An Historiography of a Concept, Social Movement, and Practice
originally written 2011
While the use of the term “Americanization” has increased in academia, scholarly study of the Americanization movement (1910 – 1920) and specific Americanization practices have been largely neglected, especially by historians. There was a flood of writing on the subject during the first couple decades of the 20th century as it became one of the dominant political discourses of the time. Industrial, government, and education policy makers rushed to create national, state, and local coordinating bodies operating both within and independently of government agencies. A veritable flood of political, educational, and editorial documents filled the popular, scholarly, and government media of the day. There were also several scholarly studies and evaluations of various Americanization efforts, which were conducted from different disciplinary perspectives: educational studies of the development and effectiveness of Americanization programs; political studies of the administrative networks, public policies, and political ramifications of various Americanization initiatives; and there were sociological studies of Americanization as both a socio-political movement and as an socio-cultural phenomenon otherwise labeled as “assimilation” or “acculturation.”[i] One important collection of studies was sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, which commissioned a 10 volume series called Americanization Studies: The Acculturation of Immigrant Groups Into American Society. This collection was published from 1920 to 1924 at the cost of some $200,000.[ii]
Historical treatment of the Americanization movement, however, was slow in coming. There was some initial treatment by Merle E. Curti in The Roots of American Loyalty (1946). Curti’s work would later influence his graduate student, Edward G. Hartmann. Hartmann, under the direction of Curti, wrote The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant in 1948.[iii] Hartmann’s book would become the definitive history of the Americanization movement, and it remains to this day the best of the few historical monographs on the subject.
Hartmann’s rather narrow focus chronicled the rise of private reform and educational policy organizations who were concerned about the assimilation of the immigrant during the first decade and a half of the 20th century. These reformers were able to influence the Bureau of Naturalization and the Bureau of Education in order to create formal governmental agencies to oversee and coordinate state and local Americanization initiatives, organize Americanization conferences, and also supply posters, pamphlets, and textbooks. This “social movement” or “crusade” began as a “positive program” of education to meet the “problem” of immigration in the U.S. and it reached its pinnacle in the years 1915-16 as the U.S. geared toward entry into the war. But a national hysteria concerning foreigners and anti-Americanism swept the country during and after the war up until 1920, which created more a “negative,” fearful, and coercive focus to Americanization initiatives. It was also during this time, specifically in 1919, that federal funding for Americanization efforts were cut back, which caused the Bureau of Education to discontinue Americanization activities, and which left the Bureau of Naturalization as the sole federal body in charge of Americanization programs. The Bureau of Naturalization’s activities were confined primarily to creating and distributing published materials (including textbooks), monitoring local Americanization activities, and working with the public schools to incorporate Americanization programs in the standard national curriculum. It was also during 1918-21 that Americanization efforts became more professionalized through academic departments of education and sociology, and Americanization was grafted as one plank in a broader public school initiative of creating an adult educational system, which Hartmann argued was perhaps the greatest legacy of the movement. The ideology of “Americanism” (and its various rhetorical forms) was rarely defined by reformers except in terms of the foreigner leaving behind the old ways in order to adopt a vague American identity. Hartmann argued that this lack of definition underscored a cultural common identity shared by reformers and their audience, whereby, the “mission” of Americanization and the values of Americanism where taken for granted as self-evident norms, and thus, Hartmann compared it to other idealistic national “crusades” like abolitionism, woman’s suffrage, civil service reform, and the common school movement.[iv]
The next historical treatment of the subject was published via a chapter in John Higham’s superb book on U.S. nativism and nationalism, Strangers in the Land (1955).[v] Higham discussed how the broader currents of xenophobia, nativism, and nationalism during the 1890s concealed into a rampant and rabid nationalist crusade of “America for Americans” and “100 per cent Americanism” during and after World War I. Fear of the foreigner gave way to a more ambiguous fear of “disloyalty,” “the gravest sin in the morality of nationalism,” which was any thought that might question the “Absolute and Unqualified Loyalty to Our Country.” This search for disloyalty focused uncomfortably on “hyphenated Americans” (German-Americans in particular) and their ability to support not only the war effort, but the greater cause of American nationalism. Infusing the search for disloyalty was a “positive and prescriptive” rhetorical abstraction that did not rise “to the dignity of a systematic doctrine:” “100 per cent Americanism.” While there was no specific dogmatic or programmatic ritual to prove one’s “Americanism,” there were several assumptions underlying this phrase. One was a “belligerent” demand for “universal conformity” to the “spirit of nationalism” and total national loyalty” to the State, which was regulated through “the pressure of collective judgment.” It was during 1917 that “The American’s Creed” (“I pledge allegiance to the flag…”) was introduced as a classroom ritual in public schools to remind children of the object of their loyalty, but more so to rhetorically instill the virtue of “right-thinking, i.e. the enthusiastic cultivation of obedience and conformity.” 100 per cent Americanism, as Higham argued, was primarily a rhetorical affair of “propaganda” and “exhortation,” but with the onset of the war nationalists supported the expansion of state powers and “the punitive and coercive powers” of the state to support if not mandate loyalty and conformity.[vi]
