Americanization now and then: the 'nation of immigrants' in the early

twentieth and twenty-first centuries

Maria Lauret

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01-05-2016

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Lauret, M. (2016). Americanization now and then: the 'nation of immigrants' in the early twentieth and twenty-
first centuries (Version 1). University of Sussex. https://hdl.handle.net/10779/uos.23421392.v1

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Americanisation Now and Then: the ‘nation of immigrants’ in the early twentieth

and twenty-first centuries

…We’ll take steps to deal responsibly with the millions of undocumented

immigrants who already live in our country. . . . even as we focus on

deporting criminals, the fact is, millions of immigrants in every state, of every

race and nationality still live here illegally. And let’s be honest—tracking

down, rounding up, and deporting millions of people isn’t realistic. Anyone

who suggests otherwise isn’t being straight with you. It’s also not who we are

as Americans. After all, most of these immigrants have been here a long time.

They work hard, often in tough, low-paying jobs. They support their families;

they worship at our churches. Many of their kids are American-born or spent

most of their lives here, and their hopes, dreams, and patriotism are just like

ours. As my predecessor, President Bush, once put it:” they are part of

American life.”1

Thus spoke President Obama in November 2014, announcing long-awaited action on

immigration reform in which he—typically—sought to reconcile familiar Republican

fears about illegal immigration with more liberal views, voiced in the language of

pragmatic economic and humanitarian considerations.2 Promising to lift the threat of

1 President Obama, The White House, ‘Remarks by the President,’ 20 November

2014. Emphasis added.
2 This was executive action; having explained his frustration with Republican leaders

in the House who refused to co-operate in the passing of a bi-partisan bill on

immigration reform, President Obama asserted his ‘legal authority . . . as President’
to ‘help make our immigration system more fair and more just.’ Ibid. David Cisneros
explains the background of the failed 2013 bill in ‘A Nation of Immigrants and a
Nation of Laws,’ 3; the mixing of liberal and conservative tropes in Obama’s
1
deportation that had blighted the lives of undocumented migrants for decades, the

President offered those who had been in the U.S. for more than five years the

opportunity to ‘stay in the country temporarily’ and ‘get right with the law.’3 As part

of his discursive ploy to placate both conservative and liberal critics of his

immigration record to date, the President made the undocumented migrants out to

be, for all other intents and purposes, Americans already: hard working, God-fearing,

patriotic breadwinners, like the immigrants of old.4 He counted himself in the lineage

of deserving newcomers of golden olden days: ‘Millions of us, myself included, go

back generations in this country, with ancestors who put in the painstaking work to

become citizens. So we don’t like the notion that anyone might get a free pass to

American citizenship.’5 In adopting, for that passage of the speech, the mask of a

white Republican, Obama subtly reminded his audience of the white American

credentials his mixed African/American heritage bestows him with, and which sets

him apart from African American descendants of slaves. Media reporting in the U.K.

and U.S. failed to note this, however, and focused instead on the President’s appeal

to American identity and values in his decision to defer deportation of illegal

immigrants: ´it’s not who we are as Americans . . . we were strangers once, too.’

And this was significant too, because the inclusive ‘we’ that hinted at the President’s

own recent (African) and more distant (white Mid Western) immigrant descent, was

immigration discourse is insightfully analysed in Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Díaz-

Barriga’s ‘Senator Barack Obama and Immigration Reform.’
3 Ibid.
4 Or like the new neoliberal subjects David Cisneros describes, who are ‘produced

through discourses about values, competence, hard work, and respectability—all of

which become indexed to whiteness.’ Cisneros, ‘A Nation of Immigrants,’ 5.
5 Obama, ‘Remarks by the President,’ n.p.

2
a departure from a more familiar Presidential discourse of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ invoking a

residual nativism or merely a fear of the foreign.

Third however, even as he distanced himself from his predecessor in a conciliatory

approach to ‘unlawful’ immigrants and in his appeal to ‘who we are,’ Obama also

strategically invoked the ghost of George W. Bush to placate immigration hawks in

both parties.6 Whereas Bush’s policies on immigration notoriously included a

strengthening of border patrol and the building of a 670 mile fence to deter migrants

crossing from Mexico, Obama quoted him to lend credence to his own gospel of

diversity and inclusivity.7 Indeed, President Obama’s closing sentiment, ’My fellow

Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants,‘ epitomised the

paradox of American national identity (‘fellow Americans’/’nation of immigrants’)

and the contradictions of bipartisan discourse on immigration that is this essay’s

central conundrum. It echoed the programmatic opening line of a 2008 report from

the Task Force on New Americans to President George W. Bush: ‘The United States

has been since its founding, and continues to be, a nation of immigrants,’ which

proposed a very different immigration agenda from that outlined in Obama’s

speech.8 The Task Force had been charged by the President to design a policy for the

6 We would be mistaken to think Obama’s Executive Order typifies a reversal of his

predecessor’s immigration policy. Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga note his conservative
emphasis on ‘earned citizenship,’ and write ‘his rhetoric looks like that of President
Bush.’ Dorsey and Díaz-Barriga, 97. Cisneros goes further and explains that, partly by
means of devolving immigration control to states and local programmes such as
Secure Communities, Obama’s ‘represents one of the strictest enforcement regimes
in decades, including record numbers of deportations, more Border Control
personnel, heightened use of surveillance technologies, and increased fence
construction.’ Cisneros,’ A Nation of Immigrants,’ 3.
7 President Bush, ‘Comprehensive Immigration Reform,’ June 26 2007.
8 U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Building an Americanization Movement for

the Twenty First Century, 1. The Report is now available in summary form on the U.S.
3
Department of Homeland Security ‘to help legal immigrants embrace the common

core of American civic culture, learn our common language, and fully become

Americans.’9 Not concerned then with ‘illegal,’ but with legal immigrants to the

United States, the Report remains a startling document in that it expresses the Bush

administration’s concern about the purported un-Americanness of recent legal

newcomers; by example of the now almost forgotten Americanisation movement of

a century before, the remedy it proposes is ‘Americanization for the 21st century.’10

Where Obama thus conceived of undocumented migrants as Americans in vitro—

work ethic, family values, regular religious worship and all—Bush saw even legal

immigrants as unwilling or unable-to-integrate outsiders, in need of ‘help’ to adopt

or adapt to the American way. Both presidents, however, strategically deployed the

idea that ‘we are and always have been a nation of immigrants’ to legitimise their

respective stances on immigration reform. That they could do so unchallenged and

government website, http://www.uscis.gov/archive/archive-news/fact-sheet-

building-americanization-movement-21st-century-report-president-united-states-
task-force-new-americans; a PDF of the full text can still be found in the archive on
www.uscis.gov.
9 Ibid., iv. The Report was the result of 2 years of consultation and historiographical

research and involved a wide range of organisations and interest groups from across
the political spectrum. Its status today is unclear; published after the election of
Barack Obama, the Report became irrelevant as soon as it appeared—which is not to
say that it may not be brought to life again should a Republican be elected President
in 2016.
10 Space does not permit a detailed comparison between the twentieth century

campaign and this proposal for Americanisation in the twenty-first. That there ever
was a concerted, top-down, nation-wide programme for Americanisation of new
immigrants is today known only by specialists such as immigration historians and
social scientists. Media and political discourse routinely ignore it and refer to
‘Americanisation’ as an organic, inevitable process of immigrant adaptation to life in
the U.S., part of the nation’s story of progress over the twentieth century.
4
with equal conviction raises all sorts of questions about the cross-party appeal of the

‘nation of immigrants’ rhetoric, its ability to embrace constituencies of Americans

with conflicting stances on immigration, and last not least its accuracy as a descriptor

of American national identity. What does the now apparently consensual idea that

the U.S. is ‘a nation of immigrants’ say about contemporary American identity? What

does it say about American immigration and its troubled history, for that matter?

Where did the concept originate and how does it inform, or necessitate (as it did,

according to the Bush Task Force) Americanisation initiatives, old and new? Or

simply: what gets lost, and what is found when Presidents represent the U.S. as a

nation consisting of immigrants?

