Assimilation of Germans in the United States

During their 300-year history in the United States, Germans were often re­garded by other Americans as especially re­sistant to assimilation, mostly because they maintained separate social enclaves with a visibly different culture.

The U.S. Census for the year 2000 re­vealed that nearly 43 million people, about 15 percent of the total population, ac­knowledged some German ancestry. Only about 700,000 of them were born in Ger­many. About 1.4 million people said they spoke the German language. Most of the rest of those claiming German ancestry had little except perhaps a German surname to distinguish them from the rest of American society. The numerous ethnic neighbor­hoods, clubs, taverns, newspapers, and other institutions that once supported a separate ethnicity had almost entirely dis­appeared. Save for the most recent immi­grants, German Americans as a group had almost completely assimilated.

“Assimilation” may be defined as a process involving interaction between two cultures, wherein the adherents of a minor­ity culture take on the cultural attributes of a mainstream or “host” society and are eventually absorbed into the dominant cul­ture. In the process, distinguishing ele­ments between the two cultures gradually disappear. The process is not a sudden transformation but a gradual passage through a series of stages, with individuals undergoing these changes at differing rates.

Not long after the eighteenth-century migrations of Germans and soon after the American Revolution, some signs of the processes of assimilation could be dis­cerned. Life in the Pennsylvania German region, with its dense concentrations of Germans and the reinforcing influence of conservative pietistic religions, seemed se­cure against the forces of cultural change. Nevertheless, another kind of cultural change was taking place: the formation of a distinct Pennsylvania German culture, which continued to evolve and increasingly seemed strange to newcomers from Ger­many. However, out on the frontiers of the Pennsylvania German region, there were signs as early as 1800 of assimilation into the English-speaking American commu­nity. In places like the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Germans formed their own close-knit communities in close contact with neighboring English and Scots-Irish settlements. The rise of a commercial agri­cultural economy in such regions drew all groups into an interdependent economic network, tied to markets as far away as Philadelphia. The diminishing use of the German language in favor of English is one clear sign of the acculturation process. The German-language newspapers in the region were mostly defunct by 1815. About the same time, tensions began to appear over the language used in the German churches. Historians of the Virginia Germans see the period 1820—1840 as one of transition of Germans to the primary use of English.

In Philadelphia, the city that had the largest urban concentration of Germans at the beginning of the nineteenth century, conflicts arose in the first two decades of the 1800s over the use of the English lan­guage in the German churches. The propo­nents favoring English-language services were typically American-born Germans who had attained some status in the larger community and were comfortable with their acculturation. The opponents tended to be older, first-generation Germans who feared not just the loss of the familiar lan­guage but the further acculturation that they believed would follow. By the 1820s the arguments were largely settled, and the growing influence of the younger genera­tions easily prevailed, with the use of Ger­man considerably reduced.

The decline of German churches and other social and cultural institutions was partly restrained by the revival of new im­migration from the German states begin­ning in the 1820s. By the 1830s new Ger­man societies and churches began to appear in cities along the East Coast and the newly established cities in the Ohio Valley, the Great Lakes, and along the Mis­sissippi. In other places along the eastern seaboard that did not receive as many of the new immigrants, German organiza­tions stagnated or declined as the younger generations became more assimilated. The assimilation process was facilitated in the growing urban industrial areas where inter­action among diverse social groups was necessary. Germans were brought more fre­quently into closer contact with other so­cial groups in their workplaces, their mar­ketplaces, and the political arena. Their affinity to the Democratic Party brought them into an uneasy relationship with the Irish, the other major immigrant group of the day.

The 1850s were a period of expansion and change in German America (a term first used during this decade). The massive upsurge in new German immigrants (1848—1853) brought fresh additions of the unassimilated first generation into the major cities and spread them across the plains of the Midwest, now being opened up by the railroads. The decade saw an im­pressive growth of German institutions of all sorts. The visibility of the Germans and their social organizations, churches, and newspapers inspired fear in some native- born Americans and helped to build a na- tivist movement to one of its highest levels. Nativists tended to argue that the immi­grants, both Irish and German, were too numerous and too resistant to American social and political values to ever become a part of American society.

Such perceptions have led some later historians to argue that the anti-immigrant attack did forge a tighter, more resistant German American social structure as a de­fensive reaction to nativism. A conclusion drawn from this was that Germans in the United States resisted assimilation and huddled within the fortresses of their churches, clubs, mutual aid societies, and rural communities. This German resistance to acculturation and involvement in the larger society, some historians said, would persist for over half a century, until another anti-German attack at the time of World War I would leave the whole edifice of Ger­man America in ruins.

