The experience of German immigrants in America has been a paradoxi cal one. Despite contemporary census reports and public opinion surveys which record the survival of some distinctive ethnic traits among persons of German ancestry, despite scattered rural areas and urban pockets where traces of German roots remain evident, most Americans would agree with Andrew Greeley that "if ever an American ethnic group vanished, it is the Germans."^ Yet German-Americans once possessed one of the most visible, complex, and vital of American ethnic cultures, and nourished a strong ethos of separatism. How did so highly structured and sophisticated an ethnic culture disappear so completely? This article will briefly consider the historiography of this issue and its implications for current conceptual models of immigrant assimilation.Early scholars did not perceive this paradox. For Faust, Fairchild, Wittke, assimilation was the normal fate of any immigrant group, Germans included. Though Faust noted that Germans were "tenacious of their social customs and principles of living," he also observed that their assimilation was "rapid almost to a fault."' But if Germans were assimilating so rapidly, why did they provoke the fierce anti-Germanism of the World War I pe riod? John Hawgood attempted to confront this problem by arguing that the theoretically normal course of German assimilation had been "some what abruptly checked" in the 1850s by American nativism which "at a cru cial period in their (the Germans'] development as an immigrant people, lessened their will to cooperate in American life, and tended to produce what became known as the hyphenated or German-American." Only the trauma of the First World War, Hawgood argued, shook loose the hyphen and brought about the delayed "completion of the Americanization of the German stock.This interpretation still finds wide currency,' despite Hawgood's failure to take into account widespread evidence for German assimi lation even in the pre-World War I period and despite subsequent scholar ship that has made it clear that ethnic cultural defense of the type found among the Germans has been by no pieans abnormal among American eth nic groups.
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