THE GERMAN AMERICANS

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
Almost any list of Americans-the roster of a baseball team, a class attendance sheet, a telephone book-includes a large number of German names. Some are not obviously German (Houser, Newman, or Berger), and often even the individual who bears the name is not certain of its origin. Americans of most ethnic backgrounds have intermarried to such an extent that about two-thirds now claim multiple ancestry, and German Americans are no exception.

In 1986, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, for the first time in more than 300 years the leading ancestral background of America's residents was no longer British, but German. Roughly 44 million Americans, or 18 percent of the populace, claimed sole or partial German heritage, a few hundred thousand more than claimed British descent.

Because the German-American population is so large, it is hard to generalize about it. Americans of German descent spring up in virtually every occupation, live in every state, and hold a spectrum of political and religious beliefs. In short, they typify America. Indeed, the vast majorities are Americans of long standing; only 4 percent of today's 44 million German Americans were born in Germany.

The term German American encompasses a number of peoples. Before 1871, Germany was not a nation, but a collection of dozens of small state kingdoms, and principalities, each with its own ruler, customs, and regional dialect. Over seven centuries speckled with migrations, wars, and religious conflict, these lands covered much of north central Europe, from the North Sea to the Nieman River near Kaunas, Lithuania. So speakers of German came from what are now parts of Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union. Immigration officials in the New World sometimes listed people as Germans although Germany was not their land of origin. If the annals of history have sometimes lumped diverse people under one umbrella term-German-it is a simplification we must now acknowledge, if not embrace.

PRESENT FROM THE INCEPTION
Beginning in 1683, Germans formed the first substantial group of non-English-speaking immigrants to settle in America. By the outbreak of the revolutionary war in 1776, their numbers had reached 225,000. More so than most other ethnic groups, who arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries, German immigrants have had more time to adapt, intermarry, and to disperse throughout the nation.

The revolutionary war and subsequent conflicts in both America and Europe slowed immigration, but Germans continued to sail to these shores. Beginning in the late 1830s, they came to America in record numbers, surpassed only by the Irish. They thereby retained their status as the largest non-English-speaking group. In 1882 alone, a quarter of a million Germans arrived in the United States.

The Germans who arrived during this later period (1816-90) differed in several ways from those who had arrived earlier. Whereas most German immigrants of the 18th century came from the Palatine or Württemberg, states along the Rhine River in the southern and western regions of the German lands, those in the second wave of immigration came mainly from the north and east-Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony.
Those who came before 1871, the year Germany was unified, tended to be loyal to their particular state or locality, rather than to Germany as a whole. Thus, Germans were not inclined to bond as one identifiable group in the United States. Albert, John and Mathilda Caroline Dorothy Poppe Severt immigrated in 1875, four years after Germany had become a unified state. Even today, a recent German immigrant may refer to him- or herself as a Saxon, Bavarian, or Berliner.

German immigrants came not only from all parts of Germany but also from all walks of life and for many different reasons. In the 18th century, religious persecution prompted many emigrants to cross the Atlantic, often in groups-families, parishes, and sometimes-entire communities traveled together. In the 19th century, political oppression at home encouraged many idealistic and utopian plans for a free colony of Germans in the United States. These new immigrants were often better educated and more politically minded than their predecessors.

Still, the overwhelming majority of immigrants came in search of better economic opportunities. In the years before the Civil War, German newcomers tended to be independent craftsmen or farmers and their families, who could afford the cost of passage and could meet the demands of the developing and still largely agricultural countries of the United States and Canada. After the Civil War, the rapid growth of industry in America and the advent of the more convenient and affordable steamship enticed German day laborers who had no families and no special skills.

The 20th century created yet another sort of immigrant, the wartime refugee, especially just before and during World War II. The total number of refugees was comparatively small, but they made an impact in the sciences, business, and the arts. Many were Jews, who were joined by Catholics, Protestants, and others who professed no religion, in fleeing Hitler's regime of 1933-45.

Events in America served to divide further a population that had already been broken up along religious, class, and territorial lines. Because they arrived during different periods and at a variety of ports, German immigrants settled all over the United States. Many gravitated to cities, where they blended into the general population more quickly than they would have in the countryside. Though German Americans are now dispersed across the continent, their history and culture figure most evidently in a handful of strongholds: St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and parts of the Middle Atlantic states and the upper Midwest. (The fabled Pennsylvania Dutch are not Dutch but Germans, whose name for themselves, Deutsche, was misunderstood by their Yankee neighbors.) In those locales they have long been the dominant group, though fierce anti-German sentiment aroused by World War I effectively discouraged German cohesiveness in all but the sturdiest of their communities.

The sheer number of German immigrants, their 300 years of immigration, their diversity in class, religion, and occupation, and their experiences in the United States have all played a role in their rapid assimilation and subsequent lack of visibility. Yet these same factors have also allowed them to influence American culture in a multitude of ways.
 
HIGH AND LOW GERMAN
The German dialect was divided into High German in the south and Low German in the north. High German refers to the low coastal plain in the north. Boats go down the Rhine in a northwesterly direction from Basel to Rotterdam and down the Elbe in a northwesterly direction from Dresen to Hamburg. Because maps often hang on walls with north at the top, we say "up north" and "down south," just as the Germans say "up in Schleswig" and "down in Bavaria" (unten in Bayern), so it is sometimes hard to remember that High Germany is in the south and Low Germany is in the north. The High German sound shift, which altered most consonants, began soon after the Alemanni and Bavarians reached the Alps following the collapse of the Roman Empire.
The High German sound shift gradually spread northward into central Germany and affected standard German, while the North Germans clung to the unshifted consonants of the other Germanic languages such as Dutch and English. Thus the German dialects were divided into High German in the south and Low German in the north.
 
SETTLING THE NEW NATION
The American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars in Europe (1801-15), and the War of 1812 all discouraged emigration to the New World. Instead, the first 40 years of the American republic were years of assimilation rather than expansion for the German-American population. Still, immigrants trickled in. In 1804, a group of separatists from Württemberg founded Harmony, Pennsylvania. Like many of their 18th-century forerunners, these settlers-known as Rappists after their leader, George Rapp-sought to live by the Scriptures. They practiced celibacy, and residents signed over all personal wealth to create their "Community of Goods." In 1814, the Rappists moved to Indiana, where they established New Harmony on 30,000 acres, but "to avoid malaria and bad neighbors" they headed back to Pennsylvania 1O years later. Their final home was Economy, on the Ohio River, 20 miles north of Pittsburgh. Here, finally, they found prosperity-oil wells, coal mines, and numerous factories sprang up by the 1820s.

Wisconsin Farm Scene by Paul A. Seifert (1840-1921), watercolor, ca. 1880

Other American communities founded by religious Germans and run-often very successfully on the principle of common ownership of property cropped up later: Zoar, Ohio, in 1819; Bethel, Missouri, in 1844; Aurora, Oregon, and Amana, Iowa, in 1856. But by and large, the emigrant leaving his home for religious reasons was a rarity in the I9th century. A Württemberg government survey found that among those leaving the state in 1817, almost 90 percent left "to overcome famine, shrinking means, and unfavorable prospects." This was reflected in the makeup of the emigrant groups: while in the 18th century entire communities left Germany together, in the 19th century almost all emigrants traveled as individuals or in small family groups, Not all chose America; two-thirds of the emigrants set out for Austria-Hungary or for Russia. During the 1820s, only 6,000 to 8,000 Germans reached the United States.

By the end of the decade, several factor were encouraging German emigration. Overpopulation and a shortage of cash for trade, combined with the traditional practice of Realteilungsbrecht-the division of the family farm among many descendants-created enormous economic pressures. Many families had coped with shrinking farmlands by taking up handicrafts such as Clockmaking or weaving, but after the end of the Napoleonic Wars Germany was flooded with cheap factory made English goods that brought disaster to German family industries. The appearance of Gottfried Duden's book Report on a Journey to the Western States of North America in 1829, thus was timely. His account of life on a small farm in Missouri sounded idyllic to those who saw their way of life fast slipping away from them.

NEXT STOP: MISSOURI
With a population of about 70,000, Missouri became a state in 1821. Duden purchased 270 acres of land in present-day Warren County, Missouri, in 1824 and he was soon convinced that planned farm communities of Germans were feasible. "No plan in this age," he wrote, "can promise more for the individual or group."
The careful advice he gave was less compelling than his descriptions of daily life. Duden spent the hour before breakfast "shooting partridges, pigeons, or squirrels, and also turkeys," and the rest of the day unfolded in a leisurely fashion: he read, strolled in his garden, visited neighbors, and "delight[ed] in the beauties of nature." His assurances that the educated man could make a go of it on the American frontier fed the imaginations of many young liberals in Germany, intellectuals disgusted with the reactionary policies the German states adopted after the Napoleonic Wars.

