@RaminS This is one of those legends in here say stories so you’re not going to see it in a historical contex, Like the battle of Gettysburg.
The United States does not have an official language you are right about that but the language they decided to utilize was English and there was a carriage with two German delegates.
That means we would haved been German sympathetic in WW2
it makes sense though and it is believable.
Urban Legend: German almost the official language in US (watzmann.net)
An excerpt from the article:
On January 13, 1795, Congress considered a proposal, not to give German any official status, but merely to print the federal laws in German as well as English. During the debate, a motion to adjourn failed by one vote. The final vote rejecting the translation of federal laws, which took place one month later, is not recorded.
The translation proposal itself originated as a petition to Congress on March 20, 1794, from a group of Germans living in Augusta, Virginia. A House committee responding to that petition recommended publishing sets of the federal statutes in English and distributing them to the states, together with the publication of three thousand sets of laws in German, "for the accommodation of such German citizens of the United States, as do not understand the English language." (American State Papers ser. 10, v. 1:114). According to the succinct report in the Aurora Gazette, "A great variety of plans were proposed, but none that seemed to meet the general sense of the House." (22 January, 1795, p. 3).
A vote to adjourn and sit again on the recommendation failed, 42 to 41, but there is no reason to believe from this close vote that more than token support existed for publishing the laws in German. The vote to adjourn seems to have been interpreted by the House as a vote of no confidence both in the committee's recommendation to translate the laws and in its recommendation on the distribution of the sets of laws once they were published in English. While there is no record of debate on the translation provision that day, if sentiment on the issue in Congress was anything like sentiment in Pennsylvania, translation was probably opposed by a substantial majority of the representatives.
On the other hand, the committee's plan for distributing the sets of laws did provoke some strong disagreement in the House. After objections to the latter were aired, a new committee was formed and asked to report again, and the House agreed to adjourn. It is from the close interim vote, not on an actual bill but on adjournment, that the so-called "German vote" legend has been built.
One month later, on February 16, 1795, the House once again considered the question of promulgating the laws, and among the issues, once again, was translating the federal statutes into German. This time some of the actual debate has been preserved. Rep. Thomas Hartley of Pennsylvania argued that "it was perhaps desirable that the Germans should learn English; but if it is our object to give present information, we should do it in the language understood. The Germans who are advanced in years cannot learn our language in a day. It would be generous in the Government to inform those persons. Many honest men, in the late disturbances [the Whiskey Rebellion], were led away by misrepresentation; ignorance of the laws laid them open to deception."
Rep. William V. Murray of Maryland, who opposed translating the laws into German, countered "that it had never been the custom in England to translate the laws into Welsh or Gaelic, and yet the great bulk of the Welsh, and some hundred thousands of people in Scotland, did not understand a word of English." (Annals of Congress 4:1228-29) The House finally approved publication of current and future federal statutes in English only. The bill was agreed to by the Senate and signed by President Washington the following month.
The January vote on adjournment is sometimes known as "the Muhlenberg Vote," after the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Pennsylvania's Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, a Federalist who spoke German with difficulty, so it is claimed, and who was at any rate a member of a prominent family of assimilated Germans who favored English as the language of education and religion (Dorpalen 1942, 178). Although the roll call vote does not survive, tradition has it that Muhlenberg stepped down to cast the deciding negative, thereby dooming German in America to minority-language status. Tradition notwithstanding, too much weight should not be given to the fact that the Speaker was not in the chair on this occasion. It was common for the Speaker to step down, and Muhlenburg did so on many other occasions during the Third Congress. Even a positive vote on the adjournment issue could not have led to approval of German translations of the laws, a concession which the Congress has repeatedly refused to make ever since.
Nonetheless, Muhlenberg was blamed for selling out German language interests by Franz L�her, whose 1847 "History and Achievements of the Germans in America" presents a garbled though frequently cited account of what is supposed to have happened.
