“Hyphenated Americans” — Anti-Immigrant Bias and the Enlargement of Whiteness
Chapter Nine of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
German and Irish and Italian immigrants to the United States were not always considered good candidates to become White Americans. In the nineteenth century, European immigrants, especially those who were Catholic, were considered an alien threat to mainstream “old stock” White Americans who were mostly Protestant and saw themselves as having “Anglo-Saxon” ancestry.
The slow and uneven process which led to the merging of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European immigrants into the mainstream of White American status and identity was put into motion by the perceived threat to White domination arising from the emancipation and enfranchisement of large numbers of Black Americans following the Civil War. Enlarging Whiteness by bringing European immigrants and their descendants into the fold of the White American Nation helped maintain the social, economic, and political dominance of Whiteness in the United States.
One branch of my maternal ancestry was part of a massive wave of German immigration to America in the 1850s. In that decade, more than a million German immigrants arrived in the United States. The majority of them settled in the Midwest in the “German triangle.” By 1890, the area between Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis was home to an estimated 2.8 million German-born immigrants.
Adolphus Busch, for example, immigrated from the Rhineland to St. Louis as a child in 1857. As an adult, he founded a successful brewing company with his father-in-law, another German immigrant, Eberhard Anheuser. A lot of early Anheuser-Busch customers were German-Americans like my great great grandparents, Frederick “Fritz” and Anna Ilsabein (Weitkamp) Krug, who, like Busch, joined the German-American community of greater St. Louis as children in the 1850s.
Anna Ilsabein Weitkamp arrived in America in 1858 or 1859. She would have been just two or three years old when she left her birthplace in Westphalia for America. Her mother didn’t finish the journey. In the 1860 U.S. Census, Anna’s infant brother Henry’s birthplace is recorded as “Atlantic Ocean” and Anna’s mother is not listed. In all likelihood, her mother died in childbirth, on board the ship, before it reached America.
Anna Weitkamp’s entire life was a roller coaster of grievous loss and guarded optimism. As a toddler, she might have been too young to feel the pain of her mother’s death but, as a child, she must have grieved over her mother’s absence. In 1870, at age fifteen, Anna was a live-in servant, helping the Inglemans (another farming family from Prussia) with farm chores and caring for their three young children. There is no sign in the records of what happened to Anna’s father. He might have died in the 1860s, a victim of the Civil War or of disease.
In 1872, seventeen-year-old Anna married Hermann Stevener, a German-immigrant farmer who had arrived in America at age nineteen in 1866. In late February 1879, just one month after the birth of their second son, Anna’s husband Hermann died at age thirty-two.
Anna remarried in October 1880. Her second husband was my great great grandfather, Frederick “Fritz” Krug. Fritz was thirty-eight when he married Anna and became a stepfather to the Stevener boys. Anna and Fritz had six more children. For the next quarter of a century, they lived on a farm on Chouteau Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, just upstream from St. Louis.
In May 1892, the Krug family suffered through a tragedy that earned them front-page news coverage in the May 20, 1892 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
THE FIRST MAN ABOARD
[…] The man’s name was Fred Krug, 45 years old, a gray-headed fellow, drenched and worn from days of exposure and sleepless watching for some passing boat that would rescue himself and neighbors. He was assisted on board from the skiff by a member of the POST-DISPATCH relief corps and at once taken up to the cabin, where hot coffee was ready. While drinking the coffee, Krug told his story, a pitiful one. He told it quietly and plainly until he came to that portion of the narrative where he described the picture of his abandoned home toppling into the water. At that point the old man began sobbing and for several minutes could not continue. When he at last raised his head the tears were streaming down over his face.
“I hate to cry,” he muttered in broken English, “but everything I had was in my home, and now it is all gone.” […]
After the flood waters of May 1892 receded, with help from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Flood Relief Fund, Anna and Fritz Krug were able to return with their children and rebuild the house and farm on Chouteau Island. A few years later, in about 1896, Anna and Fritz took the family to a photography studio in St. Louis. My great grandmother, Carrie, age three or four, posed in her Sunday best with her older sister, Sophie.
