ASSIMILATION

According to the hero of Israel Zangwill's (1864–1926) 1909 British play The Melting-Pot, "America is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming" (p. 33). Exemplifying the influence of this melting-pot ideal, the liberal Reform minister John Dietrich literally preached it to his Pittsburgh congregation in 1910, celebrating "people of every race, of every color, of every religion to be melted and tried, and out of which shall come a race superior to any the world has thus far known" (p. 4). While assimilating immigrants in an American "melting pot" might suggest wondrous new combinations, it also could imply homogenizing all Americans. In 1915 the immigrant intellectual Horace M. Kallen (1882–1974) condemned the melting-pot concept as an attempt to make immigrants conform to "the qualities and ideals of the contemporary American of British ancestry" and offered "pluralism" (p. 193) as an alternative. Likewise, in his immigration history From Many Lands (1940), the Slovenian-American writer Louis Adamic (born Alojzij Adamic, 1899–1951) describes "melting pot," as "a poor phrase and concept" because it implies that "everybody is to be turned into something else with heat" (p. 301).

Despite its detractors, the melting-pot idea did help to counteract one major obstacle to immigration: the fear that different immigrant "races" were incompatible with America, even dangerous to its progress. Belief that newer immigrants could not assimilate fueled the anti-immigrant legislation that excluded most Chinese in 1882 as well as the laws that severely restricted eastern and southern Europeans from entering in the 1920s. As Matthew Frye Jacobson notes, passing these laws decreased the perceived immigration "risk" (p. 95). In addition, Jacobson points out that "cultural and environmental explanations" were "replacing biological understandings of race" overall (p. 99). There had initially been a widespread belief that intermarriage between the native born and the immigrant would cause degeneration of the "Anglo-Saxon race," but gradually the idea that such inter-marriage might rather improve and help to assimilate immigrants gained ground. With racial and cultural "whiteness" a measure of qualification for citizenship, some immigrants assumed what Jacobson terms a "probationary white" status, gradually gaining acceptance in society (p. 103). As racial fears diminished, reformers focused on cultural assimilation of immigrants, often referred to as Americanization.

THE AMERICANIZATION MOVEMENT

Peaking in the 1920s, the Americanization movement aimed to assimilate immigrants through programs such as civics and English classes, employment training, and settlement-house activities. According to the historian Edward George Hartmann, unlike immigration restriction, Americanization "outlined a positive program of education and guidance" to produce "a patriotic, loyal, and intelligent supporter of the great body of principles and practices which the leaders of the movement chose to consider 'America's priceless heritage'" (p. 8). As Hartmann's synopsis indicates, the movement had somewhat vague and changeable goals, and the various organizations developed different methods and priorities. The literary critic Priscilla Wald has characterized Americanization programs as combining "benevolence with bigotry" (p. 196). In a 1920 collection that provides guidelines for Americanization, Winthrop Talbot criticizes Americanizers who would homogenize all citizens; instead, he upholds a vision of a "glorious garden" where "cross fertilization and intensive cultivation develop large variety and wonderful fruitage" (p. 59). Yet in this same volume, Grover Huebner takes a more aggressive stance on neutralizing immigrant culture, remaining particularly apprehensive about Catholic immigrants. Despite these disparities, Royal Dixon (1885–1962), vice president of the League of Foreign-Born Citizens, praised Americanization's potential:

For it is, indeed, every man's chance, if he will grasp it, to serve his country definitely and fruitfully, if he does no more than urge on the work of Americanization. If he takes an active hand, as he can readily do, he is assisting not merely this or the other foreigner to a higher level of understanding, but he is strengthening the nation as well. (P. 51)

Potential for such cross-fertilization existed in settlement houses, which promoted interaction between native-born residents and immigrants in classes, lectures, and social events at a neighborhood community center. In her autobiography The Promised Land (1912), the writer Mary Antin (1881–1949), who emigrated from the Jewish Pale region in Russia, describes a stimulating environment at Boston's Hale House settlement, where she joined a natural-history club that started her lifelong interest in science. However, as the historian Mina Carson notes, an element of "feudalism" infused the rhetoric and activities of settlement work. For instance, even Jane Addams (1860–1935), the founder of Chicago's Hull-House who aided immigrants while encouraging them to maintain some ethnic traditions, also articulates the settlement's paternalistic goals: "to develop whatever of social life its neighborhood may afford, to focus and give form to that life, to bring to bear upon it the results of cultivation and training" (p. 125) and "to preserve and keep whatever of value [immigrants'] past life contained and to bring them in contact with a better type of Americans" (pp. 231–232). While accepting immigrant cultural diversity, Addams asserts that "model" citizens must improve immigrants. To settlement workers and other Americanizers, immigrants presented unrefined, unformed clay to be molded.

