Does Language Save The Faith? The Politics of Language and Ethnicity and German Catholics in Early Mount Angel, Oregon
| dc.contributor.advisor | McNeely, Ian | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Luebke, David | |
| dc.contributor.author | Lute, Jeremiah | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-08-18T15:55:42Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-08-18T15:55:42Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2023 | |
| dc.description | 69 pages | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | Mt. Angel is a small town with a butte. Originally named “Tap-a-lama-ho” by its earliest native residents, the name translates to “mount of communion”; a fitting name for a butte that is now known for the Benedictine monastery that sits on the summit. The cultural and ethnic roots of the town of about 3600 residents primarily go back to Germany and Switzerland. Its established traditions and institutions, including Oktoberfest, the largest folk festival in the Northwest, and its Benedictine Monastery, the Mt. Angel Abbey, contribute to a feeling of timelessness, of walking into an historic German town. But where did this all come from? This thesis uses various primary and secondary accounts of the history of Mt. Angel to show how its German Catholic settlers established a thriving Catholic community, which experienced a series of crises in the early 1900s that led to a swift Americanization, resulting in the disintegration of the German language and ethnic identity in the community. The German and Swiss heritage in Mt. Angel that remains honored today reflects the return to an embrace of German culture in the 1960s, but its lack of grounding in an ethnic German and linguistic experience linked with the mainland gives way to a commodified, universal type of German culture that celebrates what came to be acceptable parts of German culture in the years following World War II. The Oktoberfest continues today, celebrating local traditions and businesses and putting a unique spin on the Bavarian festive tradition. This thesis argues that the social, political, and institutional forces that Mt. Angel’s German-speaking Catholics encountered in Oregon in the early 1900s led to, and in some cases forced, a decline in German-speaking and the practice of German culture, until cultural trends in the mid-1900s led to a revival of celebrating German heritage, even though the culture that was re-embraced was “bavarianized.” This thesis also argues that throughout the history of Mt. Angel’s German Catholics, the church remained the strongest influence in the community. In trying times, the Catholic church proved to be more important to the settling generations than their ethnic German background and had the most significant impact on the community of Mt. Angel in its early history. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.orcid | 0009-0001-8766-8454 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/28691 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | |
| dc.subject | German | en_US |
| dc.subject | Catholic | en_US |
| dc.subject | History | en_US |
| dc.subject | Mount Angel | en_US |
| dc.subject | Ethnicity | en_US |
| dc.title | Does Language Save The Faith? The Politics of Language and Ethnicity and German Catholics in Early Mount Angel, Oregon | |
| dc.type | Thesis/Dissertation |