| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Russell A. Kazal. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 383. $35.00
This is a richly satisfying book. One puts it down feeling that everything relevant to the subject has been carefully looked into, judiciously considered, and set forth in a calm, clear, and illuminating manner. The question under investigation is this: why are German Americans, who in 1900 constituted the largest, most self-assertive, and highly respected ethnic group in the country, entirely missing from the contemporary scene, even though multiculturalism and the persistence of ethnicity are leading themes in recent scholarship? Russell A. Kazal attacks this paradox, as he calls it, by analyzing the experience of Philadelphia's German Americans in the first three decades of the twentieth century and relating his findings to issues of current scholarly interest.	1
Focusing on one city obviously raises questions of representativeness, especially since, despite a German presence reaching back to the 1680s, Philadelphia is not usually thought of as a bulwark of Deutschtum. But Kazal points out that its overall size gave the city a larger German population than Cincinnati, Milwaukee, or St. Louis. Moreover, its being the headquarters of the National German-American Alliance (1901–1918) made Philadelphia the leading center of German ethnic militance before World War I. Acknowledging the atypical features of the city's "Germandom," as well as its more representative qualities, allows Kazal to draw attention to the importance of place on the macro (i.e. national) level. He pursues the same strategy on the micro level by looking closely at two Philadelphia neighborhoods—one close to center city, the other suburban—detailing their demography and social ecology at two points in time, 1900 and 1920.	. . .

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