Conflict and Suspicion: Anti-Germanism during the War

This infamous propaganda poster from 1917 fueled the fire of anti-Germanism in America, even after the war. 

Designed to support the campaign for Liberty Bonds, this poster depicts a German soldier, dripping with blood, peering across the ruins of Europe towards America.  

The Wooster Weekly News printed this Liberty Bonds advertisement in 1917. It claims to report German war atrocities such as “nailing a babe to a barn door.” 

This Wooster Daily Republican article describes an incident in which College of Wooster students vandalized a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm 

In Rittman, police shot at a man they feared was a German spy, only to discover that he was a “harmless hobo.”

An elderly woman in Wooster was arrested after the American Protective League accused her of “pro-German talk.”

When the United States officially entered WWI, President Wilson established the Committee on Public Information and charged them with the task of bolstering public support for the war. This new organization bombarded the public with images depicting Germans as monstrous, cruel, and right on our doorstep. Americans were told to “Beat back the Hun!” and “Destroy this mad brute!” These images instilled anger and paranoia all over the country, including in Wooster. State governments and angry civilians suppressed German language and culture, often violently. At the College of Wooster, a group of students vandalized classrooms in the German department, decapitating the likeness of Kaiser Wilhelm in a portrait that hung on the wall.¹  Men working on the construction of the Federal Savings and Loan building downtown allegedly placed a German flag atop the building and shot at it.²

Wooster’s German-American community, however, evaded much of the mistreatment leveled at German immigrants across the country. Many of the Wooster’s civic leaders were of German descent, and the institutions that marked the Wooster’s German community as “other,” the German newspaper for instance, had faded by 1917. World War I marked a critical juncture for German-Americans in Wooster, as in other communities around the country, as many chose to identify themselves as Americans and Woosterites first, and Germans second.   

Certain groups in Wayne County remained closely tied to “German-ness” in the public eye, however, namely the Amish and Mennonite communities. In addition to their use of the German language, these groups experienced persecution because of their status as conscientious objectors, and their vocal opposition to the war. Wayne County’s branch of the American Protective League, a nationwide organization dedicated to rooting out potential German sympathizers, specifically targeted the Amish and Mennonite community.³  Some Wayne County residents coerced Mennonites to violate the pacifist doctrine of their faith and purchase Liberty Bonds, going so far as to kidnap one Wooster Mennonite man.⁴  Samuel H. Miller, the editor of an Amish newspaper in nearby Holmes County, was tried and jailed for sedition because his paper printed pacifist literature.⁵  Although Mennonite churches supported the relief efforts of organizations such as the Red Cross, their refusal to participate in the war clashed with the nationalistic attitudes of many Wayne County residents.