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Eh, the Italians were relatively Republican (as were the Germans) while the Irish leaned Democratic (AFAIK there's still a decent-sized partisan gap between Americans of German or Italian ancestry and those with Irish ancestry.). It's not a coincidence that Antonin Scalia and Ron DeSantis are big Republican names while the Democrats still boast politicians like Joe Biden and Mike Duggan. The GOP of that era thought that the Great Migration (Party of Lincoln!) was going to save them from the white ethnic hordes.
I believe the Germans were mostly Democrats during the peak periods of German immigration. The liberal, largely atheistic Forty-Eighters were almost all Republicans, but they were, despite their outsized cultural influence, a tiny minority of German immigrants. The majority were conservative Catholics and Lutherans who had little use for the Republican party. The midwestern German-Americans began to warm up to the Republicans before WWI, but they didn’t switch en mass until after.
The Texas Germans voted Republican for a while IIRC, and they were conservative enough to schizophrenically larp about seceding to set up a Hapsburg monarchy.
That is interesting. Do you know what group that was? I know there were a few… attempts, if you can call it that; it would probably be more accurate to say idle day-dreams… to create a new Germany in the Midwest (every one of which fizzled out almost immediately as the immigrants realized that the USA was actually pretty great). I hadn’t heard of anything similar in Texas, but then I’m only really familiar with a couple of German communities down there.
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/adelsverein
They were successful enough that Texas had it's own dialect of German(which still has like a thousand native speakers in nursing homes in central Texas) and Fredericksburg is still a major town. Can't find a source on the monarchism RN but I swear they were planning it originally.
Thanks for the link! I’ll have to see if I can find anything on the monarchism. I’m sure it would make for a fascinating read.
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My understanding is that Catholic and "traditional" Lutheran Germans were Democrats and the pietist Lutheran and Calvinist Germans were Republicans.
You are correct, and I shouldn’t have glossed over that distinction. The pietistic German Lutherans and Reformed tended to assimilate much more quickly than their Catholic and traditional Lutheran counterparts, with many joining Methodist or Baptist churches, supporting Prohibition, opposing parochial schools, and rather quickly dropping their “hyphenated” German-American identities, in many cases anglicizing their names in the process. These were much more likely to join the Republican party prior to WWI. The German freethinkers, with their singing and athletic clubs, were even more strongly Republican.
The Republicans actually had some decent success in courting traditional Lutherans and Catholics, but they had a habit of shooting themselves in the foot every couple of years and driving those groups back to the Democrats. Prohibition was the longest-lived issue, causing friction from the 1850s until the passage of the 18th Amendment, with the Republicans typically in favor and the Democrats typically opposed. Then in 1889, Illinois and Wisconsin passed laws requiring children to attend English-speaking schools, which led to a massive backlash from the traditional German communities and concomitant electoral victories for the Democrats. (There had already been quite a few skirmishes over Bible reading and prayer in the public schools before then, which an uneasy alliance of Catholics, traditional Lutherans, and German freethinkers opposed.)
Interestingly, the Scandinavians, being mostly Pietistic, were a pretty reliable Republican vote early on, though that naturally shifted over the years as the parties changed.
In Indiana, there was an additional wrinkle in the 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan popped up in the state during WWI, then flourished massively in the early 1920s, before dying off just as quickly as it had grown. Unlike in the south, the Indiana Klan was not primarily an anti-black organization, but was anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic, with animosity toward traditional Lutherans typically thrown in with those last two. The Klan was technically bipartisan but was more closely associated with the Republicans, which probably hampered the German vote’s transition to that party.
Very interesting post.
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In the GSS, Italians lean more heavily Democrat than the Irish and both are significantly more Democrat than Republican. In this sample, the only white categories that don't lean Democrat overall are the British, the Scandinavians and the Germans & Dutch.
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