Historical interpretive essay by Ray Breun. Population proportions, educational interpretations, dates and class characterizations are preserved as the author’s 1982 account and require independent verification before factual reuse.
By 1860 the population of St. Louis was over 160,000 people.
The first railroad west of the Mississippi was two years old and the language of the street was German. Fully 60% of the population was of European origin, and 60% of the Europeans were German. St. Louis was so German, the schools taught German as a required language until 1887. Bartholomew Berthold, commonly regarded as the first German to settle in St. Louis, completed his brick house in 1812.
In the 1830’s and 1840’s Germans came in droves to St. Louis.
In 1854 alone over 18,000,000 glasses of beer were consumed from March to September and by 1860 over 40 breweries were serving the thirst of St. Louis. None of these breweries are presently left. Only the remains of the Lemp brewery are pre-Civil War. Eberhard Anheuser started brewing in 1857, but his son-in-law, Adolphus Busch, is the one who really started the Anheuser-Busch brewery in 1876.
It was a spring evening in 1858 when a stove worker, Henry Brokmeyer, delivered a talk at the Mercantile Library about his favorite subject, German Idealist Philosophy.
In the audience was one William Torrey Harris, then a shorthand teacher in the St. Louis public schools. Brokmeyer and Harris became the two major figures in a school of philosophy called The St. Louis Movement. Together they published journals, translated Hegel, Kant, Fichte and others into English, and provided the inspiration for such major American philosophical thinkers as Pierce, Dewey, Royce and James.
It was the most significant philosophical movement in the United States in the nineteenth century. Brokmeyer was educated at Brown University but was drawn to the frontier by its seeming ability to incarnate the principles of Hegelian Idealism.
He became so wellknown he was elected lieutenant governor of Missouri from 1877 to 1881. Clearly one of the most intellectual men ever to occupy that status in Missouri, he left politics quite disillusioned and went to Indian Territory to live with the Osage.
The impact of the St. Louis Movement was not in politics but rather in education through the work of William Torrey Harris.
From shortly after the Civil War until well into the twentieth century, public education in St. Louis was the model for the country. Based in large part on the German urge to rigor in the disciplines, Harris built a system which remained strong until the Depression.
It is no accident John Dewey, the last major product of the St. Louis Movement, is known as an educational philosopher. Compton Reservoir Park has the last monument built in German in St. Louis.
It was 27 May 1914 when The Naked Truth was dedicated.
One month later, 28 June 1914, Archduke Ferdinand would be killed by a Serbian student to start World War I, and this event would change the geography of St. Louis.
In May however none of that was apparent on South Grand Boulevard when the monument to German journalism was unveiled for all to see. Carl Daenzer, Emil Preetorius and Carl Schurz are memorialized by The Naked Truth. Their efforts in the Westliche Post had won international renown for quality and completeness.
One of their reporters, Joseph Pulitzer, would return to St. Louis and eventually purchase the Dispatch in 1878. Within a few days he had merged with the Evening Post of John Dillon, nephew of James B. Eads, to make one of most famous American papers of today, the PostDispatch.
But the Westliche Post is clearly the spiritual ancestor of Pulitzer. World War I seared the German period shut in St. Louis. Berlin Avenue became Pershing Avenue and Von Versen Street became Enright Avenue. Baron Von Versen had married Mary Clemens.
Her father and grandfather owned the land just north of the Kingsbury Farm which now makes up most of the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood.
When she married the Baron, her father was subdividing the land and named one of the streets after his new son-in-law. Enright was one of the first Americans killed in World War I, and in the rush to cleanse the city of its Germanic past, Von Versen became a memorial to a soldier. South St. Louis is known as the German center of the city today.
The fact is it represents the less educated and less trained part of the historic German community of St. Louis.
Yet it is still clearly inspired by the northern European traditions and remains the last representative of what was the largest Germanic settlement in the country from the first immigration.
Originally published in The Paper, March 1982.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: The author’s historical dates, German population proportions and broad class and educational interpretations require independent verification before factual reuse. Original claims are preserved and attributed.
Original source: SD_Times1982_03.pdf, printed page(s) 7; PDF page(s) 8.
