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38 I n the 1922 Federal Textbook on Citizenship Training, an aptly titled lesson called “The Good Citizen” begins with Mr. Brown telling Mr. White, “I have been reading that they intend to build some school buildings.” Their conversation moves through issues of cost (“it will take a great deal of money”) and benefits (“we must give our children the best chance for an education”) and eventually lands on voting for a certain candidate for the school board. The reader is told, “On the day of the election Mr. Brown voted. He was very busy, but he thought every voter should do his duty by voting.” As the lesson ends, Mr. Brown informs his wife that even when taxes get higher, the benefits of being part of a citizenry outweigh the monetary cost, telling her, “we will get so much in return. My tax alone would not give me this. The city serves us well because we all work together” (48). This single-page lesson from one of a series of federal citizenship textbooks published in the 1920s illustrates some habits of the “good citizen”—one who reads current events, supports education for children, pays taxes, works together with fellow citizens, and votes. National Americanization efforts as represented by federal textbooks reveal how literacy learning was used to cultivate a certain kind of citizenship in new immigrants. New immigrants in the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s may have encountered “The Good Citizen” and similar lessons in Teaching Our Language to Beginners or any of the other versions of the Federal Textbook on Citizenship Training1 in federally sponsored citizenship classes, which had the dual purpose of teaching students to become citizens and to become proficient in the English language. These textbooks, produced by the Bureau of Naturalization 2 literacy training, americanization, and the cultivation of the productive worker-citizen A difficult task is now before the man or woman who has not even learned to hold a pencil in his hand. Their hands are stiff from hard labor and they are not able to control the arm movement in a regular way. The thing they long to do is to be able to write their own names. . . . The teacher of immigrants has a greater task than simply the teaching of a new language. He must also interpret to them the real America they have never known. —Lillian P. Clark, Teaching Our Language to Beginners, 27, 1. literacy training, americanization, cultivation of productive worker-citizen 39 with help from the Department of Education, are filled with lessons such as “The Good Citizen,” which telegraphs the imagined habits of good citizenship that immigrants could access by becoming literate in English and additionally, offer a glimpse into a larger body of citizenship training documents produced during this period. Seen together, these citizenship training documents— federally produced textbooks for the teaching and learning of English, legislative and conference proceedings about immigration, and booklets from community groups intended to aid immigrants—provide ways to understand how literacy was used as a tool in citizenship training to transform early twentiethcentury immigrants to the United States into “good citizens.” These textbooks and the citizenship training programs that produced them were the product of an explicit citizenship movement in the early twentieth-century United States. An anxiety about the state of the citizenry, which historian John Higham attributes to nativism motivated by U.S. imperialism (109), changing demographics of immigration (159), and the threat of Bolshevism (222), fueled debates around immigration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The era produced numerous pieces of immigration legislation, including a literacy test to determine who among potential immigrants could enter the country that passed in 1917 after twenty years of heated debate,2 and the Americanization movement, which developed on the cusp of World War I. While the literacy test for immigrants was given in multiple languages to assess an individual’s literate ability (and therefore, worthiness to enter the country), government bodies and community groups emphasized English language literacy as a crucial part of the effort to Americanize new immigrants. This chapter focuses on the development of the Americanization movement from the mid-1910s through the 1920s because the cultural effort to produce citizens coincided both with strong legislative efforts to restrict immigration and with changes in work as a result of that era’s proliferation of mass manufacturing and big business. Nativist groups such as the Junior Order of American Mechanics, the Immigration Restriction League, and Sons...

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