INTRODUCTION OF GERMAN STOCK

Becoming Old Stock:The Paradox of German-American
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Introduction
More Americans trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country, according to the federal census.1 Arguably, by this measure, people of German descent form the nation's largest ethnic group. Yet that fact could easily elude the casual observer of American life. Today, comparatively few signs remain of the once formidable political clout, organizational life, and ethnic consciousness of German Americans. Over the twentieth century, the ethnicity that went by that label underwent what the historian Kathleen Conzen calls a "thorough submergence."2
This ethnic eclipse is reflected publicly in the calendar of American holidays and, more privately, in survey research. There is no nationally recognized tribute to German ethnicity to compete with St. Patrick's Day or Columbus Day. On a regional level, the Midwest, which drew the greatest concentrations of nineteenth-century German immigrants, does seem more willing to display its German ethnic roots, as a visitor to Cincinnati's annual Downtown Oktoberfest might note. Yet in the mid-Atlantic--the focus of eighteenth-century German settlement and a close second to the Midwest as a destination for nineteenth-century German newcomers--German ethnicity has a remarkably low profile. In the popular imagination, the descendants of eighteenth-century Rhenish immigrants who populated the Pennsylvania backcountry are known as "Pennsylvania Dutch," a usage that evokes the Netherlands. The region's cities yield barely a sign that they once hosted some of the nation's largest populations of German immigrants.
Such ethnic quiescence is brought into sharp focus when one compares it with local manifestations of Irish identity. The bulk of Irish and German immigrants to the United States arrived at roughly the same time, in waves running from the 1830s to the 1890s. Survey research carried out in the mid-1980s in the Albany, New York, area, however, found that while Irish and German ancestries were each claimed by roughly one-third of native-born whites, only some 20 percent of respondents saw themselves as "German," compared with 31 percent who asserted an "Irish" identity.3 One can see a similar contrast in how Philadelphia celebrates these two ethnicities. The city's annual Steuben Day parade in September draws scattered onlookers to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but a visitor strolling through other downtown sections might never know that the day was dedicated to a German immigrant who became a Revolutionary War hero. On March 17, that same pedestrian would find it impossible to miss the fact that Philadelphia was honoring St. Patrick. At the most prosaic level, she or he could not walk down Center City's Walnut Street for more than two blocks without having to maneuver around a line of people snaking out of a bar with green plastic hats on their heads.
The eclipse of German-American identity today is all the more startling, given its condition at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then, German Americans were perhaps the best-organized, most visible, and most respected group of newcomers in the United States. Germans, whose migration to America peaked in the 1880s, made up the largest single nationality among the foreign-born during the 1910s, greater in number than the Poles, Italians, and other southern and eastern Europeans of the "new immigration." The National German-American Alliance, a federation of ethnic associations, laid claim by 1914 to more than two million members. Before the First World War, the Germans were widely esteemed as "one of the most assimilable and reputable of immigrant groups"; a group of professional people surveyed in 1908 ranked German immigrants ahead of English ones and, in some respects, above native-born whites.4

German Americans, in other words, present an unsettling paradox. If ours is an age of multiculturalism--as many Americans like to think--then how is it that the nation's largest ethnic group has gone missing from the national scene and in regions like the mid-Atlantic? How do scholars square this awkward fact with the depictions of an enduring American pluralism that have dominated the historical literature on immigration and ethnicity since the 1960s? The German-American case thus forces us to confront the much larger question of assimilation.
Assimilation as a topic was largely neglected by historians in the 1970s and early 1980s, as I have argued elsewhere,5 and it remains controversial. By the early 1960s, notions of assimilation and Americanization cast ethnic Americans as remaking themselves to fit an Anglo-American core culture. Such ideas did not survive the decade; their underlying assumptions were torpedoed by cultural and political upheaval. The Vietnam War discredited "the Anglo-American establishment," antiwar and civil rights protests cast doubt on the virtue of a uniform American national culture, and a resurgent black separatism fueled more general affirmations of pluralism and group identities. For many immigration historians, mindful of the very real, coercive side of early twentieth-century Americanization efforts, assimilation and Americanization became "myths" to be "vanquished."6 Those scholars instead stressed ethnic persistence within a pluralistic society.
