfect indifference to royal monopolies and imperial claims.
Since the Middle Ages, the kings and queens of England had no choice but to deal with the Hansa, whose emissaries, installed in their Guildhall in London, controlled not only Baltic but North Sea trade as well. The German Hansa cities of the Middle Ages bankrolled some English ventures, blocked others, and generally exerted an influence on trade across Europe exceeding England ’s. As kingdoms dissolved and empires rose and fell, through wars of roses and wars of succession and wars of seven, thirty, and one hundred years, the Free Hanseatic Cities traded on.
Even after the league itself dissolved, Bremen, Hamburg, Danzig, Memel, Libau, Lübeck, and Riga went on trading. As Germany, perennially disunited, had its boundaries drawn again and again, the Hansa merchants kept the wine and cloth going east; the flax, hemp, timber, furs, and grain going west.
From the late seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, Britain monopolized all the major ports along the Atlantic colonies and made the rest of Europe pay for the goods England imported from America and then reexported. Cities like Bremen and Hamburg, free since the eleventh and twelfth centuries, knew how to bide their time. These international cities were accustomed to long business cycles.
The tobacco trade, carried on to Bremen’s disadvantage from the founding of Jamestown through the American Revolution, provides the quintessential case of Bremen and Hamburg’s patience. For two centuries, these free cities paid the substantial markup on tobacco exported from the Chesapeake to England and then reexported to them. They hoped to profit eventually.
What a boon it was then for the Hansa! What fine repayment of the free cities’ patience when, the guns of the Revolution echoing their last, Bremerhaven harbor began seeing American ships laden with tobacco. In the year following George Washington’s agreement with Bremen in 1790, only 4 of the 478 ships entering the Weiser River were from America. But in the next hundred years the flow of tobacco to the east increased exponentially. Between 1800 and the 1850s, the sea lane connecting Bremen to Baltimore became one of the busiest in the Atlantic. The U.S. Civil War interrupted the flow, as the sea war of 1812 had, but by 1868 Bremen had reestablished itself as the main tobacco port in Europe, followed by Rotterdam. Baltimore was the main port shipping tobacco from America. For every hogshead going to England, Baltimore now shipped six or seven to Bremen.
Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, ships discharging hogsheads of tobacco in Bremen and Hamburg began to take on a new kind of freight. The siftings from the fragrant barrels of tobacco now pillowed the heads of an equally lucrative but more lively cargo. Ships from Baltimore conveyed tobacco to the Free Ports and returned to Baltimore carrying immigrants.
Before that time German immigrants to America landed at Havre de Grace on the Susquehanna River, bypassing the noise and dirt of Baltimore on their way to quieter places. Religious pietists, provincials, country people, these Germans sought farmsteads a hundred miles away in York and Lancaster counties, Pennsylvania, or farther west in Ohio. Disembarking from schooners, they spent their carefully saved hoards on wagons and then, fitting German harnesses on American oxen, lumbered out the next day. Steady people, traditional people, they evinced little interest in cities.
Nor was Baltimore in the 1820s to 1840s an irresistible place to be. Indeed Baltimore was a city hard on the nerves.
Travelers steering out of Chesapeake Bay toward Fells Point between 1790 and the 1830s still found Baltimore’s docks higgledypiggledy—now a pier, now a marsh, now a handsome jetty, now a mire. Construction projects were mounted in bursts, abandoned when exports did not get expected returns or when labor trouble erupted. Piles of lumber stood in all weather. Ships in all stages of completion shifted in the sucking mud. Slaves were hired out by inland masters, and their mistreatment was obvious to any who paid mind.
Just inland from the busy harbor, sailors unloaded fine teas and eaux de cologne, silks and cheeses and mailbags full of letters. And then they reeled drunkenly through Fells Point, where the streets were ankle deep in flood water and emptied slops. European merchants, encouraged by Baltimore ’s smart well-rigged ships, recoiled at the city’s crude accommodations. In Baltimore, one supped on corn coarsely ground and meat butchered in the alley outside. The supply of vegetables from the fertile hills above was irregular; the stink of animals in the city center was pervasive. Baltimore was, one visitor sighed, a place of “many luxuries and no comforts.”
