MANY OF THE EARLIEST GERMANS WHO CAME TO AMERICA went to Philadelphia. They scared the locals sufficiently that in 1729 the Pennsylvania legislature tried to place a duty of five shillings on each foreigner coming to the colony. The governor refused to sign it. The Germans were craftsmen and farmers, but they were reviled by such men as Benjamin Franklin for insisting on speaking German, going to German churches, and reading German newspapers.
In 1845 there was a potato blight in Germany, and there was famine, and after the German states began a revolt in 1848, over 430,000 Germans came to America between 1850 and 1860. Most of them went to the Midwest, where they were shunned for being drinkers who desecrated the Sabbath, for being Catholic, and for speaking German. In 1890 the states of Wisconsin and Illinois passed laws saying kids had to be taught in English.
Although the exodus pretty much stopped by 1895, during World War I the loyalty of all Germans was questioned, and suddenly hamburgers became Salisbury steaks, frankfurters became hot dogs, and German newspapers started publishing in English instead of German.
The non-Jewish Germans, who were mostly conservatives, set up the first kindergartens. “Silent Night” is a German hymn. Santa Claus was a German invention, and so are the Easter bunny and Easter eggs.
During World War I, when Germany became the enemy, President Woodrow Wilson, once the president of Princeton, exploited the country’s fears by warning that hidden enemies were undermining the nation. George Creel, who was to Wilson what Karl Rove became to George W. Bush, created a hysteria. “True Americans” started going after German-Americans. Near St. Louis, a German-American defended Germany in an argument. A mob stripped him naked, wrapped him in an American flag, dragged him through the streets, and lynched him.
German American Bund parade. Library of Congress
During World War II some fifty thousand German-Americans belonged to the German Bund, an organization sympathetic to the Nazis, but most Germans were loyal to America.
In Brooklyn in the 1950s, Protestants were in the minority, and their presence was further fragmented because of the many denominations that competed for church membership in the borough. In Flatbush alone, within a two-mile radius, there was St. Mark’s Methodist Church, Baptist Church of the Redeemer, Flatbush Tomkins Congregational Church, and All Souls Universalist Church. By the 1960s, the German population had pretty much blended in and disappeared along with many of the other Protestant sects in Brooklyn.
Justus Doenicke lived in Flatbush, the son of German immigrants, a group that assimilated into America’s mythical melting pot faster than any other ethnic group. He grew up attending the local Baptist church on Cortelyou Road and Ocean Avenue.
His father, a talented estimator in the family’s construction business, made a lot of money building Catholic churches in Queens, earning enough to vacation in Europe every summer. A conservative, the father subscribed to the New York Journal-American, the most right-wing of New York’s daily newspapers, and before the war he even donated a few bucks to the America First organization.
The son, Justus, who grew up with wealth and privilege, went to the Jesuit-based Poly Prep, one of the elite prep schools for well-to-do Brooklyn WASPs. He went to college at Colgate, earned an advanced degree at Princeton, and went on to become a professor at the New College in Sarasota, Florida. His specialty became the study of right-wing organizations—the Liberty League, America First, and the German Bund.
JUSTUS DOENECKE “I was born in the Brooklyn Hospital on March 5, 1938. My grandfather came from a German village near Kassel, called Helmarshausen, around 1870 just before or during the Franco-Prussian War. The village, which was owned by the Hanoverians, is not found on a lot of maps. The family occupation in Germany was mauer, which means ‘bricklayer,’ but it can also mean ‘builder.’ In Germany his name was David Eustus Dönnaka, and he came over with his brother Arthur. When he came to America, immigration officials changed his name to Justus David, got rid of the umlaut in Dönnaka, and spelled it Doenecke.
“My grandfather and his brother married two sisters, who were born and raised in the United States. My grandmother had no German accent at all. Their name was Kappel. They were called Free Methodists. She went to a finishing school called Roberts Wesleyan Seminary in Rochester.