The Giessen Emigration Society, founded in 1833, was the first of many such organized emigration movements to try to profit by the disenchantment in the old country. Their pamphlets, widely distributed in southwest Germany, urged readers to join them and help found "a free German state, a rejuvenated Germany in North America." The Giessener Gesellschaft society developed plans to concentrate Germans in a territory which could eventually be admitted to the Union as a German State. During the decades that followed, three states came under consideration for such ambitious dreams - Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin. That state was never realized, as a group of about 500 emigrants under the society's auspices disbanded upon reaching St. Louis.
Many of the Giesseners were dubbed "Latin Farmers" because of their classical education. They soon discovered that pioneer farming was not as leisurely as Duden had described. Karl Buchele, in an 1855, summarized their predicament: "The German philosopher who ... has here become a farmer, finds that the American axe is more difficult to wield than the Pen, and that the plow and the manure-fork are very matter-of-fact and stupid tools." Another disgruntled immigrant labeled Duden a Lugenhund (lying dog), and Duden felt compelled to retract some of his own advice in an 1837 sequel to his 1829 book.

In the time between the two books, however, more than 50,000 Germans emigrated, many of them at Duden's suggestion. Many came from areas of Germany Hannover and Oldenburg, for example-that had previously lost few citizens. The Latin Farmers formed the vanguard of German settlement in Missouri, and the ' quickly spread into southern Illinois. In spite of all gloomy predictions, they came to be an important local influence, establishing libraries, schools, and newspapers.

A colonization attempt inspired by the Giessener Society later in the decade proved even more successful In 1837, the German Philadelphia Settlement Society bought about 12,000 acres in Gasconade County, across the river from Duden's land, then dispatched an advance party of 17 to spend the winter on the property. This group was joined by a steadily increasing flow of members from back east, and by 1839, when it was incorporated, Hermann, Missouri, boasted 450 inhabitants, 90 houses, 5 stores, 2 inns, and a post office. The society dissolved in 1840, but Hermann and the surrounding district gave rise to a prosperous fruit growing and wine-producing industry. In this "Little Germany," wrote a visitor, "one forgets that one is not actually in Germany itself"
 
THE TAMING OF TEXAS
As German immigration accelerated in the 1840s (tripling from the 125,000 arrivals of the previous decade), the desire to bolster cultural and economic ties with the New World became popular in Germany. Yet colonization proved no easier than it had been in the 1830s. All over Germany, local societies to aid the emigrant sprang up, but without a unified central government the region could not promote the concerted settlement that such countries as France and England managed. Independent attempts-like that of the Giessener Society-tended instead to open up areas for subsequent immigrants who acted on their own.

Such was the case in Texas. An independent republic from 1836 to 1845, Texas was a likelier prospect than Midwestern states for colonization schemes. The Germania Society of New York, founded in 1838, chose Texas because "the plan of founding a pure German state in the midst of the American Union would arouse the opposition of the American people." An outbreak of fever among settlers in Galveston in 1838, however, forced the society to abort its plans.

News of Texas had reached the northeastern states of Germany by way of a letter sent in 1832 by immigrant Friedrich Ernst to a friend in Oldenburg praising the land and life in Texas. Published first in an Oldenburg newspaper and then in a book on Texas, the letter induced the first wave of German immigrants-mostly from the states of Oldenburg, Westphalia, and Holstein-to emigrate to Texas. One man whose imagination was captured by Ernst's letter wrote that it depicted a beautiful landscape "with enchanting scenery and delightful climate similar to that of Italy" and "the most fruitful soil and republican government." These attractions enticed settlers much like those who had responded to Gottfried Duden's descriptions of Missouri. Like the Latin Farmers, some of these newcomers were disillusioned upon their arrival. One immigrant, Rosa von Roeder Kleberg, wrote, "My brothers had pictured pioneer life as one of hunting and fishing, of freedom from the restraints of Prussian society; and it was hard for them to settle down to the drudgery and toil of splitting rails and cultivating the field, work which was entirely new to them."

Between 1831 and Ernst's arrival, Germans continued to go to Texas, but compared to the influx of Germans into Missouri, Texan settlement was slight. In 1836, the total number of Germans barely exceeded 200. Texas seemed too remote to most immigrants. It was also vulnerable to attack by Comanche Indians from the west.
Nevertheless, in 1843 the republic was chosen for a colonization project known as the Adelsverein (nobles club). Composed of 24 rulers and nobles, the Germania Society aimed, "out of purely philanthropical reasons," to "devote itself to the support and direction of German emigration to Texas." No doubt Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, the commissioner general of the project, envisioned other, more glorious objectives when he wrote tight money spurred tens of that "the eyes of all Europe are fixed on us and our undertaking."

The society's prospectus detailed the terms of new Fatherland beyond the Seas." For the equivalent of $120, a person received free passage and 40 acres in west-central Texas. From December 1844 (when the first 3 shiploads of immigrants landed at Carlshafen, later renamed Indianola) to 1847 (when the society went bankrupt), more than 7,000 Germans were transported to Texas under the auspices of the Adelsverein. Prince Carl von Solms-Braunfels proved to be an incompetent leader, preoccupied with decorum rather than the nuts and bolts of founding a town. He built a stockade, called Sophienburg in honor of his lady, and manned it with a courtly company of soldiers. He did, however, with 180 subscribers, found the town of New Braunfels in 1845. This settlement, wrote one American visitor, was an eventual success, "in spite of the Prince, who appears to have been an amiable fool, aping, among the log-cabins, the nonsense of medieval courts."

In 1845, the prince was replaced as commissioner general, but adversity dogged the immigrants. Comanches threatened attack; the United States had begun its war with Mexico over the annexation of Texas; and the society was debt ridden. One thousand of the settlers died in squalid camps on the coast.

Those who survived were encouraged to spread out over new land northwest of New Braunfels. Particularly notable was the founding of Fredericksburg in April 1846. Named in honor of Prince Frederick of Prussia, it was the first white settlement in the northwest hill country of Texas, and by 1850 it had a population of nearly 2,000. An enthusiastic inhabitant wrote to a friend:

If you work only half as much as in Germany, you can live without troubles. In every sense of the word, we are free. The Indians do us no harm; on the contrary, they bring us meat and horses to buy. We still live so remote from other people that we are lonely, but we have dances, churches, and schools.

Such letters spurred further emigration to Texas, unmanaged by any colonization society. Estimates of the number of Germans who settled in Texas before the Civil War reach as high as 30,000. In 1857, a Orleans editor wrote that every ship leaving from that port for Galveston was "crowded with Germans of some wealth ... going to select a future home. " The area of heaviest German concentration stretched from Galveston northwest to Austin, New Braunfels, Fredericksburg.

In Texas, as in Missouri (and later, Wisconsin), the idea of a "new Germany" was never realized. The idea did, however, encourage settlement in rural, undeveloped areas of the country. And a large proportion of Germans arriving in the United States in the period from 1830 to 1860 looked as well to a different kind of destination for a new life: the growing cities of the Midwest.
 
GROWING WITH THE CITIES
There was a variety of reasons for heavy German settlement in Midwestern cities during the 19th century. For the lower-middle-class immigrants of the earlier period (1830-45), Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, offered the skilled craftsmen many opportunities for employment in agriculturally related occupations (brewing, tanning, and milling). To farmers, cities offered a stopover, a place to earn enough money to buy land in the surrounding countryside. St. Louis also became the home for those the cultured Germans who had tried, and then abandoned, the difficult life of the pioneer farmer. After 1845, with the incoming German population composed more and more of people with little means and few skills, laborers were drawn to the Midwest by the promise of plentiful employment in fields such as construction and transportation. One writer gave this advice: "Lose no time ... in working your way out of New York and directing your steps westward, where labor is plentiful and sure to meet with its reward."

Travel routes, westward from New York or north from New Orleans, played a major role in determining the destination of may 19th-centry immigrants. Natural and man-made waterways were the "highways" of the 1830s and 1840s. The Erie Canal, opened in October 1825, was especially important, linking the Atlantic coast with the region beyond the Allegheny Mountains. Arriving in New York (the busiest port of the mid-19th century), an immigrant could take a steamboat up the Hudson River to Albany; a week's trip from Albany on the Erie Canal landed him in Buffalo. From Buffalo, the Great Lakes provided access to Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota. The advent of the railroads made travel much easier-by 1851, an immigrant with some money to spare could cover the distance from New York to Lake Erie by train. Populations reflected this advance. Chicago in 1845 was eight percent German; by 1860, when it had become the hub of the flourishing rail system, Germans accounted for one-quarter of the city's total inhabitants.