Such interpretations, as many more re­cent historians have argued, are oversimpli­fications of the complex workings of the German American community and those within it. The decade that saw the nativist attack also saw the Germans drawn in­creasingly into the political process, partly of course to combat the nativist-organized American or “Know-Nothing” Party.

The great array of German organiza­tions that flourished during the second half of the nineteenth century also fostered a misconception that they constituted a structure designed to prevent assimilation. It is true that many such organizations pre­sented themselves as havens of German eth­nicity, where immigrants could find a com­fortable replica of traditions from the old country. Their stated objectives were often those of ethnic preservation and the cele­bration of German culture. Yet, inevitably, as they welcomed new German immi­grants, the German societies also had to assist them in their introduction into American society as a whole. Their efforts to aid the immigrants included helping them to find employment, advising them about issues of naturalization, introducing them to American politics, and, in many cases, giving them instruction in the En­glish language. Thus, while fostering eth­nicity, the German organizations also had the necessary alternative purpose of facili­tating assimilation.

The structures of German America in its heyday can thus be seen as temporary way stations for the thousands of immi­grants who entered the country and passed through in the process of assimilation. Ger­man America, its neighborhoods, its rural communities, its churches, and its social organizations appeared to external ob­servers to be unchanging and persistent. They might then conclude that all the peo­ple within those structures were steadfastly resisting change.

The constant erosion of the German population became more noticeable as the formal structures reached their peak and then began to decline. This phenomenon clearly was happening in the 1890s. The numbers of German-born counted in the decennial census rose from 1850 to 1890 and then declined in 1900 and thereafter. In the 1890s, those numbers contained both the wave of the immigrants from the 1850s and the wave of the 1880s. As new immigration from Germany fell off sharply, there were no longer replacements for the first-generation Germans who were passing away. At the same time, the grow­ing numbers of the younger generations continued assimilating and leaving the comfortable confines of the German ethnic world. During the 1890s German ethnic leaders began to voice concern about the endurance of the German structures. Con­troversy arose over efforts in some states to limit German-language schools. German newspaper editors, who saw language maintenance as absolutely necessary to pre­serve their own readership, implored the younger generation to learn German. Some German organizations like the Turner gym­nastic societies and mutual savings associa­tions began to open their memberships to non-Germans and to use English as their common language. Both the number of German societies and their individual membership rolls began to decline. The 1890s are a crucial period in the story of German assimilation, not because the process was being accelerated, but because the decline in new immigrants revealed that Germans had been steadily assimilat­ing for most of the century.

Around the turn of the twentieth cen­tury, many Germans were already finding their work within the larger community rather than in the German ethnic network. This was in part the result of the large cor­porations and industries that increasingly dominated the American economy. An even more powerful influence was the rise of mass-market consumerism and a mass popular culture. Advertisers displayed the attractions of the general popular culture, even in the German newspapers. The younger generations particularly felt no guilt about deserting the German theater and riding a streetcar to the popular music halls and vaudeville houses downtown. In­creasingly, they spent their Sundays at the amusement park at the end of the trolley line, rather than with their elders in the German beer gardens. Department stores, professional baseball, motion pictures, and eventually the radio were attractive forces of acculturation that the most fervent ap­peals of German leaders could not over­come. German organizations themselves began to appeal to the mass consumer cul­ture and became “acculturated” themselves. German restaurants and taverns, some be­coming tourist attractions, opened their conviviality to all. German neighborhood societies downplayed their Germanness and opened their doors to newer immi­grant groups who lived there.

In rural areas, factors at work might delay the assimilation process somewhat, largely due to the relative isolation of Ger­mans there from other cultural groups. Pas­tors of German churches and other ethnic spokesmen argued for German ethnicity against the inroads of American material culture and the American educational sys­tem. Small towns and rural communities might retain their ethnic characters longer; but as the land filled up and opportunities for farms or employment for the younger generation decreased, assimilation was often a by-product of the migration of younger members out of the community. Some might go to a nearby county seat; others found their way to the larger cities. The growing movement of population from the countryside to the cities, a phe­nomenon of American life generally during the years around the turn of the twentieth century, brought Germans into increasing contact with other ethnic groups and with the new mass culture.

In the first two decades of the twenti­eth century, there were strong efforts to rally Germans around their institutions and their culture. The best-known repre­sentative of this effort was the National German American Alliance, which at­tempted to gather all German societies under one umbrella organization. The tra­ditional divisions among German Ameri­cans prevented the alliance from achieving its goal of full unification of German America. For most of its brief history, it stressed the one element upon which nearly all Germans might agree: opposition to Prohibition, which, it was argued, threatened the very basis of German Amer­ican social life.

