Germans in Chicago

Irving Cutler, the author of Chicago, wrote that their true underlying motive to come to the U.S. was economic even though they had to immediately leave Germany due to political issues.

[1] According to Cutler, these Germans did not place importance on religious reasons, and they "arrived much less destitute" compared to Irish immigrants.

[1] One of the leading newspapers of the region in the late 19th century was the German language Illinois Staats-Zeitung, owned by former Cook County Sheriff A.C. Hesing, who was also the first German-born elected official in Chicago.

The paper's chief editors included U.S. Representative Lorenzo Brentano and Collector of Internal Revenue Hermann Raster.

The Staats-Zeitung was in publication until its support for Germany in World War I and a subsequent scandal involving the American Legion caused its failure in 1921.

The lower numbers were because of a reluctance to report German ancestry due to anti-German sentiment from World War I and because of reduced immigration from Germany.

[2] In the World War II era anti-Hitler dissidents and German Jews immigrated to Chicago.

In the post-World War II era ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia arrived in Chicago.

In the 1880s and 1890s, most of Chicago's German immigration originated from the estates in rural northeast Germany in places such as Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Prussia.

At that time German Americans were the primary leaders of the Socialist Labor Party and by 1890 it was essentially a German-speaking group.

In addition, agitators and radical emigrant editors stopped coming to Chicago because Bismarck repealed Germany's anti-socialist laws.