There is no doubt that the ethnic merger of Quaker English citizens with Rhineland Farmers in Pennsylvania was an ethnic mix that was significant in founding the United States. When the British attacked Philadelphia in 1777, it was PA Dutch farmers of Lehigh County who secretly hid the nation’s Liberty Bell by taking it to Allentown and hid it under one of its churches’ foundations. Although there are still a few isolated PA Dutch dialect-speaking Plain People still following primitive folkways, not adjusted to modern America, many of these religious sects born out of Freedom of religion are true-grit Americans who subscribe to the United States Constitution.
The Germanic material culture still cherished by German ethnic descendants, such as our German language Bibles and Birth/ Baptism decorated documents (Fraktur) covered the last few weeks very much impress modern German tourists, in that these people were among American descendants who helped establish William Penn’s Colony of Brotherly Love. A vast immigrant population of early American farmers who succeeded in farming the Atlantic coastal Piedmont region, the Pennsylvania Dutch turned the Lancaster Plain into a Garden of Eden; harvesting grain crops all the way out to the Ohio River Valley. Their commerce, hauling farm products on Conestoga wagons to the port of Philadelphia and beyond opened up Western expansion of United States, as well as embarking in trade with Canada.
Also evidenced decades ago, on the 200th Anniversary of the United States, a congressman proud of his ethnic heritage avowed to his colleagues, “You can’t be any more American than to be Pennsylvania Dutch!” Thereby, a true public confession of what our ethnic cultural heritage has meant to the American folkways of our Civilization. Our native PA Dutch, a very religious lot, who are an extremely principled people, were among the nation’s first defenders in the American Civil War, as well as World War I and II. When, in that case as Americans, fought against motherland Germany. Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker, a participant and the founder of the Kutztown Folk Festival, enlisted in the United States Army Counter-Intelligence Corps to combat Hitler in World War II.
In doing so, he realized how different our 17th Century Rhineland natives were from those living in the terrible period of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Shoemaker, a Prisoner of War in WWII, started the first Department of American Folklore at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster County when the war had ended, and is considered the Founder of the American Folklife Movement. Ultimately, what still remains is the overwhelming preference for hundreds of thousands of native descendants born from Rhineland peoples in Pennsylvania in Colonial times is to still call ourselves, “Pennsylvania Dutch.”
Resisting pressure from some ethnic groups to call ourselves German, because of the Rhenish Dialect they spoke, Doctors Alfred Shoemaker and Don Yoder and other PA Dutch authorities like John Joseph Stoudt, Frederic Klees, and Alliene DeChant, among most, used only the Colonial term “Pennsylvania Dutch,” just as Shoemaker proudly did with the “Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival” begun in Kutztown, PA in 1950. This Festival portrayed regional folkways that were always called “Deitsch” (Dutch), not German. A vernacular transferred here by ethnic sub-cultures living in the 18th Century Rhine Valley, their actual ethnic lineage includes German, Swiss, or French, regardless of the Rhenish tongue they spoke.
Richard L.T. Orth contributes columns to Berks-Mont Newspapers. He is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.
