Posted on 10/18/2017 9:20:01 AM PDT by Jewbacca
A fascinating collection of photos have resurfaced showing the hardships faced by German-Americans at the brutal height of the First World War. As Europe was ravaged by fighting, German immigrants in the US suffered harassment, internment, lynchings - and even the humiliation of being tarred and feathered.
Although a little-remembered part of history today, America was wracked by the fear and paranoia that swept from coast to coast during the Great War.
The United States declared war on Germany in April 1917 and helped lead the Allies to victory. But before that, many Americans were terrified of the German threat growing on the other side of the world.
This collection of pictures reveals the full extent of war hysteria and open hostility towards all things German that erupted across the nation.
Before the war broke out, America had welcomed German immigrants and regarded them highly. German was the second most widely spoken language in the country and there were over 100 million first and second-generation German-Americans living in the United States, with many of them involved in the thousands of German organizations across the country.
The United States embraced them and the German language became an established part of the high school curriculum.
But when the war broke out and Germany became the enemy of the Allies abroad, the American government began calling on its people to reject their German-American neighbors.
President Woodrow Wilson declared that German-Americans were to be treated as 'alien-enemies' and that they should reject their German identity if they were to be accepted in US society.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
My grandfather was in the Secret Service until about 1919. He was sent to Mexico to investigate what was going on there because of the Zimmerman note. This was more than just an effort to keep America neutral. The Germans wanted Mexico to go to war and tie down US forces. It was a major factor in the declaration of war against Germany that followed a few months later.
Why is there so much anti-American nonsense on this thread?
“Many well-known newspapers in the English language such as The Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Montreal Gazette, and others also reported extensively about the events. It is believed that The New York Times published thousands of articles pertaining to the Armenian massacres between 1894-1922 and 124 articles in 1915 alone.[5][7]”
“It is noted that newspapers such as The Washington Post and The New York Times reported on the Armenian massacres almost daily for over a year.[9]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_coverage_during_the_Armenian_Genocide
“Thanks, but I don’t generally watch movies based on comic books, or one about a lesbian dominatrix.”
LOL. I didn’t watch it, either. It’s a violation of our customs to watch scantily-clad women perform anything.
I just thought the concept interesting.
I presume you are talking about Fort Stanton, if you were in Lincoln County.
It is pretty country, but outside the river area, pretty desolate.
Well, I do find scantily-clad women performing, well, almost anything as an interesting concept. But, I’m also a hardcore feminist. ;’)
Uhuh.
But it's so nice of comrade poodle-journalist Harvey...
https://twitter.com/harveyday94?lang=en
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/h94day
...and his pink poodle cohorts at the UK Mail to be "concerned" about our "tragedy".
Meanwhile - what ACTUAL tragedy looked liked under their purview:
[Harvest of Despair - The 1933 Ukrainian Holodomor Famine Genocide (Documentary)]
Ha. I’m just a typical Orthodox guy.
We have a nice list of things we don’t do to keep us out of trouble. Seeems to work for the most part.
Is worshiping the state-establishment...
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in Israel are the most advanced in the Middle East, and one of the most advanced in Asia.[1] Same-sex sexual activity was legalized in 1988, although the former law against sodomy had not been enforced since a court decision of 1963.[2] Israel became the first in Asia to recognize unregistered cohabitation between same-sex couples, making it the first country in Asia to recognize any same-sex union.
...on or off "the list" these days? Lev 26:33-39
33 I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins. 34 Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. 35 All the time that it lies desolate, the land will have the rest it did not have during the sabbaths you lived in it.
36 "'As for those of you who are left, I will make their hearts so fearful in the lands of their enemies that the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will run as though fleeing from the sword, and they will fall, even though no one is pursuing them. 37 They will stumble over one another as though fleeing from the sword, even though no one is pursuing them. So you will not be able to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39 Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their fathers' sins they will waste away.
NIV
Not sure if you’re on the thread, but thought you’d find it interesting.
this happened to my grandpa and his family
they emigrated from baden in 1912, to escape the kaiser. ironically, that is my mom’s maiden name.
so, you can imagine the treatment his family received during the WW1 period of US involvement.
that said, he was a patriotic american, and never held it against anyone. he was glad to be an American.
I am very sorry to hear that.
My grandfather had a brother who moves to the USA long before my grandfather did (which was just one the eve of WWII). He (my great uncle) was also Jewish of most-recent-German-origin.
He had kind of warned my grandfather off from the USA due to problems being German (rather than problems being Jewish). He had a successful bakery in NYC most of his life, dying not too long ago.
Ironic.
That said, my grandfather never felt comfortable in the USA and promptly made aliyah to Israel when he could, shortly after serving the USA in WWII — mainly as a translator (he could speak English/German/Polish/French/Yiddish/Hebrew, all fluently). He basically followed around a general the entire war.
Good idea, go with what works, centuries-proven ideas are generally best.
I had a couple of college classes (big lecture hall, hundreds present) where the roll was actually read the first couple of sessions of the term. When they got to one fellow student and like all of us we all just heard the last name, “Hittler”, laughter followed. That’s a moniker I’d definitely drop, had I been him, just too much of a burden, irrespective of the lack of any real connection to A-dolt. It’s not as if immigrants and others haven’t changed the family name. Some of those long German names got shortened, and diificult to pronounce names of other nationalities got Anglicized.
