why was humboldt forgotten in the united states?

WHY WAS HUMBOLDT FORGOTTEN IN THE UNITED STATES?*

SANDRA NICHOLS

ABsrRAcT. In the nineteenth century Alexander von Humboldt was acclaimed as “the second Columbus” and “the scientific discoverer of America.” His prestige and fame were such that on 14 September 1869, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, a grand celcbration was held with parades, speeches, concerts, and the unveiling of memorials in cities m o s s the country. Humboldt’s popularity in the United States endured for the remainder of the nineteenth century, but he dropped from public consciousness in the twentieth century. To account for the eclipse of Humboldt’s fame in the United States three hypotheses are discussed: a shift in the character of scientific endeavor; the quality of Humboldt’s written work; and the rise of anti-German sentiment with a concurrent rush to “de-Germanize” the United States in the early twentieth century. Keywords: nriti-Gerniiiri serrtirrlent, Alexririrfer vorr Hrrrrrbolrft, H i r r h l t l r Gwcnniu l Celcbrcitiori, Huriiboldt i r i the Urii ten Stntcs.

Huniboldl W N S one of those wnriders of the world, like Aristode, like Ilrliirs Caesnr . . . who iippmrfrorri tirile to tirne, 11s i f to show 11s t l ic possibilities of the hirrmirr r t i i r i d , the foric cinrf the rarige of thefucrrlties--ri rrriiversal m i r i .

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1869, quoted in Nelken 1976

T o d a y U.S. geographers, particularly those with a historical bent, are reasonably familiar with Alexander von Humboldt’s travels, his scientific and literary output, and in particular his observations of plant communities on the slopes of Chimborazo that laid the foundation for the fields of biogeography and eventually ecology. Those same geographers, though, along with most other people in the United States, are much less familiar with Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century U.S. writers and artists, on scientists, educators and explorers, and on politicians, as well as on the public at large.

I n literature and the arts it is astounding to find so many who took to heart Humboldt’s assertion that there is an “ancient bond which unites natural science with poetry and artistic feeling” (quoted in BunkSe 1981,146). Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, Julia Ward Howe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Prescott all found inspiration in the German naturalist’s work, and they readily expressed their admiration and intellectual debt to their “hero of knowledge,” “the scientific discoverer of America” (Walls 2001).’

The landscape painters of the Hudson River School responded to Humboldt’s call to integrate careful and precise observation with an aesthetic response to na-

* I would like to thank Kent Mathewson and Andrew Sluyter and the anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful m d detailed comments. I am also grateful to David Stoddart for his insightful suggestions, for the loan o f rare volumes from his vast collection, and f o r many pleasurable hours spent discussing Humboldt.

4t DK. NICHOLS is a visiting scholar in the College of Natural Resources, University of California- Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720.

The Geogrnphicd Review yh ( 3 ) : 399-415, July zoo6 ( h p y r i g h t t) roo7 hy the American (;eogr‘iphical Society of New York

400 T H E GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

ture. Frederic Edwin Church was the most prominent member of this school. Deeply influenced by Humboldt’s Cosmos ([1845--1862] 1997, vol. 2), Church retraced por- tions of Humboldt’s route in South America and astonished the art world with monumental works such as his famous Heart of the Andes (1859). as well as other scenes of landscapes Humboldt himself had seen more than half a century earlier.2

Prominent educators in the second half of the nineteenth century readily ad- mitted Humboldt’s influence on teaching. Arnold Guyot, a Swiss emigre who brought academic geography to the United States, acknowledged Humboldt’s overarching importance to the discipline and featured the latter’s portrait on the title page of his popular Physical Geography textbook (1873; reproduced in Walls 2001,128). Louis Agassiz, the Harvard University zoologist who is regarded as the founder of natural science in the United States, was a protege of Humboldt. Agassiz revolutionized the teaching of natural history and followed his mentor’s example, privileging fieldwork over memorizing facts from books. He treated his students as coworkers, inspiring them to learn from nature and add to the knowledge base through direct engage- ment with the world, He underscored the importance of this lively “Humboldtian” approach when he reminded an audience in 1869 that “But for him our geographies would be mere enumerations of localities and statistics” (Walls 1995, 107; Agassiz 1869, quoted in Walls 2001,129).

No less dramatic was Humboldt’s impact on early U.S. political leaders. In 1804 he had several meetings with President Thomas Jefferson who, by all accounts, thor- oughly enjoyed Humboldt’s company and later pronounced him “the most scientific man of his age” (cited in Friis 1959,181). Humboldt’s visit to Washington, D.C. came at the conclusion of his epic journey through Spanish America, and the maps and the geographic and statistical information, together with Humboldt’s own lively accounts, provided Jefferson, Secretary of State James Madison, and other senior members of the government with early data about the territory acquired via the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, as well as with their first reliable accounts of agriculture, mining, trade, population, and politics of the young republic’s neighbors to the south (Schwarz 2001).

