Enemies In Their Own Land:
Germans of Southwestern Dane County
The hidden ordeal of local German Americans less than a century ago emerged as the Mt. Horeb Area Historical Society dug into its Archives to prepare an exhibit, which remains on display at the Museum.
Documents and artifacts assembled for the exhibit that opened in 1998, “Ethnic Evolution and Contribution in Southwestern Dane County,” revealed hints of how deeply these early 20th century national events affected the German-American culture that flourished here.
From diverse duchies, electorates, kingdoms, and city-states, with different religions, customs and philosophies, speaking widely varied dialects, between 1820 and 1910 almost 5.5 million people left the wars, economic hardship and religious intolerance of central Europe – headed primarily to the Midwest and northern Great Plains, where they were simply called “Germans.”
Ironically, these varied immigrants who settled amongst the rolling hills of southwest Dane County, clustered in communities based on common language and Old World connections, learned to think of themselves as Germans as they also became Americans, and while their former homelands overseas gradually unified into one Germany.
Through the 1870s, Germany continued to play the greatest role of all the European nations in peopling the United States. In New York City, Wisconsin’s revived Commission on Immigration distributed pamphlets printed in German and English, which extolled Wisconsin and gave directions to Milwaukee, the “German Athens.” More influential than these documents were letters the new immigrants had received from relatives already here.
Many of the immigrants in the late 1850s to what became known as German Valley, in Blue Mounds Township, had attended the same church in Birken-Bringhausen in Cassel, an independent entity that was absorbed by Prussia in 1866 and became part of the German Empire in 1871. These immigrants’ social lives here revolved around a Lutheran congregation, organized in 1858. The church conducted services entirely in the German language. Justus Heuser, an active congregant, recalled, “One did not dare to speak a word of English.” In 1868 these settlers established a parochial school, which daily through the winter held religious confirmation instruction that they called “German School.”
German and Irish Catholics who settled in what is now Pine Bluff established their congregation in 1853, building a small frame church the following year. In the early years a parochial school held its classes in the church basement. In 1882 these moved into a new school building.
German Catholic immigrants to the Spring Valley area of Perry Township held their first meeting in 1855 with a Mass said by the Rev. L. Conrad at the John Keller home. With dedication, these 29 families raised $618 by 1861 to build their own church, the San Salvador Church of the Holy Redeemer. In 1865, the congregation established Holy Redeemer Parochial School, which closed after 1873, then resumed operation from 1892-1937 as a four-month spring religion school. Classes were taught bilingually.
Pupils, some as old as 22, attended the Steyer School, a predecessor of the “tax-supported” German Valley School, through the winter primarily to learn English. Yet regardless of this linguistic and cultural Americanizing, these hard working immigrants continued using their shared common native language. With the entrance of America into World War I in April of 1917, however, another less organic “Americanization” process took over.
Soon after entry into war a rally for the cause took hold, and patriotic fervor prevailed in public discourse. In addition to rationing goods, the government launched efforts to encourage citizens to volunteer in the war effort. “War bread recipes” designed to save on the use of wheat products were disseminated; “war savings stamps” were sold; vegetable gardening was advocated, and defense councils formed to encourage women to “put aside any work that interferes with [their] doing [their] utmost to show how much [they] care whether or not this country wins [the] war.”
President Wilson’s Committee on Public Information mobilized some 75,000 speakers who delivered patriotic exhortations in churches, schools, movie houses and other public places and distributed 75 million copies of pamphlets in several languages. The Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 enabled prosecution of pacifists and left-wing political groups opposed to the war, such as the Socialists and the Industrial Workers of the World. During World War I sauerkraut was even renamed “liberty cabbage,” dachshunds “liberty pups,” and hamburgers “liberty sandwiches.”