The work of Higham and Hartmann are still the definitive historical treatments of Americanization and the Americanization movement, but neither one of them bothered to historically analyze or reconstruct actual Americanization programs at the micro level of local and institutional practice. There have been few scholarly treatments since Hartmann and Higham that have revisited the Americanization movement, and fewer yet that have conducted original analysis of the extensive primary documents on either federal, state, local or institutional levels.[vii] There have been no books or scholarly monographs on the subject of the Americanization movement since 1948, and Hartmann and Higham remain to this day the most cited references in relation to this subject. By the 1960s and 70s there was a rise of scholarly activity on numerous subjects related to the concept of Americanization, the Americanization movement, or various types of Americanization practices and programs. But in order to find this literature researchers must range over many academic disciplines and disciplinary fields of study, and one finds mostly fragmented and narrow treatments that have little if any connection beyond disciplinary discourses.
There is one monograph of note during this time that must be mentioned because it has gained a reputation in the literature. Robert A. Carlson’s The Quest for Conformity: Americanization through Education (1975; revised and expanded in 1987) was a somewhat influential study and it has been moderately cited by various scholars. [viii] However, its reputation is somewhat baffling because this book is severely flawed as a work of scholarship. For one, Carlson’s title is misleading because the book is not really about education. It is a revisionist history of Americanization as a broader form of cultural indoctrination. Although the book does discuss education throughout, it is highly generalized and it does not actually analyze educational processes per se except in noting that cultural indoctrination was conducted through schools and other educational forms. The whole book suffers from a penchant for overgeneralization (many intricate topics get rushed over in a few paragraphs), and in light of Hartmann’s and Higham’s work, Carlson’s book has nothing really to offer except its theoretical framework. Carlson’s book is really the only work to fully contextualize Americanization within the full scope of American history, and thereby, argue that “Americanization” has been a central preoccupation of political and cultural leaders. But his basic argument consists of condemning all Americanizers as agents of “cultural genocide.” In Carlson’s formulation, Americanization (and seemingly the whole of U.S. educational history) was nothing but a “policy of genocide of non-Caucasians.” Carlson’s thesis is an over-generalized, and in light of further contemporary scholarship, false, structural account of U.S. history positing a singular and monolithic WASP society “Americanizing” non-whites via a one-way process of cultural imperialism.[ix]
Carlson’s work highlights an important problematic within the literature on Americanization. The very term “Americanization” has always been, and continues to be, substantially ambiguous. It is akin to other widely used socio-political slogans like “republican,” “progressive,” or “liberal.”[x] Most historians have treated the term “Americanization” as synonymous with the assimilation or integration of immigrants into mainstream American socio-political culture. Richard Hofstadter offhandedly linked “naturalization and Americanization” in his work on the progressive era.[xi] Alan Kraut broadly situated the term “Americanization” as an “ideology of mobility” permeating discussions of both cultural assimilation and specific forms of socialization via the institution of schooling.[xii] Kraut’s use of “Americanization” signified the gradual and conflicting process (the “cultural tug of war”) of assimilating the immigrant within American society. Kraut’s broad usage is representative of the majority of scholars in history, literature, and the social sciences.[xiii] Since the mid 1990s historians and social scientists have also acknowledged Americanization-as-assimilation as a racialized process imbued with white supremacy. David Roediger has argued, “The process of Americanizing European immigrants acquired a sense of whiteness and of white supremacy,” and thus, there was a general conflation of “whiteness with Americanism.”[xiv]
Gary Gerstle’s “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans” (1997) traced out the origins of the Americanization-as-assimilation concept all the way back to the 18th century French-American farmer, J. Hector St John De Crevecoeur.[xv] Gerstle argued that Crevecoeur’s conception of assimilation in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) was one of the “most influential mediations on what it means to become an American.” Not only did the Crevecoeurian myth help define the early 20th century ideal of the “melting pot,” but it also influenced the way 20th century sociologists and historians conceptualized theories of assimilation (often using the term “Americanization”), which in tern had an influence on public policy and national debates.
