Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1984
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 4, No. 2, Spring 1984, pp. 109-20.
Abstract
Carl Schurz's importance as an immigrant leader and ethnic politician is well documented; his efforts on behalf of civil service reform and anti-imperialism have often been commented upon. His role as an administrator, however, is less familiar but by no means insignificant. Because it contributed to the more rational treatment of native Americans and the conservation of natural resources, it deserves to be explored more fully.
In March 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes sent to the Senate his nomination of Carl Schurz for secretary of the interior, party regulars were outraged. "In the selection of Mr. Schurz as one of your Cabinet, you will offend, of course, President Grant and his warm friends, as Mr. S. was a bitter enemy of Grant, and did his best to make him odious in the minds of the people," one Republican wrote to the president. "Change places with President Grant, and how would you feel should he take a bitter opponent of yours into his Cabinet?" Schurz was accused of being an unrealistic dreamer, an impractical philosopher with no ability in business. Roscoe Conkling and his allies hated him; James G. Blaine distrusted him and John A. Logan was jealous of him. His desertion of the Republican party in 1872 had never been forgotten, and when even the moderate James A. Garfield thought the appointment unfortunate, there was some question whether the Senate would confirm it. In the end, however, Hayes prevailed, and the controversial appointee became Zachariah Chandler's successor in the Department of the Interior.
CARL SCHURZ'S CAREER
It is not surprising that Schurz's elevation caused such a row. One of the most colorful figures in nineteenth-century America, the young German revolutionary from the Rhineland had become famous at the age of twentyone, when he liberated his professor, Gottfried Kinkel (then serving a life term for revolutionary activities), from a jail near Berlin. Schurz, who in 1849 had himself narrowly avoided Prussian capture by fleeing through a sewer from the besieged fortress of Rastatt, succeeded in bribing one of the professor's guards. After Kinkel was lowered to the street from the roof, his liberator took him to the coast and from there he escaped by ship to Britain.
Comments
Copyright 1984 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln