Quotes by General Schurz

• Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right, when wrong to be put right.
  
  
• If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.
  
  
• Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters. You choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.
  
  

Carl Schurz, for whom our school was named, was born in Cologne, Germany in 1829. He graduated from the select "gymnasium," an honor school in Cologne, and entered the University of Bonn as a doctoral candidate in 1847. He became politically involved in a revolutionary movement to promote democracy in Germany and fought with distinction as a lieutenant in the revolutionary army until its defeat by the Prussians. Sentenced to death for treason, he fled the country, but returned to Berlin under a false passport and rescued his former professor, a leader of the revolt, from the infamous Spandau prison in the most daring exploit of the entire revolution.

He lived in London and Paris where he married Margaretha Meyer and together they immigrated to the United States in 1852. They settled in Wisconsin where she established a school for children of German immigrants. It was in this school that she created the first kindergarten class in the United States.

He quickly entered politics, joined the anti-slavery movement and organized Republican Party in Wisconsin. An outstanding orator, he spoke in both German flawless English, campaigning tirelessly for Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election.

He was rewarded with an ambassadorship to Spain, but when the Civil War broke out he returned to the United States in 1862 to help preserve the Union and fight for emancipation. He was made general in the army and fought in the crucial battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.

After the war he was appointed by President Johnson to survey the economic and political conditions in the defeated Confederacy, and was very influential in forming Reconstruction policy based upon Negro suffrage.

He became editor of the Detroit Post and later the German language St. Louis Post until he was elected United States senator from Missouri in 1868. Carl Schurz was nationally renowned as a political reformer, constantly fighting oppression and corruption wherever he found them. Appointed as Secretary of the Interior by President Hayes in 1877, he instituted reform in the department, introduced a merit system, and was noted for his liberal views toward Indian affairs.

In 1881, he returned to journalism, working as editor of the New York Post and the periodicals, the Nation and Harper's Weekly He is considered to have been the most prominent foreign-born American in 19th century public life.