From sedition to patriotism: performance, place, and the reinterpretation of American ethnic identity

Journal of Historical Geography, 25, 4 (1999) 534–558 Article No. jhge.1999.0164, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

From sedition to patriotism: performance, place, and the reinterpretation of American ethnic identity Steven Hoelscher

Between the two World Wars, many Americans changed their attitudes toward ethnic minorities and their place within American civic culture. States such as Wisconsin, with its dense concentration of diverse immigrant groups, came under especially harsh fire during the Great War, only to be celebrated 20 years later as microcosms of a pluralist democracy. Although much has been written about this profound transformation of American ethnic identity from the perspective of ‘official culture’, or those governing e´lites in power, less is known about the role of immigrant communities themselves in this change. Examination of the intertwining of ideology with the social manifestations of cultural performance in one Wisconsin community provides a way to interpret the elusive experience of ordinary people. In the case of two interwar Swiss American cultural performances, a view of ethnic culture emerges that sought to refashion a more inclusive definition of what it meant to be American. In the process of redefining their own identity, third generation Swiss strategically used such performance-based memory work. Their efforts not merely reflected, but shaped a discourse of ethnicity between the wars that became decreasingly antagonistic and gradually more open to ethnic and  1999 Academic Press cultural difference.

Introduction Shortly after the American entry into World War I, Wisconsin’s Loyalty Legion released a “Sedition Map” to the nation’s leading newspapers that aimed to dispel East Coast fears of the so-called ‘58 per cent American State’. The Loyalty Legion—a superpatriot organization comprised of the state’s prominent Anglo leaders and dedicated to “repudiate, in the name of Wisconsin, every disloyal work and deed calculated to misrepresent her and her people”—felt that no more effective way to demonstrate loyalty could be found than mapping “districts infected with pro-Germanism”. When mapped, these “seditious regions” could then be monitored and controlled, thereby achieving the Legion’s goal of “promoting the disappearance of those distinctly foreign and non-American racial traits which our emigrants have brought with them from abroad” (Figure 1).[1] Such pernicious nativism, although not unknown in other parts of the country, achieved considerable intensity in Wisconsin. The potent combination of antiinterventionist Progressives such as Robert M. La Follette and its outspoken socialist leaders like Dan Hoan and Victor Berger created a context in which Wisconsin became known as the “the nation’s most seditious state” or, alternatively, the “Kaiser’s state”.[2] 534 0305–7488/99/100534+25 $30.00/0

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Figure 1. ‘‘Sedition map, 1918’’. The Wisconsin Loyalty League sought to counter the state’s unAmerican reputation by cartographically controlling and containing its ‘pro-German’ element. This map was reproduced in several of the nation’s largest newspapers, including the New York Sun. Note sedition district number 3, the Green County Swiss settlement. Courtesy of State Historical Society of Wisconsin (neg. WHi [X3] 49718).

Of equal importance, the publicly expressed ambivalence toward intervention by the state’s many ethnic groups deepened antagonisms. Wisconsin’s third, and equally derogatory, nickname stemmed from its basic population makeup. Recognized as the nation’s ‘58 per cent American state’—a number that reflected the percent of Americans not of foreign birth or parentage—Wisconsin was often seen as an ‘ethnological laboratory’. Few states could match Wisconsin’s ethnic diversity, a fact that caused much consternation among the state’s Anglo e´lites.[3] Within this volatile milieu, even such seemingly benign groups as the Swiss were vilified as seditious; this was especially so after a 1917 referendum in a Swiss-dominated region where ‘hyphenates’ voted against American involvement in the war by a ten to one margin.[4] One New York journalist, reflecting on the 100 per cent Americanism[5] that Wisconsin lacked, summarized the nativist view of many outside the state when he wrote in 1918 that: Wisconsin has not secreted enough digestive juices to dissolve its foreign elements. Scattered around its surface are little communities which retain each its own nationality. Not German alone, but Polish, Bohemian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Belgian. A traveler among these people finds himself in an alien land . . . Here and now is Uncle Sam’s opportunity to make this nephew state one of the family.[6]

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Not quite yet one of the family of states and charged with treacherous sedition, Wisconsin soon proved itself with distinction as it forcefully suppressed any identification other than with the nation-state. The Milwaukee Journal punctuated those efforts as the Pulitzer prize-winning paper informed its ‘hyphenated population’ that appeal to racial or alien ties must be forever banished from American soil . . . We want no more German–American banks, or Polish–American restaurants, or Italian– American bond companies, or Deutscher Clubs . . . This is America. America it must be, wholly and unitedly, for all time to come. And, any club, society, company or organization that retards or conflicts with that spirit should change its purpose, close up, or be put out of existence. Appeal to racial or alien ties must be forever banished from American soil.[7]

Just over two decades later, cartographers painted a remarkably different portrait of the state’s demographic composition. Now ‘seditious regions’ became the state’s greatest asset and suspicious ‘foreigners’ evolved into patriots “who cling consciously to the folk customs of their ancestors”. That same Milwaukee Journal’s full-color “All Men Are Created Equal” map seemed to prove the existence of persisting immigrant cultures. Its intricate melange of colors accented a cultural diversity not yet vanished from the state—and fortunately so. By 1941, the very factors that once made Wisconsin the ‘Kaiser’s State’, now transformed it into “a concentrated segment of democracy, in which people of all heritages work together for the welfare of all”. Most importantly, the map’s kaleidoscope of groups “refutes totalitarian claims of racial superiority”[8] (Figure 2). What set Wisconsin and, by implication, the United States apart from totalitarian states was its apparent acceptance of cultural diversity. A University of Wisconsin study the following year made these pluralist conclusions clear: Wisconsin today is an outstanding example of that phenomenon which is a peculiar heritage of the United States—a fusion of diverse nationality stocks into one unified commonwealth. Even today, some two or three generations after the arrival of the first immigrants, distinct nationality concentrations can be found. Understood and appreciated, these [groups] form the bulwarks of democracy.[9]

Wisconsin, as the report’s principle author noted elsewhere, “is more than a melting pot, where all constituents have been reduced to one element, for in such a situation the roots of democracy could never have taken hold”. Racism and xenophobia survived to be sure, but their relative acceptance declined; at least for ethnic minorities of European ancestry, cultural diversity and cultural pluralism became affirmative catchwords.[10] This profound transformation of ethnicity between the wars—from sedition to patriotism—opened the door for a momentous reevaluation of ethnic identity in American life. Politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt accepted group identities along ethnic lines as an inescapable fact of American life and intellectuals made a similar discovery, best exemplified by Caroline Ware’s observation, that “immigrants and the children of immigrants are the American people. Their culture is American culture, not merely a contributor to it”.[11] But what of the ordinary people of both maps’ ‘cultural islands’ and their role in this ideological sea change? May we assume, simply because it is easier to document the actions and perceptions of political leaders and intellectual e´lites, that their views were received passively by a receptive audience? Moreover, does the move toward greater acceptance of ethnic diversity point toward assimilation or resistance, conformity or dissent, or possibly both?

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Figure 2. “All Men are Created Equal, 1941”. This full color map from the Milwaukee Journal shows the state to be comprised of a mosaic of persisting ethnic groups. Note the use of colored stars for the key and idealized folk figures standing on a United States map. Courtesy of University of Wisconsin Archives.

To trace the impact of ordinary people on this fundamental change in American ethnic identity, this article examines the intertwining of ideology with the social manifestations of cultural performance in one Wisconsin community.[12] Because cultural performance attracts mass participation, it is a likely place to find evidence of popular experiences of ethnicization. And some communities, more than others, invite close analysis because of their intensive cultivation of an ancestor’s ‘folk customs’. One such community, identified in the Loyalty League’s 1918 map in the extreme southern part of the state as “Sedition Region Number 3” (Figure 1), is New Glarus, Wisconsin. Settled by transplanted Swiss immigrants in the years surrounding Wisconsin’s 1848 statehood, New Glarus offers an ideal setting for such a study. Recurrent and widely attended nineteenth- and early twentieth-century festivals earned for the small farming community its reputation as the site of ethnic memory for the surrounding region. As focal points, I have chosen two cultural performances to document the interwar reinterpretation of ethnic identity—its 90th Anniversary Celebration in 1935 and the invention of the Wilhelm Tell tradition three years later. I argue that, rather than merely reflecting a dominant ideology that moved from condemning to celebrating ethnic

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difference, local commemorations actively shaped and influenced the official views of immigrant and ethnic life in the American Midwest.