Crevecoeur’s conception of Americanization pervaded the work of Robert E. Park and the Chicago school sociologists, but this school also criticized one part of the myth: the notion that assimilation was quick and easy. Their work took place during a general “recoil” of liberal social scientists disturbed by the “reaction and intolerance” of the Americanization drives during World War I and the Red Scare. Because the term Americanization gained such “a bad, nativist odor” after the war, it was dropped from the vocabulary of many liberal reformers and social scientists. Many social scientists also began to believe that immigrant cultures were “resistant to assimilation,” which meant “no magical fusing” of cultures via the melting pot was taking place. The work of Oscar Handlin was a product of this critical environment, and he would serve as an important transitional figure leading to the eventual dismantling of the Crevecoeurian assimilationist theory by the “new” immigrant historians of the 1960s and 70s (Frank Thistlewaite, Rudolph J. Vecoli, and Herbert Gutmann). However, some scholars have been charged with “resurrecting” parts of the Crevecoeurian myth, such as assimilation’s “emancipatory impulse.”[xvi]
Invoking radical scholars of the 1960s and the new scholarship of David R. Roediger and others, Gerstle criticized neo-Crevecoeurian scholars for not focusing enough on the complexity and constraints (class, gender, race, nation) of the Americanization process by which “social forces external to the immigrant” play a very significant, if not the most significant, role in the Americanization of immigrants. Gerstle argued that “structure[s] of power” limited the options (and also often coerced) immigrants during the assimilation/Americanization process. He reviewed the work of more critical “new” immigrant scholars (like Gutmann, Vecoli, Hoerder, Bodnar, Morawska, and Gabaccia) who viewed Americanism as a “cultural strategy” deployed by the wealthy and powerful (employers, natives, ethnic middle-class allies) to “augment” their privileged position. Americanization was thus a “surrender” or “capitulation” to “a capitalist order,” which could have positive effects for some immigrants (those few who could “make capitalism work for them”), but which had the negative effect for most by way of “acquiescing” in their own “oppression.” Gerstle argued: “The elites were intent on becoming Crevecoeurian ‘new men’; the masses wanted to remain who they were.”
Gerstle also acknowledged the complexity of Americanization because “as indifferent or hostile to America” as immigrants could be, “a majority of the new immigrants stayed” and many of them went on to acquire not only an “American identity,” but also a “profound patriotic awakening.” Gerstle criticized the overly optimistic accounts make by Fuchs, Sollors and Hollinger who seemed to argue for a theory of personal agency and a fluidness to identity that did not take into account the restrictiveness of structural constraints (especially race). Gerstle argued, “race, even more than class and gender, still limits the options of those who seek to become American.” Gerstle clearly believed that “historical circumstances and social structures undermined experiments in the fashioning of identity,” and he looked to newer studies on gender and working class Americanism (including his own), which have created a “synthesis between agency and structure” and, thereby, demonstrated how “Americanization involves both inventiveness and constraint:” America was not “simply a Crevecoeurian land of possibility,” it was also “a land of constraint.”
Despite the important social scientific and historical usage of Americanization as a term for assimilation, there have been some hidden costs in this terminology. What has been lost is the specific historical context in which the term “Americanization” gained its wide currency. Part of the difficulty for a contemporary historian researching the Americanization movement and specific Americanization educational practices is the wide ahistorical usage of the term “Americanization” in a diverse array of studies on immigration, assimilation, nationalism, and cultural socialization.[xvii] “Americanization” is anything and everything concerned with the social, cultural, and political transformations of individuals and ethnic groups in America. This ambiguous usage has also been revitalized in the late 20th century culture wars and given new currency as either a generalized act of cultural imperialism or an equally generalized act of national solidarity.[xviii] While the usage of the term in its assimilationist sense is important in order to study U.S. nationalism and conflict over national identity and culture, it has also distracted from if not distorted our knowledge of the historical emergence and evolution of the early 20th century Americanization movement and its specific educational, social, legal, and institutional practices. There is much work to be done on Americanization as a diverse and contradictory “progressive” social movement tied to specific macro historical contexts and micro institutional and individual practices. The Americanization movement and specific Americanization practices have been largely neglected by social scientists and historians over the last fifty years.