The Polish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska (c. 1885–1970) perceived the negative side of settlements and sharply criticizes them in her novel Salome of the Tenements (1923). As Gay Wilentz notes, in this novel, Yezierska "radically critiques the settlement education projects that aimed at Americanization through the melting pot theory" (p. ix). The immigrant protagonist, Sonya, quickly grows disillusioned with her husband's settlement house, where instructors teach immigrants to bake "milkless, butterless, eggless cake" (p. 134), instructing them to do without and effectively denying their right to a more comfortable lifestyle. For Sonya, it is evident that the settlement fails to acknowledge the full humanity of immigrants; even when it helps to meet their material needs, it neglects their dignity. She finds settlement employees manipulating attendance figures to please the founder. Sonya ultimately describes the settlement as "reason forced down the throats of the people! Hireling telling lies to hireling!" (p. 138). She witnesses the good intentions of the settlement gone awry through misguided programs and services. Yezierska suggests that statistics and formulas take precedence over people, and Americanization swerves from helping immigrants to become its own end.

IMMIGRANTS SEEKING ASSIMILATION

Independently of any Americanization agency or program, many immigrants felt a strong desire to assimilate, and they explored many means to accomplish this goal. In Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, the literary critic Werner Sollors describes American ethnicity as a combination of "descent"—inheritance—and "consent"—active selection of one's identity. Arriving with a variety of descent identities, many American immigrants pursued the possibilities of consent almost immediately, exploring opportunities to redefine themselves.

In his autobiography, A Far Journey (1914), the Syrian immigrant Abraham Rihbany discusses the pros and cons of insulated immigrant "colonies" (p. 245) made up of new arrivals from the same country. While he finds his New York Syrian colony invaluable in establishing him in America, he becomes anxious since he speaks no English and encounters no new customs. Rihbany remarks, "I often asked myself, in those days, where and how do the real Americans live?" (p. 246). He determines that leaving the colony, and even the city, is necessary in order to mingle with other, non-Syrian, Americans and broaden his knowledge.

Overturning the stereotype of inassimilable Chinese, Sui Sin Far (the pen name of Edith Maude Eaton, 1865–1914) portrays Chinese families in an integrated suburb abandoning the tradition of arranged marriages in the title story of collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). In his 1923 autobiography From Immigrant to Inventor, the Serbian immigrant Michael Pupin (1858–1935), who became a successful engineering professor and inventor, relates his unique process of assimilation. He describes undergoing an "apprenticeship as greenhorn" (p. 126) while a new immigrant, with unavoidable misunderstandings and awkwardness. Through college at Columbia, he learns how to "play the game" (p. 115) of American life, balancing work, study, and entertainment while building a network of friends and mentors who aid his Americanization.

As an immediate step to assimilation, Mary Antin's father gives each family member a non-Russian name that is common in America. Antin herself praises the American public schools as instrumental in forming "good Americans" who will be "workers, thinkers, and leaders" (Promised Land, p. 175). Along with the settlement house and school, she embraced numerous opportunities through mentors, lectures, and libraries to gradually adjust herself to America. The writings of Antin, Rihbany, Sui Sin Far, and Pupin represent the experiences of immigrants who actively sought assimilation and found a variety of organizations and individuals to facilitate it.

Assimilation could create tension within immigrant families, especially when family members immigrated at different times. In Abraham Cahan's novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), the thoroughly Americanized Yekl feels alienated from his newly arrived wife:

All the way to the island he had been in a flurry of joyous anticipation. The prospect of meeting his dear wife and child, and, incidentally, of showing off his swell attire to her, had thrown him into a fever of impatience. But on entering the big shed he had caught a glimpse of Gitl and Yosseléthrough the railing separating the detained immigrants from their visitors, and his heart had sunk at the sight of his wife's uncouth and un-American appearance.

Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, in Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto, pp. 33–34.

The Russian immigrant Abraham Cahan (1860–1951) examines contrasting strategies of assimilation in his novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896). Yekl Americanizes his name to Jake and strives to assimilate by immersing himself in the American popular culture of baseball, boxing, and dance halls. After working hard to shed a "greenhorn" image, he cannot accept his traditional Jewish wife, Gitl, who follows him to America three years after his immigration. In contrast, Bernstein, a coworker who boards with Jake's family, approaches Americanization very differently, synthesizing Old World traditions with New World success. Like Antin, Bernstein focuses on education, painstakingly studying both the English language and Jewish holy books. Like Pupin, he achieves a balance of Old and New World priorities, retaining his religious practices, valuing family life, and pursuing business entrepreneurship. At the story's conclusion, Bernstein emerges triumphant to "a future bright with joy" (p. 89), marrying Gitl and opening a new grocery store. Meanwhile, Jake, who had been so determined to shed all vestiges of his European life, including his wife, faces an uncertain future. He will marry his more Americanized lover and open a dance school, but he feels like a "A Defeated Victor" whose future "loomed dark and impenetrable" (p. 89). Cahan affirms that immigrants make very conscious choices in directing their own assimilation, and he also suggests that immigrants who abandon all past associations experience discontent in America.

IMMIGRANTS CRITIQUING ASSIMILATION

Whether they explored assimilation on their own or through a formal Americanizing program, immigrants found need for caution. As Wald notes, many immigrants experienced ambivalence over assimilation. For instance, while Mary Antin celebrates American opportunity in The Promised Land, she also confronts the anti-Semitism that prevents her father from obtaining work. In her pro-immigration treatise They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration (1914), Antin remarks, "a man has to have a country before he can prove himself a good citizen" (p. 38). Racism and other troubling features of the American cultural landscape caused immigrants to question whether they could assimilate or to what degree they wanted to assimilate. In his autobiography The Soul of an Immigrant (1921), the Italian immigrant Constantine M. Panunzio remembers that the greatest incentive to assimilate came from a desire to be accepted by an employer's family and by his school rather than from the "cruel" methods and "spirit of compulsion" he finds in "our so-called Americanization program" (p. 194). Even Americanization agencies that discounted racial differences often posed difficulties, proving so constrictive that immigrants resented or rebelled against them. Many immigrants who wished to assimilate wanted to do so on their own terms.

Louis Adamic warns of the dangers of uncritical or rushed assimilation in Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America (1932), explaining that he "'played it safe,' as a sensible adventurer should do in a jungle" (p. 327). In The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), Edward W. Bok (1863–1930), who became editor of the Ladies Home Journal, observes many unappealing aspects of America, complaining of wastefulness, low productivity, and inadequate English education for foreigners in the public schools. Most disturbing for Bok was that native-born citizens did not seem to value their voting rights. He argues that by avoiding these less-attractive characteristics, an immigrant can in some ways become more American than those born in the United States. The German immigrant Edward A. Steiner (1866–1956) encountered dangerous influences soon after his arrival. In his autobiography From Alien to Citizen: The Story of My Life in America (1914), he reports being mugged and then thrown into jail on his first day in Chicago. Steiner also discovered that saloons provide the most immediate influence over many immigrants, not only encouraging vices such as alcoholism and prostitution but also operating exploitative employment agencies. Many unscrupulous Americans, some of them immigrants themselves, waited to take advantage of those newly arrived in the United States. Yet Steiner admires the work of more reputable Americanizing institutions such as the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the Immigrant Protective League, which shielded immigrants from victimization.

