MarkHarris3d

The most influential immigrant group in American history is the one nobody argues about, because almost nobody remembers it was them. Start at the beginning. The Continental Army was a half-trained mess until Baron von Steuben, a Prussian officer, showed up at Valley Forge and drilled it into a real fighting force. The freedom of the press you take for granted traces back to John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant printer whose 1735 trial established that you can't be jailed for printing the truth. German-Americans were shaping this country before there was a country. Then look around your own life. Your Christmas tree is German. The hot dog (Frankfurt), the hamburger (Hamburg), the pretzel, the delicatessen, all German. Kindergarten is German, the word and the idea, brought over and opened by Margarethe Schurz. Blue jeans came from Levi Strauss of Bavaria. Heinz ketchup, Steinway pianos, Oscar Mayer, and the big four beers, Budweiser, Pabst, Miller and Schlitz, were every one founded by German immigrants. The Brooklyn Bridge was engineered by John Roebling, born in Prussia. The Santa Claus you picture every December, plus the Republican elephant, were drawn by Thomas Nast, a German immigrant. Pfizer was founded by Charles Pfizer, who arrived from Germany in 1848. Boeing was built by the son of a German immigrant. John Jacob Astor showed up from Germany with next to nothing and became America's first multimillionaire. Charles Steinmetz, a disabled immigrant nearly turned away at the border, went on to make modern electrical power possible. And it kept going. Wernher von Braun designed the rocket that put America on the moon. Einstein was German. Carl Schurz, a refugee, became a Union general and the first German-born US Senator. Eisenhower commanded D-Day and won the White House under a name once spelled Eisenhauer. Babe Ruth was a German-American kid from Baltimore. Here is the kicker. German is the single largest ancestry group in the entire United States, around 44 million people, bigger than Irish, English or Italian. The biggest thread in the whole American fabric, and somehow the quietest. They never asked for parades. They just trained the army, freed the press, engineered the bridges, founded the companies, built the rockets and lit up the Christmas mornings, then blended in so completely you forgot they were ever the "other." That might be the most American story there is.