While there has been some very good work done in various areas, almost all scholarship is overly narrow, fragmented, and alienated from the larger body of diverse and disconnected literature. The most visible scholarship on the Americanization movement is found within the numerous histories and historiographies on the “Progressive Era” of U.S. history. While most historical works on the Progressive era give some treatment of the Americanization movement it is often very briefly and generally mentioned, and sometimes this subject is blurred within a more general discussion (as noted above) of immigration and assimilation.[xix] There are many good historical treatments of the Americanization movement in various scholarly articles and in parts of historical books; however, these treatments as noted are fragmented along disciplinary lines and very partial in their accounts. For instance, there have been important political treatments of the Americanization movement in relation to law or the federal government.[xx] There have been several treatments of the Americanization movement in relation to education, usually elementary education, but sometimes in relation to adult education or more to just educational processes generally.[xxi] There have also been historical treatments of immigrants and education, which do not directly confront or even mention the Americanization movement.[xxii] There have been several treatments of the Americanization movement in relation to citizenship or citizenship education.[xxiii] There have been many treatments of the Americanization in relation to economic institutions, like businesses, factories, and labor camps.[xxiv] Historians have also explored the Americanization movement in relation to institutions and organizations like Social Settlement houses and the Catholic Church.[xxv] There have also been many studies of Americanization in relation to gender and minority cultures.[xxvi] This particular literature has seen the largest growth in the last quarter century, but it also suffers from the most fragmentation as many of these studies are completely isolated from each other and the larger national and international (U.S. Imperialism) Americanization movement(s). And finally Americanization as assimilation as well as the Americanization movement make many appearances in various histories of immigration and histories of ethnic groups in America.[xxvii]
What one learns in this vast and fragmented literature is that there has been little attempt to bridge disciplinary lines or topical studies in order to articulate a full and complex understanding of both Americanization as an international, national, state, and local movement, and also Americanization as a concrete historical practice on the institutional, programmatic, and individual level. Hartmann’s seminal treatment, and many other important works since, have focused specifically on national and state level activities with very little attempt to integrate national, state, and local levels together. The Americanization movement was a highly localized affair and, as Hartmann demonstrated, both government and private Americanization agencies on both the national and state levels did their best to coordinate an ungovernable and highly dispersed grassroots movement. Most historical treatments of the Americanization movement either give a monolithic WASP society trying to Americanize various ethnic groups or a highly detailed and localized history of a specific Americanization program with no mention of larger state and national affairs.
Given the resurgence of immigration as a national issue and the armed intervention and social reconstruction of American troop in the Middle East, there needs to be greater awareness and understanding of the Americanization movement and its legacy. But in order to articulate the importance of this subject with the aim of directing further studies, the field desperately needs a synthesis that can tie the myriad studies of the national, state, and local levels to the splintered studies of various “Americanized” ethnic groups and the specific programs of socio-political localities. But before this work can take place there needs to be a systematic search for all the scholarly work done on this historical movement, which is currently buried in various disciplinary and topical niches.
Once some synthetic historiographical and historical works appear, then it will be important to start filling in the gaps of what we don’t know. For instance, greater attention needs to be paid to the connection between individual, institutional, local, state, national initiatives, and international initiatives in order to more fully explain how the Americanization movement emerged, “moved,” evolved, and transformed educational policy and practice. New studies would also need to incorporate the work of sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists in order to analyze historical data via new social scientific theories. Some of this theoretical work could include conceptions of ideology and nationalism, organizational and state theory, and critical race theories. Social movement theory would be one especially useful tool with which to explain “structures and processes, established and emergent organizations, institutionalized authority, and transgressive contention” as well as the “connections between local or specialized fields and broader societal systems.”[xxviii]
Another theoretical framework that would be useful is Kevin J. Doughtery’s relative autonomy of the state theory, which argues that state officials (including educational administrators and teachers) had their own agendas that were “relatively autonomous” of interest group pressure (business, foundations, professional organizations, and popular coalitions), but were also influenced indirectly and directly by these interest groups through resource dependence and ideology.[xxix] Using Doughtery’s theory, a historian could demonstrate how national and state organizations propagated potent nationalist and cultural ideologies of Americanism and offers of financial support for local Americanization initiatives, while as the same time demonstrate the “relatively autonomous” decisions and programs actually conducted by educational administrators, teacher training programs, and individual teachers in specific programs.
