Working-Class Germans in the Salt City: Syracuse, New York, 1860–1916

Abstract

Working-Class Germans in the Salt CitySyracuse, New York, 1860–1916 Daniel Koch (bio) The central city of the Empire State was once the home of thousands of Germans, the largest contingent in a multicultural, multilingual urban melting pot. Syracuse was one of the key industrial cities of the United States during the Civil War era and into the twentieth century. Like other American cities, its industrial might was built on immigrant labor, much of which was German. Yet, there has not been a historical study of German Syracuse since the editors of the German-language Syracuse Union newspaper produced a book called Geschichte der Deutschen in Syracuse und Onondaga County (The history of the Germans in Syracuse and Onondaga County) in 1897. Like the tomes of county history produced around the same time, the Geschichte focuses on the great and the good. Its subtitle gives its intention away—Nebst Kurzen Biographien von Beamten and Hervorragenden Buergern (With short biographies of officials and prominent citizens). The book is handsomely illustrated with portraits of eminent German Americans who achieved great success in their careers, and who also gave back to their communities by supporting churches, schools, and charities. These leaders were a source of pride at a time when "great man" status was the aim to which young men were taught to aspire. But the men (and they are all men) whose portraits adorn the Geschichte were exceptions. Most German immigrants worked in industrial jobs, living in what urban accommodation they could afford. They clustered in immigrant neighborhoods with other Germans but also often in mixed communities with other groups of immigrants—Irish, particularly in the early decades, and Italian and Polish in the later part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article seeks to expose a little-studied German community, going beyond the limited great-man focused nineteenth-century sources that exist. Both the Geschichte and Dwight H. Bruce's Memorial History of Syracuse (1891), the two most detailed views of the city in the late nineteenth century, portray a highly positive view of a flourishing German [End Page 361] American community that exemplified civic virtue.1 Historians have maintained that Germans were widely accepted, even celebrated, in American society between the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I.2 The purpose here is not to try to undermine this view; indeed, the records from Syracuse in this period clearly bear it out. Nor is it to write a labor history of Germans in Syracuse. It is rather to bring back to life some of what was left out or swept under the carpet in building this narrative of German success in America. This article seeks to answer why these omissions occurred and argues that it was at least partially related to pervasive racialist discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, studying Syracuse's German community enables us to reconstruct the urban geography of a nineteenth-century industrial center and take a new look at a lost German neighborhood in a key American city. Syracuse was a relatively late city to emerge in New York State. The land upon which it is built was part of the Onondaga Reservation, a 64,000-acre tract that was exempt from white settlement by the terms of the 1788 treaty between the State of New York and the Onondaga Nation.3 Syracuse is still known as the salt city due to the briny waters that flow into Onondaga Lake, from which salt can be made using a boiling process. Water from Syracuse's salt springs, an 1834 map boasted, produced nearly seven times as much salt as the same quantity of sea water. "Solar salt" was also produced by allowing the water to evaporate in the sun and raking in the remaining salt. Subsequent exploitative treaties with the state chipped away at the Onondaga Reservation (other Haudenosaunee people in New York experienced the same in the so-called treaty period between the 1790s and 1820s). The land upon which Syracuse was built was transferred first to the state and then sold off to private buyers. Settlers poured in, mainly from New England, in the early decades...