Humboldt’s methods and his accounts of his journey through Spanish America also inspired a generation of explorers who were setting out to survey the U.S. west. One of these, John C. Fremont, in a clear case of hero worship named numerous geographical features in Nevada and California in honor of the German explorer. A flood of such naming followed, as others affixed Humboldt’s name to streets, cities, and counties across the nation; lakes were named after him, as were a river, a bay, a marsh, and a reservoir; there were Humboldt Flats and Humboldt Heights, a Humboldt Mountain, Hill, Peak, Sink, and Forest, and numerous Humboldt Parks, as well a Humboldt Cave and a Humboldt Mine (De Terra 1955; Walls 2001).

Most striking is the contrast between Humboldt’s fame as a popular her-literally on a par with Columbus-and his anonymity today. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than an account of the events of 14 September 1869, the centennial of Humboldt’s birth. Subsequent references to him in the popular press throughout the

HUMROLDT IN THE UNITED STATES 401

remainder of the nineteenth century provide further evidence of his enduring popularity. In order to explain how someone so highly regarded by artists, intellectuals, and politicians, who had become such a fixture in popular imagina- tion, could simplyvanish from view, three hypotheses are considered. The first concerns a shift in the character of scientific endeavor; the second, the quality of his written work; and the third, the rise of anti- German sentiment in the late nineteenth century, which de- veloped into a full-blown anti- German hysteria during World War I.

HUMROLDT’S ENDURING NINETEENTH-CENTURY

POPULARITY

On 14 September 1869, tens of thousands of people crowded the streets of cities across the United States to mark the centennial of Humboldt’s birth: Parades, speeches, concerts, monuments, and banquets honored the most famous and beloved scholar of the time. The next day the New York Times devoted its entire front page to coverage of the events (Figure 1). The New York Times (1869b) reported that the city’s public buildings were hung with flags and portraits and that the ships in the harbor

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cdlcbratioo Cenctally Tbrougboul rho Country.

Unveiling of tbe Bust at tho Central Purk

-..*

ORAT103 BY DE. I ’ U X C I S LIEBCX

FIG. +The entire front page of the 15 September 1869 New York Times, on which these headlines appeared, was given over to coverage of the Humboldt celebrations in New York and other US. cities, as was additional space in that day’s issue. (Reproduced courtesy of ProQuest and the New York Tzrnes)

were “bright-with bunting.” New York City was in “holiday dress; so were the crowds that early in the day thronged the route that the procession was to take.” Politicians, diplomats, and dignitaries gathered in Central Park where, facing an assembly of

402 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

FIG. 2-The bust of Alexander von Humboldt in New York City’s Central Park. Source: Harper’s Weekly, z October 1869, p. 629. (Reproduced courtesy of HarpWeek HW)

some 25,000, speeches were delivered, bands played, and a bronze bust of Humboldt was dedicated near Scholars’ Gate (Figure 2).j The evening brought torchlight processions through the neighborhoods, more concerts, banquets, orations, and general jubilation.

Across the Hudson River in Jersey City, “Houses along the march route were gaily decorated with bunting. . . . [Glroups and guilds from different parts of the city marched and converged at Hamilton Square.” Prominent citizens rode on horse- back, a platoon of police joined in the procession, and wagons moved along, “COV-

HUMBOLDT IN THE UNITED STATES 403

ered with flags and evergreens and filled with young ladies dressed in white” (New York ‘Times 1869b, 8). The Jersey City crowds jammed Hamilton Square and sur- rounding streets, and traffic was at a standstill. Attention focused on a large, decorated platform where eulogies were delivered, and an orchestra and singers performed their musical offerings. Young ladies read poems; as in New York City, a bust of Humboldt was unveiled and then crowned with laurels. Hanging over the entire pro- ceeding was a large oil portrait of the honoree, flanked by banners proclaiming (p. 8):

ALEXANDER VON HUMROLDT, he lives not for an age, but for all time.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, the great benefactor.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT, born Sept. 14,1769. The greatest philosopher of his country.

The founder and teacher of universal natural science. The Aristotle of a new era.

Boston hosted three separate celebrations, among them one at the Music Hall under the auspices of the Boston Society of Natural History. Professor Louis Agassiz set the tone, and in the audience sat “the best culture of New England,” including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, together with the mayor, senators, the governor, and “many others, almost as equally distinguished” (New York Times 1869b, 1).

In Philadelphia, “The Humboldt Centennial Ceremonial began with a grand procession . . . with banners and music” (New York Times 1869a). And in a gesture worthy of Humboldt’s own embrace of cultural diversity, the same article duly noted, “One of the features was a wagon, beautifully decorated, containing representatives of Europe, Asia, Africa and America, in the persons of a Caucasian, Chinese, Negro and Indian.” It went on to describe how “the procession marched to Fairmount Park where the cornerstone for the monument was laid with Masonic rites by the Grand Lodge. Orations were de1i~ered.l’~

And so it went in cities across the country. In Syracuse, New York the parade stretched for more than a mile as 15,000 people turned out for an open-air cer- emony. In Cleveland, Ohio “6 to 8,000 persons of the different trades and profes- sions” took part “in a procession in honor of Baron von Humboldt” (New York Times 1869b, 8). In Albany, Buffalo and Cincinnati; in Baltimore, Richmond, and Memphis-cities north and south held their events honoring the German geographer, as did cities across the continent, including St. Louis, Chicago, and San Fran- cisco, where the celebrations went on for three days: “Guns were fired, bonfires were burned in numerous places, and rockets and Roman candles blazed for a time in profusion[,] . . . a splendid banquet was spread[,] . . . speeches were made, toasts drunk[ ,] and everyone present entered . . . into the convivialities of the occasion” (Evening Bulletin 1869; New York Times 1869b, 8).