Ethnic tradition and performance Working under the ‘invention of tradition’ paradigm, scholars have turned their attention to the way that popular pageantry and festivals create and maintain a diverse set of ‘civil religions’—from nationalism to ethnic affiliation.[13] As with nationalism, ethnicity is seen less as a ‘basic group identity’—ancient, unchanging, inherent in a group’s blood, soul, or misty past—and more as “a process of construction or invention which incorporates, adapts, and amplifies preexisting communal solidarities, cultural attributes, and historical memories”.[14] By emphasizing the ‘invention’ of identity, a once static phenomenon is historicized and one can begin to chart the appearance, metamorphosis, disappearance, and reappearance of ethnicities. Boundaries between ethnic groups and the dominant ethnoculture must be repeatedly negotiated, and the expressive symbols of ethnicity have to be continually reinterpreted. American ethnic groups met the American political economy pragmatically, utilizing their traditions to “creatively construct their own cultural world”, a world that helped them confront their present situations.[15] Identity construction implies an active participation by ethnic groups in defining their group boundaries and solidarities, and the invention of tradition shores up group cohesion, suggests claims to power, and redefines the parameters of ethnic identification. Whereas maps such as those of Figures 1 and 2 are inevitably products of ‘official culture’, festivals, popular pageants, and ceremonies encourage mass participation and are frequently the product of ‘vernacular culture’.[16] Governing e´lites frequently make use of ‘invented traditions’ to consolidate power,[17] but such invocations of collective ceremonial forms may also originate with what Fraser calls a “subaltern public. . .[the] parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs”. Denied ready access to such e´lite-driven “forms of imagining” as the novel, newspaper, census, and map, ordinary people use the communication channels available in the creation of competing “counter publics”.[18] Often, those channels take on a performative character. As cultural performances are based on repetition, whether lines learned or gestures reiterated, they are the generic means of tradition making. Cultural performances are those non-ordinary, framed public events that require participation by a sizable group. They are reflexive instruments of cultural expression in which a group creates its identity by telling a story about itself; performance is the chief way that societies remember.[19] Marked by a higher than usual degree of self-consciousness or reflexivity, performance genres “play an essential (and often essentializing) role in the mediation and creation of social communities, whether organized around bonds of nationalism, ethnicity, class status, or gender”.[20] Cultural performances provide an intricate counterpoint to the unconscious practices of everyday life as they are marked expressions of otherness and identity. As planned-for public occasions in which actions are invested with meaning and values are put ‘on display’, cultural performances enable diverse publics to address issues of schism, ambiguity, and division. And, importantly, cultural performances invest individuals and social groups with the rhetorical tools necessary to make strategic use of those divisions for their own, political ends. Celebration “not only represents, but also promotes, dynamic political processes, including the realignment of forces

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and interests within the body politic”. Contradictory, multifaceted, and complex, performance and celebration may both affirm and challenge dominant ideologies.[21] They were excellent “symbol-vehicles” for once marginalized groups to expand the parameters of ethnic identification.[22]

New Glarus and the “impulse to celebrate” The Swiss of New Glarus were uniquely privileged to advance the case of ethnic diversity before a large and powerful audience during the period between the wars. As in many ethnic enclaves at the turn of the twentieth century, community leaders and ordinary people alike frequently set aside time for commemorations, festivals, and performances to foster political and in-group causes. But the intensity and persistence of what one writer in 1905 already called the Swiss community’s “impulse to celebrate” was unusual.[23] By the eve of America’s entry into the Great War, New Glarus had established itself as the “Swiss commemorative headquarters” for the surrounding region.[24] Native-born and immigrant Swiss flocked to the small, central-place village for annual church-related festivals and for special decennial commemorative events. The community welcomed its role as the “central point of gathering on all holidays and festivals” as it became the place of local memory and commemoration by creatively providing an intangible, but valuable asset that was rapidly disappearing in the countryside around them—tradition.[25] The product of an organized, government-sponsored Auswanderungsverein (emigration society), New Glarus received early recognition as an “unaltered Swiss Colony”. In 1883, one columnist in The Nation wrote of his astonishment that the Wisconsin Swiss “held fast their integrity, in race, language and customs, so largely and so long”.[26] And, no less an authority than Frederick Jackson Turner held up the village as an example of how “the non-native element shows distinct tendencies to dwell in groups”.[27] As in most such places, “the Wisconsin Switzerland” was marked by a spirit of “clannishness” and was bound together by “the conservative force” of the church. Non-Swiss were seldom welcome during the early years; even at the turn of the century, “no Yankee now lives within a ring of six miles”. Meanwhile, Swiss converts to nonZwingli denomination churches were treated as “degenerates”.[28] As late as the mid-1930s, New Glarus and its surrounding hinterland retained tight ethnic boundaries. The village preserved its reputation across the state as an “insular and guarded community” through remarkably high rates of in-group marriage. Between 1850 and 1950, about 90 per cent of all marriages in the township occurred between two partners of Swiss ancestry.[29] This notoriety crossed the Atlantic where, in Switzerland, the village continued to be promoted as the “model Swiss settlement” in the United States. The 1941 WPA Guide to Wisconsin concluded that “Old World patterns persist in this Swiss-settled community” more fully than anywhere else in the state.[30] Those ‘Old World patterns’ remained conveniently restricted to the cultural realm and narrowly focused on the small village itself, but New Glarus area farmers also modernized and adopted technical innovations at stunning rates. Between 1880 and 1920 dairy production on Swiss-held farms outpaced their Wisconsin neighbors as the township catapulted from a middle rank in average value of farm products to the state’s most wealthy.[31] The dissimilarities between a modernizing countryside and a more narrowly traditional village were captured nicely during the early years of this century, when an unnamed writer commented that although “old-fashioned customs and ideas [generally] linger longer in the country than in the town, curiously, at New

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Glarus, the contrary is true”. Unlike the country, where “modern methods of doing things” were prevalent, in the village “the old Swiss life [was] still in existence”.[32] Tensions between a modernizing countryside and ‘the old Swiss life’ played themselves out dramatically in the years before the Great War when the village’s “Swissness function”, as one visitor from Switzerland put it, manifested itself vibrantly and with great rhetorical power on the festival stage.[33] Beginning in 1870 and continuing every five or ten years, commemorations of Swiss Independence and of the community’s founding attracted large audiences; the village of 1000 swelled with more than 6000 visitors in 1891 for the 600th anniversary of Swiss independence, and to estimates of 10 000 for the 60th anniversary of the region’s Swiss colonization 14 years later. With few exceptions, most of these celebrants were first and second generation Swiss who arrived by train from Illinois, Minnesota, and other parts of Wisconsin.[34] In their use of heartfelt historical orations, by exhibiting artifacts from the town’s early settlement years, in their creation of ceremonial landscapes and historical monuments, and by developing elaborate performance displays such as tableaux and the mock Landsgemeinde (cantonal assembly), the turn-of-the-century commemorations bore considerable resemblance to the civic celebrations occurring across the United States. Their content, likewise, increasingly pointed toward the growing tension between progressivism and anti-modernism found in the more complex historical pageants of urban areas. The commemorations effectively reminded the increasingly middle class generation of poverty’s virtues, while reveling in the dizzying thrill of progress.[35]

Commemorations in the wake of the Great War The events of World War I and the ensuing anti-immigrant hysteria directly impacted the Swiss American community’s festive culture. Ethnic cultural performance receded into the background as it did for all ‘hyphenated American’ groups immediately after 1918. In some instances, demonstration of a group’s loyalty to the United States became the centerpiece of a commemoration, as in Henry Ford’s famous Americanization pageants.[36] In other cases, heretofore frequent public displays of memory themselves faded into the past. Milwaukee’s Turners, for example, rewrote their constitution to restrict the festivals and plays that were a part of their pre-war public culture.[37] Between 1920 and 1935, cultural performances in New Glarus continued but were decidedly homey and quiet, filled with dignitary speeches, sharpshooting contests, and modest musical entertainment with little of the grand showiness of the previous generation’s commemorations.[38] Nevertheless, the decades following World War I also marked a moment of “awakening, activity, and acceptance” for a wide array of older stock EuroAmericans across the country.[39] In 1925 alone, a flourish of ethnic commemorative displays took place, including the immense Norse–American Centennial celebration in Minneapolis; the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Sweden on the Delaware River; the Chicago Historical Society’s celebration of the region’s French exploration; and the alliance of local Anglos and Hispanos transforming Santa Fe’s Fiesta into a celebration of “Spanish folk culture”.[40] The potent anti-immigrant nativism of the Great War years was indeed a “spectacular reversal of judgement” toward many groups; but only slightly less astounding was the ensuing reversal. Pariahs during the war, ‘Old World people’, were now seen as romantic vestiges from the past, patriots emblematic of a limited pluralism. With the politics of identity effectively neutralized by the war, the contribution of ethnic-Americans to the ever-boiling melting-pot became easier to accept and recognize. After the passage of

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the national origins quota law in 1924—legislation which marked the culmination of the nativism that began during the war and brought to an abrupt end a century long era of mass immigration—a slowly growing reassessment of the immigrant experience was launched.[41] Some historians have seen this reevaluation as an indication of the dwindling importance of “the ethnic dimension” in American life.[42] The evidence in Wisconsin points to a slightly different conclusion as the rhetoric surrounding ethnic life seemed to become even more vocal throughout the state. Rather than reading the period between the wars as the final chapter in the assimilation narrative, it is more fruitful to monitor the context of changing rhetoric surrounding group identity at a fine scale. The two faces of the ethnic on either side of the war—as potential traitor and potential contributor to the American republic—reflect mirror sides of a similar concern: how to incorporate diverse people with divided loyalties into a unified state. Significantly, third and fourth generation immigrants themselves were neither hapless pawns in this reevaluation, nor evidence of unidirectional assimilation. As the two interwar commemorations in New Glarus demonstrate, ethnic groups such as the Swiss creatively utilized their traditions as part of an ongoing “identity making”.[43] Such festive occasions were part of a complex dialogue at a historical moment of struggle. That struggle was not merely an effort to assimilate, nor to preserve intact a Swiss world view. It was an effort to redefine contours of American citizenship.

