The arrival of immigrants on America's shores has always posed a
singular problem: once they are here, how are these diverse peoples
to be transformed into Americans? The Americanization movement of
the 1910s and 1920s addressed this challenge by seeking to train
immigrants for citizenship, representing a key element of the
Progressives' "search for order" in a modernizing America. Frank
Van Nuys examines for the first time how this movement, in an
effort to help integrate an unruly West into the emerging national
system, was forced to reconcile the myth of rugged individualism
with the demands of a planned society.
In an era convulsed by world war and socialist revolution, the
Americanization movement was especially concerned about the
susceptibility of immigrants to un-American propaganda and union
agitation. As Van Nuys convincingly demonstrates, this applied as
much to immigrants in the urbanizing and industrializing West as it
did to those occupying the ethnic enclaves of cities in the
East.
In Americanizing the West he tells how hundreds of bureaucrats,
educators, employers, and reformers participated in this movement
by developing adult immigrant education programs -- and how these
attempts contributed more toward bureaucratizing the West than it
did to turning immigrants into productive citizens. He deftly ties
this history to broader national developments and shows how
Westerners brought distinctive approaches to Americanization to
accommodate and preserve their own sense of history and
identity.
Van Nuys shows that, although racism and social control agendas
permeated Americanization efforts in the West, Americanizers
sustained their faith in education as a powerfulforce in
transforming immigrants into productive citizens. He also shows how
some westerners -- especially in California -- believed they faced
a "racial frontier" unlike other parts of the country in light of
the influx of Hispanics and Asians, so that westerners became major
players in the crafting of not only American identity but also
immigration policies.
The mystique of the white pioneer past still maintains a
powerful hold on ideas of American identity, and we still deal with
many of these issues through laws and propositions targeting
immigrants and alien workers. Americanizing the West makes a clear
case for regional distinctiveness in this citizenship program and
puts current headlines in perspective by showing how it helped make
the West what it is today
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