German Americans (german: Deutschamerikaner, ) are
Americans
Americans are the citizens and nationals of the United States of America.; ; Although direct citizens and nationals make up the majority of Americans, many dual citizens, expatriates, and permanent residents could also legally claim Ame ...
who have full or partial
German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 43 million in 2019, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the
United States Census Bureau
The United States Census Bureau (USCB), officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy. The Census Bureau is part of t ...
in its
American Community Survey.
German Americans account for about one third of the total population of people of German ancestry in the world.
Very few of the
German states had colonies in the
new world
The term ''New World'' is often used to mean the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere, specifically the Americas."America." ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'' (). McArthur, Tom, ed., 1992. New York: Oxford University Press, p. ...
. In the 1670s, the first significant groups of German immigrants arrived in the
British colonies
A Crown colony or royal colony was a colony administered by The Crown within the British Empire. There was usually a Governor, appointed by the British monarch on the advice of the UK Government, with or without the assistance of a local Coun ...
, settling primarily in
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
,
New York and
Virginia
Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...
.
The Mississippi Company of France moved thousands of Germans from Europe to Louisiana and to the
German Coast, Orleans Territory between 1718 and 1750. Immigration ramped up sharply during the 19th century.
There is a "German belt" that extends all the way across the United States, from eastern Pennsylvania to the Oregon coast. Pennsylvania, with 3.5 million people of German ancestry, has the largest population of German-Americans in the U.S. and is home to one of the group's original settlements,
Germantown (Philadelphia), founded in 1683 and the birthplace of the
American antislavery movement in 1688, as well as the revolutionary
Battle of Germantown.
They were pulled by the attractions of land and religious freedom, and pushed out of Germany by shortages of land and religious or
political oppression. Many arrived seeking religious or
political freedom, others for economic opportunities greater than those in Europe, and others for the chance to start fresh in the New World. The arrivals before 1850 were mostly farmers who sought out the most productive land, where their intensive farming techniques would pay off. After 1840, many came to cities, where "Germania"—German-speaking districts—soon emerged.
German Americans established the first
kindergarten
Kindergarten is a preschool educational approach based on playing, singing, practical activities such as drawing, and social interaction as part of the transition from home to school. Such institutions were originally made in the late 18th ce ...
s in the United States, introduced the
Christmas tree tradition, and introduced popular foods such as
hot dogs
A hot dog (uncommonly spelled hotdog) is a food consisting of a grilled or steamed sausage served in the slit of a partially sliced bun. The term hot dog can refer to the sausage itself. The sausage used is a wiener ( Vienna sausage) or a f ...
and
hamburgers
A hamburger, or simply burger, is a food consisting of fillings—usually a patty of ground meat, typically beef—placed inside a sliced bun or bread roll. Hamburgers are often served with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, bacon, or c ...
to America.
The great majority of people with some German ancestry have become
Americanized
Americanization or Americanisation (see spelling differences) is the influence of American culture and business on other countries outside the United States of America, including their media, cuisine, business practices, popular culture, tec ...
; fewer than 5% speak German. German-American societies abound, as do celebrations that are held throughout the country to celebrate German heritage of which the
German-American Steuben Parade
Von Steuben Day is a holiday traditionally held on a weekend in mid-September (von Steuben was born September 17), celebrating the Prussian-born Baron Friedrich von Steuben, who arrived in the United States as a volunteer offering his services t ...
in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
is one of the most well-known and is held every third Saturday in September.
Oktoberfest celebrations
The Oktoberfest is a two-week festival held each year in Munich, Germany during late September and early October. It is attended by six million people each year and has inspired numerous similar events using the name ''Oktoberfest'' in Germany ...
and the
German-American Day are popular festivities. There are major annual events in cities with German heritage including
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
,
Cincinnati
Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...
,
Milwaukee
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...
,
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...
,
San Antonio
("Cradle of Freedom")
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, mapsize = 220px
, map_caption = Interactive map of San Antonio
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name = United States
, subdivision_type1= State
, subdivision_name1 = Texas
, subdivision_t ...
and
St. Louis
St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...
.
Around 180,000 German citizens are living in the United States in 2020.
History
The Germans included many quite distinct subgroups with differing religious and cultural values. Lutherans and Catholics typically opposed Yankee moralizing programs such as the prohibition of beer, and favored paternalistic families with the husband deciding the family position on public affairs. They generally opposed women's suffrage but this was used as argument in favor of suffrage when German Americans became pariahs during World War I. On the other hand, there were Protestant groups who emerged from European pietism such as the German Methodist and United Brethren; they more closely resembled the Yankee Methodists in their moralism.
Colonial era
The first English settlers arrived at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, and were accompanied by the first German American, Dr. Johannes Fleischer. He was followed in 1608 by five
glassmakers and three carpenters or house builders. The first permanent German settlement in what became the United States was
Germantown, Pennsylvania, founded near
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...
on October 6, 1683.
![John Jacob Astor](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/John_Jacob_Astor.jpg)
''
Large numbers of Germans migrated from the 1680s to 1760s, with Pennsylvania the favored destination. They migrated to America for a variety of reasons.
''
Push factors'' involved worsening opportunities for farm ownership in central Europe, persecution of some religious groups, and military conscription; ''
pull factors'' were better economic conditions, especially the opportunity to own land, and religious freedom. Often immigrants paid for their passage by selling their labor for a period of years as
indentured servant
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered "voluntarily" for purported eventual compensation or debt repaymen ...
s.
Large sections of
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
,
Upstate New York
Upstate New York is a geographic region consisting of the area of New York State that lies north and northwest of the New York City metropolitan area. Although the precise boundary is debated, Upstate New York excludes New York City and Long Is ...
, and the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia attracted Germans. Most were
Lutheran
Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and Protestant Reformers, reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Cathol ...
or
German Reformed
The Evangelical and Reformed Church (E&R) was a Protestant Christian denomination in the United States. It was formed in 1934 by the merger of the Reformed Church in the United States (RCUS) with the Evangelical Synod of North America (ESNA). A m ...
; many belonged to small religious sects such as the
Moravians and
Mennonite
Mennonites are groups of Anabaptist Christian church communities of denominations. The name is derived from the founder of the movement, Menno Simons (1496–1561) of Friesland. Through his writings about Reformed Christianity during the Radi ...
s.
German Catholics
, native_name_lang = de
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, imagewidth = 200px
, alt =
, caption = Cologne Cathedral, Cologne
, abbreviation =
, type = Nati ...
did not arrive in number until after the War of 1812.
Palatines
In 1709, Protestant Germans from the Pfalz or
Palatine
A palatine or palatinus (in Latin; plural ''palatini''; cf. derivative spellings below) is a high-level official attached to imperial or royal courts in Europe since Roman times. region of Germany escaped conditions of poverty, traveling first to Rotterdam and then to London.
Queen Anne helped them get to the American colonies. The trip was long and difficult to survive because of the poor quality of food and water aboard ships and the infectious disease
typhus
Typhus, also known as typhus fever, is a group of infectious diseases that include epidemic typhus, scrub typhus, and murine typhus. Common symptoms include fever, headache, and a rash. Typically these begin one to two weeks after exposure. ...
. Many immigrants, particularly children, died before reaching America in June 1710.
The Palatine immigration of about 2100 people who survived was the largest single immigration to America in the colonial period. Most were first settled along the
Hudson River
The Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south primarily through eastern New York. It originates in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York and flows southward through the Hudson Valley to the New York Harbor between N ...
in work camps, to pay off their passage. By 1711, seven villages had been established in New York on the
Robert Livingston manor. In 1723 Germans became the first Europeans allowed to buy land in the
Mohawk Valley west of
Little Falls. One hundred homesteads were allocated in the Burnetsfield Patent. By 1750, the Germans occupied a strip some long along both sides of the
Mohawk River
The Mohawk River is a U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed October 3, 2011 river in the U.S. state of New York. It is the largest tributary of the Hudson River. The Mohawk f ...
. The soil was excellent; some 500 houses were built, mostly of stone, and the region prospered in spite of Indian raids.
Herkimer was the best-known of the German settlements in a region long known as the "German Flats".
They kept to themselves, married their own, spoke German, attended Lutheran churches, and retained their own customs and foods. They emphasized farm ownership. Some mastered English to become conversant with local legal and business opportunities. They tolerated slavery (although few were rich enough to own a slave).
The most famous of the early German Palatine immigrants was editor
John Peter Zenger
John Peter Zenger (October 26, 1697 – July 28, 1746) was a German printer and journalist in New York City. Zenger printed ''The New York Weekly Journal''. He was accused of libel in 1734 by William Cosby, the royal governor of New York, but t ...
, who led the fight in colonial New York City for freedom of the press in America. A later immigrant,
John Jacob Astor
John Jacob Astor (born Johann Jakob Astor; July 17, 1763 – March 29, 1848) was a German-American businessman, merchant, real estate mogul, and investor who made his fortune mainly in a fur trade monopoly, by History of opium in China, smuggl ...
, who came from
Walldorf
Walldorf (South Franconian: ''Walldoaf'') is a town in the Rhein-Neckar-Kreis district in the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany.
In the eighteenth century, Walldorf was the birthplace of John Jacob Astor, who emigrated and became a promin ...
,
Electoral Palatinate
The Electoral Palatinate (german: Kurpfalz) or the Palatinate (), officially the Electorate of the Palatinate (), was a state that was part of the Holy Roman Empire. The electorate had its origins under the rulership of the Counts Palatine of ...
, since 1803
Baden
Baden (; ) is a historical territory in South Germany, in earlier times on both sides of the Upper Rhine but since the Napoleonic Wars only East of the Rhine.
History
The margraves of Baden originated from the House of Zähringen. Baden i ...
, after the Revolutionary War, became the richest man in America from his fur trading empire and real estate investments in New York.
Louisiana
John Law organized the first colonization of Louisiana with German immigrants. Of the over 5,000 Germans initially immigrating primarily from the
Alsace Region as few as 500 made up the first wave of immigrants to leave France en route to the Americas. Less than 150 of those first indentured German farmers made it to Louisiana and settled along what became known as the German Coast. With tenacity, determination and the leadership of D'arensburg these Germans felled trees, cleared land, and cultivated the soil with simple hand tools as draft animals were not available. The German coast settlers supplied the budding City of New Orleans with corn, rice, eggs. and meat for many years following.
The
Mississippi Company
The Mississippi Company (french: Compagnie du Mississippi; founded 1684, named the Company of the West from 1717, and the Company of the Indies from 1719) was a corporation holding a business monopoly in French colonies in North America and th ...
settled thousands of German pioneers in
French Louisiana
Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is borde ...
during 1721. It encouraged Germans, particularly Germans of the
Alsatian region who had recently fallen under French rule, and the
Swiss to immigrate.
Alsace
Alsace (, ; ; Low Alemannic German/ gsw-FR, Elsàss ; german: Elsass ; la, Alsatia) is a cultural region and a territorial collectivity in eastern France, on the west bank of the upper Rhine next to Germany and Switzerland. In 2020, it had ...
was sold to France within the greater context of the
Thirty Years' War
The Thirty Years' War was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history, lasting from 1618 to 1648. Fought primarily in Central Europe, an estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of battle ...
(1618–1648).
The
Jesuit Charlevoix
Charlevoix ( , ) is a cultural and natural region in Quebec, on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River as well as in the Laurentian Mountains area of the Canadian Shield. This dramatic landscape includes rolling terrain, fjords, headlands ...
traveled
New France
New France (french: Nouvelle-France) was the area colonized by France in North America, beginning with the exploration of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Great Britain and Spa ...
(
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...
and Louisiana) in the early 1700s. His letter said "these 9,000 Germans, who were raised in the Palatinate (Alsace part of France) were in
Arkansas
Arkansas ( ) is a landlocked state in the South Central United States. It is bordered by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma to the west. Its name is from the O ...
. The Germans left Arkansas en masse. They went to
and demanded passage to Europe. The Mississippi Company gave the Germans rich lands on the right bank of the
Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it fl ...
about above New Orleans. The area is now known as 'the
German Coast'."
A thriving population of Germans lived upriver from
,
Louisiana
Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is borde ...
, known as the
German Coast. They were attracted to the area through pamphlets such as J. Hanno Deiler's "Louisiana: A Home for German Settlers".
Southeast
Two waves of German colonists in 1714 and 1717 founded a colony in
Virginia
Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth ar ...
called
Germanna
Germanna was a German settlement in the Colony of Virginia, settled in two waves, first in 1714 and then in 1717. Virginia Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood encouraged the immigration by advertising in Germany for miners to move to Virgini ...
,
located near modern-day
Culpeper, Virginia. Virginia Lieutenant Governor
Alexander Spotswood
Alexander Spotswood (12 December 1676 – 7 June 1740) was a British Army officer, explorer and lieutenant governor of Colonial Virginia; he is regarded as one of the most significant historical figures in British North American colonial h ...
, taking advantage of the
headright system A headright refers to a legal grant of land given to settlers during the period of European colonization in the Americas. Headrights are most notable for their role in the expansion of the Thirteen Colonies; the Virginia Company gave headrights to s ...
