Origin
An age-old technique for mobilizing a populace to fight a war is to so thoroughly demonize the enemy that the conflict becomes seen by the public as a moral battle rather than a political one. This technique was used to maximum effect in America during World War I, when for the first time the U.S. was engaged as a late entrant in an overseas war, a war that many Americans wanted no part of. Accordingly, the Germans were recast as “Huns” to whom all sorts of atrocity tales were attributed, and suddenly everything Germanic became anathema.
In response, German-Americans sought to avoid being branded as disloyalists, traitors, or spies by declaring themselves to be Dutch or anglicizing their names, and common items with German names were retitled: sauerkraut became “victory cabbage,” hamburgers turned into “liberty sandwiches,” and “hamburger steak” was henceforth known as “Salisbury steak.” And a young comic named Julius Marx, who came from a German fam