In January 1871, shortly before the proclamation of the Second Reich at Versailles, the American poet Charles Goethe Baylor dedicated a poem to Germany that illustrates the prevailing sentiment in the United States toward Germany during this time. “America to Germany” begins

Germany had fought for national unity against an imperial French aggressor, and it had been one of the few friends of the North during the American Civil War. German immigrants had participated, particularly in the Northern armies, in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the total population, and in so doing had partially liberated themselves from the “foreign” stigma that American nativists attached to them before the war. In 1871 most Americans considered Germany a world leader in cultural pursuits, a land of poets, musicians, writers, philosophers, and scholars.