A Withering Church in Europe
In one crucial way, the early Amish were very similar to their neighbors. By the 1730s, they were welcoming the opportunity to move to British North America. In 1681 William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania as an expression of his Quaker peace principles and commitment to toleration, and he sent agents and advertising into the Rhine Valley to generate interest in immigration. The possibility that families could buy land for themselves and their offspring made moving to North America attractive for many German households. That Pennsylvania had no militia and granted freedom of worship made it especially appealing to Amish, Mennonites, Radical Pietists, and other religious minorities. Some five hundred Amish immigrated to Pennsylvania in the decades before the American Revolution, making them one small slice of a sizable German trans-Atlantic movement.30 For a timeline showing Amish lineage, see figure 2.2.
Later arrivals could count on help from those already in North America in getting settled and finding their way around. Amish newcomers often carried church letters from ministers in Europe attesting to their standing in the Amish community and commending them to the church in the New World. Typical was immigrant Christian Schwartzentruber (1793–1875), who left the principality of Waldeck, Germany, in 1819, as part of a second, larger wave of some three thousand Amish emigrants who sailed for North America between 1815 and 1860. Schwartzentruber carried with him a written recommendation from Samuel Brennemann and Jacob Brennemann affirming that he “may … be taken in and accepted as a Brother in the Lord and in the congregation.”31 Schwartzentruber settled first among Amish in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, but after marriage moved to Ohio and eventually to Iowa.
The Amish church in Europe withered in the late 1800s. In many ways, emigration undercut the group’s ability to endure. Membership likely peaked in 1850, when five thousand members lived in Alsace, with a lesser number in Hesse, the Palatinate, and elsewhere. But the departure of many households and crucial young leadership to North America during the 1800s drained the church’s vitality. Two of Bavaria’s three Amish churches, for example, disbanded during that time due to massive emigration to Illinois and Ontario.32
FIGURE 2.2. Anabaptist-Amish Timeline, 1517–1890
The forces of acculturation also levied a toll. The secular principles of the French Revolution had made once-persecuted dissenters into legally recognized citizens, which in turn opened the way for Amish families to join the social mainstream. Genealogical records for the Amish congregations in Hessian Waldeck and Wittgenstein reveal prosperous families who hoped to join more respectable state churches. At the same time, citizenship brought new requirements of universal military service by all males. As those Amish with the strongest peace convictions headed for North America, some of the young men who remained accepted induction into the army. In the 1880s, a Hessian Amish elder, Peter Schlabbach, was even elected to the Prussian legislature. Within a decade, his dwindling congregation had to combine with a neighboring Mennonite church to survive.
During the later 1800s and early 1900s, the few Amish who remained in Europe merged with nearby Mennonite groups, who were undergoing their own process of assimilation. Churches of Amish background in Alsace remained somewhat more traditional, but, especially after World War I, they surrendered practices that might have distinguished them—shunning and the footwashing ritual—and accepted marriages between Amish and non-Amish individuals. In many cases, nationalist influences even led congregations to make peace with military service. In 1937 the last Amish congregation, a small church in the Palatinate village of Ixheim, merged with the Zweibrücken Mennonites, closing the Amish story in Europe. See Appendix B for key dates and events in Amish history.
Some scholars suggest that the demise of the European Amish church was inevitable and that it had more to do with geography than emigration and acculturation. Because the Amish were tenant farmers and leaseholders on scattered estates, they were unable to create close-knit communities like those formed by Amish immigrants in North America. The difficulty of establishing stable communities, these observers argue, explains why the European Amish declined while their American cousins increased.33 Regardless, the Amish experience in America was hardly free from tension, and the evolution of Amish identity there grew out of a dynamic struggle marked by both social separation and cultural engagement.
CHAPTER 3
THE STORY IN AMERICA
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The oral tradition of the Amish of Daviess County, Indiana, includes the story that their leaders once preached and prayed in the White House. Sometime in the 1890s, two of the settlement’s leaders, Bishop Joe Wittmer (1844–1915) and Minister Peter Wagler (1853–1933), were traveling in the East and had stopped over in Washington, D.C., to change trains. As the two men waited in the grand station hall, an official approached them, asked if they were clergy, and invited them to conduct a chapel service at the White House. The invitation startled the two men, but according to family memory, “after some hesitation they complied with the request. They felt that to do otherwise would be inconsistent with their calling.”
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Entwined with the American Saga
The story of Joe Wittmer and Peter Wagler praying in the White House is highly unusual in Amish lore, but it underscores the fact that Amish people have never lived in isolation. Whether changing trains in an urban depot in the nineteenth century or supporting volunteer fire companies and marketing furniture to sophisticated urbanites in the twenty-first century, they have always engaged the wider world. The Washington, D.C., encounter also suggests the way mainstream American society has repeatedly approached them—expecting them to act in certain ways or to fulfill popular expectations. All the while, the Amish seek to be true to their “calling” in a world that frequently misunderstands them and shares few of their values.
