A German-speaking outpost in the American Midwest

November 1, 2023·28 min·2 clips

Congress once railed against German immigrants who 'refused to learn English' — their descendants include Eisenhower, Steinbeck, and Jennifer Lawrence.

Germans were treated as the supposed invaders. Cox begins with members of the U.S. Congress accusing German immigrants of rejecting English, holding onto alien customs, and refusing the American way of life. History was not so tidy. German descendants later became part of American public life, including Dwight Eisenhower, John Steinbeck, Grace Kelly, and Jennifer Lawrence. The episode then turns to place. Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Texas, Kansas, and Missouri all appear as states where German-American communities formed, and where the language sometimes lasted. Missouri gets the closest look through Gottfried Duden, a German lawyer and former military man who arrived in the United States in 1824. He bought farmland west of St. Louis, hired others to work it, wandered around, and later wrote a book that traveled far. Duden made Missouri sound almost too good to be true: easy crops, endless summer, and deer showing up at the door. Professor Bill Keel brings the correction. Duden mixed fact and fantasy so freely that later German immigrants called him the lying dog. Still, the book mattered. In the 1830s, one third of Germans who came to the United States chose Missouri. The dream turned into farms and towns, then ran straight into pre-Civil War politics. Missouri Germans were mostly against slavery. In Kohlkamp, Confederate soldiers attacked German residents at night because they sided with the Union. Kansas offered another route west, with Kansas statehood and the Homestead Act dated to 1861. Dialects came too, making the Midwest less linguistically uniform than a map suggests.

As heard by us

A clear, lively look at the German-speaking communities that took root in Missouri and Kansas.

A German-speaking outpost in the American Midwest turns a familiar American complaint on its head: the supposedly unassimilable immigrants here are Germans.

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