German Americans

• 1. Introduction

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  German Americans make up roughly 41 million people in the United States today, or about 12 percent of the entire population. Yet for much of the 20th century, one of the largest and most culturally vibrant immigrant communities in American history did something nearly unprecedented: it deliberately erased itself. Streets were renamed. Languages were abandoned mid-sentence. Bank signs came down. Children were yanked from Lutheran schools and told never to speak German again. How did a group that once had its own opera houses, symphony orchestras, and two-way bilingual public schools in major American cities become, as one historian put it, virtually invisible? And how did that transformation happen in the span of just two years? The story of German Americans runs from the very first European settlers at Jamestown in 1607 to the founding of kindergartens, the introduction of hot dogs and hamburgers, and a community that helped elect Abraham Lincoln. It is also the story of what a nation at war can do to an entire people's sense of who they are.

• 2. The First Arrivals

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  Johannes Fleischer, a physician and botanist, accompanied the first English settlers to Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, becoming the first German to settle in North America. He was followed the very next year by five glassmakers and three carpenters. These earliest arrivals were tradespeople, not pilgrims, and they set a practical tone for the Germans who followed over the next two centuries.

  The first permanent German settlement in what became the United States was Germantown, Pennsylvania, founded near Philadelphia on the 6th of October, 1683. What drew Germans to colonial British America was a combination of push and pull: worsening chances of farm ownership in central Europe, persecution of religious minorities, and military conscription on one side; cheap land, religious freedom, and economic possibility on the other. Many paid for their Atlantic passage by becoming indentured servants, selling years of their labor to cover the cost of the crossing.

  In 1709, Protestant Germans from the Palatine region fled poverty by traveling first to Rotterdam, then to London, where Queen Anne helped arrange their passage to the colonies. The trip was brutal. Poor food, contaminated water, and the infectious disease typhus killed many passengers before they reached America in June 1710. Of the roughly 2,100 who survived, most were settled along the Hudson River in work camps to pay off their passage. By 1711, seven villages had been established on the Robert Livingston manor in New York.

  Pennsylvania drew the largest numbers, and by 1775, Germans made up about one-third of the state's population. The word the world came to use for them, "Pennsylvania Dutch," was a corruption of Deutsch, the German word for German. They were known for intensive farming, strong religious communities, and a determination to keep German as their language of church, school, and home.

• 3. Building the Interior

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  The Mississippi Company settled thousands of German pioneers in French Louisiana in 1721, recruiting particularly from the Alsatian region, which had recently come under French rule. Fewer than 150 of the first wave of indentured German farmers made it to Louisiana alive. Those who did felled trees, cleared land, and cultivated the soil with hand tools because draft animals were unavailable. For many years afterward, they supplied the city of New Orleans with corn, rice, eggs, and meat. The area upriver from New Orleans where they settled became known as the German Coast.

  In the Southeast, two waves of German colonists in 1714 and 1717 founded Germanna in Virginia, near modern-day Culpeper. Virginia's Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood recruited German miners specifically to establish a mining industry in the colony. German Moravians from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, led by August Gottlieb Spangenberg, traveled the Great Wagon Road and purchased nearly 99,000 acres from Lord Granville in the North Carolina Piedmont in 1753. They named the tract Wachovia after a valley in Austria whose streams and meadows it resembled. From that tract grew Salem College, one of the early female colleges in America, founded in 1772.

  By the 19th century, German settlement had spread across the Midwest. Cities along the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, and the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers attracted enormous German populations. By 1900, the populations of Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati were all more than 40 percent German American. In Omaha, Nebraska, the proportion reached 57 percent by 1910. Milwaukee became known as "the German Athens," and its brewing industry produced some of the most famous brands in American history: Pabst, Schlitz, Miller, and Blatz.

  A separate and particularly distinctive subgroup were the Germans from Russia. Their ancestors had settled in the Russian Empire after Catherine the Great invited German farmers in 1762 and 1763 to introduce more advanced agriculture. The tsarist government had promised them the right to maintain their language, religion, and exemption from military service. As those protections eroded across the 19th century, about 100,000 Germans from Russia emigrated to the United States by 1900, settling primarily in the Great Plains. Among them was Lawrence Welk, born in 1903, who became an iconic figure in the German-Russian community of the northern Great Plains.

• 4. Culture and Community

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  Beginning in 1741, the Moravian Church settlements of Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Lititz in Pennsylvania, and Wachovia in North Carolina, developed highly sophisticated musical cultures that included choral, brass, string, and congregational singing. Haydn's Creation had its American debut in Bethlehem in the early 19th century. Johann Conrad Beissel, born in 1690, led the Ephrata Cloister in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and his treatises on music and hymns have been called the beginning of America's musical heritage.

  In city after city, German immigrants took the lead in building musical institutions. Wheeling, West Virginia, a small city, could claim 11 separate singing societies, the first of which started in 1855. In Louisville, Kentucky, the Liederkranz, started in 1848, grew so popular that an audience of 8,000 attended a performance in 1877. Turner societies, gyms and social clubs organized from the mid-19th century onward, drilled members in physical fitness while also serving as community anchors. By the 1890s, Turners numbered nearly 65,000 across the country.

  The German-language press was massive. By the late 19th century, Germania, the collective name for German American neighborhoods and their institutions, published over 800 regular publications. In Cincinnati alone, during the latter half of the 19th century, at least 176 different German-language publications began operations. A few, such as the Cincinnati Freie Presse, lasted nearly a century. The papers were owned and operated in America, with no control from Germany; one scholar described them as "essentially an American press published in a foreign tongue."

