And my background:
Take a look at the gravestone to the right; that’s from one of my family members; translated from the German, it reads “Born in the year 1736: Heinrich Rittenhouse…” and trails off into the grass.
Wikipedia’s entry on the Mennonite church / movement notes:
Persecution and the search for employment forced Mennonites out of the Netherlands eastward to Germany in the 17th century. As Quaker evangelists moved into Germany they received a sympathetic audience among the larger of these Dutch-Mennonite congregations around Krefeld, Altona-Hamburg, Gronau and Emden. It was among this group of Quakers and Mennonites, living under ongoing discrimination, that William Penn solicited settlers for his new colony. The first permanent settlement of Mennonites in the American Colonies consisted of one Mennonite family and twelve Mennonite-Quaker families of Dutch extraction who arrived from Krefeld, Germany, in 1683 and settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Among these early settlers was William Rittenhouse, a lay minister and owner of the first American paper mill. Jacob Gottschalk was the first bishop of this Germantown congregation. This early group of Mennonites and Mennonite-Quakers wrote the first formal protest against slavery in the United States. The treatise was addressed to slave-holding Quakers in an effort to persuade them to change their ways.
Yep - we Rittenhouses came here because we were a religious minority that the locals in Europe were working over. We were invited by William Penn to come here and enjoy religious freedom and get out from under the thumb of governments that liked to determine what was and wasn’t the ‘right’ way to worship their God.
In my own more immediate family history, there’s lots of religious dissenters and minorities that got a rough number here and abroad - Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Anglicans, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Methodists, Baptists, Unity, Theosophists, and several more. My Chinese daughter would have been barred from immigrating to the USA - first by laws that forbade Chinese women
as the forerunners of the Yellow Peril that would destroy America. It wasn’t until very modern times that Chinese were seen as something un-threatening…
…and that could change if we ever got into a fight with them, and they could become uncitizens, as the Japanese and some Italians did during World War 2 - and Germans during both World Wars. H’m - German-Americans means me again…even if all of them came to America before the Revolution.
One of my buddies here in Chicago had a dad who was wounded as a US solider in the war - while the rest of his family sat in an internment camp. But the problem is that it’s just so easy to stop thinking things through and start hating and fearing.
Ask any Jew you know who had family gassed and incinerated in Europe to solve the ‘Jewish problem’, because it was easy and convenient to hate them and blame your problems on a whole race of people.
Ask the Irish about their families in Ireland who were treated like crap in Ireland and then came over here and were treated as a Catholic plot to take over the country.
Ask the Mormons about their faith’s treatment by the locals in the midwest, where they were killed and burned out until they had to escape to Utah - and then were attacked by the US Government.
I could go on and on with examples. But I have some different things to say…