Carl Schurz

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Carl Schurz, shortly after his inauguration as Secretary of the Interior in 1877 signature

Carl Schurz , also Karl Schurz , (* March 2, 1829 in Liblar , Prussian Rhine Province ; † May 14, 1906 in New York ) was a radical democratic German revolutionary at the end of the 1840s and was there during the second half after he emigrated to the United States 19th century politician. From 1877 to 1881 he was Secretary of the Interior of the United States under President Rutherford B. Hayes .

In the principalities of the German Confederation , Schurz had joined the democratic movement and was involved in the bourgeois March Revolution of 1848/1849 , especially in the last phase of the Baden Revolution from May to July 1849. He was able to do so two days before the revolution was finally defeated militarily from that of federal troops trapped Rastatt fortress escape and into exile settle. He then stayed temporarily in France, Switzerland and Great Britain until 1852, but also briefly incognito in Prussia to help his teacher and friend Gottfried Kinkel, who had been imprisoned for revolutionary activities, to escape from the Spandau prison .

In 1852 Schurz emigrated to the USA with his recently married wife Margarethe . There he became one of the most famous " Forty-Eighters " to this day . Schurz, who initially worked as a publicist and lawyer, eventually made a political, military and diplomatic career. In 1856 he joined the Republican Party, which had been founded two years earlier, as an opponent of slavery . In 1861, US President Abraham Lincoln sent him to Spain as ambassador for about a year . Back in the United States, he served in the further course of the Civil War from 1862 in the Army of the Northern States , first as a brigadier general , and finally with the rank of major general . After the north's victory over the southern Confederate states and their re-connection to the Union , he turned entirely to politics as a statesman . He was the first native German to become a member of the United States Senate .

Life

Childhood and youth

Carl Christian Schurz was born in 1829 as the son of country school teacher Christian Schurz (1797–1876) and his wife Marianne, née Jüssen, in the outer bailey of Gracht Palace in Liblar (now part of Erftstadt ) near Cologne , which was then Prussian territory . He had three younger siblings, Heribert (1830-1838), Anna (1833-1908) and Antoinette (1837-1923). From the school year 1833/34 he went to school in Liblar, from Easter 1837 attended the seminar practice school in Brühl and from 1839 to 1846 the Marcell high school in Cologne. This forerunner of the Dreikönigsgymnasium was popularly called the Jesuit high school because of its history, but was no longer supported by the order. In his memoirs, Schurz describes his accommodation with a family of craftsmen in Cologne and the pedagogy of some of his teachers, which he greatly appreciates. For financial reasons he had to leave school and moved to Bonn. There he passed the final examination as an external student on July 28, 1847. From 1847 he studied philology and history at the University of Bonn . Here he made friends with Professor Gottfried Kinkel and joined the Frankonia fraternity in Bonn in 1847 and the Normannia fraternity in Bonn in 1849 . In August 1848 he became the spokesman for Frankonia and on December 1, 1848 President of the newly founded democratic student association in Bonn.

March Revolution

Carl Schurz as a student in London, drawing 1851

During the March Revolution , Schurz took part in the assault on the Siegburg armory on May 10, 1849 . He was indicted on January 19, 1850, but acquitted on May 2, 1850 by the Cologne jury. He then went via the Palatinate to Baden to join the ranks of the rebels (see also Baden Revolution ), where he became adjutant to Fritz Anneke , whom he knew from Cologne and who commanded the artillery of the Palatinate People's Army . After the defeat by Prussian troops, Schurz and Albert Neustädter were able to escape from the Rastatt fortress through a sewer and flee to France in Alsace . From there the two traveled illegally to Switzerland. They parted ways; Schurz arrived in Zurich on August 11, 1849 . He received money from like-minded comrades in Bonn, lived on the outskirts of Zurich, maintained contacts with other German revolutionary refugees living there, studied historical works and, with a view to the experiences of the uprising, also war history. However, ideas about a job were dashed.