  In education, German Americans pushed hard for bilingual schooling. Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Cleveland operated what would today be called two-way immersion programs, teaching half in German and half in English. As late as 1917, a German version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was still being sung in public schools in Indianapolis. Fort Wayne, Indiana, had German as the primary language in homes, churches, and parochial schools before World War I. Many street signs were in German; Main Street was Haupt Strasse.

• 5. The Great Erasure

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  When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the response to German American culture was swift and extreme. The Justice Department compiled a list of approximately 480,000 German aliens; more than 4,000 were imprisoned in 1917-18 on allegations of spying or endorsing the German war effort. The Red Cross barred people with German last names from joining, fearing sabotage. In Collinsville, Illinois, a German-born man named Robert Prager was dragged from jail and lynched by a mob. A Minnesota minister was tarred and feathered for praying in German with a dying woman.

  Governments at every level moved against the German language. Iowa's governor issued the Babel Proclamation in 1918, prohibiting all foreign languages in schools and public places. Nebraska banned instruction in any language except English; the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that ban as illegal in 1923 in Meyer v. Nebraska. In Chicago, conductor Frederick Stock stepped down from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra until he finalized his naturalization papers. Orchestras replaced Wagner with Berlioz. Cincinnati's public library was asked to remove all German books from its shelves. The town of Berlin, Michigan, became Marne, Michigan, honoring those who fought in the Battle of the Marne.

  The collapse in German self-identification was statistically dramatic. In Nebraska, about 14 percent of the population had identified as being of German origin in 1910; by 1920, only 4.4 percent made the same claim. In Wisconsin, nearly 29 percent had identified as German in 1910; by 1920, only 6.6 percent did. In Chicago, the number identifying as German-born dropped from 191,000 in 1910 to 112,000 in 1920. Film critic Roger Ebert described hearing the pain in his German-American father's voice as the man recalled being pulled from Lutheran school during World War I and forbidden by his parents ever to speak German again.

  In the Missouri Synod's Lutheran Church, only 471 congregations held English services in 1910. By 1919, that number had jumped to 2,492. German-speaking taverns and beer gardens were shut down by Prohibition; when they reopened in 1933, they spoke English. One historian concluded that no other North American ethnic group, past or present, had attempted so forcefully to officially conceal its ethnic origins.

• 6. War, Loyalty, and Service

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  German Americans fought on both sides of the American Revolution. Great Britain, whose King George III was also the Elector of Hanover, hired 18,000 Hessians, auxiliary soldiers rented from the rulers of several small German states, to fight against the colonists. Many were captured; some stayed and became U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, the Lutheran congregations of Pennsylvania largely supported the patriot cause. Peter Muhlenberg, a Lutheran clergyman in Virginia, rose to the rank of major general in the Continental Army and later served as a Congressman.

  In the Civil War, German Americans came down heavily on the Union side. Sentiment among them was largely anti-slavery, particularly among the Forty-Eighters, the political refugees who had fled Germany after the failed revolutions of 1848. Notable among these was Hermann Raster, who published anti-slavery pamphlets and edited what was then the most influential German-language newspaper in America. He helped secure German-American votes for Abraham Lincoln. When Raster died, the Chicago Tribune wrote that his writings during and after the Civil War did more to build understanding of the American cause in Germany, and to float U.S. bonds in Europe, than the combined efforts of all U.S. ministers and consuls.

  Over 176,000 U.S. soldiers born in Germany served in the Union Army. Major General Franz Sigel was the highest-ranking German officer on the Union side, and many German immigrants claimed they had enlisted specifically to "fight mit Sigel." Pennsylvania fielded five German regiments; New York fielded eleven; Ohio, six.

  In World War II, the situation was more complicated. About 25,000 people became paying members of the pro-Nazi German American Bund before the war. Nearly 11,000 German citizens were interned under the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 between 1940 and 1948. At the same time, many Americans of German ancestry held the highest command positions in the U.S. military, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and General Carl Andrew Spaatz.

• 7. What Remains

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  Pennsylvania, with 3.5 million people of German ancestry, has the largest population of German Americans in any single state, anchored by communities like Germantown in Philadelphia, founded in 1683. Fewer than five percent of German Americans today speak German. The German-language newspaper Hiwwe wie Driwwe, established in 1997 in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, is now the only Pennsylvania German newspaper still publishing.

  The Amish and the Hutterites represent the most visible continuation of German-speaking immigrant culture. The Amish arrived in Pennsylvania in the early 18th century, with immigration peaking between 1727 and 1770. The Hutterites fled persecution for their religious beliefs and came to the United States between 1874 and 1879. Today they reside primarily in Montana, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, and still speak Hutterite German.

  Geographically, there is still what the source describes as a German belt, a band of predominantly German American populations running from eastern Pennsylvania all the way to the Oregon coast. States in the upper Midwest, including Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas, all report German ancestry at over 30 percent of their populations. German was the most-reported ancestry in 23 states, and one of the top five reported ancestries in every state except Maine and Rhode Island.

  The cultural imprint is harder to see but real. German Americans established the first kindergartens in the United States. They introduced the Christmas tree tradition. Hot dogs and hamburgers are foods they brought with them. The largest Lutheran denominations in the country today are all descended from churches started by German immigrants. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, both native German speakers, stand among the most recognized names in American sports history. The Studebaker brothers, who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1736 from the blade-manufacturing town of Solingen, built wagons that carried frontiersmen west, provided the Union Army with artillery, and eventually produced one of the largest automobile companies in America.