Historians in the 1970s and 1980s produced many intriguing and sophisticated studies of particular ethnic and racial groups. Yet rejecting assimilation hindered, rather than aided, their understanding of pluralism, for those two phenomena are deeply intertwined.7 The study of pluralism requires examining not just ethnic groups but also the relations among them, and those relations can have an assimilative effect in drawing groups or their members closer to one another. Postwar theorists such as Will Herberg and Milton Gordon understood this; they depicted many European Americans as submerging their specific ethnic identities in the broader religious ones of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew.8
Since the early 1980s, an interest in pluralism has helped lead a number of historians toward a cautious reexamination of assimilation. They have revisited the topic without resurrecting the idea of an Anglo-American core. Some immigration historians now view assimilation, in essence, as one of a number of processes operating historically within a pluralist order that itself has evolved.9 They and other historians have come to understand that process as one by which European ethnics of different national backgrounds found common ground with one another or with longer-settled Americans. These scholars have described assimilation along class lines, via an industrial unionism that united an ethnically split working class in the 1930s; along lines of race, with European immigrants learning to adopt a common "white" racial identity; and, relatedly, through an emerging mass culture and a brand of American nationalism that allowed those newcomers to join an "imagined community" of specifically white Americans.10
These works have shaped my own understanding of assimilation and ethnic identity. I use "assimilation" to refer to processes that result in greater homogeneity within a society. Such processes may operate at different levels: among individuals, between groups, or between groups and a dominant group in the society. They may operate within different arenas, with individuals or groups drawn together in terms of culture or intermarriage or shared institutions or shared elements of identity, such as "whiteness." And they may operate to varying degrees within and across different arenas. In the immigrant context, I find it most useful to see assimilation as referring to processes that generate homogeneity beyond the level of the ethnic group.11 "Ethnic group" itself refers, in Milton Gordon's sense, to a group with "a shared feeling of peoplehood" tied to a specific Old World ancestry.12 "Identity" in its most basic sense refers to an individual's sense of self,13 a construct to some extent both volitional and ascribed. In the words of one historian, identity "concerns how individuals understand their place in the social world as well as how others view them." Key to the concept is the insight that individuals hold multiple identities in the form of socially recognized categories: a particular person can see herself at one and the same time as, for example, a middle-class professional, a woman, a white, an American, and someone of German descent.14 Such an individual may partake of various collective or group identities, each of which, on its own terms, seems singular. Collective identity "tends to appear homogeneous and based on clear boundaries for the sake of expression beyond the group."15 But for the individual, changes in how one views oneself can be accomplished by emphasizing one collective identity over another, by introducing new elements to the mix of identities one holds, or by holding a collective identity that itself is changing internally. The different identities of any one person ebb, flow, and interact in complex ways that can result, over time, in a significantly different self-image.
Like other historians revisiting assimilation, I seek to understand its operation within particular historical contexts and its long-term social and political consequences. Here, the German-American experience cries out for study. As John Higham noted, that experience represents the most "spectacular case of collective assimilation" in the last century.16 Historians of German America certainly never neglected assimilation, and they have long offered explanations for why the group's ethnic profile fell so dramatically. The most obvious relates to the contingencies of twentieth-century history. That century saw the United States fight two world wars against Germany and witnessed the genocide perpetrated by the Third Reich; it therefore left Americans with few incentives to identify with a German ancestry. Even before those events, institutional German America--which encompassed everything from secular gymnastic and singing societies to German Lutheran congregations and German Catholic national parishes--was unraveling. Historians such as John Hawgood once pointed to the intense nativist backlash that accompanied American intervention in World War I as the key to the destruction of this ethnic world.17 More recently, Guido Andre Dobbert, James Bergquist, and other scholars have portrayed German ethnic institutions as suffering a long-term decline beginning in the 1890s.18
Yet, while we know much about the erosion of German America, we know little of the fate of those who left it. If many Americans of German background were leaving German ethnic circles at the beginning of the twentieth century, where did they then go? What kind of Americans did most German Americans become once their ethnic identity was so strikingly submerged? Did they reshape their multiple identities in ways that reflect or that go beyond the findings of assimilation's reappraisers? Specifically, what role did class, gender, religion, mass culture, nation, and race play in their redefinitions? Did German Americans, for example, find refuge in the "monolithic whiteness" that Matthew Jacobson sees as flattening "racial" distinctions among European immigrants after the 1920s? Did they take to the powerful and often exclusive American nationalism that Gary Gerstle depicts as dominating much of American life between the First World War and the 1960s?19 Or did they find other routes away from German America?