Americans of German Origin and the War

In Americans of German Origin and the War (1917), Otto Hermann Kahn (1867-1934), the Mannheim-born Wall Street financier and Metropolitan Opera chairman, takes up the hardest question facing his community: where German-American loyalty should rest once the United States entered the war. The pamphlet preserves extracts from a speech Kahn gave at the Merchants’ Association of New York’s Liberty Loan meeting on June 1, 1917, later printed by the Government Printing Office. Kahn insists that immigrants owed undivided allegiance to America and presents war-bond subscription as the proof of that loyalty. Historians still read the text as a record of Liberty Loan publicity and the suspicion German-Americans faced during 1917. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.