, had bought land in present-day
Spotsylvania and encouraged German immigration by advertising in
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
for
miners to move to Virginia and establish a mining industry in the colony. The name "Germanna", selected by Governor
Alexander Spotswood
Alexander Spotswood (12 December 1676 – 7 June 1740) was a British Army officer, explorer and lieutenant governor of Colonial Virginia; he is regarded as one of the most significant historical figures in British North American colonial h ...
, reflected both the German immigrants who sailed across the Atlantic to Virginia and the British queen,
Anne
Anne, alternatively spelled Ann, is a form of the Latin female given name Anna. This in turn is a representation of the Hebrew Hannah, which means 'favour' or 'grace'. Related names include Annie.
Anne is sometimes used as a male name in the ...
, who was in power at the time of the first settlement at Germanna. In 1721, twelve German families departed Germanna to found
Germantown Germantown or German Town may refer to:
Places
Australia
* Germantown, Queensland, a locality in the Cassowary Coast Region
United States
* Germantown, California, the former name of Artois, a census-designated place in Glenn County
* Ge ...
. They were swiftly replaced by 70 new German arrivals from the
Palatinate, the start of a westward and southward trend of German migration and settlement across the
Virginia Piedmont and
Shenandoah Valley around the
Blue Ridge Mountains
The Blue Ridge Mountains are a Physiographic regions of the world, physiographic province of the larger Appalachian Mountains range. The mountain range is located in the Eastern United States, and extends 550 miles southwest from southern Pennsy ...
, where
Palatine German predominated. Meanwhile in
Southwest Virginia
Southwest Virginia, often abbreviated as SWVA, is a mountainous region of Virginia in the westernmost part of the commonwealth. Located within the broader region of western Virginia, Southwest Virginia has been defined alternatively as all Virg ...
, Virginia German acquired a
Swabian German accent.
In
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and ...
, an expedition of German
Moravians living around
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Bethlehem is a city in Northampton and Lehigh Counties in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania, United States. As of the 2020 census, Bethlehem had a total population of 75,781. Of this, 55,639 were in Northampton County and 19, ...
, and a party from Europe led by
August Gottlieb Spangenberg, headed down the
Great Wagon Road
Great may refer to: Descriptions or measurements
* Great, a relative measurement in physical space, see Size
* Greatness, being divine, majestic, superior, majestic, or transcendent
People
* List of people known as "the Great"
*Artel Great (born ...
and purchased from
Lord Granville (one of the British Lords Proprietor) in the
Piedmont
it, Piemontese
, population_note =
, population_blank1_title =
, population_blank1 =
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, demographics1_footnotes =
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of
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and ...
in 1753. The tract was dubbed , Latinized
Wachovia
Wachovia was a diversified financial services company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Before its acquisition by Wells Fargo and Company in 2008, Wachovia was the fourth-largest bank holding company in the United States, based on total asset ...
, because the streams and meadows reminded Moravian settlers of the
Wachau
The Wachau () is an Austrian valley with a picturesque landscape formed by the Danube river. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations of Lower Austria, located midway between the towns of Melk and Krems that also attracts "connois ...
valley in
Austria
Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
.
They established German settlements on that tract, especially in the area around what is now
Winston-Salem
Winston-Salem is a city and the county seat of Forsyth County, North Carolina, United States. In the 2020 census, the population was 249,545, making it the second-largest municipality in the Piedmont Triad region, the 5th most populous city in ...
.
They also founded the transitional settlement of
Bethabara, North Carolina, translated as House of Passage, the first planned Moravian community in North Carolina, in 1759. Soon after, the German Moravians founded the town of
Salem in 1766 (now a historical section in the center of Winston-Salem) and
Salem College
Salem College is a private women's liberal arts college in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Founded in 1772 as a primary school, it later became an academy (high school) and ultimately added the college. It is the oldest female educational establ ...
(an early female college) in 1772.
In the
Georgia Colony
Georgia most commonly refers to:
* Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States
Georgia may also refer to:
Places
Historical states and entities
* Related to the ...
, Germans mainly from the
Swabia region settled in Savannah, St. Simon's Island and
Fort Frederica in the 1730s and 1740s. They were actively recruited by
James Oglethorpe
James Edward Oglethorpe (22 December 1696 – 30 June 1785) was a British soldier, Member of Parliament, and philanthropist, as well as the founder of the colony of Georgia in what was then British America. As a social reformer, he hoped to r ...
and quickly distinguished themselves through improved farming, advanced
tabby (cement)
Tabby is a type of concrete made by burning oyster shells to create lime, then mixing it with water, sand, ash and broken oyster shells. Tabby was used by early Spanish settlers in present-day Florida, then by British colonists primarily in co ...
-construction, and leading joint Lutheran-
Anglican-Reformed religious services for the colonists.
German immigrants also settled in other areas of the
American South, including around the
Dutch (Deutsch) Fork area of
South Carolina
)'' Animis opibusque parati'' ( for, , Latin, Prepared in mind and resources, links=no)
, anthem = " Carolina";" South Carolina On My Mind"
, Former = Province of South Carolina
, seat = Columbia
, LargestCity = Charleston
, LargestMetro = ...
,
and
Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...
, especially in the
Austin and
San Antonio
("Cradle of Freedom")
, image_map =
, mapsize = 220px
, map_caption = Interactive map of San Antonio
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name = United States
, subdivision_type1= State
, subdivision_name1 = Texas
, subdivision_t ...
areas.
New England
Between 1742 and 1753, roughly 1,000 Germans settled in Broad Bay, Massachusetts (now
Waldoboro, Maine
Waldoboro is a town in Lincoln County, Maine, in the United States. The population was 5,154 at the 2020 census. Waldoboro was incorporated in 1773 and developed a reputation as a ship building and port facility from the banks of the Medomak R ...
). Many of the colonists fled to
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
,
Maine
Maine () is a state in the New England and Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and ...
,
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia ( ; ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is one of the three Maritime provinces and one of the four Atlantic provinces. Nova Scotia is Latin for "New Scotland".
Most of the population are native Eng ...
, and
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and ...
after their houses were burned and their neighbors killed or carried into captivity by
Native Americans. The Germans who remained found it difficult to survive on farming, and eventually turned to the shipping and fishing industries.
Pennsylvania
The tide of German immigration to
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
swelled between 1725 and 1775, with immigrants arriving as
redemptioners or indentured servants. By 1775, Germans constituted about one-third of the population of the state. German farmers were renowned for their highly productive animal husbandry and agricultural practices. Politically, they were generally inactive until 1740, when they joined a
Quaker-led coalition that took control of the legislature, which later supported the
American Revolution
The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 1765 and 1791. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revoluti ...
. Despite this, many of the German settlers were
loyalists
Loyalism, in the United Kingdom, its overseas territories and its former colonies, refers to the allegiance to the British crown or the United Kingdom. In North America, the most common usage of the term refers to loyalty to the British Cro ...
during the Revolution, possibly because they feared their royal land grants would be taken away by a new republican government, or because of loyalty to a British German monarchy who had provided the opportunity to live in a liberal society. The Germans, comprising
Lutherans
Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Catholic Church launched ...
,
Reformed,
Mennonite
Mennonites are groups of Anabaptist Christian church communities of denominations. The name is derived from the founder of the movement, Menno Simons (1496–1561) of Friesland. Through his writings about Reformed Christianity during the Radi ...
s,
Amish
The Amish (; pdc, Amisch; german: link=no, Amische), formally the Old Order Amish, are a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christian church fellowships with Swiss German and Alsatian origins. They are closely related to Mennonite churc ...
, and other sects, developed a rich religious life with a strong musical culture. Collectively, they came to be known as the
Pennsylvania Dutch (from ''Deutsch'').
Etymologically, the word Dutch originates from the Old High German word "diutisc" (from "diot" "people"), referring to the Germanic "language of the people" as opposed to Latin, the language of the learned (see also
theodiscus
' (in Medieval Latin, corresponding to Old English þēodisc, Old High German diutisc and other early Germanic reflexes of Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz, meaning "popular" or "of the people") was a term used in the early Middle Ages to refer to t ...
). Eventually the word came to refer to people who speak a Germanic language, and only in the last couple centuries the people of the Netherlands. Other Germanic language variants for "deutsch/deitsch/dutch" are: Dutch "Duits" and "
Diets
The Low Countries comprise the coastal Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta region in Western Europe, whose definition usually includes the modern countries of Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. Both Belgium and the Netherlands derived their ...
", Yiddish "daytsh", Danish/Norwegian "tysk", or Swedish "
tyska." The Japanese "ドイツ" (/doitsu/) also derives from the aforementioned "Dutch" variations.
The
Studebaker brothers, forefathers of the wagon and automobile makers, arrived in Pennsylvania in 1736 from the famous blade town of
Solingen
Solingen (; li, Solich) is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located some 25 km east of Düsseldorf along the northern edge of the region called Bergisches Land, south of the Ruhr area, and, with a 2009 population of 161,366 ...
. With their skills, they made wagons that carried the frontiersmen westward; their cannons provided the
Union Army
During the American Civil War, the Union Army, also known as the Federal Army and the Northern Army, referring to the United States Army, was the land force that fought to preserve the Union of the collective states. It proved essential to th ...
with artillery in the
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states ...
, and their automobile company became one of the largest in America, although never eclipsing the "Big Three", and was a factor in the
war effort
In politics and military planning, a war effort is a coordinated mobilization of society's resources—both industrial and human—towards the support of a military force. Depending on the militarization of the culture, the relative si ...
and in the industrial foundations of the Army.
American Revolution
Great Britain, whose
King George III
George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 173829 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until the union of the two kingdoms on 1 January 1801, after which he was King of the United Kingdom of Great Br ...
was also the
Elector
Elector may refer to:
* Prince-elector or elector, a member of the electoral college of the Holy Roman Empire, having the function of electing the Holy Roman Emperors
* Elector, a member of an electoral college
** Confederate elector, a member of ...
of
Hanover
Hanover (; german: Hannover ; nds, Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in Northern Germany ...
in Germany, hired 18,000
Hessians. They were mercenary soldiers rented out by the rulers of several small German states such as Hesse to fight on the British side. Many were captured; they remained as prisoners during the war but some stayed and became U.S. citizens. In the American Revolution the Mennonites and other small religious sects were neutral pacifists. The Lutherans of Pennsylvania were
on the patriot side. The Muhlenberg family, led by Rev.
Henry Muhlenberg was especially influential on the Patriot side. His son
Peter Muhlenberg
John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg (October 1, 1746October 1, 1807) was an American clergyman, Continental Army soldier during the American Revolutionary War, and political figure in the newly independent United States. A Lutheran minister, he serve ...
, a Lutheran clergyman in Virginia became a major general and later a Congressman. However, in upstate New York, many Germans were neutral or supported the
Loyalist cause.
From names in the 1790 U.S. census, historians estimate Germans constituted nearly 9% of the white population in the United States.
Colonial German American population by state
The brief
Fries's Rebellion was an anti-tax movement among Germans in Pennsylvania in 1799–1800.
19th century
![German population 1872](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/German_population_1872.jpg)
The largest flow of German immigration to America occurred between 1820 and
World WarI, during which time nearly six million Germans immigrated to the United States. From 1840 to 1880, they were the largest group of immigrants. Following the
Revolutions of 1848 in the German states
In political science, a revolution (Latin: ''revolutio'', "a turn around") is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due ...
, a wave of political refugees fled to America, who became known as
Forty-Eighters. They included professionals, journalists, and politicians. Prominent Forty-Eighters included
Carl Schurz and
Henry Villard
Henry Villard (April 10, 1835 – November 12, 1900) was an American journalist and financier who was an early president of the Northern Pacific Railway.
Born and raised by Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard in the Rhenish Palatinate of the Kin ...
.
![Germans-emigrate-1874](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Germans-emigrate-1874.jpg)
"Latin farmer" or
Latin Settlement is the designation of several settlements founded by some of the
Dreissiger and other refugees from Europe after rebellions like the
Frankfurter Wachensturm
The Frankfurter Wachensturm (German: charge of the Frankfurt guard house) on 3 April 1833 was a failed attempt to start a revolution in Germany.
Events
About 50 students attacked the soldiers and policemen of the Frankfurt Police offices '' Hau ...
beginning in the 1830s—predominantly in Texas and Missouri, but also in other US states—in which German intellectuals (
freethinkers
Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought) is an epistemological viewpoint which holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and that beliefs should instead be reached by other methods ...
, german: Freidenker, and
Latinists) met together to devote themselves to the
German literature,
philosophy, science,
classical music, and the
Latin language
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of t ...
. A prominent representative of this generation of immigrants was
Gustav Koerner who lived most of the time in
Belleville, Illinois until his death.
Jewish Germans
A few
German Jews
The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (''circa'' 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish ...
came in
the colonial era. The largest numbers arrived after 1820, especially in the mid-19th century. They spread across the North and South (and California, where
Levi Strauss
Levi Strauss (; born Löb Strauß ; February 26, 1829 – September 26, 1902) was a German-born American businessman who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His firm of Levi Strauss & Co. (Levi's) began in 1853 in San Francisc ...
arrived in 1853). They formed small German-Jewish communities in cities and towns. They typically were local and regional merchants selling clothing; others were livestock dealers, agricultural commodity traders, bankers, and operators of local businesses.
