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Short answer, it's "complicated" in that there are always multiple things going on at once, but... yes. And the ways it's "complicated" are weirder than you mi

Short answer, it's "complicated" in that there are always multiple things going on at once, but... yes. And the ways it's "complicated" are weirder than you might think. Like that Germans were actually one of the least "assimilating" significant non-English European populations here in the 19th century. Actual histories often don't match our assumptions based on current ideologies. Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917–1919 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449071 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24449071 "…World War I not only intensified fears that the "melting pot" was failing, but also broadened this concern to include German Americans as a suspect ethnic group. Before the war, German Americans were one of the most respected immigrant groups in America, having achieved success in many spheres. Brewery magnate Adolf Busch, intellectual and U.S. Senator Carl Schulz, and financier John D. Rockefeller were among the German Americans who had risen to prominence in the United States. Significantly, German Americans acquired their favorable reputation despite being the ethnic group most resistant to assimilation…" "…Furthermore, Texans’ historic distrust of German Texans helped inspire anti-German activities. During the antebellum period, slaveholders had viewed German Texans with suspicion, especially after an 1854 convention of German Texans adopted an anti-slavery resolution. In fact, only a minority of German Texans supported this resolution, but most Texans did not understand that subtlety. They were preoccupied with German Texans’ common culture which prevented them from discerning political, religious, and social differences among Germans…" "…Claiming that German Texans’ ethnicity was equivalent to disloyalty, many council of defense members in Texas were determined to purge all traces of German culture from their state…" (DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.1994.tb00925.x for your sci-hub needs...) But my main point is that these are very different situations -- national projects in Europe unifying/homogenizing various long-existed local geographically-specific cultures (I'm not sure 'assimilation' is even the right word here). Vs America, where various European populations came, only in the last few hundred years, displaced local geographically-specific cultures, and then competed with each other for political power or cultural hegemony as they expanded to take land the previous occupants were displaced from, also sometimes forming communities together (in which they were all newcomers to the land). Just two very different situations; although i tried to say there were some commonalities in the way cultures are homogenized/unified, I am sympathetic to the idea that "why are you even looking for commonalities these are such different situations". I think we often over-simplify the diversity of historical paths with this stuff, assuming that the way we now look at "culture" or "nationality" or "race" has always been the way people did, and/or was inevitable. But these things were built, in the not too recent past, and didn't work the same way they work now even in recent history, and worked differently in different places.

throwaway894345 5y ago
WRT Germans in Texas, that’s highly regional—I don’t know that it generalizes broadly to America. It also doesn’t demonstrate a top-down pressure to assimilate in order to build up another group’s political power, but rather an overblown fear that German-Americans (I am German-American, for the record) had conflicting interests. I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, but “pressure to assimilate in order to grow someone’s political power” doesn’t sound like an accurate characterization of American history as I understand it.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  We were talking about Texas, I brought up Germans in Texas and you responded to that -- so I found an article about the history in Texas. I can find other articles from other parts of the U.S., but at this point I feel like you've shown whatever I find, I think you have your mind made up about, as you say, "American history as you understand it", and are uninterested in historical evidence that might complicate that. As I understand it, the history is more diverse and complicated than you understand it. I shared one source to that end, you dismissed it because it didn't match your preferred narrative. But again, my main point was not that one sentance.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    My issue is that your example doesn’t actually support the thesis (see my previous post). So if you can’t produce an example that supports your thesis then it’s going to be hard to persuade just about anyone.
    - mannerheim 5y ago
      There was certainly a great amount of pressure against German during and following WWI. As an example of the sort of public sentiment at that time, the artist Grant Wood (famous for American Gothic) even had a spat with the Daughters of the American Revolution a decade after the war: > In 1927, Wood was commissioned to create a stained glass window in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Unhappy with the quality of domestic glass sources, he used glass made in Germany. The local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) complained about the use of a German source for a World War I memorial, as Germany had been an enemy of the US in that war. They expressed a lingering anti-German sentiment in society, and other people in Cedar Rapids also protested the German source. As a result, the window was not dedicated until 1955.[2] > Wood was said to have described the DAR as "those Tory gals" and "people who are trying to set up an aristocracy of birth in a Republic."[3] Five years later Wood painted Daughters of Revolution, which he described as his only satire. He emphasized the contrast of three aged women in faded dresses framed against the heroic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, which, ironically, was painted in Germany by the German-American artist Emanuel Leutze.[1] Wood depicted his mother's clothing on the models, including a lace collar and amber pin he bought for her in Germany.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Revolution German names became anglicised, German newspapers disappeared, and German stopped being taught in schools. Whether German would have survived without this sort of persecution is not really knowable, but it did happen.

throwaway894345 5y ago

WRT Germans in Texas, that’s highly regional—I don’t know that it generalizes broadly to America. It also doesn’t demonstrate a top-down pressure to assimilate in order to build up another group’s political power, but rather an overblown fear that German-Americans (I am German-American, for the record) had conflicting interests. I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, but “pressure to assimilate in order to grow someone’s political power” doesn’t sound like an accurate characterization of American history as I understand it.

jrochkind1 5y ago
We were talking about Texas, I brought up Germans in Texas and you responded to that -- so I found an article about the history in Texas. I can find other articles from other parts of the U.S., but at this point I feel like you've shown whatever I find, I think you have your mind made up about, as you say, "American history as you understand it", and are uninterested in historical evidence that might complicate that. As I understand it, the history is more diverse and complicated than you understand it. I shared one source to that end, you dismissed it because it didn't match your preferred narrative. But again, my main point was not that one sentance.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  My issue is that your example doesn’t actually support the thesis (see my previous post). So if you can’t produce an example that supports your thesis then it’s going to be hard to persuade just about anyone.
  - mannerheim 5y ago
    There was certainly a great amount of pressure against German during and following WWI. As an example of the sort of public sentiment at that time, the artist Grant Wood (famous for American Gothic) even had a spat with the Daughters of the American Revolution a decade after the war: > In 1927, Wood was commissioned to create a stained glass window in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Unhappy with the quality of domestic glass sources, he used glass made in Germany. The local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) complained about the use of a German source for a World War I memorial, as Germany had been an enemy of the US in that war. They expressed a lingering anti-German sentiment in society, and other people in Cedar Rapids also protested the German source. As a result, the window was not dedicated until 1955.[2] > Wood was said to have described the DAR as "those Tory gals" and "people who are trying to set up an aristocracy of birth in a Republic."[3] Five years later Wood painted Daughters of Revolution, which he described as his only satire. He emphasized the contrast of three aged women in faded dresses framed against the heroic painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, which, ironically, was painted in Germany by the German-American artist Emanuel Leutze.[1] Wood depicted his mother's clothing on the models, including a lace collar and amber pin he bought for her in Germany.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_Revolution German names became anglicised, German newspapers disappeared, and German stopped being taught in schools. Whether German would have survived without this sort of persecution is not really knowable, but it did happen.