The Great Disappearing Act: An Interview with Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson
Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
Today on the Blog, Gotham editor Hongdeng Gao speaks to Christina Ziegler-McPherson about her latest book, The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City, 1880-1930. Ziegler-McPherson discusses how over the span of a few decades, New York City’s German community went from being the best positioned to promote a new, more pluralistic American culture that they themselves had helped to create to being an invisible group. She offers fresh insights into how German immigration shaped cultural, financial, and social institutions in New York City and debates about assimilation and multi-lingualism in the United States.
Could you begin by telling us how you came to this book project? What were some of the challenges that you faced in the research and writing process?
The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City, 1880-1930
By Christina Ziegler-McPherson
Rutgers University Press, 2021
238 pages
The concept for this book went through several iterations. I initially wanted to write a history of the German community in New York City during World War I as a case study of nativism. I then shifted my focus to going beyond questions of nativism and look at the evolution of the German community in New York City in a period that is largely understudied in migration studies, the late 19th-early 20th centuries. I wanted to build upon Stanley Nadel’s pioneering book (Little Germany, Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80) and address the questions of community maturity and decline. An important difference from this work and earlier community studies from the 1970s or 1980s is that this study is not trying to explain “ghettoization” or urban decline. Rather, I was interested in community structures and change over time, as well as questions of definitions and drivers of assimilation. I was also interested in community as a group of self-defined people and institutions rather than a particular geographic space. I had also previously written an immigration history of Hoboken (Immigrants in Hoboken: One-Way Ticket, 1845-1985), which was my first effort at doing social history. I decided I would try to do a similar project but focus on one immigrant group and in a larger city.
The biggest challenge in this project was trying to measure community movement and geographic dispersal in a large urban environment that was itself rapidly growing and expanding (physically-geographically and socio-demographically) and doing it with sources that regularly changed boundaries and definitions. The Census changed its questions every decade between 1870-1930, and so comparing responses to questions was difficult because the questions themselves were rarely consistent over time (e.g., asking about “place of birth” vs. “mother tongue”). Ward and other political district boundaries changed several times, so it was sometimes difficult to compare demographic changes within a district. Measuring change in a highly dynamic environment is difficult, and when one is talking about populations in the thousands or hundreds of thousands, it becomes very challenging. The fact that a lot of the data was not organized in a way that allowed for easy sampling or analysis was also an issue. In one instance, I wanted to look at where Germans registered as “enemy aliens” lived in the city during World War I, so I drew a sample of nearly 2,700 names from a 113-page list of approximately 21,000 names. The list is a PDF scan of a newspaper insert and so this meant every name had to be entered into a spreadsheet by hand. This was, needless to say, very time consuming. And then the results had to be analyzed. The amount of work needed in order to answer one question or be able to write one sentence or phrase was very high in this project.
As you mentioned, between 1880 and 1930, New York City’s German community was “an extremely diverse” group. Can you briefly tell us how you define the community? How was it stratified internally and what held the community members together as a distinctive group?
My definition of “German” is relatively simple: I considered anyone German speaking and/or from a state that was in the German Confederation and later the German Empire to be “German.” I also relied on the US Census definition of “German” in terms of my statistics. I consider the community to have been “diverse” in that it included working-middle-and (eventually)- upper class people; a wide range of occupations; Catholics, Jews, and Protestants (and a wide range of Protestant sects within Protestantism); was geographically well distributed (so Germans were in every state and territory), and had important generational variety (people who emigrated in the 1830s were and saw themselves as different from Germans who emigrated in the 1880s or the 1920s). I also tried to take into account people’s self-understanding of “diversity”: so, people’s understanding of themselves as being “Bavarian” vs. “Sachsen” and having identities based on home state origin vs. an identity based on language or a pan-German identity imposed by the majority community.
Despite the dialect differences, the German language was an important community-binder. English-speaking New Yorkers defined anyone who spoke German as being “German” regardless of state or region of origin.
The Verein (club) culture and more relaxed attitude toward alcohol consumption were also important definers of community. For people living in a cosmopolitan urban environment like New York City today, it is easy to forget how powerful the Anglo-American temperance/prohibition movements were in the 19th century, or how pervasive and extensive Anglo-American religious and moral conservativism was. Even in a city like New York City in the 19th century, there were a wide range of activities that are now considered normal, ordinary, harmless that were banned because they were considered immoral and socially and spiritually unhealthy (e.g., going to the theater, playing sports). The cultural (and ultimately political) conflicts over alcohol and recreation/leisure activities on Sundays between Germans and English-speakers was a major difference between the English-and-German-speaking communities. Opposition to alcohol prohibition was the main issue that united German New Yorkers politically, and often the only political issue that enabled Germans to transcend their other political differences.
You note that by the turn of the 20th century, many of German immigrants understood assimilation not as “absorption into an unchanging, static American culture dominated by white English-speaking Anglo Saxon Protestants” but rather as “a process of creating a new society and culture… with each ethnic group becoming more like one another and in turn, changing the larger society’s understanding of what it was to be an American.” Could you give a few examples of how this kind of assimilation occurred in the case of Germans?
Two of the best examples of this are American attitudes toward leisure time and celebrations/observations of Christian holidays, although both of these are not completely due to German influence. (American culture is not simply the product of mixing English and German immigrant cultures, many other groups contributed!)
The modern American understanding of leisure time, of the weekend as a time for personal free time, for shopping, for socializing, for recreation, in effect, doing what you want, stems from the labor movement of the 1870s-1890s and the demands for shorter workdays. This movement was not wholly German but was heavily dominated by Germans, who made up a large minority of workers, and importantly, skilled workers, in New York City and in the United States The idea also that Sunday as “a day of rest” meant personal free time and socializing with family and friends, vs. church attendance, Bible reading, and community-enforced morality (e.g., bars, restaurants, cultural institutions being closed on Sunday) stemmed directly from German immigrants.
