Title: When German Immigrants Were America’s Undesirables - HISTORY
Headings: When German Immigrants Were America’s Undesirables
When German Immigrants Were America’s Undesirables
Woodrow Wilson thought German Americans couldn't assimilate.
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Content: Many had come over in a migration wave in the late 19th century. Once here, they built restaurants and guesthouses that, in the German tradition, each had their own beer brewery. In 1910, the U.S. had 554 German-language newspapers, as well as German-language school systems that coexisted with English-language schools. “By 1917 these immigrants who came to Cincinnati or St. Louis or Milwaukee or New York or Baltimore were fully integrated into American society,” says Richard E. Schade, a German studies professor at the University of Cincinnati. But when the U.S. entered World War I, these immigrants came up against a new “anti-German hysteria.” pinterest-pin-it
World War I propaganda poster from the US intelligence office ‘Don’t talk, the web is spun for you with invisible threads, keep out of it, help to destroy it, spies are listening,’ showing Kaiser Wilhelm II as the spider. ( Credit: Photo12/UIG/Getty Images)
Because Germany was one of America’s adversaries in the war, many Anglo-Americans began to fear that German Americans were still loyal to the Kaiser, or German emperor. Suddenly, German Americans became “hyphenated Americans” who suspiciously practiced their own traditions instead of “assimilating” into Anglo-American culture. As President Woodrow Wilson once admonished: “