Henry Lehman, who founded
Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. ( ) was an American global financial services firm founded in 1847. Before filing for bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman was the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States (behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, a ...
in Alabama, was a particularly prominent example of such a German-Jewish immigrant. They formed
Reform synagogues and sponsored numerous local and national philanthropic organizations, such as
B'nai B'rith
B'nai B'rith International (, from he, בְּנֵי בְּרִית, translit=b'né brit, lit=Children of the Covenant) is a Jewish service organization. B'nai B'rith states that it is committed to the security and continuity of the Jewish peo ...
. This German-speaking group is quite distinct from the Yiddish-speaking East-European Jews who arrived in much larger numbers starting in the late 19th century and concentrated in New York.
Northeastern cities
The port cities of
New York, and
Baltimore
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
had large populations, as did Hoboken, New Jersey.
Cities of the Midwest
Cities along the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, and the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers attracted a large German element. The Midwestern United States, Midwestern cities of
Milwaukee
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...
,
Cincinnati
Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...
,
St. Louis
St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...
,
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
were favored destinations of German immigrants. The Northern Kentucky and History of the Germans in Louisville, Louisville area along the Ohio River was also a favored destination. By 1900, the populations of the cities of Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland,
Milwaukee
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...
, and
Cincinnati
Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...
were all more than 40% German American. Dubuque, Iowa, Dubuque and Davenport, Iowa had even larger proportions, as did Omaha, Nebraska, where the proportion of German Americans was 57% in 1910. In many other cities of the Midwestern United States, Midwest, such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, German Americans were at least 30% of the population.
By 1850 there were 5,000 Germans, mostly Schwabians living in, and around, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Many concentrations acquired distinctive names suggesting their heritage, such as the "Over-the-Rhine" district in Cincinnati, "Dutchtown, St. Louis, Dutchtown" in South St Louis, and "German Village" in Columbus, Ohio.
A particularly attractive destination was
Milwaukee
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...
, and came to be known as "the German Athens". Radical Germans trained in politics in the old country dominated the city's Social Democratic Party (United States), Socialists. Skilled workers dominated many crafts, while entrepreneurs created the brewing industry; the most famous brands included Pabst Brewing Company, Pabst, Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Schlitz, Miller Brewing Company, Miller, and Valentin Blatz Brewing Company, Blatz.
Whereas half of German immigrants settled in cities, the other half established farms in the Midwest. From Ohio to the Plains states, a heavy presence persists in rural areas into the 21st century.
Deep South
Few German immigrants settled in the Deep South, apart from
, the
German Coast, and
Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...
.
Texas
![WahrenbergerHouseAustinTX](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/WahrenbergerHouseAustinTX.JPG)
Texas attracted many Germans who entered through Galveston, Texas, Galveston and Indianola, Texas, Indianola, both those who came to farm, and later immigrants who more rapidly took industrial jobs in cities such as Houston. As in
Milwaukee
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...
, Germans in Houston built the brewing industry. By the 1920s, the first generation of college-educated German Americans were moving into the chemical and oil industries.
Texas had about 20,000 German Americans in the 1850s. They did not form a uniform bloc, but were highly diverse and drew from geographic areas and all sectors of European society, except that very few aristocrats or upper middle class businessmen arrived. In this regard, Texas Germania was a microcosm of the Germania nationwide.
The Germans who settled Texas were diverse in many ways. They included peasant farmers and intellectuals; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists; Prussians, Saxons, and Hessians; abolitionists and slave owners; farmers and townsfolk; frugal, honest folk and ax murderers. They differed in dialect, customs, and physical features. A majority had been farmers in Germany, and most arrived seeking economic opportunities. A few dissident intellectuals fleeing the 1848 revolutions sought political freedom, but few, save perhaps the Wends, went for religious freedom. The German settlements in Texas reflected their diversity. Even in the confined area of the Hill Country, each valley offered a different kind of German. The Llano valley had stern, teetotaling German Methodists, who renounced dancing and fraternal organizations; the Pedernales valley had fun-loving, hardworking Lutherans and Catholics who enjoyed drinking and dancing; and the Guadalupe valley had freethinking Germans descended from intellectual political refugees. The scattered German ethnic islands were also diverse. These small enclaves included Lindsay in Cooke County, largely Westphalian Catholic; Waka in Ochiltree County, Midwestern Mennonite; Hurnville in Clay County, Russian German Baptist; and Lockett in Wilbarger County, Wendish Lutheran.
Germans from Russia
![Volga-Germans-US](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/26/Volga-Germans-US.jpg)
Germans from Russia were the most traditional of German-speaking arrivals. They were Germans who had lived for generations throughout the Russian Empire, but especially along the Volga River in Russia and near the Crimea. Their ancestors had come from all over the German-speaking world, invited by Catherine the Great in 1762 and 1763 to settle and introduce more advanced German agriculture methods to rural Russia. They had been promised by the manifesto of their settlement the ability to practice their respective Christian denominations, retain their culture and language, and retain immunity from conscription for them and their descendants. As time passed, the Russian monarchy gradually eroded the ethnic German population's relative autonomy. Conscription eventually was reinstated; this was especially harmful to the Mennonites, who practice pacifism. Throughout the 19th century, pressure increased from the Russian government to culturally assimilate. Many Germans from Russia found it necessary to emigrate to avoid conscription and preserve their culture. About 100,000 immigrated by 1900, settling primarily in the Dakotas, Kansas and Nebraska. The southern central part of North Dakota was known as "the German-Russian triangle". A smaller number moved farther west, finding employment as ranchers and cowboys.
Negatively influenced by the violation of their rights and cultural persecution by the Tsar, the Germans from Russia who settled in the northern Midwestern United States, Midwest saw themselves a downtrodden ethnic group separate from Russian Americans and having an entirely different experience from the German Americans who had emigrated from German lands; they settled in tight-knit communities who retained their German language and culture. They raised large families, built German-style churches, buried their dead in distinctive cemeteries using cast iron grave markers, and sang German hymns. Many farmers specialized in sugar beets—still a major crop in the upper Great Plains. During World WarI, their identity was challenged by anti-German sentiment. By the end of World WarII, the German language, which had always been used with English for public and official matters, was in serious decline. Today, German is preserved mainly through singing groups and recipes, with the Germans from Russia in the northern Great Plains states speaking predominantly English. German remains the second most spoken language in North and South Dakota, and Germans from Russia often use loanwords, such as ''Kuchen'' for cake. Despite the loss of their language, the ethnic group remains distinct, and has left a lasting impression on the American West.
Musician Lawrence Welk (1903-1992) became an iconic figure in the German-Russian community of the northern Great Plains—his success story personified the American dream.
Civil War
Sentiment among German Americans was largely anti-slavery, especially among Forty-Eighters.
Notable Forty-Eighter Hermann Raster wrote passionately against slavery and was very pro-Lincoln. Raster published anti-slavery pamphlets and was the editor of the most influential German language newspaper in America at the time. He helped secure the votes of German-Americans across the United States for Abraham Lincoln. When Raster died the ''Chicago Tribune'' published an article regarding his service as a correspondent for America to the German states saying, "His writings during and after the Civil War did more to create understanding and appreciation of the American situation in Germany and to float U.S. bonds in Europe than the combined efforts of all the U.S. ministers and consuls." Hundreds of thousands of German Americans volunteered to fight for the Union (American Civil War), Union in the
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states ...
(1861–1865).
[Christian B. Keller, "Flying Dutchmen and Drunken Irishmen: The Myths and Realities of Ethnic Civil War Soldiers", ''Journal of Military History'', Vol/ 73, No. 1, January 2009, pp. 117–145; for primary sources see Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich, eds., ''Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home'' (2006).] The Germans were the largest immigrant group to participate in the Civil War; over 176,000 U.S. soldiers were born in Germany. A popular Union commander among Germans, Major General Franz Sigel was the highest-ranking German officer in the
Union Army
During the American Civil War, the Union Army, also known as the Federal Army and the Northern Army, referring to the United States Army, was the land force that fought to preserve the Union of the collective states. It proved essential to th ...
, with many German immigrants claiming to enlist to "fight ''mit'' Sigel".
![Germans1900](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Germans1900.jpg)
Although only one in four Germans fought in all-German regiments, they created the public image of the German soldier. Pennsylvania fielded five German regiments, New York eleven, and Ohio six.
Farmers
Western railroads, with large land grants available to attract farmers, set up agencies in Hamburg and other German cities, promising cheap transportation, and sales of farmland on easy terms. For example, the Santa Fe railroad hired its own commissioner for immigration, and sold over to German-speaking farmers.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the German Americans showed a high interest in becoming farmers, and keeping their children and grandchildren on the land. While they needed profits to stay in operation, they used profits as a tool "to maintain continuity of the family". They used risk averse strategies, and carefully planned their inheritances to keep the land in the family. Their communities showed smaller average farm size, greater equality, less absentee ownership and greater geographic persistence. As one farmer explained, "To protect your family has turned out to be the same thing as protecting your land."
Germany was a large country with many diverse subregions which contributed immigrants. Dubuque was the base of the ''Ostfriesische Nachrichten'' ("East Frisian News") from 1881 to 1971. It connected the 20,000 immigrants from East Friesland (Ostfriesland), Germany, to each other across the Midwest, and to their old homeland. In Germany East Friesland was often a topic of ridicule regarding backward rustics, but editor Leupke Hündling shrewdly combined stories of proud memories of Ostfriesland. The editor enlisted a network of local correspondents. By mixing local American and local German news, letters, poetry, fiction, and dialogue, the German-language newspaper allowed immigrants to honor their origins and celebrate their new life as highly prosperous farmers with much larger farms than were possible back in impoverished Ostfriesland. During the world wars, when Germania came under heavy attack, the paper stressed its humanitarian role, mobilizing readers to help the people of East Friesland with relief funds. Younger generations could usually speak German but not read it, so the subscription base dwindled away as the target audience Americanized itself.
Politics
Relatively few German Americans held office, but the men voted once they became citizens. In general during the Third party System (1850s–1890s), the Protestants and Jews leaned toward the History of the Republican Party (United States), Republican party and the Catholics were strongly History of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic. When prohibition was on the ballot, the Germans voted solidly against it. They strongly distrusted moralistic crusaders, whom they called "Puritans", including the temperance reformers and many Populist Party (United States), Populists. The German community strongly opposed Free Silver, and voted heavily against crusader William Jennings Bryan in 1896. In 1900, many German Democrats returned to their party and voted for Bryan, perhaps because of President William McKinley's foreign policy.
At the local level, historians have explored the changing voting behavior of the German-American community and one of its major strongholds, St. Louis, Missouri. The German Americans had voted 80 percent for Lincoln in 1860, and strongly supported the war effort. They were a bastion of the Republican Party in St. Louis and nearby immigrant strongholds in Missouri and southern Illinois. The German Americans were angered by a proposed Missouri state constitution that discriminated against Catholics and freethinkers. The requirement of a special loyalty oath for priests and ministers was troublesome. Despite their strong opposition the constitution was ratified in 1865. Racial tensions with the blacks began to emerge, especially in terms of competition for unskilled labor jobs. Germania was nervous about black suffrage in 1868, fearing that blacks would support puritanical laws, especially regarding the prohibition of beer gardens on Sundays. The tensions split off a large German element in 1872, led by Carl Schurz. They supported the Liberal Republican party led by Benjamin Gratz Brown for governor in 1870 and Horace Greeley for president in 1872.
Many Germans in late 19th century cities were communists; Germans played a significant role in the labor union movement. A few were anarchists. Eight of the forty-two anarchist defendants in the Haymarket Affair of 1886 in Chicago were German.
World Wars
Intellectuals
![Hugo Munsterberg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Hugo_Munsterberg.jpg)
Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), a German psychologist, moved to Harvard in the 1890s and became a leader in the new profession. He was president of the American Psychological Association in 1898, and the American Philosophical Association in 1908, and played a major role in many other American and international organizations.
Arthur Preuss (1871–1934) was a leading journalist, and theologian. A layman in St Louis. His ''Fortnightly Review'' (in English) was a major conservative voice read closely by church leaders and intellectuals from 1894 until 1934. He was intensely loyal to the Vatican. Preuss upheld the German Catholic community, denounced the "Americanism" heresy, promoted the Catholic University of America, and anguished over the anti-German America hysteria during World WarI. He provided lengthy commentary regarding the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the anti-Catholic factor in the presidential campaign of 1928, the hardships of the Great Depression, and the liberalism of the New Deal.
World War I anti-German sentiment
![German American internment sites during World War II](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/German_American_internment_sites_during_World_War_II.jpg)
During World War I, German Americans were often accused of being too sympathetic to Imperial Germany. Former president Theodore Roosevelt denounced "hyphenated Americanism", insisting that dual loyalties were impossible in wartime. A small minority came out for Germany, such as H. L. Mencken. Similarly, Harvard psychology professor Hugo Münsterberg dropped his efforts to mediate between America and Germany, and threw his efforts behind the German cause. There was also some Anti-German hysteria like the killing of Edmund Kayser, Pastor Edmund Kayser.
