World War I had a devastating effect on German-Americans and their cultural heritage. Up until that point, German-Americans, as a group, had been spared much of the discrimination, abuse, rejection, and collective mistrust experienced by so many different racial and ethnic groups in the history of the United States. Indeed, over the years, they had been viewed as a well-integrated and esteemed part of American society. All of this changed with the outbreak of war. At once, German ancestry became a liability. As a result, German-Americans attempted to shed the vestiges of their heritage and become fully “American.” Among other outcomes, this process hastened their assimilation into American society and put an end to many German-language and cultural institutions in the United States.
Although German immigrants had begun settling in America during the colonial period, the vast majority of them (more than five million) arrived in the nineteenth century. In fact, as late as 1910, about nine percent of the American population had been born in Germany or was of German parentage – the highest percentage of any ethnic group.[1] Moreover, as most German-Americans lived on the East Coast or in the Midwest, there were numerous regions in which they made up as much as 35 percent of the populace. Most of the earlier German immigrants had been farmers or craftsmen and had usually settled near fellow countrymen in towns or on the countryside; most of those who arrived in the 1880s and thereafter moved to the ever growing cities in search of work. Soon enough there was hardly any large U.S. city without an ethnic German neighborhood. German-Americans wielded strong economic and cultural influence in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, with the latter three forming the so-called German triangle.
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EMPRESARIO SYSTEM. After Mexican independence in 1821, the Mexican government contracted "empresarios" or land agents to aid the settlement of Texas. Each empresario agreed to settle a specific number of Catholic families on a defined land grant within six years. In return, the empresario received a land premium of just over 23,000 acres for every 100 families he settled. However, if the requisite number of families did not settle within six years, the contract was void. The empresario controlled the lands within his grant, but he owned only the lands he received as a premium.
The majority of the Texas empresario grants were effected under the national law of 18 August 1824 and the state law of 24 March 1825. Under the state law, a married man could receive 177 acres of farming land and 4,428 acres of grazing land. An unmarried man could receive one-quarter of this amount. The settler had to improve the land and pay a nominal fee to the state. By 1830, however, the Mexican government began to question the loyalty of American immigrants in Texas, who outnumbered Mexicans in the area by more than two to one. Thus, on 6 April 1830, Mexico passed a law prohibiting further American immigration and canceling existing empresario contracts.
