The sinking of the British passenger liner, the Lusitania, off the coast of Ireland in May of 1915, resulting in the loss of 1,200 aboard, including Americans, stoked anti-German (and anti-immigrant) feeling in this country.
In 1915, the war in Europe between Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia—known as the Allies—and the Central Powers of Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and its supporters had been raging for nearly a year. The United States had taken a stance of neutrality, but there were sympathizers for both sides among the citizenry—given that many Americans were recent immigrants or could trace their lineage from one of those warring nations.
The attack of ships in the Atlantic Ocean by German U-Boats, including two American vessels with a loss of two lives and two British ships carrying Americans had already stoked tensions. But the sinking of the Lusitania, a British passenger liner, off the coast of Ireland that resulted in the loss of 1,200 passengers from drowning, with 128 of them Americans, heightened the anti-German (not to mention anti-immigrant) feeling in this country, and put German-Americans under the microscope of public scrutiny.
“Where did their loyalty lie?” was the questioned being asked.
President Woodrow Wilson had used the metaphor of “a great melting pot” to describe the assorted nationalities and ethnic and racial groups comprising the population, borrowing his metaphor from ‘The Melting Pot’, a 1908 play by Israel Zangwill. The newest members of this ‘pot’ were recent arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe.
An article on the topic in Chronicle of America noted that they were coming “at a rate of one million a year,” adding their “children who fill a quarter of the nation’s elementary schools are soon singing of purple mountains majesty.”
Wilson, in his comments, said “There is here a great melting pot in which we must compound a precious metal. That metal is the metal of nationality.”
The reality was that while these immigrants were coming to America in search of a better life, greater economic opportunity, or escaping persecution in their native lands—just as earlier settlers from Western and Northern Europe had—they did not completely abandon their native culture.
“In 1913, 538 newspapers appeared in 29 foreign languages,” the article noted, adding that the Polish National Alliance, for example, had 800 branches. The new arrivals, like their predecessors, tended to congregate together in neighborhoods—although some of this was the result of housing discrimination—read those newspapers, established churches similar to those in their home countries, and continued practicing their traditions.
All of this was not lost of the predecessors. “For many Americans, beset with war fever, ‘America First’ is now a password for xenophobia,” the Chronicle of America article stated. This was reflected in the lyrics of a popular song Don’t Bite the Hand That’s Feeding You which says “If you don’t like your Uncle Sammy, then go back to our home over the sea.”
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The year 1915 also saw the release of “Birth of a Nation—the landmark silent film that told a tale of the Civil War and Reconstruction from the Southern point-of-view. As a film, its techniques and method of storytelling met great acclaim. However, it’s sympathetic portrayal of ‘The Lost Cause’ was not met with high regard in all quarters.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) tried to bar the film, claiming that “it shows a distorted view of Negro history.” The film was credited (or blamed) for inciting race riots and encouraging the revival of the Ku Klux Klan—a clandestine organization that was given favorable treatment in the film.
President Woodrow Wilson, who the historical record would show, was not a fan to the African-American cause or the ill treatment and violence facing the descendants of Southern slaves, described the film “as writing history with lightning.”
It certainly aided in the rewriting of history, a version of the Civil War and its aftermath that held fast in the minds of many Americans up until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1960s started to crack the facade. I’m assuming, it also gave Southern states more leeway in their institutionalizing of the Jim Crow Laws that had began in the late 1800s and early 1900s—an apartheid society of separate and unequal that flourished for several decades.
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So there you are, two news stories from 1915 that have echoes we can still hear.
Steve Horton is a mid-Michigan journalist and editor-publisher of the ‘Fowlerville News & Views’.
Excellent article!
Informative article. Strikes a chord! Never knew about the source of the saying America as a "melting pot"!
Immigration came to a near halt with a law in 1924 that barred many European immigrants because of "too many foreigners." As St. Patrick's Day nears I have pleased to be the first one of my Irish parents to be born in the good old USA!!