There also needs to be much more detailed study of localized contexts of Americanization as an educational and not just a political or cultural endeavor. This means a more systematic study of the educational processes that took place, which were used by specific educators in order to attempt to Americanize specific ethnic groups in specific localities. This also means a more detailed and focus look at teachers, teaching methods, curriculum, curriculum designers, educational materials and contexts, and funding. It also means looking into the institutional and organizational histories of normal schools and teacher training programs in order to see how teachers were prepared to become Americanizers. Educational and curricular purposes also need to be explored in relation to theories of ideology and, more particularly, theories of nationalism as an ideology, cultural system, and site of cultural conflict.[xxx]
There also has been almost no work done on the larger effects or antecedents of the Americanization movement. Very few studies link the continental Americanization movement to U.S. imperialism. Robert A. Carlson’s The Quest for Conformity touched on this connection, and several disconnected articles focusing on single colonized groups have discussed the issue of cultural and martial imperialism via Americanization in U.S. colonies like Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, and the continental Americanization of Native Americans and African Americans. An important research question, which has not been full addressed by any historian, is the antecedent relationship between the 20th century Americanization movement and the 19th century Americanization efforts forced on Hawaiians, Philippinos, Native Americans, and freed black slaves.[xxxi] Another important focus that has been almost completely ignored is the effect of the Americanization movement on the development of civic education in the public schools, and the development adult education in the newly formed community colleges.[xxxii] While there has been some treatment of the Americanization movement in the public schools by historians such as David Tyack and others (see footnotes 16 and 17), there has been no historical studies conducted to my knowledge, which have linked the Americanization movement to the widespread emergence of adult education or the origins of the community college.[xxxiii]
Understanding the emergence of American national identity, the expansion of the liberal state, the institutionalization of American identity in Americanization programs, and the growing geo-political power of the United States are all interconnected issues for 20th century historians and 21st century policy makers. David A. Hollinger used the older warning of David M. Potter as a branching off point to reevaluate the historian’s usage of the nationalist paradigm.[xxxiv] Hollinger warned, “Nations can easily turn historians into tools,” but he added, “Nations are not the only formations that threaten to turn historians into tools. Nonnational and antinational movements and solidarities can do the same.” Historians are always negotiating ideological, cultural, personal, or conceptual allegiances and they “select and deselect with every sentence.” Besides, Hollinger noted, “there is still substantial room for a national narrative that speaks to the American public, and that even has among its several purposes the critical maintenance of the United States considered as a political solidarity.” Hollinger stated quite directly: “to study the nation is not necessarily to be an ideological nationalist.” And he explained how there are many opportunities to describe power, inequality, and human agency within national narratives, and there is also room to deconstruct and historicize national identities as well: “How has the United States drawn and redrawn its social borders to accommodate, repel, or subjugate this or that group, in defiance of its egalitarian and individualistic self-image?” The study of Americanization, the early 20th century Americanization movement, and the multiple practices of Americanization programs by institutions and individuals comprise a complex ecology whereby issues of nationalism, internationalism, citizenship, patriotism, education, social control, exclusion, inequality, and social justice all come to the fore. This Gordian knot waits for future historians not to cut, but to unwind in order to trace the complicated contradictions of American nationalism and progressive politics which haunt this country still.
Endnotes
[i] Herbert A. Miller, The School and the Immigrant (Survey Committee of the Cleveland Foundation, 1916); Howard C. Hill, “The Americanization Movement,” American Journal of Sociology, XXIV (May 1919): 609-627; Isaac B. Berkson, Theories of Americanization: A Critical Study with Special Reference to the Jewish Group (New York: Teachers College Press, 1920); Frank V. Thompson, Schooling of the Immigrant, Carnegie Corporation Americanization Studies (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920).
[ii] This series was reissued in toto under the editor William S. Bernard: Publication No. 125, Patterson Smith Reprint Series in Criminology, Law Enforcement, and Social Problems (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1971). For a review and short history of this series see: Milton M. Gordon, “The American Immigrant Revisited,” Social Forces 54:2 (Dec 1975): 470-74.
[iii] Edward George Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (1948; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1967).
[iv] Hartmann, Ibid., 236, 252-53, 261-70.
[v] John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955; reprint, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
[vi] Higham, ibid., 196, 200, 204-05.
[vii] See footnote 19.
[viii] Robert A. Carlson, The Quest for Conformity: Americanization through Education (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975). Carlson expanded this book somewhat into a more general treatment of Americanization as a whole: The Americanization Syndrome: A Quest for Conformity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). However, the later book is essentially the same work with the same basic portrait and relying on the same basic secondary and primary source material. See John W. Briggs, review of The Quest for Conformity, by Robert A. Carlson, History of Education Quarterly 28:4 (Winter 1988): 689-91.
[ix] Carlson, ibid., 12, 15, 93, 141.
