Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908-1929 (review)

Most studies of governmental efforts to "Americanize" immigrants have concentrated on the federal level. Ziegler-McPherson documents the largest and most important of the state bureaucracies—in New York, California, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Though most state agencies were chronically under-funded, it seems clear that it was here where much of the action took place. Historians have also tended to view Americanization in the context of wartime super patriotism and the political and social reaction of the postwar Red Scare. These were instruments of social control, creations of paternalistic progressive reformers who sought to remold working-class immigrants in their own middle class WASP images.

Ziegler-McPherson adds considerable detail to this story and conveys the diversity of the state programs. She places Americanization in the broader context of Progressive era reforms and interprets the concept broadly, considering a wide range of initiatives involving labor conditions, housing, and services for immigrants as well as diverse educational efforts. On balance, however, the study does little to change our overall understanding of the motivations behind government Americanization.

The book's first four chapters focus on the prewar programs in New York and California. The first, New York's Bureau of Industry and Immigration, was established in 1910 under the direction of the consummate pluralist reformer Frances Kellor. The Bureau started ambitiously, focusing on the licensing and regulation of port services for immigrants, immigrant housing, employment bureaus, and labor camps. Kellor placed environmental factors at the center of the problems facing immigrant workers and she included the actions of native born people as part of her assessment. Never before or again, the author notes, was assimilation pursued so vigorously. Kellor was replaced in 1915, however, by Marian Clark, a staunch eugenicist, someone far more interested in restricting immigration and re-shaping immigrants than in addressing their environmental problems. Fought at every step by immigrant legislators and voluntary groups, the Bureau atrophied under Clark's leadership.

Established with sufficient funding under progressive governor Hiram Johnson in 1912-1913, California's Commission of Immigration and Housing conducted research on immigrant banks, employment bureaus, labor camps, lodging houses, tenements, and other issues. Here and in some of the other agencies, reformers were drawn as readily from immigrant as from WASP backgrounds. California's most important plan may well have been its Home Teachers program which conducted classes not only in English and civics, but also in hygiene and home economics. There is little doubt this curriculum and the Commission's legislative campaigns improved conditions for migratory workers—and little doubt that these efforts betrayed mainstream middle class values.

During the war these bodies and the newly-established Massachusetts Bureau of Immigration (1917) spent much of their energies cooperating and facilitating government propaganda campaigns on behalf of the war and spying on war opponents, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and other suspected radicals. The California Commission supported the concept of internment of IWW activists, while the New York body worked closely with ultra-patriotic groups.

Illinois was a late comer to governmental Americanization programs in part because Chicago's progressive reformers had already established a range of relevant programs through social settlements and the Immigrants Protective League (1908). By the war years, however, the League was facing severe financial problems. Veteran pluralist reformer Grace Abbott and others turned to the state and the Illinois Immigrants Commission was established in 1919. Like most of the other state agencies, however, the commission was grossly under-funded, and it lasted only two years. Like the other reformers involved in these state agencies, Abbott conducted important research projects, in this case on immigrants in Illinois mining towns and on educational opportunities for immigrants in the state. Ziegler-McPherson shows how such quintessentially progressive research efforts enlightened the public on the problems facing immigrants—even where they did not result in...