The Justice Department prepared a list of all German aliens, counting approximately 480,000 of them, more than 4,000 of whom were imprisoned in 1917–18. The allegations included spying for Germany or endorsing the German war effort. Thousands were forced to buy war bonds to show their loyalty. The American Red Cross, Red Cross barred individuals with German last names from joining in fear of sabotage. One person was killed by a mob; in Collinsville, Illinois, German-born Robert Prager was dragged from jail as a suspected spy and lynched.
A Minnesota minister was tarred and feathered when he was overheard praying in German with a dying woman. Questions of German American loyalty increased due to events like the German Black Tom explosion, bombing of Black Tom island and the U.S. entering World War I, many German Americans were arrested for refusing allegiance to the U.S. War hysteria led to the removal of German names in public, names of things such as streets,
[Kathleen Doane]
"Anti-German hysteria swept Cincinnati in 1917"
. ''The Cincinnati Enquirer'', June 6, 2012. Accessed February 15, 2013. and businesses. Schools also began to eliminate or discourage the teaching of the German language.
In Chicago, Frederick Stock temporarily stepped down as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra until he finalized his naturalization papers. Orchestras replaced music by German composer Richard Wagner, Wagner with French composer Hector Berlioz, Berlioz. In
Cincinnati
Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...
, the public library was asked to withdraw all German books from its shelves. German-named streets were renamed. The town, Berlin, Michigan, was changed to Marne, Michigan (honoring those who fought in the Battle of Marne). In Iowa, in the 1918 Babel Proclamation, the governor prohibited all foreign languages in schools and public places. Nebraska banned instruction in any language except English, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the ban illegal in 1923 (''Meyer v. Nebraska''). The response of German Americans to these tactics was often to "Americanization, Americanize" names (e.g., Schmidt to Smith, Müller to Miller) and limit the use of the German language in public places, especially churches.
File:WWIHunNatlArchives.jpg, American wartime propaganda depicted the bloodthirsty German "Hun" soldier as an enemy of civilization, with his eyes on America from across the Atlantic.
John Meintz, punished during World War I - NARA - 283633 - restored.jpg, German American farmer John Meints of Minnesota was Tarring and feathering, tarred and feathered in August 1918 for allegedly not supporting war bond drives.
World War II
![Marlene Dietrich ww2 47](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Marlene_Dietrich_ww2_47.jpg)
Between 1931 and 1940, 114,000 Germans moved to the United States, many of whom—including Nobel prize winner Albert Einstein and author Erich Maria Remarque—were History of the Jews in Germany, Jewish Germans or anti-Nazis fleeing government oppression. About 25,000 people became paying members of the pro-Nazi German American Bund during the years before the war. German aliens were the subject of suspicion and discrimination during the war, although prejudice and sheer numbers meant they suffered as a group generally less than Japanese Americans. The Smith Act, Alien Registration Act of 1940 required 300,000 German-born resident aliens who had German citizenship to register with the Federal government and restricted their travel and property ownership rights. Under the still active Alien and Sedition Acts, Alien Enemy Act of 1798, the United States government German American internment, interned nearly 11,000 German citizens between 1940 and 1948. Civil rights violations occurred.
An unknown number of "voluntary internees" joined their spouses and parents in the camps and were not permitted to leave.
Many Americans of German ancestry had top war jobs, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and USAAF General Carl Andrew Spaatz. Roosevelt appointed Republican Wendell Willkie (who ironically ran against Roosevelt in the 1940 United States presidential election, 1940 presidential election) as a personal representative. German Americans who had fluent German language skills were an important asset to wartime intelligence, and they served as translators and as spies for the United States. The war evoked strong pro-American patriotic sentiments among German Americans, few of whom by then had contacts with distant relatives in the old country.
Contemporary period
In the aftermath of World War II, millions of Expulsion of Germans after World War II, ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from their homes within the redrawn borders of Central and Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Most resettled in Germany, but others came as refugees to the United States in the late 1940s, and established cultural centers in their new homes. Some Danube Swabians, for instance, ethnic Germans who had maintained language and customs after settlement in Hungary, later Yugoslavia (now Serbia), immigrated to the U.S. after the war.
After 1970, anti-German sentiment aroused by World War II faded away. Today, German Americans who immigrated after World WarII share the same characteristics as any other Western European immigrant group in the U.S. They are mostly professionals and academics who have come for professional reasons. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification of Germany, Germany has become a preferred destination for immigrants rather than a source of migrating peoples.
![Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.jpg)
The German American community supported reunification in 1990.
In the 1990 United States Census, 1990 U.S. Census, 58 million Americans claimed to be solely or partially of German descent. According to the 2005 American Community Survey, 50 million Americans have German ancestry. German Americans represent 17% of the total U.S. population and 26% of the non-Hispanic white population.
''The Economist'' magazine in 2015 interviewed Petra Schürmann, the director of the German-American Heritage Museum in Washington for a major article on German-Americans. She notes that all over the United States, celebrations such as German fests and Oktoberfests have been appearing.
Demographics
![Distribution of Americans claiming German Ancestry by county in 2018](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Distribution_of_Americans_claiming_German_Ancestry_by_county_in_2018.png)
States with the highest proportions of German Americans tend to be those of the upper Midwest, including Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas; all at over 30%.
Of the four major US regions, German was the most-reported ancestry in the Midwest, second in the Western United States, West, and third in both the Northeastern United States, Northeast and the Southern United States, South. German was the top reported ancestry in 23 states, and it was one of the top five reported ancestries in every state except
Maine
Maine () is a state in the New England and Northeastern regions of the United States. It borders New Hampshire to the west, the Gulf of Maine to the southeast, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec to the northeast and ...
and Rhode Island.
German American population by state
![Americans with German Ancestry by state](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Americans_with_German_Ancestry_by_state.svg)
As of 2020, the distribution of German Americans across the 50 states and DC is as presented in the following table:
German-American communities
Today, most German Americans have assimilated to the point they no longer have readily identifiable ethnic communities, though there are still many metropolitan areas where German is the most reported ethnicity, such as
Cincinnati
Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...
, Northern Kentucky, Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, Columbus, Indianapolis,
Milwaukee
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...
, Minneapolis – Saint Paul,
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...
, and St. Louis, Missouri, St. Louis.
Communities with highest percentages of people of German ancestry
The 25 U.S. communities with the highest percentage of residents claiming German ancestry are:
# Monterey Township, Putnam County, Ohio, Monterey, Ohio 83.6%
# Granville Township, Mercer County, Ohio, Granville Township, Ohio 79.6%
# St. Henry, Ohio 78.5%
# Germantown Township, Clinton County, Illinois, Germantown Township, Illinois 77.6%
# Jackson Township, Dubois County, Indiana, Jackson, Indiana 77.3%
# Washington Township, Mercer County, Ohio, Washington Township, Ohio 77.2%
# Saint Rose Township, Clinton County, Illinois, St. Rose, Illinois 77.1%
# Butler Township, Mercer County, Ohio, Butler, Ohio 76.4%
# Marion Township, Mercer County, Ohio, Marion Township, Ohio 76.3%
# Jennings Township, Putnam County, Ohio, Jennings, Ohio and Germantown, Illinois, Germantown, Illinois (village) 75.6%
# Coldwater, Ohio 74.9%
# Jackson, Ohio 74.6%
# Union, Ohio 74.1%
# Minster, Ohio and Kalida, Ohio 73.5%
# Greensburg Township, Putnam County, Ohio, Greensburg, Ohio 73.4%
# Aviston, Illinois 72.5%
# Teutopolis, IL, Teutopolis, Illinois (village) 72.4%
# Teutopolis Township, Effingham County, Illinois, Teutopolis, Illinois (township) and Cottonwood Township, Brown County, Minnesota, Cottonwood, Minnesota 72.3%
# Dallas Township, Michigan, Dallas, Michigan 71.7%
# Gibson Township, Mercer County, Ohio, Gibson Township, Ohio 71.6%
# Marshfield, Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, Town of Marshfield, Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin 71.5%
# Santa Fe Township, Clinton County, Illinois, Santa Fe, Illinois 70.8%
# Recovery Township, Mercer County, Ohio, Recovery Township, Ohio 70.4%
# Brothertown, Wisconsin, Town of Brothertown, Wisconsin 69.9%
# Herman, Dodge County, Wisconsin, Town of Herman, Dodge County, Wisconsin 69.8%
Large communities with high percentages of people of German ancestry
Large U.S. communities with a high percentage of residents claiming German ancestry are:
# Bismarck, North Dakota 56.1%
# Dubuque, Iowa 43%
# St. Cloud, Minnesota 38.8%
# Fargo, North Dakota 31%
# Madison, Wisconsin 29%
# Green Bay, Wisconsin 29%
# Levittown, Pennsylvania 22%
# Erie, Pennsylvania 22%
# Cincinnati, Ohio 19.8%
# Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 19.7%
# Columbus, Ohio 19.4%
# Beaverton, Oregon 17%
Communities with the most residents born in Germany
The 25 U.S. communities with the most residents born in Germany are:
# Lely Resort, Florida 6.8%
# Pemberton Heights, New Jersey 5.0%
# Kempner, Texas 4.8%
# Cedar Glen Lakes, New Jersey 4.5%
# Alamogordo, New Mexico 4.3%
# Sunshine Acres, Florida and Leisureville, Florida 4.2%
# Wakefield, Kansas 4.1%
# Quantico, Virginia 4.0%
# Crestwood Village, New Jersey 3.8%
# Shandaken, New York 3.5%
# Vine Grove, Kentucky 3.4%
# Burnt Store Marina, Florida and Boles Acres, New Mexico 3.2%
# Allenhurst, Georgia, Security-Widefield, Colorado, Grandview Plaza, Kansas, and Fairbanks Ranch, California 3.0%
# Standing Pine, Mississippi 2.9%
# Millers Falls, Massachusetts, Marco Island, Florida, Daytona Beach Shores, Florida, Radcliff, Kentucky, Beverly Hills, Florida, Davilla, Texas, Annandale, New Jersey, and Holiday Heights, New Jersey 2.8%
# Fort Riley North, Kansas, Copperas Cove, Texas, and Cedar Glen West, New Jersey 2.7%
# Pelican Bay, Florida, Masaryktown, Florida, Highland Beach, Florida, Milford, Kansas, and Langdon, New Hampshire 2.6%
# Forest Home, New York
Southwest Bell, Texas Vineyards, Florida, South Palm Beach, Florida, and Basye-Bryce Mountain, Virginia 2.5%
# Sausalito, California, Bovina, New York, Fanwood, New Jersey, Fountain, Colorado, Rye Brook, New York and Desoto Lakes, Florida 2.4%
# Ogden, Kansas, Blue Berry Hill, Texas, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida, Sherman, Connecticut, Leisuretowne, New Jersey, Killeen, Texas, White House Station, New Jersey, Junction City, Kansas, Ocean Ridge, Florida, Viola, New York, Waynesville, Missouri and Mill Neck, New York 2.3%
# Level Plains, Alabama, Kingsbury, Nevada, Tega Cay, South Carolina, Margaretville, New York, White Sands, New Mexico, Stamford, New York, Point Lookout, New York, and Terra Mar, Florida 2.2%
# Rifton, New York, Rifton, Manasota Key, Florida, Del Mar, California
Yuba Foothills, California Daleville, Alabama. Tesuque, New Mexico, Plainsboro Center, New Jersey, Silver Ridge, New Jersey and Palm Beach, Florida 2.1%
# Oriental, North Carolina, Holiday City-Berkeley, New Jersey, North Sea, New York, Ponce Inlet, Florida, Montgomery County, Tennessee, Woodlawn-Dotsonville, Tennessee, West Hurley, New York, Littlerock, California, Felton, California, Laguna Woods, California, Leisure Village, New Jersey, Readsboro, Vermont, Nolanville, Texas, and Groveland-Big Oak Flat, California 2.0%
# Rotonda, Florida, Grayson, California, Shokan, New York, The Meadows, Florida
Southeast Comanche, Oklahoma Lincolndale, New York, Fort Polk South, Louisiana, and Townsend, Massachusetts 1.9%
# Pine Ridge, Citrus County, Florida, Pine Ridge, Florida, Boca Pointe, Florida, Rodney Village, Delaware, Palenville, New York, and Topsfield, Massachusetts 1.8%
Culture
The Germans worked hard to maintain and cultivate their language, especially through newspapers and classes in elementary and high schools. German Americans in many cities, such as
Milwaukee
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...
, brought their strong support of education, establishing German-language schools and teacher training seminaries (''Töchter-Institut'') to prepare students and teachers in German language training. By the late 19th century, the Germania Publishing Company was established in Milwaukee, a publisher of books, magazines, and newspapers in German.
"Germania" was the common term for German American neighborhoods and their organizations. ''Deutschtum'' was the term for transplanted German nationalism, both culturally and politically. Between 1875 and 1915, the German American population in the United States doubled, and many of its members insisted on maintaining their culture. German was used in local schools and churches, while numerous ''Vereine'', associations dedicated to literature, humor, gymnastics, and singing, sprang up in German American communities. German Americans tended to support the German government's actions, and, even after the United States entered World WarI, they often voted for antidraft and antiwar candidates. 'Deutschtum' in the United States disintegrated after 1918.
Music
Beginning in 1741, the German-speaking Moravian Church Settlements of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, Nazareth and Lititz, Pennsylvania, Lititz,
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
, and Wachovia, North Carolina, Wachovia in North Carolina had highly developed musical cultures. Choral music, Brass and String Music and Congregational singing were highly cultivated. The Moravian Church produced many composers and musicians. Joseph Haydn, Haydn's ''Creation'' had its American debut in Bethlehem in the early 19th century.
The spiritual beliefs of Johann Conrad Beissel (1690–1768) and the Ephrata Cloister—such as the asceticism and mysticism of this Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, group - are reflected in Beissel's treatises on music and hymns, which have been considered the beginning of America's musical heritage.
In most major cities, Germans took the lead in creating a musical culture, with popular bands, singing societies, operas and symphonic orchestras.
A small city, Wheeling, West Virginia could boast of 11 singing societies—Maennerchor, Harmonie, Liedertafel, Beethoven, Concordia, Liederkranz, Germania, Teutonia, Harmonie-Maennerchor, Arion, and Mozart. The first began in 1855; the last folded in 1961. An important aspect of Wheeling social life, these societies reflected various social classes and enjoyed great popularity until anti-German sentiments during World WarI and changing social values dealt them a death blow.
The Liederkranz, a German-American music society, played an important role in the integration of the German community into the life of Louisville, Kentucky. Started in 1848, the organization was strengthened by the arrival of German liberals after the failure of the revolution of that year. By the mid-1850s the Germans formed one-third of Louisville's population and faced nativist hostility organized in the Know-Nothing movement. Violent demonstrations forced the chorus to suppress publicity of its performances that included works by composer Richard Wagner. The Liederkranz suspended operations during the Civil War, but afterward grew rapidly, and was able to build a large auditorium by 1873. An audience of 8,000 that attended a performance in 1877 demonstrated that the Germans were an accepted part of Louisville life.
The Imperial government in Berlin promoted German culture in the U.S., especially music. A steady influx of German-born conductors, including Arthur Nikisch and Karl Muck, spurred the reception of German music in the United States, while German musicians seized on Victorian Americans' growing concern with 'emotion'. The performance of pieces such as Beethoven's ''Ninth Symphony'' established German serious music as the superior language of feeling.
Turners
Turners, Turner societies in the United States were first organized during the mid-19th century so German American immigrants could visit with one another and become involved in social and sports activities. The National Turnerbund, the head organization of the Turnvereine, started drilling members as in militia units in 1854. Nearly half of all Turners fought in the Civil War, mostly on the Union side, and a special group served as bodyguards for President Lincoln.
By the 1890s, Turners numbered nearly 65,000. At the turn of the 21st century, with the ethnic identity of European Americans in flux and Americanization a key element of immigrant life, there were few Turner groups, athletic events were limited, and non-Germans were members. A survey of surviving groups and members reflects these radical changes in the role of Turner societies and their marginalization in 21st-century American society, as younger German Americans tended not to belong, even in strongholds of German heritage in the Midwest.
Media
![Bundesarchiv Bild 137-005795, Deutsche Zeitungen in Nordamerika](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/Bundesarchiv_Bild_137-005795%2C_Deutsche_Zeitungen_in_Nordamerika.jpg)
As for any immigrant population, the development of a foreign-language press helped immigrants more easily learn about their new home, maintain connections to their native land, and unite immigrant communities. By the late 19th century, Germania published over 800 regular publications. The most prestigious daily newspapers, such as the ''New Yorker Staats-Zeitung'', the ''Anzeiger des Westens'' in St. Louis, and the ''Illinois Staats-Zeitung'' in Chicago, promoted middle-class values and encouraged German ethnic loyalty among their readership. The Germans were proud of their language, supported many German-language public and private schools, and conducted their church services in German. They published at least two-thirds of all foreign language newspapers in the U.S. The papers were owned and operated in the U.S., with no control from Germany. As Wittke emphasizes, press. it was "essentially an American press published in a foreign tongue". The papers reported on major political and diplomatic events involving Germany, with pride but from the viewpoint of its American readers. For example, during the latter half of the 19th century, at least 176 different German-language publications began operations in the city of Cincinnati alone. Many of these publications folded within a year, while a select few, such as the ''Cincinnati Freie Presse'', lasted nearly a century. Other cities experienced similar turnover among immigrant publications, especially from opinion press, which published little news and focused instead on editorial commentary.
By the end of the 19th century, there were over 800 German-language publications in the United States. German immigration was on the decline, and with subsequent generations integrating into English-speaking society, the German language press began to struggle.
[Dobbert, G.A. "German-Americans between New and Old Fatherland, 1870-1914." ''American Quarterly''. 19.4 (1967): 663-680.] The periodicals that managed to survive in immigrant communities faced an additional challenge with anti-German sentiment during World WarI and with the Espionage Act of 1917, Espionage and Sedition Act of 1918, Sedition Acts, which authorized censorship of foreign language newspapers. Prohibition in the United States, Prohibition also had a destabilizing impact on the German immigrant communities upon which the German-language publications relied.
By 1920, there were only 278 German language publications remaining in the country. After 1945, only a few publications have been started. One example is Hiwwe wie Driwwe (Kutztown, PA), the nation's only Pennsylvania German newspaper, which was established in 1997.
Athletics
Germans brought organized gymnastics to America, and were strong supporters of sports programs. They used sport both to promote ethnic identity and pride and to facilitate integration into American society. Beginning in the mid-19th century, the Turners, Turner movement offered exercise and sports programs, while also providing a social haven for the thousands of new German immigrants arriving in the United States each year. Another highly successful German sports organization was the Buffalo Germans basketball team, winners of 762 games (against only 85 losses) in the early years of the 20th century. These examples, and others, reflect the evolving place of sport in the assimilation and socialization of much of the German-American population. Notable German Americans include Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, both native German speakers.
Religion
![US census map of Lutheran churches - 1850](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/US_census_map_of_Lutheran_churches_-_1850.jpg)
German immigrants who arrived before the 19th century tended to have been members of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches in Germany, and created the Lutheran Synods of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New York. The largest Lutheran denominations in the U.S. today—the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod—are all descended from churches started by German immigrants among others. Calvinist Germans founded the Reformed Church in the United States (especially in New York and Pennsylvania), and the Evangelical Synod of North America (strongest in the Midwest), which is now part of the United Church of Christ. Many immigrants joined different churches from those that existed in Germany. Protestants often joined the United Methodist Church, Methodist church.
In the 1740s, Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, Count Nicolas von Zinzendorf tried to unite all the German-speaking Christians—(Lutheran, Reformed, and Separatists)—into one "Church of God in the Spirit". The Moravian Church in America is one of the results of this effort, as are the many "Union" churches in rural Pennsylvania.
Before 1800, communities of
Amish
The Amish (; pdc, Amisch; german: link=no, Amische), formally the Old Order Amish, are a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christian church fellowships with Swiss German and Alsatian origins. They are closely related to Mennonite churc ...
,
Mennonite
Mennonites are groups of Anabaptist Christian church communities of denominations. The name is derived from the founder of the movement, Menno Simons (1496–1561) of Friesland. Through his writings about Reformed Christianity during the Radi ...
s, Schwarzenau Brethren and Moravian Church#Missions, Moravians had formed and are still in existence today. The Old Order Amish and a majority of the Old Order Mennonites still speak dialects of German, including Pennsylvania German, informally known as
Pennsylvania Dutch. The Amish, who were originally from southern Germany and Switzerland, arrived in Pennsylvania during the early 18th century. Amish immigration to the United States reached its peak between the years 1727 and 1770. Religious freedom was perhaps the most pressing cause for Amish immigration to Pennsylvania, which became known as a haven for persecuted religious groups.
The Hutterites are another example of a group of German Americans who continue a lifestyle similar to that of their ancestors. Like the Amish, they fled persecution for their religious beliefs, and came to the United States between 1874 and 1879. Today, Hutterites mostly reside in Montana, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, and the western provinces of Canada. Hutterites continue to speak Hutterite German. Most are able to understand Standard German in addition to their dialect.
The German speaking Russian Mennonites, "Russian" Mennonites migrated during the same time as the Hutterites, but assimilated relatively quickly in the United States, whereas groups of "Russian" Mennonites in Canada resisted assimilation.
Immigrants from Germany in the mid-to-late-19th century brought many different religions with them. The most numerous were Lutheran or Catholic Church in the United States, Catholic, although the Lutherans were themselves split among different groups. The more conservative Lutherans comprised the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. Other Lutherans formed various synods, most of which merged with Scandinavian-based synods in 1988, forming the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Catholic Germans started immigrating in large numbers in the mid to latter 19th century, spurred in particular by the ''Kulturkampf''.
Some 19th-century immigrants, especially the "Forty-Eighters", were secular, rejecting formal religion. About 250,000 German Jews had arrived by the 1870s, and they sponsored reform synagogues in many small cities across the country. About two million Central and Eastern European Jews arrived from the 1880s to 1924, bringing more traditional religious practices.
Language
After two or three generations, most German Americans adopted mainstream American customs — some of which they heavily influenced — and switched their language to English. As one scholar concludes, "The overwhelming evidence... indicates that the German-American school was a bilingual one much (perhaps a whole generation or more) earlier than 1917, and that the majority of the pupils may have been English-dominant bilinguals from the early 1880s on." By 1914, the older members attended German-language church services, while younger ones attended English services (in Lutheran, Evangelical and Catholic churches). In German parochial schools, the children spoke English among themselves, though some of their classes were in German. In 1917–18, after the American entry into World WarI on the side of the Allies of World War I, Allies, nearly all German language instruction ended, as did most German-language church services.
About 1.5 million Americans speak German at home, according to the 2000 census. From 1860 to 1917, German was widely spoken in German neighborhoods; see German in the United States. There is a false claim, called the Muhlenberg legend, that German was almost the official language of the U.S. There was never any such proposal. The U.S. has no official language, but use of German was strongly discouraged during World WarI and fell out of daily use in many places.
There were fierce battles in Wisconsin and Illinois around 1890 regarding proposals to stop the use of German as the primary language in public and parochial schools. The Bennett Law was a highly controversial state law passed in Wisconsin in 1889 that required the use of English to teach major subjects in all public and private elementary and high schools. It affected the state's many German-language private schools (and some Norwegian schools), and was bitterly resented by German American communities. The German Catholics and Lutherans each operated large networks of parochial schools in the state. Because the language used in the classroom was German, the law meant the teachers would have to be replaced with bilingual teachers, and in most cases shut down. The Germans formed a coalition between Catholics and Lutherans, under the leadership of the Democratic Party, and the language issue produced a landslide for the Democrats, as Republicans dropped the issue until World WarI. By 1917, almost all schools taught in English, but courses in German were common in areas with large German populations. These courses were permanently dropped.
Assimilation
The apparent disappearance of German American identity
German Americans are no longer a conspicuous ethnic group. As Melvin G. Holli puts it, "Public expression of German ethnicity is nowhere proportionate to the number of German Americans in the nation's population. Almost nowhere are German Americans as a group as visible as many smaller groups. Two examples suffice to illustrate this point: when one surveys the popular television scene of the past decade, one hears Yiddish humor done by comedians; one sees Polish, Greek, and East European detective heroes; Italian-Americans in situation comedies; and blacks such as the Jeffersons and Huxtables. But one searches in vain for quintessentially German-American characters or melodramas patterned after German-American experiences.... A second example of the virtual invisibility is that, though German Americans have been one of the largest ethnic groups in the Chicago area (numbering near one-half million between 1900 and 1910), no museum or archive exists to memorialize that fact. On the other hand, many smaller groups such as Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, Jews, and others have museums, archives, and exhibit halls dedicated to their immigrant forefathers".
But this inconspicuousness was not always the case. By 1910, German Americans had created their own distinctive, vibrant, prosperous German-language communities, referred to collectively as "Germania". According to historian Walter Kamphoefner, a "number of big cities introduced German into their public school programs".
Indianapolis,
Cincinnati
Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...
, Cleveland, Ohio, Cleveland and other cities "had what we now call two-way immersion programs: school taught half in German, half in English".
This was a tradition which continued "all the way down to World WarI".
According to Kamphoefner, German "was in a similar position as the Spanish language is in the 20th and 21st century"; it "was by far the most widespread foreign language, and whoever was the largest group was at a definite advantage in getting its language into the public sphere".
Kamphoefner has come across evidence that as late as 1917, a German version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was still being sung in public schools in Indianapolis.
Cynthia Moothart O'Bannon, writing about Fort Wayne, Indiana, states that before World WarI "German was the primary language in the homes, churches and parochial schools"
of German American settlers. She states that "Many street signs were in German. (Main Street, for instance, was Haupt Strasse.) A large portion of local industry and commercial enterprises had at its roots German tooling and emigres. (An entire German town was moved to Fort Wayne when Wayne Knitting Mills opened.) Mayors, judges, firefighters and other community leaders had strong German ties. Social and sporting clubs and Germania Park in St. Joseph Township provided outlets to engage in traditional German activities".
She goes on to state that "The cultural influences were so strong, in fact, that the Chicago Tribune in 1893 declared Fort Wayne a 'most German town'."
Melvin G. Holli states that "No continental foreign-born group had been so widely and favorably received in the United States, or had won such high marks from its hosts as had the Germans before World WarI. Some public opinion surveys conducted before the war showed German Americans were even more highly regarded than immigrants from the mother culture, England".
Holli states that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra once "had so many German-American musicians that the conductor often addressed them in the German language",
and he states that "No ethnic theater in Chicago glittered with such a classy repertory as did the German-American theater, or served to introduce so many European classical works to American audiences".
Impact of World War I on German Americans
The transition to the English language was abrupt, forced by federal, state and local governments, and by public opinion, when the U.S. was at war with Germany in 1917–18. After 1917, the German language was seldom heard in public; most newspapers and magazines closed; churches and parochial schools switched to English. Melvin G. Holli states, "In 1917, the Missouri Synod's Lutheran Church conference minutes appeared in English for the first time, and the synod's new constitution dropped its insistence on using the language of Martin Luther, Luther only and instead suggested bilingualism. Dozens of Lutheran schools also dropped instruction in the German language. English-language services also intruded themselves into parishes where German had been the ''lingua franca''. Whereas only 471 congregations nationwide held English services in 1910, the number preaching in English in the synod skyrocketed to 2,492 by 1919. The German Evangelical Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and other states also anglicized its name by dropping German from the title".
Writing about Fort Wayne, Indiana, Cynthia Moothart O'Bannon states that, in the First World War, "Local churches were forced to discontinue sermons in German, schools were pressured to stop teaching in German, and the local library director was ordered to purchase no more books written in German. The library shelves also were purged of English-language materials deemed sympathetic to or neutral on Germany. Anti-German sentiment forced the renaming of several local institutions. Teutonia Building, Loan & Savings became Home Loan & Savings, and The German-American bank became Lincoln National Bank & Trust Co."
She continues that "in perhaps the most obvious bend to prevailing trends, Berghoff Brewery changed its motto from "A very German brew" to "A very good brew," according to "Fort Wayne: A Most German Town," a documentary produced by local public television station WFWA, Channel 39".
Film critic Roger Ebert wrote how "I could hear the pain in my German-American father's voice as he recalled being yanked out of Lutheran school during World WarI and forbidden by his immigrant parents ever to speak German again".
Melvin G. Holli states, regarding Chicago, that "After the Great War it became clear that no ethnic group was so de-ethnicized in its public expression by a single historic event as German Americans. While Polish Americans, Lithuanian Americans, and other subject nationalities underwent a great consciousness raising, German ethnicity fell into a protracted and permanent slump. The war damaged public expression of German ethnic, linguistic, and cultural institutions almost beyond repair".
He states that, after the war, German ethnicity "would never regain its prewar public acclaim, its larger-than-life public presence, with its symbols, rituals, and, above all, its large numbers of people who took pride in their Teutonic ancestry and enjoyed the role of Uncle Sam's favored adopted son".
He states "A key indicator of the decline of "Deutschtum" in Chicago was the census: the number identifying themselves to the census-taker as German-born plummeted from 191,000 in 1910 to 112,000 in 1920. This drop far exceeds the natural mortality rate or the number who might be expected to move. Self-identifiers had found it prudent to claim some nationality other than German. To claim German nationality had become too painful an experience".
Along similar lines, Terrence G. Wiley states that, in Nebraska, "around 14 percent of the population had identified itself as being of German-origin in 1910; however, only 4.4 percent made comparable assertions in 1920. In Wisconsin, the decline in percentage of those identifying themselves as Germans was even more obvious. The 1920 census reported only 6.6. percent of the population as being of German-origin, as opposed to nearly 29 percent ten years earlier... These statistics led Burnell... to conclude that: "No other North American ethnic group, past or present, has attempted so forcefully to officially conceal their... ethnic origins. One must attribute this reaction to the wave of repression that swept the Continent and enveloped anyone with a German past"".
The Catholic high schools were deliberately structured to commingle ethnic groups so as to promote ethnic (but not interreligious) intermarriage. German-speaking taverns, beer gardens and saloons were all shut down by Prohibition; those that reopened in 1933 spoke English.
Impact of World War II on German Americans
![Anastasy Vonsyatsky marching with the German American Bund](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Anastasy_Vonsyatsky_marching_with_the_German_American_Bund.jpg)
While its impact appears to be less well-known and studied than the impact which World WarI had on German Americans, World WarII was likewise difficult for them and likewise had the impact of forcing them to drop distinctive German characteristics and assimilate into the general US culture. According to Melvin G. Holli, "By 1930, some German American leaders in Chicago felt, as Dr. Leslie Tischauser put it, 'the damage done by the wartime experience had been largely repaired'. The German language was being taught in the schools again; the German theater still survived; and German Day celebrations were drawing larger and larger crowds. Although the assimilation process had taken its toll of pre-1914 German immigrants, a smaller group of newer postwar arrivals had developed a vocal if not impolitic interest in the rebuilding process in Germany under National Socialism. As the 1930s moved on, Hitler's brutality and Nazi excesses made Germanism once again suspect. The rise of Nazism, as Luebke notes, 'transformed German ethnicity in America into a source of social and psychological discomfort, if not distress. The overt expression of German-American opinion consequently declined, and in more recent years, virtually disappeared as a reliable index of political attitudes...'"
Holli goes on to state that "The pain increased during the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Congressman Martin Dies Jr., Martin Dies held public hearings about the menace of Nazi subversives and spies among the German Americans. In 1940, the Democratic party's attack on anti-war elements as disloyal and pro-Nazi, and the advent of the war itself, made German ethnicity too heavy a burden to bear. As Professor Tischauser wrote, "The notoriety gained by those who supported the German government between 1933 and 1941 cast a pall over German-Americans everywhere. Leaders of the German-American community would have great difficulty rebuilding an ethnic consciousness... Few German-Americans could defend what Hitler... had done to millions of people in pursuit of the 'final solution', and the wisest course for German-Americans was to forget any attachment to the German half of their heritage.""
A notable example which highlights the generational effect of this de-germanization on German-American cultural identity is Donald Trump, US President Donald Trump’s erroneous assertion of Swedish heritage as late as 1987 in The Art of the Deal.
This error stems from Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, who was of German heritage but attempted to pass himself off as Swedish amid the anti-German sentiment sparked by World WarII, a claim which would continue to mislead his family for decades.
By the 1940s, Germania had largely vanished outside some rural areas and the Germans were thoroughly assimilated. According to Melvin G. Holli, by the end of World WarII, German Americans "were ethnics without any visible national or local leaders. Not even politicians would think of addressing them explicitly as an ethnic constituency as they would say, Polish Americans, Jewish Americans, or African Americans."
Holli states that "Being on the wrong side in two wars had a devastating and long-term negative impact on the public celebration of German-American ethnicity".
Historians have tried to explain what became of the German Americans and their descendants. Kazal (2004) looks at Germans in Philadelphia, focusing on four ethnic subcultures: middle-class ''Vereinsdeutsche'', working-class socialists, Lutherans, and Catholics. Each group followed a somewhat distinctive path toward assimilation. Lutherans, and the better situated ''Vereinsdeutsche'' with whom they often overlapped, after World WarI abandoned the last major German characteristics and redefined themselves as old stock or as "Nordic" Americans, stressing their colonial roots in Pennsylvania and distancing themselves from more recent immigrants. On the other hand, working-class and Catholic Germans, groups that heavily overlapped, lived and worked with Irish Americans, Irish and other European ethnics; they also gave up German characteristics but came to identify themselves as White ethnics, distancing themselves above all from African American recent arrivals in nearby neighborhoods. Well before World WarI, women in particular were becoming more and more involved in a mass consumer culture that lured them out of their German-language neighborhood shops and into English-language downtown department stores. The 1920s and 1930s brought English-language popular culture via movies and radio that drowned out the few surviving German language venues.
[Russell A. Kazal, ''Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity'' (2004).]
Factors making German-Americans susceptible to assimilation
Kazal points out that German Americans have not had an experience that is especially typical of immigrant groups. "Certainly, in a number of ways, the German-American experience was idiosyncratic. No other large immigrant group was subjected to such strong, sustained pressure to abandon its ethnic identity for an American one. None was so divided internally, a characteristic that made German Americans especially vulnerable to such pressure. Among the larger groups that immigrated in the country after 1830, none - despite regional variations - appears to have muted its ethnic identity to so great an extent."
This quote from Kazal identifies both external pressures on German Americans and internal dividedness among them as reasons for their high level of assimilation.
Regarding the external pressures, Kazal writes: "The pressure imposed on German Americans to forsake their ethnic identity was extreme in both nature and duration. No other ethnic group saw its 'adoptive fatherland' twice enter a world war against its country of origin. To this stigma, the Third Reich added the lasting one of the Holocaust. In her study of ethnic identity in the 1980s, sociologist Mary Waters noted that the 'effect of the Nazi movement and World WarII was still quite strong' in shaping 'popular perceptions of the German-American character', enough so that some individuals of mixed background often would acknowledge only the non-German part of their ancestry."
Kazal contrasts this experience with the experiences of the Japanese, Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Italians, east European Jews, and Irish. "Japanese Americans, of course, suffered far more during the Second World War",
but until at least the 1950s, the pressure on Japanese Americans "ran toward exclusion from, rather than inclusion in, the nation".
"The state and many ordinary European Americans refused to recognize Asians as potentially American. In contrast, they pressured Germans to accept precisely that American identity in place of a German one".
Kazal goes on to state "The burden of "enemy" status made those pressures far greater for Germans than for other European ethnic groups. To some extent, American intervention in World WarI actually helped fuel ethnic nationalism in the United States among Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Italians, and east European Jews, who felt their desires for existing or prospective homelands stood to gain from an Allied victory. Indeed, some historians have depicted the following decade as one when immigrants transcended local or regional homeland affiliations to craft or further consolidate national identities as Poles, Czechs, and Italians. Such groups escaped the fury of "100 percent Americanism" during the war, in part because of their obvious stake in the defeat of the Central Powers".
As for Irish Americans, Kazal states that the lack of enthusiasm of many of them for helping England made them "vulnerable to the wartime "antihyphen" climate",
but that "Irish nationalist activity intensified during and immediately after that war, as many Irish Americans became swept up in the events leading to the creation of the Irish Free State",
and that "It made a difference for the long-term viability of Irish-American identity that the Irish homeland not only did not go to war with the United States but, in fact, emerged during the interwar years as a sovereign nation".
Kazal then goes on to discuss the internal dividedness. He writes: "German-American identity fell victim not only to a peculiar set of events, but also to an extraordinarily high level of internal diversity. All ethnic groups have internal divides, whether of class, religion, gender, politics, or homeland region. What distinguished German America was that it incorporated not just some but ''all'' of these divisions. Irish Americans, for example, had lost their status as primarily a proletarian group by 1900, yet they were united by religion and politics. "Irish American" had come to mean Irish Catholic; the vast majority of Irish Americans subscribed to some form of Irish nationalism conflated with American patriotism; and Irish-American voters were overwhelmingly Democrats.
The power of this synthesis, Kerby Miller argued, explains the survival of Irish-American identity despite the ebbing of organised Irish-American nationalism after the Free State's founding. For German Americans, religion and party politics were sources of division rather than of unity".
Kazal goes on to state that "The subcultures of German America, meanwhile, had ample opportunity for contact, however testy, with non-German counterparts. The latter beckoned as destinations when the cost of being German-American rose too high".
It is not just Kazal who has pointed out the internal dividedness of the German American community. Kathleen Neils Conzen has pointed it out; David Peterson states that Conzen, "along with many others, concludes that German-Americans' heterogeneity, particularly in religion, hampered their ability to build socially and politically stable ethnic communities",
and that Conzen "stresses that German Americans assimilated relatively rapidly and that their diversity played a key role in that assimilation".
(Conzen is also drawn upon by Joy Kristina Adams, who cites Conzen when she (Adams) states that "The diversity and size of the German settlements made them susceptible to long-term Americanization by fostering factionalism, increasing contacts between Germans and non-Germans, and weakening unified leadership".) The ''Encyclopedia of the Great Plains'' also stresses the internal dividedness, stating "One of the distinguishing characteristics of the German population in North America (especially in comparison to other immigrant groups) has been its relative degree of cultural diversity, reflected especially in the number of Christian denominations to which Germans belonged. In part this reflects patterns that had developed over centuries in Germany, whose population came to include nearly every variety of Christianity–from Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed groups to more radical Anabaptist pietistic movements such as Amish, Mennonites, Schwenkfelders, and the Moravian church. It is not surprising, then, that nearly all of these denominations were represented among the German immigrant population in North America."