On the actual day of the centennial the New York Times (1869a) commented on the Humboldt phenomenon sweeping the United States:


In a country not much given to the worship of deceased heroes, the honors that are to be paid today to the memory of Humboldt are altogether exceptional. This illus- trious philosopher has no special claim upon the citizens of this Republic, and yet it is safe to say that in no part of the world-neither in the country of his birth nor in that of his adoption-will his name be pronounced with respect to-day by so many lips as in this, Republic, which did not exist when he was born.

Orators and writers marveled that this outpouring was not for a conquering war- rior or a politician, but for a scholar and a philosopher-“the great savant,” as newspapers of the time typically characterized him. In our day one might expect to see this kind of display for a rock star or a top athlete, but certainly not for a scientist or a writer.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century no detailed explanation seemed necessary when mentioning Humboldt’s name. The newspapers and week- lies of the era regularly carried articles about him as well as advertisements for his published works. The bookshelves of an educated person seemed incomplete without one or more works by Humboldt. A notice for the Peoples’ Library, a collection of books aimed at a middle class eager for self-improvement, proudly announced that its selections afforded the “most instructive reading, from the best writers.” Humboldt was featured alongside popular novelists such as Charles Dickens, Char- lotte Bronte, and Anthony Trollope, as well as that great historian of the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon. The publishers of the Peoples’ Library were aiming for a cross-section of U.S. society, including “the Professional Man, the Student, Teacher, Mechanic, Merchant or Family” (Harper’s Weekly 1879).

Humboldt had become a cultural icon, and in the heady atmosphere of the exploration and opening of the U.S. West, as well as belief in progress through science, every city seemed to need its own monument to the “scientific discoverer of America” (Daum 1994, 50; Walls 2001, 126). In St. Louis, the self-described “Gate- way to the West”, a crowd of 10,ooo attended the dedication of a “colossal bronze statue of Alexander von Humboldt” (New York Times 1878). The monument’s benefactor had debated whether Columbus or Humboldt was the more prominent U.S. cultural icon but eventually decided in favor of the latter (Daum i994,52-53). The 11-foot-tall bronze likeness of the young explorer was placed atop a pedestal in Tower Grove Park, opposite that of another highly regarded figure: William Shakespeare.

On a more mundane level, Humboldt’s name was invoked for purely commer- cial purposes and used as an attention grabber in advertisements. In an early form of product endorsement, the Liebig Company wanted everyone to believe that Humboldt, albeit posthumously, approved of their Coca Leaf Tonic: “Baron von Humboldt in his travels and explorations in South America became deeply inter- ested in the wonderful properties of the coca plant. Consumption and asthma, he says, are unknown among the natives who use it, and it is furthermore conducive to longevity” (Harper’s Weekly 1885).

References to Humboldt continued into the early years of the twentieth century, although by then some reminder of his legacy seemed warranted. In 1904 Harper’s

IlUhlBOLDT IN T H E UNITED STATES 405

Weekly noted that 100 years earlier “Alexander von Humboldt completed [his] ep- och-making journey in Latin America which not only gave him his commanding position among scientists, but, by inspiring Charles Darwin with a passionate de- sire to study nature in the same regions, led to the discovery of the laws of evolu- tion.” The article went on to remind its readers of the role Humboldt had played in introducing Anglo-American readers to the then little-known lands of Spanish America.

SHIFTS IN SCHOLARSHIP

How could someone who was held in such high regard, and had literally become a cultural icon, simply disappear from the public’s consciousness? In the second half of the nineteenth century a new approach to research and the accumulation of knowledge was taking hold, replacing how Humboldt had gone about his work. Humboldt’s method had involved not only direct field observation, measuring and collecting data in situ but also allowing himself to experience, in an emotional and aesthetic sense, the phenomena before him. His was personal fieldwork par excellence, yet it was only part of the task he set himself. As he wrote up his data and observations, he also meant to demonstrate how all of the many disparate details could be brought together into a new and comprehensive understanding of the unity of nature. The interconnected, holistic view became his holy grail, and for the last twenty-five years of his life he diligently toiled on his five-volume opus Cosmos (1845-1862). That goal of integration and synthesis, however, was not one that subsequent researchers and scholars saw as central to their efforts, and the search for a comprehensive view of science was soon set aside in favor of specialization (Daniels 1971, 174-287; Sachs 2006, 236-242,339).

