GERMAN AMERICANS

GERMAN AMERICANS. In the census of 1990 almost 58 million residents of the United States declared themselves to be of German ancestry, by far the largest ancestry group. The nearly continuous large-scale German migration to the United States from the late eighteenth century until the 1920s explains the size of this group.

German immigration to the United States began with the arrival of religious dissenters in Pennsylvania during the 1680s. In 1790, the U. S. Census counted 375,000 Germans in the United States. German immigration increased after the Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815). During the 1850s, more than 976,000 German immigrants arrived in the United States. Germans stood out because of their high proportion of literate and skilled newcomers, their penchant for family migration, and their dispersal throughout the rural and urban areas in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states.

The peak of German immigration occurred in the 1880s, when more than 1. 4 million Germans arrived. Most were craft workers and their families who streamed into the industrializing United States. Milwaukee, Chicago, and Cincinnati had the highest proportion of German Americans in the late nineteenth century, although cities such as New York and Philadelphia also numbered well over 200,000 German Americans in 1890.

The German American community reflected the diversity of Germany in a number of ways: Catholics were a slight majority, Lutherans were a significant minority, and German Jews were also a large group. German immigrants came from both cities and rural areas. People from southern, particularly southwestern Germany, predominated until the late nineteenth century, when former citizens of Prussia (present-day northern Germany and Poland) began to arrive in larger numbers.

German Americans were politically and culturally highly visible in the United States in the century before World War I (1914–1918). Their ethnic press was probably the largest and most diverse of any immigrant group; political and cultural organizations abounded, especially in urban areas. They were prominent among both Republicans and Democrats in the late nineteenth century. They formed the core of the small socialist movement and founded a number of important craft unions at the turn of the twentieth century. German Americans were heavily involved in the cultural life, especially in musical organizations, in most American metropolises.

World War I and its anti-German sentiments led German American communities to become largely invisible. While the migration of economically displaced and working-class Germans continued on a modest level after World War I (Germans received a relatively high quota allotment under the 1924 Quota Law), German American organizations dissolved or retained a low profile during most of the twentieth century.

Although more than 100,000 German Jewish refugees entered the United States as immigrants under the German quota, these newcomers were reluctant to see themselves as members of the German American community. This distance was heightened because of strong pro-fascist sentiments among some older German immigrants, even though formal membership in pro-Nazi organizations was not high. Few German Americans were interned as politically suspect or as enemy aliens during World War II (1939–1945). The end of World War II saw a modest resumption of German immigration.

In the late twentieth century, between eight and twelve thousand Germans immigrated to the United States annually. In 2002, German Americans were a group who lived almost exclusively through heritage societies and tourist sites highlighting the nineteenth-century history of German settlements.