In August 1850 he traveled to Berlin ; for camouflage he used the name and passport of his cousin Heribert Jüssen. On the night of November 6th to 7th, Schurz freed his former professor Gottfried Kinkel from the prison in Spandau with the help of the bribed prison guard Georg Brune and fled with him via Rostock to Warnemünde . On November 17, 1850, they traveled from there on a ship owned by the Rostock shipping company Ernst Brockelmann to Edinburgh in Scotland, where they arrived on December 1. In December they reached over London to Paris . There Schurz was arrested and expelled from France, so that he had to return to London on June 13, 1851. He was charged on September 12, 1851 for the liberation of Kinkel, but not convicted. Until August 1852 he lived in London near Regent's Park ; there he taught the German language and gave music lessons. Schurz was constantly monitored by Prussian authorities in the United Kingdom and France.

On July 6, 1852, he married Margarethe Meyer in London , who in 1856 founded the first kindergarten in the United States in the Free Congregation at Watertown, Wisconsin .

Politicians in the United States

Ascent

In 1852 Carl Schurz traveled to Philadelphia . In 1855 he became a member of the Freemasons Association , his lodge was the Herman Lodge No. 125 . In 1856 he moved to Watertown in the state of Wisconsin over and worked there as a land seller. He was soon one of the most influential leaders of the emerging Republican Party and played a major role in its election victory in 1860 , not least because of his influence on the voting behavior of German-Americans. Therefore, the recently elected US President Abraham Lincoln appointed him ambassador to Spain when he took office .

Carl Schurz in a general's uniform during the Civil War

However, Schurz returned to America from Spain in January 1862 during the American Civil War to join the Union Army. Under Franz Sigel's leadership, as an unserved immigrant, he rose within a few months to major general and division commander of the volunteer army. Schurz commanded mostly German volunteers and took part in the following battles, among others: Second Battle of the Bull Run , Battle of Chancellorsville , Battle of Gettysburg , Battle of Chattanooga . The American press, particularly after the Battle of Chancellorsville, looked to the Germans to blame. A trial before the court martial, suggested by Schurz to clarify these allegations, did not take place. In 1864 he left the army briefly to participate in the Republican election campaign for Lincoln's re-election. After spending the last year of the war in staff assignments, he left the army in 1865.

John A. Logan , Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner : "The Old Hash Warmed Up Again" - drawing by Thomas Nast from Harper's Weekly , June 22, 1872

Afterwards founded Schurz in Detroit ( Michigan ), a new Republican newspaper, the Detroit Post . In 1867 he settled in St. Louis ( Missouri ), where he became co-owner and editor of the German-language Western Post , which was run by Emil Preetorius . The following year he met Otto von Bismarck in Berlin. In 1869 he was elected to the United States Senate, where he represented the state of Missouri from 1869 to 1875. Schurz belonged to the independent members of the Republican Party along with Charles Sumner and stood up against the rampant corruption under Ulysses S. Grant's presidency. In 1875 he tried to form a new one, the so-called Reform Party ( Mugwump ) , from the moderate elements of the Democrats and Republicans , but gave up the attempt before the presidential election in 1876 .

Interior minister

Carl Schurz, 1879
Carl Schurz drawn by CW Allers on May 8, 1888
Carl Schurz, drawing of unknown date

The recently appointed US President Rutherford B. Hayes (1877–81) appointed Schurz as Minister of the Interior in his cabinet . Schurz made a contribution to the rapid end of the turmoil after the Civil War in the southern states and initiated a change in American Indian policy by subordinating it to a civilian administration - until then largely determined by the War Department and thus dominated by the military. In his area of ​​responsibility, he also tried to sensitize the population to the need to conserve forests .

Gray eminence

From 1888 to 1892 he was a representative of the Hamburg-American Packetfahrt-Actien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) in New York. He was then President of the National Civil Service Reform League until 1901.

Schurz was politically active until his death in 1906. He, who had co-founded the Republican Party in 1860, became a staunch opponent of the increasingly global and imperialist orientation of the United States' foreign policy , especially under President Theodore Roosevelt , who from 1898 expanded the US's sphere of influence to East Asia and Latin America. Schurz founded the American Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 together with personalities such as Mark Twain , William James and George S. Boutwell , which campaigned against the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War . He used the phrase Right or wrong - my country! by Stephen Decatur junior and coined it with the following sentence: “Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right. "( Eng . " Our country, right or wrong. If just, to keep just; if unjust, to put right. " )

Carl Schurz died in New York and was buried there in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery . Mark Twain penned his obituary in Harper's Weekly.

