World War I Navy recruitment poster

“IF ONE were to ask a group of American school children today what image springs to mind when they hear the word ‘German,’ you would most likely hear the following adjectives: fat, mean, violent, arrogant, ugly, loud, aggressive..or all of the above. It would be obvious that there is an aversion and negative response to the very word. If one were to ask who Schiller or Goethe were, you would probably either be met with a blank stare or be told that they were ‘Nazi generals.’

“The German people in our modern media have been alternately portrayed as silly, clumsy, beer-bellied fools or mad scientists and evil warlords. They vie with Arabs for first place as the Saturday cartoon version of the arch enemy of mankind.. their “guttural” accent alone enough to trigger fear and loathing. This conditioning started long before the National Socialists, however. It began almost a century ago and only took a few months to engineer. It is difficult to believe that there was actually a time when the German popular image was not only otherwise, but completely the opposite. It was very good and very old, going back, as we have seen, to the American Revolution.

“In the United States, Germans were the majority of immigrants for decades and they formed a huge part of the population. A German presence went back to the earliest days of the nation when most early German immigrants lived in the rural countryside. Back in 1745, there were an estimated 45,000 Germans living in Pennsylvania alone, and most were farmers. Only about two fifths lived in cities larger than 25,000 people, and even as late as 1870, German-born farmers made up one third of the agricultural industry in rural America. The German-American element was strong enough that German Language was allowed as an official alternative in the schools of many states, some requiring it upon parental demand as early as 1839. Some public and parochial schools taught exclusively in German throughout many decades, and many larger cities, such as Baltimore, St. Louis, Cincinnati and Cleveland operated bilingual schools.”

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