World War I and German Americans

America’s participation in World War I sparked a period of national paranoia and violence directed at German immigrants and their descendants. Fighting an interna­tional conflict with a country that had sent a large immigrant population to the United States brought about a nativism few immigrants had ever experienced.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 changed that, first because for many Ger­man Americans it reawakened old and sometimes forgotten feelings for a distant fatherland. Some Germans chose to return to Europe to fight. Others found it difficult to comply with President Woodrow Wil­son’s request to remain neutral in thought and action and fought personal battles over allegiance to the homeland and loyalty to the adopted country. They had been de­voted to their culture, but not to the Ger­man government, and yet many continued to believe in the greatness of the German people. Some maintained close ties with rel­atives in their native country, while most cultivated a nostalgic attachment to the mystical land of their grandparents. Numer­ous German Americans were also concerned about American adherence to strict neutral­ity. They opposed the sale and shipment of munitions to the Allies because that would have favored one side over the other in the war.

At the same time, British propagan­dists molded U.S. public opinion to sup­port the Allies and hate the Central Powers, especially Germany. Americans were also overwhelmed by rumors and newspaper ac­counts about foreign intrigue and German sabotage activity within the country. By the time the United States entered World War I in April 1917 Americans had become in­creasingly frightened of German spies and had been conditioned to hate anything as­sociated with Germany.

During the war, the Committee on Public Information, the government agency responsible for uniting a reluctant nation for war, reinforced this disgust of everything German with pamphlets, posters, and speeches portraying the Ger­man enemy as barbarian and determined to destroy everything America represented. Federal laws required that German nation­als living in the United States register with U.S. marshals or local postmasters. Con­gress enacted the Espionage Act to catch spies and traitors. The combination of neg­ative information about the enemy and re­strictive legislation created a climate of sus­picion and distrust of anything associated with Germany.

Suddenly German immigrants and Americans of German descent had to prove that they were 100 percent American. They were seen as the enemy or as being pro­German, despite their insistence that they opposed the German emperor and his mil­itaristic government, because they spoke the language of the enemy. This resulted in a sharp division between other U.S. citi­zens and German Americans.

To avoid persecution, German Ameri­cans had to act patriotic and look 100 per­cent “American.” The easiest way for them to demonstrate their loyalty was to support the government in all its war efforts.

patriotism and Americans of German birth and heritage had to abandon the last rem­nant of their German culture: the German language.

Despite these efforts, anti-German sentiment grew and German Americans bore the brunt of the resulting hysteria, which expressed itself in varying degrees of severity. Federal laws, intended to catch enemy spies and limit their activities on American soil, became measures to silence opposition to the war. Any expression of dissatisfaction, disagreement, or outright unwillingness to support the war effort, es­pecially if made by a person with a German name, could result in arrest and prosecu­tion under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. German-language magazines and newspapers had to deal with new govern­ment regulations, because criticism of the war printed in the enemy tongue looked more disloyal than a similar article in En­glish. Postmaster General Albert Burleson had the authority through the Espionage Act to deny mailing privileges for sus­pected disloyal publications. And the Trad­ing with the Enemy Act of October 1917 required that foreign-language papers file translations with proper officials of any ar­ticle dealing with the Red Cross, Liberty Loan, draft, or the war in general.

The Trading with the Enemy Act also gave A. Mitchell Palmer, the alien property custodian, the authority to confiscate tan­gible or intangible property in the form of land, patents, money, or securities that be­longed to the enemy. The term enemy ap­plied to any citizen of Germany or person residing in Germany, even if American- born, who owned property in the United States.

State and local governments also joined the war against the enemy. Officials removed German books from schools and libraries. Book burnings in states such as Montana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina not only included books written in Ger­man but English texts that appeared to be pro-German. Teachers who questioned or challenged the war were dismissed. In Mis­souri, the city of St. Louis began a renam­ing campaign of German-sounding streets and the town of Potsdam in Gasconade County changed its name to Pershing fol­lowing a local petition drive.

