The Disappearance of the Holy Roman Empire from American Classrooms

The medieval history textbooks in use in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century tended to center the history of the period around the Holy Roman Empire. This was partly due to the fact that many, if not most, American scholars of the latter half of the nineteenth century wishing to study abroad, looked to Heidelberg and Frankfort rather than Oxford and Cambridge. In the same way, more American artists studied in Munich than in Paris. American scholars adopted the German seminar system as their standard for graduate education and consequently continued to look to Germany for their models of research and theory.

There was also the fact that that the German population of the United States was large, active, and successful in keeping German language and culture alive and well. There was considerable public antipathy toward Great Britain fueled by a number of causes, including the sentiments of a large and recently arrived Irish population, the financial panic and business failures caused by the withdrawal of British funds from The United States following the collapse of the Baring bank, the monopoly of great expanses of the open grasslands of the West by British companies and British-financed immigrants, and a number of other things.

At any rate, American historians of the United States, such as the widely known and greatly respected William Bancroft, were more likely to seek the origins of American democracy and character in the folk assemblies of the Teutonic forests than in the shire courts of medieval England. The United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially its educators, was probably more influenced by German culture than English -- although there were some notable exceptions and new tendency to discount European influence as a whole.

This dynamic German element of American culture was crippled and even eradicated in some regions as a result of the First World War. A wave of hysteria not unlike the early modern witch hunts swept across America. Many states passed laws forbidding the teaching of the German language in public schools; it became dangerous to speak German at all in public; German clubs and Turner halls were closed down, some only after being gutted by angry crowds; establishments owned by people of German descent or even German-sounding names (including German Jews) were boycotted or vandalized; and many German citizens sought to change their names or to claim that they were in fact of Dutch descent. One could go on at much greater length, but it should be sufficient to say that German culture and the pride of Germans in their origins and traditions never recovered from the attacks of this period.

Part of the reason for the violence of this reaction was no doubt due to the amazingly effective work of British publicists, but it is probable that it was the burning of the great library of Louvain that turned the sentiment of American scholars against Germany and against the alma maters of many of them. It took a long time for this revulsion to work its way through the American educational system, but one aspect of this process was the disappearance of the pages devoted to the Holy Roman Empire, except insofar as the Empire's actions affected the Church.

Since that time, the interest of the majority of American scholars has turned from the political and constitutional history in which German-trained historians were so adept, to the cultural, economic, ecclesiastical, and social history in which British and French scholars excel. The growth of graduate law schools has contributed greatly to that process. Fifty years ago, an American student would normally pursue a bachelor's degree, often in History, as a preparation for "reading law," a form of apprenticeship, with a practicing attorney, until he was ready to take an examination for admission to the legal profession. In most cases now, the completion of law school is required for taking the bar examination and, to an increasing extent, the bar examination has been replaced by the simple requirement of graduation from an accredited law school.

Consequently, what remains in our textbooks relating to the Holy Roman Empire is being further attenuated, and the Empire is being relegated to the same sort of oblivion as the history of Medieval Spain.

Lynn