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 ...
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Some of my ancestors were German. They came over three generations before the revolution and settled in the Hudson River valley. The name is not too common and so is not viewed as a “German” name.
That being said, my great-grandfather went by the nickname, the Dutchman, in WWI probably so as not to be thought of as German. His family had been here for over 200 years at that point and this was in Kansas City.
Thanks, I later posted the links I’d found regarding same.
If I make reference to a particular event in history, I usually provide a link as a source.
I occasionally will ask another poster to do the same.
Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to pontificate to me.
Thank you.
There was a story last year that Pres. Trump’s grandfather (also named Fred) had allowed people to believe he was Dutch for the same reason, after the family moved to Queens during WWI.
OT: Fred (grandfather) Trump made a fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush.
Of course we need to remember that before the 1850s there was no Germany as we understand it, just people that spoke Deutsch — deutsch-man.
Nederlanders and Deutschlanders have been very distinct from each other for centuries.
Oh, I don’t disagree. But from the US viewpoint, the low landers and the deutschlanders and all those others weren’t English, Scot, Irish and they threatened to be numerous enough to cause a language confusion over here at various points.
I apologize not for the content of my remark, but for its snarkiness.
My frustration comes from making a point or comment and having people come on and ask for specific links to exactly support a position.
Often times they are people posting in passing about something that is literally fingertips away.
For example, I made a comment the other days regarding “forgotten cultures” that have probably been around for tens of thousands of years—predating ours.
I immediately got a post from some “the earth is 4000 years old” believer asking me for specific links to support my argument.
The problem was it wasn’t an argument, it was an opinion; and second of all, it was based on a book I read 15 years ago...
That type of thing has probably happened 10-15 times in the last month. I find that old guys come on here to flex their alpha muscles and argue like folks used to do down at the General Store.
So, I apologize for the bad manners. I should have handled that better.
Thank you for your reply. No problem. :-)
I think that I have that book in my stacks of what I intend to read, eventually. Despite increasing public access to the primary source material and path-breaking historical accounts, the point remains that even though US cryptanalysis established the existence of Japanese spy and sabotage rings, radio detection and other CI methods had not led to their shut down, even in the more intense security environment after Pearl Harbor. With US war industries and military installations regarded as vulnerable and a Japanese strike at the US West Coast seen as imminent, internment made a lot of sense. I do not see though how internment helped to protect the secret of US cryptanalytic success.
On that last, if we’d have just busted the guys using the codes, the Japanese would have caught on pretty quickly and changed up their codes.
Oddly, the Chicago Tribune revealed that the US won the Battle of Midway because we broke the Japanese naval code, but the Japanese missed or ignored it. The Japanese were complacent about US code breaking abilities because they regarded their codes as having innate extra security in that they saw their language as too difficult for enough foreigners to master so as to equip an effective enemy code breaking enterprise.
We really had that last with the Navaho code talkers and other groups.
Amen. They must have driven Japanese listeners crazy. And with an ethnically and linguistically homogenous society, the Japanese were unable to reciprocate.
Yes, and I found a few good links because of it too. Thank you.
My joke is they used to blow up atomic bombs there — and no one noticed.
Great point. Overflew that areas several years ago. Immediately knew what I was looking at.
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