“A moment for co-operation, unity, and harmony” The 1935 commemoration surpassed any event before the war in terms of organizational complexity and richness of rhetorical symbolism. Where earlier festivals featured silent and motionless tableaux of historic scenes, the 90th anniversary staged a dramatic pageant, explicitly designed to foster a sense of historical continuity through repetition and bodily performance. The pageant transformed history into myth and the community’s past into a shared ritual; and while parades, orations, and special church services accompanied the pageant, they only served to reinforce the performance’s twin aims of asserting continuity of local tradition amid sweeping social and economic change and of making that ethnic continuity part of an American tradition. Many socioeconomic changes had taken place since the massive pre-war commemorations, including: the demise of cheese making in the New Glarus vicinity and the rise of factory labor for many area farmers at the regional milk condensing plant; increased geographic and social mobility; the cessation of immigration from Switzerland; and the use of English in all school classes, area newspapers, and in church services.[44] Well aware of these changes and the threats they posed to ethnic community, village professionals feared that insufficient support for a celebration could be summoned. The newspaper’s headline, “Shall New Glarus Celebrate its 90th Anniversary?”, was met with early indifference. The newly formed Commercial Club, organized and run by the prominent business interests, took the lead in the festival’s production.[45] For them, curiosity at the organizing meetings, although welcome, was not enough: “idle interest will not put on the celebration, but if everyone in the community will co-operate, maybe the job will not be so difficult”. Unity and co-operation were not automatically rendered, but coaxed out of a reticent community. “After considerable discussion”, a vote was taken and the businessmen decided to hold the celebration over a three-day period that August. The celebration’s centerpiece was to feature an ill-defined pageant or Swiss play that portrayed the life-history of the community, but how that history should be told, by whom, and on which aspects to focus, remained undecided.[46]

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“To Carry the Virtues of our Past into our Present” One committee member’s devotion to the commemoration was unwavering. The Commercial Club enlisted Dr John Schindler—the son of the village’s first mayor and a member of a prominent family—to write the historic pageant. Although a physician by profession, local history and lore comprised his real love. Schindler saw the past in sweeping terms across vast stretches of time and space, ultimately leading to the present. An admiration for the lives of local residents and the pride that he felt, and believed others must feel as well, for local place, enriched his progressive view of history.[47] Fused with that progress came an anti-modernism more pronounced than the previous generation’s commemorations. Wistfully, Schindler hoped to bring the past back into the lives of the local people and to slow down the faceless march of modern, mass society. “Cars whiz by in endless procession”, Schindler noted. “Seldom do the occupants realize. . .that around here hangs the romance of the building of Wisconsin”.[48] The nostalgic past, removed from the forces of modernity, held the key to a better future; no better person could be found to write a similar narrative of the Swiss colonization. The choice of Schindler also was appropriate because he came under the influence of two key members of the nation-wide pageantry movement while attending the University of Wisconsin. Thomas H. Dickinson and Ethel Theodora Rockwell were forceful advocates of community historical pageantry as “an early expression of an art impulse springing from the soil”. By dramatizing events from the local past and present, pageantry’s naive dramatizations represented an original American form of “social ceremonial” and an important component of the Progressive Movement.[49] Dickinson advocated the use of folk themes to articulate a political message common to Progressive thought: by creating a drama that was “socially constructive”, the dramatist should engage in “expanding the purposes of social progress”. Socially constructive drama would help a community discover itself by “expressing the self-consciousness of the community as a social unit”.[50] Schindler followed this view closely, for the pageant he noted: “is done chiefly to remind each new generation of the splendid courage, endurance, and co-operation which signalized the rather unique beginnings of our village. It is done to carry the virtues of our past into our present and on into the future”.[51] With a firm belief in the ability of performance to help the community discover itself, Schindler hoped that by playing the part of the colonists, present day New Glarners could learn from them.

Making a good impression Village business leaders concerned themselves with the more prosaic business of organizing the festival as a whole and countering unexpected difficulties as they arose. A generational shift in the community meant that few residents remained who had actually been born in Switzerland and many no longer spoke Swiss German.[52] Knowledge of the homeland and its customs was becoming concentrated among a handful of recent immigrants or second and third generation Swiss Americans who, like John Schindler, possessed historical interest in the colonization. Moreover, participation still required hustling; even as late as a month before the performance, it was unclear who would participate.[53] In the end, festival organizers solicited the support they needed to produce the event; participation came from a broad cross-section of the village and township population, but they were utilized in the pageant in ways that reflected social stratifications within the community (Table 1). The vast majority of the pageant officials and committee members came from the village’s business class, with only a handful of

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T 1 1935 historical pageant participants (by occupation)

Officials and committee members Characters, with speaking roles Colonists and families‡ Dancers

N

Village professional∗ (%)

Farmer/milk plant worker† (%)

Unknown (%)

20

85·0

15·0

0·0

34

32·4

58·8

8·8

30

6·7

93·3

0·0

20

0·0

100·0

0·0

Sources: Manuscript notes for the 90th Anniversary Pageant, n.d., subject files, NGHSA; and Official Program of the 90th Annniversary Pageant, Presented at New Glarus, Wisconsin (New Glarus, 1935). Occupational data supplied by Millard Tschudy. Notes: ∗ Village professions include: furniture dealer, teacher, insurance broker, automobile sales, pastor, blacksmith, bank clerk, tavern keeper, lumber dealer, factory supervisor, engineer, feed operator, and physician; † many farmers at one time or another worked at the Pet Milk Condensing Plant and, conversely, many factory workers at one time farmed. Thus, they were combined into one category; ‡ the data source only lists ‘household heads’, although both men and women, together with their children, performed as colonists. The number 30, therefore, considerably underestimates total participation.

farmers and milk factory workers taking part in such organizational work; their contribution came in the form of performance. Most characters in the pageant with speaking roles, as well as those portraying the colonists, either worked on a farm fulltime or split that time at the milk condensing factory, whereas all of the folk dancers came from neighboring farms. The two-fold goal of the pageant—to broaden the scope of American identity for non-ethnic outsiders, and to reconnect insiders with their pioneer past—was partially accomplished before the production. Such “restored behavior” hinged on the lengthy rehearsal period that brought the social memory of the colonization to life.[54] “Many people have said”, it was reported a week before the scheduled performance, “that they have learned more about the history and development of our community from hearing the pageant, in practice, than they have been able to acquire in a lifetime by other means”.[55] But if Schindler was concerned with “carrying the virtues of our past into our present” for the benefit of community insiders, the pageant organizers worried considerably more about making sure that link was understood by outsiders.

Messages for an emigration and a depression Although many outsiders were neighboring ethnic Swiss, many other visitors—those with power and no ties of descent—came with different purposes in mind. Governor Phillip La Follette, for one, seemed to notice hardly anything remotely ethnic about the gathering. For the state’s leading politician, the day presented an opportunity to remind his audience of 3000 that “We must be pioneers today. The pioneers did not wait for opportunity to come to them—they blazed new trails that others could follow”. Considerations of the Great Depression were preeminent as the governor repeatedly pushed a conservative and individualist economic vision. “It is up to you and me to take the experiences, traditions, and principles of the pioneers and apply them to the

