Listen and Subscribe
Podcast Transcript
According to the US Census, the single largest ethnic group in the United States are Germans. More than 40 million Americans identified their ancestry as German.
Driven from Europe by unrest, poverty, famine, and religious persecution, Germans quickly assimilated into American society.
So much so that it’s difficult to imagine an America without kindergarten, blue jeans, ketchup, and, of course, lagered beer.
Learn more about German Americans and the impact of German migration on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The beginning of German migration to North America has its roots in the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century, which was fought largely on German soil, killing up to one-third of the population through violence, famine, and disease.
The devastation of the 17th century prompted many German Protestants to seek opportunities abroad, especially persecuted Anabaptist groups like the Mennonites and Amish. This migration coincided with the visit of American Colonial Founder William Penn to the Rhine region of Germany in 1677.
Penn brought promotional materials offering 5,000-acre plots for only £100, with the bonus of guaranteed religious freedom. Just six years later, German settlers founded Germantown, Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania “Deutsch” who arrived in the region have erroneously been referred to as Dutch.
Throughout the 18th century, migrants arrived in steadily increasing numbers as word of their success spread back home. Abundant cheap land, religious freedom, and agricultural hardship in Europe brought roughly 100,000 Germans to North America during the colonial era.
Many financed their passage through ‘redemptioner contracts,’ a form of indentured service where new arrivals repaid shipping merchants upon landing. Pennsylvania remained the epicenter of the diaspora. By the outbreak of the American Revolution, roughly one-third of the colony was of German descent.
The number of migrants exploded in the 19th century, as agricultural woes, economic unrest, and political revolution drove an estimated five million Germans to the United States. The German Potato blight of the mid-1840s created the largest surge, as food prices increased by an estimated 100%, causing mass starvation.
In 1841, my Great-great-great-grandfather arrived in the United States from Pomerania, Prussia, which is today part of Poland, but that is a whole other episode.
Germans viewed America as an agricultural paradise, a promise made real by the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160 acres of surveyed public land to anyone willing to farm it for five years.
Books and glowing letters from successful emigrants fueled this perception, romanticizing the American experience. Along with these encouraging letters, emigrants provided prepaid tickets, fueling chain migration and often sponsoring entire villages to migrate together.
Immigrants established dense enclaves in the American Upper Midwest, which became known as the German Triangle. The endpoints of the German Triangle were three Midwestern cities: Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and St. Louis.
While estimates vary, the population of those with German ancestry exploded, with Milwaukee reaching an estimated 50% by the beginning of WWI, with Cincinnati and St. Louis very close behind. Because German settlers arrived in such massive numbers, they fundamentally reshaped the region’s culture and economy.
The most obvious economic contribution to these regions was beer.
German immigrant and brewmaster John Wagner first introduced bottom-fermenting yeast to the United States in 1840. This marked a major break from traditional top-fermented brewing, or ales, which had dominated American cellars and taverns for generations.
The introduction of bottom-fermenting beers spawned a revolution in technology and beer culture across the country. Brewers typically stored bottom-fermenting beers in cold caves and cellars, surrounded by ice when possible, because they ferment at much colder temperatures, resulting in a clearer, crisper beer.
German and Czech brewmasters in Europe began using pale malts to produce a new style of lighter beers, known as pilsners and lagers.
Before commercial refrigeration, lagering required cold climates. Milwaukee relied on its frigid winter and harvested ice from Lake Michigan, while St. Louis and Cincinnati used extensive limestone caves and riverbank cellars.
These cities grew into brewing powerhouses led by German immigrants such as Frederick Pabst, Joseph Schlitz, and Valentin Blatz in Milwaukee; Christian Moerlein and John Hauck in Cincinnati; and Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch in St. Louis.
Beer production in these cities soared, particularly in Milwaukee. After the Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed the brewing industry there, Milwaukee filled the production deficit and never gave it back. By the twentieth century, Pabst and Anheuser-Busch had pushed their production to more than 1,000,000 barrels per year.
German influence didn’t stop at beer. German cuisine also left a significant legacy on the region, particularly in sausage-making. Immigrant butchers brought centuries of sausage-making experience, which led to the adoption of favorites like bratwurst, knockwurst, liverwurst, and braunschweiger.
It is almost impossible to visit Milwaukee without having some sausage; it has become part of the city’s lore. Longtime Milwaukee Journal writer H. Russell Austin captured this legacy, writing: Milwaukee’s German heritage gave the city a distinct Old World flavor… German butchers brought their traditional recipes and made sausage-making one of the city’s famous specialties.
This was not unique to Milwaukee. Perhaps the most famous of the sausage cities is Cincinnati, which developed a powerful meat-packing industry and became known as ‘Porkopolis’. Texas BBQ is also heavily influenced by German immigrants to the region
In the German triangle, other German culinary traditions were wildly popular, particularly ketchup, sauerkraut, mustards, rye bread, and, of course, pretzels.
Pretzels were a popular side dish at beer gardens, partly because their salty flavor encouraged patrons to enjoy an extra beer or two, a trick that is still common in pubs and taverns today.
German migrants also reformed one of America’s most enduring traditions, Christmas. Before the 19th-century wave of German migration, Christmas in America was a mixed bag, ranging from being strictly outlawed by religious authorities to a rowdy street party.
While early Pennsylvania Germans placed small, candle-lit evergreens on their tables and exchanged gifts in late December, the practice was far from widespread. To their non-German neighbors, bringing trees indoors looked like an odd, pagan ritual.
Christmas trees gained popularity in the 1830s, thanks in part to magazine sketches depicting the British Royal Family embracing the practice. Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was German.
The archetype for Santa Claus came from a German immigrant and famous political cartoonist, Thomas Nast. Nast’s cartoons in the 1860s transformed Santa from a small, elf-like figure in brown furs to our modern version. Nast even relocated Santa to the North Pole.
Perhaps the most impactful German import during the 19th century emerged in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1856, when Margarethe Meyer Schurz opened the country’s first kindergarten. Schurz knew the power of educating very young children. German educators had used the system for nearly 30 years.
When presented with praise for the miraculous behavior and maturity of her own 5-year-old daughter, Schurz touted the virtue of early childhood education when she said: No miracle, but only brought up in a kindergarten—a garden whose plants are human.
The failed uprisings across the German states in 1848 sent thousands of political exiles each year to the American Midwest. The Germans who arrived during this migration, known as “Forty-Eighters,” were a significant part of American history during the Antebellum and Civil War.
Having escaped tyranny in Europe, many of the Forty-Eighters were staunch abolitionists. They became active spokesmen for the cause, such as Karl Heinzen, one of the most outspoken abolitionists in the country.
Heinzen and his publication, the Louisville Platform, didn’t stop at abolition; they also spoke out against the lack of voting rights for women. Carl Schurz fought as a student revolutionary during the 1848 Prussian uprising, a role that quickly drew an arrest warrant from the Prussian government.
Schurz migrated to the United States, first through New York and eventually settling in Wisconsin; he became politically active in the emerging Republican Party. He chaired the Wisconsin delegation to the party’s 1860 convention.
He brought German-speaking people into the party and secured their support by giving bilingual speeches across the state, helping deliver a victory for Abraham Lincoln in Wisconsin.
Schurz’s political activism reflected a broader German-American commitment to the Union cause, with nearly 200,000 German-born soldiers taking up arms for the North.
While German immigrants often enjoyed a reputation as skilled artisans and industrious farmers, they were far from immune to nativist backlash. The Know-Nothings, a late antebellum secret political organization, targeted German Catholics and the Forty-Eighters.
Their mobs attacked German interests across the German triangle and beyond for their religion, politics, and beer culture. In 1855, Know-Nothing party candidate James Taylor directed agitation against German voters, arousing protest and acts of electoral destruction in German enclaves.
…And of course, there is the Chicago Beer Riot of 1855. German communities were targeted by temperance advocates for their drinking culture. Driven by nativism and temperance fervor, Chicago Mayor Levi Boone struck directly at the city’s German community in 1855.
He tripled liquor license fees and outlawed Sunday saloon sales, provoking an armed march on the courthouse that exploded into a riot.
German Americans have made major contributions in engineering, manufacturing, transportation, communications, and science.
Prominent German-born inventors and their descendants played a vital role in transforming American industry across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Key breakthroughs included John Roebling’s development of wire rope, enabling the construction of suspension bridges, and Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine, which revolutionized the printing field.
Additional game-changing innovations included Emile Berliner’s flat record and disc gramophone, Herman Hollerith’s punched-card tabulation system, a crucial forerunner to modern computing, and George Westinghouse’s safety air brake for trains.
German Americans also advanced agriculture with John Froelich’s gasoline-powered tractor, electrical engineering through the work of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, and musical instrument design through the innovations of the Steinway family…and of course, Levi Strauss gave us the blue jean.
Anti-German sentiment accelerated during WWI. The hostility spilled into public life as states banned German-language instruction and church sermons, city councils changed German-sounding street names, and restaurants even rebranded sauerkraut as “liberty cabbage”.
German-Americans were forced to register under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Registration involved completing a four-page form outlining their birth history and migration history, as well as providing a photograph.
Federal marshals arrested over 6,300 residents as enemy aliens, sending them to military internment camps in North Carolina and Georgia.
President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration outlined 12 regulations to guide the process and contained a description of an enemy alien: an alien enemy whom there may be reasonable cause to believe to be aiding or about to aid the enemy . . . or violates any regulation promulgated by the President . . . will be subject to summary arrest . . . and to confinement in such penitentiary, prison, jail, or military camp.
The challenges didn’t stop at federal regulations, as Germans were often the victims of ostracism and public acts of violence. In 1918, hysteria drove the killing of coal miner Robert Prager. Prager was lynched by more than 100 people in Collinsville, Illinois, his only crime a German accent at the height of anti-German sentiment during WWI.
Prosecutors tried eleven men for his murder, but the jury acquitted every single one. After deliberating for barely ten minutes, the jury returned not guilty verdicts, prompting one juror to remark: I guess nobody can say we aren’t loyal now.
In the 1930s, the rise of Nazi Germany once again threw the loyalty and standing of German-Americans into question. A new wave of German migrants would rise to the challenge of defeating Nazi Germany.
Leading the charge was Albert Einstein, the German-born physicist driven out of Europe, who was followed by Hans Bethe and James Franck. These men helped advance American science and paved the way for America’s use of nuclear energy and the creation of the atomic bomb.
Despite being the largest ethnic group in the United States, Germans aren’t nearly as high-profile as others. There are some celebrations, but generations of German Americans who lived through two world wars learned it was better to just assimilate and downplay their heritage.
Nonetheless, the contributions of German Americans have touched almost every area of life in the United States, even if most people don’t know it.