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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 96-101



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Identity Crisis

Russell A. Kazal. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 390 pp. Illustrations, tables, appendix, notes, and index. $35.00.

The U.S. census reports that more Americans trace their ancestry to Germany than to any other country, yet a strong German American ethnic consciousness is largely absent today (p. 1). This absence is perhaps not surprising, given America's involvement in World War One and World War Two. Indeed, historian Russell A. Kazal acknowledges the role these wars played in suppressing German American ethnic consciousness in his book Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. But Kazal goes far beyond such simple explanations, asserting that the way wartime hysteria reshaped German American identity had long-term consequences for American pluralism and racial identity after the conflict.

Although a city like Milwaukee or St. Louis might seem a natural choice for this kind of study, Kazal focuses instead on the German American community of Philadelphia. He based this decision in part on statistics: while smaller midwestern cities often boasted higher percentages of German Americans, Philadelphia's size meant that its German American population outnumbered those elsewhere. But there were other, equally significant reasons for Kazal's focus. Philadelphia's German American community traced its roots to the seventeenth century, a fact that affected the way such residents understood their identity. And many of the nation's most prominent German American organizations were headquartered in the city, including the National German-American Alliance, a group that played a central role in negotiating German American identity during World War One.

Using a wide array of German- and English-language sources, from census data and newspapers to club records and parish newsletters, Kazal argues that a homogeneous German American "community" did not really exist in Philadelphia by the turn of the century. Class, religion, generations in America, neighborhood, and other factors divided the German American population of the city. Brewers and bankers rarely mixed; neither did Lutherans, Catholics, and Jews (Kazal chooses not to focus on Jews in his [End Page 96] study). German organizational life (Vereinswesen) bridged some of these divides, but even the numerous singing societies, gymnastics clubs, and fraternal orders usually emphasized rather than muted class and religious identities. The United German Trades labor federation sponsored working-class choirs committed to Marxist socialism, while German Catholics participated in a social world almost wholly outside of the secular Vereinswesen. In the first part of the book, Kazal highlights such divides by examining in detail the German American population of two neighborhoods: the middle-class Germantown area and the working-class Girard Avenue District.

Fewer than 8 percent of the population of Germantown, a leafy suburb of Philadelphia, was of German stock (which Kazal defines as first- and second-generation German). Like their Germantown neighbors, most of these residents were middle class and white collar. Some Germantown German Americans were involved in ethnic organizations, such as the National German-American Alliance. Yet according to Kazal, by the early 1900s these ties were weakening. Germantown's small population of German Americans shared their neighborhood with an overwhelmingly Northwestern European American population. Only one of the neighborhood's three Lutheran churches even offered German-language services by 1900, and the area's German Americans increasingly preferred non-ethnic organizations, such as the Businessmen's Association, to the ethnic Vereine. With such weak ethnic "reinforcement," Kazal argues, Germantown's German Americans increasingly oriented themselves and their identities toward their non-German neighbors. Indeed, when Philadelphia celebrated the 225th anniversary of Germantown's founding by German immigrants, most of the neighborhood's leading German Americans observed it as "Founders' Day," not "German Day," the description the National German-American Alliance preferred.

The gritty, working-class Girard Avenue District retained a more distinct ethnic identity at the turn of the century. Forty-five percent of the district's residents were of German stock. Widely recognized as the heart of German Philadelphia, the district was the center of the German-dominated...

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