Specialization would seem a logical response to a rapidly expanding knowledge base; it yielded tangible results and ever-greater capacity for human manipulation and control of nature. As scholars and researchers raced down their separate disciplinary pathways, though, knowledge became increasingly fragmented and com- munication across major disciplinary boundaries more the exception than the rule. Nowhere was reintegration a discipline. A very few intrepid geographers sought to build bridges between several of the new disciplines-Carl Sauer comes to mind as one who attempted to synthesize geology, history, anthropology, botany, geomor- phology, climatology, and so on-but for the most part even geographers drifted into their own subspecialties.’

The divergence was one of tectonic proportions, nowhere more apparent than in the oceanic gaps that opened up between the hard sciences and the natural sciences on one shore and the social sciences on the opposite shore, while the arts and humanities drifted according to their own impulses. An effort to keep human knowledge and intellectual pursuits connected in some kind of conceptual Gondwanaland seemed neither desirable nor possible. Instead of offering inspiration and guidance for future generations of scholars and researchers, the Humboldtian integrative approach simply faded, replaced by an exciting new way of thinking about nature.


Humboldt died in 1859, in the very year that Charles Darwin published On the Ori- gin of Species. That landmark work, with its powerful concept of evolutionary biology, fundamentally reshaped the natural sciences, sending researchers dashing down new paths, and the world moved on, overlooking the fact that Darwin himself had been both inspired and profoundly influenced by Humboldt. Increasingly, Humboldt’s great effort at aesthetic, spatial, and temporal synthesis-of construct- ing a mode of thought and inquiry even broader than today’s discipline of ecology -acquired the character of a curious, anachronistic approach that no longer held appeal or seemed worth pursuing.‘ A century later, when a nascent environmental movement went searching for its intellectual roots, it turned to Thoreau and the Transcendentalists but not to Humboldt, who had had such a formative influence on their thinking and writing.

WRITING AND TRANSLATION Another argument put forth to account for Humboldt’s eclipse has to do with his own writing style. In 1995 Penguin Classics published a new translation of his Per- sonal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. Jason Wilson, who translated and abridged this edition, offered valuable insights that support the hypothesis that Humboldt’s own mode of expression and use of language contributed to loss of interest in his work.

In his approach to science Humboldt combined rigorous quantitative measure- ment with a romantic, aesthetic response to nature and landscapes. Similarly, in his writing, alongside meticulous, painstaking representation, Humboldt wanted to evoke for his readers a sense of awe and wonder in the presence of nature. In the descriptions of his encounters with non-European peoples, he wanted his readers to come away with an appreciation and empathy for people so different from themselves, a moral outrage at the mistreatment of the poor and marginalized, a conviction that the only rational response to the institution of slavery was to abolish it.’ He wanted to bridge the gap between subject and readers, have them feel what he himself felt, and arrive at judgments grounded in the liberal, humanist tradition of the Enlightenment. But to accomplish that takes extraordinary literary skill, and Humboldt the writer was not consistently equal to the challenge. One critic of his writing noted that “a certain heaviness of style . . . and [the] laborious picturesque- ness of treatment make it more imposing than attractive to the general reader.”’ Wilson, in his introduction to the Personal Narrative, noted that even a close personal friend of Humboldt wrote him to say, “you really don’t know how to write a book. You write endlessly, but what comes out of it is not a book, but a portrait without a frame” (1995, lvii).’ Wilson went on to quote Humboldt’s own lament regarding his shortcomings as a writer: “If I only knew how to describe adequately how and what I felt, I might, after this long journey of mine, really be able to give happiness to people. The disjointed life I lead makes me hardly certain of my way of writing.” Humboldt’s busy, extroverted life, Wilson speculated, kept him from fo- cusing on the craft of writing.

HUhlROLDT I N T H E UNITED STATES 407

Then there is the matter of literary style and the translations into English. Ac- cording to Wilson (1995, lix), the two earlier translations of the Personul Narrative from the French (the first by Helen Maria Williams and the latter by Thomasina Ross), were given to overly poeticized renditions, appealing more to a Victorian-era audience than to twentieth-century tastes. Humboldt’s own writing was shaped by the Romantic tradition that was much given to lengthy and rambling prose that fell from fashion with the advent of the more compact and direct style of the Realists and Naturalists of a later period.“’

In person, however, Humboldt was highly entertaining: He was an extraordinary raconteur, a brilliant conversationalist, and much in demand at soirees. In 1804, at the conclusion of his travels through Spanish America and prior to setting sail for Europe, he visited Washington, D.C., where he met with President Thomas Jefferson and members of the cabinet. He made a highly favorable inipression on Jefferson, and the two continued to correspond for years to come. William Burwell, Jefferson’s private secretary, wrote in his journal:

He was about thirty of small figure, well made, agreeable Physiognomy, simple unaffected manners, remarkably sprightly vehement in conversation, 8( sometimes eloquent, he spoke a variety of languages, the English among it-his presence at Wn [Washington] attracted from Pa [Philadelphia] all the men of science and learning. . . for z weeks we had an assemblage at the Pts [President’s] of literati to whom he listened with pleasure. . . . Mr. J[efferson] appeared delighted with H[umboldt] & said that he was the most scientific man of his age he had ever seen.” (quoted in Friis 1959,181)