Farther out from the city’s populous center, things were often worse. If central Baltimore sometimes steeped in a bay broth rich with sea life, ordure, sewage, and disease, the city’s edge endured chronic mudslides, not to mention frequent tangled accidents with horses and carts. The same geography that made the city a noisome hole catching refuse from the heights also hampered the delivery of fresh goods from the countryside.
To Baltimore, along with their crafts and their ethos of craft, immigrants from the Hansa towns brought ripened notions of social good and of the dignities accruing to social roles. They brought not just luxuries but comforts; not just progress but modernity; not just the adrenaline high of life among crowds but a set of well-developed beliefs in civil life and the city.
What this new immigrant brought to the Chesapeake was the word my great-grandfather used and his daughters Fanny, Myrtle, and Jean embodied and impressed on us all, merely by how they stood, walked, and stored their many pairs of gloves in their bureau drawers in original tissue. That word is civilization.
Imagine the new immigrant arriving in Baltimore circa 1880. On disembarkation, he is greeted by a welcoming party from the local Mechanic Society, German chapter, or if he possesses a trade in local demand (say, cigar making) he may even be met by a member of the local German manufactory. Perhaps this old European concern has now opened a branch in Baltimore, the better to select its own leaf at auction in Danville. Whichever it is, having departed from Bremen or Hamburg, the immigrant coasts into the city along with the weekly mail.
Calendar, 1888, Norddeutscher Lloyd. From the author’s collection.
As he adapts to his new setting, the newcomer finds Baltimore as fertile in Gemütlichkeit as any city on the globe. From the Locust Street dock, he may be led to a neighborhood where members of his own church or synagogue pray from the prayer books of home and hold the picnics and festivals familiar to him. If he does not already have employment, he may be helped to find it, seasonal or permanent, in one of the manufacturing workshops springing up all over the city. And if he has a wife he will be encouraged to look to her. Perhaps she ought to make herself useful? Make a decent contribution as the family gets on its feet? Every Thursday the Norddeutscher Lloyd docks see many German country girls bound for service up Charles Street, making their way to the kitchens and nurseries of the rich.
In the unlikely event that our immigrant is slow in understanding the Americans’ unorthodox ways with headgear—casualness about hats on or hats off, their penchant for straw—he will be admonished not to be distracted by sloppy American mores. A man sets the right tone in business in a coat and collar. Has he not yet joined a club, a workingman’s group, some association of mutual aid and recreation? Has he not yet learned to keep his countenance, to remain equable in proximity to slaves or ex-slaves? He will be reminded that he is a worker of a proud tradition, one drawing on the oldest guild ways and the newest social theories. Yes, many people have started out in America poor. And look at them now.
Look at them now—smoking, sipping beer, and debat
ing the world ’s affairs with no one to interfere. In their own clubs, the Germania and the Concordia, they are speaking the German language.
Certainly Baltimore ’s men to watch in the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s were the busy Bremen and Hamburg traders who traveled the seas and then repaired to these clubs to discuss business. The men at the Germania and similar clubs comprised a striking subculture. Enthusiastically German and enthusiastically American, they would be likely to characterize themselves, if asked, as simply enthusiastically Baltimorean. Like the Hansa’s London emissaries of centuries back, the Bremen and Hamburg traders owned the place.
The smoking room of the Germania, well stocked with latest news of local commerce—the Baltimore Sun, the American, Niles Register, Prices Current, and of course Tobacco Leaf—was also where a man found conveniently posted the last-minute changes in the schedule of the Norddeutscher Lloyd. He would want to know when the ships would pull in, for then the smoking room would be restocked with papers from all over German-speaking Europe. The local German sheets—the abolitionist Wecker, Deutsche Correspondent, and others were stacked conveniently in the magazine stands.
Yet any who mistook the members of the Germania Club for reluctant Americans—or for sentimentalists, throwbacks, or green-horns—would be wrong. They threw themselves wholeheartedly into their new country’s politics. It was not nostalgia for what was left behind that the members of the Germania Club nursed in Baltimore. It was Gemütlichkeit and Kultur they fostered there. They had a talent for not being alien.
