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Enlightened Tolerance or Cultural Capitulation? Contesting Notions of American Identity
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
After the cannons cooled Spain reluctantly relinquished Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Until the late nineteenth century American expansion followed a fairly simple pattern. Indigenous peoples were rounded up, corralled into reservations, or simply massacred, allowing citizens back East to colonize the West. But the new territories from the 1898 war were far from the Union’s constituent states. Geographic and demographic impediments challenged the traditional methods of amalgamating new territories. If it was impractical to settle these colonies with old-stock Americans federal authorities determined to give them what they considered the next best thing—American culture and norms. What these policy makers could not have imagined was the unanticipated consequences of Americanization. This policy’s extension overseas would spark a chain of events that would eventually challenge the role played by ethnicity and ideology in the American national narrative. Americanization, which first targeted the country’s German-speaking minority , began in the late eighteenth century.1 “Americanization policies, like the Manifest Destiny notions that sustained it, not only served the dominant AngloProtestant sectors in supporting the expansionist policy of the United States, but also as a political and cultural resource for the production of American nationalism and, with it, U.S. national development, integration and identity.”2 Western expansion followed by statehood was intended to reabsorb old-stock Americans who moved westward and not incorporate new peoples into the national family.3 Those who were not American had to become American. In 1789 Noah Webster claimed, “It must be considered further, that the English is the common root or stock from which our national language will be derived. All others will gradually waste away—and within a century and a half, North America will be peopled with a hundred millions of men, all speaking the same language.”4 Thus, those Enlightened Tolerance or Cultural Capitulation? Contesting Notions of American Identity amílcar antonio barreto 145 retaining their previous vernaculars and cultural identities were branded as suspicious and possibly subversive.5 While American society largely disregarded immigrants—exception for celebrating national holidays—immigrant children were another matter.6 Schools exposed them to a new language and traditions: “Immigrants were disparaged for their cultural peculiarities, and the implied message was, ‘You will become like us whether you want to or not.’ When it came to racial minorities, however, the unspoken dictum was ‘No matter how much like us you are, you will remain apart’.”7 State-run educational bureaucracies are far from neutral purveyors of information. Regimes design schools as training grounds to generate forthcoming generations of obedient citizens.8 American public schools prepared native-born and immigrant children to accept roles as loyal citizens. They would prepare the country’s new colonial wards in the same way—via government-run schools. Shortly after the Spanish-Cuban-Philippine-American War President McKinley commissioned a study of the new Puerto Rican colony. Its author, Henry Carroll, boasted,“They will learn our customs and usages, in so far as they are better than their own, as they learn our language.”9 Prior to World War I Theodore Roosevelt emphasized, “We have room for but one language here and that is the English language.”10 In a letter appointing José Gallardo Puerto Rico’s education commissioner in 1937 President Franklin Roosevelt wrote that Puerto Ricans had to learn English—the only medium through which islanders could learn “American ideals and principles.”11 Belying an official creed of liberty and equality was a belief in the ethnic and racial superiority of Anglo-Protestants. Such notions justified rejecting calls for greater Puerto Rican autonomy.12 As Edward Said contended , this presumption of “greatness” endures in American foreign policy and popular attitudes.13 Policy optimization depended on staffing schools with Americans teachers.14 Puerto Rico’s distance from the U.S. mainland made that preference impractical. When available, American teachers were favored over locals for high-level administrative posts.15 Indeed, the island’s education commissioners were presidential appointees eager to carry out Washington’s dictates to the fullest extent possible.16 Americanization was also enforced by various nongovernmental organizations , including an array of new Protestant churches whose proselytizing included providing social services, such as hospitals, in a society where the Spanish state had invested paltry resources.17 The Catholic Church also heeded Americanization ’s call once its Spanish prelates were replaced with Americans. Both Catholic and Protestant churches established private schools, eagerly promoting Americanization beyond encouraging language shift.18 Both...