The thirty-four-year-old Humboldt succeeded in charming all who had an op- portunity to meet him during that visit to Washington. Following one memorable evening at the home of Secretary of State James Madison, Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury, wrote in a letter to his wife of the “exquisite intellectual treat” he had received from Humboldt,

who is on his return from Peru and Mexico, where he travelled five years, and from which he has brought a mass of natural, philosophical, and political information.. . . We all consider him an extraordinary man, and his travels, which he intends pub- lishing on his return to Europe, will I think, rank above any other production of the kind. I am not apt to be easily pleased. . . . He speaks more than [ J. B. C.] Lucas, [James] Finley, and myself put together, and twice as fast as anybody I know, Ger- man, French, Spanish, English, all together. But I was really delighted, and swallowed more information of various kinds in less than two hours than I had for two years past in all I had read or heard. (quoted in Friis 1959,176)

Dolly Madison, who had been the hostess of the evening, wrote in a letter to her sister, Mrs. Anna Payne Cutts, that “we have lately had a great treat in the company of a charming Prussian Baron von Humboldt. . . . He is the most polite, modest, well-informed and interesting traveller we have ever met, and is much pleased with America. . . . He had with him a train of philosophers, who, though clever and entertaining, did not compare with the Baron” (quoted in Friis 1959,175).


In our day Humboldt would probably have made a superb radio and television personality, hosting his own programs to educate, explain, entertain, and delight us, opening our eyes and minds to a new way of seeing nature, the world, and our place in it. But our media were not available to him, so his undisciplined writing, his early English translators, and new literary fashions may well have had a hand in his loss of appeal.

ETHNIC CLEANSING If scientists no longer looked to Humboldt as a lodestar, if devotion to the unity of nature no longer propelled the research agenda, if the reading public was no longer enthralled by his accounts of travels to distant and exotic lands, at least one other group could be counted on to celebrate Humboldt’s legacy and keep his memory alive in the United States: German Americans. Yet it is the fate of this community that perhaps best accounts for Humboldt’s slide into obscurity in the United States.

Notwithstanding the eulogies invoking Humboldt’s universal appeal, “a man for all ages,” as the banner in New Jersey had proclaimed, it was German Americans who claimed him as their cultural hero. Most of the parades and processions and banquets of the Centennial Celebrations of September 1869 were organized by Ger- man societies; two-thirds of the crowd attending the events in New York‘s Central Park were said to be German. Many of the speeches were delivered in German, and the German flag was intertwined with the Stars and Stripes on floats and speakers’ platforms. For German Americans it was a celebration of ethnic identity and a display of cultural pride.

Barely a year later though, in 1870, Europe was embroiled in the Franco-Prus- sian War, newspapers were full of reports of Paris under siege, and U.S. sympathies clearly lay with the French. It was not simply an expression of public sympathy for the underdog but consistent with a long-standing antipathy toward German Ameri- cans that permeated U.S. society, that would gain momentum in decades to come, and that during World War I would culminate in an anti-German hysteria that drove German American culture underground-and, with it, the memory of Alexander von Humboldt.

Although Germans had immigrated to the Americas as long ago as the seven- teenth century, they arrived in record numbers in the nineteenth century, numbers surpassed only by the Irish. German immigrants became the largest non-English- speaking group in the United States, and, as they became increasingly politically active, they simultaneously held to their own cultural traditions, provoking the sus- picion and ire of native-born English speakers. As with many immigrant groups, they tended to cluster in their own neighborhoods and to speak their own language. They published newspapers and magazines in German; at their peak in the 1890s, some 800 such publications existed in the United States. And German Ameri- cans were particularly adept at coming together in all manner of cultural and political organizations: music and literature societies, physical education clubs, and citizens leagues. They established libraries, churches, schools, and businesses. They engaged

H U M R O L D T I N THE U N I T E D STATES 409

in civic improvement projects and maintained a lively public presence with their parades, picnics, and dances. Above all, they frequented taverns and on Sundays went out to beer gardens to enjoy music, dancing, bowling, and ample amounts of good German lager. This latter custom in particular offended native-born citizens of a Puritan bent who believed that one should refrain from all frivolous activities on the Sabbath. In time, antipathy to German beer consumption and the libertine behavior on Sundays helped fuel the temperance movement that eventually led to Prohibition (Galicich 1996).

Politically, German Americans were outspoken as well, particularly following the arrival of the “Forty-Eighters”-those who fled after the 1848 revolutionary up- heavals in Europe. The Forty-Eighters were liberal, agnostic, and intellectual, im- bued with the philosophy of the German enlightenment. They were social reformers and vociferous opponents of slavery, and they sought to unite the various German American groups around common concerns. They were successful in getting Ger- man-language instruction in the public schools of most major cities, and they fought back against puritanical citizens who sought to deny them their right to drink beer and enjoy their Sundays as they saw fit. In the 1880s, when German immigration was at its peak and many of the new immigrants found themselves in harsh living and working conditions in the emerging industrial cities, they became active in la- bor causes and formed the backbone of the trade-union movement. Angry nativ- ists, blaming the Germans for stirring up trouble with their socialist ideas, formed countergroups-such as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Pro- tective Association-and lobbied for legislation to prohibit alcohol consumption and to establish English-only schools (Galicich 1996; Kamphoefner 2004).

