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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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