German-Americans: A Brief History

The Germans were the first continental Europeans to settle in America in large numbers, arriving in the seventeenth century a generation or two after the English, the Irish, and the Scots. From the start, they were most welcomed, as they soon impressed their Anglo-Saxon neighbors with their work ethic, honesty, and orderliness. The Americanization of individual Germans, if separated from other Germans, presented little problems. If, on the other hand, grouped together to a German settlement, they became stubbornly independent and their pride in their own culture and language made them resist assimilation – a characteristic that would later become their doom.²⁷⁶

275 O’Connor, p. 377.

276 O’Connor, p. 5, 20–21.

After the Napoleonic wars the Germans started to pour in. Their number soared already during the 1830’s, when over 150,000 Germans migrated to the United States, but that pales in comparison with the 1.7 million Germans that came during the 1850’s and 1860’s. Mass migration from Germany to the United States was distinctly a mid-nineteenth century phenomenon as a total of five million Germans streamed to the United States between 1840 and 1890.²⁷⁷ They turned out to be one of capitalist America’s best investments ever: the German-Americans have contributed most through their intelligence and plain hard work by making the United States the world leader in agriculture, industry, and science.²⁷⁸

The growing amount of Germans in the United States gave birth to German dreams of establishing New Germanies in America by overwhelming a certain area with a large number of German immigrants within a short period of time; this would result, it was hoped, in states that would be German in language, in culture, and in organization. The German-American assertion was that their culture was superior to Anglo-Saxon culture and, therefore, German language, German press, and German education – their Deutschtum – in the United States should be preserved. Serious attempts were well under way in Missouri in the 1830’s, in Texas in the 1840’s and in Wisconsin in the 1850’s, but they were made a bit too late, at a time when the United States had already become a nation. But the important consequence of these failed attempts to found geographically and politically exclusive New Germanies was that they strengthened the desire of the German immigrants to remain exclusive culturallyand socially. This choice of separatism started the era of

“hyphenated Americans.” The term referred to Americans who emphasized their country of origin:

instead of being simply Americans, the hyphenated Americans insisted on adding a prefix and a hyphen in front of the word, becoming German-Americans, Irish-Americans and so on.²⁷⁹

A particularly important group in German-American history was the so called Forty-Eighters – political exiles, who had fled Germany after the failed revolutions of 1848. Their arrival in the United States occasioned the rise of the Know-Nothings, a violent Nativist movement of the 1850’s, which did not stop at nothing to get Congress to pass anti-immigrant legislation. The Forty-Eighters arranged themselves against the Know-Nothings in defense of German-American rights, awakened German-Americans to political consciousness and taught them the value of voting in a bloc. In the

277 Hawgood, John A.,The Tragedy of German-America. The Germans in the United States of America during the Nineteenth Century – and Aftter, New York, 1940, p. 57–58, 76–78; O’Connor, p. 67.

278 Hawgood, p. 22–27, 30–31; O’Connor, p. 5–7.

279 Hawgood, p. 93–104, 195, 200, 232; O’Connor, p. 67–74.

presidential elections of 1860 German-Americans voted in significant numbers for the abolitionist, anti-Nativist Republican, Abraham Lincoln. To the German-Americans the significance of this lay in that for the first time the heterogeneous German stock – representing different religions and different German states – had become politically united and successfully checked the Nativist movement, which perished as a result of the Civil War. They accomplished this, however, as German-Americans, not as Americans, which further strengthened their desire to herd themselves into what historian John Hawgood has called a “mental reservation known as German-America.”²⁸⁰

Then, as has been already stated in Chapter 2, adoration of all things German became a fashion among the American elite. “Americans,” historian Richard O’Connor concludes, “have always been overimpressed by success,”²⁸¹ and Germany, emerging from the Franco-Prussian War strong and united, was the success story of the late nineteenth century. Americans, and especially Roosevelt, wanted to adopt as much of it as possible, which resulted, for example, in the reorganizing of the whole American school system from kindergarten to graduate school after the German model.²⁸²

The admiration for Germany contributed to the impression that the German-Americans came from a superior stock. A questionnaire sent to state governors, for example, showed that a majority of them preferred German immigrants to all other stocks, including the English. And why not? The French and the Russian-Jews might have distinguished themselves in the arts, but it was men of German extraction like Rockefeller, Chrysler, Studebaker, and Heinz that made things work and flourish in America. One indicator of German-American success was that the annual average income of the German-born was 613$, which was even higher than the average income of the native-born.²⁸³

Many German-Americans accepted all too eagerly the idea of their own superiority, and they let it show. The large German-language press – in the 1890’s there were nearly 800 German-language newspapers in the United States – in particular trumpeted the excellence of the German race.

Strongly in the hands of German-America’s Teutonized element, the German-American press was of all the foreign-language newspapers by far the most snobbish and the most critical of the American customs. Simultaneously, Anglophilia and resentment of the self-satisfied German stock was gaining momentum among Anglo-Americans. To them nothing came to symbolize the

280 Luebke, Frederick C.,Bonds of Loyalty. German-Americans and World War I, Chicago, 1974, p. 32; O’Connor, p.

67–68; Hawgood, p. 21–22, 227–237, 251, 267.

281 O’Connor, p. 269.

282 Luebke, p. 58–59; O’Connor, p. 268–269, 274.

283 O’Connor, p. 269, 366–368; Luebke, p. 65–66.

appalling aspects of German ethnocentrism quite as much as the National German-American Alliance, which sought to “revitalize the German national sentiment” in the United States, but its punch-line, “Germans are a race of rulers,” did not help in winning over the hearts and minds of the Americans. Hawgood asserts that two Germanies were born in 1871, Imperial Germany and German-America: “The inhabitants of the one considered themselves as better than all other Europeans and the inhabitants of the other thought that they were better than all other Americans.”²⁸⁴

Of course, not all German immigrants wanted to become incorporated into German-America. Many chose to become Americans and some of them even tried to warn their fellow Americans of German origin on the dangers of cultural separatism. Nevertheless, of all the Germans that migrated to the United States after the Civil War, German-America absorbed the majority. When World War I broke out, President Wilson wanted the United States to show the world some self-possession also because he was genuinely worried that there would be internal disorder. No one quite knew how much of German and how much of American there was in the mixture that made a German-American, but New York in any case had about 700,000 of them and Chicago about 500,000 – no wonder Wilson was worried.²⁸⁵

It cannot be stressed enough, however, that the German-Americans were good citizens and an overwhelming majority of them were politically loyal to the United States. German-America was nothing like a transplanted Imperial Germany. It was a new colonial culture, which was emotionally bonded to the old Vaterland, but did not share all the same values. Its aim was to defend and to promoteDeutschtumin America, to preserve German culture as the unchallenged counter-culture to the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, and to guide the United States closer to Germany from the Anglo-French orbit. German-America was not aggressive nor propagandist. German-Americans did not wish to force German ways on other Americans – that would have been just another form of Nativism, which they abhorred. In many ways, the German-Americans comprehended the idea of America far better than the oppressive Anglo-Saxons. To the German-Americans, America was a land of freedom and a pluralistic society, where everyone was entitled to the free exercise of their own culture without being called a non-desirable citizen.²⁸⁶ But they were gravely mistaken.

284 Hawgood, p. 265; O’Connor, p. 268–269, 348, 360–361; Luebke, p. 43–45.

285 Cooper, p. 273, Hawgood, p. 81, 85–87, 257, 267.

286 Hawgood, 257, 267; Luebke, p. 28, 50–51; O’Connor, p. 275.