German-American
Individual Germans had been coming to the United States since the 17th century, and continued into the late 19th century at a rate exceeding that of any other country. The first to arrive as a group were religious dissenters who landed at Philadelphia aboard the Concord in 1683. These settlers from Krefeld, Frankfurt and Palatinate, were led by a young lawyer, Franz Daniel Pastorius. With William Penn's help, Pastorius established "Germantown", the settlement near Philadelphia. Lately, Germantown "became the distributing center through which the stream of German immigration poured into southeastern Pennsylvania, and finally overflowed down the Valley of Virginia into the back country of the colonies farther south"(Bittinger, 10). By 1727 there were about 20,000 Germans in Pennsylvania; by the start of the Revolution in 1776, the number jumped to 110,000 to 125,000. They were mostly farmers, simple rural folk, a few were skilled artisans. They became the forerunners of today's "Pennsylvania German /Dutch" culture, and had almost no subsequent connection with Germany. In this early period, political, social, and economic collapse, crop failures, famine, religious persecution and tyrannical rulers were the main fa
The government's Committee on Public Information flooded the country with grotesque anti-German propaganda (Wittke, 68). Many German-Americans found they were harassed and mistreated. The leaders of these revolutions wanted new, republican forms of government to replace the existing monarchies. However, the revolutions failed and resulted in even stricter regulations being placed upon the people. The Wilson administration, however, became increasingly committed to opposing any restrictions on U. began to deteriorate during the decade preceding World War I, the Alliance became increasingly supportive of the imperial German government and its aims. Cheap land, encouraging transportation companies and land speculators, and family letters from the New World spurred this tide, which "not only filled in the older eastern communities, but flowed westward along the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes into the Middle West"(Lass, 68). The German-American press, once largely in the hands of political liberals, had passed to the control of younger immigrants whose attitudes reflected those of imperial Germany. S trade with the Allies (Wittke, 57).
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