“I don’t know why my grandfather settled in Brooklyn, except that every large American city had a German section. He settled in the old downtown on Bedford Avenue, where he attended the Lutheran church.
“He and his brother may have started in bricklaying, but they were bright enough to organize their own company, Justus C. Doenecke and Sons, at 66 Court Street in Brooklyn. From about 1890 to the 1930s they did quite well. After World War I they hired an employee, Joe Fogerty, who had an in with the Roman Catholic archdiocese. Queens County was beginning to attract massive numbers of ethnics—Italians, Germans, Irish, and various Slavic groups. When an area was developed, it wanted its own Catholic church and Catholic school, and through this Fogerty, my grandfather obtained a lot of contracts for building them.
“My father joined the firm, and his skill was that of estimator. He was the guy who looked at the blueprints and all the books of the subcontractors and their prices and then figured out how much to bid for the job. This was before calculators and computers. He would come home at night, and the dining table would be covered with blueprints and yellow legal pads. He would do the math in his head.
“The company folded up during the Depression. I frankly think they lived too high on the hog. It was my grandfather and his two sons, my father and my uncle Arthur, and during the ’20s they were wealthy enough that one of them would be vacationing in Europe while the other two did the business. They took turns that way, and it caught up with them.
“After the family firm folded, my father during World War II worked for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Then he worked for a company called Pfeifer until 1951, and then he went to work for a construction firm called Gens-Jarboe. The company dissolved around 1964. He had inherited money from his mother, so he just retired.
“My father met my mother when he was in his thirties. My mom’s father, Rule Fairly Smith, was the city editor of the New York World, which was Pulitzer’s paper. He was very much a newspaper man. He grew up in Bangor, Maine, and briefly attended Harvard Law School. I assume he settled in Brooklyn because New York was the center of the newspaper business. He stayed with the World until it dissolved about 1931. According to my mother, when Joseph Pulitzer died, the Pulitzer boys bled the paper for all the money they could get out of it, and then sold it to Roy Howard and the New York Telegram. My grandfather’s wife was Ellen Cyr, who wrote the Cyr primers for children.
“My father went to Dartmouth College for two years. He was class of 1916. His parents encouraged him to drop out to go into their business. His nickname at college was Dutch, meaning Deutsch. If he had a religion, it was Dartmouth. He had an unreal loyalty and expectation about it. He wanted the school to remain the way it was in 1914. When they built the Hopkins Center on the Dartmouth Green, he said, ‘That destroys the architecture of the school.’
“My father always hated Roosevelt and the New Deal. That was his politics. He was a LaFollette Progressive who then became very right-wing. His feeling was that labor was too assertive, and he also bitched about taxes. He thought Roosevelt had conspired to get us into World War II and also that he had sold out the country at Yalta. His was the standard right-wing, prototype Birchite line.
“My father gave to America First. He’d send them a dollar for the cause. A dollar in those days is like $10 to $15 today. The committee was organized in the fall of 1940. Between 1940 and the start of World War I he sent them maybe $3. These were a coalition of people who often agreed on little else but the war.
“Its original name was the Emergency Committee to Defend America First, and it was organized to fight the Lend-Lease legislation sponsored by the Roosevelt administration.
“Since Britain was in debt and couldn’t pay for arms, Roosevelt wanted to lend them or lease them the arms, and they were supposed to pay us back in kind.
“The argument of the America Firsters was: ‘We need this ourselves. We shouldn’t be giving it away now. We’re on a limb and sawing it off. Britain well could go under and then where are we?’
“The next issue was convoys, because once you give permission for the United States to send tanks and uniforms and airplanes to Britain, how are we going to transport this stuff? The British ships were getting sunk by U-boats. The question became: should the United States convoy this material ourselves? This resulted in quite a heated fight in Congress. It was only voted through about a month before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Once Pearl Harbor was attacked, America First dissolved in three days. It dissolved for good, and everyone scattered, though the people who supported it in Congress stayed around until the Eightieth Congress, which fought the Truman administration, and on into the early part of the Eisenhower administration.