Baltimore ’s famous son H. L. Mencken recalled his grandfather August’s spasms of identification with a wide range of authentic but wholly inconsistent Germanies. A penchant for submitting himself to theological discussion did not, in Grandfather August’s book, ill comport with also affecting the dialect of the Pennsylvania Germans from whom he bought tobacco. Nor did the fact that he, like most of the German businessmen in those days, came from people once traders in Oldenburgh, inhibit him from scorning those from the Hansa towns. H. L. Mencken’s grandfather’s adopted pedigree as a “Saxon,” a pedigree acquired in Baltimore, entitled him to “disdain them Plattdeutschen” when the whim struck.
What August Mencken might have meant by Plattdeutschen was Jews. The coastal, cosmopolitan trading zones of the northern Hansa towns were more likely than inland regions to host their share of Jews. Baltimore German Jews were not immune from the prejudice to which Jews worldwide had long been subject. And yet it is fair to say that Jews enjoyed in this port of entry, as in so many others, privileges accruing to Germanness frequently in excess of penalties levied on Jewishness.
Historian A.J.P. Taylor once pointed out that it was trade that spread Germanness across Europe. In places where Germans had “no concrete national home and little expected one,” they were unmistakably German. Meanwhile, as Taylor continued, “Where Germans did not penetrate, their influence was carried by Jews.”
It cannot be literally true that nineteenth-century Baltimore gave the Hansa its last hurrah, but to many of German extraction in Baltimore it seemed that way.
This protean, as opposed to purist, Germanness, so detachable from national identity and volkisch rootedness, struck strong roots in Baltimore and its preservation carried no threat to ardent American patriotism, nor to what was just as common, ardent love for the adopted city of Baltimore. This Germanness embraced English as the language of the home and coined key terms for its liberation from the parochial or ancien régimes: “Liberal” was one. “Enlightened” was another. Business in nineteenth-century Baltimore was ecumenical. At the Germania, it was hardly worth remarking that some among the smokers had learned Polish or Latvian from their mothers or that some mixed Hungarian loanwords with their German.
In Baltimore, for those properly liberal, neither country nor ethnic origin outweighed the bond of the common language. Spoken by Baltimore ’s rising business class, German carried with it Kultur—the common love of music, reading, and the edifying lecture.
Nor did religious affiliation present insuperable barriers. In 1869 the bride of Rabbi Benjamin Szold wrote to her mother, “We have made many friends, Jew and Gentile, German and American.” Henrietta bids her mother imagine that her husband, the rabbi, not only “delivered a speech in English on the subject of ‘Charity’ before an American Gentile audience in the Masonic Hall in Lynchburg Virginia,” but that his speech “was printed in all the English language newspapers.”
Even more striking examples of the ecumenism of the 1880s are provided by H. L. Mencken, who recounts that at his Gymnasium, the famous German-English Knapp School, there was no “enmity between the Chosen and the Goyim in the old professor’s establishment, and no sense of difference in the treatment of them.”
In the 1880s, Mencken notes, there was “still a class in Hebrew” on which he himself sat in “long enough to learn the Hebrew alphabet.” True, Professor Knapp might discharge his own Prussian spleen by “bursting into a classroom that was disorderly, to denounce it as a Judenschule,” and yet, Mencken recalls, the Prussian schoolmaster was also “fond of using a number of Hebrew [!] loan words, tokos (backside), schlimiel (oaf ), kosher (clean) and meshuggah (crazy).” Not to be outdone in liberality, Mencken points out that the Jewish students helped themselves to the whole sideboard, clean and unclean. About the pork eating of his Jewish schoolmates, Mencken writes, “I must add in sorrow that the Jews at Knapps’s were unanimously chazir-fressers.”
Mencken’s Yiddish usage reveals how easily, how promiscuously, “Germans” of all kinds mixed in 1880s Baltimore. I say this knowing that my aunts would have found such mixing quite unfortunate.