Nor were German Americans immune to events occurring in the fatherland. Kaiser Wilhelm had embarked on a major program of militarization, fueling fears of German expansionism. Native-born citizens worried about the loyalty of their German American neighbors and feared the presence of traitors, spies, and sabo- teurs. When the United States entered World War I in 1917 a full-blown anti-Ger- man hysteria erupted: German Americans were harassed, intimidated, publicly flogged, tarred, and feathered. In Illinois an angry mob lynched a young German coal miner. Across the country German homes and schools were attacked, Beethoven’s music was banned in Pittsburgh, statues of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller were vandalized or removed, and German-language classes were dropped from school curricula. The anti-German sentiment did not stop there. University faculty members were forced to resign, and in Cincinnati the public library ordered all books in German removed from the shelves, along with works translated from German. Banned were literary works, scientific and historical books, newspapers and periodicals, and the biographies of prominent Germans (Ott and Tolzmann 1994; Galicich 1996; Tolzmann 2001).

On 4 April 1918 the New York Times (ig18a) reported that a bonfire of German books was being planned in Cleveland: “Huge boxes for the collection of material for the bonfire will be placed in downtown sections by those in charge of the move-


ment,” so that the flames could be “fed by German school books, literature, war screeds, music, phonograph records and pictures.” There was no recalling the pride the country had taken in being associated with the German community during the

WANT NO GERMAN IN JERSEY State Board Urges Local Schools to

Eradicate Every Trace. TRENTON, S. J.. June 1.-A most

fiweeping rccoinmeiidntlon for the ex- clusion of werythlng German from the publlc sclioolu of New Jersey was adopted uimtiiinouslj’ today by the State Board of l3ducatinn hem. The text of the resolution follows :

“Tlie State Board of Education rc‘c- onimenda to thc Hoards of Education t!iroughout the State thut they rlgldh‘ excluda from the schooIe under . thelr ndmlnlstration any teaching of any. kind, or any textbook, magazine. newsfinper. tlr yuhlicutlon in any langvage that in nny way, either directly or Indirectly. tends to establish German propaganda or exalts Uciinaii Knlserism or lcultur or existlng German Rlms or ideals.”

The recwmmendatlon wa8 prescnted by I jr . John C. Van Dyke of ltulgers Col- l egc a niembcr 01‘ the Advisory Cornmit- tee or the StHtt: boartl.

Thi! personal clash between Colonel D. Stuart cYnvsii . meinhcr from SaIsm ( h i n t y . und John 1’. Murriiy of Jersey (‘ity, which too!< place nt tlw JIny maet- leg, was patched up. c.‘olonel Craven a~mloflzed tn Jlr. llurray. fils apology was accepted.

FIG. 3-Less than fifty years after cities across the United States had joined the German American community to celebrate the Humboldt Centennial, the country was gripped by anti-German hysteria. Source: New York Times, 2 June 1918, 7. (Reproduced courtesy of ProQuest and the New York Times)

Humboldt centennial, when the New York Times (1869a) had written, “We share their enthusiasm and try to divide with them the glory of honoring one whose memory is by so many titles worthy of being held in remembrance.”

And such “ethnic cleansing” continued, as in New Jer- sey, where the State Board of Education unanimously re- solved that local boards of education throughout the state “rigidly exclude from the schools under their adminis- tration any teaching of any kind, or any textbook, magazine, newspaper, or publica- tion in any language that in any way, either directly or indirectly, tends to establish Ger- man propaganda o r exalts German kaiserism or kultur or existing German aims or ideals” (New York Times 1918b) (Figure 3 ) .

Humboldt himself would have abhorred the kaiser’s government and war ma- chine, as did German Ameri- cans who saw themselves as

the heirs of the liberal philosophy of the Forty-Eighters, who had applied themselves so assiduously in their adopted country to the cause of social reform and the ideals of the United States. But the hysteria gripping the country allowed for no such subtle distinctions. Many families anglicized their names to blend in. Patriotic fervor wedded to a hatred of all things German prompted restaurants to change their menus to read “liberty steak” instead of hamburgers and “liberty cabbage” in place of sauerkraut. A rush to de-Germanize the nation prompted communities to rename their parks, streets, schools, and towns. Germantown, Nebraska became

HUMBOLDT IN T H E UNITED STATES 411

Garland; Berlin, Iowa became Lincoln. In Cincinnati, Hanover Street was changed to Yukon Street; Schumann Street to Meredith Street; and Humboldt Street became Taft Road (Hawgood 1940; Galicich 1996; Tolzmann 2001).

