Happily, none of this argument deters the writers of fiction or the public. It is important to recognise that, at any moment in history, there are real alternatives, argued Hugh Trevor-Roper. "The historian must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors will seem to permit different outcomes," wrote Johan Huizinga. Other historians have confessed to being more intrigued. To EP Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class, such counterfactual speculation was "unhistorical shit". So if you spoke German, you would think like a German, you would become a totalitarian in favor of the kaiser.P eople who see a divine hand or the iron laws of dialectical materialism at work in human affairs bridle at the question: "What if things had turned out differently?" To EH Carr, historian of Soviet Russia, to speak of what might have happened in history, as opposed to what did happen, was just a "parlour game". "And there was this notion that language was somehow organic to your soul. "During the war, there is an argument that if you learn German, you will become the 'Hun,' " Finkelman says, using the pejorative term for anyone from Germany. German had become so stigmatized that only 1 percent of high schools even taught it. But by the end of the World War I that had changed dramatically. Legal historian Paul Finkelman says in 1915 about 25 percent of all high school students in America studied German. Before World War I, German wasn't just an ethnic minority language it was the most studied modern foreign language in America. But the biggest collision ahead was over language. Beer put Germans on a collision course with the growing temperance movement. The social life of the community was lubricated with the beverage Germans brought from the old country. And while many immigrants assimilated into the English-speaking mainstream, many others sent their children to German-language public schools. They could live on city streets or in towns with German names. German-Americans often worshipped in churches where German was used. "That's at a time when the German population was only about 40 million." "During the 1850s, 900,000 - almost a million - Germans went to the United States," says historian Kenneth Ledford of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
They were Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Mennonites, Jews and free thinkers of no religion at all. There were still more German-American families that had been in the country longer, many since Colonial times. The 1910 census counted more than 8 million first- and second-generation German-Americans in the population of 92 million. Germans were the largest non-English-speaking minority group in the U.S.
Some Germans and German-Americans were attacked during World War I. German-born Robert Prager was lynched in Collinsville, Ill., in 1918.
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