Listening to WWI: The War at Home

The War on German Americans

World War I, the historian John Higham points out, was “the first big international conflict between America and a country which had been sending to it a large and cohesive immigrant population.” Even after the turn-of-the-century waves of “new immigrants,” German Americans remained the largest immigrant group at 2.3 million people—and that did not count millions more who were the children or grandchildren of earlier German immigrants. The vicious nativist attack on the loyalty of German Americans that emerged before and during the war was particularly remarkable because Germans were then regarded, Higham notes, “as one of the most assimilable and reputable of immigrant groups.” Germans had until then followed a successful assimilation strategy through which they sought to become “American” in politics while remaining “German” in culture.

Actually, the relative acceptance that German Americans enjoyed may have contributed to their problems. Because they saw themselves not as strangers but as full members of the American polity, they responded initially to the war by lobbying strongly to influence American foreign policy in ways favorable to their country of birth. This lobbying, in turn, led to the first nativist attacks on German Americans. When the German government began submarine warfare, which resulted in American deaths, the intensity of attacks increased. Even German Americans joined in questioning the behavior, if not the loyalty, of their fellow immigrants. In 1916, Reinhold Niebuhr, a German American and a young theologian who would later become famous, wrote an article in Atlantic Monthly on the “Failure of German-Americanism” in which he charged that the German American had been “indifferent to the ideals and principles of this nation” and “untrue to the virtues of his race.” He attributed the “lack of esteem in which German-Americanism is now held in this country” to this failure on the part of German Americans rather than to wartime hysteria.

After the United States entered the war against Germany in April 1917, the nativist crusade against “hyphenate Americanism” escalated dramatically. German Americans were the primary targets even though they no longer opposed American foreign policy as they had previously. Some sense of the suspicion can be heard in the speech delivered by James W. Gerard, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany, to three thousand people at a patriotic concert and benefit at the Brooklyn Academy of Music organized by the Ladies Aid Society of St. Mary's Hospital on November 25, 1917. Gerard’s speech describes “the great majority of American citizens of German descent” as “splendidly loyal” but also warns that any who step out of line would be found hanging from lampposts.

Gerard's speech was far from the most inflammatory statement about Germans or German Americans by respected public figures. “It is religious to hate the Kaiser,” Dr. James R. Day, chancellor of Syracuse University, told his students. Bishop William A. Quayle, a prominent Methodist clergyman, did not directly attack German Americans but insisted that America's fight was directly with the German people and not just their leaders. “The German people is committing the unspeakable horrors which set the whole world aghast,” Quayle wrote in this essay in the Northwestern Christian Advocate.

Such views fostered efforts to suppress German-American culture. In Lima, Ohio, city officials joined in burning German books. In Columbus, Ohio,. the school board sold German publications to a scrap dealer and Boy Scouts burned German-language newspapers. German music was dropped from the repertory of some orchestras. Karl Muck, who was actually Swiss-born, lost his job as conductor of the Boston Symphony. More comic were the efforts to remake the language to efface German words.

Much worse was sporadic violence directed at German Americans suspected of disloyalty. The most notorious incident was the lynching of German-born Robert Prager in Collinsville, Illinois, in April 1918. Other incidents stopped just short of murder. In a statement made on October 22, 1918, John Deml, a farmer in Outagamie County, a heavily German and Scandinavian area of Wisconsin, describes the nativist mob that had visited him two days earlier. Suspected of not strongly enough supporting the war effort, he was narrowly saved from lynching. Many such incidents were not recorded, but they lived on powerfully in people's memories. In this 1976 interview, Lola Gamble Clyde, the daughter of an Irish-born Presbyterian minister and a teenager during World War I, describes the “hysteria” that faced German Americans in rural Latah County, Idaho.

German Americans themselves had a complex response to these attacks. Many, like Frank Brocke, the son of a German-American farmer, also from Latah County, tried to keep a low profile. During and after the war, many German Americans began to conceal their ethnic identity—some changed their names; others stopped speaking German; still others quit German-American organizations. Frank Brocke's own assimilation (he later became the president of the local bank) led him to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II—a stance that many Japanese Americans and others would disclaim.

For more reading on German Americans and World War I, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860­1925 (1970); Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (1974); La Vern J. Rippley, The German-Americans (1976); Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I (1985).

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