Several communities pushed for end­ing of the use of the German language in public. They argued that continued use of the enemy tongue was a German propa­ganda move to discourage unity in the United States and that speaking German gave aid and comfort to the enemy. Iowa had the strongest law, forbidding the use of German on streetcars, over the telephone, or anywhere else in public, as well as its teaching in public and private schools. Sev­eral State Councils of Defense, the organi­zation responsible for coordinating re­sources for the war effort at the state level, backed the move to stop the teaching of German in schools.

Numerous private and semiofficial or­ganizations supplemented official authority in this anti-German hysteria. The largest of these groups was the American Protective League (APL). Attorney General Thomas Gregory publicly endorsed the group and sought federal funds to support its police work. The APL believed it had to defend the nation against an army of over 250,000 German spies living in the United States. Members of the APL conducted private in­quests into the loyalty of German Ameri­cans and routinely spied on workers and neighbors, opened mail, tapped the phones of those suspected of disloyalty, and ha­rassed young men who they thought were evading the draft.

Encouraged by government actions, vigilante groups and patriotic Americans went after alleged enemies and traitors, took the law into their own hands, and vi­olated fundamental rights as they hunted suspected disloyal individuals and pro-Ger- mans as criminals. They interpreted the of­ficial rhetoric of loyalty and unity as per­mission to demand conformity in thought and action. Everything German, be it a person’s name, a newspaper, and organiza­tion, or the language, became suspect. Pos­sessing a German-sounding name often was reason enough to deny a job promo­tion or to launch an investigation into the private life of a person. Businesses and in­dividuals, either voluntarily or involuntar­ily, changed their names.

During the winter and spring months of 1918, demands to keep silent and con­form to national consensus escalated to in­clude vandalism and mob violence. Persons reading German-language newspapers or conversing in the enemy’s tongue in public could expect verbal abuse. Throughout the United States, German Americans who did not appear patriotic enough or who ex­pressed the slightest pacifist inclination or disagreement with the government could justifiably fear humiliating acts of physical abuse and violence. In Jefferson City, Mis­souri, a group of twenty-five men nabbed a German man, took him to a nearby park, administered a public beating, and forced him to kiss the flag because in a drunken stupor he had expressed the hope that his birth country would win the war. A natu­ralized German in Minnesota received a coat of tar and feathers for allegedly mak­ing disloyal statements. Night riders in Illi­nois painted Mennonite churches yellow to protest the sect’s pacifist beliefs and their refusal to serve in the military. In Toledo, Ohio, a mob marched through a German American neighborhood intimidating its citizens and knocking men down who did not remove their hats upon hearing the “Stars and Stripes.” This hysteria and fear of things German reached its peak in April 1918 with the mob lynching of Robert Prager, a German-born miner, in Collinsville, Illinois.

German Americans reacted to this paranoia in many ways. Some, in fear, withdrew from public life or changed their names. Others became superpatriots and coerced fellow German Americans sus­pected of slacking into compliance. Most demonstrated the minimum patriotism necessary to survive without attracting at­tention. While numerous churches and so­cieties suspended the use of German only temporarily, many adopted English perma­nently. The National German-American Alliance dissolved. Nearly half of all Ger­man publications disappeared by 1919. The most enduring impact came in the public schools. Canceling the teaching of German eliminated an important tool in the perpetuation of the language and accel­erated acculturation.

Petra Dewitt

See also Berlin/Kitchener, Ontario; Canada, Germans in (during World Wars I and II); Committee on Public Information; Espionage and Sedition Act; National German-American Alliance; Newspaper Press, German-Language in the United States; Prager, Robert Paul; World War I, German Prisoners and Civilian Internees in

References and Further Reading

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860—1925. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1955.

Keller, Phyllis. States of Belonging: German American Intellectuals and the First World Wzr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1979.

Luebke, Frederick C. Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and WorldWar I. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1974.

Peterson, Horace C., and Gilbert C. Fite.

Opponents of War, 1917—1918. Seattle: University of Washington, 1968.

Toltzmann, Don Heinrich. The German- American Experience. Amherst, MA: Humanity, 2000.