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problems of today”, La Follette implored his audience, as he pleaded for state and federal governments to “stop paying people to be idle”.[56] La Follette’s tactic was an age-old one: namely, to draw selectively from the perceived virtues of the past to fight today’s problems. But coming from the governing e´lite, with no ties to the community or their local heritage, his speech sounded hollow. The governor’s emphasis on the work ethic’s individuality came at the expense of group cohesion, a message that conflicted with the goals of the festival organizers. For La Follette, pioneer iconography did not sit along side an ethnic vision, but supplanted it. Fred Ott, the festival’s chairman and a local furniture dealer, found it considerably easier, and much more important, to reconcile the pioneer and the immigrant. Recalling questions about the group’s loyalty less than 20 years earlier, Ott reminded the audience of the festival’s vernacular purpose: New Glarus celebrates to “keep alive the Swiss spirit. Though we are loyal citizens of the United States, we are still Swiss and believe that we have a heritage that is worth preserving”. He adjured the crowd to retreat from environmentalist notions of identity, and to recognize that a people’s spirit rested not on geography but on folklore: “We have no mountains or deep valleys which may reecho our songs this afternoon. It is, however, not the landscape which makes a country, but the people, who live there. . .Our lives must reflect the real Swiss spirit”.[57] In the end, Ott’s values differed little from those of La Follette, except in one crucial respect. If the governor’s “experiences, traditions, and principles” were found in a generic pioneer, for Ott that same spirit resided in an immigrant, and more specifically, a Swiss pioneer. Pioneering could be—and for the purposes of the 90th anniversary commemoration, had to be—communal. Communitarian values received articulation in Schindler’s dramatic historical pageant. The cast of early colonists, dancers and yodelers, was joined by Civil War veterans, idealized female representations of Switzerland, the United States, and Uncle Sam (Figure 3). As much as possible, descendants of the early settlers were recruited to play the role of their ancestors (Figure 4).[58] A virtual throwback to the popular historical pageants of the Progressive era, the New Glarus celebration of community and tradition offered ethnic folklore as the region’s ‘authentic’ culture. Local community cohesion, it was hoped, could be strengthened by accentuating the locality’s unique, ethnic identity and its place within a wider historical narrative. The Swiss spectacle echoed the Progressive vision that “the place is the hero and the development of the community is the plot”.[59] The audience was to feel awe at the heroism of the pioneers and, in turn, take their example into their own lives. Reworking the rhetoric of Romantic Nationalism for vernacular purposes, Schindler summarized the twin themes of place and its heroic development in this way: “The growth of the colony has been steady until the present time, and it is a far different village that would greet our founders today. But the advantage we have over the founders in a material way, would be more than outweighed by the advantage which they possessed in things of the soul”.[60] At this time of economic crisis and national hardship, a hero came in the form of a local place where ordinary men and women eschewed material extravagance to live simpler, better lives. The story line progressed upward, retelling a fable of solidarity and unanimity overcoming individualism, cowardice, and opportunism. When dissension threatened the emigration at an early stage and some argued for turning back, one mock colonist reminds the group not to forget that “[w]e are Swiss whom hardship can not stop. This is a moment for co-operation, for unity, and harmony”.[61] Echoing the festival organizers themselves, this passionate plea for unity recurred throughout the narrative. Upon reaching the New World, the pageant’s colonists heard the same message repeated:

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Figure 3. Helvetia at 1935 Historical Pageant. Women were often called upon to personify the abstract virtues of the nation-state during historical pageants. Here Olive Becker embodies Switzerland as Helvetia. Courtesy of New Glarus Historical Society.

“Stay together, Swiss with Swiss, and wherever you go, you will live and do as they do in Switzerland. You will keep alive the things which are Swiss”.[62] The pageant proved an unqualified success. The three performances attracted nearly 6500 people and were marked, according to the local newspaper, by “a spirit of cooperation” and an “absence of ‘the Commercial Spirit’ ”.[63] Its middle class, businessoriented organizers approved of such sentiments as they breathed a sigh of relief in the event’s “absence of ‘rowdyism’ ”. Fortunately, the scheduled carnival failed to show up. Rowdyism and elements of the carnivalesque, so much a part of festival, might have mocked the earnestness of the complex messages being sent forth.[64] Ethnic cultures sat squarely in the middle of American cultural life, the pageant’s first message; thus it depicted the Swiss immigrants as the real winners of the west, as civilized openers of the frontier to white settlement. The only non-Swiss in the play—a quintessential American who didn’t speak Swiss—is lampooned for his crude manners and ungrammatical speech. Dressed “roughly, with no shirt, but only ragged underwear”, the American pioneer chews, spits and talks in “drawling English”, his laziness compounded by a thick-headed racism as he puts his nose to the ground, takes a couple of big whiffs and declares, “by darn, seems to me I smells Injuns”. By contrast, and

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Figure 4. Characters in 1935 Historical Pageant. The historical pageant reenacted the immigration story of 90 years earlier. With a cast comprised of both immigrants and third generation ethnics, the pageant reinforced the theme that the Swiss were the real winners of the west. Courtesy of New Glarus Historical Society.

with no small sense of their own racial superiority, the Swiss pioneers are depicted as industrious, thrifty and, despite their poverty, well-mannered and better dressed. Their relations with Native Americans are amicable, even deferential, attesting to a ‘frontierism’ better than the American version.[65] The values and traditions of the Swiss also helped to deal with the age’s great problems, both economic and political. Indeed, beyond their work ethic, the alleged Swiss pioneer values of patriotism and inherent love of democracy highlighted the moral chasm between freedom and oppression. Arguing for the “Buckskin Shirt” of the pioneer to combat the “Dictatorship of Italian Blackshirts”, the “Fascism of German Brownshirts”, and the “Communism of Russian Redshirts”, the pageant’s author positioned Swiss pioneers as prototypically democratic. The celebration of ethnic pioneers enabled the community to place itself within the continuity of American history and yet simultaneously to express pride in being different and not completely welded into the larger, homogenizing national culture. This strategy was both adaptive and defiant; the final, and most important, message of the performance was a veneration of local attachments to place and vernacular culture. The story’s protagonists were the ordinary people being born, living difficult lives, encountering and overcoming obstacles. They accomplished this through hard work but, more importantly, through co-operation, unity, and harmony. The construction of a peaceful historic community spoke to both the heartfelt pride of local residents as well as ethnic leaders’ concerns over the decline of an integrated ethnic community. Rowdyism and the carnival threatened to break the seamless web of community and co-operation of this cultural presentation. The desire to present an illusion of consensus

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prevented the pageant’s author from including other, more complicating factors in the village’s history, including: well-known social and geographic schisms brought over and transplanted from the earliest immigration; discrimination against non-Zwingli denomination churches; an “epidemic of cross burnings” in nearby Monroe and well-attended Klu Klux Klan meetings to the south of town; and the increasing industrialization of the countryside coupled with the attendant weakening of the traditional small-scale and decentralized Swiss cheese factories.[66] To present such an unflattering history would puncture the pageant’s affirmation of community and social cohesion and imperil the performance’s celebration of local attachments to place and the ever receding ethnic past.

“A holy reaffirmation of the democratic spirit” Whereas the 1935 historic pageant celebrated local and ethnic memory through an American performance style, three years later New Glarus articulated abstract loyalties to a distant homeland through a resolutely non-American performance. A classic ‘invented tradition that is still performed annually in both Switzerland and New Glarus, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell retold the famous story of the archer, his arrow, his son and an apple. More significantly, the play presents a narrative of the birth of modern democracy as valiant Swiss peasants and nobles together overthrow the powerful Austrian overlords.[67] Where earlier larger-scale public displays of ethnic culture recurred intermittently, organizers of Tell hoped, from the very beginning, to “make this one of the traditions of New Glarus”.[68] This powerful genre, a folksy cultural display of Germany’s High Culture icon, allowed a bridge into the nation, while still permitting ethnic distinctiveness. By enacting Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in German during the second war this century against that country, the Swiss community simultaneously demonstrated New Glarus’ “different heritage” and its compatibility with American ideology (Figure 5).

“Wilhelm Tell had a painful beginning” Everyone connected with the play in its early years credits Edwin Barlow for the initial idea and the ability to motivate community members to stage the outdoor production. His unique background that straddled both sides of the Atlantic enabled Barlow to become an ethnic cultural broker par excellence. Such brokers most often appear when a group undergoes change in its status and relationship to a ‘host society’. Confronted by pressures during the war years to Americanize and in the wake of their more recent reassertion of local ethnic identity during the 1935 anniversary pageant, leaders in the Swiss community searched for a broker who could effectively bridge both worlds. Although some recent immigrants trickled into the Swiss-dominated region, none possessed the economic ability or intellectual leadership to move effectively between the local, national, and international scales of memory. Louis Wirth grasped this context during his studies in Chicago around this time, noting that such brokers influence their fellow ethnics by “recovering, disseminating, and inspiring pride in the group’s history and civilization and pleading its case before world public opinion”.[69] Nobody seemed more poised to argue for the Swiss—to the world, and themselves—than Edwin Barlow. Described aptly as a community “insider/outsider”, Barlow was related to the village by birth, but spent little time there. After becoming a clerk at the Long Island Savings Bank, he dabbled in “the theatrical field” but with little success.[70] His greatest financial success occurred when the 39-year-old bank clerk was adopted by a “New York social

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Figure 5. Wilhelm Tell and Family, c. 1938. Fabricated from the cloth of Switzerland’s best known myth, Wilhelm Tell provided an ideal medium through which Swiss Americans asserted their centrality and their “difference” within a previously restricted civic culture. Courtesy of New Glarus Historical Society.

registerite” who took an unspecified interest in the bachelor. This munificent arrangement enabled Barlow to begin extensive European travels, including a nine-year residence in Lausanne, Switzerland. During this period he most likely saw the Interlaken version of Tell that had such a profound effect on him.[71] These foreign experiences, so utterly in contrast with his common, rural upbringing gave Barlow a demeanor that differentiated him from his former neighbors in New Glarus. Flaunting his worldliness, the selfproclaimed “man-of-the-world” was viewed with suspicion by many in the small Midwestern town who saw his theatrical presentation of self as “weird” and “out of the ordinary”. Whatever his eccentricities, Barlow also possessed an “unflagging, unflappable energy”. With that energy and the assurance that comes naturally with a thick wallet, was an unswerving insistence on doing what, at first blush, might seem impractical.[72] While on Long Island, Barlow first concocted the idea to stage an outdoor production of the Schiller drama upon reading of the successful 90th Anniversary Celebration. Why not direct that “wonderful spirit” to create a living, performative monument to ethnic memory, a “ ‘Folkfest’ to be performed year after year in the tradition of the finest outdoor dramas of Europe?”[73] Over the next three years, Barlow began garnering support for his ‘Folkfest’ from several key village leaders, especially Esther Stauffacher, an important, respected community leader who only two years earlier led the efforts to construct a local historical village.[74] That he turned to Stauffacher, demonstrated the interloper’s skill at reading the community and at negotiating its local political apparatus. Barlow would have made little progress on his own, but with the support and legitimation of the well-connected Stauffacher, the “crazy idea” stood a chance. His outsider status was crucial; with no vested economic or political interests in the daily life of the village and appealing to his authority as a knowledgeable “world