Like Wittmer and Wagler, who never aimed for the halls of political power, America’s Amish have not sought social limelight or national influence. Yet the Amish story has been deeply entwined with the America saga. Despite its European roots, the Amish movement has been a North American phenomenon. The diverse ways of being Amish in the twenty-first century have emerged in an American context in response to American conditions and concerns. Twentieth-century efforts to plant Amish settlements in Honduras and Paraguay proved fruitless, while Amish populations have continued to flourish in the midst of a fast-paced America committed to pluralism and individualism.1
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the relationship between the Amish and mainstream Americans has been how the hopes and fears of outsiders have helped to shape Amish identity. Most other Americans—tourists, policy makers, consumers, coworkers, and neighbors—have changed their views of the Amish over the centuries, in concert with the changing mores of mass culture. If American society has been broadly tolerant, its tolerance has had a coercive edge, molding Amish society in subtle but real ways. We view the Amish through the lens of popular opinion at the end of this chapter, but first we explore the early interactions between the Amish and other Americans.
Products of Immigration
Amish interaction with American culture began with immigration, as families arrived in two distinct waves that coincided with major movements of German-speaking Europeans to North America. Between 1736 and 1770, about five hundred Amish arrived through the port of Philadelphia and settled in the southeastern Pennsylvania counties of Berks, Chester, and Lancaster. By 1767 some of these households had moved west into Somerset County, and by 1791 others had purchased farms in Pennsylvania’s Kishacoquillas Valley. In the decades that followed, descendants of these eighteenth-century arrivals established a string of communities from eastern Ohio (1809) to southeastern Iowa (1840).2
Although Amish immigrants carried distinct religious convictions, they shared many folkways with other Pennsylvania Germans as well as a German dialect that came to be called “Pennsylvania Dutch.” The dialect was itself a product of immigration and resettle
ment as arrivals from various parts of Germany mixed their speech-ways in North America and produced a dialect that was not precisely the same as anything spoken in Europe. In fact, some scholars consider Pennsylvania Dutch a language rather than a dialect. Throughout the 1800s, Pennsylvania Dutch was the linguistic currency of Lutheran, Reformed Church, and non-religious Pennsylvania Germans alike. By the late twentieth century, however, the most traditional Anabaptist groups were all but alone in holding onto Pennsylvania Dutch, and it became something of a marker, setting its speakers apart.3
A second wave of Amish immigrants came to North America roughly between 1815 and 1860.4 During these years some three thousand Amish left Europe, seeking both economic opportunity and freedom from compulsory military service, which was then becoming more common. Relatively few of these nineteenth-century newcomers settled in Pennsylvania, although some traveled through the state and found temporary shelter among fellow church members there. Louis Jüngerich (1803–1882), who moved from Hesse to Pennsylvania in 1821, wrote to his uncle in Europe that the Amish church in America “works actively” to help those “arriving in this country. Entire families can often find shelter with them. … Members of the congregation paid their passage and picked them up from the ports.”5
With land prices higher in the East, most nineteenth-century Amish quickly headed west. Some arrived in New York City and traveled west from there, but others bypassed the East Coast entirely, taking passage on European cotton ships bound for New Orleans. From there they traveled up the Mississippi River and its tributaries to new homes in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, and Ontario.
In a few cases, Amish from both rounds of immigration settled in the same places and worshiped together. Such was the case in Johnson County, Iowa, and, for a time, in the area that would become known as Nappanee, Indiana. More frequently, however, newer immigrants established communities distinct from those formed by descendants of earlier settlers. Both waves of immigrants recognized one another as Amish, but economic factors and kinship networks largely determined where they settled.
Amishness in an Era of Refinement
Amish immigrants came to North America looking for freedom to practice their faith as well as opportunity to secure land for their children and grandchildren. “We had everything in abundance,” an Amish writer mused in 1862, as he considered his people’s situation.6
Yet the American context posed distinct challenges. Parents and church leaders needed to make sense of life in a restless nation that had little time for tradition and celebrated individual freedom. In the New World, with few established cultural norms, it was not always clear how the church-community would preserve a rigorous moral order. One theme in nineteenth-century Amish history was the interplay between church and family, the two most basic and sometimes competing authorities in Amish society.7 Parents, more so than the church, were responsible for the training and discipline of children. As Anabaptists, the Amish did not baptize infants or consider them members of the church, even though children routinely attended Sunday worship. Only at baptism did a young adult formally come under church authority.
When church leaders gathered during the early 1800s, they struggled over how to manage churchly responsibility and teenage freedom.8 An 1837 meeting of ministers in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, for example, criticized parents who dressed un-baptized children in fashionable clothes. Neither were parents to turn a blind eye to teens who “take the liberty to sleep or lie together without any fear or shame.” If this happens “with the knowledge of the parents,” the ministers announced, “parents shall not go unpunished.”9
But as Amish elders were discovering, authority in any form—parental or churchly—was a fragile thing in America. Dramatic economic transformations challenged established ways of life, often placing both parents and bishops on the defensive. Coming to America had offered immigrants and their descendants remarkable opportunities to acquire land and take up the trades of their choice. Now the fruits of that enterprise were maturing in a social and political atmosphere that celebrated self-determination and material refinement rather than traditions of simplicity.
