The German-American Press

to Germans there, were at pains to encompass the entire German
community and to overlook or to soften some of the divisions
and contentions within the community. By 1860 almost any given
German newspaper had plenty of rivals to compete with for readers.
The public could take its choice from among journals of various
ideological, religious, and political persuasions. The multifaceted
journalism already clearly emerging by 1860 tended now to reflect
rather than to disguise the divisions and conflicts within German-
America.
The involvement of the new generation of refugees of 1848
has been most frequently pointed out as the catalyst for a more
vigorous and involved German journalism. Carl Wittke's principal
chapter on the German press of this era is titled simply "The Forty-
Eighter Renaissance."6 It would be superfluous to repeat accounts
like Wittke's of the entrance of this new leadership of educated
and articulate writers, bringing with them much higher standards
of journalism and of intellectual content than had previously
prevailed in the German-language press. They assumed leadership of
established journals like the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, the Philadelphia
Demokrat and the St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens, and started new
ones like the Cleveland Wdchter am Erie, the St. Louis Westliche
Post and the Davenport Demokrat, which would become journalistic
institutions of great influence. The overall influence of the forty-
eighters was felt in several ways.  For one, as a group of
contemporaries with shared interests and experience arising from
their revolutionary past, they could forge a network that knit together
the German newspapers more closely-a network strengthened by
the constant movement of forty-eighters from one paper to another.
From this there arose by the end of the 1850s a sort of common
culture and shared experience of German-American journalism.
This fraternal network developed notwithstanding the many bitter
controversies that existed among them. For certainly they brought a
new level of spirited debate to a previously rather placid German
journalism. Often refusing to accept the standard line of party
politicians, the forty-eighters drew upon their own political and social
philosophies in responding to the issues of the day, issues such as
expansionism, nativism, temperance, and of course the threatening
problem of the expansion of slavery. It was through the efforts of the
forty-eighters that German-American citizens very often received a

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