Unfortunately, even those who professed to aid and uplift the immigrant might also prove untrustworthy, as Anzia Yezierska often observes in her works. In her story "Wings" from the collection Hungry Hearts (1920), a young sociologist named John Barnes comes to live in the ghetto to study "Educational Problems of the Russian Jews" (How I Found America, p. 5). Shenah Pessah, the tenement's cleaning person, appears "a splendid type for his research" but one whose "lack of contact with Americanizing agencies appalled him" (pp. 5, 6). In an essay on Yezierska's work, JoAnn Pavletich comments that "as a scientist, [Barnes's] powerful, culturally authorized gaze fixes Pessah in the position of interesting, but ultimately inferior primitive object of study" (p. 90). Mary V. Dearborn likewise notes that what Yezierska "clearly hated most was being the subject of scientific study," as "Wings" and other stories show (p. 125). While Shenah envisions a romantic relationship developing with Barnes, he considers her merely an object to study and to reform. Yezierska demonstrates the dehumanizing condescension inherent in this type of study, as Barnes feels "the enthusiasm of the scientist for the specimen of his experimentation—of the sculptor for the clay that would take form under his touch" and marvels that "out of the thousands of needy, immigrant girls whom he might have befriended, this eager young being at his side was ordained by some peculiar providence to come under his personal protection" (pp. 6, 14). Approaching Shenah as a study object seems to encourage a cavalier attitude toward her feelings. After taking her to the library to introduce her to new books, Barnes kisses Shenah, throwing her into emotional turmoil. What he dubs a "passing moment of forgetfulness" (p. 15) means much more to Shenah, who experiences great distress when he leaves her. She remembers that he had characterized her as a "poor lonely little immigrant!" a label that later becomes a "cruel mockery" (p. 15). In this case, the Americanizer abuses his influence over the immigrant, confirming that he views her as inferior through both his impersonal scientific study and his disrespectful sexual imposition. Ironically, in this case, the immigrant survives despite the Americanizer's intervention rather than because of it.

IMMIGRANTS REDEFINING ASSIMILATION

In 1920 Julius Drachsler, a professor of economics and sociology at Smith College, argued that Americanization's "ethnic fusion" ideal usually amounted to a "radical fusion" that attempted to Anglicize new immigrants (p. 161). Anxious to assimilate successfully but wary of many Americanization techniques, immigrants also asserted a less-expected formula for assimilation: immigrants Americanizing the country's native-born inhabitants. Immigrant writers illustrate that Americanization could and should be more than a one-sided process and that they resisted such a "radical fusion."

Yezierska's story "America and I," from Children of Loneliness (1923), presents an immigrant gradually uncovering this part of the assimilation process. Constantly searching for her niche in her new country, the story's narrator finds that Americanizing agencies—her employer's "English class for foreigners," the "Women's Association," the "Vocational Guidance Center"—cannot bring satisfaction (How I Found America, pp. 149–150). The narrator believes that being American means being "a creator, a giver, a human being!" (p. 145). Working as servant and seamstress does not fulfill her, but there is also an overarching problem regarding America that the narrator finally recognizes: "I wanted to find it ready made" (p. 152). She has been expecting to assimilate herself into America as it is. However, this narrator experiences a "revelation" that America is "a world still in the making. I saw that it was the glory of America that it was not yet finished. And I, the last comer, had her share to give, small or great, to the making of America, like those Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower" (pp. 152–153). She decides to help build America by opening up "my life and the lives of my people" to other Americans, writing about the immigrant ghetto to form a "bridge of understanding" (p. 153). Rather than simply being assimilated, this immigrant helps to assimilate America to the culture of the immigrants and to become American by easing the intercultural tensions stimulated by immigration.

In his autobiography, Edward Bok expresses a similar sense that America itself needs "Americanization" through the immigrant (p. 445). He cites influential figures in the Americanization movement who pay only "lip-service" (p. 446) to American ideals, such as a speaker who emphasizes the importance of teaching immigrants to respect American institutions but in conversation condemns the president, the cabinet, and Congress. As Bok observes, "There are thousands of the American-born who need Americanization just as much as do the foreign-born" (p. 445). Immigrant perspectives, traditions, and appreciation for American liberties can help renew America, according to Bok.