The answer to these questions is not straightforward, because we are concerned

discourses that purport to address a national identity in the very act of creating it as

an ideological entity. In order to reveal the contradictions disguised by the notion of

the ‘nation of immigrants,’ it is my aim first to deconstruct its rhetorical power and

then to trace how the official discourse of American nationhood changed from

‘100% Americanism’ in 1915 to ‘a nation of immigrants’ a century later, with

apparently equal self-evidence. Then, it is also my task to investigate what hides,

unofficially, behind those banners of a homogeneous nationalism on one hand, and

unity in ethnic diversity on the other. I am thus concerned to analyse Presidential

discourse as it seeks to endorse policies legitimising immigrants as potential true

Americans, whilst disavowing the cultural difference they bring with them, whether

they be Theodore Roosevelt’s Americanisation movement, echoed in the report of

G.W. Bush’s Task Force, or Presidentially sanctioned legal measures to redeem the

5
deserving illegal immigrant, as in Obama’s executive action of November 2014.11 But

I am also interested in what happens to cultural differences in the processes of

Americanisation and ethnicisation in everyday life, through public schooling,

employment, trade unionism and civic engagement before World War II, and

through expansion of higher education and exposure to American media and the

culture of consumption after it.12 Praxis may well conflict with principle, after all. My

hypothesis throughout is that, contrary to appearances and in light of its factual

inaccuracy, today’s ‘nation of immigrants’ is the paradoxical product of twentieth

century Americanisation, and has its origin not in ethnic pride but in immigrant

shame—and racist exclusion.

The trouble with ‘a nation of immigrants’

Inclusive in its implication of ethnic diversity and affirming—or so it seems—the

U.S.’s exceptional status as a refuge for all, ‘we are a nation of immigrants’ has

become so familiar a slogan that the ideological work it continues to do has long

since become obscured by the statement’s prima facie truth. For who would deny, in

a country that owes its very identity, its raison d’être even, to DIY settlement and

11 I am not concerned here with ostensible diversification measures such as the Title
IX Ethnic Heritage Studies Program, passed by Congress in 1974 in response to a long
campaign by ethnic activists. See for this history James Anderson, ‘The Evolution and
Probable Future of Ethnic Heritage Studies,’ http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED184964
12 Rudy Vecoli saw a similar dynamic at work in the 1980s, when he wrote that the

‘return to the melting Pot,’ which had started to appear in Reaganite public rhetoric,
‘ought not to be mistaken with the underlying social reality of ethnic diversity and
multiculturalism.’ Rudolph J. Vecoli, ’Return to the Melting Pot: Ethnicity in the
United States in the Eighties,’17. See for the process of Americanisation as conceived
of contemporaneously Grover G. Huebner, ‘The Americanization of the Immigrant.’
6
governance (call it conquest), that Americans came from somewhere else, that they

‘were strangers once, too?´13 Reflection, however, shows this ostensibly innocuous

idea to be a self-serving fiction. Strangers to whom? ‘Immigrants’ to what nation,

state, or polity? Are the descendants of Native Americans ‘immigrants’? Are those

inhabitants of the South West whose Mexican ancestors had their lands annexed in

the nineteenth century and subsequently became U.S. citizens by default,

‘immigrants’? Are the children generations removed from those who were brought

from Africa to America in shackles, on slave ships, centuries ago, ‘immigrants’?14 And

were they the kind of strangers who, as President Obama put it in his 2014

immigration reform speech, were ‘welcomed . . . in and taught . . . that to be an

American is something more than what we look like’?15 Notwithstanding the

President’s clear allusion to racial difference in this last phrase and his pointed

inclusion of himself in the national ‘we’ as the son of an African immigrant now, the

idea of African Americans as erstwhile ’immigrants’ or ‘strangers’ who were

‘welcomed’ and ‘taught’ anything other than their innate and indelible inferiority is

preposterous.16 And it is more so coming from an African American President:

13 Obama, ‘Remarks,’n.p.
14 Roger Daniels argues in his well-known history of American immigration that
Africans can and indeed should be regarded as ‘immigrants,’ on the grounds that
doing so would merge the history of slavery and the African diaspora with
immigration history to mutual benefit. Although I accept his reasoning, to advocate
recognition of slaves as ‘immigrants’ as a condition for better integrated
historiography is to sacrifice the political importance of the distinction between
forced migration and that of free labour. See Daniels, Coming to America, 54-5.
15 Obama, ‘Remarks by the President,’ n.p.
16 The issue is complicated and potentially doubly offensive to African Americans

because most of them, including Michelle Obama, can lay claim to slave ancestry
whereas he cannot. Indeed, during his 2007 election campaign Obama’s credibility
problems were not confined to the Republican Right (who demanded he produce his
birth certificate to prove his American citizenship) but were also a concern among
7
Obama uttered these words the same week the people of Ferguson, Missouri,

marched in protest against the police killing of Michael Brown, the state of

emergency having been declared just three days before. And so, even as the

President tried to represent his pardon to undocumented migrants as part of a

national narrative of inclusivity and racial diversity—or rather: precisely because this

President sought to do so, the racist nature of the ‘nation of immigrants’ shibboleth

was revealed. Exclusion of Native, erstwhile South Western Mexican and African

Americans from the polity and the history of ‘the nation of immigrants’ speaks

volumes about the on-going erasure in public discourse of indigenous existence on

U.S. soil, of slavery and Jim Crow, of the violent ‘settlement’ of the West and of the

current crisis for African Americans incarcerated in, what Angela Davis has termed,

the ‘prison-industrial complex’.17 Even if it is the most important, this is only one

aspect of the trouble with ‘a nation of immigrants.’

For, if one wants to invoke the American history of immigration that goes back to the

nation’s founding, then we could just as well speak of a ‘nation of nativists.’ As

Edward Hartmann wrote in his 1948 history of the Americanisation movement,

it takes its place along side [sic] those other manifestations of American

distrust and discontent with their new neighbors,—the nativism of the

1830’s, the Know- Nothingism of the 1850’s, the A[merican] P[rotective]

African Americans who had battled through the Civil Rights era, because of what
they saw as his shallow grounding in Black history and activism. See Lauret, ‘How to
Read Michelle Obama.’
17 Angela Davis, ‘Masked Racism,’ n.p.

8
 A[ssociation]-ism of the 1890’s, the Ku Klux Klanism of the 1920’s and the

immigration restrictionism of the first quarter of the twentieth century18

through to the Minutemen patrolling the Southern border now.

Finally, whether fourth, fifth, and tenth generation Americans can still, in any way,

consider themselves ’immigrants’ is a question that needs asking too: if they can,

then a great many countries in the world today would be entitled to call themselves

‘nations of immigrants’ as well, and the exceptionalist premise which is so deeply

ingrained in American political rhetoric would be exposed for the ideological spin

that it is.

The idea is thus fatally flawed as a definition of American national identity, and it is

flagrantly a-historical to boot. If many Americans today see themselves as in some

way ‘ethnic’ and identify with (some privileged part of) their forebears’ immigrant

legacy (Irish Chinese Italian Polish Greek Jewish, or indeed ‘African’) it is worth

remembering that their grandparents and great-grandparents would have been

mortified to do the same. For, only a hundred years ago and until well into the

1960s, the United States emphatically identified itself as a nation of Americans, and

proud to be so. ‘There can be no 50/50 Americanism in this country. There is room

here for only 100 percent Americanism,’ Theodore Roosevelt famously declared in

1915 in his speech to the Knights of Columbus. ‘There is no such thing as a

hyphenated American who is a good American,’ he continued. ‘The only man who is

a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.’19 The idea that

18 Edward George Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant, 7.

19 Italics added. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, ‘Americanism.’
9
the U.S. is a ‘nation of immigrants’ thus represents a 180 degree turn from

Roosevelt’s position and that of American presidents before and after him, up until

the mid-twentieth century. It is, contrary to what is commonly thought and despite

the rhetorical aplomb of Bush and Obama’s speechwriters, quite new. Introduced in

a pamphlet written by John F. Kennedy in 1958, when he was a young and thrusting

Massachusetts senator, the ‘nation of immigrants’ gained currency as an emblem of

national identity only in August 1963, when the New York Times Magazine published

an article of that title in support of liberalisation of the U.S.’s then very restrictive

immigration quota system.