[x] For discussions of the term “republicanism” see: Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” American Quarterly 37 (Autumn 1985): 474-495; Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism and Ideology,” American Quarterly 37 (Autumn 1985): 461-473; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” The Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 11-38. For a discussion of the term “progressivism” see: John D. Buenker, John C. Burnham, and Robert M. Crunden, Progressivism (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, Inc., 1977); Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec 1982), 113-132; Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1983); James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870 – 1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: American in the Progressive Era, 1890 – 1920 (1992; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991). For a discussion of the term “liberalism” see: Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” The American Historical Review 99:4 (Oct 1994): 1043-1073; James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870 – 1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); James T. Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[xi] Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 181.
[xii] Historians have also focused on other cultural media, which socialized immigrants. Jackson Lears described how “ethnocentrism reinforced professionalism” in the advertising business and how advertisements as medium of “manipulation” and “control” “showed recent immigrants how to assimilate to ‘American’ ways.” Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 205, 253. Eric Foner noted, “The department store, dance hall, and motion picture theater were as much agents of Americanization as the school and workplace. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), 191. See also Rob Kroes, “American Empire and Cultural Imperialism: A View from the Receiving End,” Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Thomas Bender, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 295-313.
Lawrence Cremin also focused on several educative media during the early 20th century. “Media of Popular Communication,” American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 322-72.
[xiii] Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880 – 1921, 2nd ed. (1982; reprint, Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2001), 120, 125, 128-29, 155.
[xiv] David R. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (1994; reprint, London: Verso, 2000), 187-90; David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 84-85, 91, 143.
[xv] Gary Gerstle, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” The Journal of American History 84:2 (Sept 1997): 524-58; J. Hector St John De Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press).
[xvi] Gerstle specifically indicts Lawrence H. Fuchs and Werner Sollors, but Donna R. Gabaccia placed Gerstle in the same camp. Gabaccia argued that Gerstle “remains as much a neo-Crevecoeurian as the scholars he criticizes” because Gerstle approached Crevecoeurian assimilationist theory too much on its “own terms.” For instance, Gabaccia points to Gerstle’s focus on only Europeans (ignoring other minorities like Blacks, Native Americans, and Latinos), and his focus on the nation state (ignoring transnational and diaspora elements). Gabaccia argued that Gerstle should have extended his critique of assimilation, coercion, structural constraints, and the power of the nation state to include a “critique of national historiography” and “the nation itself.” Donna R. Gabaccia, “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Immigration Historians,” The Journal of American History 84:2 (Sept 1997): 570-75.
[xvii] Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York, 2nd ed. (1963; reprint, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974); Nathan Glazer, “Is Assimilation Dead?” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (Nov 1993): 122-36; Russell A. Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History,” The American Historical Review 100:2 (Apr 1995): 437-71; Dennis J. Downey, “From Americanization to Multiculturalism: Political Symbols and Struggles for Cultural Diversity in Twentieth-Century American Race Relations,” Sociological Perspectives 42:2 (Summer 1999): 249-78; For a good sample of this literature see: George E. Pozzetta, ed. Assimilation, Acculturation, and Social Mobility (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991).
[xviii] For liberal condemnation of the term see: Michael Walzer, “What Does it Mean to Be an ‘American?’” Social Research (1990); Reprinted in Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1996). For conservative use of the term see: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, revised ed. (1991; revised, New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); E. D. Hirsch Jr., “Americanization and the Schools,” The Clearing House 72:3 (Jan/Feb, 1999): 136-39; Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
[xix] There is only book length work on the Progressive era that gives substantial treatment to the Americanization movement: John F. McClymer, War and Welfare: Social Engineering in America, 1890-1925 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980). McClymer has also published an important article “The Federal Government and the Americanization Movement, 1915-1924” Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives 10 (Spring 1978): 23-41. This article was republished along with several other important articles on the Americanization movement in an anthology edited by George E. Pozzetta called Americanization, Social Control, and Philanthropy (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991). Gary Gerstle is one of the few historians of 20th century America that has given the Americanization movement extended treatment in several works, especially in American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also: Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). There is a problem, however, with all these fine treatments of the Americanization movement. All of these works rely primarily on the federal archives of the departments of Immigration and Naturalization (Record Group 85, National Archives), Labor (Record Group 174, National Archives), and Education (Record Group 12, National Archives). Thus, the historical treatment of the Americanization movement in these works focuses mostly on the federal level with little or no treatment of state, local, or institutional/organizational levels (although there is often mention of national institutions like the public school system or national organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution). For a brief discussion of the usage of these federal archives see: Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005): 206-07, footnote 36. One should also note that most of the literature on the Americanization movement focuses on persons, organizations, and events from the East Coast or Midwest, but there were active Americanization campaigns in the West and Southwest, especially California. Noah Pickus argued incorrectly that “Americanization was primarily an eastern and midwestern phenomenon,” which “largely ignored other [non-European] immigrants, such as those from China or Mexico (Ibid., 206, footnote 35). There is a large, but fragmented body of research on the Americanization of peoples from Mexico, Japan, Guam, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Native Americans. Often this literature links (although rather generally) the Americanization movement to U.S. imperialism. See footnote 26 in this essay.