The nation’s open, risk-taking economy had produced remarkable social mobility, at least among white Americans. Paradoxically, the breakdown of social class distinctions actually made Americans more class conscious, since anyone could aspire to live like an aristocrat so long as he or she convincingly imitated genteel ways. Americans purchased detailed guidebooks based on Renaissance-era manuals for young nobles that promised to teach anyone how to dress, eat, speak, and entertain like a lady or a gentleman. Refined Americans worked long and hard to give the appearance of not having to work at all. Genteel life required genteel surroundings, and even common folk began to outfit their houses with carpets, mirrors, and dishes that they displayed only “for show.” Homes became places of retreat rather than centers of production. Work space that once housed the family loom or a craftsman’s tools now became a parlor, complete with stuffed furniture purporting a life of leisure.10
This revolution of daily life during the first half of the nineteenth century was both far-reaching and profound not only because it changed how thousands of people lived but also because it revised the way they thought about how they should live. By 1850, in the wake of this refinement of material and social culture, middle-class respectability was anything but plain. Amish commitments to simple ways, which had not been far from the mainstream in the 1700s, suddenly seemed out of step.
These social transformations were all too obvious to David Beiler (1786–1871), an esteemed bishop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Writing in 1862, Beiler was distressed by the “great changes during these [past] sixty years,” certain that “whoever has not experienced it … can scarcely believe it.” Remembering his youth, he wrote that “there was no talk of fine shoes and boots nor did one know anything of light pleasure vehicles.” In those days, he noted, wagons were unpainted, and “there were not such splendid houses and barns.” Nor did homes feature sofas, writing desks, carpets, and decorative dishes, as had now become fashionable.11
Beiler was no petulant elder. His insightful observations track closely with material changes across American society, including ways in which a new consumer culture was displacing household production. “It was customary to hear the spinning wheel hum or sing in almost every farmhouse,” Beiler recalled of his childhood, and he mourned that “the large amount of imported goods with which our country is flooded, and also the domestic cotton goods which are to be had at such low price, have almost displaced the home-made materials so that the daughters who now grow up no longer learn to spin.” Young men, too, were beginning to work away from home, earning cash to buy fancy harnesses or “strange colored fine store clothes.”12 Although Amish traditionalists such as Beiler had not yet distinguished themselves by rejecting consumer technologies such as the telephone as they would after 1900,13 they were skeptical of the Industrial Revolution from its earliest days. They recognized the way mechanization displaced family and local communities in favor of distant sources of production and influence.
Amish leaders also found themselves increasingly out of step with the nation’s religious tenor. In the same way that the Industrial Revolution championed specialization and efficiency, nineteenth-century Protestant leaders were recasting the relevance of their churches in a society that celebrated growth and change. Religious renewal, America’s Protestant elite claimed, required coordinated planning and rational organization. Protestant leaders constructed a host of institutions and enterprises that merged churchly goals with plans to reform and redeem society. Sunday schools, for example, not only taught morality but also produced “better”—more properly refined—citizens. By pouring their energies into special-purpose organizations championing education, publication, and moral uplift, Christians could find their calling in national causes rather than in local concerns or peculiar practices. This agenda was often combined with an emotion-laden revivalism tha
t sought to convert individuals, not to a particular church community, but to a broad moral vision of civic renewal.14
David Beiler and other tradition-minded Amish were also concerned about the economic and social transformations reshaping America in the early 1800s. But these changes did not prompt them to join popular Protestant causes of revivalism and reform. Instead, they responded to religious and cultural unsettledness by appealing to the importance of a stable, tradition-guided moral order, which they called the Ordnung.
Keeping the Old Order
Ordnung is the German word for “order,” but for the nineteenth-century Amish, it had broader implications than the English term may suggest. The Amish notion of Ordnung was one of divine order, of life as it should be lived—tested by tradition, dubious of progress, unaffected by the whims of change. This set of moral guidelines, formulated by the local church and adapted over time, constrained individuality and regulated dress and household furnishings. It stood in contrast to the mainstream emphasis on progress, a competitive economy, individualistic authority, and the religious revivalism of enterprising churches that aimed to redeem America through civic moral crusades.15
The role of the Ordnung in guiding Amish church life came sharply into focus after 1862. That year Amish bishops, ministers, and deacons from across the United States and Ontario began a series of annual gatherings to address and resolve disagreements in certain Amish communities. These so-called Dienerversammlungen (ministers’ meetings) convened each spring from 1862 through 1878 (except in 1877) to consider such issues as the proper way to baptize, how to relate to Mennonites, and how much the church should accept American cultural mores.16 Was posing for photographs a sign of vanity? Was voting in public elections acceptable for a pacifist group—especially in a nation gripped by civil war? Should the church approve lightning rods, a new technology that might undermine one’s trust in God? Could farmers adopt hybrid species such as mules?17 In short, which offerings on the American cultural menu should the church accept and which should it reject?
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