Recognizing that it would take some time to develop new quotas, the bill provided as a stopgap measure for the annual admission of immigrants to be no more than 2 percent of each nationality’s proportion of the foreign-born U.S. population in 1890. The old Pennsylvania approach of accepting as Americans white Europeans regardless of their national background was repudiated. Use of the 1890 instead of the 1910 census meant a reduction in the annual Italian quota from 42,000 to about 4,000; in the Polish quota from 31,000 to 6,000; and in the Greek quota from 3,000 to 100. The commissioner of immigration reported, one year after the 1924 legislation took effect, that virtually all immigrants now “looked exactly like Americans.”19
Immigration from southern and eastern Europe now slowed to a trickle. Would the newcomers from eastern and southern Europe who had already arrived become Americans, or constitute some foreign, undigestible irritant in American society? Holding fast to the idea that American identity was based on conformity to the culture and religion of the earliest American settlers, many restrictionists saw in ethnic churches, fairs, songs, food, and dozens of other manifestations of voluntary ethnic pluralism ample proof that the newcomers were not becoming American. Madison Grant, whose book The Passing of the Great Race (1916) had issued an urgent call for restriction, wrote in 1925 that “the example of the Pennsylvania Germans [Amish] shows us that it will take centuries before the foreigners now become Americans.” And observing the community of Hamtramck, in Detroit, where he alleged a mass meeting of Polish residents demanded Polish rule, he concluded, “there certainly was no ‘melting pot’ in Hamtramck.” 20
“The myth of the melting pot has been discredited,” said Albert Johnson, a principal author of the 1924 National Origins immigration legislation.21 In 1926, Henry Pratt Fairchild in The Melting Pot Mistake saw “the native and the foreigner … growing steadily farther and farther apart, and the spheres in which they move … growing more and more distinct and irreconcilable.”22 Efforts to Americanize the newcomers, no matter how well-intentioned, were doomed to fail, argued Fairchild, because the deepest feelings of love and affection of immigrants lay understandably with their ancestral homelands.
Efforts to Americanize the Newcomers
The Americanization movement Fairchild thought futile had been hard at work even before July 4, 1915, when the first official national Americanization Day was held, with the motto, “Many Peoples, But One Nation”23 (soon to be replaced by “America First”). The leaders of the movement acted on the assumption that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and their children could be remade by the American environment, just as immigrants from the north and west of Europe, including impoverished and despised Irish Catholics, had been remade in the nineteenth century. Wilson’s secretary of the interior, Franklin Lane, whose department issued an Americanization Bulletin during 1918 and 1919, wrote that in “fashioning a new people … we are doing the unprecedented thing in saying that Slav, Teuton, Celt and the other races that make up the civilized world are capable of being blended here.”24
Education in a variety of settings was the chief strategy of the Americanizers. As early as 1907, New Jersey passed legislation to support evening classes in English and civics for the foreign-born, and a new organization called the North American Civic League for Immigrants was created “to improve the environment and the spirit of America, the knowledge of America, and the love of America and one’s fellow men into the millions gathered and gathering here from the ends of the earth.”25 A nonsectarian organization that sought support from Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, the league selected Boston, site of antiimmigrant agitation, and then the second-largest port of entry to the U.S., in which to begin its program of education in English and good citizenship.26 By the end of the first year, it had organized committees in thirty-six cities in nine states to assist in its program of assimilation; eighteen of the committees were in Massachusetts. Granted space by the federal government in the new immigration station in Boston, it enlarged its role as a coordinating organization, becoming a repository of information on immigration aid societies, immigration boarding houses, the character and availability of interpreters, and other services, and published a series of messages stressing patriotic themes for newcomers to the United States in nine foreign languages, including Yiddish, Arabic, and Finnish.
Similar to the North American Civic League was an organization developed in Chicago in 1908 called the League for the Protection of Immigrants (the Immigrants Protective League by 1910), which also sponsored programs to welcome newcomers and to educate them in American ways.27 In New York, a special gubernatorial commission, after finding evidence of considerable exploitation of and discrimination against immigrants, recommended establishment of a Bureau of Industries and Immigration to promote the effective employment of immigrants and their development as useful citizens, a recommendation that was enacted in 1910.28
Many social clubs such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor and the United Mine Workers, and business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce joined schools and other agencies of government in the Americanization movement. Industry participated, partly because it believed that the failure of immigrants to learn English resulted in an economic loss. Henry Ford set up classes in his plants and required attendance of his five thousand non-English-speaking employees. The International Harvester Company produced its own lesson plans for the non-English-speaking workers in its plants, which clearly taught more than English. The first plan read:
I hear the whistle. I must hurry.
I hear the five minute whistle.
It is time to go into the shop …
I change my clothes and get ready to work …
I work until the whistle blows to quit.
I leave my place nice and clean.
I put all my clothes in the locker.
I must go home.29
The first report issued by the Bureau of Industries and Immigration in New York in 1912 stressed the importance of ensuring liberty and justice. In 1914 the Federal Bureau of Naturalization sponsored citizenship classes throughout the public schools. Its program brought candidates for citizenship together with naturalized citizens for patriotic exercises.30 By 1919, the Bureau of Immigration reported that 2,240 communities were conducting classes for immigrants. That year, the bureau entered into an agreement with the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America, in which the Scouts were pledged to serve as guides and ushers in citizenship receptions. Many states followed the lead of the national government in setting up departments or bureaus of Americanization, and some state boards of education conducted special training courses for Americanization teachers.31
At the height of the Americanization movement in 1921, the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution published a Manual of the United States: For the Information of Immigrants and Foreigners in English and seventeen other languages, which in its first four editions was distributed in two million copies throughout the nation.32 The general tone of the booklet was welcoming: “To the men and women who come from far-off lands to seek a new home in America and become its loyal supporters as good citizens, the Daughters of the American Revolution extend a cordial welcome.” Citizenship was the key, according to the DAR. “We ask you to make yourselves worthy to become a citizen of our country, to study its history, to become acquainted with its literature, its traditions and its laws…. It is a proud honor to have American citizenship conferred upon you. It is more honorable to deserve such citizenship,” wrote a past president-general in her address of welcome. She invited the outsiders “to share in this citizenship when you have learned its duties and privileges,” promising them that “this is a land of equal opportunity for all. We offer you these equal opportunities.”33