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 ot 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 If the material was found to be unacceptable, mailing privileges were withdrawn.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.
