German Americans

German Americans. Nearly six million Germans immigrated to America between 1830 and 1930, forming the country's largest ethnic group and by far the largest language minority. At the peak in 1900, German immigrants and their children comprised 10.5 percent of the U.S. population. Despite a substantial German presence in colonial America, especially in Pennsylvania, there was little institutional continuity into the nineteenth century. German immigration was second only to Irish in the 1830s and 1840s, then took the lead, making up over one‐third of the total in the 1850s and 1860s and more than 27 percent in the 1870s and 1880s. Half or more of the migrants came as families, with women constituting a sizable 40 percent. Most Germans came motivated by economic hardship and—notwithstanding some religious and a few secular colonization groups—without formal organization. Refugees from the failed revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and from Prussian persecution of Catholics and socialists in the 1870s and 1880s emigrated as well.

Though predominantly of rural origins, German Americans were more heavily urbanized than the contemporaneous populations of either Germany or the United States. Prominent in Middle Atlantic cities, they dominated the ethnic population of the urban and rural Midwest. The 1980 census's ancestry data revealed a solid block of sixteen states stretching from Pennsylvania and Maryland to Colorado and Montana (along with Alaska) where Germans made up the largest ethnic element.

Widely distributed across the occupational spectrum, Germans were most heavily represented in skilled artisanal and industrial trades. Active as unionists and labor radicals, they formed a large contingent of the socialist movement. They dominated American brewing, were prominent in the entire food and drink sector, and often rose to prominence in more specialized branches of manufacturing. Their proportion in agriculture, initially below the national average, increased across generations. Census figures suggest relatively low rates of labor‐force participation for German women but overlook much work done on farms and in family businesses. Although occupational diversity suggests successful acculturation, it in fact allowed Germans to obtain everything they needed within their ethnic community.

Because of Germany's belated national unification (1871) and immigrants’ religious, regional, and socioeconomic diversity, German Americans rarely united behind one political party, giving them a reputation for political impotence. Indeed, no other German immigrant approached the prominence of the diplomat, Republican senator, and cabinet member Carl Schurz (1829–1906). However, German Americans were nearly as successful as Irish Americans in winning election as big‐city mayors, and they used politics effectively to defend their culture. Resisting nativist movements, Prohibition, and “blue laws,” they promoted their language in the public and private arenas. Catholics and Lutherans—the two largest German confessional groups—built up substantial networks of parochial schools in the late nineteenth century, which operated largely in their native tongue. Public elementary schools in several dozen cities and towns also offered German instruction and in some instances truly bilingual education. An unofficial, incomplete survey taken around 1900 recorded 550,000 pupils studying German at the elementary level, 42 percent of them in public, 35 percent in Catholic, and 16 percent in Lutheran schools. The German‐language press reinforced these efforts at cultural preservation. At its peak in 1894, with ninety‐seven daily newspapers among eight hundred total publications, its combined circulation equaled half the German‐born population.

The intolerance engendered by World War I markedly accelerated the decline in German‐American culture initiated by falling immigration in the 1890s. The language was banned from schools and many areas of public life, and the number of German periodicals fell by half. Neither the 130,000 refugees from Nazi Germany nor some half million postwar immigrants effected an appreciable revival.
See also Brewing and Distilling; Labor Movements; Lutheranism; Mennonites and Amish; Roman Catholicism; Socialism; Socialist Party of America; Temperance and Prohibition; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Frederick C. Luebke , Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I, 1974.
Kathleen Neils Conzen , Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836–1860, 1976.
La Vern J. Rippley , The German‐Americans, 1976.
Hartmut Keil and John B. Jentz, eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago: A Documentary History of Working‐Class Culture from 1850 to World War I, 1988.
Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home, 1991.
Linda Schelbitzki Pickle , Contented among Strangers: Rural German‐Speaking Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth‐Century Midwest, 1996.

Walter D. Kamphoefner