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traveler”, he could take risks that no local resident, no matter how well connected, ever could.[75] In a revealing interview several years later, Barlow recalled that few people other than Stauffacher seemed interested initially in his idea for a ‘Folkfest’. “Wilhelm Tell”, he relayed, “had a painful beginning” that nearly caused him to retreat to the safe confines of Long Island. The possibility of retreat in the face of failure was Barlow’s option, but not one that existed for the deeply-rooted Swiss of the region. This simple fact was pointed out to the “world traveler” by the one local person with whom he had a direct, familial connection. While the “preparations were in such confusion and the people in so great an uproar”, his aunt “begged him to give up the notion of a community project”. Barlow recalls that he nearly did when she scolded him to “remember, you can go back to New York after this thing is over, but I’ll have to live here”.[76] The threat posed by Wilhelm Tell was a danger that faced a group whenever it creates a public display that purports to speak for its identity and underlying reality. The culture created by such displays is always a public culture that eventually leaves the carefully contrived grasp of its creators. Such public culture can expose, accentuate, and tear open internal divisions within a community that had been carefully concealed beneath the surface. Social ties within small towns, more often cobbled together through personality than social class, are fragile and contingent; and New Glarus, for all its communal rhetoric, was no different than other such places. Due to the sheer scale of the undertaking that required the committed efforts of hundreds of people, and because the story represented the central founding myth of the homeland, Wilhelm Tell assumed a weighty seriousness. If done successfully, Tell could reinforce community; if it failed, community could be undermined.[77] Barlow managed to garner enough support for this ‘Folkfest’ during the spring of 1938 to consider staging the drama late that summer. His growing network comprised a cross-section of the community—businessmen, lumber and feed dealers, farmers, clergy, factory workers, and teachers. Creating a broad base of support was a crucial maneuver that legitimized a fundamental aspect of the production. Tell to be successful had to be a community production; that became one of its chief selling points. By involving diverse strands of people, the play could appear as if it arose naturally and organically from the soil. Beyond the difficult task of drumming up support, the logisitical details seemed endless: committees were formed; rehearsals went late into the night; costumes were created from books lent by the Helvetica Library in New York; and the American Swiss neded training in traditional folk dancing. Here, Barlow enlisted the assistance of a member of the Bern Opera to teach the Swiss community ‘the old ways’. Finally, donations from individuals and businesses were collected in case the production did not pay for itself, but this proved unnecessary when the festival’s overwhelming success astonished even its heartiest supporters.[78] More than 150 men, women, and children participated in the two, German language productions, accounting for fully 10 per cent of the village and surrounding township population. Around 2000 visitors sat through periodic rain showers watching the German playwright’s drama in a language that only 20 years earlier was deemed ‘the enemy tongue’. This achievement, plus the $600 profit, ensured that the newly minted tradition would continue.[79]

The Swiss are more American than Americans The first four years of Tell witnessed, in addition to a doubling of participation numbers, a three-fold increase in attendance, reaching more than 5000 by 1941.[80] These early

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Figure 6. A Swiss Farmer Playing a Tyrant, c. 1942. The parallels between the Wilhelm Tell story and the war against an aggressive Nazi Germany were heightened by Paul Grossenbacher’s evocative portrayal of the Austrian tyrant Gessler. Grossenbacher, a Swiss immigrant farmer, said that he “played the role just like Hitler”. Courtesy of New Glarus Historical Society.

performances all took place in German, a point of pride for organizers, but one that required justification. The first year’s program explained: “The play would lose much of its charm were it to be given in the English language”. Despite this feeling, one of the two German performances was dropped in 1941 and in its place, an Englishlanguage translation was added. From a practical perspective, the Tell Guild, the drama’s chief organization, recognized the possibilities of attracting larger audiences to the performance if they expanded it beyond German speakers. Equally important, heightened tensions between the United States and Nazi Germany recalled the anxieties of just 20 years earlier when all public displays of ethnic culture were suppressed. The Swiss Americans adroitly maintained their German play and, simultaneously, fit it into an increasing nationalist rhetoric. The Tell Guild launched a blitzkrieg of programs, brochures, and press releases designed to liken the play with American revolutionary history. Press photos were released that connected the sadistic thirteenth-century Austrian overlord, Gessler, to his twentieth-century counterpart (Figure 6). The text to the 1942 brochure hints at the efforts to legitimize Tell as an American drama. Likening their four-year-old festival to a sacred ritual, the Guild conveyed a seriousness of purpose, calling it a “holy reaffirmation of the democratic spirit”.[81] The press uniformly repeated this viewpoint, demonstrating the ideological chasm between 1918 and 1942. The State Journal called the Swiss heritage “liberty-loving”, while the Capital Times spoke of the “Swiss fight for freedom”, and the Chicago Tribune noted that the English language version was necessary because the “noble celebration of a nation’s struggle to free itself from tyranny carries such poignant and ominous overtones as to make its presentation more valuable than ever”. Tell, its organizers’ claimed, was a “more American” story than the Anglofounding of New England.[82]

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Tell speaks for the group and the state By enacting Wilhelm Tell, the community placed their group’s heritage into the marrow of American national ideology. The Articles of Incorporation for the production’s official organization stated that the chief reason for the festival was “to stimulate a greater interest in Democracy. . .in the State of Wisconsin and anywhere in the world”.[83] The connections between Schiller’s drama and American Revolutionary history and its salience for a world on the verge of another world war were explicit. The 1941 program, for example, declared that “it is this message of liberty and freedom from oppression that the people of New Glarus are trying to show by their ‘Wilhelm Tell play’ ”.[84] New Glarus’s Tell demonstrated the tolerance and power of democratic pluralism in the face of the Nazism’s ruthless repression of ethnic minorities and, in turn, positioned Swiss culture as the archetypical American culture. Yet, this relates only half the story. The other reason for the festival also can be found in the Articles of Incorporation: “to perpetuate the memory, character and traditions of the Swiss people for the welfare and common good of the residents of the community of New Glarus”.[85] For many in the community, the annual ritual of performing Wilhelm Tell re-invented their Swiss heritage. Reporting that the children “as well as many old folks in the cast, learned more about Wilhelm Tell and Swiss history the past few weeks than in the rest of their lives”, the local paper questioned if the community had not too hastily discarded local traditions 20 years earlier. Newly created traditions, it recognized, provided a means for community cohesion and stimulated a receding public memory.[86] Looking back across the span of 60 years, one early cast member believes that “Tell was a means, an almost sacred web, for people to find their identity”; and the woman who played the part of Bertha von Bruneck for the first performance recalls that “we were just starting to get excited about being Swiss. . .Mr Barlow was a leader in this area, so we followed”.[87] These insider readings do not imply that the play was received uniformly throughout the community for Tell provided multiple interpretations and experiences. Some grudgingly endured the heavy commitments of the weekend and the weeks preceding the festival and quickly withdrew their support; others used the occasion to escape New Glarus and the increasing crowds.[88] Outsider views were equally polyvalent. Tell elicited as many interpretations as there were seats for the growing audiences. Some saw the play in the light of American patriotism; more typical, however, were the observations of a Chicago resident who found solace in Tell’s anti-modern rusticity, its “sincerity and simplicity”. Even more common were the comments of a visitor from Madison, Wisconsin, who was touched by the connection of the performance to her own, Swiss heritage and identity.[89] Ethnic memory, rather than the play’s didactic flag-waving, dominated, as few letters collected by the Tell Guild during these early years mention the patriotism taken for granted by newspaper editors and publicists. A high seriousness thus marked the play from its inception, a seriousness that contained little space for comedy or irony. This sincerity of purpose brought together tourists searching for anti-modernism or their ethnic roots with the performers who sought to reinvigorate their own slumbering ethnic identity. Unknown to tourists, the drama was invented by a wealthy outsider from Long Island; but this was unimportant to the increasingly symbolic and ever more reflexive ethnicity of the New Glarus Swiss. This heightened self-consciousness became a crucial element of the cultural pluralism fashioned between the wars in communities like New Glarus. As with the historic pageant only half a dozen years before, this conspicuously constructed ethnic iden-

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tification became a rallying point around which co-operation and unity, however manufactured, gathered. The Wilhelm Tell play became an ideal genre to build a connection to the state—indeed, to position the group as the small-scale archetype of the state—while simultaneously permitting ethnic heritage and difference to thrive. The festival achieved its greatest rhetorical power in the parallel Americanization and ethnicization of Schiller’s drama and its incorporation into local public memory. The coexistent rise of Nazism only lent special urgency and confusion to these traditionbuilding efforts.