Chicago filched its status as the center of the Midwest from Cincinnati. Situated at the point where the Great and Little Miami rivers flow into the Ohio, Cincinnati was the boomtown of the 1830s, the era of the waterways. Germans contributed substantially to its growth: By 1841, 28 percent of the total population was German; 10 years earlier the figure was only 5 percent, By 1850, when Cincinnati was known as the "Queen City of the West," the German community (including those born in America) made up half its population.

From 1847 to 1855, a period of especially high European immigration because of poor harvests in the Old World, Germans flocked to Wisconsin. A state bureau of immigration, railroad companies, and eager immigrants themselves encouraged settlement in the new state, which entered the Union in 1848. One German-language newspaper sold stationery preprinted with a "brief but true" description of Wisconsin. Milwaukee, settled in 1836 where the Milwaukee River flows into Lake Michigan, attracted many of the newcomers. More than 8,000 Germans arrived there during the 1850s, and in 1860, Germans accounted for 16,000 out of a total population of 45,000.

Unlike the Irish, who also formed a substantial immigrant population in Milwaukee, Germans tended to flock together in their own neighborhoods. Likewise, in Cincinnati, the focus of the German community was an area known as "Over-the-Rhine," across the canal from the main part of town. St. Louis, however (where from 1830 to 1850 the population exploded from 7,000 to 77,860), did not boast an exclusively German neighborhood. Its German population-22,340 in 1850, and more 50,000 just 10 years later-was spread throughout the city's 28 districts.

Jews also figured largely in the migration from Germany to the United States in these years. Between 1840 and 1880 the Jewish-American population grew from 15,000 to 250,000 persons, most of them Germans. Like their Christian contemporaries, they took their skills and culture primarily to Midwestern cities, though the Jews tended to be merchants rather than artisans or laborers. A handful became highly successful owners of department stores; others, mostly in New York, built substantial houses of banking and finance, such as the Lehman, Kuhn, and Loeb families. Immigrant Levi Strauss, for instance, started a dry-goods store that became the blue jeans empire of today. The seeds of Reform Judaism, a modernization of some traditional Jewish practices and beliefs that is now the largest of Judaism's three main branches, also came from Germany with the immigrants and got its real start in America, led by Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in Cincinnati. The German Jews settled in tightly knit communities to better practice their faith-and because they were barred from many neighborhoods.
Differences in neighborhood arrangements from city to city raise a question about how German Christians or Jews and native-born Americans got along. Did the l9th-century German immigrants band together more than any group at any time, as one historian, John Hawgood, claimed? Or did they move into the mainstream of American life willingly and rapidly?

SETTLING IN, FITTING IN
The following comments, made by a visitor to a 19th Midwestern German community, seem to support Hawgood's theory:
Life in this settlement is only very slightly modified by the influence of the American environment. Different in language and customs, the Germans isolate themselves perhaps too much from the earlier settlers and live a life of their own, entirely shut off.
Although this observer was writing about a relatively secluded rural settlement in southern Illinois, urban life did not always foster rapid assimilation into an American way of life either. More than half a million people emigrated from Germany between 1852 and 1854 alone (many of them from areas in northern and eastern Germany previously unaffected by emigration). Sometimes a German immigrant felt a strong pressure to, in the words of one immigrant writer, "transform himself into a complete Yankee." But thanks to their large numbers, most Germans found it easy to preserve at least some distinctive elements of their culture.

Preservation of the mother tongue was of paramount importance in a person's battle to preserve ethnic identity. As an example, Albert and Mathida Poppe Severt were very adamant all their lives that only German was to be spoken in their home or in their presence. If grandchildren spoke English, they would be ignored or sent home. For the Otto Severt boys, this presented a problem when they started school and they didn't have a good command of English. The Evangelical St. Johns Church in Arpin, Wisconsin with Otto August Severt being a charter member, continued to conduct services in German until 1917 with an English service conducted only twice monthly. The church continued to keep records in German until 1928. Even in St. Louis, bastion of the idealistic Germans of the recent immigration, the editors of a prominent German newspaper, the Anzeiger des Westens, mourned "the laming and corruption of the German language." A German-language school was established in St. Louis in 1836, two years before the city's public school opened. By 1860, there were 38 German schools in the city, most affiliated with Protestant and Catholic churches (though one was Jewish and one freethinking, or nonreligious). The very number of German children in these schools provided so much competition with the 35 public schools that in 1864 the local school board voted to include German language instruction in the public school curriculum. There was one earlier exception to the rule of division by language: In 1850, John Kerler, Jr., stated that "Milwaukee is the only place in which I found that the Americans concern themselves with learning German, and where the German language and German ways are bold enough to take a foothold."

Kerler described another attraction of Milwaukee its "inns, beer cellars, and billiard and bowling alleys, as well as German beer." Indeed, by 1850 there were 7 German breweries in Milwaukee; a decade later there were 19, some with taverns or beer gardens where informal gatherings over German-style lager beer helped young men feel at home. Whole families also gathered there. In fact, in every major Midwestern city, beer gardens like the Milwaukee Garden (established in 1850 and said to accommodate more than 12,000 patrons), took the place of public parks. Suburban "refreshment gardens" appeared on the outskirts of many Midwestern towns.
Germans were also known for more formal social arrangements. The middle-class German immigrant brought to the urban and rural Midwest a tradition of forming and joining associations. These clubs, or Vereine, provided members both cultural and social nourishment, including drama, debate, and sharpshooter clubs. Many grew out of a love of music. The Missouri Republican observed that "the Germans best among all nations understand how to make music subservient to social enjoyment."
Gesangvereine, or German singing societies, were especially visible. Baltimore's Liederkranz, founded in 1836, stated its objective as "improvement in song and in social discourse through the same." The singing societies built concert halls, produced operas, and organized national choral festivals where groups from all over the country gathered to entertain huge audiences. One of America's greatest musical families started with Leopold Damrosch, a German immigrant of 1871 who founded an opera company. His son, Frank, was director of the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, and another son, Walter, was a conductor with the Metropolitan Opera Company and the New York Symphony Orchestra in the early 20th century.
Perhaps most characteristics of the German immigrants were the Turnvereine, or gymnastic clubs. Founded in Germany by Friedrich Jahn in 1811 as a means of promoting well being through exercise, the clubs' programs also advocated nationalism and the need to defend the fatherland against Napoleon. In this sense, early Turnvereine were much like training camps. In America, "turners" still practiced gymnastics (the St. Louis School system enlisted the head of a local club to organize its physical education system), but they also arranged picnics, parades, and dances, serving a social as well as a sporting purpose. Some clubs took on the role of all-purpose community house in the 20th century. The Turnverein in Yorkville, New York City's largest German district, offered kindergarten classes to any neighborhood child before closing its doors in 1985. Others limited their offerings: The club in downtown Milwaukee became a German-style restaurant, its walls decorated with photographs of past gymnasts.

Churches set up their own brand of Vereine. Particularly common in Catholic parishes, these organizations ranged from mutual benefit associations (akin to insurance companies) to women's rosary and fund- raising societies. In Baltimore, a group called the Sisters of Charity was responsible for that city's first hospital, established in 1846. German Jews and Protestants also had their own associations.

THE FORTY-EIGHTERS
A particular boost to the sense of German ethnic identity came with the forty-eighters, a group of 4,000 to 10,000 Germans who arrived in America as refugees from the failed political revolutions and social-reform movements of 1848. On the whole they were liberal, agnostic, and intellectual, traits that threatened or offended many of the more established immigrants. But the influence of the forty-eighters on the cultural and political life of the German-American community was tremendous, and many worked to unite divergent groups of German Americans around issues that concerned Palatines and Berliners, Catholics and Protestants alike.

In the years immediately following their arrival, the forty-eighters continued to support, from across the ocean, the liberal cause in Germany. But troubling events in this country increasingly drew their attention. As early as 1835, antiforeign feelings had led to the establishment of the Know-Nothing party (so called because members continually claimed they "knew nothing" of the movement); by the early 1850s (coincidental with high mid-century immigration), the "nativism" favored by the Know-Nothings was on the rise. Nativists tried-through petition, legislation, ostracism, and open abuse -to restrict the entry of immigrants into the United States and to limit the rights of those who had already arrived.

