Oregon Exchanges
For the Newspapermen of the State of Oregon
The Northwestern German Press
By JOSEPH SCHAFER
Dr. Schafer, head of the department of history in the University of Oregon, is a profound student of current history and an authority on the history of the Northwest. He is American born of German parentage, his father having come to the United States in the emigration of 1848.
SINCE public opinion, until it becomes unified, is group opinion, it becomes necessary for the student of the war to study the reactions toward it of such well defined groups as the German-reading Americans, and the only practical way to do this is to read the papers they read.
These papers indeed may not represent the views of their readers in all respects. There are two reasons at least for supposing that the German papers in this country do not properly speak the mind of their constituents on the war questions. First, the editors of those papers appear to have had a briefer course in Americanism, on the average—to have been more recent arrivals in the United States—than the men and women whom they assume to instruct. An editorial census on the following points would be a matter of deep public interest at this time: How many were born here of German parents? How many are of other than German ancestry? The writer has no exact data which would enable him to answer these questions. But a somewhat extended observation leads to the belief that this group of foreign language editors, with some notable exceptions, has been recruited generally from the class of very new German Americans, usually men of ability and training, but naturally possessing a fresh and lively interest in the affairs of the German fatherland and sympathizing intensely with its people and their ideals, their customs, their government, and their institutions. Their outlook upon American life differs radically from that, let us say, of Germans born in this country of parents who emigrated prior to 1870 and especially of parents who left Germany before the middle of the 19th century. Second, these editors, being recognized as makers of opinion among German readers, have been shining marks for the official propagandists of the German government now known to have been maintained in this country for some years before the war. There is every reason to believe that many papers in that language were established or subsidized as a feature of the paid propaganda carried on here.
At all events, the editors have generally shown a zeal in the cause of Germany since 1914, which doubtless outruns the zeal of their readers, otherwise the German government would have less cause to complain of the conduct of Germans in America in permitting a declaration of war, the draft, and the passage of laws granting huge war credits. On only one other supposition can the discrepancy between the promises of German