Kennedy argued in ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ that the National Origins Act of 1924,

which had reduced wave upon immigration wave around the turn of the twentieth

century to a mere trickle, had stopped America from living up to the promise of

Emma Lazarus’ words on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give us your poor, your tired, your

huddled masses.’ Instead, that offer of universal refuge by mid-century had been so

watered down as to have become fatally compromised, so that immigrants were

welcome in the U.S. now only ‘as long as they come from Northern Europe, are not

too tired or too poor or slightly ill, never stole a loaf of bread, never joined any

questionable organization, and can document their activities for the past two

Years.’20 In his sarcasm about how the 1924 immigration law had betrayed America’s

promise, Kennedy criticised the xenophobia of his own day and the paranoia of

recent McCarthyism (‘questionable organization,’ ‘document activities for the past

two years’). Unmistakably however, he also satirised early twentieth century nativist

20italics added. John F. Kennedy, New York Times Magazine (August 4, 1963), 205.
Extract from John Fitzgerald Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants.
10
discourse (‘as long as they come from Northern Europe’) and the campaign to

Americanise ‘the foreign element,’ as immigrants were referred to then, which grew

up in response to it (‘too tired, too poor, or slightly ill’). For, although the

Americanisation movement had originally emerged from the settlement houses and

had sought to counter nativist arguments for immigration restriction in the 1910s

and 20s, the eugenicist view that the new immigrants were of inferior stock to that

of the Northern Europeans who had preceded them, informed its widespread

campaign to assimilate the newcomers nonetheless. By 1958 however that coercive

and eugenicist rhetoric had lost credibility, and so Kennedy could argue that a new

immigration policy should be ‘generous, it should be fair; it should be flexible.’ Like

Obama recently, Senator and would-be President Kennedy also included his own

history as a descendant of Irish immigrants in his arguments for drastic reform of the

National Origins Act and commemorated ‘waves of hostility, directed especially at

the Irish, who, as Catholics, were regarded as an alien conspiracy’ in his book.21

Following hot on the heels of his well-publicised visit to Ireland in June of 1963,

where he was greeted as a national hero, Kennedy’s article in the New York Times

could then conclude with a rousing call to immigration reform as also a moral

21 Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants, 102-3. Anti-Catholicism has deep roots in

American nativism; see for example A. Cheree Carlson, ‘The Rhetoric of the Know-
Nothing Party;’ George H. Haynes, ‘The Causes of Know-Nothing Success in
Massachusetts;’ John Higham’s classic Strangers in the Land; Bruce Levine,
Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery: Thomas R. Whitney and the Origins of the
Know-Nothing Party;’ Steven Taylor, ‘Progressive Nativism: The Know-Nothing Party
in Massachusetts.’
11
mission: ‘With such a policy we could turn to the world with clean hands and a clean

conscience.’22

This new policy would be the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, also known as

Hart-Celler, which abolished immigration quota based on nationality and removed

the taint of immigration restriction-through-selection that had originated in the

‘scientific’ racism of the early twentieth century. Kennedy felt, in arguing for

immigration reform, that such selection ill-served the United States in a post war

economy that was increasingly based on innovations in science and technology.

Instead of a quota system based on national origins (which privileged the historically

dominant countries of emigration from Northern Europe, such as England, Scotland,

Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Scandinavia) he proposed an

immigration policy that prioritised family reunification and ‘the skills of the

immigrant and their relationship to our need.’ (150) The ‘clean hands,’ of course,

also reveal Kennedy’s Cold War agenda, which required that the U.S. be seen as a

free country, unlike the U.S.S.R., defined by the promise of ‘liberty and justice for all’

and open to all comers.23

22 Kennedy, ‘A Nation of Immigrants,’ 205. See for Kennedy’s several visits to Ireland
and his family connections there Sylvia Ellis, ‘The Historical Significance of President
Kennedy’s Visit to Ireland in June 1963.’ I am sceptical about the idea that Kennedy’s
personal connection with his ‘cousins’ in Ireland (both literal and not) was a major
factor in the introduction of new immigration legislation. His initiatives in liberalising
immigration as a Senator and then as President were unsuccessful and the file of his
speeches on immigration in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is
slight. See http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKCAMP1960-1061-
021.aspx Any reputation for immigration law reform connected with the Kennedy
name was earned later, by his brother Senator Edward Kennedy.
23 Task Force on New Americans, Building an Americanization Movement for the

Twenty First Century, 1.

12
A combination of equality motivations, partly based on historic guilt that the U.S.

had not admitted enough of Europe’s Jews during and after W.W.II, and partly

fostered by the Civil Rights Movement, as well as Cold War imperatives thus

impelled the Senator and President to liberalise immigration law. 24 He wanted

immigration reformed in order that it ‘serve[s] the national interest and reflect[s] in

every detail the principles of equality and human dignity to which our nation

subscribes,’ and he made a specific—and historic—plea that the existing ‘special

discriminatory formula to regulate the immigration of persons . . . . [from] the Asia-

Pacific Triangle’ be repealed (149; 152).25

Whatever JFK’s intentions, however, the effect of the new Immigration and

Nationality Act far exceeded what he (and President Johnson, who signed it into law

in 1965) had had in mind and caused problems of inequality and injustice even as it

solved those of Asian exclusion and racial quota.26 Eithne Luibheid has lucidly

24 This sense of historic guilt had no doubt been strengthened by the Anti-
defamation League and B’nai B’rith’s appeal to the young JFK, which purportedly
instigated the writing of A Nation of Immigrants. Ira Mehlmann makes this
interesting point in ‘John F. Kennedy and Immigration Reform.’
25 This view was not new and neither was Kennedy’s July 1963 legislative initiative

unprecedented. If anything, it came rather late in the Presidency; in 1952 President

Truman had unsuccessfully tried to veto the McCarran-Walter Act (which updated
but essentially maintained the 1924 National Origins Act) noting the ‘absurdity, the
cruelty of carrying over into this year of 1952 the isolationist limitations of the 1924
law.’ President Truman, cited by Center for Immigration Studies (anonymous
author), ‘Three Decades of Mass Immigration: The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration
Act.’
26 Notoriously, President Lyndon B. Johnson remarked on signing the new Act into

law on 3 October 1965: ‘This bill we sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not
affect the lives of millions. It will not restructure the shape of our daily lives or add
importantly to our wealth and power. . . . This bill says simply that from this day
forth those wishing to emigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their
skills and their close relationship to those already here.’ Infamous words: the 1965
Act changed the face of America out of all recognition and decisively affected voter
13
explained, for example, that the current flow of ‘illegal immigration’ (from Mexico

principally, Latin America generally) was caused by the Hart-Celler Act because it

imposed restrictions of skill and number on migrants from the Western hemisphere,

who until 1965 had been exempt from such federal legislation. The law ‘led directly

to contemporary struggles faced by Mexicans in the United States today,’ Luibheid

wrote in 1997; it thus caused the current impasse as regards so called ‘illegal’

Mexican and Latin@ workers. 27

That Presidents Bush and Obama thus both spoke and continue to speak of a ‘broken

immigration system’ due to undocumented migration across the Southern border is

doubly ironic. First, the 1965 Act has forced what were formerly sojourners and

seasonal workers to stay in the U.S., so that their ‘illegality’ is actually a result of the

law changing, rather than a change in labour demand or migrant behaviour.

Second—and more pertinent for our purposes: why would the U.S. pride itself on

being a ‘nation of immigrants’ if it perceives itself at the same time to be in (illegal

and legal) immigration crisis? If Bush proposed an Americanisation movement for

the twenty-first century, whilst Obama conceived of the deserving undocumented

immigrant as a proto-American, a neo-liberal subject in his own image, then how are

we to understand the relation between ‘immigrants’ and ‘Americans,’ insiders and

outsiders to the national identity?

demographics over the next 50 years by creating what has been called ‘the browning
of America.’ Edward M. Kennedy, ‘The Immigration Act of 1965,’ 148.
27 See Luibheid, ‘The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act: an End to Exclusion?’

509.
14
Again, these are complex questions which elicit paradoxical answers, as we shall see.

The dynamic between political discourse and everyday praxis is hard to gauge, the

more so because Americanisation in the early twentieth century, as a deliberate

effort of nation-building for an industrial and urban society, not only impacted on

immigrants but on the native-born as well.28 Similarly, when reaction against that

earlier coercive Americanisation came in the 1970s with the rise of the so called

‘white ethnics,’ it was the native-born two or more generations on, who asserted

(rather than re-discovered) an ethnic difference they themselves had never really

lived or been discriminated for—they could claim their Irishness (as former SDS

leader Tom Hayden did) or their Italian roots or their Polish ancestry precisely

because they were now secure enough in their white and mostly middle class

American identities to do so.29 Both these phenomena were delayed effects of the

Americanisation movement and they require further explanation if we are to

understand the move from ‘a nation of Americans’ to ‘a nation of immigrants’ better

than we do at present. In what follows I will suggest that, although the phrase ‘we

are a nation of immigrants’ is quite new, its anxious ideological burden (of creating

unity from diversity, e pluribus unum in a modern sense) originates in America’s first

period of mass immigration from 1880 to 1920.30 More particularly it is the legacy of

28 Indeed, President Bush’s Task Force of 2008 aimed at something rather similar
when it called upon ‘immigrants and native-born alike’ to ‘uphold and pledge
allegiance to foundational principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution,’ in order that ‘the United States remains a successful nation.’
Task Force for New Americans, Building an Americanization Movement for the
Twenty-First Century, 1.
29 Hayden serves as a case-study of white self-ethnicisation in Matthew Frye

Jacobson’s Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post Civil Rights America.
30 As Vecoli reminds us, ‘e pluribus unum’ originally referred to the union of States

that was formed at the time of the American Revolution from the 13 original
15
the Americanisation campaign at its most coercive and virulent, between World War

I and the passing of the Johnson-Reed National Origins Act of 1924. I shall argue that,

contrary to the long-held view that the Americanisation crusade was ‘unsuccessful’

and ‘should be relegated to the junkheap of history,’ it in fact succeeded in setting a

new standard of what it meant to be a good and true American for decades to come,

even as it failed to stem the tide of nativism it was supposed to counter. 31

Americanisation: what was it?

