The Mühlenberg Legend
For years I believed the Mühlenberg legend: that there had been a vote in the US on what the official language was to be, and that it was a very close race between English and German. One version of the legend was that the decision, in the House of Representatives, came down to a single vote, and the deciding vote – for English – was cast by the House’s first ever Speaker, Frederick Augustus Conrad Mühlenberg.
This turns out to be purest Quatsch, Schnickschnack and Mumpitz. (I have no idea whether these Google Translate synonyms for balderdash are really used in German, but if not then they really should be.)
So it turns out misinformation really did exist before the internet.
Even more surprising, the US has no statutory official language; English has been used on a de facto basis, owing to its status as the country’s predominant language.
Der Hochdeutsch-Pennsylvanische Geschicht-Schreiber, oder Sammlung Wichtiger Nachrichten aus dem Natur- und Kirchen-Reich
This post is really about ‘patriotic’ rebranding, though. Of course, German was widely spoken in the US. There were hundreds of German-language US newspapers (the first of which had originally been given the wonderful name Der Hochdeutsch-Pennsylvanische Geschicht-Schreiber, oder Sammlung Wichtiger Nachrichten aus dem Natur- und Kirchen-Reich. (This roughly translates as ‘The High German-Pennsylvanian story-writer, or collection of important news from the realms of nature and the church.’ It was later known as Die Germantauner Zeitung, presumably because the previous name left no room for a headline.)
Even so, the language was in slow decline until World War I. Then, when the US entered the war, anti-German feeling accelerated the change.
(I don’t really want to deal here with murders of German US citizens, or with the internment camps introduced by President Woodrow Wilson which foreshadowed the camps in which Japanese American citizens were interned in World War II, or with forced registration of German Americans. But all of that happened.)
Most of the German language newspapers switched to publishing in English, and some closed down entirely.
The music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms disappeared from music programs. Schools stopped teaching the German language.
Berlin, Michigan changed its name to Marne, Michigan (after the WW1 battle). Berlin, Iowa changed its name to Lincoln. (There are still Berlins in Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts (or however the hell you spell it), Vermont and elsewhere. It’s enough to take your breath away.)
Liberty Cabbage
It’s the rebranding (in most cases, really, failed attempts at rebranding) of food that really caught my eye.
The term ‘hot dog’ gained in popularity over ‘frankfurter’ – people didn’t want to eat things that sounded too German. There was also an attempt to rename them ‘liberty sausages’ – thankfully, that hasn’t stuck.
In 1918, the Federal Food Administration received a petition to rename sauerkraut ‘liberty cabbage.’ During the war, shopkeepers had found that sales of sauerkraut had declined sharply. It couldn’t all be because people suddenly realised they hated it (although I imagine there were people who had secretly hated the stuff for years, and used the war as an excuse to stop eating it).
Similarly, hamburger was called ‘liberty steak’.
Other things simply disappeared, albeit temporarily: saloons removed pretzels from their bars.
Give Me Liberty (Whatever That Is)
‘Liberty’ seemed to be the go-to prefix for patriotic rebranding.
Dachshunds were referred to as ‘liberty pups’. There is no record of whether the dogs were consulted about the change.
Strangest of all, people also no longer wanted to be said to be suffering from German measles; instead, newspapers started reporting outbreaks of ‘liberty measles’. You’d think something with negative connotations – such as a disease! – would be allowed to be called German.
There’s little readily available information on this, but it looks as if there was a drive to replace every German term, and rubella just got caught up in it. A bit like when you find-and-replace text in a document.
(I briefly wondered whether it was an indication that ‘liberty’ has become a meaningless signifier, in the US, of the US; but I don’t think it’s quite lost its meaning. It’s just that’s there is neither consistency nor clarity about what that meaning actually is.)
To Cabbage – And Beyond!
Most of these names didn’t stick, and I imagine they weren’t really intended to – they were just part of the wave of internal wartime propaganda.
Something similar happened in 2003, of course, when France refused to support the US’s call for UN approval for the Iraq invasion. The name ‘freedom fries’ never really caught on. (Although, temporarily, French exports to the US fell by 15%).
An earlier example I hadn’t known about involved the humble kiwi (the fruit, actinidia deliciosa,that is; not a particularly self-deprecating New Zealander).
It had been named the Chinese Gooseberry, but was called the ‘melonette’ when exports to the US began in the 1950s – to avoid any hint of the Cold War conflict between China and the US. (‘The Melonettes’ sounds like an unusually busty girl group.)
In the 1960s the ‘kiwi fruit’ name was adopted – partly to avoid tariffs on melons.
Nor is the absurdity of patriotic rebranding confined, by any means, to the US. After the Jyllands-Posten cartoon controversy in 2006, the Iranian Confectioner’s Union changed the names of Danish pastries to ‘Roses of the Prophet Muhammad’ (which is, admittedly, a wonderful name).
That’s a thin slice of the story so far. Look out for more, equally absurd, patriotic rebrands whenever a government near you wants to throw a temporary spanner into the gears of the news cycle.
[Image by Hans Braxmeier, from Pixabay]