Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (review)

This work is most successful when it describes the way in which the Americanization movement, the aim of which was naturalization, developed in the West—particularly the inter-mountain West. The most original material comes from archival and other sources for Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. These states received only glancing treatment in Edward George Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (New York, 1948), the old standard in the field. Van Nuys argues that the West had its own policy, but, except for a greater concern about Asian immigrants—who could not be naturalized—he does not seem to have differentiated the western movement from the national one.

Van Nuys takes a much more critical attitude toward the Americanizers than Hartmann did. Particularly telling is his treatment of Grace Raymond Hebard (1861–1936), pioneer historian of Wyoming, long-time faculty member of its university, crusader for woman suffrage, energetic Americanizer, and a local legend. He refuses to "print the legend" but reveals the paradox underlying her position. Hebard, Van Nuys argues, was largely motivated by "fear" that "not to Americanize . . . placed the potential fate of the nation in the hands of radicals or degenerates. . . . She defined citizenship in terms of racial assumptions [then] common" (146–147).

The author is more interested in the Americanizers than in their clients. Immigrants and their organizations have no real voice in this book; they are largely the mute objects of the work to reform them. Nor does he make enough distinctions between the various nativists. James D. Phelan, the millionaire one-term U.S. senator from California who figures prominently in the work, was inexorably opposed to Asian immigrants but supportive of Italian immigrants and their organizations in a way that few Protestants were.

The book is clearly written, well organized, and accurate, with only the odd slip. Israel Zangwill, for example, was not an "English . . . immigrant" (35); he was born and died in Britain. Van Nuys has made a distinct contribution to the literature and points the way toward work that needs to be done.