We need to return to the Americanisation movement of the first Roosevelt’s time

not only to understand the current salience of the ‘nation of immigrants’ as an

ideological formation, but also to appreciate its cross-party, nostalgic appeal to the

days of the ‘good’ immigrant, which informs the current sense of crisis. Unlike

today’s monocultural, undereducated and overbreeding migrant who refuses to

speak English and has crossed the border illegally, or so the story goes, the

immigrant of old chose to assimilate to all things American and could not wait for the

day he (always he) could ‘take out his papers.’ Rather like the hard-working, God-

fearing and self-motivated migrant whom President Obama would allow to stay in

the country rather than see deported, the good immigrants of old were consistently

contrasted to the ‘melancholic migrant, who holds on to their past culture and to

colonies. Since then, it has taken on all sorts of expedient other meanings, of which
the most recent is ‘out of many [peoples, or ethnicities] one.’ Rudolph Vecoli, ’The
Significance of Immigration in the Formation of American Identity,’ 9.
31 Vecoli reports that this was the consensus by the 1960s, ‘Return to the Melting

Pot,’ 8.
16
their difference,’ in Cisneros’ words.32 Why the U.S. across the political spectrum

today should want to identify as a ‘nation of immigrants’ when, at the same time,

immigrants legal and illegal are seen as a problem, is a question that can be

answered only in politically divergent ways. It is because today’s border-crossers

remind white liberals of their own destitute immigrant forebears a century ago,

whereas to conservative eyes today’s migrants cling to their melancholic difference,

unlike those who wholeheartedly joined in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness a

century ago. Here, for an example of the latter, is Samuel Huntington, remembering

the good old days of a century ago:

Past immigrants wept with joy when, after overcoming hardship and risk,

they saw the Statue of Liberty, enthusiastically identified themselves with

their new country that offered them liberty, work, and hope; and often

became the most patriotic of citizens. . .

However:

By 2000, America was . . . less a nation than it had been for a century. . . .

Globalization, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, immigration,

subnationalism, and anti-nationalism had battered American consciousness...

The teaching of national history gave way to the teaching of ethnic and racial

histories.33

The ‘nation of immigrants’ Huntington wants to remember was willing to work hard,

learn English, play by the rule of law, and most of all: it was grateful for the gift of

32 Cisneros, ‘A Nation of Immigrants,’ 14.

33 Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? America’s Great Debate, 4-5.
17
entry to the Promised Land.34 I shall return to the importance of gratitude in a

moment; for now, it is important to note two things: one, that Huntington chooses

to forget about the impact of the Americanisation movement altogether,

representing the ‘old’ immigrant instead as somehow naturally predisposed to

enthusiastic Americanism. Second, revisionist historiography of the past thirty years

has amply demonstrated that this immigrant was nothing so simple, so

assimilationist and so a priori Americanist as Huntington asserts`; that s/he could

appear so in hindsight can only be attributed to wishful thinking and wilful historical

amnesia.35 Both revisionist and right wing historians, however, have tended to

underplay the importance of the Americanisation movement in the formation of

twentieth and twenty-first century American identities, so it is this that we shall turn

to next.

Originating in the settlement movement and reform efforts to clean up inner cities

and aid the poor in the 1880s and 90s, the Americanisation impulse of voluntary

34 As Mary Antin cannily titled her memoir of immigration to America in 1912. The
Promised Land (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics 2012) That she was rather more
complex than the good immigrant of Huntington’s memory is explained by Maria
Lauret’s analysis of Antin’s memoir in Wanderwords: Language Migration in
American Literature, 67-94.
35 See for attention to and retention of ethnic cultures from Nathan Glazer and

Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot: Jews, Italians and Irish of New
York City (1963) onwards: Leonard Dinnerstein, Roger L. Nichols and David M.
Reimers, Natives and Strangers: Ethnic Groups and the Building of America (1979);
Michael Novak, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in American
Life (1995); Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, Ethnic Americans: a History
of Immigration (1999); Donna R. Gabaccia, Immigration and American Diversity: a
Social and Cultural History (2002); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: the
Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States
(2002) and Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2005).
18
organisations to help immigrants adapt to America’s overcrowded industrial centres

gradually became, under pressure of growing nativist anti-immigrant sentiment in

the 1900s, a concerted local, state and federal effort to civilise the ‘other.’ As

Edward Hartmann has shown, in its final stages after W.W.I and fearing importation

of un-American ideas after the Russian Revolution, the movement also came to

serve as a re-education of the native-born about their patriotic duty in the face of

stranger danger. Modernity, after all, was not just a shock for the Italian peasant or

the former Jewish shtetl dweller, who had been—in Oscar Handlin’s paradigmatic

term—‘uprooted’ from the stability of kin and country to be unceremoniously

dumped into an alien environment and left to get on with it. Modernity had also

forced Americans, who had neither chosen nor previously experienced such variety

of cultures and tongues, to live and work together in industrial places and urban

spaces that were wholly new to them. Not only the European but also American-

born country-to-city migrants thus encountered and shaped a nation in flux, an

America in the throes of radical social and economic change. As the historian of

nativism John Higham has written,

Under the inroads of industrialism, bureaucracy, and specialized knowledge,

the self-sufficiency of the “island communities” [of the nineteenth century]

was irretrievably passing. . . . . [m]ore and more of the American people

became integrated into economic networks and status hierarchies that

drastically reduced the significance of the local arena. . . . . consciousness of

racial, national, and ethnic differences radically intensified.36

36Italics added. John Higham, ‘Integrating America: The Problem of Assimilation in

the Nineteenth Century,’ 20.
19
What better way to counter such consciousness of difference and division than with

a wide-ranging, state- and federally administered programme of social reform,

involving numerous initiatives and agencies at the local level, that would inculcate in

everyone, immigrant and native alike, the rights, privileges and duties of American

citizenship?37 And what better way to teach newcomers, unused to the rigours of

living by the clock in overcrowded city slums, the discipline of industrial labour than

to promise them a fair wage and American citizenship after five years of hard work

and lawful conduct?

So far, so straightforward in theory; in practice, however, the standard of

Americanisation to which all immigrants and Americans should be raised proved

much harder to define and agree upon. Among the few contemporary historians

who have paid attention to the Americanisation movement, Donna Gabaccia has

shown that, beyond such common programmatic aims as education for industrial

labour and citizenship, there was no clear consensus on what Americanisation

should mean.38 Then, as now, the idea that the ‘common core of American civic

culture,’ or what it means to be ‘fully American,’ or even ‘our common language’

(knowledge of which might set standards for Americanisation according to the 2008

Bush Task Force Report) are in any way self-evident or clear-cut or date back to the

founding of the Republic must be abandoned in light of evidence to the contrary.39

37 President Bush’s Task Force Report recommended much the same multi-level
approach for Americanisation in the twenty-first century.
38 See Gabaccia, Immigration and American Diversity.
39 English as ‘our common language’ and mastery of it as mandatory for citizenship

was contested in the early twentieth century campaign and is so now, too. English is
not now and has never been the official language of the United States. If
Americanisers now and then demand(ed) it, they did so in opposition to others who
believed language was not essential to citizenship, or they do so against all evidence
20
In the teens and twenties the Americanisation movement consisted of minimalists

and maximalists, liberals and right-wingers. Some believed immigrants should be

educated on a five-year plan to work hard, respect the law, learn English (if only to

follow industrial and/or military orders) and apply for citizenship. Others demanded

in addition abandonment of any interest in or allegiance to their country and

language of origin, wholesale adoption of the American way of life, including

American clothing and cuisine (in practice this meant buying canned goods) and

spending their money in American stores, rather than sending remittances home to

their families in Poland or Sicily. In their 1993 summary of Americanisation

historiography, commissioned by ‘a U.S. philanthropic institution interested in

immigration-related issues’ in order to assess the viability of ‘certain forms of social

intervention to assist assimilation,’ Otis L. Graham and Elizabeth Koed put it thus:

