Multiculturalism is in their roots ; Heritage: Ehrlich's, Schaefer's German ancestors struggled with assimilation in Maryland
Michael Dresser. The Sun. Baltimore, Md.: May 16, 2004. pg. 1.B
(Copyright 2004 @ The Baltimore Sun Company)
When Clickner Ehrlich and William Henry Schaefer were born in Baltimore in the late 1880s, they became part of a multicultural city where German-American children were offered bilingual education at public expense, and their parents felt little pressure to jump into the melting pot.
The grandfather of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and father of Comptroller William Donald Schaefer would have enjoyed advantages unthinkable to the Latin, Asian and African immigrants to modern- day Baltimore.
Ehrlich and Schaefer, who have recently decried the pace at which immigrants are becoming "Americanized," are both members of an ethnic group that enjoyed tremendous influence in 19th-century and early 20th-century Maryland. Between the Civil War and World War I, German-Americans used that power to create a society in which they could prosper without speaking English.
In 1897, when Ehrlich's and Schaefer's ancestors would have been elementary school age, the city's public school system included seven schools that offered instruction in both German and English to 7,000 pupils. Maryland's laws had to be published in translation in German-language newspapers - of which there were many.
Baltimore was at that time part of the "German Triangle" along with Milwaukee and St. Louis - three cities in which Teutonic culture and language were pervasive. Germans in those cities in effect enjoyed all the benefits of multiculturalism, which Ehrlich recently described as "crap" and "bunk."
Schaefer and the Ehrlich family of today are thoroughly assimilated - as the governor has said all immigrants should strive to be. But while some 19th-century German-Americans plunged headlong into the English-speaking culture, others adapted slowly.
For instance, the governor's father, Robert L. Ehrlich Sr., confirmed in a brief interview that Clickner Ehrlich attended a German language school. He said his father became a longtime Baltimore police officer and died in 1965.
About his more distant ancestry, the senior Ehrlich is a bit hazy. He said he believes his paternal grandfather's name was Otto, but records at the Maryland State Archives list Clickner's father as Herman Ehrlick - multiple spellings are common in immigrant names of the era - and his mother's maiden name as Susan Dove of Gaithersburg. "I'm sorry now that as a kid growing up I [didn't ask] more questions," the governor's father said in an interview that he cut short because of disagreements with The Sun's editorials.
He said he was told that Clickner Ehrlich was born to a father who emigrated from Bavaria but died at the age of 33.
Someone named Herman O. Ehrlick was naturalized in Baltimore in 1888, and according to city directories he was keeping a saloon on German Street (Redwood Street after World War I) as late as 1901. At various times he was also listed as a machinist and a florist. He disappears from the public records after 1902.
According to Francis P. O'Neill, reference librarian at the Maryland Historical Society, Clickner is listed as part of his uncle Walter's household in 1890. Walter was apparently one of several Ehrlich brothers who arrived in Baltimore in 1883 on a ship from Bremen and later shared a home near what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard - not far from where fellow German-American George Herman "Babe" Ruth was raised.
Schaefer has seemed ambivalent about his heritage, sometimes claiming to be Dutch. But genealogical records compiled by the Mormon Church show that his German ancestors came to Baltimore some 30 years earlier than Ehrlich's.
The records show that the comptroller's great-grandfather, George Conrad Schaffer, emigrated with his wife from Germany's Hessen region between 1851 and 1855. Louis Schaefer, the comptroller's grandfather, was born in Baltimore in 1860 and used the current spelling of the family name.
George Schaffer arrived in Maryland when German and Irish immigrants were still under siege from nativist "Know-Nothings" who feared the cultural influence of the new arrivals and resented hearing them speak strange languages.
If the nativists thought their insults and attacks would speed German assimilation, they were wrong, according to Dieter Cunz's 1948 book The Maryland Germans: A History.
"They cut themselves off, founded their own societies, churches, schools, newspapers and built a wall around their German-American individualism that was to hinder the acclimation of even the next generation," Cunz wrote. "The oftener the Know Nothings broke into a German [festival] or attacked and beat a German, the more stubbornly the Germans stuck together in order to show they were not ashamed of being German."
During the Civil War, Baltimore's German community became a powerful political force courted in their language by both political parties - much as today's Democrats and Republicans run political ads in Spanish.
After that war, in which Germans contributed more than 10 percent of Maryland's Union soldiers, their influence reached new heights in politics, the arts and business. German families such as the Gunthers and Heuriches held a virtual monopoly on the brewing trade. Restaurants such as Haussner's and Schellhase's dominated the culinary scene.
In 1868, the Maryland General Assembly passed a law requiring that all new laws be published at state expense in German-language newspapers as well as English publications. In 1873, the first German-English public schools were set up in Baltimore - a move that eventually doomed the city's private German schools. German- speaking adults could attend the schools at night for English instruction.
O'Neill said that as far as he knows, no other ethnic group achieved similar preferential history in Maryland.
By the late 19th century, German-speaking Baltimoreans had built a parallel culture that made mastery of English an advantage but not a necessity. They could attend church services, hear concerts, attend plays in their own language, and then gather to enjoy the Gemutlichkeit at the local Bierstube.
It was into that world that William Henry Schaefer was born in 1888 and Clickner Ehrlich in 1889. The comptroller's father would marry a woman with an English-sounding surname, Tululu Skipper, but the governor's grandfather married Margaret Krauss, a woman of German descent.
In 1900, more than 50 German societies from around Baltimore gathered to form the Unabhangige Burgerverein (Independent Citizens Union), a powerful lobbying group that fought for German immigrants' rights in much the same way that CASA of Maryland advocates for Latin American and other immigrants today.
According to the Cunz book, the German-Americans of that era were no longer on the defensive.
"This society made no attempt to hasten the Americanization of citizens of German descent," Cunz wrote. "On the contrary, through energetic emphasis on the German background, through the continuation of the German language, by making people conscious of their German descent and by cultivating German customs and manners, the process of acclimatization was retarded."
It was not until World War I - and a national reaction against all things German - that the hold of such institutions began to wane significantly.
Spokesmen for Ehrlich and Schaefer said the two officials did not want to be interviewed about the German experience and the questions it raises about today's immigrants.
But Kim Propeack, a spokeswoman for CASA, said her group is happy that Ehrlich's grandfather had access to government support for both his German heritage and his efforts to fit into American culture. She said today's immigrants are only seeking the same.
"We feel that having got that kind of support in his own family, the governor owes a responsibility to today's immigrants," Propeack said.
Credit: SUN STAFF