Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States
The German-language newspaper press is the most prolific of all ethnic presses in American history. The history of the German newspapers closely parallels that of their English-language counterparts.
As political instruments, they sought to marshal the political force of German Americans. They often served as instruments of assimilation. Over the course of the twentieth century, the German newspapers began a slow decline, affected by declining immigration from Germany, dwindling readership, and the weakening of German ethnicity.The origins of German American journalism lie in the mid-eighteenth century, when struggling German printers in Pennsylvania began to publish monthly or weekly newspapers. Although Benjamin Franklin may be considered to have been the first to publish (in 1732) a German newspaper, the Philadelphische Zeitung (Philadelphia Newspaper), his poorly edited effort soon failed. In 1738 Christoph Sauer of Germantown outside Philadelphia began publishing the Hoch-Deutsch Penn- sylvanische Geschichts-Schreiber (High German Pennsylvania Chronicle), later known as Pennsylvanische Berichte (Pennsylvania Reports). At Sauer’s death in 1758, his son Christoph Sauer II took over the paper. The paper’s influence among Germans was demonstrated in the 1760s when the younger Sauer successfully opposed Franklin’s plan to change Pennsylvania from a proprietary to a royal colony. In the years before the American Revolution, a rival paper, John Heinrich Miller’s Wochentliche Philadelphische Staatsbote (Weekly Philadelphia Public Messenger), established in 1762, gained the support of many Germans in opposition to British rule. German printers generally were outraged by Parliament’s Stamp Act (1765), which levied a special tax on foreign-language newspapers. Miller mounted a protest, and continued his opposition to the British down to the time of the Revolution.
Sauer, of more pietistic and paci- fistic inclination, continued his paper in the Loyalist cause during the British occupation of Philadelphia, but had to leave town with the British in 1777. Miller resumed publishing his paper after the British left.The post-Revolutionary era saw the expansion of German newspapers throughout Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the valley of Virginia. Thirty-eight papers were started in Pennsylvania by 1800 (Arndt and Olson 1961, 501—605). German papers emerged in Reading in Pennsylvania, in Frederick in Maryland, and in Winchester in Virginia. As German immigration fell off during the Napoleonic Wars, German newspapers remained confined mostly to that earlier-settled region and to nearby areas of Ohio.
German newspapers always relied for their primary audience on the first generation of immigrants. Thus, whenever the flow of new arrivals fell off, the German- language papers would begin to languish. When the tide of new immigrants rose, as it did in the 1830s, new papers were started in the regions where they settled, especially the industrial cities of the East and in the expanding West. Among the more significant papers begun in this period were the Philadelphia Alte und Neue Welt (Old and New World), 1834; the Pittsburgh Frei- heitsfreund (Friend of Freedom), 1834; the St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens (Western Informer), 1835; the Cincinnati Volksblatt (People’s Page), 1836; the Buffalo Welt- btirger (World Citizen), 1837; the Cleveland Germania, 1837; and the Milwaukee Banner, founded in remote Wisconsin Territory in 1844. Papers of all sorts needed support from political parties; most German papers attached themselves to the Jacksonian Democrats. This, for example, was the case of the New Yorker Staats- Zeitung (New York Public News), which was begun by German Democrats in 1834 to do battle in the municipal elections. It would become the longest-lasting German newspaper in America and, by the end of the nineteenth century, the largest and most powerful.
During the period between 1848 and the beginning of the Civil War, the German press underwent a remarkable expansion. Between 1849 and 1854, one of the major new waves of German migration brought new readers. These newcomers included a small but significant element who were fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848. These educated and professional men provided new leadership for German newspapers and found jobs in the new papers being established. Important technological advances stimulated newspaper development: the telegraph enabled newspapers to receive instant news reports and to begin daily publication. The expansion of the railroad network allowed faster and wider distribution. New steam-powered rotary presses provided speedier output of the bigcity newspapers. Adding to these stimuli was the political realignment in the decade before the Civil War. As old political parties split up or withered away and new ones like the Republican Party arose, they vied for political control of newspapers. The traditional Democratic loyalties of the Germans were no longer assured, and party rivalries multiplied the German newspapers in many towns and cities. In 1848 there were an estimated 70 German newspapers in the United States; by 1860 there were 144, much more divided in their political affiliation (Berquist 1987, 136—137). Most major northern cities had several outstanding German newspapers by the time of the Civil War. The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung faced the Abendzeitung (Evening News); the Philadelphia Demokrat confronted the Freie Presse (Free Press). The Chicago Illinois Staats-Zeitung, staunchly Republican, faced two Democratic papers, the National Demokrat and the Abendzeitung.
Around the time of the Civil War, something like a two-tier system of German newspapers had begun to emerge—a system that would persist until about the end of the century. There were major national and regional newspapers that developed large circulations and followed the example of the English-language newspaper empires founded by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (an immigrant who started his career as a reporter with the St.
