Americanization Movement

Americanization Movement. The effort to transform immigrants into patriotic citizens began with the nation's founding, but peaked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, Americans generally assumed that immigrants, most of whom came from Protestant northern and western Europe, would easily be absorbed into the population. By the 1880s, however, as Catholics and Jews from southern and eastern Europe arrived in great numbers, civic, religious, and settlement workers tried by various means to assimilate these “new immigrants.” Education took on new importance, both for children and adults. Night schools offered English and civics classes, and industries often required that their foreign‐born workers attend.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 accelerated nativism and fears of subversion. Frances Kellor and the Committee for Immigrants in America established immigrant‐education programs within the federal Bureau of Education and organized National Americanization Day on 4 July 1915. Later, the National Americanization Committee launched campaigns linking naturalization and military preparedness. Its mottoes—“American First,” “100 percent Americanism,” and “English First”—underscored the movement's nativist cast. The federal Bureau of Education, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the General Federation of Women's Clubs, and the U.S. Chambers of Commerce joined forces for Americanization work. Although women far outnumbered men as Americanization teachers, most efforts targeted men; programs for women emphasized child‐rearing and domesticity rather than citizenship.

After the war, the fear of Bolshevism fueled the movement. Yet it lacked a core. No federal agency had the power to institute the kind of programs favored by the proponents of Americanization. Moreover, most recent immigrants worked in industries where their introduction to American life, coming through unions and leisure activities, often differed from the principles taught in civic classes. After the patriotic frenzy of the 1919 Red Scare, many native‐born Americans concluded that Americanization could not transform undesirable aliens. They focused instead on immigrant restriction, a movement that led to the restrictive and discriminatory Immigration Act of 1924.
See also Anticommunism; Education: The Public School Movement; Immigration; Immigration Law; Nativist Movement; Settlement Houses.

Bibliography

John F. McClymer , The Americanization Movement and the Education of the Foreign Born, in American Education and the European Immigrant: 1840–1940, ed. Bernard J. Weiss, 1982, pp.96–116.
Ellen Fitzpatrick , Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform, 1990.
James R. Barrett , Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United States, 1880–1930, Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 996–1020.

Judith R. Raftery