One German custom especially appalling to native-born Americans was drinking beer on the Sabbath. Many native-born Americans followed the English Puritan tradition of refraining from frivolous activities such as dancing, bowling, and drinking on Sundays. Most German Americans had no such traditional restrictions on Sabbath behavior, and their Sunday drinking caused such outrage that movements to restrict or prohibit liquor consumption arose in several states. Although most German immigrants agreed that moderation in drinking was a good idea, they viewed these legal efforts as direct attacks on both their way of life and their religious freedom. In Wisconsin (which by 1855 was heavily German), one newspaper lambasted "the Temperance Swindle" for reducing "all sociability to the condition of a Puritan graveyard." A German theater owner in St. Louis in 1861 defied a police order to close on Sunday, whereupon 40 officers arrived to prevent the audience from entering.

The culture gap had an uglier side. An 1855 riot in Louisville., Kentucky, led by the Know-Nothings, was one of the era's more blatant and violent manifestations of anti-German feeling. Catholics (both German and Irish) were frequently victims of attacks by nativists, who wanted a Protestant America. In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, opponents of slavery were also targets. Many of the more prominent German Americans, including most of the forty-eighters, spoke out against slavery, antagonizing slave owners and their supporters. Most of these activists, moved by the strong anti-slavery stance of Republicans such as forty-eighter Carl Schurz, joined the Republican party soon after its founding in 1854. Although the average German immigrant did not own slaves, the Democratic party retained significant German-American support because it had formed the primary opposition to the Know-Nothing party in the past.

In general, German Americans felt more strongly about the preservation of the Union than about the abolition of slavery. By the time Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860, seven southern states had already seceded from the Union, and German Americans (Republicans and Democrats alike) frowned upon this breach of national unity. After all, it was the search for economic and political stability that had motivated many of them to emigrate.

In December 1860, pro-Southern soldiers known as Minute Men resolved to further the cause of secession in the border state of Missouri. But the next May, federal troops thwarted their plans, capturing the pro-Southern state militia at Camp Jackson, near St. Louis. Many of the soldiers who stopped the Minute Men were German volunteers, members of Turnvereine or of Wide-Awake clubs (German organizations originally formed to protect Republican speakers at political rallies in Missouri). The result was that Missouri stayed in the Union, and German-American soldiers received much of the credit for the political victory.

Thousands of young German Americans-from Pennsylvania to Colorado-fought in the Civil War. Henry A. Kircher, 19, a first-generation American from Belleville, Illinois, left a record of his Civil War experiences in his letters home to his family. He initially joined the 9th Illinois Infantry but soon left, at least partially in response to ethnic tensions between Germans and Americans in that regiment. With a few other Germans from Belleville, he then joined the 12th Missouri Infantry, a regiment composed primarily of foreigners and led by German officers with such names as Osterhaus, Schadt, Wangelin, and Ledergreber.

In August 1864, after the Battle at Ringgold Gap (Georgia), Kircher's right arm and left leg were amputated; Captain Joseph Ledergreber died from shots through the lungs and spine. In sum, thousands of German Americans were injured or lost their life in battle. From the time the Civil War ended in April 1865 to well into the next century, German Americans pointed to these sacrifices for the Union as proof of their patriotism. For many, the Civil War would mark a turning point in their sense of themselves as American citizens. 

INDUSTRIALIZATION AND WAR
Two themes characterize German immigration in the decades between the Civil War and World War I. The first was a great increase in the number of new arrivals. The 1880s were the peak years of this exodus from the fatherland: In that decade, 1,445,181 Germans made their way across the Atlantic, about a quarter of a million of them in 1882 alone.

But a second, countervailing force was at work. In these same years, emigration from southern and eastern Europe began to climb, so that Germans fell sharply as a percentage of America's foreign-born population. Whereas in 1854 Germans accounted for about half of all foreign-born persons in America, by the 1890s that figure had fallen to less than one-fifth. Compared to the wave of Italians, Russian Jews, Scandinavians, Poles, and others, the Germans were in some senses part of the old America, a cultural presence that harked back to colonial times. These two facts changed the nature of the Germans' adaptation to their new homeland.

The source of German immigration was shifting, too. Whereas pre-Civil War immigrants hailed from the Southwestern agricultural regions along the Rhine, the later arrivals were more likely to emigrate from the Hesses or Nassau. These northeastern states were dominated by estate agriculture, in which land was farmed commercially rather than by individual families. Consequently, a growing percentage of the emigrants were day laborers who had worked other people's fields, and who also, upon arriving in America, found most of the farmland occupied.
 
CLOSER TO HOME
Marshfield, Wisconsin was an immigrant community, settled predominately by German-speaking settlers. When war erupted in Europe, not only President Wilson but many Americans had to stand aside and practice a policy of neutrality, to keep the political loyalty to their new country in balance with the deeper cultural and familiar loyalty to the "old" country. As the war dragged on beyond the late summer and fall of 1914 into 1915, tensions mounted. Inflation, increasing the price of ordinary goods and services, along with rationing, all fanned the flames of distrust. As time went on the war stretched into 1916. When America finally entered the war alongside England and France in 1917, Marshfield's German residents were forced to make some public choices.

The Marshfield Times editorialized that shortly after the war's expansion in Europe in September 1914, that "Wisconsin, more than the average American state is interested in the great war that is being fought in Europe. More than a third of her population is either German or of German extraction and thousands of Wisconsin families are represented by relatives in the fighting army of the Kaiser." Hoping that peace would come quickly and decisively, the Marshfield papers backed Wilson's policy of "watchful waiting" and assured readers that America should fear nothing except a temporary decline of exports to Europe.

The search for reliable information regarding the war's progress and impact, especially on the German people brought a flurry of responses from the papers, their editorials and letters to the editor. On the one hand, the concern surfaced that America was underprepared and could not resist an invasion of the type that rocked Europe's borders. On the other hand, it became the duty of people here in Marshfield to help those suffering in Germany. Throughout late September and into October 1914, German social organizations in the city pulled together to raise money and ship food and clothing to families and veteran's groups in Germany. "United in bonds of common sympathy for the widows, the orphaned children and the wounded soldiers, noted the Marshfield Times, "members of the Marshfield Kriger-Verein and the German-American Alliance have set out to raise a large fund for relief of the suffering and destitute in the Fatherland which has been caused by the Great European War." Yet this campaign was done "quietly" throughout the city and state, surreptitiously to avoid the glare of publicity and accusations of violating American's official stance of neutrality. Marshfield residents benefited from the American Express's offer to ship Christmas presents overseas free of charge, so long as the gifts were packed and ready to ship by November 3, 1914 and were clearly marked as "Christmas Gifts for Children of Europe."

While debate appeared on whether or not continued immigration should be allowed during the war, the Marshfield Times in 1915 celebrated German achievements in pharmacology, medicine, science, and its many recipients of the Nobel Prizes. "Where is the blighting effect of Prussian militarism?" asked an editorial rhetorically. "To the unprejudiced observer it seems an excellent institution. Truth, justice, efficiency, faith will win in the end, which means Germany (shall win)." Unfortunately, this positive tone came just two weeks before the Lusitania went down with a German torpedo which shook many Americans' sense of security in Wilson's neutrality policy. Throughout May, 1915 the Times worked to put the best face on the sinking of the ship and loss of American lives by blaming England for using the ship to transport munitions under the cover of passenger service and asserting that German submarine warfare was a logical measure of self-defense. In the following months and throughout the summer, the paper endorsed the neutrality policy and urged readers to avoid the war hysteria promulgated by those in "New York" who would manipulate anti-German sentiment to enter the war on the side of England and France.
 
The Marshfield Times endorsed Charles Evans Hughes for the presidency over Wilson, because the paper assured readers that Hughes would represent a more balanced perspective for Germany. Noting that nearly a half million people rallied to Hughes' Milwaukee visit that fall while only 30,000 appeared for Wilson, the paper let the impression form that the Republican party offered a better choice than the usually endorsed Democrats. Responding to the dissatisfaction voiced by numerous Marshfield residents in the paper's stance, the Times defended itself against charges of being "a spy of the Kaiser" and kowtowing to the German Chancellor by claiming in its headline "Pretty Hard to Please Everybody with Newspaper." Despite Wilson's close reelection in November 1916, the city celebrated Christmas with the German Theatre Company of Bavaria giving a performance at the drama festival hosted at the Adler Opera House.