[xx] Kenneth B. O’Brien Jr., “Education, Americanization and the Supreme Court: The 1920’s,” American Quarterly 13:2 (Summer, 1961): 161-171; John F. McClymer, “The Federal Government and the Americanization Movement, 1915-1924” Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives 10 (Spring 1978)P 22-41.
[xxi] Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876 – 1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961); Robert A. Carlson, “Americanization as an Early Twentieth-Century Adult Education Movement,” History of Education Quarterly 10:4 (Winter 1970): 440-64; David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education, Part 4.4, “Americanization: Match and Mismatch” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Robert A. Carlson, The Quest for Conformity: Americanization through Education (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975); John F. McClymer, “The Americanization Movement and the Education of the Foreign-Born Adult, 1914-25,” In American Education and the European Immigrant: 1840-1940, edited by Bernard J. Weiss. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Paper originally prepared for 12th annually Duquesne History Forum, Oct. 18-20, 1978; Vincent P. Franklin, “Ethos and Education: The Impact of Educational Activities on Minority Ethnic Identity in the United States,” Review of Research in Education 10 (1983): 3-21;
David Tyack, Thomas James, and Aaron Benavot, “Moral Majorities and the School Curriculum: Making Virtue Mandatory, 1880-1930.” Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785-1954 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987):154-76; Michael R. Olneck, “Americanization and the Education of Immigrants, 1900-1925: An Analysis of Symbolic Action,” American Journal of Education 97 (Aug 1989): 398-423.
[xxii] Michael R. Olneck and Marvin Lazerson, “The School Achievement of Immigrant Children: 1900-1930,” History of Education Quarterly 14:4 (Winter 1974): 453-82; Raymond A. Mohl, “The International Institutes and Immigrant Education, 1910-40,” In American Education and the European Immigrant: 1840-1940, edited by Bernard J. Weiss. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Paper originally prepared for 12th annually Duquesne History Forum, Oct. 18-20, 1978; Nicholas V. Montalto, “The Intercultural Education Movement, 1924-41: The Growth of Tolerance as a Form of Intolerance,” In American Education and the European Immigrant: 1840-1940, edited by Bernard J. Weiss. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Paper originally prepared for 12th annually Duquesne History Forum, Oct. 18-20, 1978; Nicholas V. Montalto, A History of the Intercultural Education Movement, 1924-1941 (New York: Garland Press, 1982).
[xxiii] Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1987): 235-48. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997): Ch 12; Jeffrey Mirel, “Civic Education and Changing Definitions of American Identity, 1900 – 1950,” Educational Review 54:4 (2002): 143-152. Noah Pickus, True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005): Ch 4-6.
[xxiv] Gerd Korman, Industrialization, Immigrants, and Americanizers: The View from Milwaukee, 1866 – 1921 (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1967); Stephen Meyer, “Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914-1921,” Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 67-82; James R. Barrett, “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880 – 1930,” The Journal of American History 79:3 (Dec 1992): 996-1020; Gilbert G. Gonzalez, “Labor and Community: The Camps of Mexican Citrus Pickers in Southern California,” The Western Historical Quarterly 22:3 (Aug 1991): 289-312.
[xxv] Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890 – 1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: The Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889 – 1930; Philip Gleason, “The Catholic Church in American Public Life in the Twentieth Century,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 3:4 (2000): 85-99.
