Americanization in the States: Immigrant Social Welfare Policy, Citizenship, and National Identity in the United States, 1908–1929

Conclusion

• Conclusion The Americanization movement of the 1910s and 1920s was a unique phenomenon in American history. High rates of immigration have often been accompanied by reactions of nativism, but only once have Americans attempted to define their national identity through positive social reform rather than through discrimination and exclusion. The result, the Americanization movement , was deemed such a failure by both foreign- and native-born Americans that by the late 1920s the effort was abandoned in favor of immigration restriction. This taint of failure has been long-lasting; Americans have not attempted a similar large-scale program to promote American citizenship among immigrants since the 1920s. Even the term “Americanization” remains so distasteful that it is not used to describe the myriad public and private programs that encourage naturalization and assist immigrants today. Americanization obtained this sorry reputation because of its connections to the nationalism of World War I. Progressive Americanizer Frances A. Kellor made a fatal political error when she tied her cause of immigrant assimilation through social welfare to the military preparedness movement. Nationalism was central to progressivism, yet Kellor and other progressive nationalists failed to recognize that their newfound conservative allies were not interested in expanding definitions of American citizenship and national identity to include immigrants, and that they were hostile to the progressive argument that immigrant assimilation required the transformation of both foreign- and native-born through progressive social reform. The association of Americanization with the spirit of “100 Percent Americanism ” that was pervasive during World War I has prompted scholars to view Americanization as a product of the war. This perspective has, in turn, caused historians to examine only the educational programs that dominated the post-war movement and miss the social environmental reforms that progressive Americanizers initiated in the early 1910s. This understanding of Americanization as both a wartime phenomenon 164 and as education policy comes from the pioneering work of John F. McClymer . McClymer was one of the first scholars to recognize Americanization as progressive social policy in his analysis of the activities of the U.S. Bureau of Education and Naturalization. He was the first to draw attention to the gender dynamics within the Americanization movement and to the critical role of middle-class women as both leaders and foot soldiers in Americanization programs.1 His insights into Americanizers’ faith in “scientific” expertise and social engineering, their politicization of culture, and their eagerness to ascribe great meaning to the trivialities of everyday life are reminders of the many weaknesses of the Americanization movement. World War I had a profound influence on the Americanization movement, but Americanization as immigrant social welfare had existed long before the war in both the private and public sectors. Neither a product of the war nor a monolithic program of coercion through education that emerged during the Red Scare, Americanization was a diverse set of social welfare policies initiated and implemented by progressives before and after World War I to foster immigrant assimilation and define American identity along middleclass lines. Americanization policies also encompassed more than immigrant education; they also included the reform of the social environment through such activities as labor camp and housing inspection, complaints resolution, and dock monitoring. Looking at Americanization through the lens of education reveals invasive, paternalistic, and sometimes culturally condescending programs that some scholars, particularly Gary Gerstle and Desmond King, have deemed coercive and require a “disciplinary state.”2 However, a close examination of Americanization policies, before and after the war, reveals low participation rates by immigrants, inadequate funding, and spotty enforcement of laws that technically made immigrant participation compulsory. Progressive Americanizers were more willing to compel native-born employers, contractors, hoteliers, and landlords to uphold employment, licensing, housing, and sanitation laws than they were to force foreign-born adults to attend English-language classes. The most distinctive aspect of Americanization policy— progressives’ attempt to reform the social environment by regulating the behavior of Americans in the name of good citizenship—has been largely ignored except by Daniel A. Cornford and Gilbert González, who examine the California Commission of Immigration and Housing’s labor camp sanitation program. Frank Van Nuys’s study of the Americanization movement in the West is a step in the right direction, Considering the educational and social environmental Conclusion 165 166 Americanization in the States components of the progressive immigrant social welfare policies that comprised the Americanization movement.3 This study of immigrant social welfare...