Perils of Prussianism
Main Street German America, Local Autonomy, and the Great War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8156393 |
|---|---|
| Authors | STEPHEN J GROSS, Stephen Gross (0000-0003-0711-787X, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 78 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 78-116 |
| Publication date | 2004-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Agricultural History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-1482 • E-ISSN: 1533-8290 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00021482-78.1.78 |
| OpenAlex | W4237258885, W2046374203 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 5 |
Scholars have recognized World War I as a time of crisis for German Americans. The government's campaign against the hyphen and for 100 percent Americanism threatened all ethnic Americans but espacially those of German descent. This essay examines the wartime events in two rural German catholic communities in central Minnesota and asserts the power of local culture to shape the communities' response to the nativism unleashed by the war. More specifically, the war exacerbated pre-existing conflict between area farmers and members of the village merchant class. This played out politically. Merchants wre supportive of the loyalty campaign and tried to control its impact, while area farmers broke from a tradition of antipathy to populist politics and rushed to join the newly established Nonpartisan League. These differences expressed conflicting material interests, but they also reflected a growing community-wide debate over the meaning of local identity and the content of local culture. That the merchant class failed during the war to challenge significantly the communities' island debate-indeed the merchants' own interests precluded a closer alliance with the larger national community-speaks to the tenacity of ethnic culture in the countryside and its ability to support resistance to larger hegemonic forces
Alliance · Antipathy · Economic history · German · Hegemony · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychological nativism · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Asian American and Pacific Histories · European history and politics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2012 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |