Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German American Identity.

Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German American Identity. By Russel A. Kazal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. vii plus 383, with maps, tables, and index.).

Ethnic identity is both a historical and a local affair. Becoming old Stock helps us understand these and other important coordinates of ethnicity. It is a very smart book about German-Americans, arguably the nation's largest ethnic group. Bristling with insights into the formation, suppression, divisions, and disappearance of German identity in Philadelphia, it provides a methodology and a comparison for studying other twentieth century urban centers with large German populations and other ethnic groups. Though in places belabored and repetitious, Becoming Old Stock is keenly thought and imaginatively researched, joining quantitative methods, written and oral sources, and the best secondary literature.

Kazal's work affirms what should be, but what is not obvious to every student of ethnicity: Ethnicities have histories. They are not fixed, static, and enduring, but rather change--mutate, alter, metamorphose, and disappear--over time. Whiteness and blackness, mutable and diverse terms, have, as do all their "colored cousins," histories and can be understood as inventions. In any case, ethnic identity, whatever its forms, does not have its roots in unchanging race or immutable tradition, and is inseparable from change and its historical and literary invention. Kazal authoritatively shows ethnicity is not only shaped by society and nation at large, but is a result of specific settings, or what Kathleeen Conzen has nicely formulated as the "pluralisms of place."

Kazal begins his book with Philadelphia in 1900, when the city's German population formed part of the third largest group in the nation. Nevertheless its number and concentration of German immigrants lagged far behind those of German populations in New York, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and other cities. Kazal pays special attention to Philadelpia's diverse German neighborhoods, which are characterized by different ethnic densities, religious, class and generational concentrations, and group interactions. He points out profound differences between German Protestants, who were quicker to abandon the language and faster to assimilate, and German Catholics, who built more schools, intermarried more frequently with fellow Catholics, and were more closely tied to labor and then working class associations.

The spine of Kazal's narrative falls in the period from 1900 to 1930. At the outset he judiciously reminds us that German identity was repeatedly broken on the rock of religious, class, and political division since German immigration in the 1830s until the end of the Second World War and subsequent revelations about the Holocaust. Recognizing the national suppression of German identity during the two world wars, Kazal's volume shows that abandonment of Germanness and German assimilation to a national identity belonged to two other periods. At the end of the nineteenth century, Germans accepted the invitation to become "old stock Americans" on the basis of belonging to one of the two northern white races of Europe (British and Teutonic) to differentiate themselves from the waves of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Starting in the interwar years and accelerating in post World War Two period, Germans took up an identity as "white ethnics." This expressed their solidarity with fellow Italians, Irish and others and to state their opposition to the growing presence of Blacks in their neighborhoods.

By the measure of language and institutional participation (Vereinwesen), Kazal argues, Germans were well on the road to assimilation in the decades immediately prior to the First World War, even though German neighborhoods maintained German associations and practiced, to use another felicitous formulation by Kathleeen Conzen, "a kind of biculturalism in spite of structural assimilation." Class cooperation at work and in unions, interactions in church and neighborhoods, and leisure activities in neighborhood and town at large accelerated assimilation. New goods, fresh opportunities, and other lures of emerging mass, consumer culture, along with the integrative elements of democratic politics, also played important roles in turning Germans into Americans. Declining readership of German papers and shrinking participation, especially by males, in German educational and social groups measured a "decisive fall of public Germanness."

Shedding light on Kazal's title, Becoming Old Stock, Germans, in the period from the Civil War to the First World War, began to believe themselves as members of the Germanic race, a conceptual notion which "yielded, in essence, an invitation to enter American life as members of a larger, northwest European category. That category was portrayed as forming the core of the American nation; [thus] ... 'American race stock' and 'old stock.'" [120] What assimilation began, the First World War completed. With the United States' entrance in World War I in 1917, the nation judged Germany and German culture as enemies of the Anglo-American way of life. German leadership lost its message and audience as hyphenated Americans were no longer welcome in the nation of hundred-percent loyalty: "What began as a suspicion of German Philadelphians as potential spies and saboteurs," Kazal commented, "mushroomed into an assault on any German ethnic expression,"--and this assault spread from east coast to west, from city to town and village throughout the nation. (The Herman the German monument in New Ulm was riddled by bullets--the largest

number of which were possibly fired by German-Americans--during the war and fell into a state of neglect until it was restored ten years ago.)

In the post-war world of the 1920s, Germanness was beaten down by nativism on the one side and dissolved by assimilation on the other. While some middle class Germans in the interwar years asserted their superiority over new immigrants, German workers and Catholics found in southern and eastern Europeans a the common ground of shared whiteness. This anticipated the "white ethnic" movements of the 1940s and 1950s, which played prominent roles in cities like Chicago and Detroit. The consequence of this, Kazal ironically concludes, was, "with the ambiguous terms whiteness and unhyphenated American appropriated for advantage, their bearers are unaware of the price paid to acquire them."

Essentially sociological in its content, Kazal's work does not speculate on what American culture lost with the depreciation and disappearance of German-American ethnicity. However, throughout his work Kazal treats German-American ethnicity as a lost good, even though its definition and potential largely go undefined. In his Introduction, he acknowledges that profound religious, political, class, and place differences divided sundry German immigrants from their arrival in this nation. He further concurs with Lesley Ann Kawaguchi that even prior to the Civil War, Germans immigrants had to face the tasks of fashioning a German and then a German-American identity, and that neither of these identities, even if formed and widely-shared, would have supplanted German immigrants' more elemental religious and provincial identities. Perhaps, Kazal could have gone further and have flatly affirmed that a full, uniform, and functional German-American identity was an impossibility given German immigrants' primary interest in family, land, work, religion, and locality. Autocratic, anti-democratic and -socialist Protestant Prussia's unification of Germany vitiated the German ideal for American embodiment. But all this is a matter of another book on Philadelphia's earlier German immigrants, when already before us there is a fine book on time and place as coordinates of German ethnicity.

Joseph A. Amato

Marshall, MN