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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There were different waves of German immigration to the United States. The first waves started in the late 17th century to Pennsylvania and formed what we now call the Pennsylvania Dutch, although most were actually just plain Lutheran and assimilated quickly enough. There are some letters exchanged among the Quakers and even Ben Franklin exhibiting concern that Pennsylvania was being overrun by Germans! My father's family of my surname came in the 1690s with other family branches in the subsequent decades through the 1750s. None were strictly Anabaptist and we fought in the Revolutionary War for the colonialists. You still see strong German cultural influence in central Pennsylvania from this immigration wave 300 years ago even though few new emigrants joined the Pennsylvania Germans after the Revolutionary War.

T[b]hen, in starting in the 1830s and particularly in the 1840s, a massive tide of German immigrants swept across America.[/b] Unlike the 18th century Germans, these were not Anabaptists or low church Lutherans but a mixture of Catholic and Protestants, and from various parts of Germany. This tide was partially fueled by the revolutions of the 1840s. They came to both cities and countryside and most headed for the "frontier" of the time, the middle west, although large and flourishing communities settled in Baltimore. These Germans were more recognizably "generically German" than the earlier Germans, whose identities had initially been rooted in faith. The Germans were the most successful of the immigrant groups and, unlike the Irish of the same time, were widely recognized as being law abiding, orderly, hardworking, making their assimilation much easier and as such they suffered fairly minimal anti-immigration pushback (although not entirely exempt, there were a few localized anti-German riots). It helped that most were Protestants.

The unification of Germany in the 1860s and the resulting economic growth of the new German state did slow down the tide of German emigration to America, but a strong German identity did continue, particularly among the 1840s immigration generation. Baltimore had German newspapers and German beer halls and German singing societies. But when WWI broke out, the German-speaking Americans knew where their loyalties lay and that was the psychological break with Germany and most of the German identities quickly faded away and newspapers and singing societies closed down. So successful was this retrenchment that by WWII, it never occurred to anyone to question the potential loyalty of someone like Eisenhower just because he had a German last name. An all-encompassing American identity had taken over and the middle 20th century saw a significant retrenchment from "ethnic" identities, which extended to other European immigration groups like the Italians and Polish.

If you want to ask why the German American concept is now so invisible, it's because it was no longer needed and people were now too far removed from a mother country that also no longer existed in a meaningful sense. [/quote]
To add on to this - the Erie Canal was opened in 1825 and created better direct access to the Midwest. Railways also expanded in the decades after that. Per Wikipedia: "As the Midwest opened up to settlement via waterways and rail in the mid-1800s, Germans began to settle there in large numbers. The largest flow of German immigration to America occurred between 1820 and World War I, during which time nearly six million Germans immigrated to the United States. From 1840 to 1880, they were the largest group of immigrants." From my ancestry research there were entire families (parents with 10-15 kids, plus siblings with similar families) that settled and populated the Midwest. Along with the German immigrants, there was also a lot of internal migration of English farmers from the northeast (MA, NJ) and mid-Atlantic (DE, MD, VA). Everyone was looking for land opportunity. The Germans who immigrated during this time period were well educated and wealthy. Within one to two generations, they congregated to build out the main cities, started all sorts of businesses, and became community leaders. German culture, combined with English culture was the dominant culture. As others have said, WWI & WWII brought a suppression of the German language and explicit identification of being German, but by this time immigrants were 3rd and 4th generation anyway, so they didn't feel strong cultural ties to "Germany".

I read an interesting study about 5 years ago looking regionally at what defined "American" culture. It found that German culture was the core of "American" culture in over 50% of the country. German Americans are not invisible - we are everywhere and well integrated into the WASP melting pot.

Also shout-out to the other American mutt in this thread! That's how I describe myself when asked about my heritage. I'm Italian-Polish-German-English-Spanish, and there's some hints of middle eastern and African from those Italian sailor ancestors of mine.[/quote]

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