The processes of assimilation and the consequent dwindling of traditional Ger­man America were well under way in the period before World War I. While the identification of some with the German Empire may have caused a revival of Ger­man ethnicity, the attacks upon German American culture after the United States entered the war dealt an additional blow to the surviving institutions, as well as to all public expressions of German ethnicity. The passage of Prohibition laws dealt an­other blow to the German social organiza­tions, for which beer was a vital element. Suspicions of the use of the German lan­guage led to restrictions on the German- language newspapers and prohibitions on the teaching of German in some places. Overwhelming pressures on all things Ger­man doubtless caused many to abandon their already tenuous ties to German eth­nicity and hastened their assimilation. An unusual drop in the number of German- born recorded in the census of 1920 sug­gests that many may have been concealing their German birth from the census taker.

But regardless of the events of the wartime crisis, the demographic factors has­tening Germans’ assimilation continued re­lentlessly. Immigration from Germany never again attained the level of the boom of the 1880s. The first-generation immigrants from that era now were being replaced by more numerous second and third genera­tions, who were less eager to assert their German heritage. In the new nativist envi­ronment of the 1920s, many Germans has­tened to identify themselves as members of the “Nordic” race of northwestern Euro­peans, praised by the immigration restric- tionists as superior to other Europeans. But that position, of course, meant that they had to stress their similarities with the Scandina­vians, English, and Irish rather than their own distinctive culture. Given the various attractions of mass popular culture and en­tertainment that appeared in the Roaring Twenties, Germans saw little reason to spend their leisure time within the old Ger­man enclave. Fewer remained in the churches and institutions of the old German neighborhoods as upward social mobility led to geographic mobility, and the younger generations were dispersed more often into neighborhoods of mixed social groups.

World War II did not bring any strong pressures on the German Americans as a group, perhaps a sign that the general soci­ety did not perceive any strong ethnic loy­alties among them. Some German Ameri­can leaders hoped that new immigration might revive after the war, but the facts did not fulfill their hopes. The new first-gener­ation immigrants of the postwar era in­cluded many women who had married U.S. soldiers in Germany, who were sub­ject to many influences to quickly assimi­late, and who raised a second generation with little sense of German ethnicity. In­creasingly, many “immigrants” coming to America from Germany were transients representing German businesses or govern­ments. By the end of the twentieth century, the once-impressive German network of ethnic institutions had dwindled to a few vestiges of their former selves, with few others remaining to care about them.

But the two-way process of assimila­tion also left American culture changed. German Americans influenced American life in many ways, even as they were changed by the United States. The most obvious examples are their foodways and the German words (kindergarten, sauer­kraut) that became part of the English vo­cabulary. Many American churches bear the marks of their German foundations. The Germans, followed by other immi­grants, helped Americans to change from the somber “Puritan” Sunday observance to the more festive European model. Amer­icans adopted the Christmas holiday (com­plete with Christmas tree) as it was cele­brated among the Germans. Public festivities and observances followed the German model, with family celebrations involving both sexes. German music, both classical and popular, transformed Ameri­can artistic expression. German gymnastics became the model for American physical culture. Professions such as engineering, pharmacy, and chemistry were influenced by German models. The American educa­tional system was formed in many ways by German influences. And not least, lager beer, so much a part of German life, be­came a part of American life as well. Much of German culture was now preserved in the context of general American life.

James M. Bergquist

See also American Civil War, German Participants in; Americanisms in the German Language; Beer; Music (U.S.), German Influence on; National German- American Alliance; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Pennsylvania; Turner Societies; World War I and German Americans

References and Further Reading

Bergquist, James M. “German Americans.” Multiculturalism in the United States: A Comparative Guide to Acculturation and Ethnicity. Eds. John D. Buenker and Lorman A. Ratner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Conzen, Kathleen Neils. “Patterns of German-American History.” Germans in America, Retrospect and Prospect: Tricentennial Lectures Delivered at the German Society of Pennsylvania in 1983. Ed. Randall M. Miller. Philadelphia: German Society of Pennsylvania, 1984.

------. “German-Americans and the Invention of Ethnicity.” America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three- Hundred-Year History. Eds. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh. 2 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, vol. 1: 131-147.

Dobbert, Guido A. The Disintegration of an Immigrant Community: The Cincinnati Germans, 1870—1920. New York: Arno Press, 1980.

Gjerde, Jon. The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830—1917. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Gordon, Milton M. Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Kazal, Russell M. “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History.” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 437-471.

------. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.