Volume 47 - No. 04
By Friedrich Gomez
It may come as a complete surprise to most that the largest single ethnic group in America today are not the English – as many might surmise -- but German. Yes, England is still historically referred to as our “Mother Country,” and our Founding Fathers were, in large numbers, English, as were most of the early presidents of the United States who claimed English ancestry. Academics on this subject are more surgically precise: “The extent of English heritage varies with earlier presidents being predominantly of colonial English Yankee stock.” Perhaps a broader and more accurate ethnic analysis would be to surmise that the lineage of most early American Presidents to have been predominantly of British origin. In essence, all of our U. S. Presidents were/are of multi-ethnic origin, such as Richard Nixon who was of Scotch, Irish, Scotch-Irish, English, and German lineage, to cite only one example.
January 26, 2017
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The early British influence has long permeated the DNA of America. Additionally, a surplus of our cities and states and even large regional areas, such as New England, New York, Boston, New Hampshire, Maryland, Massachusetts, Georgia, Virginia, etc. were named after counterparts in England. And though America has no official language (as many other countries have) our “unofficial” language which is most widely-spoken today is, of course, English. And to tie a bow around it all, England remains our closest ally. But the train of similarity comes to a screeching halt after that. German blood and German people are, officially, the most dominant ethnic group, by far, in America today.
According to the latest American census reports, over 50 million Americans now claim German ancestry, which officially makes them the largest single ethnic group in the good ol’ U. S of A. If you divide Hispanics into MexicanAmericans, Cuban-Americans, Puerto Rican-Americans, et al, then it’s not even a close horse race. In a 2010 U. S. Census report, 48 million Americans claimed German ancestry. In 2013 that number jumped to over 50 million German-Americans and this number is burgeoning as we stride into 2017. Yet, this vast number of GermanAmericans remain the “silent majority.” Unlike other ethnic groups, GermanAmericans keep a relatively lower-profile. Italians-Americans are quick to identify themselves -- ask Sylvester Stallone, Al Pacino, Robert DiNiro, or New York’s erstwhile mayor and past presidential hopeful, Rudy Giuliani. Equally vocal are the Irish-Americans and other hyphenated American groups such as the English, the Greeks, the Jews, Russians, French, well, just about everyone else. If there is any downside to this hyphenated ethnic coin it is that out of 50-plus million German-Americans who claim
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such ethnicity on their census forms, only 1.38 million actually speak German in the United States! Sadly, for me (who speaks this beautiful language), that is only 0.5% of the entire GermanAmerican population in this country that are fluent in the language. This was not always so.
There existed an earlier time in America when the German culture openly flourished before it was curtailed. German immigrants had moved in great numbers to New York and Chicago and many who resided in countless small Midwestern towns spoke German almost exclusively. German-language newspapers, movie theatres and even churches grew in leaps and bounds. As American historians note: “In some of these areas, the German influence was so pervasive that other non-German settlers ended up learning German so they could communicate with fellow residents. Germans helped establish General Electric and designed New York’s
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Brooklyn Bridge. They dominated the beer industry and that influence lingers in name brands like Busch, Miller and Pabst.” In Pennsylvania, which has a large German-American population, German was long allowed as the language of instruction in schools and, according to state records: “State documents were available in German until 1950.”
So, what happened? Why has the Germanic language dwindled to a near non-existence in proportion to its population today?
At the onset of World War I, extreme anti-German feelings surfaced in America and, as a result, the fluency of the language decreased from one generation to the next until today only a small fraction of people with German ancestry are actually fluent in the German language. The level of suppression of the language was so extreme during World War I that it was not only
a social taboo but, in some instances, a legal issue: “Many states forbade the use of German in public schools to the point where speaking German in public was against the law in some regions.” This anti-German hysteria during the First World War rose to such a crescendo that the widespread use of the language became limited to Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities. This linguistic debacle under the specter of the First World War saw German lose its position as the second most widelyspoken language in the United States. This once-strong German influence would soon end abruptly. And they (the German-American communities) would recede into the silent majority. World and domestic upheavals in history were the authors of this demise on American soil. Often, unjustly. That residual is still felt and remains the primary reason behind the paltry number of fluent German-speakers today -- it is because the language was greatly suppressed by
America’s Silent Majority The German-Americans Continued on Page 2