However, after Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, relations with the United States worsened, and it appeared that war with Germany would become inevitable. As early as February 1917 the paper reported that all German language columns (such as local and syndicated news features) would disappear from the paper, because "it has been deemed advisable for us to discontinue this feature indefinitely...." Rumors of Wilson's death only made matters worse as an uproar swept through the community provoked by "conflicts" between Marshfield's German and non-German residents. Tensions mounted and were reflected in the Marshfield Times banner reminder that "We are all Americans" and whether or not born here, everybody should support this country as if it were his homeland. That all was not quiet in town could be seen in the political sniping reported in the Times as a current definition of education making the rounds as "learning to become ashamed of father, mother and the old home." Two days later, the United States declared war against the German Empire.
Once a state of war existed, Marshfield residents met the new conditions with some degree of enthusiasm. During the year and a half of American participation in the European conflict, several distinct patterns emerged in the newspapers. First, any public sympathy for Germany was criticized. While not the extreme example taken in West Bend, Wisconsin, where teaching German was forbidden in the public schools, Marshfield readers sought to put some distance between the good or "modern Germany" that was "orderly and industrious" and from which their family had come, and the bad or "political Germany" that was "medieval and absolutist." Germans who had come stateside and failed to become citizens were chided. Asking "Can You Explain It?" the Marshfield Times denounced the wealthy, upstanding citizens in their community or across the United States who made money but not patriotic commitments. Further attacks came when the paper reported the words of state senator Atlee Pomerence who declaimed that "If your heart speaks German you are against us." Pacifism was equated with pro-Germanism and both were denounced as hurting the American war effort. On another occasion the Times attacked, as traitors to the U.S., those Germans who "came here without a cent" and who made money but did not commit by purchases of war bonds or filing for citizenship. Even the News struck out at the Herald as providing support for the German war effort by falsely reporting German investments as favorable means for those looking to make money out of the war. Each local paper did its best to assure readers of its loyalty and faith to the American war effort.

Second, in the attempts to show support for the war effort, the city service groups raced to raise money through the sale of war bonds during the liberty bond drives, as well as fund-raising for the Red Cross. The citywide goal of $14,000 was set in June 1917; the Eagles and Knights of Columbus each tried to outdo the other in money raised for the Red Cross and Liberty Bond Drives to show the depth of their patriotism. For those who were slow in coming around and making a public show of support, the News reported how one "pro-German" became a "100 percent patriot" after being dunked in the river (which river was not mentioned) and then forced to kiss the American flag.

Third, the increase in the cost of living created tensions that undoubtedly helped to fuel the suspicions and animosities noted in the first two instances. Shortages of certain basic staples had shown up at the war's outset in August of 1914. Increases in the price of flour showed up first, followed by sugar and then corn and animal feed. Prices at the wholesale level doubled in a month's time as speculators did their best to capture supplies for sales overseas. Even cigars jumped 150 percent in cost by 1917 and the price of a newspaper doubled. After the American declaration of war in April 1917, the federal and local governments urged people to grow their own food and preserve that produce for home consumption; the motto "raise all you can-can all you raise" urged citizens to keep out of the larger marketplace and thereby reduce the pressures on climbing prices for the food needed to help feed our own soldiers as well as our allies' troops. Soon tin cans fell into short supply because of the drastic demand for overseas shipment and the Times announced that cans would be provided by the local governments only to those industrial concerns involved in packing perishable goods absolutely necessary to the war effort. As if these aggravations were not enough, dogs running freely through the city found their way into these "liberty gardens" tearing up the plants and vegetables so carefully sown. The Marshfield Times urged people to pen up, or at least to leash their dogs (but to what effect is only speculation). Fourth and finally, growing apprehensions that war in some form might be inevitable brought the call for universal service to the United States for the first time since the Civil War. Urging young men to volunteer for the army before any draft was necessary, the Marshfield Times endorsed the actions of young ladies of the city who played an encouraging role by assuring "young men who failed to affiliate with the local militia company" that they "would be stricken from their (the young ladies') list of social acquaintances." On the other hand, the paper chided women who married men in order to keep them out of the war. Noting an increase in the number of marriages since the declaration of war with Germany, the Times called for potential brides to keep a distance if they suspected that a married man would use the excuse of breadwinner to avoid the patriot's call to duty. The call to enlist and wear the uniform came at precisely the same time that verbal fights over German identity had heated up in town. War bond drives and food shortages also had tempers flaring. Some preliminary action was seen by Company "A" Second Regiment from Marshfield as part of the Wisconsin militia mobilized for patrols along the Mexican and American border during the Mexican Revolution and the famous incursions by Pancho Villa. From the summer of 1916 through January 1917, Marshfield's young enlisted men traveled much and fought little in this minor campaign. However, the martial spirit dominated, and after their return and war in Europe was begun, "A" Company formed part of the Red Arrow Division, the 32nd, from Wisconsin that saw action in France that summer through to the Armistice of November 11, 1918.

News of the war remained scarce until after the Armistice and then letters from Marshfield's soldiers to their families appeared in the Times with increasing frequency. The 32nd Division had served in some of the bloodiest fighting from the late summer of 1918 through to the end of the war. The soldiers of "A" Company stood up against the fierce German offensive and allied counter attacks at St. Mihiel, Belleau Woods and Chateau Thierry. Some returned with their health, celebrated for their bravery, such as R. Connor who was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel. Others came back seriously wounded, such as Leo Luis, who lost a leg in the fight at Belleau Woods during August. He returned home in late November to zero degree weather at three a.m. on a 30 day furlough, but welcomed nonetheless by family, friends and a small band, to whom he showed off his artificial limb. More often than not, the paper carried notices of those who would never come home again.

Notices in the paper included mention of funerals for Lutherans, a memorial mass for Catholics, and the name and address of surviving family members. "Died in France" read one column head, "Three more Blue Stars of Boys from this Section Turned to Gold" referring to the practice of hanging a blue star in the window of a family with a serviceman, and a gold star for a casualty. Corporal Henry Schielz was one native son who did not come home and who had been with Company "A" from its initial muster and service on the Mexican border in 1916. He died of a gunshot wound in France two days before the Armistice.

Often times there were letters from sons to families telling of the great scenery, the "queer looking money" and the industrious farmers of Europe. The cost of cigarettes was high, and wherever the "Sammys" went (U.S. soldiers were named after Uncle Sam-the "G.I.s" named after the term government issue would be another 20 years later) the natives were glad to diddle the exchange rate from four francs to the dollar to nearly one franc to the dollar! Underlying much of the stories that the papers chose to print were sentiments voiced by Charles Normington who was in Paris when the Armistice was signed who wrote, "I only hope the soldiers who died ... are looking down upon the world today. It was a grand thing to die for." Paul Schultz, aged 23, was one of those Marshfield men who died for this "grand thing" and would not return to his job at the R. J. Baker Ice Cream Company.

In February 1919 W D. Connor sponsored a banquet for nearly 400 soldiers, and sailors from Marshfield and the surrounding communities at the armory. These most recent veterans were joined by Civil War members of the G.A.R. and the Spanish-American war veterans. Home guards accompanied by 20 or so young ladies dressed as Red Cross nurses did the serving. Planning began shortly thereafter for a gala parade and celebration for the local veterans returning sometime that summer. The middle of June was selected as "Red Arrow Days" and the city began fund-raising to get the needed $8,000 to carry off the day in some style. When asked where the name "Red Arrow" came from, one returning soldier said that it was the Red Arrow that had pierced the Hindenberg Line, referring to notations on the military maps marking the allied advances in the summer of 1918.

"Red Arrow Days" took place Thursday and Friday, June 18 and 19, 1919 on Central Avenue with "a stuffed critter," parades, speeches, fireworks, various patriotic shows and the now-celebrated Second Regiment Band from Marshfield. The band had always been a source of local pride from its inception at the turn of the century and its role in military service. With the first world war, it rose to some national prominence under its director Theodore Steinmetz (or "Steiny" as the Marshfield Times called him) and his composition "Lafayette, We Are Here." The "stuffed critter" turned out to be an ox for the barbecue, which weighed more than 800 pounds when dressed and more than a half ton when stuffed! The stuffing was made of "30 pounds of bacon, 30 pounds of liver, 30 loaves of bread, a bushel of onions and three gallons of catsup." J. P. Adler brought in a professional cameraman to record movies of the great celebration.

Amidst it all, few may have noticed the small column head proclaiming "Peace. Teutons Willing to Sign the Peace Terms-Day of Signing Uncertain," with the brief explanation that the German government would sign the peace terms unconditionally. This brief note is important for a couple of reasons. First, those defeated were "Teutons," not Germans. The German sympathies of three years earlier had disappeared when enlisted men gave their lives overseas. They had become "Americans" with little mention of their German descent; their combat as much as the home front propaganda had served to foster a new identity of Marshfield's largest ethnic group. Second, the unconditional surrender at Versailles set the stage for a series of disasters, political and economic, that would bring the world to war again within 20 years.