‘Liberal Americanizers tended to promote a minimalist core, a blend of skills [such as

English], behaviour [such as punctuality and hygiene] and values [such as democracy

and egalitarianism]’ whilst allowing for immigrant contributions to American culture,

such as cuisine, folklore, and religion. The ‘100%-ers’ by contrast demanded in

addition ‘thrift and sobriety . . . respect for the capitalist system . . . perhaps

conversion to Christianity [and] certainly the repudiation of radical/terrorist political

doctrines.’40 Clearly, the equation of ‘radical’ and ‘terrorist’ in this last line betrays

that bi-or multilingualism is a greater asset in the globalised world of today than the
English-Only advocated by proponents of an official English amendment to the
Constitution.
40 Otis L. Graham Jr. and Elizabeth Koed, ‘Americanizing the Immigrant, Past and

Future: History and Implications of a Social Movement,’ 44. ‘Radical/terrorist’ is an

informative slip also because it makes visible just how many parallels those
interested in ‘intervention to assist assimilation’ saw between social divisions in the
early twenty first and early twentieth centuries, and why they looked to the
21
these historians’ political bias, but it does not invalidate the statement as a whole,

which is largely accurate, if not comprehensive.

Historians at the other end of the political spectrum have added an important

further dimension to Americanisation as a process, furthermore, in highlighting that

the immigrant’s successful assimilation also required them to internalise the U.S.’s

racial hierarchy and to learn to think of themselves as ‘white.’ As Matthew Frye

Jacobson has observed, it was this which paradoxically produced their descendants’

repudiation of the burden of whiteness during the Civil Rights movement of the

1950s and 60s. At that time, Jacobson writes, ‘The sudden centrality of black

grievance to national discussion prompted a rapid move among [the new, self-

identified] white ethnics to dissociate themselves from white privilege,’ citing their

lack of connection with slavery on account of their relatively recent arrival in the

country as well as the discrimination their parents and grandparents had been

greeted with when they first arrived.41

In advancing his argument about the relation between white ethnics’ disavowal of

white privilege and the emergence of ethnic pride, Jacobson built on the work of

James Barrett and David Roediger, who had earlier demonstrated the mutability of

Americanization movement of the 1910s and 20s for inspiration and precedent for
such intervention. Unfortunately I have not been able to trace precisely which ‘U.S.
philanthropic institution’ commissioned Graham and Koed’s work. It appeared in The
Public Historian preceded by an authors’ statement explaining the commission and
followed by critical ‘Reviewers’ comments’ and ‘Client’s Evaluation of the Usefulness
of the Work Product.’ The latter was largely positive; it concluded that ‘our
foundation will be inclined to look upon assimilation-assisting efforts more
favourably than before we commissioned and read this report; ibid’ 49.
41 Jacobson, Roots Too, 21.

22
whiteness as a social construction. Because in the early twentieth century the new

immigrants had been considered of inferior racial ‘stock,’ they occupied a place as

‘inbetween peoples,’ Barrett and Roediger argued, above African Americans but

below the native-born descendants of Anglo Europeans. Immigrants from Southern

and Eastern Europe had not always and already been considered ‘white;’ they had

encountered hostility and discrimination, done worse, harder and lower paid work

than native-born whites, been forced into overcrowded slum housing and had

suffered routine abuse, being called by the ethnic epithets (hunky dago yid greaser)

their grandchildren in the 1970s remembered so well, or worse.42 Their

Americanisation as emancipation over the course of the twentieth century meant

moving out of this ‘inbetween’ status into whiteness and Americanism.43

Americanisation demanded conformity to American ways and values in line with

Roosevelt’s 100%-ism, but it also promised them incorporation into the polity,

including the right to vote and run for office, and these were rights that Native and

native-born African Americans had limited or no access to.44 It therefore endowed

them with racial superiority and a social mobility that, again, was largely denied to

Native and Black Americans. Henceforth, and as if in anticipation of the legal/illegal

dyad of immigration debate today, the ‘good’ conformist immigrant would be a

42 James R. Barrett and David Roediger, ‘InBetween Peoples:” Race, Nationality and
the New Immigrant Working Class.’
43 As Ieva Zake has shown for erstwhile Eastern and Central European immigrants, by

mid-century ‘the anticommunist white ethnics’ understanding of themselves as true

Americans was partly built on a conflict with ethnic and racial minorities who,
according to the white ethnics, were critical because they had failed to appreciate
the U.S.’ Italics added. Ieva Zake, ‘In Search of True Americanness,’ 1073.
44 Native Americans were only granted full citizenship with the Snyder or Indian

Citizenship Act of 1924.

23
would-be and should-be American citizen; the ‘bad’ (remember JFK’s words: who

‘stole a loaf of bread’ or joined a ‘questionable organization,’ or could not ‘document

their activities for the past two years’) should lose their jobs and return home, or be

deported.45

The purpose of the Americanisation movement by the 1920s was thus a far wider

one than its initial agenda of fitting the immigrant to American life and industrial

work had suggested; it was to produce a ‘one-minded’ nation through assimilation of

the ‘foreign element,’ in the parlance of the day, to the Americanist cause.46

That this cause was not an old, revolutionary and democratic one but, rather, a new

imperial agenda was made clear by Americanisers such as Stephen Emory Bogardus,

who stipulated that the purpose of his book Essentials for Americanization was ‘To

Help Win the War for Democracy.’47 By this he did not mean World War I, but the

U.S.’s internal ideological strife in 1920, when his and most other Americanisation

tracts were published and distributed across the nation.

This was the point when, according to Edward Hartmann, author of the most

comprehensive history of the Americanisation movement to date, ‘interest in

Americanization on the part of practically every town and municipality in the United

45 James Barrett writes of the Red Scare of 1919 as ‘a kind of enforced

Americanization,’ which immigrants with radical sympathies had to accept on pain of
being put in jail or of being deported. James R. Barrett, ‘Americanization from the
Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the Working Class in the United
States, 1880-1930,’ 1019.
46 ‘To be great a nation need not be of one blood, it must be of one mind,’ wrote the

sociologist John Commons in 1907. Cited by Robert A. Carlson, ‘Americanization as

an Early Twentieth Century Adult Education Movement,’ 447.
47 Stephen Emory Bogardus, Essentials of Americanization, 1.

24
States which contained a substantial immigrant population’ reached fever pitch in

the ‘crusade against the alien radical.’48 In that same year, literary scholar Lincoln

Gibbs of the University of Pittsburgh for example argued for the necessity of top-

down Americanisation because ‘Foreign critics of America, even though friendly,

have expressed their surprise that our citizens seem scarcely to be aware of the

governments by which they are controlled,’ giving us a startling insight not only into

American self-consciousness on the international stage, but also into the relative

weakness of Federal power in the eyes of contemporary commentators.49 A

statement such as Gibbs’ would be unthinkable fifty years ago, let alone today, and

the effect of the Americanisation movement of the 1910s and 20s, if understood, as I

do here, as the ideological justification for the combined centralising force of

industrial capitalism with state and Federal political authority, is a large part of the

reason why.

Having begun as a local, philanthropic effort to help immigrants settle, the

Americanisation movement grew into a state-wide and then an increasingly coercive

States-wide programme, involving immigrants and the native-born. Ideologues like

Bogardus and Gibbs thus help us see that Americanisation was a project of nation-

building very broadly conceived, of forging a national consciousness and purpose—

cloaked in the promise of prosperity that ‘the American way of life’ entails—for a

48 Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant, 235-6; 237. We should

be careful, however, to distinguish the red-baiting of this period from that in the
Cold War. By 1920, even an enthusiastic Americaniser like Edward Bok could still see
the Soviet Union as offering the working man the kind of opportunity hitherto only
available in the U.S.: ‘Russia may, as I like to believe she will, prove a second United
States of America in this respect;’ Edward W. Bok, The Americanization of Edward
Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After, 448.
49 Lincoln R. Gibbs, ‘Americanization and Literature,’ 551.

