These goddamn Squareheads are Bavarianizing our children. All these teens on Tic-Tock are talking about August Bebel and the best sauces to dip pretzels in. I sneezed earlier today, and someone had the indecency to tell me "Gesundheit". These backwards oafs can never assimilate into American culture, Wisconsin is already lost and is just a new Palatinate.
Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements, and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of us Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.
Benjamin Franklin: Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751)
Those Germans in Pennsylvania nearly had the constitution (and thus following legal documents) be written in German as well. I feel like that's a possible shift in how future immigrants would have been assimilated, if there were precedent to allowing non-English at that level, maybe there'd be at least more pronounced and longer lasting non-English speaking communities rather than defaulting to the English dominated WASP culture that is hegemonic. Idk just mayo thoughts
which is why they gravitate to identity grievance politics
dude, you are the one who pretends (for political aims) that a fully burgerized settler is a roaming barbarian climbing rome's walls bc of his identity
WWI was the defining moment of assimilation. External and internal social pressure forced a lot of german americans to stop speaking german and integrate with wider american culture. By WWII they had pretty much completely integrated into american society.
No, it's in the name. WASP = white anglo saxon protestants. The core of whiteness is the nobility. Because race science and the concept of whiteness is dumb.
I read once that the general 19th / early 20th century fascination that many Scandinavian Americans had with the thought of ancient Norsemen reaching way further inland on Turtle Island than they ever really did, manifested in things like the Kensington Runestone hoax... That all of that was basically in order to assert that the Scandinavian settlers had more of a "right to the land" than the Anglos, who saw the Scandinavians basically as weird foreigners.
Now I'm not an expert by any means, even though this is my own family history so I really should know a lot more; but my impression is that Scandinavians had privileges in the USA from being protestant and from looking like Anglos, yet Scandinavians' deviation from the hegemonic Anglo core, most obviously in language, still created tension. This tension as I see it never really fully disappeared, it just became a lot less obvious: like, I have been called "not a real American" for being Norwegian before — but the difference between myself and the average self-identified Norwegian American is that I actually live in Norway, speak Norwegian, and generally have a meaningful connection to Norway.
I feel like Scandinavian Americans were historically much more of a mixed bag, with both your Joe Hills and Knute Nelsons, but the thorough assimilation of Scandinavians by today makes modern Scandinavian Americans much more consistently Seppo-ish.
Now I'm not an expert by any means, even though this is my own family history so I really should know a lot more; but my impression is that Scandinavians had privileges in the USA from being protestant
Early America has A LOT of anti-Catholic brainworms, the Puritans were constantly fretting about "Popish Conspiracies", there were tons of nativist anti-Catholic political parties and gangs. A lot of German immigrants were Catholic, and basically all Irish were, it was probably a bigger contribution towards hostility towards them than ethnic tensions.
They start with the assumption that England is the best and work backwards from there. The Saxon is only good when mixed with the Angles, thus they are superior to Germans for example.
The impression that Germans and Scandinavians are included is largely based on how things became later when you got national romance and especially since Germany have the dubious honour of being home to the most notorious race scientists and the notion of Aryans.
As a half Minnesotan Pretzel muncher, I can confirm, we are all secretly communist and just waiting to overthrow the government and set up communal beer halls where you will drink from giant steins with pictures or Marx and Lenin on them!
The internal conflict being a revolutionary Midwesterner must cause. Knowing revolution is necessary but only possessing the ability to be passively aggressive.
Well on behalf of all s, I would like to declare my subgroup of crackkkas to be superior to WASPs.
We actually built their society, these snobs would still be stewing in their own filth if it wasn't for the Romans, and at least it's undeniable our food, aesthetics, and art kick ass.