to embrace their new opportunities, they criticized everything they found in their new home.  The contemptuous hauteur and provincial egotism of the modern Prussian, loathsome enough in the educated, were ridiculous in the poor immigrants.  Gradually this Prussian spirit increased.  In 1883 it could still be said of the three hundred German-American periodicals, daily, weekly, and monthly, that in their tone they were thoroughly American.  But ten or fifteen years later changes were apparent.  In 1895 there were some five hundred German periodicals published in America, and many of the newer ones were rabidly Germanophile.  The editors and owners of the older publications were dying out, and new hands were guiding the editorial pens.  Often when there was no American-born German available, an editor was imported fresh from Germany.  He came as a German from a new Germany—­that Prussianized Germany which unmasked itself in August, 1914, and which included in its dream of power the unswerving and undivided loyalty of all Germans who had migrated.  The traditional American indifference and good nature became a shield for the Machiavellian editors who now began to write not for the benefit of America but for the benefit of Germany.  Political scandals, odious comparisons of American and German methods, and adroit criticisms of American ways were the daily pabulum fed to the German reader, who was left with the impression that everything in the United States was wrong, while everything in Germany was right.  Before the United States entered the Great War, there was a most remarkable unanimity of expression among these German publications; afterwards, Congress found it necessary to enact rigorous laws against them.  As a result, many of them were suppressed, and many others suspended publication.

German pastors, also, were not infrequently imported and brought with them the virus of the new Prussianism.  This they injected into their congregations and especially into the children who attended their catechetical instruction.  German “exchange professors,” in addition to their university duties, usually made a pilgrimage of the cities where the German influence was strong.  The fostering of the German language became no longer merely a means of culture or an appurtenance to business but was insisted upon as a necessity to keep alive the German spirit, der Deutsche Geist.  German parents were warned, over and over again, that once their children lost their language they would soon lose every active interest in Kultur.  The teaching of German in the colleges and universities assumed, undisguised and unashamed, the character of Prussian propaganda.  The new immigrants from Germany were carefully protected from the deteriorating effect of American contacts, and, unlike the preceding generations of German immigrants, they took very little part in politics.  Those who arrived after 1900 refused, usually, to become naturalized.