25
divided, recalcitrant and disparate society. Nor was this a society being torn apart by

mass immigration; rather, the rifts in the social fabric that needed to be healed, and

that the Americanisation campaign sealed over by projecting its attention onto ‘the

foreign-born,’ ran much deeper and were potentially much more disruptive than

those caused by the presence of newcomers.50 Race riots during the Red Summer in

Chicago, Charleston, Washington D.C. and other American cities, the Red Scare of

the Palmer Raids in 1919, widespread labour unrest (general strike in Seattle and

downing of tools by the United Mine Workers) as well as the struggle for female

suffrage evidenced divisions of race, of class, of gender and of political persuasion in

a rapidly urbanising, industrialising, and most of all centralising society that could not

be laid to rest by the efforts of a few benevolent societies or immigrant aid clubs.

Nor was the real ideological work of Americanisation that of fitting the immigrant to

an existing norm of American-ness, but rather of defining, and then firming up that

norm for natives and immigrants alike with Americanism. In 1915 the Harvard

philosopher Horace Kallen had written in his famous essay ‘Democracy Versus the

Melting Pot:’ ‘At the present time there is no dominant American mind. Our spirit is

inarticulate, not a voice, but a chorus of many voices each singing a rather different

tune.’51 Americanisation as Americanism made the difference, and it was the

50 For, of course, there is a fundamental contradiction underlying both the early

twentieth century and the Bush administration’s calls for Americanisation of the
immigrant; if, as the writers of the Task Force report believe, immigrants have come
and continue to come to the United States in pursuit of ‘liberty and justice for all,’
then there should be no need to ‘educate’ them (at best) or coerce them (at worst)
into respect for America’s ‘core civic culture.’ Building an Americanization Movement
for the Twenty First Century, 1.
51 Horace Kallen, ‘Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,’ n.p.

26
immigrant who was most categorically and coercively required to demonstrate the

latter. In the battle over America’s soul, and whether it would draw its sustenance

from the past or make itself fit for the future, an Americaniser such as Carol

Aronovici could therefore go as far as to reverse the relation between immigrant and

native-born altogether. Aronovici argued that Americans should take their lessons in

Americanisation from immigrants, because it was they who ‘have felt the influence

of American institutions and have accepted American methods of living and thinking

as their own.’52 These ‘methods of living and thinking’ included, as we have seen,

older ideas and practices such as commitment to the values in the Declaration of

Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, understood for example by the

nativist American or ‘Know Nothing’ Party in the nineteenth century to be

‘democracy, individualism, freedom, a high standard of living, equality, and

progress.’53 Yet, as Alex Goodall has pointed out, ‘until the early twentieth century,’

that is: until the intensified Americanisation campaign of World War I through to

1924, ‘systematic attempts to consider “Americanism” as a distinctive political

ideology were surprisingly rare.’54 What the campaign added to the concept of

Americanism were modern requirements such as participation in consumer society,

use of English (and English only, at least in public) and a new kind of patriotic

citizenship. This found its clearest articulation in the oath of naturalisation, in which

the older pledge to ‘renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign

prince, potentate, state or sovereignty of whom I have heretofore been a subject or

52 Carol Aronovici, Americanization, n.p.

53 A. Cheree Carlson, ’The Rhetoric of the Know-nothing Party: Nativism as a
Response to the Rhetorical Situation,’ 372.
54 Alex Goodall, ‘Two Concepts of Un-Americanism,’ 929.

27
citizen’ was augmented under Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 with its corollary, to

‘support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America

against all enemies, foreign and domestic, [and] that I will bear true faith and

allegiance to the same.’55 No wonder then that, after the Johnson Reed Act was

passed and the border all but closed to new immigrants in 1924, the loyalty so

explicitly demanded of the ‘foreign-born’ for incorporation into the American polity,

now translated into gratitude for the ‘gift’ of being so included. This ‘gift’ was made

all the more precious for its no longer being available to those of their countrymen

and relatives in Russia, Poland and Italy who would have been emigrants to America

too, but whose access would now be denied—or deferred for another forty years.56

The gratitude paradigm

Crucial in my theory that the roots of current ideas of American nationhood lie in the

early twentieth century Americanisation campaign is what we might call the

55 U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, ‘Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the

United States of America.’ Wikipedia helpfully provides a comparison of oaths of
naturalisation in various countries, which reveals that no other is quite so long and
so detailed as that of the U.S., and no other demands the renunciation of allegiance
to the pledger’s country of birth. See Wikipedia ‘Oath of Citizenship’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_citizenship#United_States. Steven Taylor
outlines the legacy of the New England Know Nothings to the Progressive Party, and
therefore to Theodore Roosevelt’s thinking, in ‘Progressive Nativism: The Know-
Nothing party in Massachusetts.’
56 The Immigration Act of 1924 reduced the number of immigrants to the U.S. to 2%

of those of that nationality already living in the country in 1880. In practice this
meant that immigration from the new regions (Southern and Eastern Europe) was
restricted between 1924 and 1965, when the new Immigration Act was passed, to
hundreds per year, in stark contrast to the hundreds of thousands and millions who
came in any given year between 1880 and1920.
28
‘gratitude paradigm:’ a structure of thinking and feeling about U.S. citizenship that

profoundly shapes American patriotism, exceptionalism and, with it, the ‘nation of

immigrants’ idea as an ideological formation. I mean by it the notion that immigrants

to the United States now, as well as then, owe America something, that the

country—in allowing them entry and eventually citizenship—bestowed a gift on

them which needs re-paying with undying love and loyalty.

Again, the prima facie truth of the U.S. as a ‘nation of immigrants’ is belied if we

compare it to the situation in other countries of immigration.57 Immigrants the world

over change domicile in hope of a better life, and that hope, in time, is usually

fulfilled—if not as well advertised as the American Dream.58 They may be thankful

that their new country offered them refuge from persecution, or a future for them

and their children, or simply work—but they do not, as a rule, think of their new

citizenship as a gift requiring, or inspiring, gratitude and an eternal bond of loyalty to

their adopted country. Yet such a ‘visceral, emotional attachment to America and its

history, or “patriotic assimilation”’ is precisely what the United States required of its

new citizens in the early twentieth century, and in some quarters it does so still—

these are the words the Center for Immigration Studies uses.59 I believe it is part of

the reason why Italian Americans, for example, ‘as well as other ethnic groups,’ as

57 A good general source for such an approach is Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder,
with Donna Gabaccia, What is Migration History?
58 Daniels and Harzig and Hoerder make some interesting comparisons for U.S

immigration figures as compared to Canada, Argentina, Brazil and Australia in What

is Migration History? 41-2 and Coming to America, 25.
59 Emphasis added. Mark Krikorian, Center for Immigration Studies, Legal

Immigration: ‘What Is to Be Done?’

http://cis.org/articles/2001/blueprints/krikorian.html

29
Danielle Battisti writes, ‘became Cold War “warriors” or “ambassadors” . . . . [having]

achieved upward social mobility, political integration, and cultural inclusion in the

U.S. by mid-century.’60 What, then, might the gratitude paradigm have to do with

the shift in American self-definition, from a ‘nation of Americans’ to the ‘nation of

immigrants’ with which we began?

As we know, immigrants between 1880 and 1920 were enticed, in their millions, by a

rapidly developing industrial economy to come to America to work in order to

improve their lives and create a future for their children. That they came, as

President Bush’s Task Force on New Americans puts it, on a ‘quest for freedom’ and

in response to ‘America’s promise of liberty and justice for all’ however is rhetoric of

hindsight that needs to be deconstructed if we are to understand twentieth century

immigration and Americanisation beyond the hype of Dreams and Democracy.61 Did

these immigrants not serve their time in hard industrial labour? Did they not also

raise families, start businesses, pay their taxes, contribute to American society,

politics, culture and consumption? Did their offspring not go to school to be made

over into law-abiding and loyal American citizens? Did parents not make sacrifices

for their children’s future, only to see them move away to different places, better

jobs and speaking another language than the one they grew up with? Did they not

send their sons and granddaughters to far-flung lands to fight America’s wars? In

other words: were immigrants not the givers, whilst America did the taking?

60 Danielle Battisti, ‘The American Committee on Italian Migration, Anti-Communism,

and Immigration Reform,’ 11-12.
61 U.S. Department for Homeland Security, ‘Building an Americanization Movement

for the 21st Century,’ 1.

30
These questions—so obvious and rhetorical as to be rarely asked—are pertinent

ones nonetheless: why should American immigrants and their descendants to the nth

generation be forever grateful for something that in other countries is seen as a fair

exchange: citizenship for contribution, incorporation for participation?