Conclusions: ethnic localization and the uses of performance Most historical interpretations of American ethnic experience between the world wars stress accommodation and assimilation. According to these accounts, the anti-immigrant crisis gradually ceased in the 1920s and 1930s with an ethnic counter reaction that was merely a final mustering of nostalgic forces before an eventual merging with American society. Official culture’s forms of imagining usually depict this diversity within a larger context of Americanization.[90] Yet, the evidence from the perspective of vernacular culture points to a contrary conclusion. Ethnic groups like the Swiss used sanctioned rhetoric to create alternative spaces outside of a restrictive civic culture and, in the process, redefined that culture. As groups reached middle class status, they might propose their compatibility with American goals and values as they simultaneously defended their culture. Their opposition to dominant American values of conformity and individualism often was masked in this process, but it was there none the less.[91] The concerns of Swiss middle-class leaders about trends toward modernization and loss of integrated community dovetailed with this political project. From the complex messages of the historical pageant and the Wilhelm Tell tradition a similar view of ethnic culture emerged between the wars that sought to refashion a more inclusive definition of what it meant to be American. For groups like the Swiss, ethnic identity was neither obliterated through an abstract Americanization, nor passed down as an unbroken tradition, but rather discovered and re-presented through cultural performances. The celebrations of both ethnic and American ideals made use of classic Americanist rhetoric in an attempt at cultural legitimation within a civic culture that had previously remained exclusive. By proposing their compatibility with American goals and values while proclaiming their uniqueness, the cultural performance provided the third generation ethnics a way to crack a seemingly all powerful American cultural hegemony. Indeed, in the process of redefining their own identity, such performative memory work actively shaped a discourse of ethnicity between the wars that became decreasingly antagonistic and gradually more open to ethnic and cultural difference.[92] That this reinterpretation hinged, in large degree, on a none-too-subtle anti-modernism only served to make ethnic difference more palatable. The lens of ethnic localization may be the best way to view the 90th anniversary pageant and Wilhelm Tell.[93] The New Glarus Swiss created a notion of culture that was as place specific as it was ethnic specific. By means of performance, the New Glarus Swiss planted their values, aspirations, and myths deeply into local culture and, in doing so, helped reshape that culture in their image. Although that planting was accomplished through considerable effort and with the leadership of key individuals, support became widespread enough to overcome obstacles of inertia and indifference. The Swiss immigration story, as told through the 90th anniversary pageant, became the place history, and Wilhelm Tell provided an ideal medium through which Swiss

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Americans asserted their centrality and their “difference” within a previously restricted civic culture. Department of Geography and Anthropology 227 Howe-Russell Geoscience Complex Louisiana State University Baton Rouge Louisiana 70803 USA

Acknowledgments The research for this article was greatly enhanced by the financial support of three institutions, which I gratefully acknowledge: the Swiss Historical Society, Chicago, IL; the Immigration History Research Center, St Paul, MN; and the College of Arts and Sciences at Louisiana State University for a Manship Fellowship. For their helpful comments on previous drafts and presentations of this paper, I thank: Regina Bendix, Michael Conzen, Carville Earle, John Hudson, Gerry Kearns, Jack Kugelmass, Robert Ostergren, Miles Richardson, Yi-Fu Tuan, Rudolph Vecoli, and this journal’s anonymous reviews. The material in this article is part of a more extensive discussion of the political and economic uses of ethnic memory to be published in my Heritage on Stage (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison).

Notes [1] Resolutions adopted by the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion, Evening Wisconsin, 23 March 1918; E. B. Usher, Why the loyalty of Wisconsin is questioned, 20 April 1918, un-named newspaper, Papers of the War History Commission: Wisconsin in World War I: Clipping File, 1917–1918, Series 1699, Box 1, Manuscript Archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (hereafter SHSW). See also L. L. Carey, The Wisconsin Loyalty Legion, 1917–1918, Wisconsin Magazine of History 53 (1969) 33–50; and K. Falk, Public opinion in Wisconsin during World War I, Wisconsin Magazine of History 25 (1942) 389–407. [2] C. D. Stewart, Prussianizing Wisconsin, Atlantic Monthly (January 1919) 99–105. Important background on the period in Wisconsin may be found in: J. D. Stevens, Suppression of expression in Wisconsin during World War I (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin 1967); Idem, When sedition laws were enforced: Wisconsin in World War I, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 58 (1970) 39–60; D. L. Brye, Wisconsin Voting Patterns in the Twentieth Century (New York 1979) 250–7; L. J. Rippley, The Immigrant Experience in Wisconsin (Boston 1985) 104–15; and Falk, op. cit. [3] According to the 1920 census, slightly more than 41 per cent of Wisconsin’s population was either born in a foreign country or both parents were born abroad. U.S. Census, 1920. Volume 3: Population, 1118, 1120. On Wisconsin as a ‘58 per cent American state’, see untitled pamphlet, Wisconsin Loyalty Legion Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers, 1917–1919, box 1, SHSW; Usher, op. cit. On Wisconsin an ‘ethnological laboratory’, see W. A. Curtis, The light fantastic in the central west, Century Magazine (1907) 570–9. [4] Official Referendum, in John M. Becker Papers, Mss. 109, Box 1, Folder 1, SHSW; United States versus John M. Becker—General proceedings, August 1918, Becker Papers, Box 1, Folder 5, SHSW; Amerikanischer Schweizer Nachrichten, 4 April 1917; Monroe Evening Times, 21 March, 2 and 4 April 1917; and Wisconsin State Journal, 22 March 1917. [5] Out of specific anti-German nativism grew a vaguer anti-hyphenism, or 100 Per Cent Americanism, which “belligerently demanded universal conformity through total national loyalty”. Dual identification with another nation was considered blasphemy, and the loyalty of any ‘hyphenated’ American was called immediately into question. J. Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (New York 1978) 195–205. [6] S. H. Adams, Wisconsin Joins the War, Everybody’s Magazine 38 (January 1918) 28–33. [7] Milwaukee Journal, 7 December 1917. [8] Clifford Butcher, Little league of nations is Wisconsin’s biggest asset, Milwaukee Journal, 29 June 1941.

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[9] Wisconsin’s Changing Population, Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, publication 9, serial no. 2642, general series no. 2426 (Madison 1942) 3–4, 13. [10] G. W. Hill, Fields and faces in Wisconsin, unpublished lecture, 1941, Box 2, A-10, George Hill Records, University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison, Wisconsin. See also O. Zunz, The genesis of American pluralism, Tocqueville Review 9 (1988) 201–19; and J. Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (Baltimore 1984) 198–232. [11] C. F. Ware (Ed.), The Cultural Approach to History (New York 1940) 87. On Roosevelt’s limited pluralist vision, see L. Adamic, Two-Way Passage (New York 1941). [12] I confine my analysis to ethnic groups of European ancestry. Thus, while I suspect that the theoretical framework might speak to the experiences of other groups, my analytical claims are restricted to Euro-American groups. [13] E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1983). [14] K. N. Conzen et al., The invention of ethnicity: a perspective from the USA, Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1992) 4. [15] J. Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington 1985) 205. Bodnar’s constructivist perspective is a hallmark of recent trends in immigration history and is delimited by the essays in V. Yans-McLaughlin (Ed.), Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (New York 1990) and by Conzen et al., op. cit. See also the review by R. Kazal, Revisiting assimilation: the rise, fall, and reappraisal of a concept in American ethnic history, American Historical Review 100 (1995) 437–71. The work of literary critic Werner Sollors presaged much of this debate as he argued that historical scholars should examine “the ability of ethnicity to present (or invent) itself as a ‘natural’ and timeless category”. See W. Sollors (Ed), The Invention of Ethnicity (New York 1989) xi; and Idem., Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York 1986). I follow Conzen et al. here as they agree with this point but add that ethnicity is not a collective fiction. Rather, ethnic consciousness is “grounded in real life context and social experience”. (4–5). [16] Official culture originates in the concerns of cultural leaders and authorities at all levels of society and promotes an interpretation of the past that reduces the threat of competing interests. Official culture tends toward the dogmatic as it presents an ideal or abstract version of public memory uncluttered by complex or ambiguous terms. Vernacular culture, conversely, “represents an array of specialized interests that are grounded in parts of the whole”. Firsthand experience in small-scale communities form the basis for the defenders of this culture which, by its very existence, threatens the sacred and eternal character of official expressions. See J. Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton 1992) 13–20. On the use of maps in the service of e´lite or powerful interests, see B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London 1991) 163–87; M. Edney, Mapping and Empire: the Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago 1997); and J. Black, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven 1997). [17] E. Hobsbawm, Mass-producing traditions: Europe, 1870–1914, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, op. cit., 263–307; R. Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (Madison 1988); and G. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York 1975). [18] N. Fraser, Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy, in C. Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA 1992) 123. My use of the term “forms of imagining” derives from Anderson, op. cit. [19] V. Turner, Are there universals of performance in myth, ritual, and drama?, in R. Schechner and W. Appel (Eds), By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual (New York 1990) 9; and P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge 1989). [20] D. Kapchan, Performance, Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995) 479. [21] F. Manning, Cosmos and chaos: celebration in the modern world, in F. Manning (Ed.), The Celebration of Society: Perspectives on Contemporary Cultural Performance (Bowling Green, OH 1983) 3–30. See also A. Falassi, Festival: definition and morphology, in A. Falassi (Ed.) Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival (Albuquerque 1987) 1–12; B. Babcock (Ed.) The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca 1978); and R. Bauman, Performance, in R. Bauman (Ed.), Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-Centered Handbook (New York 1992) 41–9. [22] R. D. Abrahams, The language of festivals: celebrating the economy, in V. Turner (Ed.) Celebrations: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington DC 1982) 161. From the perspective