The war's impact could be seen in other ways as well. One obvious sign was the great affection felt for Sergeant Willard D. Purdy who had given his life in France. After returning from patrol in Hegenbach, Alsace, on July 4, 1918, Sergeant Purdy was engaged in calling roll and collecting the grenades from his men when a pin dislodged from one of the grenades. Unable to toss the grenade away without injury to others, he ordered the men to scatter. Smothering the grenade in his stomach, he died instantly but saved the lives of more than a half dozen other soldiers. A year later, the city decided to name the new junior high school and vocational school in his honor. A second less obvious, but dramatic impact of the war was on the population. Nearly 450 young men from Marshfield enlisted. Approximately one in ten died in the war, either in battle, the raging influenza epidemic, or as a result of military service. Did the high proportion come about because such a large number served? Did such a large number serve in order to prove their American patriotism to a much stronger degree because they had names like Grube, Riethus, Seidl, Schultz, Oertel, and Yaeger? Was there a need to prove once and for all that German-Americans were not the same as "Huns" or "Teutons?"
  
TO THE FRONTIER
The only area in North America still available for homesteading at this time was the Great Plains-the plateau stretching from Saskatchewan in Canada through the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. In the United States before 1875, this region was better known as the Great American Desert, a vast expanse to be suffered en route to more promising acreage in the Far West. Frequent skirmishes with Indians and the meager rainfall deterred most prospective farmers.

These conditions did not deter Russian Germans. Between 1872 and 1920, nearly 120,000 ethnic Germans emigrated to America from homes on the Russian steppes-flat, dry terrain that resembled the prairies of the Dakotas. Their ancestors had been lured to Russia by the promises of rulers Catherine the Great (reigned 1762-96) and Alexander I (1801-25), who wanted German farmers to cultivate the untitled steppes, and, later, according to her invitation, to "serve as models for agricultural occupations and handicrafts." Among the incentives were promises of religious liberty, exemption from military duty, cash grants, and self-government. There were 300 colonies of German settlers in southern Russia, scattered along the lower Volga River and in the Black Sea district, when in 1870 the czarist government began to revoke their original privileges.

The inhabitants of these colonies lived a life separate from their Russian neighbors and closely tied to their church, a pattern they duplicated in North America in independent communities of Lutheran, Catholic, or Mennonite persuasion. Most of those who chose the United States as their home (many Mennonites went to Canada because it granted them exemption from the draft), settled between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers to the east and the Rocky Mountains to the west. The isolation of Russian Germans in this area naturally slowed their assimilation into American society, but their success in farming the inhospitable land was key to the development of the Great Plains as the "granary of the world." By 1920, 420,000 of them lived in America, spread across most of the United States and in the western provinces of Canada. Russian Germans, who had introduced a variety of grain called red hard winter wheat from Turkey to the Volga River region, then grew the crop on their farms in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado. In so doing, they helped make the United States self-sufficient in food production to this day.
 
URBAN TENSIONS
Not everyone who arrived in the 1880s met with such opportunity. In the city as well as in the countryside, the average German immigrant found fewer acres and less work than had greeted his predecessors. Industrialization was altering life in American cities much as it was in Germany. Artisans such as bakers, furniture workers, and toolmakers found their age-old skills of little value-factory work required the speedy completion of one small task, not a craftsman's painstaking care. A 12-year-old boy who had to learn the meticulous skills of cabinetmaking, for instance, might now stand for years at a machine repeatedly making one small item.

This trend led to high unemployment and to living conditions that were often miserable. In 1884, one German cigar maker in Chicago could find only occasional work; his family of eight lived in a three-room house that was "scantily and poorly furnished, no carpets, and the furniture being of the cheapest kind." His children were sick "at all times. " Workers who found permanent employment could take little pride in their work and were often "exploited. A conductor who put in a 16-hour day protested that "the company is grinding [me] and all the others down to the starvation point."
Nor did city officials make the workers' plight any easier. During the last decades of the 19th century, Chicago was the scene of repeated police abuse and election fraud. Meetings organized by workers were often disrupted by police, and police harassment and violence were used to get striking workers back on the job. The German newspapers of the day reported many cases in which politicians moved voting places overnight to prevent workers from voting in the morning, closed them before the workday ended, intimidated those who did arrive, and stuffed ballot boxes with illegal votes. The German-language newspaper Verbote responded indignantly to a blatant case of vote fraud in 1880: "We are fully justified in saying that the holiest institution of the American people, the right to vote, has been desecrated and become a miserable farce and a lie."

These disillusioning events, coupled with poor living and working conditions, encouraged German immigrants to turn to labor unions as organizations that could best represent their interests. In 1886, almost one-third of the total union membership in Chicago was German, and of all the ethnic groups, Germans contributed the most members. In fact, more Germans joined labor unions in that city than did native-born Americans.

German involvement in the labor movement did not sit well with nativists, who, in the last decades of the 19th century, were again seeking support for anti-immigration laws. With the railroad strike of 1877 and the Haymarket Riot of May 4, 1886 (which broke out when someone at a workers' protest threw a bomb at policemen, who fired randomly in response), nativists claimed that German immigrants-with their predilection for socialism and radical labor activism-had imported the trouble. Though it was never determined who threw the bomb, eight men were tried in the wake of the Haymarket Riot; four were subsequently hanged, three of them German-born. This fact fueled the nativists' fire, as did the surge in German (and other) immigration in the 1880's.
 
UNITED GERMANY: INSPIRATION AND THREAT
The unification of Germany by the Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck in 1871 focused American attention abroad long before World War I broke out in 1914. Some Germans in the United States were unenthusiastic: German-American Catholics in particular grew bitter at the oppressive measures the "Iron Chancellor" used to achieve his ends, and many emigrants now left the German empire in order to avoid being drafted into the Prussian army. But other German Americans overlooked Bismarck's failings, which they felt were exaggerated by the English-language press, and emphasized instead his leadership in the defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the creation of a united Germany.

In fact, to an outspoken minority of German Americans, the event was an inspiration. If Germany could be united, they reasoned, why could not the diverse groups of Germans in America-never before united politically, but sharing a language, and to a large extent, a culture-act as a potent and unified bloc? A speaker in Cincinnati leader expressed this viewpoint by urging his compatriots to "make an end to all our petty quarrels.... Let us make our power felt, and let us use it wisely."
By the 1890s, this sentiment became more popular and was echoed in many of the 800 German-language publications across America, which shifted the focus of their news away from America and back to the fatherland. In part, this nationalism was in response to a sharp drop in German immigration at the end of the 19th century. This led to fears among some German Americans that without strong efforts to promote German culture their communities would assimilate completely, and the German language as well as German art, music, and literature would no longer have a presence in the United States. Promoting German culture did not mean abandoning the new homeland; indeed, many German Americans believed that the national interests of Germany and the United States were complementary, so that support for the one would ultimately benefit the other.

Native-born Americans grew increasingly wary of this German political and cultural activity in their midst. Nativist groups such as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Protective Association sought to limit immigration and supported measures-the prohibition of alcohol, woman suffrage (most suffragettes advocated prohibition), Legislation requiring all students to speak English-that German Americans opposed.

German Americans responded by forming their own organizations, most notably the German-American National Alliance, founded in 1907 by an American-born engineer from Philadelphia named Charles J. Hexamer. Nativists, though, heard in the Alliance an echo of Germany's own Pan-German League, part of whose platform was "to oppose the united commercial power of our enemies, the Anglo-Saxons." Could Germany be trying to establish a power base in the Western Hemisphere, using German Americans as an advance guard?

Suspicions were fed by American fears of Germany's leader Kaiser Wilhelm, who had come to power in 1890 and whose militarism led many to believe he was bent on world domination. To a growing number of Americans, German-American unity seemed an expression of support for the Kaiser's imperialistic path, or at least a sign Of split loyalties. As early as 1894, in a speech entitled "What 'Americanism' Means," future president Theodore Roosevelt denounced immigrants who regarded themselves as "Irish-Americans" or "German Americans." In his view, they were distinctly unpatriotic: "Some Americans need hyphens in their names because only part of them has come over. But when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name."

The term hyphenate became an increasingly popular insult to describe just about anybody who felt strongly about his ethnic identity. Ethnic tensions in America increased in August 1914 when fighting broke out in Europe. President Woodrow Wilson initially set the nation on a course of neutrality, urging that Americans be "impartial in thought as well as in action ... neutral in fact as well as in name." But before the war was one month old, reports of German atrocities in Belgium (especially the burning of Louvain, with its ancient library) shocked many Americans and emboldened the American caricature of the goose-stepping, brutal Hun. Life magazine published a cartoon in late July 1915 that fueled this stereotype: a German officer with pointed helmet struts across the page; suspended from his bloody bayonet are an old man, a woman, and two small children. German submarines prowled the Atlantic, and by the time one sank the British passenger ship Lusitania in May 1915, killing 1,200 persons (including 124 American citizens), Wilson was hard put to recommend neutrality in thought or deed.