As a pretext to go to war, it worked. The US declared war on the Central Powers (I find declarations of war really quaint). It seems as if a lot of people believe the sinking of the Lusitania was the cause, but that was in 1915, two full years earlier. Unrestricted German U-boat attacks on shipping had resumed in March 1916, hadn’t been enough on its own to stir the country into war, but the ZT was. The proposal in the telegram was, in the event that the US declared war on Germany, that Mexico would get German aid to fight the US in a land war. The US had been at war not very many years earlier, chasing down Pancho Villa, and btw, we should have built the damned border wall at that time. Patton got his first combat experience in that war, serving on the staff of Pershing.
Had the US’ diplomatic efforts started in earnest in 1915, the whole thing might have been simmered down, but I doubt it. New combatants kept joining up. the Ottoman Empire went to war against Russia over old territorial claims, and Montenegro for example had previously been occupied by the Turks, so they declared war on the Turks. By April 1915 the British (including troops drawn from India and other parts of the British empire) had landed at Gallipoli, a bloody corner of the war that went on a mere three weeks before an armistice was agreed to in order to bury the dead. When the fighting resumed, it wouldn’t end until August. The naval campaign to reopen the Dardenelles, which had started in February 1915, ended January 1916, a victory for the Ottoman Empire. There’s a huge British war memorial at Gallipoli, Michael Wood visited it when he shot that Trojan War documentary years ago.
Meanwhile, the British were organizing Arab revolts against the Turks, which started to show success later in 1916, and the British and French had defended the Suez Canal in 1915 and won.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/zimmermann-telegram-published-in-united-states
[snip] On this day in 1917, the text of the so-called Zimmermann Telegram, a message from the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassador to Mexico proposing a Mexican-German alliance in the case of war between the United States and Germany, is published on the front pages of newspapers across America. In the telegram, intercepted and deciphered by British intelligence in January 1917, Zimmermann instructed the ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, to offer significant financial aid to Mexico if it agreed to enter any future U.S-German conflict as a German ally. If victorious in the conflict, Germany also promised to restore to Mexico the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. [/snip]
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/brussels.htm
[snip] The German army moved into Brussels as smoothly and as compactly as an Empire State express. There were no halts, no open places, no stragglers. For the gray automobiles and the gray motorcycles bearing messengers one side of the street always was kept clear; and so compact was the column, so rigid the vigilance of the file-closers, that at the rate of forty miles an hour a car could race the length of the column and need not stop - for never did a single horse or man once swerve from its course. All through the night, like a tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army. And when early in the morning I went to the window the chain of steel was still unbroken. It was like the torrent that swept down the Connemaugh Valley and destroyed Johnstown.
This was a machine, endless, tireless, with the delicate organization of a watch and the brute power of a steam roller. And for three days and three nights through Brussels it roared and rumbled, a cataract of molten lead. The infantry marched singing, with their iron-shod boots beating out the time. They sang Fatherland, My Fatherland. Between each line of song they took three steps. At times 2000 men were singing together in absolute rhythm and beat. It was like blows from giant pile-drivers. When the melody gave way the silence was broken only by the stamp of iron-shod boots, and then again the song rose. When the singing ceased the bands played marches. They were followed by the rumble of the howitzers, the creaking of wheels and of chains clanking against the cobblestones, and the sharp, bell-like voices of the bugles.
More Uhlans followed, the hoofs of their magnificent horses ringing like thousands of steel hammers breaking stones in a road; and after them the giant siege-guns rumbling, growling, the mitrailleuses [machine guns] with drag-chains ringing, the field-pieces with creaking axles, complaining brakes, the grinding of the steel-rimmed wheels against the stones echoing and re-echoing from the house front. When at night for an instant the machine halted, the silence awoke you, as at sea you wake when the screw stops.
For three days and three nights the column of gray, with hundreds of thousands of bayonets and hundreds of thousands of lances, with gray transport wagons, gray ammunition carts, gray ambulances, gray cannon, like a river of steel, cut Brussels in two.” [/snip]
— Richard Harding Davis
Regarding Belgian democide in the Congo, here’s a link:
Rummel’s main democide page is useful reading on the more general topic.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
I’m not sure why he didn’t put the first item there.
>>Based as it was on cryptanalysis, the core evidence is so sensitive that it remains secret even today.
Actually the story of Japanese intelligence rings in the U.S. is reasonably well-documented. The technical details of the breaking of the Purple code may not be, but the results of those intercepts are, and the thinking in Washington that led to mass internment as a way to avoid revealing we’d broken the code.
Magic: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast During Ww II
https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Intelligence-Evacuation-Japanese-Residents/dp/0960273611
See my previous as well. MAGIC is a very interesting book.
>>It didn’t even have walls. (It did have about 100 miles of near impassible desert around it.)
Every time I fly to California and can look out the window, I am reminded that there is a whole lot of nothing in the American Southwest. It’s pretty from the air, but I wouldn’t want to have to eke out an existence there.
Liberty Cabbage and Liberty Meat...
Sounds as stupid then as Liberty Fries now.
Why do we keep doing the same stupid stuff over and over. We get mixed up in wars we should not be mixed up in, we give our President dictatorial powers, and we don’t know enough to just stay in our own country and live our lives.
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