As well as I can remember Aunt Fanny’s response to the question of whether she remembered any Yiddish, it was to be offended that I could picture her so Ball’mer. She thought of Yiddish as an earthy, casual language spoken by persons of haphazard upbringing. For Jews who knew no better, Yiddish was fine, but the language of Balt-ee-mewer Jews who hailed from “Austria” was naturally English.
And if Aunt Fanny had looked mournful at my lack of understanding, Aunt Jean did not scruple to hide her strong indignation. Did I imagine, her stern look challenged me, that her brothers, Eddie, Paul, and Theo, and then her sons, Jerry and Earle, would have been invited to join Uncle Baron in London, to inherit what he had built, had they not had the proper upbringing, had not come from the finest sort of Jewish home? Not a Yiddish-speaking but a nice home, full of her father’s books, with proper furnishings, and children brought up carefully to know exactly what was what?
Admittedly her father, Jacob, had regarded his sons’ name change from Levy to Baron, their employment change from cloth shrinking to tobacco, and their departure from the country of their birth, America, to England, as a betrayal. The subsequent departure of his grandsons, her sons, he also regarded as a knife thrust at his heart. Jean herself chose to see the transfer of the Levy men from Baltimore to London as destiny.
What my Aunt Jean did not tell me, and what I did not begin to understand until I followed Jacob’s cane and let history guide me back to Baltimore, is that these seeds had been planted well before either her formidable father or good Uncle Baron ever sailed into Chesapeake Bay. Generations before they came to the Bay, a full century before George Washington established the trade relations with Germany that would crowd the shipping lanes, these seeds were planted.
Long before Bernhard Baron struck wealth from his invention so prodigious, so marvelously productive of pleasure and well-being, young men had been reaping rewards in London that had sprouted from seedlings on the Chesapeake.
Like my great-uncles, like Uncle Baron himself, what seeded all their fortunes was tobacco.
FIVE
That Bewitching Vegetable
It really was a pity, in Aunt Jean’s case, that the United States of America decided not to confer titles on its distinguished citizens. For I think she was as formidable a lady as her sister-in-law, Lady Bertha Baron of London, w
ho also was raised (though she hid it) in Baltimore. Or if Jean could not have an actual title conferred at Court, then she should have had one of those epithets given to sovereigns and conquerors. Jean the Unswayable.
Jean the Indomitable.
Imperious over her steel rims, queenly behind her city balcony, Aunt Jean resembled Bette Davis’s Queen Elizabeth in a Bonwit Teller dress. Part diva, part dragon, opinionated but wholly indifferent to opinion, Aunt Jean, all the family agreed, was great.
Not nice. Or considerate. Or warm, or any of those pleasant things her sisters Myrtle and Fanny were. But great.
Just like appearing at Court, calling on Aunt Jean meant meeting the highest standards of sartorial care. Jean wore, of course, whatever Jean liked.
Unlike Fanny and Myrtle, who believed that a lady, even an old lady, should remain au courant, Jean was above truckling to fashion or observing the protocols of dress dictated by occasion and hour. Sometime in the 1960s Myrtle and Fanny started having their hair cut, colored, and teased into one of the silver-or gold-blond or copper-blond coiffures in favor with the ladies of their card club. Sharing one cab to the hairdresser, having lunch out, they made a day of it, sometimes even wandering from the salon and into Lord & Taylor’s for a bit of shopping, looking at the newer styles. Myrtle never went very far, but there was a three-year stretch in the 1970s when Fanny, inspired by the racks, was known to appear in pantsuits. “Whoo-hoo!” her son Dan would say, stretching out his long legs. “Pants for company, Mother? But of course you’ll change for dinner,” he teased. “Should we call Jean to ask what she thinks?”
As she had done since roughly World War I, in the mornings Jean swept her thinning brown hair into a French knot. Then she put on the elastic hose. And then whatever dress and cardigan, or satin quilted housecoat, went best with her arthritic back and state of mind. Arrayed by eight o’clock in what she ’d wear (barring a “function”) all day, she ’d stretch her legs out on the stool before the damask chair and brief her housekeeper, Leona, on the day’s visitors: delicacies to offer, accoutrements required.