World War I
The war brought about massive social upheaval and intensified the spread of the Spanish flu in 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people. This "first modern war" brought many technologies now associated with warfare, including the use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas. The use of chemical and biological weapons in warfare is now restricted by an agreement signed in 1925 called the Geneva Convention.
The Hyphenated Americans
World War I sparked a nativist movement against hyphenated Americans, or Americans who came from other countries, as immigrant groups were seen as separate from America and not fully supportive. According to MNopedia, “The growing tension between heritage and assimilation came to a head when America entered World War I. In the 1890s, nativist rhetoric from politicians like Massachusetts’ Henry Cabot Lodge had urged Americans to preserve the hegemony of Protestant Anglo-Saxons against millions of new immigrants. It reappeared in the 1910s, strengthened by fears of political radicals and German saboteurs."Americanization
Those who continued to practice their European heritage found themselves under attack from fellow Americans, as a wave of nationalism had gripped the nation and anything associated with Europe was in question. Despite Norway’s neutrality, this applied to Norwegian Americans as well. Norwegians, like Germans and others of European nationality, found themselves at the receiving end of a brutal campaign of Americanization. Newspapers published in Norwegian were censored. Governor Harding of Iowa forbade the use of any foreign language in any public place in Iowa, and other governors in other states did similar things.In the mind of many Americans, speaking a foreign language or practicing a foreign culture was seen as anti-American, or as a sign that someone didn’t support America. As a result, fluency in Norwegian among Norwegian American children dropped dramatically. Norwegian-Americans' support for joining World War I was also called into question as only four of the ten “Norwegian” votes in Congress supported Woodrow Wilson’s 1917 declaration of war. America’s entry into World War I only heightened the nationalism amongst Americans.
Assimilation: The Melting Pot
As a result of the extreme pressure from fellow Americans, Norwegian Americans were forced to assimilate more quickly into American culture and drop their status as Norwegian Americans. Many Norwegian newspapers, schools, and churches began switching from Norwegian to English, and the Norwegian Lutheran Church officially became just the Lutheran Church.“At the time of the [1914] Eidsvoll festival, asserts [Carl] Chrislock, ‘very few observers were predicting that assimilation would shortly obliterate the Norwegian-American community.’ It was World War I that helped slow ethnic activism, and after the outbreak of the war, ‘festival rhetoric became considerably more prone to acknowledge the claims of American patriotism.’ For Chrislock the 1925 centennial was merely ‘a last hurrah’ - the end of Norwegian-American history” (Schultz, p. 273).
Sources to explore:
Cultural Pluralism versus Assimilation edited by Odd S. Lovoll, Norwegian-American Topical Studies, Vol. 2
"The Pride of the Race Had Been Touched:" The 1925 Norse-American Immigration Centennial and Ethnic Identity by April Schultz in Norwegian-American Studies, Vol. 33