Robert Paul McCaffery points out that "Despite their numbers... and unlike many immigrant groups, Germans never united as a powerful ethnic block. Religious disputes brought from the old country prevented them from uniting in the new. The two strongest denominations, Catholics and Lutherans, could not come together; and the Free Thinkers distrusted and shunned them both."
"These divisions ran so deep that German-Americans could neither unite to fend off attacks engendered by World WarI, nor elect German candidates for political office".
McCaffery states that "Discussions of the disunity of the Germans are many",
giving a work by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and a work by Kathleen Neils Conzen as examples,
and he states that Leslie V. Tischauser "maintains that neither World WarI, political questions of importance to Germans, nor German candidates could unite the German-Americans of Chicago".
Jason Todd Baker, meanwhile, writes that "Divided by imported regional prejudices, religious differences, political affiliations, and spread in pockets across the city, the Germans in nineteenth-century
St. Louis
St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...
comprised the city's largest immigrant ethnicity and possibly its least cohesive".
He goes on to state that German Americans in St. Louis "could not be relied upon to do much of anything as a group. St. Louis served (and still does) as the seat of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, a conservative American Lutheran confession, and their local strength led to friction with Germans of other faiths. These Lutherans did not traffic much with the sizable German Catholic population of the city, who often shared their houses of worship and political stances with the Irish. The small rabbinical German Jewish community remained insular. The Freethinkers, atheists, socialists, et al., had little use for any of these groups. In addition, the Germans, while heavily concentrated in a few pockets of north and south St. Louis, were spread across the city proper and into the larger countryside".
And according to the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, "The diversity of religious expression among German-speaking immigrants was paralleled by a high degree of heterogeneity stemming from differences in regional and linguistic origins. This situation differed from that of other nineteenth-century immigrant groups, notably the Irish, but also Italians and people of other European backgrounds. The resulting lack of a unified and clearly definable German-American community explains in part why only few Americans, including those of German descent, have any idea when Steuben Day or German-American Day falls, whereas the Irish St. Patrick's Day is one of America's most popular celebrations, and Columbus Day, named after the Italian explorer, is a federal holiday".
Persistence of German language
Despite the remarkable level of language assimilation reached by German Americans, distinct German usage survived well into the mid-to-late-20th century in some places. Writing about the town of Hustisford, Wisconsin, Jennifer Ludden discusses Mel Grulke, who was born in 1941, with German his first language at home; "Grulke's great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1880s, yet three generations later, his farmer parents still spoke German at home, attended German language church services and chatted in German with shopkeepers when they brought their farm eggs into town to sell".
To this day, German speakers can be found in the United States among long-established Anabaptist groups – the Amish, Old Order Amish and most Old Order Mennonites speak
Pennsylvania Dutch (or Bernese German or Alsatian language, Alsatian by a minority of Amish) along with High German to various degrees (though they are generally fluent in English). All Hutterites speak Hutterite German and many Russian Mennonite, "Russian" Mennonites speak Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect coming originally from the area around Danzig. The three Amish dialects as well as Hutterite German are still learned by all children of the group, whereas Plautdietsch-speakers tend much more to switch to English. Another group of German-speakers can be found in the Amana Colonies in Iowa; according to the website Statistical Atlas, all the residents of East Amana, Iowa, East Amana speak German at home, and only 67.7% can speak English "very well".
It has been shown that cultural differences between the attitudes towards farming of German Americans, on the one hand, and of British-ancestry "Yankees", on the other, lasted into the 1980s and have to some extent lasted into the 21st century; German Americans have tended to see farming in a more family-oriented manner than Yankees.
German-American influence
Cuisine and beers
The influence of German cuisine is seen in the cuisine of the United States throughout the country, especially regarding pastries, meats and sausages, and above all, beer. Hot dog, Frankfurters (or "wieners", originating from Frankfurt am Main and Vienna, respectively), hamburgers, bratwurst, sauerkraut, and strudel are common dishes. German bakers introduced the pretzel, which is popular across the United States. Germans introduced America to lager, the most-produced beer style in the United States, and have been the dominant ethnic group in the beer industry since 1850.
The oldest extant brewery in the United States is Yuengling, D. G. Yuengling & Son of Pottsville, Pennsylvania (approximately 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia), founded in 1829 by an immigrant from Aldingen in what is today Baden-Württemberg; the brewery's flagship product remains a 19th-century German-style amber lager.
[''BeerHistory.com''.]
Yuengling of Pottsville: America's Oldest Brewery
. Retrieved December 8, 2006. By the late 19th century,
Milwaukee
Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...
, with a large population of German origin, was once the home to four of the world's largest breweries owned by ethnic Germans (Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, and Miller) and was the number one beer producing city in the world for many years. Almost half of all current beer sales in the United States can be attributed to German immigrants, Capt. A. Pabst, Eberhard Anheuser, and Adolphus Busch, who founded Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, Missouri, St. Louis in 1860.
Later German immigrants figured prominently in the rebirth of craft brews following Prohibition in the United States, Prohibition, culminating in the microbrewery, microbrew movement that swept the U.S. beginning in the late 1980s.
Festivals
German and German-American celebrations, such as Oktoberfest, Carnival in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, Rhenish Carnival,
German-American Day, and Von Steuben Day are held regularly throughout the country. One of the largest is the
German-American Steuben Parade
Von Steuben Day is a holiday traditionally held on a weekend in mid-September (von Steuben was born September 17), celebrating the Prussian-born Baron Friedrich von Steuben, who arrived in the United States as a volunteer offering his services t ...
in New York City, held every third Saturday in September. There are also major annual events in Chicago's Lincoln Square, Chicago, Lincoln Square neighborhood, a traditional a center of the city's German population, in
Cincinnati
Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wit ...
, where its annual ''Oktoberfest Zinzinnati''
is the largest Oktoberfest outside of Germany and in Milwaukee, which celebrates its German heritage with an annual German Fest.
Many of the immigrants from Germany and other German-speaking countries came to Pennsylvania to what was then "Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Allegheny City" (now part of the North Side (Pittsburgh), North Side of the City of
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...
). So many German speakers arrived, the area became known as "East Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Deutschtown" and has been revived as such. Within Deutschtown and since 1854, Teutonia Maennerchor Hall, The Teutonia Männerchor has been promoting and furthering German cultural traditions.
Skat (card game), Skat, the most popular card game in Germany, is also played in areas of the United States with large German American populations, such as Wisconsin and
Texas
Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...
.
Education
The following German international schools are in operation in the United States, serving German citizens, Americans, and other U.S. residents:
* German International School Boston
* German School New York
* German American School of Portland
* German International School of Silicon Valley
* German School Washington, D.C.
Notable people
German Americans have been influential in almost every field in American society, including science, architecture, business, sports, entertainment, theology, politics, and the military.
German American general/flag military officers Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, Baron von Steuben, George Armstrong Custer, John Pershing, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Chester W. Nimitz, Carl Andrew Spaatz and Norman Schwarzkopf commanded the United States Army in the American Revolutionary War,
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states ...
, Indian Wars,
World WarI, World War II, World WarII, and the Persian Gulf War, respectively.
German Americans were famous American politicians, including
Carl Schurz, Friedrich Hecker, Frederick Muhlenberg, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and John Boehner. Henry Kissinger was a famous diplomat,
Many German Americans have played a prominent role in American industry and business, including Henry J. Heinz (H. J. Heinz Company), Frank Seiberling (Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company), Walt Disney (Disney), John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), William Boeing (The Boeing Company and United Airlines), Walter Chrysler (Chrysler Corporation), Fred Duesenberg, Frederick and August Duesenberg (Duesenberg, Duesenberg Automobile Corporation), Studebaker, Studebaker brothers (Studebaker, Studebaker Automobile Corporation), George Westinghouse (Westinghouse Electric Corporation),
Levi Strauss
Levi Strauss (; born Löb Strauß ; February 26, 1829 – September 26, 1902) was a German-born American businessman who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His firm of Levi Strauss & Co. (Levi's) began in 1853 in San Francisc ...
(Levi Strauss & Co.), Charles Guth (PepsiCo Inc.), Bill Gates (Microsoft, Microsoft Corporation), Jawed Karim (YouTube), Elon Musk (SolarCity, SpaceX and Tesla Motors), James L. Kraft (Kraft Foods Inc.), Henry E. Steinway (Steinway & Sons), Charles Pfizer (Pfizer, Inc.),
John Jacob Astor
John Jacob Astor (born Johann Jakob Astor; July 17, 1763 – March 29, 1848) was a German-American businessman, merchant, real estate mogul, and investor who made his fortune mainly in a fur trade monopoly, by History of opium in China, smuggl ...
(Waldorf Astoria Hotels and Resorts), Conrad Hilton (Hilton Hotels & Resorts), Guggenheim family (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation), (Guggenheim Partners), Marcus Goldman and Samuel Sachs (The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.),
Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. ( ) was an American global financial services firm founded in 1847. Before filing for bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman was the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States (behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, a ...
(Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.), Charles Diebold (Diebold Nixdorf), Bernard Kroger (Kroger), Carl Laemmle (Universal Studios), Marcus Loew (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.), Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.), Herman Hollerith (International Business Machines Corporation, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)), Steve Jobs (Apple Inc.), Michael Dell (Dell Inc.), Eric Schmidt (Google Inc. and Alphabet Inc.), Peter Thiel (PayPal, PayPal Inc.), Adolph Simon Ochs and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (''The New York Times''), Charles Bergstresser (''The Wall Street Journal''), Al Neuharth (''USA Today''), Eugene Meyer (financier), Eugene Meyer (''The Washington Post'') etc.
German Americans were pioneers and dominated beer brewing for much of American history, beginning with breweries founded in the 19th century by German immigrants August Schell (August Schell Brewing Company), Christian Moerlein (Christian Moerlein Brewing Co.), Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch (Anheuser-Busch, currently part of AB InBev), Adolph Coors (Molson Coors Brewing Company), Frederick Miller (Miller Brewing Company), Frederick Pabst (Pabst Brewing Company), Stroh's, Bernhard Stroh (Stroh Brewery Company) and Joseph Schlitz (Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company).
[Amy Mittelman, ''Brewing Battles: A History of American Beer'' (2007)]
Some, such as Brooklyn Bridge engineer John A. Roebling and architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, left behind visible landmarks.
Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Linus Pauling,
John Peter Zenger
John Peter Zenger (October 26, 1697 – July 28, 1746) was a German printer and journalist in New York City. Zenger printed ''The New York Weekly Journal''. He was accused of libel in 1734 by William Cosby, the royal governor of New York, but t ...
, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Weizenbaum set intellectual landmarks.
After World War II, Wernher von Braun, and most of the leading engineers from the former German V-2 rocket base at Peenemünde, were brought to the U.S. They contributed decisively to the development of U.S. military rockets, as well as rockets for the NASA space program and the initiation of the Apollo program to land on the Moon. Similarly, fellow German aviation technologist Siegfried Knemeyer, the former top aviation technologist within the Reich Air Ministry during World WarII, was brought to the United States through a similar path to von Braun, and served as a civilian employee of the USAF for over twenty years. Neil Armstrong was the first human to land on the moon.
There were many celebrities. Bruce Willis, George Eyser, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicklaus,Michael Keaton, Dale Earnhardt, Doris Day, Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff (Doris Day), Grace Kelly, Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Johnny Weissmuller, Ernst Lubitsch, Walter Damrosch, John Denver, Henry John Deutschendorf (John Denver), John Kay (musician), John Kay, Heidi Klum, Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando,Nicole Kidman, Kim Basinger, Kevin Costner, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, David Hasselhoff, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt,Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin James, Kevin George Knipfing (Kevin James) became prominent athletes, actors, film directors or artists.
German-American presidents
There have been three presidents whose fathers were of German descent: Dwight D. Eisenhower (original family name ''Eisenhauer'' and maternal side is also German/Swiss), Herbert Hoover (original family name ''Huber''), and Donald Trump (whose paternal grandparents, Frederick Trump and Elizabeth Christ Trump immigrated from Kallstadt in 1902).
Presidents with maternal German ancestry include Harry Truman, whose maternal grandfather Solomon Young was a descendant of Johann Georg Jung and Hans Michael Gutknecht, who emigrated from Germany together in 1752, Richard Nixon, Richard Milhous Nixon, whose maternal ancestors were Germans who anglicized ''Melhausen'' to Milhous, and Barack Obama, whose maternal family's ancestry includes German immigrants from the South German town of Besigheim and from Bischwiller in the
Alsace
Alsace (, ; ; Low Alemannic German/ gsw-FR, Elsàss ; german: Elsass ; la, Alsatia) is a cultural region and a territorial collectivity in eastern France, on the west bank of the upper Rhine next to Germany and Switzerland. In 2020, it had ...
region that is nowadays part of France; both families came to America around 1750. Lyndon B. Johnson, Grover Cleveland, George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush and Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Jr had at least one German ancestor, but they did not emphasize it.