“Two of our presidents contributed to America First, including Gerald Ford, who was an assistant football coach and law student at Yale, and John Kennedy, who gave $100. He gave it as a surrogate for his father, Joe. When I read the internal correspondence of America First, they all said that Joe Kennedy was a notorious cheapskate; that he was trying to cover his ass with the Roosevelt administration. [Joe Kennedy was the U.S. ambassador to Britain before the war.] They had no respect for him, found him to be an expedient man.
“People tend to forget, because of the liberal nature of the way Brooklyn voted, that within any large city were people who were very, very right-wing. Not too far from us Father Coughlin had support in Brooklyn. If you were a reactionary Catholic, you got the Brooklyn Tablet, which was edited by the Scanlon brothers. It represented the Cardinal Spellman wing of the Church.
“We were Protestants. My father was confirmed in the Lutheran church, and my mother was Baptist, and I grew up going to the Baptist church on Cortelyou Road and Ocean Avenue. They were very doctrinal people. My father’d say, ‘If you lead a good life, you’ll go to heaven.’ In fact, the old man Doenecke, my uncle, just before he died, was asked, ‘Have you made your peace with God?’ He said, ‘I have come to believe in nothing.’ But these were not deep people. It’s not like they were mulling over this stuff.
“My father got his news mainly from the most right-wing of New York papers, the Journal-American, which had two columnists he absolutely worshipped. One was Westbrook Pegler and the other was George Sokolsky, and he thought those two men were great sages. He would quote them like scripture. When people would say to me, ‘What newspaper do you get?’ I was embarrassed. My mother would say, ‘Always tell them it’s for Pegler.’
“We Protestants were very much in the minority. One day each spring there was a parade called the Anniversary Day Parade, which was to celebrate Sunday school in the Protestant churches. If it weren’t for the Jews in the scout troops—the Cub Scouts and the Boy Scouts had a lot of Jews—you wouldn’t have had much of a parade. And the longer I lived there, the numbers got smaller and smaller.
“We lived on Ocean and Caton Avenues in Flatbush. We were right near the Parade Grounds, which was an extension of Prospect Park. As a kid, I played the usual games, stickball and stoopball. We collected bubblegum cards, and we went to the movies a lot. We had seven different movie theaters within walking distance. We went to the RKO Kenmore the most, but also Loews Kings, and the Astor, which had foreign films or films that were coming back after being out of circulation two or three years. If we ever missed a movie, my mother would say, ‘We’ll see it when it comes back to the Astor.’
“As a kid I always rooted for the Dodgers. That was tribal. I enjoyed going to Ebbets Field. I found watching the fans interesting. To go to the games was being part of an amateur sociology class. There were a lot of drunks, and yelling all the time.
“I remember when Jackie Robinson came up, my parents didn’t care at all. It was fine with them. Their attitude was somewhere between ‘It’s not nice’ to not giving a damn. They never went to a single game in their lives. They ignored sports.
“I remember Robinson. He was fast and a little heavy. He gave the impression of being strong with all the weight he was carrying. We took them all for granted. I knew who they were and what they were doing.
“My mother knew Kate O’Malley, the wife of the owner of the Dodgers. There was a garden club in Flatbush, and Mrs. O’Malley was active in it. She evidently had lost her vocal chords and had trouble speaking. She would talk in a whisper. She was a great gardener. Mrs. O’Malley loved orchids. She offered my mother tickets to go to the games, but my mother had absolutely no interest. I would have had to explain baseball to her to get her to go. As I said, my father never went to a game in his life.
“I would denounce O’Malley because he moved the Dodgers to California, but my mother would defend her friend. ‘Kate O’Malley is such a lovely woman.’