Mt. Horeb held a Loyalty Day observance in June of 1917, two months after the United States entry into the war and the launching of President Wilson’s extraordinary propaganda campaign to muster public support for the war. The parade featured floats flaunting strong anti-German sentiment. “Evidently a great many people thought the parade was made up for display,” complained the editor of the Mt. Horeb Times in the following week’s edition. “This is not the case,” he wrote. “Hundreds stood along the sidewalks watching that should have been marching with the others if they had the right spirit and wanted to show their Loyalty. … Did you march? If not, why not? There are only two kinds of citizens now – patriots and slackers. Your actions and your speech,” he warned, “will place you in one class or the other. There is no alternative and the general public is an impartial and unmerciful judge.”
The featured speaker of the Loyalty Day gathering was Chase E. Whalen. “If all the pro-Germans could be gotten together and hear Mr. Whalen talk to them for a while,” wrote the Times editor, “they would all enlist before he got through with them.”
War questioners were quickly chastised. Congressman Robert M. LaFollette, born and raised in Southwestern Dane County and a leading opponent of the war, delivered a speech in April of 1917 in which he described U.S. participation in the war as a scheme to bring more money and power to the corporations he had fought so hard against. His opponents fiercely rebuked him, the Senate targeted him for censure, and popular media denounced him as a traitor.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the state’s large German-American population, anti-German sentiment ran high in Wisconsin. The war with Germany unleashed a torrent of hysterical conformity; anything and anyone with ties to Germany became vulnerable to charges of disloyalty. Lives were threatened and even lost. In April of 1918, Northland College Professor E. A. Shimler, whose only crime was to have a German name and teach the German language, was hauled far from his home and tarred and feathered. On Sept. 14, 1918, 200 people surrounded the Clark County home of Mrs. Caroline Krueger because her three sons refused to serve in the war. The family, staunchly religious with pacifist views, declared that they would be among the first to volunteer if the war were in this country. They further announced “that it was not right to send American soldiers to France and that they never would go.” At this the mob became so embroiled that a shoot-out ensued leaving the Krueger home peppered with hundreds of bullet holes. One Krueger boy and a mob member died in the shootings.
Propaganda inundated local leaders of the Dane County Council of Defense. On April 5, 1918, Helen T. Paxson, Chairman of the Dane County Committee on Americanization, wrote a letter to the woman who chaired the Mt. Horeb chapter telling her the women of Mt. Horeb needed to be “more helpful citizens” and that they should stand behind the Government and all it asks of them. “Are you doing this, or are the majority still untouched? … If this is the case,” she wrote, “what is the trouble, why cannot you reach them?”
“What is your population? Is it foreign?” Paxson questioned. “Are the people mostly farmers, Germans and otherwise, who are merely un-loyal, largely through ignorance, or are they actually disloyal?”
While there was great local support for the war—area women knit helmet liners, wrapped bandages, observed “meatless Mondays” and wheatless Wednesdays, sewed fundraising quilts, and saved peach pits for use in gas mask filters—everything German, and for that matter, foreign, went underground. The German Valley Lutheran confirmation class of 1917, for example, was the last to use the German language. While much of the Roman Catholic liturgy occurred in Latin at St. Ignatius Catholic church at Mt. Horeb, parishioner Sally Ryan McGinley recalled frequently listening to the litany of saints in German prior to 1918.
This anti-foreign sentiment spread to other local ethnic groups as well. The secretary’s minutes of the West Blue Mounds Lutheran congregation abruptly changed from Norwegian to English in 1919. Nationwide, 9,000 services in the Norwegian Lutheran churches changed from Norwegian to English in the course of only one year – 1918.
Although World War I ended in 1918, anti-German and anti-immigrant sentiment nationally remained high and climaxed in the Immigration Act of 1924, which established national quotas, greatly reducing the number of immigrants annually to 164,677, with 86 percent allotted to northwestern Europe.
In 1924 Conrad Heuser and Rev. Gotthold Nitardy, pastor of the German Valley Lutheran Church, took a six-month trip to Germany and elsewhere in Europe to visit relatives. Upon their return to the United States the two were summoned to the courthouse in Madison and questioned about the purpose of their trip and the length of time they had spent in Europe. The German Valley congregation, known by various names, officially changed its name to Immanuel Lutheran in 1941, the onset of World War II.
For more on this subject check out the website of the Wisconsin Historical Society at www.wisconsinhistory.org .