See also
* Americans in Germany
* Anti-German sentiment, worldwide and USA
* German Canadians
* German-American Heritage Foundation of the USA
* Germany–United States relations, covers diplomacy, trade and culture
* German language in the United States
* Hyphenated American
* Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, religious denomination formed mostly from German Americans
* Nativism (politics) in the United States#Anti-German
*
Pennsylvania Dutch, Germans who came to colonial Pennsylvania
Explanatory notes
References
Further reading
* Adams, Willi Paul.
The German-Americans: An Ethnic Experience' (1993).
* Bade, Klaus J. "From emigration to immigration: The German experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." ''Central European History'' 28.4 (1995): 507–535.
* Bade, Klaus J. "German emigration to the United States and continental immigration to Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." ''Central European History'' 13.4 (1980): 348–377.
* Bank, Michaela. ''Women of Two Countries: German-American Women, Women's Rights and Nativism, 1848–1890'' (Berghahn, 2012).
* Baron, Frank, "Abraham Lincoln and the German Immigrants: Turners and Forty-Eighters," ''Yearbook of German-American Studies,'' 4 (Supplemental Issue 2012), 1–254.
* Barry, Colman J. ''The Catholic Church and German Americans''. (1953).
* Bronner, Simon J. and Joshua R. Brown, eds. ''Pennsylvania Germans: An Interpretive Encyclopedia'' (: Johns Hopkins UP, 2017), xviii, 554 pp.
* Brancaforte, Charlotte L., ed. ''The German Forty-Eighters in the United States''. (1989).
* Bungert, Heike, Cora Lee Kluge, & Robert C. Ostergren (eds.). ''Wisconsin German Land and Life''. Madison, Wis.: Max Kade Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006.
* Coburn, Carol K. ''Life at Four Corners: Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran Community, 1868–1945''. (1992).
* Conzen, Kathleen Neils. "Germans" in Stephan Thernstrom, Thernstrom, Stephan; Orlov, Ann; Oscar Handlin, Handlin, Oscar, eds
''Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups'' Harvard University Press. . (1980). pp. 405–425.
* Conzen, Kathleen Neils. ''Germans in Minnesota''. (2003).
* Conzen, Kathleen Neils. ''Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836–1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City''. (1976).
* DeWitt, Petra. ''Degrees of Allegiance: Harassment and Loyalty in Missouri's German-American Community during World WarI'' (Ohio University Press, 2012).
* Dobbert, Guido A.
German-Americans between New and Old Fatherland, 1870–1914. ''American Quarterly'' 19 (1967): 663–680.
* Efford, Alison Clark. ''German Immigrants: Race and Citizenship in the Civil War Era.'' New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
* Ellis, M. and P. Panayi. "German Minorities in World WarI: A Comparative Study of Britain and the USA", ''Ethnic and Racial Studies'' 17 (April 1994): 238–259.
* Emmerich, Alexander. ''
John Jacob Astor
John Jacob Astor (born Johann Jakob Astor; July 17, 1763 – March 29, 1848) was a German-American businessman, merchant, real estate mogul, and investor who made his fortune mainly in a fur trade monopoly, by History of opium in China, smuggl ...
and the First Great American Fortune''. (2013); Astor (1763-1848) came to the US in 1783
* Ernst, Robert. ''Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863'' (1949), detailed coverage of Germans and Irish.
* Faust, Albert Bernhardt. ''The German Element in the United States with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence''. 2 vol (1909)
vol. 1 vol. 2* Fogleman, Aaron. ''Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775'' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996
online*
German-Americans: The silent minority. ''The Economist'' February 7, 2015, With a statistical map by counties
* German Historical Institute.
Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present'. (2010, updated continually)
* Gross, Stephen John. "Handing down the farm: Values, strategies, and outcomes in inheritance practices among rural German Americans", ''Journal of Family History'', (1996) 21: 2, 192–217.
* Grubb, Farley. '' German Immigration and Servitude in America, 1709–1920'' (Routledge Explorations in Economic History) (2011).
* Guenther, Karen. "A Question of Loyalty: German Churches in Reading During the First World War," ''Pennsylvania History"" (2017) 84#3:325-5
online* Hawgood, John. ''The Tragedy of German-America''. (1940).
* Iverson, Noel. ''Germania, U.S.A.: Social Change in New Ulm, Minnesota''. (1966). emphasizes Turners.
* Jensen, Richard. ''The Winning of the Midwest, Social and Political Conflict 1888–1896''. (1971). Voting behavior of Germans, prohibition, language, and school issues.
* Johnson, Hildegard B.
The Location of German Immigrants in the Middle West. ''Annals of the Association of American Geographers'' 41 (1951): 1–41.
* Jordon, Terry G. ''German Seed in Texas Soil: Immigrant Farmers in Nineteenth-century Texas''. (1966).
* Kamphoefner, Walter D. and Wolfgang Helbich, eds. ''German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective''. Madison, Wisconsin: Max Kade Institute, University of Wisconsin–Madison (2004).
* Kamphoefner, Walter D., "Uprooted or Transplanted? Reflections on Patterns of German Immigration to Missouri," ''Missouri Historical Review,'' 103 (January 2009), 71–89.
* Kamphoefner, Walter D. "Immigrant Epistolary and Epistemology: On the Motivators and Mentality of Nineteenth-Century German Immigrants." ''Journal of American Ethnic History'' (2009): 34–54
in JSTOR on deep-reading their letters
* Kamphoefner, Walter D. ''Germans in America: A Concise History.'' Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021.
* Kazal, Russell A. ''Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity''. (2004).
* Keller, Christian B. "Flying Dutchmen and Drunken Irishmen: The Myths and Realities of Ethnic Civil War Soldiers," ''Journal of Military History'', 73 (January 2009), 117–145.
* Keller, Phyllis. ''States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.
* Knarr, Mary L. "Faith, frauen, and the formation of an ethnic identity: German Lutheran women in south and central Texas, 1831–1890". (Ph.D. dissertation, Texas Christian U. 2009)
online* Krawatzek, Félix, and Gwendolyn Sasse. "Integration and Identities: The Effects of Time, Migrant Networks, and Political Crises on Germans in the United States." ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 60.4 (2018): 1029-1065
online
* Kulas, S. John. ''Der Wanderer of St. Paul: The First Decade, 1867-1877: a Mirror of the German-Catholic Immigrant Experience in Minnesota'' (Peter Lang, 1996), newspaper history
* Levine, Bruce. ''The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
* Luebke, Frederick C. ''Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans During World WarI''. (1974).
* Luebke, Frederick C., ed. ''Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln''. (1971).
* Luebke, Frederick C. ''Germans in the New World''. (1990).
* Luebke, Frederick. ''Immigrants and Politics: The Germans of Nebraska, 1880–1900''. (1969).
* Nadel, Stanley. ''Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80'' (1990).
* O'Connor, Richard. ''German-Americans: an Informal History''. (1968), popular history
* Otterness, Philip. ''Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York'' (2004) 235 pp.
* Pickle, Linda. ''Contented among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest'' (1996).
* Pochmann, Henry A. and Arthur R. Schultz; ''German Culture in America, 1600–1900: Philosophical and Literary Influences''. (1957).
* Rippley, LaVern J. "German Americans." ''Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America,'' edited by Thomas Riggs, (3rd ed., vol. 2, Gale, 2014, pp. 207–223
Online* Ritter, Luke, "Sunday Regulation and the Formation of German American Identity in St. Louis, 1840–1860," ''Missouri Historical Review,'' (2012), vol. 107, no. 1, pp. 23–40.
* Roeber, A. G. ''Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America''. (1998).
* Salamon, Sonya. ''Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming, and Community in the Midwest'' (U of North Carolina Press, 1992), focus on German Americans.
* Salmons, Joseph C. ''The German Language in America, 1683-1991''. Madison, Wis.: Max Kade Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993.
* Schiffman, Harold
"Language loyalty in the German-American Church: The Case of an Over-confident Minority (1987).
* Schirp, Francis
. ''The Catholic Encyclopedia''. Vol. 6. New York: Appleton, 1909.
* Schlossman, Steven L. "Is there an American tradition of bilingual education? German in the public elementary schools, 1840-1919." ''American Journal of Education'' (1983): 139–186
in JSTOR* Tatlock, Lynne and Matt Erlin, eds. ''German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation''. (2005).
* Tischauser, Leslie V. ''The Burden of Ethnicity: The German Question in Chicago, 1914–1941''. (1990).
* Tolzmann, Don H., ed. ''German Americans in the World Wars'', 2 vols. Munich, Germany: K.G. Saur, (1995).
* Tolzmann, Don H. ''German-American Literature'' (Scarecrow Press, 1977).
* Trommler, Frank & Joseph McVeigh, eds. ''America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History''. (2 vol 1985); vol 1: ''Immigration, Language, Ethnicity''; vol 2: ''The Relationship in the Twentieth Century''. Essays by scholars covering broad themes.
* Turk, Eleanor L.
Germans in Kansas: Review Essay. ''Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains'' 28 (Spring 2005): 44–71.
* van Ravenswaay, Charles. ''The Arts and Architecture of German Settlements in Missouri: A Survey of a Vanishing Culture'' (1977; reprint University of Missouri Press, 2006).
* Walker, Mack. ''Germany and the Emigration, 1816–1885'' (1964).
*
Where Have All the Germans Gone?'. New York: Films Media Group, 1976.
* Carl Frederick Wittke, Wittke, Carl Frederick. ''The German-Language Press in America''. (1957).
* Carl Frederick Wittke, Wittke, Carl Frederick. ''Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America''. (1952).
* Carl Frederick Wittke, Wittke, Carl Frederick. ''We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant''. (1939), ch. 6, 9.
* Wood, Ralph, ed. ''The Pennsylvania Germans''. (1942).
* Zeitlin, Richard. ''Germans in Wisconsin''. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, (2000).
Historiography
* Hustad, Bradley Jake. "Problems in Historiography: The Americanization of German Ethnics." (MA thesis, Mankato State University, 2013)
online*
* Kluge, Cora Lee. ''Other Witnesses: An Anthology of Literature of the German Americans, 1850–1914''. Madison, Wis.: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 2007.
* Miller, Zane L. "Cincinnati Germans and the Invention of an Ethnic Group", ''Queen City Heritage: The Journal of the Cincinnati Historical Society'' 42 (Fall 1984): 13–22.
* Nollendorfs, Valters. "The Field, the Boundaries, and the Cultivators of German-American Studies." ''Monatshefte'' 86.3 (1994): 319-33
online* Ortlepp, Anke. "Deutsch-Athen Revisited: Writing the History of Germans in Milwaukee" in Margo Anderson and Victor Greene (eds.), ''Perspectives on Milwaukee's Past''. (University of Illinois Press, 2009).
*
* Pochmann, Henry A. and Arthur R. Schult. '' Bibliography of German Culture in America to 1940'' (2nd ed 1982); massive listing, but no annotations.
* Tolzmann, Don Heinrich. "German-American studies: History and development." ''Monatshefte'' (1988): 278–288
online* Tolzmann, Don Heinrich, ed. ''German-American Studies: Selected Essays'' (Peter Lang, 2001).
Primary sources
* Kamphoefner, Walter D., and Wolfgang Helbich, eds. ''Germans in the Civil War; The Letters They Wrote Home''. (U of North Carolina Press, 2006).
* Kamphoefner, Walter D., Wolfgang Johannes Helbich and Ulrike Sommer, eds. ''News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home''. (Cornell University Press, 1991).
* (English translations of selected German-language newspaper articles, 1855–1938).
In German
* Emmerich, Alexander. ''Geschichte der Deutschen in Amerika von 1680 bis in die Gegenwart''. (2013).
* Rehs, Michael. ''Wurzeln in fremder Erde: Zur Geschichte der südwestdeutschen Auswanderung nach Amerika'' DRW-Verlag, 1984.
*
External links
Discover America´s German Roots German-American Heritage Foundation of the USA
German-American history and culture
Emigrant Letters to Germany (in German)German-American Business Biographies from the German Historical Institute
German-American Hall of FameHow German Is American?The German-Hollywood ConnectionChicago Foreign Language Press Survey: English translations of 120,000 pages of newspaper articles from Chicago's foreign language press from 1855 to 1938, many from German papers.German Heritage in Lettersby the German Historical Institute Washington.
German-American organizations
German-American Heritage Museum of the USASteuben Society of AmericaGerman American Heritage CenterGermans from Russia Heritage SocietyMax Kade Institute for German-American Studiesat the University of Wisconsin–Madison
Max Kade German-American Centerat Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis
The Germantown Historical Society (Philadelphia)The German Society of Pennsylvania (oldest German Society in the U.S.)The Pennsylvania German Societyat Kutztown University
Indiana German Heritage Society
Local German-American history and culture
German Traces NYC from the Goethe-InstitutInteractive German-History Map of PittsburghZinzinnati History (Cincinnati, Ohio)
Milwaukee German-American Radio ProgramTeutonia Männerchor in PittsburghSome German Contributions to Wisconsin Life
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American people of German descent,
German American,
German diaspora by country, American
European-American society