“Sometimes we’d go to New York. I remember going to Madison Square Garden to watch Clair Bee and LIU and their great star, Sherman White. They all got nailed in a basketball scandal in 1951, which made a lot of headlines. They weren’t throwing games. They were manipulating point spreads. A lot of local schools were involved.
“What I remember most about Flatbush was the lack of grass. It was apartment buildings. We were basically cliff-dwellers. You look out the window, and there was nothing but sidewalks for blocks upon blocks. I didn’t have the youth a lot of suburban kids did, because of that. I wasn’t out mowing the lawn or having a cookout or getting your license when you were sixteen. You didn’t ride bicycles in the neighborhood. In a way you were more sophisticated and streetwise, but in a way you had your own provincialism and naivete.
“We lived across the street from the Church Avenue station on the BMT Brighton line, called the D train. My father worked in Manhattan, so he’d take the subway every day, and he’d get up very early in the morning to beat the crowd so he could get a seat.
“The area was predominantly Jewish with maybe 40 percent a general mix of gentiles. No blacks at all. The Irish kept themselves separated. They would go to the Catholic schools.
“The only reason I knew any Irish kids was that for two summers I went to camp in Friendship, Maine, owned by a man by the name of John Duda. During the year he ran a Boys Club, and he would take us out to Prospect Park, and most of my friends from that club were either from St. Xavier parish or from St. Angelo Hall school.
“For my elementary education I went to Berkeley Institute on Lincoln Place near Grand Army Plaza, about three blocks from my home. It was a girls’ school but it took boys up to the sixth grade.
“Beginning in the seventh grade, I went to a school called Poly Prep. Broadly speaking, it’s in Bay Ridge, overlooking the Narrows. It was a country day school, very much college preparatory. It was ethnically half-Jewish, half-gentile. About 20 to 30 percent of the gentiles were Anglos, but you had Italians, Syrians, Scandinavians, and Greeks, some of the dominant ethnic groups of Bay Ridge.
“The Protestants and the Catholics very much had a parallel system. Those upper-class Christians who were Protestants went to Poly Prep, and those Christians who were Roman Catholic would go to Brooklyn Prep, which was Jesuit, and it was a feeder school for Jesuit colleges. Very seldom did someone from Brooklyn Prep go to a secular college. It was a straight route from primary school through to a Catholic university. Holy Cross was the big one. Holy Cross was almost an alumni group for Brooklyn Prep and for Loyola School in Manhattan. Also Fordham. Not so much Georgetown, which at the time was a play school for Latin American rich kids.
“If you went to a more Diocesan college, you’d go to St. John’s or St. Francis. These were run in office buildings. These colleges supplied a lot of lower-echelon white-collar people, civil servants—that layer of society. If you wanted a profession or an upper-echelon business, you’d go to Holy Cross, Fordham, or Georgetown.
“Daniel Kelly, my best friend growing up, went to Brooklyn Prep. Kelly wanted to go to Yale, and they wanted him to go to Holy Cross. The brothers of Brooklyn Prep told him, ‘We’re not going to write you a recommendation. You’re going on your own.’
“He said, ‘The heck with you people. I’m going to Yale if I can get in.’ And he went. That was bucking the system.
“When I attended my cousin’s graduation from Loyola School in Manhattan, the priest who gave the commencement address was Father Arthur McRatty. He shook my hand in the reception line. I was obviously a college student, and he asked me where I was going to college.
“‘I go to Colgate,’ I said.
“He said, ‘You’re one of those who couldn’t get into Holy Cross or Georgetown.’
“It was a really diplomatic remark. People talk about the good old days, the world of our fathers. This is the world of our fathers.
“Poly Prep was a rather small school, about 450 students in all. It was quite competitive athletically within a league that involved St. Paul’s School on Long Island; Adelphi Academy; Riverdale, up in the Bronx; Horace Mann School; and a school called Trinity. They pretentiously called themselves ‘the Ivy League.’
“At Poly Prep you were either a brain or a jock, and I was neither, though I got through life all right. You were expected to be extremely able in one of those categories. I was always in the second quarter of my class, and my senior year I lettered in track.