Reception and honors

In 1964 Edward G. Robinson played Schurz in the John Ford Western Cheyenne , in 1968 Christian Rode Schurz played in the biopic Carl Schurz - Revolutionary and Statesman in Two Continents .

Herbert Kranz wrote as volume 1 of his historical stories The Way to Freedom - Carl Schurz: From Baden Lieutenant to American Statesman , which appeared in 1960. Ernst Röhl published At Your Own Risk - Carl-Schurz-Roman in 1992 by the publishing house Das Neue Berlin .

Honors in Germany

  • Many streets were named after him, for example in Aschaffenburg, Augsburg, Berlin-Spandau, Bonn- Duisdorf , Braunschweig, Bremen- Schwachhausen , Brühl (Rhineland) , Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Siegburg, Stuttgart, Munich, Magdeburg, Karlsruhe, Kaiserslautern, Cologne, Krefeld, Rastatt, Pforzheim, Fulda, Heidelberg, Wuppertal, Mönchengladbach, Göppingen, Paderborn, Pirmasens, Heinsberg, Waghäusel, Leipzig, Bad Kissingen, Saarbrücken, Ulm, Nuremberg and Gießen. In his place of birth Erftstadt - Liblar a school, a street and a square are named after him, in Hardheim a barracks and in Rastatt a fountain. In Frankfurt there is also a Carl-Schurz-Siedlung and a high school in the Sachsenhausen district is named after him. In 1969 Fritz Kessler published a list of the monuments and memorial plaques for Schurz.
  • The city of Erftstadt and the Pro Academia e. V. award people or associations with a Carl Schurz Medal . The Steuben-Schurz-Gesellschaft promotes German-American friendship. The Carl-Schurz-Haus in Freiburg im Breisgau is a German-American institute for transatlantic cultural exchange; Student residences in Bonn and Bochum have the same name. Schurz are dedicated to postage stamps from the French occupation zone in Baden 1949 and the German Federal Post Office in 1952 and 1976.
  • There is currently an initiative to set up a copy of one of the two Carl Schurz statues created by Karl Bitter in the USA at the beginning of the 20th century with the names of other prominent Forty-Eighters in Berlin .

Honors in the United States

  • Elected Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters
  • Carl Schurz Park, New York City, visavis Yorkville, named after him in 1910
  • Carl Schurz Park, Stone Bank (Town of Merton), Wisconsin, on the shores of Moose Lake
  • Memorial for the three German-Americans Carl Schurz, Emil Preetorius and Carl Daenzer with the symbolic bronze figure "The Naked Truth" ("The Naked Truth") in St. Louis in May 1914 by Wilhelm Wandschneider
  • Bronze statue of Karl Bitter , New York City (1913), on Morningside Drive at the corner of 116th Street
  • Bronze statue of Karl Bitter (slightly smaller than New York's), Oshkosh, Wisconsin (1914) at the end of Washington Ave on the shores of Lake Winnebago
  • Schurz High School, Chicago, built in 1910
  • Schurz Hall, University of Missouri-Columbia dormitory
  • Carl Schurz Elementary, New Braunfels, Texas
  • 4 cent postage stamp from 1983
  • Carl Schurz barracks (1945–1994) of the US armed forces in Bremerhaven
  • Mount Schurz , second highest mountain in Yellowstone National Park (eastern range, north of Eagle Peak and south of Atkins Peak); named in 1885 after Carl Schurz of the United States Geological Survey for his services as Secretary of the Interior of the United States during the Hayes administration and for his efforts to protect Yellowstone National Park
  • USS Schurz , the former German gunboat SMS Geier, which was moored off Hawaii in April 1917, occupied by the US Navy and renamed after him

