8 Hattie Plum Williams 
because “they are clannish and quarrelsome and Americans can’t 
get along with them.” Even social workers sometimes go into 
the settlements looking for bad conditions, and they invariably 
find just what they are looking for—but nothing else. When a 
Russian German rises out of the ranks of the street sweepers, he 
is recognized as a “ German,” while the “ Russian” remains the 
lowest type of laborer and the most hopeless political factor in the 
city. These misunderstandings persist year after year in a city 
so small as Lincoln, and with a foreign group where the barrier 
between the immigrant and the native is so slight as here exists. 
They account in part for the fact that the Russsian German is an 
immigrant problem to the city and that the city is a problem to the 
immigrant. 
I. Composition According to Place of Birth 
The Russian German population of Lincoln is composed almost 
entirely of immigrants from the Volga provinces of Saratow and 
Samara. It will be recalled that there are several groups of Ger- 
mans in Russia, each with individual characteristics accentuated 
by long residence and isolation in a foreign land. The Baltic 
Germans, exclusive and aristocratic, have furnished little emigra- 
tion to America and the few who have lived in Lincoln have 
belonged to the educated and professional classes. The Germans 
from South Russia, popularly known as the “Odessers,” have 
settled more largely in the farming districts of the west. There 
are in Lincoln but nine persons born near the Black Sea and 
these all came in the early immigration of thirty or forty years 
ago. Seldom does one of this group come to Lincoln now, and 
none live within the border of the settlements. The Volga Ger- 
mans include both Catholic and Protestant, and of the former 
there are in the city only six families, aggregating twenty-nine 
people. Aside from a small scattering of persons from other 
parts of Russia, the remainder of the 6,500 Russian Germans in 
Lincoln are Protestants direct from the Volga, known among 
their countrymen as “Volgers.” In one sense they form a de- 
cidedly homogeneous group which emphasizes their “ conscious- 
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