Although the anti-German hysteria subsided after the war, it had a profound impact on the German American community. Membership in cultural and political organizations dropped, many German Americans stopped speaking German, and by 1920 the number of German publications was a third of what it had been in 1894, as readership and subscriptions continued to decline. With the passage of the Eigh- teenth Amendment in 1919, taverns and beer gardens closed, and what had been a central feature of German American social life disappeared. Increasingly, German Americans ceased to define themselves as “hyphenated citizens,” as they set about assimilating into the mainstream. The Third Reich‘s imperial designs, World War 11, and revelations of Nazi horrors further eroded any inclination to celebrate German ancestry. For subsequent generations, the distinctive German cultural heritage faded-and, with it, the memory of their cultural heroes.’*

Nothing like the anti-German hysteria of World War I recurred in World War I1 -reduced immigration and greater assimilation had taken care of that-but the damage had been done. In the public mind Humboldt, once the equal of Colum- bus, was simply forgotten.I3

REDISCOVERING HUMBOLDT In his presidential address to the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in 1940, Sauer ([1941] 1965,355) urged geographers to acquaint themselves with “the individual great and genial figures of our past,” with Humboldt among those he deemed most worthy of study. In that same speech Sauer also lamented the chilling effect on learning when disciplinary boundaries narrowed research and reduced collegial exchange. To become familiar with Humboldt, on the other hand, was to see “wide horizons open up” (p. 355). More than sixty years later, at another gather- ing of the AAG, Humboldt was again invoked, this time during two special sessions devoted to the explorer’s life, work, and influence in the Americas. The meetings were held in Philadelphia in March 2004, almost exactly two hundred years after Humboldt had stepped ashore in that city for his one and only visit to the United States-and something of the spirit of Humboldt again came alive.14

Although the sessions certainly did not rise to the level of the celebrations and speeches in 1869, excitement was palpable as presentations and discussions offered a broader view of Humboldt than even many geographers had known. Here was a physical geographer who believed that social, economic, and political conditions were as worthy of his attention as were geology, botany, and climatology and who remained unflinching in his support for human rights and his opposition to slavery. Here was an empirical scientist who rigorously pursued data collection and who simultaneously valued the subjective and the aesthetic, believing they were essential for an accurate understanding of reality. Here was a natural scientist who was an ecologist before the term was even coined. And here was a writer and a


scholar who strove to convey a unified vision of nature and culture, just prior to the fragmentation of knowledge and the split between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities and to the emergence of the multitude of academic disciplines and subdisciplines that we have today.

The relevance of Humboldt for our times, and the renewed scholarly interest in his life and work, suggest that in the United States we could be on the verge of rediscovering Humboldt. The atmosphere at those AAG sessions in 2004 perhaps approximated the enthusiasm, wide-ranging curiosity, and hearty good fellowship that Humboldt’s contemporaries wrote they so enjoyed while in his company. It was an example of how the “Humboldtian” approach could invite participation, transcend disciplinary boundaries, and reveal new kinds of connections. Engaging in generous collegial exchange could be no finer spirit with which to resurrect Hum- boldt and pay tribute to his conviction that we are all part of an interconnected “cosmos .”

NOTES I. For a more thorough discussion of Humboldt’s impact on the intellectual and cultural history

of the nineteenth-century United States, see Walls (2001). In Laura Walls’s opinion, “Alexander von Humboldt was to nineteenth-century America rather like Albert Einstein was to the twentieth century: the iconic scientist, whose intellect was so far beyond the ordinary as to seem mystical, super- human, fabulous, yet curiously benign” (p. 121).

2. Church produced a number of major paintings from these travels, including: The Fulls o f the Tequedurnu neur Bogotu, New Grunudu (1852), The Andes ofEcuudor (1855). I n the Tropics (1856), View of Cotopuxi (1857), and Chirnborazo (1864). I am grateful to Harvey Flad for drawing my attention to Humboldt’s influence on the Hudson River School, as well as to Church‘s own retracing of Humboldt’s route in South America. Walls (2001,129-132) provides a discussion of Humboldt’s influence on Church, with particular emphasis on Heart of the Andes. John Howat (zoo j , 43-57) offers a more recent assess- ment. Reproductions of many of Church’s South American sketches and paintings can be found in Kelly (1989) and Howat (2005).

3. In 1981 the bust of Humboldt, originally placed at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street, near the Scholars’ Gate entrance to Central Park, was relocated to Explorers’ Gate at Central Park West and 77th Street, across from the Museum of Natural History.

4. The monument itself was not installed until some years later and was unveiled on 4 July 1876 as part of the grand Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia (New York Daily Tribune 1876). The fact that Humboldt’s statue was unveiled on the Fourth of July, the most symbolic day in the six-month- long exhibition, serves to further underscore the importance accorded Humboldt at the time. A schedule of the day’s events reads, in part: “July 4. Centennial anniversary of Declaration of Independence. Parade of volunteer troops from all parts of the Union; exercises in Independence Square, oration by William B. Evarts; poem by Bayard Taylor; Senator Ferry, President of US. Senate, presided. Emperor of Brazil and large number of distinguished visitors present; grand music by large chorus and orchestra. In the evening a grand display of fireworks was given in Fairmount Park. Dedication of the Catho- lic T.A.B. Fountain in Fairmount Park. Monument to Alexander von Humboldt, in Fairmount Park, unveiled” [www.ushistory.org/philadelphia/timeline/iS~6.htm].

