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Last updated: 9/26/02
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For corrections or additions, please contact oknorrATwillamette.edu.
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Last updated: 9/26/02 Carl Schurz (1829-1906) In 1852, Schurz emigrated to the United States where he became
a lawyer, newspaper editor, and influential supporter of Abraham
Lincoln. A Union general in the Civil war, Schurz became the first
German-American U.S. Senator (R, Missouri, 1869-1875) and served
as Secretary of the Interior under Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881).
As interior secretary, Schurz implemented legislation to protect
forests, reformed the civil service, and promoted better treatment
for African Americans and Native Americans. The small reservation
town of Schurz, Nevada, honors his name. For corrections or additions, please contact oknorrATwillamette.edu.
q
Revolutionary Hero, Journalist, and German-American Statesman
Carl Schurz studied Latin and Greek in high school in Germany. During
his university entrance exams in 1847, he impressed his examiners
because he knew the entire sixth book of Homer's Iliad by
heart.
As a student of history at Bonn University, Carl Schurz fought in
the democratic German revolution of 1848. Imprisoned in Fort Rastatt,
he escaped through a sewer and later helped his jailed mentor, Prof.
Gottfried Kinkel, escape from a Berlin prison.
"I did indeed –
and unfortunately – forget a lot of the Latin and Greek that
I learned as a highschool student. But I never lost the esthetic and
moral impulses which these studies gave me, the idealistic values,
which they helped me form, the intellectual horizons which they opened
up. ... If I could choose again between classical studies and the
so-called "useful" disciplines, I would, without a doubt,
choose for myself more or less the same kind of curriculum that I
went through."
(Carl Schurz, Lebenserinnerungen I, Berlin 1906, p. 91, translated
from the original German)
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