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[32] [33]

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of ethnicity, see A. Cohen, A polyethnic London carnival as a contested cultural performance, Ethnic and Racial Studies 5 (1982) 23–41; S. Marston, Public ritual and community power: St Patrick Day parades in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1841–1874, Political Geography Quarterly 8 (1989) 255–69; and K. N. Conzen, Ethnicity as festive culture: nineteenth-century German America on parade, in W. Sollors (Ed.), Invention of Ethnicity, 44–76. Lands and peoples: Swiss at New-Glarus, Our Times: A Weekly Journal of Current Events, 21 October 1905, 123–4. J. Luchsinger, What America has meant to me, typeset manuscript, n.d. [c. 1910] Subject Files, New Glarus Historical Society Archives, New Glarus, WI (hereafter NGHSA). G. Seiler, Nachkla¨nge zum Koloniefest, ein Gruß den alten Grauen! Der Deutsch Schweizerische Courier, 29 August 1905; and J. Luchsinger, The Swiss colony of New Glarus, Wisconsin Historical Collections 8 (1879) 2. As Pierre Nora notes, such a selection of places of memory occurs precisely at moments when its active use is threatened. See P. Nora, Between memory and history, Les Lieux de Memoire, Representations 26 (1989) 7–25; and D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign County (Cambridge 1985). J. D. B., An unaltered Swiss Colony, The Nation, 2 August 1883, 94. For similar assessments, see D. Du¨rst, Gru¨ndung und Entwicklung der Kolonie Neu-Glarus, Wisconsin, Nord-America, umfassend den Zeitraum von 1844–1892, nebst einer Reisebeschreibung (Zu¨rich 1894) 4; Luchsinger, op. cit., 1–29; C. Zimmerman, Town of New Glarus, in History of Green County, Wisconsin (Springfield, IL 1884) 1023–45; J. J. Tschudy, Additional notes, Wisconsin Historical Collections 8 (1879) 30–5; W. Streissguth, New Glarus in 1850, Wisconsin Magazine of History 16 (1935 [1851]) 328–44. On the organized migration from Canton Glarus to New Glarus, Wisconsin, see J. Winteler, Geschichte des Landes Glarus: von 1638 bis zur Gegenwart, band 2, (Glarus 1954) 461–2; H. Stu¨ssi, Auswanderung, in J. Davatz (Ed.) Glarus und die Schweiz: Streiflichter auf wechselseitige Beziehungen (Glarus 1991) 146–54; and D. Brunnschweiler, New Glarus: Gru¨ndung, Entwicklung und heutiger Zustand einer Schweizerkolonie im amerikanischen Mittlewesten (Zu¨rich 1954). The significant source on the migration itself is from the diary of one of those immigrants, Matthias Du¨rst: Matthias Du¨rsts Auswanderungstagebuch, reprinted in L. Schelbert (Ed.) New Glarus 1845–1970 (Glarus 1970) 20–156. F. J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (Tucson 1992 [1897]) 235. Ibid.; and Wilhelm Streissguth to Peter Jenny, New Glarus, WI, 22 February 1853, reprinted in S. Peter-Kubli (Ed.), Die Welt is hier Weit: Briefe von Neu Glarnern an den Glarnerischen Auswanderungsverein in Schwanden aus den Jahren 1845–1855, vol. 75, Sonderdruck des Jahrbuchs des Historischen Vereins des Kantons Glarus (Glarus 1995) 97: [“degeneriert”]. For more on non-Zwingli denominations as “degenerate”, see J. Luchsinger, The planting of the Swiss colony at New Glarus, Wis., Wisconsin Historical Collections 12 (1892) 372. Such high levels of endogamous marriage behavior is typical for immigrant communities. What stands out is the trend’s longevity. Data derived and calculated from Swiss Evangelical and Reformed Church records, New Glarus, WI; and from Brunnschweiler, op. cit. 94–5. Similar trends are also noticed by travelers from Switzerland, notably in A. Baumgartner, Bei den Glarnern in Wisconsin (Glarus 1934). Useful comparisons may be found in R. M. Bernard, The Melting Pot and the Altar: Marital Assimilation in Early Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (Minneapolis 1980); J. Gjerde, From Peasants to Farmers: The Migration from Balestrand, Norway to the Upper Middle West (Cambridge 1985) 202–13; and R. C. Ostergren, A Community Transplanted: The Trans-Atlantic Experience of a Swedish Immigrant Settlement in the Upper Middle West, 1835–1915 (Madison 1988) 232–3. W. Bosshard, New Glarus: die Schweizer Mustersiedlung in USA, Zu¨richer Illustrierte, 30 Juni 1933, 820–1; and Works Projects Administration, Wisconsin: A Guide to the Badger State (New York 1941) 547. Rank calculated from Wisconsin Dairymen’s Association, Reports, 1873–1920 (Madison 1920) and from J. Schafer, Wisconsin Domesday Book, Town Studies, vol. 1 (Madison 1924) 15. See also E. E. Lampard, The Rise of the Dairy Industry in Wisconsin: A Study in Agricultural Change, 1820–1920 (Madison 1963) 91–120; F. Merk, Economic History of Wisconsin During the Civil War Decade (Madison 1916) 28; and G. T. Trewartha, The Green county, Wisconsin, foreign cheese industry, Economic Geography 2 (1926) 292–308. Town and Village of New Glarus, in Memoirs of Green County, typeset manuscript, nd [c. 1910] Miscellaneous Documents file, NGHSA. A. Baumgartner, Erinnerungen aus Amerika (Zu¨rich 1906), Miscellaneous Documents file, NGHSA.

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[34] Amerikanischer Schweizer Nachrichten, 3 September, 1891; Amerikanischer Schweizer Nachrichten, 21 August 1895; Das 60 ja¨hrige Jubila¨umsfest ein grosser Erfolg! Der Deutsch Schweizerische Courier, 22 August 1905; and Coloniefest mit Erfolg durchgefu¨hrt, Der Deutsch Schweizerische Courier, 17 August 1915. [35] J. T. Etter, Beschiedenes Geda¨chtnißkra¨nzchen gewunden der Goldenen Jubelbraut New Glarus, Wis., einer der a¨lteste Schweizer Kolonien der Ver. Staaten, 1897, Subject Files, NGHSA. For a description of contemporary pageantry, see D. Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill 1990). Jon Gjerde and Anne Kelly Knowles trace the tensions often felt by nineteenth-century immigrants upon reaching middle-class status. Gjerde, op. cit.; and A. Knowles, Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier (Chicago 1997). [36] During and immediately after the war, Henry Ford had his workers stage a pageant in which immigrants in their native dress and speaking their native language walked into a giant cauldron, emerging as ‘100 per cent’ Americans in red, white, and blue costumes, and holding American flags. See Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 89–91. See also J. McClymer, The federal government and the Americanization movement, 1915–1924, Prologue:The Journal of the National Archives 10 (1978) 22–41. [37] Constitution of the Milwaukee Turners, Milwaukee, c. 1925, collections of the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, Madison, WI. [38] Sharpshooter’s Union at the New Glarus Schuetzen Park, 19–23 July 1923, Subject Files, NGHSA; 80th anniversary to be observed, New Glarus Post, 12 August 1925; Anniversary of the founding of New Glarus, New Glarus Post, 19 August 1925; M. L. Bauchle, Last of the Swiss pioneers, The Wisconsin Magazine, 17 April 1927; New Glarus: the 1933 Convention City, 46th Annual Convention of the Wisconsin State Fireman’s Association, 1933, 9–14, Subject Files, NGHSA. [39] R. Weiss, Ethnicity and reform: minorities and the ambience of the depression years, Journal of American History 66 (1979) 566–85. [40] A. R. Schultz, Ethnicity on Parade: Inventing the Norwegian American Through Celebration (Amherst 1994); M. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York 1991) 436–40; and C. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque 1997). [41] Higham, op. cit., 195–295; Weiss, op. cit. As Ian McKay argues, a similar process occurred in maritime Canada at roughly the same period. See I. McKay, Tartanism triumphant: the construction of Scottishness in Nova Scotia, 1933–1954, Acadiensis 21 (1992) 5–47. [42] P. Gleason, Americans All: World War II and the shaping of American identity, Review of Politics 43 (1981) 483–5. [43] J. Kirkpatrick, Trials of identity in America, Cultural Anthropology 4 (1989) 303. [44] Trewartha, op. cit.; Brunnschweiler, op. cit.; and Swiss Evangelical and Reformed Church records, New Glarus, WI, 1850 to 1945. [45] As Larry Danielson found for Swedish Americans in Kansas, such commercial involvement became a feature common among ethnic festivals of this period. L. Danielson, The ethnic festival and cultural revivalism in a small midwestern town (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University 1972). [46] Commercial Club Minutes, March 1935, subject files, NGHSA; New Glarus Post, 20 February and 13 March 1935. [47] Much of the biographical background on John Schindler is derived from a series of interviews with his daughter, Carol Brand of Monroe, WI, October 1993. [48] J. Schindler, The Old Lead Trail, typeset manuscript, SC 2540, SHSW. On the importance of anti-modernism generally during this period, see R. L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Chapel Hill 1993). [49] David Glassberg, op. cit., offers a synopsis of the importance of both Rockwell and Dickinson and their links to Progressivism. Several years later, Rockwell became involved directly in New Glarus pageantry as she made occasional visits to the Swiss community and corresponded with leaders of the Wilhelm Tell play. [50] T. H. Dickinson, The Case of American Drama (New York 1915) 111. See also E. T. Rockwell, Historical pageantry: a treatise and a bibliography, State Historical Society of Wisconsin Bulletin of Information 84 (1916) 10. [51] Schindler, Historical Pageant Given at the Ninetieth Anniversary Celebration of the Settlement of New Glarus, by the Swiss Colonists, typeset manuscript, 1935, subject files, NGHSA.