5. Always a firm believer in studying the approach of those who had gone before, in a 1941 address to the AAG, Sauer ([1941] 1965, 355) observed: “Of special value . . . to the development of the student is the first-hand study of the individual great and genial figures of our past. A student can hardly immerse himself for a period in following through the intellectual history of a Ritter or Humboldt without seeing wide horizons open up. . . . [It] is about as important an induction into geography as I am able to suggest.” Acknowledging the spirit of Humboldt in Sauer’s own work, in 1959, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Humboldt’s death, Sauer was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Gold Medal by the Gesellschaft fur Erdkunde zu Berlin.

HUMBOLDT I N T H E UNITED STATES 413

6 . Any extended discussion of this topic would necessarily address Humboldt’s place in the development of Western thought, including the influence of his own pioneering historical survey of conceptions of nature in volume 2 of Cosmos. Clarence Glacken (1967) set the gold standard for this type of endeavor with his Traces on the Rhodiun Shore: Nuture and Culture in Western Thought frotn Anrierit Tirties to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Prior to his death in 1989, Glacken had been writing about the period when Humboldt was active, but the surviving manuscript has yet to be edited and published. Meanwhile, others scholars have addressed facets of this major theme. Walls (1995, 107) speculated that, as the empirical, materialistic, and fact-driven Positivists squared off against the in- heritors of the Humanist-Romantic tradition, neither found value in an intellectual forebear whose work they considered old-fashioned and suspect, in part because of its association with the opposition. The role of compartmentalization, dualistic thinking, and epistemological rivalries in extin- guishing Humboldt’s legacy is a rich subject, one deserving a lengthier discussion than is possible here.

7. This view of Humboldt is at odds with recent critiques emanating from postcolonial studies, most notably an essay by Mary Louise Pratt in Imperial Eyes (1992, iii-i43), “Alexander von Humboldt and the Reinvention of America,” wherein she portrays Humboldt as a champion and advance guard of the “Euroexpansionist process.” Pratt raises legitimate questions about Humboldt’s belief in Euro- pean-led progress; however, her decontextualized and highly selective use of evidence is problematic as she constructs a Humboldt to suit her project (Sachs 2 0 0 3 ) . In this she joins a German tradition that has repeatedly appropriated and reimagined a Humboldt to serve the ideology at hand, be it Humboldt the advocate of “unity” posthumously recruited in support of the political project of Ger- man unification in the nineteenth century; Humboldt’s intellect held up as proof of the superiority of the Aryan race, as claimed by the National Socialists; or Humboldt the antifascist Marxist-Leninist o f the German Democratic Republic (Rupke 2005).

8. Excerpt from a discussion about Cosmos in M’ikipedia. (www.en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title =Alexander_von_Humboldt].

9. Wilson (1995, Ixiii) edited the 1,997 pages of the Persorial Nurrative (which first appeared in French as Relation historiqne i fu v~yage nux regions equinoxides du nouveai~ continent [ 1814-1825]) down to 300 pages. And Huniboldt’s original, it is worth remembering, represents only a partial account of his five-year-long American odyssey with Aime Ronpland.

10. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that Humboldt was capable of writing powerful and evocative passages, particularly in his Persorial Narrutive, but that changing literary styles, and in particular a crisper approach to scientific writing, likely played a role in his loss of appeal among scholars and the general public alike.

11. I am grateful to Anne Buttimer for sharing with me a collection of excerpts from letters and diary entries by contemporary eye-witnesses, describing their impressions of Humboldt during the latter’s visit to Washington, D.C. in early June 1804. I am also grateful to David Stoddart for supplying me with a copy of the full article by Herman Friis (1959) in which the excerpts appear.

12. This raises questions regarding the fate of other prominent German figures such as, for ex- aniple, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He too was a multifaceted intellect (and a contemporary and a friend of Humboldt), but in Goethe’s case it can be argued that his contribution to a single field, namely literature, and not his work in optics, botany, biology, philosophy, or linguistics, assured his pliice in history. In this regard it is worth noting that Goethe is often dubhed a giant of Western, not simply German, literature. A thorough discussion of the fate of other prominent German figures in the post-World War I United States is beyond the scope of this article. For scholarship in the field of German Ainerican studies, see Tolzniann (2001).

13. Two world’s fairs, which ranked as major U.S. cultural events prior to World War I , elevated other heroes of exploration, helping to cement their status as cultural icons. The World’s Columbia Exhibition held in Chicago in 1893 provided the country with a new holiday: Columbus Day. ’The 1904 St. Louis Fair, the Louisiana Exposition, reminded the public of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which had set out a century earlier. When Humboldt’s legacy fell victim to the de-Germanization of U.S. culture, other cultural icons were ready to take his place. I am grateful to Carol Medlicott for pointing out the role of the St. Louis Fair in helping to forge a US. identity, in part by resurrecting the memory of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which had also fallen into obscurity.


14. Humboldt arrived in Philadelphia from Cuba on 20 May and departed for Europe on 30 June 1804 (Friis 1959,142). The Humboldt sessions at the Philadelphia meeting of the AAG were held on 17 March 2004.

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