Works

Foreword to the memoirs of Carl Schurz, first edition 1906
  • Life memories. 3 volumes. Georg Reimer, Berlin 1906, 1907 and 1912 ( Volume 1 online , digitized ; Volume 2 online , digitized ; Volume 3, digitized ).
  • Life of Henry Clay. 2 volumes. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Cambridge, Massachusetts 1887 and 1899.
  • Abraham Lincoln. An essay. Hughton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York 1891 (German: Georg Reimer, Berlin 1908).
  • Charles Sumner. An essay. The University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1951 (posthumous publication).
  • Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz 1841–1869. Edited by Joseph Schafer. Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 1920.
  • The letters from Carl Schurz to Gottfried Kinkel. Introduced and ed. by Eberhard Kessel . Carl Winter University Press, Heidelberg 1965.
  • Speeches of Carl Schurz. JB Lippincott, Philadelphia 1865 (12 political speeches).
  • Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz. Selected and edited by Frederic Bancroft. Six volumes. GP Putnam's Sons, New York and London 1913.
  • Rüdiger Wersich (Ed.): Carl Schurz. Revolutionary and statesman. His life in self-testimonials, pictures and documents. Heinz Moos, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-7879-0139-6 (German and English).

literature

Lexicon entries

Monographs

  • Marianne and Otto Draeger: The Carl Schurz Story. From German revolutionary to American patriot. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86650-100-3 .
  • Rudolf Geiger : The German American. Carl Schurz - From German Revolutionary to American Statesman. Casimir Katz, Gernsbach 2007, ISBN 978-3-938047-28-6 .
  • Walter Kessler: Carl Schurz - Struggle, Exile and Career. Greven, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-7743-0383-5 .
  • Joachim Maas: The tireless rebel. Life, deed and legacy of Carl Schurz. With an appendix: Carl Schurz on Abraham Lincoln. Claasen and Goverts, Hamburg 1949.
  • Daniel Nagel: From Republican Germans to German-American Republicans. A contribution to the identity change of the German forty-eight in the United States 1850–1861. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 2012, ISBN 978-3-86110-504-6 .
  • Hans Trefousse: Carl Schurz. A biography. The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 1982, ISBN 0-87049-326-4 .

Magazine articles

Web links

Commons : Carl Schurz  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Carl Schurz  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians. Sub-Volume 5: R – S. Winter, Heidelberg 2002, ISBN 3-8253-1256-9 , pp. 372-376.
  2. Continuing on Otto von Bismarck's attempt as envoy to arrest Schurz, with documents July 31, 1851. The political refugee Carl Schurz. ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: State Main Archive Koblenz . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.landeshauptarchiv.de
  3. Eugen Lennhoff, Oskar Posner, Dieter A. Binder: Internationales Freemaurerlexikon . Revised and expanded new edition of the 1932 edition, Munich 2006, 951 pages, ISBN 978-3-7766-5036-5 , Lemma Schurz, Carl, p. 761
  4. The tasks of the "Secretary of the Interior" are different from those of the German Interior Minister in the organization of the federal administration (which Schurz reorganized according to the Prussian model) and the administration of the federal territories and properties such as national parks and Indian reservations . He is not responsible for homeland security and law enforcement agencies, which are under the state and local authorities and the Department of Justice .
  5. ^ See on the admiration during his lifetime, honorary banquet for Carl Schurz to celebrate his 70th birthday. Organized by the German Associations in New York. Held on March 8, 1899 in the Liederkranz Hall. Hermann Bartsch, New York 1899 (digitized version) .
  6. ^ Anti-imperialist league , Library of Congress.
  7. ^ Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States . Harper Perennial, New York 2005, ISBN 0-06-083865-5 , pp. 311 and 314.
  8. ^ Rudolf Tombo: Carl Schurz. Died on May 14, 1906. In: Monthly books for German language and pedagogy. Vol. 7, 1906 (digitized version) .
  9. Carl Schurz, pilot . estories.x10.mx. Retrieved March 13, 2016.
  10. ^ Fritz Kessler: Carl Schurz. Monuments - busts - memorial plaques. In: Local calendar of the Euskirchen district in 1969.
  11. ^ Carl Schurz Medal of the Pro Academia e. V.
  12. ^ Homepage of the company.
  13. ^ Postage stamp Carl Schurz from 1949 100 Years of Rastatt ( Memento from September 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).
  14. http://www.moin-moin.us/single-post/2016/06/22/Konzept-Carl-Schurz-1848er-Denkmal-in-Berlin ; http://www.gsi-bonn.de/fileadmin/Seiteninhalt/Medien-Content/Bildungsangebote/Policy_Think_Tank/CarlSchurzDenkmal23_17doc.pdf .
  15. ^ Members: Carl Schurz. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 25, 2019 .