No one knows for certain when the first Oktoberfest was held in America. Yet it is fairly clear from nineteenth-century archival materials that social events under the name of Oktoberfest were held from time to time in immigrant beer gardens in places like Cincinnati, New York, Milwaukee, and St. Louis as early as the 1870s.
In general, the Bayerischer Volksfestvereins (Bavarian Volksfest Clubs), with their informal nationwide network of local chapters, organized and promoted the earliest American Oktoberfests. The Philadelphia chapter, for example, held its first Oktoberfest in 1878. In places where Bavarian immigrants were not well organized, the Cannstatter Volksfestverein (Cannstatt Volksfest Club), the Vereinigte Deutsch-Ungarn (United Hungarian Germans), the Vereinigung der Donauschwaben (United Danube Swabians), or a local German sport club would organize its own substitute Oktoberfest party. All of the American versions of the Oktoberfest, however, were quite different from the Munich original and remain so to this day.
The first Bavarian Oktoberfest was held in Munich on October 17, 1810. It was organized by Max Joseph of Bavaria to celebrate the marriage of his son, King Ludwig I, to Princess Therese von Sachse-Hildburghausen. The sixteen-day fair was held in honor of the bride on a large field called the Theresienwiese, a field now surrounded by Munich's ever-expanding suburbs. The real purpose of this first Oktoberfest, aside from celebrating the royal wedding, was to bring progressive agriculture into contact with the Bavarian peasantry and to stir up nationalistic feelings for the newly created Kingdom of Bavaria. It was brilliant political stunt.
Max Joseph modeled his Oktoberfest after the large open-air festival held in 1805 at Unspunnen, Switzerland, now considered by many cultural historians to be Europe's first true folk festival. There were ox roasts, pig roasts, horse races, and folk competitions. The following year, the Oktoberfest was expanded to include agricultural exhibits, with awards given for the best livestock and produce, including wine and beer, very much in the vein of a modern American state fair.
The Munich breweries participated with floats and samples of beer brewed specially for the events, thus permanently linking beer with the festival. Finally, Max Joseph added an opening parade with young couples wearing the peasant costumes, or Trachten, of Bavaria's various political divisions, the first time in fact that such a collection of regional folk costume was put on display. In short, the Oktoberfest became a symbol of Bavarian nationalism, a public show of Bavarian folk culture, and doubtless Europe's largest "county fair."
The Oktoberfest was so successful that Munich decided to make an annual event of it, and other kingdoms in Germany quickly picked up on the idea. The most famous of these is the Cannstatter Volksfest--often referred to as the Cannstatter Wasen--established at Stuttgart in 1818. It promotes Swabian culture in the same manner that the Oktoberfest promotes the popular culture of Bavaria.
'Mountains of sausage, rivers of beer'
The reason the Oktoberfest and its many spinoffs gained such popularity is that they celebrated peasant culture as the essence of national
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