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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (117140)	4/7/2019 9:42:33 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 358487

Yes, the country was heavily influenced by the Enlightenment. And there was a lot of effort to establish residents of the country as Americans before whatever else ethnic identify they might have. Case in point, Texas was settled by a significant number of Germans. My German ancestors came over in the early to mid-1800s. Because of how sparsely settled Texas was and to an extent still is, there was a significant German community here. They even spoke their own recognized variant of German. There were newspapers printed in German and schools were taught in German. After WWII, the state required that English be taught, but I had relatives who only had enough English to get by. My grandmother had a very thick German accent. The Cajun French in Louisiana were similar with less emphasis on literacy. When I was a kid, it was common to go to places where the adults were speaking French. Some of them had no English. The summer after I graduated from high school, I worked for Beaumont Coca Cola. Routes that went through Nederland, Orange and other towns close to Louisiana would have stops that were still like that. That was in the mid-1970s. AFAIK, there were no Dutch speakers in Nederland at the time. Despite being settled by them. Anyway, despite this, they were Americans first. My grandfather fought in WWI. Joined when he was 16. My parents have a wold almanac that my grandfather had. It was printed in the 1930s and had a section on the rise of Hitler. It was pretty defaced with words crossed out. horns and fangs drawn on the picture of Hitler, etc. So it was clear where their sympathies lay.