Book Description

Excerpt from The German-Americans and the European War: A Reply to Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard and Others With the exception of the first few years after the creation of this republic the naturalized citizen has been the object of constant attacks unless he was of English nativity. In the war of the revolution the Germans and the Irishmen fought almost without exception for the independence of the colonies, while practically all the Tories or opponents of the new commonwealth were of English birth. After the republic had been established about ten years the Federal party, which was in possession of the government, held the foreigners responsible for the attacks made upon it. It passed in 1798 the so-called alien and sedition laws, which practically deprived every inhabitant of the United States born on foreign soil of the protection of the laws. These statutes, which, by the way, were soon repealed, were the only ones ever passed in the United States with the open and ovowed intention to prevent criticism of the Government by suspending the Constitution and supplanting judges and juries by executive orders, and it is worthy of more than passing notice that they, as stated explicitly by Prof. Woodrow Wilson and his "History of the American People," were directed against Frenchmen and Englishmen. The loyalty of Germans and Irishmen in the United States had never been questioned up to that time. During the following decades immigration from Europe was so small that the percentage of naturalized voters was negligible, and therefore not much attention was paid to them. A change name, when about the middle of the last century, large numbers of Germans and Irishmen had come to this country and began to take an interest in American politics. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.