Adopting this theme of immigrants influencing America rather than vice versa, the native-born intellectual Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) introduced the idea of a "trans-national America" in 1916, remarking, "there is no distinctively American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures" (p. 91). Pointing out the limits of the melting-pot concept, Bourne instead proposes a "transnationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all colors and sizes" (p. 96). For Bourne, immigration and its cultural infusion make America stronger, forming a multicultural, textured fabric and, thus, a multidirectional assimilation. Similarly, elaborating on his pluralism ideal, Horace Kallen envisions America as a symphony in which "each ethnic group is the natural instrument, its spirit and culture are its theme and melody, and the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization" (p. 220). Written and played simultaneously, this symphony includes "nothing so fixed and inevitable" but ranges ever "wider and richer and more beautiful" (p. 220). More recently, the cultural critic Homi K. Bhabha has proposed the term "hybridity," which signifies "difference without an assumed hierarchy" (p. 3), a useful entrée into immigrant experience. Hybridity captures the different contributions immigrants may bring to America and also helps to describe their individual collections of traditions as they assimilate into America and assimilate America into themselves.

Werner Sollors has characterized the "double consciousness" of ethnic American writers. He describes these authors as "cultural producers" who "function as translators of ethnicity to ignorant, and sometimes hostile, outsiders and, at the same time, as mediators between 'America' and greenhorns" (p. 249). American immigrant writers demonstrated an awareness of their multiple roles as they struggled to express both the stresses and opportunities of assimilation. As they created literary translations of the immigrant experience, they also aimed to help "Americanize" their readers.

See alsoAmerican Indian Stories; Chicago; Chinese; Immigration; Jews; Mrs. Spring Fragrance; The Promised Land; The Rise of David Levinsky; San Francisco

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Adamic, Louis. From Many Lands. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940.

Adamic, Louis. Laughing in the Jungle: The Autobiography of an Immigrant in America. 1932. New York: Arno, 1969.

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1910.

Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. 1912. Edited by Werner Sollors. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Antin, Mary. They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914.

Bok, Edward William. The Americanization of Edward Bok. New York: Scribners, 1920.

Cahan, Abraham. 1896, 1898. Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto. New York: Dover, 1970.

Dietrich, John. "'The Melting Pot': A Plea for the Unborn Children of America." St. Mark's Reformed Church, Pittsburgh, Pa., 8 May 1910.

Dixon, Royal. Americanization. New York: Macmillan, 1916.

Drachsler, Julius. Democracy and Assimilation: The Blending of Immigrant Heritages in America. New York: Macmillan, 1920.

Huebner, Grover. "The Americanization of the Immigrant." In Americanization, edited by Winthrop Talbot, pp. 174–184. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1920.

Panunzio, Constantine M. The Soul of an Immigrant. New York: Macmillan, 1921.

Pupin, Michael. From Immigrant to Inventor. New York: Scribners, 1923.

Rihbany, Abraham Mitrie. A Far Journey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914.

Steiner, Edward. From Alien to Citizen: The Story of My Life in America. New York: Revell, 1914.

Sui Sin Far. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Edited by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Yezierska, Anzia. How I Found America: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska. Introduction by Vivian Gornick. New York: Persea, 1991.

Yezierska, Anzia. Salome of the Tenements. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Zangwill, Israel. The Melting-Pot: Drama in Four Acts. 1909. New York: Macmillan, 1914.

Secondary Works

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Bourne, Randolph. "Trans-National America." Atlantic 118 (1916): 86–97.

Carson, Mina. Settlement Folk: Social Thought and the American Settlement Movement, 1885–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Dearborn, Mary V. Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. New York: Free Press, 1988.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Hartmann, Edward George. The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948.

Kallen, Horace M. "Democracy versus the Melting-Pot: A Study of American Nationality." Nation 100, no. 2590 (18 February 1915): 190–194; 100, no. 2591 (25 February 1915): 217–220.

Pavletich, JoAnn. "Anzia Yezierska, Immigrant Authority, and the Uses of Affect." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 19 (2000): 81–104.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Talbot, Winthrop. "The Faith That Is in Us." In Americanization, edited by Winthrop Talbot, pp. 56–62. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1920.

Wald, Priscilla. "Immigration and Assimilation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing." In The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, edited by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould, pp. 176–199. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Wilentz, Gay. Introduction to Salome of the Tenements, by Anzia Yezierska, pp. ix–xxvi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Lori Jirousek