When she wanted to make me aware of how much she spoiled me, my maternal grandmother sometimes mentioned to me that her own maternal grandma, my great great grandma, Anna Krug, had been a very stern woman who never indulged children. When I asked her why Great-great Grandma Krug was so mean, Grandma Culberson would just say it was because Anna was German. She would say, “Grandma Anna was a Weitkamp!” giving the surname it’s German pronunciation.
But I think my Great-great Grandma Krug’s grimness was a shield she picked up as a child and carried with her through all the tragic losses of her life. When I look at the photo taken in 1915 of Anna with her youngest son, John Gottlieb Krug, I see in her eyes the weight of past grief and resigned anticipation of grief yet to come.
At the end of nineteenth century, German immigrants were able to carve out pieces of the American Midwest where they could feel secure and at home, cocooned in a German-American centered world. But it didn’t last. The advent of World War I toppled whatever remained of the wall of security German-Americans had built around their communities.
For a brief moment in American history, German-Americans were given a taste of the much deeper contempt and distrust White Americans felt toward Chinese and Black Americans. It must have been terrifying for Anna Krug and her family.
On the night of April 5, 1918 in Collinsville, Illinois, about twenty miles east of Chouteau Island, a man named Robert Prager was dragged by a mob of angry White men from the basement of the Collinsville jail where the local sheriff had tried vainly to hide and protect him. Prager’s chief offense, in the eyes of the mob, was that he was not sufficiently American. Prager was a German-born immigrant.
Robert Prager had arrived in America at age seventeen in 1905. In 1917, when the U.S. declared war on Germany, Prager was living in St. Louis. He applied for naturalization and tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy, but was rejected for medical reasons. He moved around looking for work and in late summer 1917, settled in Collinsville, working for a time as baker and later as a laborer for one of the coal mining companies in town.
In 1918, Prager applied for membership in Local 1802 of the United Mine Workers of America. When Prager’s application was rejected, perhaps because he was thought to be a socialist, he wrote an angry letter of complaint and posted copies of it in spots where union miners in Collinsville were sure to see it, outside saloons and around the town center.
Prager might have thought his letter would elicit sympathy and support from the union miners in town, but that was not how the miners reacted. Prager had misjudged the moment. Based on what happened next, it appears the letter sparked a deep and primeval feeling of betrayal and anger in the union miners who read it.
On the night of the same day the letter was posted, April 5, 1918, a crowd of more than 100 men forced Prager from his home and made him march barefoot down the main street of the town wrapped in an American flag and singing patriotic songs. The local sheriff, also German-American, took Prager into custody to protect him from the mob. But as the numbers in the mob outside the jail swelled the sheriff could not keep them out.
The mob reclaimed Prager and again made him parade through the streets kissing the flag and swearing allegiance to America. Just after midnight, hoping to tar and feather Prager but not locating any tar, the mob found a rope instead and used it to lynch him. Afterwards, eleven men were tried for the murder of Robert Prager. All eleven were acquitted.
Prager’s death came at a time when the term “hyphenated American” had become a common term of abuse.
In 1915, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in New York to the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic and largely Irish-American crowd, in which he said, in part:
…The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic …
In a 1919 speech arguing for the creation of the League of Nations, Woodrow Wilson also spoke out on what he saw as the dangers to American democracy posed by “hyphenated Americans:”
I want to say — I cannot say too often — any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.
For all my German-American relatives living in the St. Louis area at the turn of the twentieth century, the message was clear. It was time to become White Americans and put aside the German language, German culture, and German-American identity. German language schooling, common at the turn of the century in places like St. Louis and Cincinnati and elsewhere in the “German triangle,” came under heavy fire in the wake of America’s declaration of war against Germany in 1917.
