German Americans

SIGNIFICANCE: German Americans constitute a major ethnic group in the United States, numbering more than 40 million in the mid-2020s. Early German immigrants, including those who were Catholic, Protestant, Separatist, and Jewish, assimilated relatively easily and dispersed throughout the country. In general, unlike the Irish, Italians, and Poles, negative characteristics were not attributed to them, although Anglo-Protestants often objected to their drinking beer on Sundays.

The first German colony was established in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683 by Mennonites, an Anabaptist sect. However, individual Germans were already present in the English colonies and in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The Hutterites, another Anabaptist sect, came to America in 1874, settling in South Dakota. Although pacifists, they were subjected to conscription during World War I. Most of the community migrated to Canada, but many later returned.

Methodism developed a following among German Americans in the nineteenth century, and although the Methodist Church began phasing out the German branch in 1924, some congregations of the German Methodist Church persisted throughout the twentieth century. Germans also set up Baptist and Presbyterian churches. By 1890, nearly half of German Americans were Roman Catholic. Catholics and Lutherans did not mix much, which tended to divide German American political influence. The German and Irish wings of the American Catholic Church experienced some conflict in the 1880s and 1890s. Before World War I (1914-1918), German, Irish, and Polish congregations attended separate Catholic churches. Similarly, German and Scandinavian congregations often established separate Lutheran churches. German American and Eastern European Jews generally formed separate worship groups, although the Eastern European Jews commonly spoke Yiddish, a largely Germanic language. German American Jews maintained cultural ties with Germany until the Nazi period.

Relations with Indigenous Americans

The Germans seemed to have less trouble with Indigenous Americans than other settlers in the eighteenth century. In Texas, where thriving German settlements were established in the 1830s and 1840s, the Meusenbach-Comanche Treaty of 1847, negotiated between John Meusenbach and Comanche leaders Buffalo Hump, Santana, and Old Owl, was never broken by either side.

Two German travelers and a German American made significant contributions to Indigenous American ethnology. Alexander Philipp Maximilian, Prince of Wied-Neuwied, visited the United States in 1832 and produced a comprehensive study of the Mandan tribe, which later became extinct. Friedrich Gerstäcker, who visited the United States from 1837 to 1843, and again in 1849 and 1867, created a detailed ethnography of American Indian culture. German American Gustavus Sohon, born in Prussia, served in the US Army as a surveyor in the Northwest. He became familiar with several Indigenous tribes along the Columbia River and made numerous sketches of their lives, which are a valuable part of the anthropological record.

German Americans and Slavery

Various German American groups spoke out against the practice of slavery in the United States. The Mennonites of Germantown, Pennsylvania, made the first protest in 1688. The Salzburger Protestant colony of Ebenezer in Georgia, founded in 1734, also opposed slavery.

The failed Revolution of 1848, during which reactionary authorities in Berlin and Vienna suppressed attempts at constitutional reform, resulted in thousands of liberal intellectuals migrating to the United States. These new immigrants, who were particularly active in establishing newspapers, had a major impact on the cultural life of German American communities. The Forty-Eighters, as they were known, were strongly opposed to the practice of slavery, and under their influence, a strong alliance formed between abolitionist forces and the German press in the United States.

Among the Forty-Eighters was Mathilde Franziska Anneke-Giesler, an early champion of women’s rights who came to the United States in 1850. Although she wrote almost exclusively in German, she was in close contact with suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and often lectured in English. Antagonism to her feminist and antislavery attitudes caused her to go to England in 1860, where she lectured against the practice of slavery, returning to the United States in 1865.

In 1854, Germans meeting in San Antonio, Texas, declared their opposition to the practice of slavery, and German Americans fought on the Union side during the Civil War. In a battle with Confederate soldiers, one German American guard of sixty-five men lost twenty-seven people and had nine of its wounded murdered by opposition forces.

Relations with Anglo-Saxon Society

In the early nineteenth century, the German community in New York was significant enough to be courted by both political parties. A German Democratic Party organization was created in 1834, and eventually a German-language newspaper was established to reflect the party’s platform.

The years before the Civil War saw the rise of nativism, and anti-Catholicism was rampant. In 1855, murderous rioters in Louisville, Kentucky, attacked German Americans because many of them were Catholic and foreign-born and tended to be politically radical. The German Americans’ opposition to slavery also created hostility in several regions.

German Americans experienced some friction with Anglo-Saxon Protestants of a puritanical bent, who disdained frivolity, especially on Sunday, and disliked some German customs associated with Christmas because they appeared to be pagan in origin. This immigrant group also clashed with the growing temperance movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The breweries founded by Germans in cities such as Cincinnati, Ohio; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and St. Louis, Missouri, contributed to the economic development of these cities, and German Americans largely controlled the American brewing industry. German Americans in Texas kept that state from becoming a dry state until national Prohibition went into effect. Opposition to Prohibition was one of the major purposes of the National German American Alliance (Deutsch-Amerikanische Nationalbund), formed in 1901 as a national, sectarian, politically nonpartisan German American organization. It reached a membership of three million by 1916 to become the largest ethnic organization in US history. Congress revoked the organization’s charter in 1918, in the wake of the organization's vocal support for neutrality during World War I.

Germans were also active in the labor movement that began after the Civil War and in radical politics, which caused some conflict with the dominant society.

World War I

The United States’ entry into World War I unleashed a tremendous irrational hostility toward anything associated with Germany, including music. This hostility extended beyond folk and popular music, but included classical music and opera. German Americans were harassed and subjected to physical assault, vandalism, and even murder. This hysteria existed even in areas where German Americans constituted more than one-third of the population or even a majority.

Laws in various states forbade teaching German in schools and speaking German in public, and thousands were convicted. Such laws were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1923. Anti-German attitudes lingered after the war and accelerated the Anglicization of churches, social organizations, and newspapers.

World War II

In 1936, the German American Bund (Amerikadeutscher Volksbund) replaced an earlier organization, Friends of the New Germany, intended to represent the Nazi Party in the United States. The membership was believed to be only sixty-five hundred, and 40 percent were not actually of German stock. Nonetheless, the organization’s posturing, arrogance, and hostility mobilized public opinion against the Nazis and complicated diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany. The Steuben Society, the most prestigious German American organization, and other German organizations felt it necessary to repudiate the Bund, and German American antifascist organizations were formed.

After World War II, German American ethnic identity became increasingly tenuous as the population moved to the suburbs, and changes in recreational tastes weakened ties to German culture. Postwar German immigrants were less inclined to take part in German cultural organizations.

In 1948, the Russian blockade of the land routes to West Berlin made that city, and by extension West Germany, a symbol of freedom and democracy, giving Americans a more positive attitude toward Germany. West Germany became a military ally and, during the second half of the century, became increasingly integrated into the Pan-European identity of the European Union. Similarly, German Americans came to identify more with the broader European American culture.

German American Settlements

German American settlements had a particularly strong cultural impact in the state of Texas. In the mid-nineteenth century, entire communities in Germany relocated to Texas. The German immigrants settled in a swath of territory that stretched primarily through the central Hill Country portion of Texas. These communities adopted distinct architectural styles and had a penchant for establishing annual festivals that remained in existence through the twenty-first century. The town of Boerne claimed the oldest, continuous German band outside of Germany. These small communities have remained popular tourist attractions.

In addition to its German cultural attractions, the town of Fredericksburg was the hometown of Admiral Chester Nimitz, the most acclaimed US Navy admiral of World War II. The National Museum of the Pacific War is located in Fredericksburg and contains many exhibits that commemorate World War II, complete with reenactments of US Marine Corps invasion landings.

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