The vocal leadership of the German-American community inadvertently worsened tensions. The depredations of Belgium, they believed, had been exaggerated by Germany's enemies, especially Great Britain, in a deliberate attempt to draw the United States into the war-an attempt made all the easier by the two nations' common language and Wilson's noted allegiance to English culture. The publisher of the German-language Omaha Tribüne, Val Peter, reflected this mentality in a
1915 address to the Nebraska branch of the German-American National Alliance:
Both here and abroad, the enemy is the same! perfidious Albion [England]! Over there England has pressed the sword into the hands of almost all the peoples of Europe against Germany. In this country it has a servile press at its command, which uses every foul means to slander everything German and to poison the public mind.

But by dismissing every reported atrocity as anti German propaganda and portraying the nation's leadership (especially President Wilson) as unsuspecting dupes of the British, prominent German Americans came across to the American public as callous, uncaring, and undiscriminating in their support of Germany. For example, although most German-American newspapers and organizations expressed dismay over the lives that had been lost when the Lusitania was torpedoed, they also made excuses for the German action: United States citizens had been warned by the German embassy about traveling on British ships; Germany was forced into submarine warfare by the British blockade of Germany; Congress should have ensured a policy of strict neutrality by forbidding the sale of American weapons to the British. These excuses rang hollow to many Americans who were distraught over the tragic loss of life.

President Wilson vigorously repaid the attacks on him in the German-American press with a number of speeches made in the fall of 1915. In his State of the Union address to Congress that year, Wilson condemned "citizens of the United States, . . . who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt." With language that was more characteristic of the fiery Roosevelt, Wilson went on to insist that all such traitors must be crushed out," and that "the hand of our power should close over them at once." Wilson's speeches, implicitly equating support of Germany with treasonous anti-Americanism, marked the beginning of the end of American neutrality.
The United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, with this declaration by President Wilson: "The world must be made safe for democracy ... the right is more precious than peace." He had been driven to declare war, he told Congress, by Germany's continuation of submarine warfare. But there was another major factor in Wilson's decision. A telegram, written by German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann and sent to Mexico, had been intercepted by the British navy. In the telegram Germany offered to help Mexico regain Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, a plan evidently designed to keep U.S. troops out of Germany's backyard by keeping them busy at home. The telegram convinced both Wilson and the American public of Germany's hostile intentions toward the United States. Unfortunately, like many of Germany's actions during World War 1, it sparked hatred of all things German. As American soldiers - many of German descent - arrived on the battlefields of Europe, anti-German hysteria welled up in cities, towns, and rural outposts across America.
 
ANTI-GERMANISM GROWS VIOLENT
On the night of April 4, 1918, a year after the United States had declared war against Germany, a group of Maryville, Illinois, coal miners apprehended Robert Paul Prager, a co-worker whom they suspected of being a German spy. They marched him from his home in Collinsville, forced him to kiss the American flag and to sing patriotic songs in front of a gathering crowd, and questioned him about his activities as a German spy. Prager insisted on his innocence and on his loyalty to the United States. But the mob was not appeased, and they hanged him from a tree on the outskirts of town.
Prager's death was the culmination of a year of harassment of German Americans. Theodore Ladenburger, a German Jew living in New York, wrote that "from the moment that the United States had declared war on Germany," he was made to feel like "a traitor to [his] adopted country." Moreover, he continued: ... in view of my record as a citizen I did expect from my neighbors and fellow citizens a fair estimate and appreciation of my honesty and trustworthiness. It had all vanished. Outstanding was the only fact, of which I was never ashamed-nor did I ever make a secret of it-that I had been born in Germany.

German Americans were intimidated into buying Liberty Bonds (sold by the U.S. Treasury to finance the war), imprisoned for making "disloyal" remarks, and forced to participate in flag-kissing ceremonies like the one that preceded Prager's lynching. Citizens from Florida to California were publicly flogged or tarred and feathered. Homes and schools were vandalized. Mennonites, who firmly opposed all wars, were especially persecuted; in 1917-18, more than 1,500 Mennonites fled the United States to settle in Canada.

Hysteria also threatened German cultural institutions. Attacks on German music included the banning of Beethoven in Pittsburgh and the arrest of Dr. Karl Muck, the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, on charges that he was a threat to the safety of the country. The same motive lay behind the removal or vandalism of statues of poets Johann Goethe and Friedrich Schiller and other German cultural giants. German-language classes were dropped from school curricula and German textbooks banned. Under a 1917 law, German-language newspapers had to supply English-language translations that were reviewed for approval by local postmasters. If the material was found to be unacceptable, mailing privileges were withdrawn.
Perhaps the most ridiculous example of the rush to "de-Germanize" America was the removal, in 1917, of the figure of the goddess Germania from the Germania Life Insurance Building in St. Paul, Minnesota. The building was renamed the Guardian Building. Likewise, streets, parks, schools, and even towns were re-christened: Germantown, Nebraska, for example became Garland and Berlin, Iowa, was renamed Lincoln. Restaurants served "liberty steak" in place of hamburgers and "liberty cabbage" for sauerkraut. In Massachusetts, a physician even renamed German measles "liberty measles.

What were some of the other effects of such widespread anti-German hysteria? The German-American National Alliance faltered in April 1918, the month of Robert Prager's death, and membership in German cultural and political organizations plummeted. Many German Americans stopped speaking German, even in the privacy of their homes. German aliens rushed to become American citizens, and hundreds of citizens of German descent changed their names. George Washington Ochs of Philadelphia petitioned to change his last name to Oakes, despite the patriotism clearly embodied in his first two names.

Exceptions to this wave of hasty assimilation included tight-knit groups of churchgoing Germans, who reacted, by clinging more firmly to their beliefs and customs and by isolating themselves further from their neighbors. After the armistice of November 11, 1918, church groups risked American hostility by doing relief work in Germany, where starvation threatened thousands of people. This work, which consisted mainly of raising money for food and clothing to be sent to Germany, stimulated a brief revival of ethnic consciousness. United by their concern for friends and relatives abroad, German Americans contributed heavily to relief programs.

But organizations such as the Steuben Society, founded in New York in 1919 and guided by aims of political unity similar to those pursued by prewar groups, never became really popular again. Even before the war broke out, German Americans had been assimilating apace, leaning English and seeking careers in the larger American society. Indeed, by the 20th century, sizable communities where only German was spoken were largely a thing of the past. But in the opinion of at least one historian, World War I did not simply hasten this assimilation, it virtually banished ethnic consciousness among German Americans so that the postwar generation suffered from a kind of "cultural amnesia": parents who were immigrants or first-generation Americans had-out of fear and humiliation-so denied their roots that their children grew up with no sense of their own German heritage.

UP AND DOWN WITH THE PRESS
That heritage was most palpably conveyed by German Americans who had founded, edited, and contributed to periodicals printed in the German language. Publishers generally had a high sense of responsibility toward their readers; all of them tried to better the lot of their countrymen. Their job was twofold. They worked to preserve German language and culture as long as possible; they also tried to introduce their readers to American social and political life.

Even in colonial times, this mission was met: Between 1732 and 1800 there were 38 German-language newspapers published in the United States. The heyday of the German-American press, however, came in the years between 1848 and 1860, when there were 266 German newspapers. This amazing growth is explained in part by the huge number of new immigrants, but more significant was the arrival of the forty-eighters.

Many of these political refugees had edited or written for radical newspapers in Germany; most regarded the press as a force for social change. More than half of their ranks became involved in some aspect of journalism in the United States. Their high standards and their emphasis on politics sometimes shook up the German-American publishers who had been in the business for years. In Cincinnati, for example, there was substantial rivalry between the incoming "Greens" and the old guard publishers, or "Grays," who were quite comfortable with the idea of the foreign-language newspapers as a meek forum of social announcements and sentimental stories and poems about the old country. Elsewhere, however, the two factions coexisted peaceably or even worked together on papers that became powerful in the community. In St. Louis, where there were seven German dailies in 1860, forty-eighters joined the staffs of Die Waage and Anzeiger des Westens, and the latter was transformed into an antislavery journal by three immigrants.

This journalistic tradition spawned many advances. Thomas Nast, the son of a forty-eighter, is known as the father of the political cartoon and was the first person to depict a donkey and elephant as mascots of the Democratic and Republican parties. Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the Linotype, an automatic typesetting machine that had its first successful run on July 3, 1886, in the composing room of the New York Tribune.
The number of German publications reached its peak in 1894 at 800 and began a rapid decline hinging on the political tension in Europe. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of German-language publications in America dropped from 554 to 234. Subscribers fell away, especially with President Wilson's declaration of war in 1917, and many were not won back even at war's end.
 
