Politics and German Americans
German Americans, like most other immigrants, came to the United States—where democracy was a watchword—from lands where there was little experience with political activity by the majority of people.
Because German Americans were present in large numbers at some crucial times in American political history, their votes were often sought by American party politicians. Yet it was difficult for the Germans to maximize their opportunities to exercise political power. Internal divisions and conflicts frequently prevented their uniting on major issues. Germans did unite politically at those times when they felt that their culture and identity as a group were threatened by adversaries such as nativists, liquor prohibitionists, and advocates of other cultural issues. Attempts to unite them on other issues often failed.German immigrants in colonial days received their first political education in Pennsylvania, a colony whose legislature had the most developed party system in all of British North America, and a colony in which the Germans’ political potential was recognized. By the 1730s two parties had emerged: the Proprietary Party, which was aligned with the colony’s proprietors and their governors; and the Quaker Party, which opposed them. The proprietors by this time were Anglican and not Quaker. Generally, the Germans adhered to the Quaker Party, partly because many German pacifists agreed with Quaker principles, but also because of differences with the proprietors’ land policies, which created obstacles for Germans eager to take up land. By the 1750s some Germans on the frontier broke with the Quakers and supported the government’s efforts to provide better defenses against the French and the Indians. In 1764 and 1765 Benjamin Franklin and others began a movement to make Pennsylvania a royal colony, but failed, in considerable part because the Germans felt that royal governors would be more arbitrary.
Similar fears of British rule caused Germans to move toward the patriot cause as the colonies moved toward revolution. The British Parliament’s 1765 Stamp Act, for example, singled out the German colonists by placing a special tax on newspapers published in languages other than English. German reaction added to the general colonial protest that led to the act’s repeal.In the postrevolutionary era, as the first American party system took shape, Germans were found in the ranks of the Jeffersonian Republicans more often than among the Federalists. Germans were active in Pennsylvania in the establishment of the Jeffersonian party in the 1790s. In 1808 Simon Snyder, son of a German immigrant, won the governorship of Pennsylvania as a Jeffersonian Republican by emphasizing his identity as a member of the common folk.
When the old party system broke up after the War of 1812, the elements forming around Andrew Jackson in the 1820s actively sought the immigrant vote, and Germans began to form one of the most consistent voting blocs behind the Jacksonian Democrats. The Whig Party, which emerged as the principal opposition to the Democratic Party, frequently denounced the Democratic exploitation of the immigrants’ votes, and thus appeared in the Germans’ view to be nativistic and threatening. As new German immigration began to spread into the Ohio Valley and the Midwest, the immigrants were generally welcomed by Democratic politicians and encouraged with minor political offices. Perhaps the most successful German politician before the Civil War was Gustave Koerner, a lawyer who immigrated to Illinois in the 1830s and became a member of the state supreme court and later the lieutenant governor of the state.
The German Americans would never again be as united as they were under the Democratic Party from the 1820s to the
Secretary of the Interior to President Rutherford B.
Hayes, Carl Schurz remained active in politics and journalism after leaving office in 1881. (Library of Congress)early 1850s. The growing sectional conflict that emerged in the 1850s, along with a major upsurge in political nativism, created havoc with many existing political allegiances. The German population, greatly increased in numbers by the massive influx during the period from 1848 to 1854, now appeared to be more important, particularly in the midwestern states. In 1854 the Germans appeared to be turning toward the Free-Soil movement; many reacted against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and against its sponsor, the prominent Illinois Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas. Many Germans, responding to the new leadership of German intellectuals and refugees from the revolutions of 1848, tended toward the Republican Party as it took shape from 1854 to 1856. Their main motivation, like that of other Free-Soilers, was to prevent the spread of slavery into the new territories being opened in the West. Germans who actively advocated the more radical position of abolishing slavery entirely were a small minority. The Republicans at the same time were also incorporating former Whigs and nativists, causing some Germans to remain Democratic. German Catholics and Lutherans more often adhered to the Democratic ranks. In the crucial presidential election of 1860, Germans divided their votes, mostly between the Republican Abraham Lincoln and the northern Democrat Stephen Douglas. Germans did not, as some of their leaders claimed, provide the difference at the polls that made Lincoln president. On the other hand, they did persuade the Republican Party to disavow nativism in its party platform of 1860.
Although Carl Schurz, the most prominent of all German politicians, hoped to lead all Germans into the Republican Party,
"The man with the (carpet) bags. ” Caricature of Carl Schurz, U.S.
senator from Missouri, by Thomas Nast, 1872. (Library of Congress)the divisions among them remained during the Civil War. Germans were a mainstay in the Republican Party in Missouri and played a major role in keeping that state from secession. Germans who answered the call and fought for the Union army tended to solidify their relationship with the Republicans and began to take up the position that the purpose of the war must be to end the slavery system. Germans who feared the social consequences of slavery abolition remained in opposition.
The post—Civil War era continued the party competition for the Germans’ political loyalties. Schurz is probably not the model of German American political positions in this era. His self-image was as a political reformer; Germans in general responded more to issues of cultural identity and defense against nativists. Republicans in several states during the 1870s and 1880s began to promote liquor prohibition laws, thus driving some Germans toward the Democratic Party. Republican efforts in Illinois and Wisconsin in the late 1880s to ban school instruction in German produced a similar reaction. A Democratic landslide in the congressional elections of 1890 returned the House of Representatives to Democratic control; many attributed that result to the reaction of Germans against the Republicans. The Democratic upsurge also helped German-born John Peter Altgeld win the governorship of Illinois in 1892. In 1896, however, the Democratic Party’s adoption of the populist “free silver” issue caused many “sound money” Germans to go to the Republican Party. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the growing Socialist movement, strengthened by the recent immigration of industrial workers from Germany, also attracted support from German laborers. In the early twentieth century, moderate Socialists controlled the Milwaukee local government for many years.