[xxvi] On gender see: Eileen Boris, “Reconstructing the ‘Family’: Women, Progressive Reform, and the Problem of Social Control,” in Gender, Class, Race and Reform in the Progressive Era, Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds. (Lexington, KT: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991): 73-86. On Latinos see: George Sanchez, “’Go After the Women:’ Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915 – 1929,” Stanford Center for Chicano Research, Working Paper Series No. 6 (June 1984): 1-32. Revised and reprinted in Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990); Reinhard R. Doerries, “The Americanizing of the German Immigrant: A Chapter from U.S. Social History,” American Studies 23:1 (1978): 51-59; Mario T. Garcia, “Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant, 1880-1930,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 6:2 (Summer 1978): 19-34; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900 – 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): Ch 4 & 5; Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. and Richard R. Valencia, “From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to Hopwood: The Educational Plight and Struggle of Mexican Americans in the Southwest,” Harvard Educational Review 68:3 (1998): 353-412. On Native Americans see: David Wallace Adams, “Fundamental Considerations: The Deep Meaning of Native American Schooling, 1880 – 1900,” Harvard Educational Review 58:1 (Feb 1988): 1-28; Michael C. Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 1850-1930 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1923 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Donal F. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). On Japanese see: David K. Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-49 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). On Puerto Ricans see: Pedro Caban, “Subjects and Immigrants During the Progressive Era,” Discourse 23:3 (2001): 24-51. On Filipinos see: Anne Paulet, “To Change the World: The Use of American Indian Education in the Philippines,” History of Education Quarterly 47:2 (May 2007): 173-202. On Hawaiians see: Manette K. P. Benham and Ronald H. Heck, Culture and Educational Policy in Hawai’i: The Silencing of Native Voices ()Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998); C. Kalani Beyer, “The Connection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong as Both Borrower and Architect of Education in Hawai’i,” History of Education Quarterly 47:1 (Feb 2007): 23-48. On African Americans see: James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
[xxvii] Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration and Assimilation (New York: New York University Press, 1977); Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: The Free Press, 1983); John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, Natives and Strangers: Blacks, Indians, and Immigrants in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880 – 1921, 2nd ed. (1982; reprint, Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 2001); David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
[xxviii] Doug McAdam and W. Richard Scott, “Organizations and Movements” in Social Movements and Organization Theory. Gerald F. Davis, Doug McAdam, W. Richard Scott, and Mayer N. Zald, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 38.
[xxix] Kevin J. Dougherty, The Contradictory College: The Conflicting Origins, Impacts, and Futures of the Community College (1994; reprint, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001): 15-39, 105-6, 183-88, 239-42, 273-86.
[xxx] On ideology see several essays by Clifford Geertz, especially “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols,” “Ideology As a Cultural System,” “The Politics of Meaning,” and “Common Sense as a Cultural System” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973) and Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). See also: John B. Thompson Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and Ideology and Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); J. M. Beach, Studies in Ideology: Essays on Culture and Subjectivity (Lanham: University Press of America, 2005): Part I and II. On social scientific theories and histories of nationalism see: Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Guido Zernatto, “Nation: The History of a Word,” Review of Politics 6 (1944): 351-66; Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. (1946; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 171-79; Louis Wirth, “Types of Nationalism,” The American Journal of Sociology 41 (May 1936): 723-37; Hans Kohn, “The Nature of Nationalism,” The American Political Science Review 33 (Dec 1939): 1001-21; Chong-Do Hah and Jeffrey Martin, “Toward a Synthesis of Conflict and Integration Theories of Nationalism,” World Politics 27 (April 1975): 361-86; Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, eds. (1979; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997): 581-604; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; reprint, London: Verso, 1991); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (1990; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Liah Greenfeld, “The Trouble with Social Science,” Critical Review 17:1-2 (2005): 101-16.
[xxxi] C. Kalani Beyer wrote an interesting article connecting Samuel Chapman Armstrong to both the Americanization of blacks and Hawaiians in “The Connection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong as Both Borrower and Architect of Education in Hawai’i,” History of Education Quarterly 47:1 (Feb 2007): 2348. There is also an interesting article, which links social studies curriculum and civic training in the public schools to the Americanizing efforts done on African Americans at the manual training Hampton Institute in Virginia. This raises interesting questions about Americanization and social control in relation to oppressed, non-white minorities/non citizens and similar and/or differentiated treatment of citizen and/or “white” children in public schools. Michael Lybarger, “Origins of the Modern Social Studies: 1900 – 1916,” History of Education Quarterly 23:4 (Winter 1983): 455-68.
[xxxii] Emory S. Bogardus, Essentials of Americanization (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1919); Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage, 1961): 66-75; Morris Janowitz, The Reconstruction of Patriotism: Education for Civic Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987): 104-107; Joel Westheimer, ed., Pledging Allegiance: the Politics of Patriotism in America’s Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007).
[xxxiii] Paul H. Sheats, “Adult Education for Victory and Peace,” Journal of Educational Sociology, special issue on The Foreign Born – Their Citizenship 17:1 (Sep, 1943): 28-35; Caroline A. Whipple, “Adult Education and the Public Schools,” Journal of Educational Sociology 19:1 (Sep, 1945): 20-26.
[xxxiv] David M. Potter, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” The American Historical Review 67 (July 1962): 924-50; David A. Hollinger, “The Historian’s Use of the United States and Vice Versa,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Thomas Bender, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 381-95.