But while they did not establish a German state, these immigrants did
cling to their customs wherever they settled in considerable numbers.
Especially did they retain their original social life, their
_Turnvereine_, their musical clubs, their sociable beer gardens, their
picnics and excursions, their churches and parochial schools. They
still celebrated their Christmas and other church festivals with
German cookery and _Kuchen_, and their weddings and christenings were
enlivened but rarely debauched with generous libations of lager beer
and wine. In the Middle West were whole regions where German was the
familiar language for two generations.

There were three strata to this second German migration. The earlier
courses were largely peasants and skilled artisans, those of the
decade of the Civil War were mostly of the working classes, and
between these came the "Forty-eighters." Upon them all, however,
peasant, artisan, merchant, and intellectual, their experiences in
their native land had made a deep impression. They all had a
background of political philosophy the nucleus of which was individual
liberty; they all had a violent distaste for the petty tyrannies and
espionages which contact with their own form of government had
produced; and in coming to America they all sought, besides farms and
jobs, political freedom. They therefore came in humility, bore in
patience the disappointments of the first rough contacts with pioneer
America and its nativism, and few, if any, cherished the hope of going
back to Germany. Though some of the intellectual idealists at first
had indefinite enthusiasms about a _Deutschtum_ in America, these
visions soon vanished. They expressed no love for the governments they
had left, however strong the cords of sentiment bound them to the
domestic and institutional customs of their childhood.