After the turn of the century, cultural issues gained more prominence in the political lives of German Americans.
After the unification of Germany between 1870 and 1871, the earlier provincial loyalties of German immigrants were increasingly replaced by a German cultural nationalism. German political leaders encouraged the issue of cultural defense as a way of maintaining German American support. In a new effort to unite German Americans into a more powerful coalition, German leaders organized in 1901 the National German-American Alliance (NGAA), led for much of its history by Charles James Hexamer, a Philadelphia engineer. Created as an umbrella organization over German societies and institutions of all sorts, the NGAA claimed at its height a membership of over 2 million (Luebke 1974, 98), but the number who consciously acknowledged membership was much fewer. In the years before 1914, the organization played a role in cultural politics, primarily on the issue of Prohibition, which was beginning to be advocated in the form of a national Prohibition law. Although this was an important and symbolic issue to many Germans, who felt that their lifestyle and customs were being denigrated, the NGAA probably weakened its credibility among other Americans by obtaining much of its financial support from the brewing industry. Because Prohibition initiatives were more often the work of the Republican Party, the Democratic Party tended to increase its German support before 1914. But at the same time, national and imperial rivalries were building in Europe, particularly between the German and British empires. Given the traditional Anglophobia that was reflected in many elements of American society, German leaders had felt free to glorify the rising German Empire as part of their cultural appeal. When the European war broke out in 1914, the German opinion makers, while clearly favoring Germany, endorsed Woodrow Wilson’s call for neutrality. Over the next two years, they actively presented the German side of the war, claiming that this was the necessary antidote to British war propaganda, which was seen as an offense against America’s neutrality. Perceiving Wilson’s policies as increasingly favorable to the British, German newspaper editors organized a meeting in 1916 to support a candidate to oppose Wilson in the presidential election of that year. Their endorsement was Charles Evans Hughes, who in fact was then nominated by the Republicans. Although German voters showed in the subsequent election that their preferences were shifting somewhat toward the Republican ticket, Hughes did not win the election, and the German community leaders’ efforts to fully unite the German American vote failed.The next four years were to see some profound changes in the politics of German Americans. In April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany, and the previous pro-German remarks of German American politicians and editors were now denounced as disloyal. German Americans and their leaders hastened to assert their loyalty and their support of the war effort, but this did not stop an intense wave of anti-German feeling that had among its effects the silencing of political opinions among German Americans. By the end of the war, the NGAA was out of business, its charter revoked by Congress for its prewar activities in distributing German propaganda. German Americans then witnessed Wilson’s advocacy of the Versailles Treaty, with its punitive measures against Germany. The general American war weariness and isolationist reaction resulted in the overwhelming defeat of the Democratic presidential candidate, James Cox, in 1920. The Germans, in a more or less silent act of revenge and retribution against Wilson, voted overwhelmingly for the Republican Warren G. Harding.
While the Germans were in many ways removed from the calculus of ethnic politics after 1920, they continued to reflect in their political behavior their reaction to Wilson, his war, and his treaty. Germans have been identified as one of the principal constituents of American isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s, especially as it was found among Republicans in the Midwest. The younger generations of German Americans increasingly dissociated themselves from taking political positions as Germans. The rise of National Socialism in Germany found relatively few supporters among German Americans. Those few who organized pro-Nazi groups were mostly recent immigrants from Germany seen by other German Americans as repeating the mistakes made before World War I. Isolationism and nonintervention in the war in Europe remained the principal German American position. In the events after American entry into World War II, antiGerman feelings by other Americans were markedly less than in World War I, perhaps because Germans were no longer seen either as subversive or as politically powerful.
The story of an active German American role in politics basically ends in 1945. Visible efforts since then by German Americans centered on noncontroversial subjects such as cold war anticommunism, the support of West Germany, and Germany’s reunification. While there were eventually successful outcomes on these issues, the activities of German Americans played a rather small role in them. The prospect of their exercising any united political power no longer existed.
James M. Bergquist
See also Altgeld, John Peter; Hexamer, Charles J.; Koerner, Gustave Philipp; Milwaukee Socialists; National German- American Alliance; Pennsylvania; Printing and Publishing; Schurz, Carl; Socialist Labor Party; Treaty of Versailles; World War I and German Americans
References and Further Reading
Fogleman, Aaron S. Hopeful Journeys: German
Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture, 1717—1775. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996.
Johnson, Charles T. Culture at Twilight: The National German-American Alliance, 1901—1918. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.
Luebke, Frederick C. Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1974.
------. “German Immigrants and American Politics: Problems of Leadership, Parties and Issues.” In Germans in the New World: Essays in the History of Immigration. Ed. Frederick C. Luebke. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990, pp. 79-92.
Luebke, Frederick C., ed. Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1971.
Trefousse, Hans L. Carl Schurz: A Biography. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1982.
Trommler, Frank, and Joseph McVeigh, eds.
America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History; Volume I: Immigration, Language, Ethnicity.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1985.