Hi there,

I study German immigration to the United States, so I'll tackle this question for you. I'm going to interpret your question as asking about German-Americans between the years 1900 and 1914, because the outbreak of World War I had a tremendous impact on the German-American experience, and is the subject of much study in its own right, but it was a singular event.

The opening disclaimer is that it's very hard to make generalizations about the German-American experience simply because it was so varied, but what I've written below holds true across most groups of German-speakers in the US at this time. Somewhere between eight and nine million German speakers arrived in the United States in the 19th century, though the numbers are fuzzy both because record keeping wasn't always great and because the definition of who counted as "German" was similarly uncertain, especially before Germany's unification in 1871. This immigration mostly occurred in three waves, by the last of which (in the 1880s) Germans clearly outnumbered Irish in new arrivals. That meant that they were the largest immigrant group to arrive in the United States by 1900, and today Americans of German descent may or may not outnumber all others, including Americans of British/English descent (again, it's hard to know for sure for any number of reasons.

As a consequence of such a large number of co-ethnics/co-nationals immigrating in the seventy-ish years before 1900, you might imagine that German-Americans had a well-established place in American society by that point. You would be correct in so assuming. Throughout the nineteenth century, German-Americans developed a reputation for being better educated, more highly skilled, less prone to crime and vice, and more committed to nuclear family structures than just about any other immigrant group, so in this sense they achieved what we would regard today as a "model minority" status.^(1) Even more importantly, by 1900 the changing demographics of the incoming immigration stream, which featured greater numbers of immigrants arriving from southern and eastern Europe, made Germans look more "normal" by comparison for those Americans who worried about immigration. As a result, German-Americans were folded into the "Old Stock" of western and northern Europeans who were given de facto preferential treatment upon entering the country,^(2) celebrated in the Dillingham Commission's Report,^(3) and ultimately given one of the largest immigration quotas upon the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924.^(4) By that time, many German-Americans argued that in addition to being "Old Stock," they could even be folded into the definition of "Anglo-Saxon."^(5)

So what did this mean for the experiences of German-Americans? They got along in American society with a minimal amount of friction, except following American entry into World War I. With rare exceptions, German-Americans by and large were not suspected of disloyalty during the crusade against "hyphenism" that preceded the war. These exceptions are notable and telling. Groups such as the national German-American Alliance antagonized anti-immigrant nationalists because they suggested that at least some German-Americans might prioritize loyalty to Germany over loyalty to the United States.^(6) But as a practical matter, these amounted to debates between some German-American intellectuals on the one hand and a few nativist intellectuals on the other, and did not have an impact on the average German-American's day to day life (except, again, when World War I broke out, but as I mentioned that's a completely different story). There was also much more virulent and violent anti-German sentiment in the 1850s, but that's far earlier than the time frame you asked for.

The above applies to cultural/ethnic discrimination, but it's also evident that German-Americans were among the best situated economically. Both because of their generally higher level of skills and education and because they had deeply entrenched community networks, German-Americans as a whole tended not to work low-paying, insecure jobs secured by labor brokers or padrones. Instead, they tended to end up as skilled workers or independent farmers, which accorded more with the immigrant ideal of the time.

In short, while there are obviously exceptions when you're talking about 8-9 million people, life for German-American immigrants was about as good as it could be around 1900. They didn't suffer from anything along the lines of the "no Irish need apply" trope, to say nothing of the restrictions inspired by the racial pseudeoscience of the day. That was challenged in 1914 and completely upended in 1917, but as I said that's a different story.

I would be happy to answer any follow up questions, or to provide more sources.

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1. Frederick Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: The German-Americans and World War I

2. Vincent Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island

3. Katherine Benton-Cohen, Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy

4. Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America

5. Russell Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity

6. Charles T. Johnson, Culture at Twilight: The National German-American Alliance, 1900-1918