During the war, Americans were encouraged by U.S. government propaganda to view German-Americans as potential spies and traitors. In early 1918, South Dakota passed a law prohibiting the use of German on the telephone. In May 1918, Iowa Governor William L. Harding issued the Babel Proclamation which contained the following mandates:
First. English should and must be the only medium of instruction in public, private, denominational or other similar schools. Second. Conversation in public places, on trains and over the telephone should be in the English language. Third. All public addresses should and must be in the English language. Fourth. Let those who cannot speak or understand the English language conduct their religious worship in their homes.
The Babel Proclamation, unconstitutional and impossible to enforce, was repealed in October 1918, but the anti-immigrant fervor that inspired it continued unabated. In the 1920s, English-only laws for schooling were in place in thirty-four states.
The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the making, transportation, and sale of alcohol in the United States, was proposed by Congress in December 1917 and ratified in January 1919. Prohibition was fed not only by religious zeal, but also by the extreme xenophobia and anti-immigrant bias of the WWI era. German-Americans, with their love of beer, as well as other “hyphenated Americans” and “colored” peoples, were specific targets of the ban on alcohol.
As difficult as life might have been at the turn of the twentieth century for German-Americans and other “hyphenated” European-American immigrants, there was a solution to their difficulties, a far from ideal solution, but a solution nonetheless; they could drop their European languages and habits and eventually become White Americans.
Assimilation was not so easy for Indigenous Americans, or Chinese Americans, or Mexican Americans, or Black Americans. Racial categorization and bias made the idea of fully assimilating “colored” peoples into the American nation inconceivable to most White Americans.
The lynching of German immigrant Robert Prager was notable because it was exceptional. Prager is thought to be the only foreign national lynched in America in the World War I era. On the other hand, mass murders and lynching of people of color were not exceptional events in America in the decades leading up to and following the turn of the twentieth century.
In Los Angeles, in 1871, a mob of about five hundred men attacked Chinatown. In what has been called the largest mass lynching in American history, seventeen to twenty Chinese were hanged.
On December 29, 1890, U.S. Army troops murdered as many as 250 Lakota children, women, and men in Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
In late May and again in early July 1917, White mobs attacked Black neighborhoods in East St. Louis, burning homes and businesses and killing as many as 250 Black women, men, and children and leaving an estimated 6,000 homeless.
On January 28, 1918, a group of Texas Rangers, U.S. Cavalry soldiers, and local ranchers in Porvenir, Presidio County, Texas, rounded up and executed fifteen, unarmed Mexican-American men and boys.
None of these atrocities was exceptional. They were not isolated incidents. They were each part of a pattern of ongoing violence and extra-judicial murders, a pattern of systemic racism that has persisted into the twenty-first century.
In 1917, the New York Evening Mail published a political cartoon critical of the federal government’s non-response to the mass destruction of Black lives and property in East St. Louis. The caption of the cartoon posed a question to Woodrow Wilson: “Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported extensively on the terrible human costs of the burning, massacre, and lynching of Black residents in East St. Louis in May and July 1917, just as they had reported on the terror and tragedy of the big flood on the Mississippi in May 1892. But there was one big difference in the way the newspaper responded to the two catastrophes.
In 1892, the newspaper not only sent a rescue boat out to save my Krug ancestors and their German-American neighbors on Chouteau Island, they also organized a Flood Relief Fund and raised money through private donations and charity events to provide aid to the flood victims. My Krug ancestors were able to put their lives back together because of that support. They were well on their way to becoming accepted as full members of the White American nation.
But in 1917, the victims in East St. Louis were Black people. In the days following the massacre the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a handful of the names of “Negroes” who were wounded during the riots and were being cared for in St. Louis, but the names of the uncounted Black people murdered during the riots were never reported.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch did not organize a relief fund for the Black victims of the 1917 East St. Louis massacre as they had for the flood victims of 1892. In July 1917, the paper was focused on soliciting donations for a different sort of relief fund, the Safe Milk and Free Ice Fund, a fund to assist poor, mainly European immigrant White children in St. Louis tenements. There was no comparable effort to assist the East St. Louis Black children whose parents were murdered or whose homes were burned in the riots of May and July 1917.