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[52] Ibid. Schindler wrote the pageant in English and only after considerable debate was it translated, then performed, in Schwyzerdu¨tsch. [53] Handwritten manuscript notes for the 90th Anniversary Pageant, n.d., subject files, NGHSA. [54] R. Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia 1985) 74. [55] New Glarus Post, 31 July 1935. [56] New Glarus Post, 7 August 1935. [57] Ibid. On the importance of the folklore movement in Europe and its relationship to both nation-building and local identity, see R. Bendix, National sentiment in the enactment and discourse of Swiss political ritual, American Ethnologist 19 (1992) 768–90; and W. A. Wilson, Herder, folklore, and romantic nationalism, in E. Oring (Ed.) Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: A Reader (Logan, UT 1989) 23–44. [58] Manuscript notes for the 90th Anniversary Celebration, op. cit. [59] W. Langdon, The pageant in America, American Monthly Magazine 38 (March 1911) 102–3. [60] Official Program to the 90th Anniversary Pageant (New Glarus 1935), 40, subject files, NGHSA. [61] Ibid., 21. [62] Ibid., 25. [63] New Glarus Blazes a Trail, Monroe Times, n.d., Clipping Scrapbooks, NGHSA. [64] M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington 1984). [65] Official Program to the 90th Anniversary Pageant, 13. The popular construction of the now classic frontier myth is traced in R. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century (New York 1992). [66] On the early schisms engendered by ‘Gross-Tal’ and ‘Klein-Tal’ settlements, see Du¨rst, op. cit.; for details on the customary religious discrimination by the Swiss, see Luchsinger, The planting, 372; and for reports of the Klan meetings and cross burnings, see New Glarus Post, 28 June and 8 August 1924. [67] Among the massive literature on Tell’s place in Swiss culture, three sources are useful: R. Bendix, Backstage Domains: Playing “William Tell” in Two Swiss Communities (Bern 1989); A. Dundes, The apple-shot: interpreting the legend of William Tell, Western Folklore 50 (1991) 327–60; and L. Stunzi (Ed.) Tell: Werden und Wandern eines Mythos (Bern 1973). [68] Official Program of the Wilhelm Tell Play, Elmer’s Grove, New Glarus (New Glarus 1938), Wilhelm Tell Community Guild Scrapbooks, at the NGHSA (hereafter cited as WTS). Emphasis added. [69] L. Wirth, The problems of minority groups, in R. Linton (Ed.), The Science of Man in the World Crisis (New York 1944) 361. [70] Memoirs of Edwin Barlow, handwritten manuscript, n.d., subject files, NGHSA; Edwin Barlow, Tell originator and benefactor, dies at Ripon, New Glarus Post, 25 September 1957. [71] Ibid. Editorial, tribute to a friend, Monroe Evening Times, 24 September 1957. [72] In addition to the above sources, interviews taped between 1992 and 1996 with the following long-time Tell performers round out this biographical sketch: Herbert Kubly, Clayton Streiff, Millard Tschudy, and Elda Schiesser. [73] Barlow Memoirs. Former Green County resident makes suggestion to local friends, New Glarus Post, 18 September 1935. [74] Edwin Barlow to Esther Stauffacher, New York, 13 May 1937, Wilhelm Tell Community Guild Archive, in possession of Elda Schiesser, New Glarus, WI (hereafter cited as WTCGAES). [75] Henry M. Schmid to Ethel Rockwell, 10 October 1939, WTCGA-ES. Further, I would suggest that Barlow’s ability to take risks in this insular community suggests an early encounter with what Giddens calls “high modernity”. For the connections between a “risk society” and high modernity, see A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford 1991) 3–5, 27–9. [76] Edwin Barlow Tell Origin of Pageant, handwritten manuscript, 17 September 1941, WTS. [77] Similar findings appear in R. H. Lavenda, Festivals and the creation of public culture: whose voice(s)? In I. Karp et al. (Eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington DC 1992) 76–104. [78] Folk dances due for revival here: authentic old steps by costumed participants would add color, New Glarus Post, 7 September 1940. Henry Schmid to Ethel Rockwell, 10 October 1939; Minutes of the Wilhelm Tell Community Guild, 28 July 1938; James P. Zollinger to Edwin Barlow, New York, 22 June 1940, all from WTCGA-ES.

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[79] Official Program of the Wilhelm Tell Play, Elmer’s Grove, New Glarus (New Glarus 1938), WTS; Henry M. Schmid to Henry Platt, 17 May 1942, WTCGA-ES. [80] Minutes of the Wilhelm Tell Community Guild, October 1941, WTCGA-ES. [81] Official Program of the 1942 New Glarus Presentations of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (New Glarus 1942), WTS. [82] New Glarus presents third annual costume pageant of Tell, gains nation-wide notice, Wisconsin State Journal, 30 August 1941; The forbidden story, Capital Times, 1 November 1941; Fourth annual festival will start today, Chicago Tribune, 31 August 1941; and Swiss defense of freedom symbolized in ‘Wilhelm Tell’, Christian Science Monitor, 3 May 1941; G. A. Salzberger to Henry M. Schmid, East Milton, MA., 3 August 1940; Henry M. Schmid to G. A. Salzberger, 19 August 1940, WTCGA-ES. [83] Articles of Incorporation, Minutes of the Wilhelm Tell Community Guild, July 1939, WTCGA-ES. [84] Quoted in C. Parker, Swiss fight for freedom in New Glarus play, Capital Times, 24 August 1941. [85] Articles of Incorporation, op. cit. [86] K. T., Wilhelm Tell highlights, New Glarus Post, 7 September 1938. Ralph Linton’s early work on festivals—or “nativistic movements” as he calls them—points to similar conclusions: “current or remembered elements of culture”, he writes, “are selected for emphasis and given great symbolic value. . .By keeping the past in mind, such elements help to reestablish and maintain the self respect of the group’s members in the face of adverse conditions”. See R. Linton, Nativistic movements, American Anthropologist 45 (1943) 231, 233. [87] Millard Tschudy interview with the author, New Glarus, 12 September 1994; and Lila Dibble quoted in New Glarus Post, 28 August 1991. [88] K. F. Mueller to Henry M. Schmid, 13 August 1940, WTCGA-ES; Paul Grossenbacher, Wilhelm Tell Recollections, handwritten manuscript, n.d., WTCGA-ES. [89] J. L. Fay to Wilhelm Tell Community Guild, Chicago, August 5, 1940, WTCGA-ES; Letters in New Glarus Post, 14 September 1938 by J. Porter; 21 September 1938 by M. Ingold; and 21 September 1938 by Ida Maurer. [90] See, for example, L. Fuchs’ American Kaleidoscope: Race, Ethnicity, and the American Culture (Hanover, NH 1990). Three recent evaluations of the assimilation model include G. Gerstle, Liberty, coercion, and the making of Americans, Journal of American History 84 (1997) 524–58; E. Morawska, In defense of the assimilation model, Journal of American Ethnic History 14 (1994) 76–87; and Kazal, op. cit. [91] For roughly similar conclusions from the perspective of working class groups, see G. Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (New York 1989) 6–8; L. Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge 1990); and J. R. Barrett, Americanization from the bottom up: immigration and the remaking of the working class in the United States, 1880–1930, Journal of American History 79 (1992) 996–1020. [92] The term “memory work” is derived from J. Gillis, Memory and history: the history of a relationship, in J. Gillis (Ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton 1994) 3. [93] K. N. Conzen, Mainstreams and side channels: the localization of immigrant cultures, Journal of American Ethnic History 11 (1991) 5–20.