Louis Westliche Post [Western Post]). The second tier of German newspapers developed in smaller cities and towns. They had begun to proliferate in the 1850s, but their number expanded rapidly as the railroads began to settle Germans in new areas of the West. Such newspapers were risky ventures, and many had short lives. For example, rough estimates show that there were about 52 German newspapers started in Nebraska between 1875 and 1900, most of them with circulations below 1,000. Only about 18 of these were still being published in 1900 (Arndt and Olson, 1961).By far the most successful German newspaper of that era was the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. Its circulation was above 50,000 in the 1880s, making it the sixth- largest newspaper in the United States. Among other leading newspapers of the era were the Illinois Staatszeitung, the Chicago Abendpost, the Baltimore Correspondent, the Philadelphia Gazette, the Philadelphia Tageblatt (Daily Page), the St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens and Westliche Post, the Milwaukee Herold, the Cincinnati Freie Presse and Volksblatt (People’s Page), and the Cleveland Wachter am Erie (Watchman on the Erie).
The historian Carl Wittke judged the German press to have reached its peak about 1893, at which time he counted about 800 German newspapers and magazines, including 97 daily papers (Wittke 1957, 206—209). Soon after this, signs of the decline of the German press began to appear. Factors in that decline included the lack of new German immigrants, after a major influx in the 1880s; the turning of the second generation to other interests outside German America; and a major depression in the 1890s. Intense competition among major German newspapers gave way to mergers of major rivals, like that of the Westliche Post and the Anzeiger des Westens in St. Louis, in 1898. Another trend beginning to appear was the failure of many small-town newspapers, whose readership could be picked up by the regional big-city papers.
In cities like Cincinnati and Milwaukee, the number of readers of German dailies began to decline, while the readers of English-language newspapers increased. Clearly the second generation of Germans was deserting the ethnic papers.Also, around the turn of the twentieth century a new generation of German editors emerged. As the generation of 1848 receded from the scene, they were replaced by publishers less concerned with ideology and politics and more with preserving German culture and language, thereby maintaining the readership of the German papers. The increasingly bland and noncontroversial position of the major newspapers were derided by the German Socialist newspapers that flourished in some of the major cities at the time. But the mainstream newspapers focused on German cultural pride and nationalism as a useful unifying force to maintain German ethnicity. The German press dwelt frequently on issues such as opposition to the temperance crusade, the maintenance of German-language schools, and—unfortunately for the future—the superiority of the German Empire in its rivalry with the British Empire.
Such chauvinism set the German newspapers up for serious trials after 1914. Many newspapers continued their role as apologists for German foreign policy after the outbreak of World War I. They naturally endorsed the policies of neutrality that President Woodrow Wilson declared in 1914, but became critical when Wilson appeared to favor the British. When the United States was drawn into the war in 1917, these German papers had to quickly reverse their course. Unfortunately, their previous praise of the German cause became grounds for suspicions of disloyalty and subversion. Amid rising anti-German wartime hysteria, the German newspaper press became a prime target. In many towns and cities, local anti-German pressures led to abandonment of the local German press by both subscribers and advertisers. In October 1917 Congress imposed additional pressures in the Trading-with-the-Enemy Act, which required newspapers in foreign languages to file with the post office translations of any articles on politics or international affairs.
Some papers that could prove their “loyalty” gained exemptions from the requirement, but others were presented with a heavy burden. Many small newspapers went out of business at once. Overall, many readers simply chose the easiest way to avoid harassment and accusation and stopped their subscriptions.The war had delivered a major blow to much of the German press. The number of German daily papers, 70 in 1910, was reduced to 29 in 1920. Total circulation of dailies, 900,000 in 1910, was 250,000 in 1920. Strenuous efforts to regain old readers brought the figure to about 350,000 in 1930 (estimates derived from N.W Ayer & Sons Newspaper Annual 1911, 1204—1209; 1920, 1290-1292; 1929, 1359-1360). The newspapers had little desire to muster political influence after the war experience, and many newspapers retreated to primarily covering the German ethnic community. The Great Depression and the fall
of new immigration took their toll further. Some of the most famous and long-standing newspapers failed, like the St. Louis Westliche Post did in 1938. Beginning in the 1930s, one enterprising publisher, Val Peter, began to gather failing newspapers and forge a chain centered in the plant of the Omaha Tribune, but distributed nationwide. At various times he published papers in Omaha, St. Paul, Buffalo, Baltimore, San Francisco, Kansas City, Denver, and other cities. But the papers were read increasingly by elderly Germans, because new German immigration had fallen off sharply. The effect of World War II on the German press was not as harsh as that of World War I, but there were simply not enough new readers to offset those who died or stopped their subscriptions. All the German papers were in sharp decline by the 1970s; the Peter chain folded in 1983. By the early twenty-first century, only two papers remained, both weeklies: the venerable New Yorker Staats-Zeitung published in Florida, and America-Woche, the result of the merger of many other newspapers, now published in Long Island, New York.
James M. Bergquist
See also Anzeiger des Westens; Freiheit; Illinois Staatszeitung; Most, Johann; New Yorker Staats-Zeitung; Peter, Val J.; Printing and Publishing; Sauer, Christoph; World War I and German Americans
References and Further Reading
Arndt, Karl J. R., and May E. Olson. German- American Newspapers and Periodicals, 1732-1955: History and Bibliography. Heidelberg: Quelle and Meyer, 1961.
Bergquist, James M. “The German-American Press.” In The Ethnic Press in the United States: A Historical Analysis and Handbook. Ed. Sally M. Miller. New York: Greenwood, 1987.
Geitz, Henry, ed. The German-American Press. Madison, WI: Max Kade Institute, 1992.
Luebke, Frederick C. Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I.
Dekalb: Northern Illinois University, 1974.
Wittke, Carl. The German Language Press in America. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1957.