“We had some well-known alumni. Arthur Levitt, the head of the stock exchange, went to Poly Prep. His father was comptroller of the city. There is a very successful Wall Street lawyer named Daniel Pollack. He takes on a lot of heavy cases that are argued before the Supreme Court. Myles Behrens is an excellent eye doctor and surgeon and medical scholar. And Kenneth Duberstein was with the Reagan entourage. He was several years behind me. Also James Fluge, who’s been for several years the assistant to Teddy Kennedy.
“What was remarkable was the tremendous assimilation among the Germans. It started in the twenty years between World War I and II. Once there were several German-language newspapers in New York, but after World War I, there were pressures to enforce assimilation and to avoid using German in conversation. There was a curbing of the teaching of the German language.
“By World War II only one German paper, the Staats-Zeitung, remained. It was owned by the Ridder family. The company later became Knight-Ridder. The paper was becoming minuscule. Very few people—mainly the lower middle class—read it. By the start of World War II, there was no German community. It had folded up. Intermarriage really took hold by the second generation. I don’t think one of my father’s cousins or brothers married another German-American. The thing pretty much dissolved as far as ethnic identity. We didn’t go to Yorkville [Manhattan’s Upper East Side]. My father never went to Luchow’s [an old-time German restaurant on 14th Street near Union Square that hung on until 1982]. I didn’t know any German at all until I had to take doctoral qualifying exams when I went to graduate school.
“When I started at Poly Prep in 1950, German was one of the four languages taught. It was French, Latin, Spanish, and German. You take Spanish because it’s easy. You take French because there’s a culture. You take Latin because you had to take it in the eighth grade, and you said, ‘Hell, I might as well continue with it.’ And that’s why you took those languages. It wasn’t ethnic identity or any deep choices of any kind. We didn’t give a whole lot of thought to any of this. Within three years the German was dropped, never to be recovered, and the German teacher ended up teaching biology. There was a lack of interest.
“In the beginning Flatbush was really farmland, and when it started being developed, houses came, and the houses were replaced by apartments, and you had all these Protestant denominations, each setting up its own church. Within two square miles you had Episcopal, Lutheran, Christian Science, Methodist, and Presbyterian.
“By the 1950s a lot of these parishes couldn’t support themselves. They didn’t have enough money or enough old people to keep things going, when any logical planner would say, ‘You have to merge these congregations into one large one.’ And they could have done that. The major Protestant ones, who wouldn’t have argued too much over doctrine—Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Disciples of Christ—could have federated, though the Baptists would not have joined any other and the Episcopalians would have remained apart. They were sacramentally oriented and saw themselves as Catholic as well as Protestant. It would have defied canon law for the Episcopalians to federate. But the others—if you wanted a church as healthy as one of the major synagogues, or the Roman Catholic Church, they should have gotten together.
“They actually did that in the summer to give the ministers a vacation. Five or six of these churches would join together and meet one week at St. Mark’s Methodist this Sunday, and next Sunday at Baptist Church of the Redeemer, and the next Sunday at the Flatbush Tomkins Congregational Church, All Souls Universalist. If they were able to do it for the summer, they could have done it for good. But they didn’t.
“When I went back to Brooklyn about five years ago, they all had become black churches. The Baptist church I went to is Haitian now. I could tell because the service was in French. I also found some of the movie theaters had become black gospel temples.
“My neighborhood turned black between 1960 and 1970. The whites went to the suburbs. Long Island was the logical place, or New Jersey. Whether the whites left first or whether the blacks moved in first depended on the area. Maybe on the block.
“When I was a boy, the merchants along Flatbush Avenue, the main commercial street, were 70 percent Jewish. By 1970 I would ride down the street and notice that they had been replaced by Asians. Except for a few elderly people, the Jews were gone.”
Justus Doenecke today. Courtesy of Justus Doenecke