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Review
| Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918, by Peter Conolly-Smith. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004. 402 pages. $29.95, cloth.
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| When the United States entered World War I, eight million German immigrants and their children lived among a total national population of more than 100 million. New York City, with 600,000 Germans in 1910, ranked second only to Berlin in the number of German speakers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this population supported, along with smaller journals, three major German-language newspapers, which constitute the major primary source for this study. The Staats-Zeitung, which had begun publication in 1834, and which is still published today as a weekly, aimed at a proudly German, financially secure, conservative and middle class audience. The socialist daily Volkszeitung, which appeared from 1878 to 1932, promoted an international culture and politics of the working class. William Randolph Hearst's New Yorker Morgen Journal, which began in 1895 and ceased publication in April 1918 in the name of wartime unity, provided German-speaking New Yorkers with the Hearst version of American news and life, complete with large headlines, special coverage of women, sports and popular entertainment, and many visuals. |
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The author, Peter Connolly-Smith, has read these newspapers and uses them to argue that, before the frenetic repression and disparagement of German cultural expression that accompanied World War I, the world of traditional German Kultur—classical music by Beethoven, Mozart and others, Wagnerian opera, German-language lecture halls, and serious theater represented by Schiller, Goethe and Lessing, as well as other forms of ethnic amusement, from beer gardens to Turnvereine, clubs for physical culture, and singing festivals—had been dramatically challenged and subverted by American popular culture. Broadway musicals, vaudeville acts populated with comic German stereotypes, Hearst's popular comic strips, such as the Katzenjammer Kids, baseball games and other sporting events for large crowds, the increasingly spectacular medium of movies, and centers of popular frolic and amusement, such as Coney Island had, before the War, all of these had seduced the audiences for leisure activities particularly associated with the communities that made up German-America. "German-Americans' sense of ethnic identity," the author concludes, " diminished in direct proportion to the simultaneous rise of the new popular culture." Conolly-Smith thus strongly challenges the often-taught notion that "German America's decline was a function of the war and the attendant national outpouring of anti-Germanism." Rather, the War was "less a pivotal moment for America's Germans than the culmination of a decades-long process of cultural negotiation and accommodation." He argues that years before World War I, Germans' "ethnic and cultural assimilation into America had been determined" by vigorous incursions of American popular, especially visual, culture. (pp. 13, 14) |
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Because each of the newspapers which were used by the author attempted to represent the views and tastes of a different audience, they make an excellent basis for studying not only what Conolly-Smith refers to as "the daily tensions and temptations [Germans] faced as hyphenated Americans," but also the process of "cultural translation," the gradual replacement of German traditions and rituals by American cultural equivalents. Hearst's German-language Journal, when it ceased publication in 1918, had already provided, Conolly-Smith suggests, a bridge to the English-language press and a way to become a fully American participant in the common popular visual culture of the time. In Hearst's English-language Sunday American, readers who were not yet proficient in English could find familiar comic strips, a woman's section, as well as illustrated guides to sports and the latest American plays and films. In a "coda" to the book, Conolly-Smith argues in a way reminiscent of Lizabeth Cohen's Making A New Deal (1990) that, because "the popular-visual" American culture provided a common experience for all immigrant groups, it "may prove helpful in explaining the integration of other groups [of immigrants] into American society." (p. 284) |
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Translating America deserves a wide audience. Teachers and students of immigrant experiences and of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era in general will find the author's tripartite approach clear and logical, beginning with a general discussion of the relationship of New York's German-American communities to these daily newspapers and ending with a step by step account of both the wave of pro-German patriotism and the rising state-sponsored animosity toward German culture that accompanied World War I in New York. The middle section of the book contains discrete chapters which use newspapers to understand conflict between the "New Woman" and Victorian ideas of womanhood, competition between German-language theater and American theater, and reactions of "German America at the Movies." Conolly-Smith has also chosen and interpreted a number of fascinating illustrations—cartoons, playbills, posters, advertisements. The book will surely inspire a testing of its controversial conclusions in other venues populated by German Americans, for example in rural areas, smaller cities and towns of the Midwest. |
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