Lewis Hyde, in his book The Gift, would regard the latter as evidence of market-

economy thinking, in which the immigrant’s labour is exchanged for a living in a

straightforward transaction whose value is determined by the laws of supply and

demand. Such an exchange requires no patriotism, no singing of ‘America the

Beautiful’ at family reunions, and no pledging of allegiance at the beginning of each

school day. These, however, are commonplace practices in the United States, no less

a demonstration of ‘visceral, emotional allegiance,’ or ‘patriotic assimilation’ than

the Naturalization oath itself. Hyde contrasts the economy of the marketplace, pace

Marcel Mauss, with the very different dynamics of a gift economy, which is ‘marked

by three related obligations: the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the

obligation to reciprocate’ and it is these that, in my theoretical frame, befit the

American ‘gratitude paradigm.’ 62 The gift thus creates a bond of obligation which

necessitates what Hyde calls a ‘labour of gratitude’ that must prove the recipient

worthy of the gift, and only when the gift is finally passed on [to the next generation,

in our case] is that labour done, and the debt of gratitude discharged. Hyde’s

anthropological approach is useful here insofar as it contrasts the dynamics of a

market economy to that of an older order, which creates an almost mystical bond

62Hyde’s concern is with creativity and I am thus taking his work out of context, but
the anthropological frame fits all the same. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative
Spirit Transforms the World, xviii.
31
between giver and receiver. It makes sense of the pledge of allegiance as an

everyday ritual that echoes, in abbreviated form, the immigrant’s original

inauguration into citizenship. Extending his analysis I thus hypothesise that the

economy of the gift typifies the way the immigrant’s relation to the nation was

conceived in early twentieth century Americanisation discourse, under pressure

from Nativism and demands for 100% Americanism, giving rise to a labour of

gratitude that has bound new and old Americans to the nation through the

obligation of loyalty and patriotism, in an era when in most other areas of life the

laws of the marketplace held sway.

And in American popular memory this attitude of gratitude, forcibly instilled in the

early twentieth century Americanisation campaign and passed on to subsequent

generations, has proved remarkably persistent—even in the face of anti-Vietnam

protests or more recent examples of criticism of the U.S. by younger, educated or

more liberal Americans. The gratitude paradigm is ubiquitous; in Cynthia Weber’s I

Am an American video series it drives a number of recent immigrants who have been

unjustly treated by the Immigration and Nationality Service to proclaim their

gratitude and undying loyalty to the United States all the more ardently.63 It figures

in American genealogy shows; in the U.S. version of Who Do You Think You Are

63 In the series, documented and undocumented individuals tell of their travails with
the I.N.S. as first generation migrants. They relate their unjust treatment ‘for being a
Chinese American and a Muslim’ (James Yee) or their difficulty in obtaining
citizenship despite having served in the military for many years (Guadalupe
Denogean) yet they invariably affirm their allegiance to the United States. See for a
description of the project http://www.iamanamericanproject.com and for the video
portraits
https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/i_am_an_american_portraits_of_post_9_1
1_us_citizens
32
descendants of immigrants often have their roots traced back to an ancestor in

Europe who, it is invariably assumed, came to the United States in search of freedom

and prosperity, which—or so the narrative goes—invariably they found. Henry Louis

Gates Jr.’s Faces of America on PBS regularly features descendants of immigrants

sobbing, at Gates’ prompt, when they imagine the life they might have had if their

parents or grandparents had not come to the United States—a dismal and most

likely destitute existence, is the implication, as if a good life outside the U.S. were

unimaginable.64 And it is so because of the gratitude paradigm, in turn endemic to

that greatest and most wearisome cliché of the American Dream fulfilled—albeit, in

reality, usually only by the third, fourth or fifth generation. Again: what did and do

these immigrants to the United States have to be grateful for, exactly?

The obvious answer would appear to be that they became part of the world’s

greatest superpower, but such ostensibly common sense thinking is a-historical. First

and second generation immigrants before World War II (think: the Depression) were

not part of any superpower, and besides—as Jacobson has shown in Roots Too—

many of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren turned against American

64See, for example, the episode with film director Mike Nichols. Nichols’ parents
were refugees from Nazi Germany and in light of that particular history the
sentiment is understandable—were it not for the fact that the U.S.’s record on
accepting Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany before and during World War II is
nothing to write home about. According to the Holocaust Museum, only 137,450
Jewish refugees had settled in the U.S. by 1952. Besides, fleeing to the U.S., no less
than to other countries like Canada or Argentina, often entailed significant hardship
and discrimination for the first generation of Jewish refugees. United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘United States Policy Towards Jewish Refugees, 1941-
1952,’ Holocaust Encyclopaedia,
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007094
33
supremacy in the 1960s and 70s, protesting the ‘military-industrial complex’ and the

racial inequality of 1960s and 70s America, embracing a self-styled marginal ethnic

American identity instead.

It is my contention in this essay that the missing part in this puzzle is the obverse of

the ethnic pride which emerged in the 1970s and is still so prevalent today in many

Americans’ self-identifications as hyphenated: ethnic shame. This was the shame—

for a parent’s accent, for the public humiliation of having your mouth washed out

with soap for speaking ‘foreign’ in the playground, for one’s obviously Jewish Slovak

Polish Italian Greek name, for the ‘backward’ food eaten at home and the hand-me-

down clothes, the ‘superstition’ and old-fashioned values of home—that conditioned

the lives of American-born descendants of immigrants growing up during the

Depression, World War II and the Cold War. However much their families may have

instilled in them that they were proud Italians, Ukranians, Poles, or Jews, ‘many

ethnic Americans still felt marginalized in many ways’ in public life, as Battisti writes,

and would point to the continued restriction of immigration from their former

homelands as proof of their perceived inferiority.65 Until well into the 1960s, a

sometimes crippling, often resentment-breeding ethnic shame was the price exacted

by Americanisers for the hard-won American-ness of immigrants and their (grand)

children, an American-ness which—just as Roosevelt had stipulated—was

incompatible with ethnic legacies of the old country during the iciest decades of the

65Battisti, ‘The American Committee on Immigration,’ 12. Hartmann adds to this that
the Americanization movement resulted in a ‘deepening of inferiority complexes as
the immigrants became increasingly aware that they were considered problems by
many of their native American neighbors.’ Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize
the Immigrant, 271-2.
34
Cold War. Hardly surprising then that, when third and fourth generation immigrants

entered higher education in the 1960s and 70s and saw how Civil Rights discourse

measured American values of equality and justice against equally American practices

of segregation and inequality, they applied the same logic to themselves. Rejecting

the ethnic shame that had kept their elders down, they asserted an ethnic pride

which in one fell swoop disengaged them from the taint of white supremacy, and

identified themselves henceforth as hyphenated Americans.

Of course, these generations’ race- and class status had everything to do with this.

As the essayist Richard Rodriguez polemically argued in the early 1980s, just at the

point when they were entering the middle class by virtue of their college education,

newly ethnicised students claimed their working class origins.66 They also, now,

disavowed their whitewashed position in the racial hierarchy that it had been part of

their grandparents’ Americanisation to adopt. Because it would make them culpable

in the eyes of African Americans marching for their rights, the (great)grandchildren

of immigrants claimed, as Jacobson put it, ‘their immigrant heritage (denoting . . .

recent arrival, underdog credentials, and innocence in white supremacy’s history of

conquest and enslavement)’ thereby paradoxically re-claiming, in a way, their

‘inbetween’ status.67 And it is this, this ‘rise of the white ethnics’ whose ethnicity had

long since been eroded by Americanisation as movement and process, that evinced

the birth of the ‘nation of immigrants,’ as if in reprise of the proto-multicultural

66 See Rodriguez’s first volume of autobiographical essays, Hunger of Memory: the

Education of Richard Rodriguez.
67Jacobson, Roots Too, 21.

35
immigrant America that had briefly existed at the turn of the twentieth century.68 In

other words, the gratitude paradigm John F. Kennedy had articulated with A Nation

of Immigrants was now mobilised to turn ethnic shame into pride (‘look how far we

have come’) and a nation of Americans into one of diverse ethnicities.69 Because it

enables white liberals to celebrate their multicultural tolerance and openness (‘we

were strangers once, too’) and conservatives to honour their forebears’ sacrifice

(legitimating resentment of the ‘ungrateful’ immigrants (and African Americans) of

today) the ‘nation of immigrants’ can work wonders: it unites Americans on both

sides of the immigration debate across the chasm of racial inequality that would still

exclude millions of Black, Native, and Chican@ Americans from the national

project.70

A nation of Americanised immigrants?