HIDING THEIR ANCESTRY
German reading matter was not the only casualty of the war at home; ethnic pride suffered too, as shown by a strange twist in the 1920 U.S. census. Although in the preceding decade 174,227 newcomers arrived from Germany (most of them in 1910-14, before the outbreak of the war) and return migration was low, the statistics show a 25.3 percent decline from the 1910 census in the number of German-born Americans. According to historian La Vern J. Rippley, the discrepancy can be explained by the reluctance of German Americans to reveal their birthplace to 1920 census takers. Rippley concludes that "the German-born as well as the German stock in the United States moved underground."

The 1920s brought another set of challenges to the immigrant Population. Legal persecution of Germans died down, and, in 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court declared legislation banning the teaching of German in schools unconstitutional. But anti-German sentiment created a more lasting legacy with the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, ratified on July 1, 1919, which prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks. Many backers of the amendment were genuinely concerned about the host of social and public health problems caused by alcoholism. But others were motivated by a desire to restrict an activity that was viewed by Germans and non-Germans alike as a central part of German-American social life and to curtail the economic success of the German Americans who owned most of the nation's breweries.

Retaliation came safety in one place-the voting booth. It appears that in 1920, German Americans, ethnically minded or not, gained some measure of revenge for Wilson's wartime policies by casting their votes not so much for presidential candidate Warren G. Harding as against Wilson's fellow Democrat James Cox. Harding's candidacy was publicly and strongly backed by the Deutsch-Amerikanische Burgerbund, or the German-American Citizen's League, which openly resolved to "sweep from office all miscreants ... who hounded and persecuted Americans of German descent,... who [are] contemptuous of any hyphen except the one which binds them to Great Britain, unmindful of the supreme sacrifice of Americans of German blood in the late war."
Established in Chicago in January 1921, the radical Burgerbund was a rarity in the postwar period. Some of its diehards thought that Harding owed his victory to the German-American vote, and five of them visited the vacationing president-elect in Florida to demand a seat in his cabinet. The demand went unmet.

By 1924, the Burgerbund had retreated, and leadership of the community fell to the more moderate Steuben Society. Founded in 1919, the society aimed to shift blame for the war from Germany onto Russia and France. In this effort it was aided by a group of revisionist writers and historians who held that Germany was not solely responsible for the bloodshed. But the Steuben Society's more immediate goal was to recast the image of the German American in the eyes of the general public. German Americans, the societies members insisted, were neither "mongrels with a divided allegiance" nor "hyphenates." In keeping with this goal, they named their organization after Baron Friedrich von Steuben, a hero of the War of Independence. By the 1924 election the so-called revenge vote had run its course, with German Americans once again casting their ballots diversely.

AFTER THE WAR’S DISGRACE
Postwar Germany was a shambles: 1,800,000 people had died during the war and more than twice that number were wounded. Its economy was also in ruins-from July to November 1923, the value of the German mark plummeted from 160,000 marks to the dollar to 4.2 billion marks to the dollar. Life again looked more secure across the Atlantic, and about 430,000 German immigrants came to the United States between 1919 and 1933. The majority were fleeing the hopeless economic situation, but some left for political reasons-Germany's postwar constitution displeased leftists and rightists alike.

Among the émigrés in these years were increasing numbers of German Jews, fleeing the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Germany. Jews had always been discriminated against in Germany, but by the early 20th century German anti-Semitism had become fairly muted. German Jews were excluded from most government-related careers, for example, but could still make a good living in the prestigious independent professions of medicine, law, journalism, and the arts. Most German Jews spoke German rather than Hebrew or Yiddish, and many considered themselves more German than Jewish.
But as the economic situation in Germany deteriorated, German Jews found themselves increasingly being blamed for all that had gone wrong during the war and afterwards. Much of this scapegoating was the work of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP)-the Nazi party. The Nazis wanted, their words, to "purify" Germany of Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and other "non-Aryan" races, as well as of homosexuals and political liberals, making it the private sanctum of fair-haired "Aryan" Germans. Nazi sympathizers tended to be young, lower-middle-class men who counted them selves among the "lost generation"-people whose lives and opportunities had been shattered by the war. Not surprisingly, some supporters of the Nazi party came to the United States in search better opportunities, and in 1924, four recent newcomers founded the Teutonia Association in Detroit, where they had gone to seek work. During the next two years, the organization attracted others who had already been active in Hitler's circle in Germany. By 1932, the group had branches in five American cities and a membership of more than 500.

Many of that number expected to return to Germany once Hitler came to power, and the association, at least initially, did not regard itself as a vehicle for spreading National Socialism in the United States. In 1936, however another organization was formed with that very aim. It was called the German-American Bund, known generally as the Bund, and its members were known as Bundists.

Leaders of American Nazi organizations shared Hitler's distorted view of the United States and of the 8 million Americans of German stock who lived there. They thought it their duty to "rescue" their Aryan brothers from the insidious influence of American culture, Jews, and communists. They expected, ignoring the extent of intermarriage and the variety of American political and racial opinion, that German Americans would heed their cry en masse.

In actuality, Americans of German descent seemed no more influenced by Nazi propaganda than anyone else. In the 1930s, one pollster found that 70 percent of the German Americans he interviewed were "totally indifferent" to international Nazism and that 20 percent were "definitely anti-Nazi." Bund membership never exceeded 25,000, and most of that number was concentrated in the industrial cities of the Northeast, where newcomers tended to congregate. The impression that the Bund was more powerful than it actually was from 1936 to 1939 stemmed from wide coverage on radio and in the newspapers.

The Bund's downfall is easily explained: Few German Americans responded to its call for collective racial action based on the notion of Aryan supremacy. In Milwaukee, for example, the Bund received so much negative publicity in the German-language Journal that it was soon forced to hold its meetings outside the city. The chairman of the New York branch of the Steuben Society denounced the Bundists as "unfortunately our blood, but of no credit to us."

When Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, the event provoked some short-lived hostility in New York-Jews boycotted German-owned stores and German-made goods, and Christian German Americans responded by boycotting Jewish shops and services. When the Bund got involved in the boycott, however, most Christian German Americans shied away. But by the end of the decade, Nazi atrocities had drawn the entire world's attention. American opinion began to shift noticeably in March 1938 when Hitler invaded and annexed neighboring Austria. Then, 8 months later, Nazis across Germany burned more than 500 synagogues and looted or destroyed Jewish stores; thousands of Jews were beaten, shot, and dragged off to concentration camps.

Expressions of anger issued from all over the United States. President Roosevelt recalled the U.S. ambassador to Germany and protested to the Nazi government. (Less nobly, the United States-along with many European nations-closed its borders to all but a handful of Jewish refugees.) The Steuben Society issued its first unqualified public denouncement of Nazi anti-Semitism. On November 15, the New York Staats-Zeitung, the most influential German-language newspaper of its day, spoke out against the "dark powers" that would "turn loose the lowest and most degraded instincts against defenseless people."

When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, many members of the German-American community-as they had before U.S. entry into the previous war-called for an isolationist policy. So, unfortunately, did the pro-Nazi Bundists. This coincidence of opinion (one side anti-Semitic, the other antiwar) did not reflect well on the German-American community as a whole, and the non-Bundists feared a replay of the anti-Germanism that swept America during World War I.

No matter what reasons the isolationists had, America's entrance into the war seemed inevitable as Hitler's forces invaded more of Europe. By January 1941, two thirds of all Americans favored supporting Great Britain against Germany and Italy. Partly in response to this growing public sentiment, and to convince Americans of their loyalty, some German-American societies agreed. Robert F. Wagner, later the mayor of New York and son of the German-born New York senator of the same name, headed a group called the Loyal Americans of German Descent. Formed in July 1941, it pledged to "rally all our fellow-citizens of German ancestry to the all-out defense of America and of democracy."

With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the United States entered the war. Organizations that had urged isolationism all along were quick to declare their loyalty to the American cause. The Steuben News, for example, devoted its entire January 1942 issue to expressions of support for the war effort. As during World War I, some German Americans exercised their right to oppose U.S. involvement, but when involvement came, they generally supported the cause. With few exceptions, nothing close to the widespread anti-German hysteria of the World War I years occurred during World War II.

The reasons were various. This war had been started not by the German Empire, but by one radical political party led by an apparent madman. And by the 1940s after 20 years of low German immigration, German Americans for the most part spoke English and participated in mainstream politics and society; many had Anglicized their names to prevent a recurrence of the random persecution. World War II was a supreme national cause, one in which German Americans loyally took part.