American Christian holiday practices are a mix of northern European traditions, mostly German and Dutch; German traditions are more widespread mainly because there were more German immigrants than Dutch immigrants and these German immigrants settled all over the country, while Dutch immigrants tended to cluster in certain regions (like the Hudson River Valley or Michigan). These traditions are also almost entirely Protestant . What is important to understand is that all of these traditions (Christmas tree decorations, gift giving, Easter eggs, etc.) really developed in the 19th century as part of larger trends of modernism, secularization, market capitalism, industrialization. German immigrant entrepreneurs were important players in industries such as printing, candy making, household goods manufacturing and so on that promoted and enabled the commercialization of these traditions. Chocolate Easter eggs or Santa Clauses are not simply German cultural imports, they are the product of a capitalist, industrial economy actively engaged in colonialism and now globalization.
You argue that before World War I, German Americans had been the ethnic group “best positioned to promote alternative visions of American society.” Why was that the case? How did other groups such as Irish Americans and those of non-European descent figure in this pluralistic vision of society?
German and German American intellectuals were able to promote pluralistic understandings of American culture because they had an extensive and well distributed German language print industry (for instance, the first use of the word “melting pot” in relation to assimilation actually occurred in a German magazine in 1857, several decades before the concept began to be discussed by English-speaking intellectuals), and they had relatively large amounts of social capital. The American German community was large, increasingly well-organized politically, geographically well distributed across the United States, and generally respected by Anglo Americans and other immigrant groups.
Other immigrant groups fit into the German concept of pluralism, but of course, from the German perspective, in a lower, inferior status. German American intellectuals understood pluralism in relation to themselves, not in terms of other groups or immigrants in general. There was not much interest in other groups, and there was a confidence/arrogance that Germans were contributing the most in terms of quantity and quality of important things (i.e., culture) to American society. Although Irish immigrants were a very large immigrant group (in numbers nearly as many as Germans), they as a group had less social capital, in large part due to the strong anti-Catholic prejudice on the part of Protestant Americans and the greater poverty they brought with them from Ireland (again, in large part due to anti-Catholic prejudice on the part of the British).
You describe William Steinway and many other German American entrepreneurs as individuals who were straddled between German and Anglo-American cultures. Can you discuss a little bit about how these businessmen navigated the two cultures, especially in relation to changing labor and philanthropic practices at the time?
This question of what was or comprised a “German business” is a primary question of the German Historical Institute’s Immigrant Entrepreneurship project (https://www.ghi-dc.org/research/digital-history/immigrant-entrepreneurship ), which was an important resource for me in this project. I see “Germanness” in these businessmen in terms of who they associated with in both their professional and personal lives, family connections, language spoken in business operations. So Steinway and other German and German American businessmen and entrepreneurs were active in German-only cultural and social organizations, promoted German culture and community organization, encouraged Germans to vote as a unified ethnic block, etc. But I have found no evidence that there were any cultural or ethnic distinctions between German-speaking and English-speaking capitalists (e.g., German Jewish bankers like Felix Warburg or Jacob Schiff with JP Morgan or even Steinway vs. an English-American piano manufacturer: I doubt there were any significant differences in business practice). The question of differences in business cultures between Germany and the U.S. in the 19th century is one that I do not think has been explored. I think one could say that German American businessmen were very comfortable in practicing/observing German culture in their private lives and in their businesses, when convenient and beneficial, while also adopting all of the ruthlessness of Anglo-American capitalism when it suited them.
What would you say was the lasting impact of WWI and the demonization of the German language for German Americans? How can it help us rethink US immigration and ethnic history?
The lasting impact was this effort on the part of Germans and German Americans to hide their ethnic identity, to stop speaking German (at least publicly), to stop promoting German culture and community institutions in highly visible ways. This disappearing extends to the point that German American Studies is a smaller field within American ethnic and immigration history than it otherwise could be, even though Germans were the largest immigrant group for most of the 19th century. The assimilation to the point of disappearing has been so complete that many Americans know nothing about German immigration to the United States, do not know that they have German heritage, or the influence of this immigration on American society and culture.
Scholarship in this area should absolutely not be filiopietistic (I don’t study German immigration because I have German heritage, I study migration because I am an American and migration is central to US history). Rather, understanding the German immigrant experience in World War I, especially in regard to language, is important in terms of understanding American social and political resistance to bi-or-multi-lingualism, the continued insistence on the part of many English-speaking Americans that assimilation = English speaking (vs. other metrics like residential integration, inter-marriage, etc.), that English is “the American language.” This question of language adoption as the primary definition of integration or assimilation should be more thoroughly explored, and could be done, for instance, with a comparison of German vs. Spanish today.
Additionally, the difficult and unpleasant question of whether coercive assimilation policies “work” need to be more thoroughly explored.
Is there anything else that you would like to add about The Great Disappearing Act?
I would like this work to be both an inspiration and a jumping off point for other scholars. There are a lot of stories about immigration in New York City, and German immigration in particular that I was not able to do with this project, and I hope others find these holes and start filling them with interesting scholarship. This is a group effort!
Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson is a California-born historian living in Bremen, Germany. She earned her Ph.D. in history with a focus on migration and public history at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000. She is the author of four books and several articles about migration, assimilation theory, and immigrant communities, and won a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship to Germany in 2014-2015. She has worked as a public historian and museum curator for the past 20 years.
Hongdeng Gao is a History PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines how Cold War geopolitics and grassroots activism in New York City improved access to health care for under-served Chinese New Yorkers in the late 20th century.