German was the second most common language in America prior to the World Wars, but just how common was it? If I went back to America in 1900 what are my odds of running into a monolingual German speaker?

by Dickhole_Mcgee
azurox

Follow up question. How big was the pressure for German speakers to abandon their mother tongue or stop teaching it to their children? It seems unlikely to me that someone would abandon their national identity like that. I know about discrimination against the japanese and the internment camps but I don't know about the experience Germans in America went through during the war.