"America, thou art more fortunate..."

This scene of German emigrants boarding a steamer bound for America would have been what the Augustins and Spricks saw and experienced when they left Hamburg, Germany, in the 1880s. The great German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, right, wrote this poem in 1827 in Weimar (Vienna):

America, thou art more fortunate
than our old continent.
Thou has no ruined castles
or ancient basalt.
Thou art not now plagued
with useless memories
and fruitless strife.

(Not exactly true anymore, but we digress.) Jorgen Bracker, former director of the Hamburg History Museum, wrote this about immigrants coming to America:

The motives of many Germans leaving their homeland at the time of the enlightenment was not only crushing poverty but equally the restrictions imposed by the authorities and a religion which suppressed individual ideologies. It was these people Goethe had in mind when he stated that a new beginning was only possible in America, where no deference had to be paid to outdated power structures and traditional attitudes, where men could build a state in which everyone enjoyed equal rights based on adequate schooling and educational opportunities. From Goethe's time to the beginning of the First World War, several millions Germans emigrated to the USA; their descendants today amount to many times this figure.