Historical Doppelganger?
When someone in this once very German city says today’s immigrants “just need to do what my ancestors did,” I think, “Really?”
Maybe I’ve spent too many years doing historical documentaries, because every time I hear people talk about what’s happening in America today, I keep thinking it’s probably a variation of what’s happened in the past.
Not everybody liked those Germans back in the 19th century. They got economic and political power after the Civil War… and get this… they didn’t just want to preserve their language; they wanted to impose it on the rest of the city. And they did. For years, every student in the St. Louis Public Schools was required take German. There was plenty of resentment to this forced bilingualism, and opponents finally managed to get the German requirement dropped in 1887.
Still, the language and culture lived on. There were German newspapers and German theater, and German-Americans continued to teach their own children German. They even sent them back to Germany for their educations.
German immigrants did assimilate as their descendants proudly claim, but it was often on their own terms. Their native language lived on in homes, neighborhoods and shops. I remember interviewing an American-born woman who grew up in south St. Louis around in the very early 1900s. She told me she spoke English at home with her American parents but learned German to speak to neighbors and shopkeepers. So, I suppose German lessons were probably as handy back then as Spanish lessons might be today in certain neighborhoods.
It all ended rather suddenly when the U.S. went to war with Germany in 1917. To prove their loyalty as Americans, German-Americans were forced to give up public displays of their German culture and language. No hyphens allowed.
So when people talk about the “immigrant tradition,” what do they mean? The practice of proudly–or stubbornly–maintaining their culture and language, or forcing them to use English and drop the hyphens?
Category: Immigration 101