Clearly, if we are to understand current American anxiety about mass immigration—

whether addressed in the form of President Obama’s deportation deferral or Bush’s

68 As if, because this third and fourth generation ethnicity was, as Herbert Gans
argued in 1979, now (re)claimed in largely symbolic form, nostalgically as a tradition
one could take pride in, but did no longer have to live. See Gans, ‘Symbolic Ethnicity:
the Future of ethnic groups and cultures in America.’
69 Immigration of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kennedy wrote,

’gave every old American a standard by which to judge how far he had come and
every new American a realization of how far he might go.’ A Nation of Immigrants,
99.
70 Jacobson cites David Horowitz in the debate about slave reparations: ‘. . . as a Jew

I owe a debt to America . . . black Americans . . . should feel the same way.’ We can
take this as an example of the gratitude paradigm in full ideological swing, counting
the legacy of slavery as one of the plethora of privileges the U.S. has bestowed on its
citizens. Jacobson, Roots Too, 335.
36
second Americanisation initiative—we should remind ourselves of its history. We

need to evaluate the success, or otherwise, of organised Americanisation efforts at

local, state and federal levels, yet since there is little recent research on the

Americanisation movement of a century ago this is not easy to do. What scholarship

there is tends to conclude that the movement was short-lived, extreme, and failed to

achieve its objectives.71 Robert A. Carlson’s nutshell summary from 1970 has hardly

been challenged since:

the extreme period of Americanization . . . lasted through 1916, continued at

a high pitch through . . .World War I, slackened briefly after the war, gave a

dying flash during the 1919-20 “Big Red Scare,” then dropped to a flicker in

the prosperity of the 1920s, with the “return to normalcy” and the

disillusionment with President Wilson’s missionary democracy.72

Carlson gives a time-line of the campaign, from Roosevelt’s 100% Americanism

speech through to the mid 1920s, and reflects the historiographical consensus that

by then the Americanisation campaign had run its course, chiefly because the

Nativists eventually got their way with the immigration restriction of the Johnson

Reed Act of 1924. The latter, after all, created the ‘immigration pause’ conservative

71 Many historians of Americanisation take their cue from Edward G. Hartmann’s The
Movement to Americanize the Immigrant of 1948, the only monograph that, as far as
I have been able to ascertain, has ever been published on the early twentieth
century movement. Consultation of primary sources such as field reports and the
handbooks which were in (mass)circulation at the time (such as Ruby M.
Boughman’s report on Americanisation in LA and Aronovici and Bogardus, cited
above) gives a more contemporaneous view of the depth and reach of the
movement on the ground and in action, however.
72 Carlson, ‘Americanization,’ 452.

37
historians Graham and Koed viewed as so fortuitous in retrospect, because it

enabled (or so they claimed) the restoration of American order and unity.73

As we have seen however, Carlson’s summary of organised Americanisation’s short

and ‘extreme’ career underestimates the impact it had on immigrants and natives

both; the same can be said of the work of other historians who, from Moynihan and

Glazer’s Beyond the Melting Pot of 1963 onwards, have been at pains to show how

ethnicity remained a significant factor in American social and cultural life. However

true this may be, my point is that the Americanisation Theodore Roosevelt and

Woodrow Wilson advocated, which—regardless of its minimalist and maximalist

manifestations—amounted in essence to Americanism, did become the hegemonic

discourse of American nationhood for most of the twentieth century.74 It reached its

heyday in the Cold War and in particular with McCarthyism, but it is worth

remembering that the ground for 1950s anti-communist imperatives had been

prepared decades earlier in the Sedition Act of 1918, which proscribed public

criticism of the government, including negative statements about the flag, the

military and the Constitution. Similarly, the Overman committee, founded in the

same year, had been charged with investigating German and then Bolshevik

activities in the United States and can therefore be seen as a forerunner of the

House Un-American Activities Committee (H.U.A.C.) of Cold War infamy.

73 The act stipulated that no more than a 2% equivalent of the number of people of a
particular national origin already living in the United States according to 1920 Census
figures would be allowed entry per year. In practice, this quota system heavily
favoured those of Irish, German, and UK origin; according to Desmond King these
countries accounted for ‘about 70 percent of the annual quota of approximately
158.000.’ King, The Liberty of Strangers, 60.
74 See for a good selection of critical perspectives on this notoriously slippery

concept Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin eds. Americanism.

38
Even if the movement to impose it was relatively short-lived and may now be

considered ‘extreme,’ Americanisation as a discourse was well-nigh inescapable in

the first two decades of the twentieth century, and it did not stop suddenly in 1924,

even if many of the free provisions of the movement did (such as night school

classes in English, or courses in American-style cooking and childcare).

In practice and as a norm to aspire to, Americanisation was a deliberate and wide-

ranging project in social engineering that had real effects on real people.75 Reaching

into their workplaces, their schools, their homes and kitchens and ultimately their

individual psyches, the conception of American identity forged and promulgated in

the Americanisation campaign, in terms of the skills, values, behaviour and political

conviction outlined above, impressed itself upon immigrant and native hearts and

minds and took hold there for most of the twentieth century—and beyond.76

Organised Americanisation of the teens and twenties then, I want to stress, is not

some footnote to immigration history, epitomised in its extremity by the Ford Motor

Company’s staging of its English School graduation ritual, in which workers of various

national origins jumped into the melting pot and came out transformed into

uniformly clad model Americans.77 Instead, as Michael Olneck has observed,

75 Many immigrant autobiographies of the period for example measured the

narrator/author’s ‘progress’ by the extent of their Americanisation; The
Americanization of Edward Bok, the Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After
of 1920, for example, epitomised this phenomenon. Like Mary Antin’s more
ambivalent The Promised Land, Bok’s book quickly became a bestseller and was used
by the Americanisation campaign as an exemplary text in civics classes.
76 We might think here of the resurgence of a rabid ‘patriotic’ nationalism and

concurrent xenophobia in the wake of 9/11, of which the Tea Party’s demand that
President Obama submit his birth certificate was a delayed and extreme expression.
77 Among the many scholars who have recounted this story are Joshua Miller in

Accented America; Susan Currell in American Culture in the 1920s, and Werner
Sollors in Beyond Ethnicity.
39
 The Americanization movement is significant as an effort to secure cultural

and ideological hegemony through configuration of the symbolic order. . . . .

The symbolic redefinition of American civic culture, not the transformation of

immigrants, is [its] important historical consequence. . .’78

These almost throwaway remarks in Olneck’s essay deserve to be repeated,

highlighted, and emphasised. For, as we have seen, the Americanisation campaign

was not a case of adapting the immigrant to an existing national identity and sense

of civic duty, but of re-defining American identity, with ‘assimilation of the foreign

element,’ in the parlance of the day, as the excuse. The Americanisation agenda of

the early twentieth century was far broader, more pervasive and more intrusive than

is generally assumed, and far more aggressively pursued in some quarters than even

the Ford factory’s theatricals would lead us to believe. It was also far more

successful, in the longer term, than historians have given it credit for; not

coincidentally, the particular brand of patriotism known as ‘the American creed’ only

entered common parlance in 1917, when William Tyler Page first articulated and

submitted it to the U.S. House of Representatives.79 America’s entry into World War

I was, of course, its cradle, but no less so the increasing intensity of organised

Americanisation efforts. For the social program to ‘educate’ immigrants in the

American way was also, in intention, effect, or both, a means of coercing them, as

78 Michael Olneck, ‘Americanization and the Education of Immigrants, 1900-1925: an

Analysis of Symbolic Action,’ 399.
79 Page’s declaration was personalised as ‘An American’s Creed’ and concluded: ‘I

therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to

obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.’ It can be found
online at http://www.ushistory.org/documents/creed.htm

40
well as the native-born, to sign up to an imperial brand of American nationalism that

would be fit for the twentieth century. After 1924 it was this ‘American creed’ that

instilled in immigrants and their descendants the gratitude paradigm that held sway

for the next four decades, and was only significantly challenged in the 1960s and 70s,

with the demand for African American Civil Rights and the social movements it

brought in its train.

And so, if we are to gauge accurately what hides under the apparently consensual

banner of the ‘nation of immigrants’ in the contemporary context of fear of

terrorism and cultural difference, then we need to look back further than JFK and

Teddy Roosevelt to the modernity that first necessitated mass immigration to the

U.S. and then sought to regiment it with forcible Americanisation. Immigration

reform, then and now, was never about ‘America living up to its promise’ or about

‘who we are’ as people who do not deport immigrants, because ‘we were strangers

once too.’ Rather, it was and is about tracing back the history of that strangeness

and that promise, and re-examining the terms and conditions with which it came.

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Biographical note

Maria Lauret is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of

Sussex, U.K. She is the author of Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America
(1994); Alice Walker (2000, 2011), Wanderwords: Language Migration in American
Literature (2014), co-author of Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (2001) and
founding editor of the journal Atlantic Studies.

45