German American - Assimilation

Assimilation

"Assimilation" in this context means the steady loss of distinctive characteristics (especially language), as the Germans melted into a common American nationality. By 1910 German Americans had created their own distinctive, vibrant, prosperous German-language communities, called "Germania". The transition to the English language was abrupt, forced by World War I. After 1917 the German language was seldom heard in public; most newspapers and magazines closed; churches and parochial schools switched to English. Youth increasingly attended high schools, where they mingled, in English, and dated (and later married) people of other ethnicities. The Catholic high schools were deliberately structured to commingle ethnic groups so as to promote intermarriage. German-speaking taverns, beer gardens and saloons were all shut down by prohibition; those that reopened in 1933 spoke English. By the 1940s Germania had largely vanished outside remote areas and the Germans were thoroughly assimilated.

Historians have tried to explain what happened. 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 War I 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 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 War I, 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.