The Corrosive solvent: Assimilation and the pathology of Americanization

“ American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralise every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism. ”

“ I have tried to make the note of immigration grow slowly to a dominating significance in this panorama, and with that, to make more and more evident my sense of the need of a creative assimilation, the cry for synthetic effort, lest all this great being, this splendid promise of a new world, should decay into a vast unprogressive stagnation of unhappiness and disorder. I have hinted at failures and cruelties, I have put into the accumulating details of my vision, [Pg 204] children America blights, men she crushes, fine hopes she disappoints and destroys. ”

“ To Americanize means to take the immigrant and remake him. Teaching him to write and speak the language of the country is a mere detail of the process. One cannot be awake to the industrial and social needs of the country without co-operating in every movement calculated to discourage the diversity of language, and to give to the foreigner every facility for the quick and easy mastery of English. But Americanization is a different proposition. ”

“ These three dangers are; first, the danger of making the Americanization movement so plainly a conventional uplift movement that the foreigner will resent what he might, with a more tactful approach, request; second, the danger that, by thinking of Americanization as something needed by the foreigner alone, we shall miss the opportunity of making Americanization a vast national effort of self-education in the nature and application of the principles of liberty justice, and equality of opportunity that, theoretically at least, comprise the American idea ”

“ Americans, I think you do not realize your blessings in this great land of plenty, where you have so many fine things. Even here, I often see sad faces, and hear words of discontent. Sometimes I am a little discontented myself, when I see something I want, and think I cannot, or ought not to, have it. ”

“ Our immigrants upon changing their foreign languages, customs, beliefs and ideals upon becoming "Americanized," deteriorate profoundly in moral character; deteriorate to a degree that shows itself in the criminal statistics.
It is very fortunate for the moral welfare of millions of our foreign population that the present furore for "Americanization" is destined to fail in its object. Its failure is in its own nature. The fundamental social virtues, honesty, industry, thrift, truthfulness and the rest, are the same for all societies on the same general level of development. ”

“ And with this physical degeneration we find mental and moral deterioration. The frequent expression of the poor, “We have no sickness, thank God,” is uttered by those whose sunken eyes, pale cheeks, and colorless lips speak more eloquently than words, of the unseen agencies which are sapping the fountains of health. Vice, crime, drunkenness, lust, disease, and death, here hold sway, in spite of the most powerful moral and religious influences. ”

“ With many Bohemian daily newspapers, with publishing houses printing new books each day, with preaching in the native tongue, and with societies in which Bohemian history is taught, the Czechish language will not soon disappear from the streets of Chicago; and language to the Bohemian, as, indeed, to all the Slavs, is history, religion and life.
The Bohemian immigrant comes to us burdened by rather unenviable characteristics, which his American neighbour soon discovers, and the love between them is not great. ”

“ One is likely to be apprehensive as to the future when one realizes that nearly all the children go to a parochial school, in which only a minimum of the English language is taught; that the men are all organized into patriotic and religious brotherhoods which march armed through the streets. One cannot yet determine how much these things will do to prevent Americanization and assimilation, two things which are exceedingly desirable and which these and other agencies seem to prevent. ”

“ The so-called Americanization campaign is so crude an attempt to put something over that even the unsophisticated foreigner whom it is intended to impress watches the pictures or reads the pamphlets which set forth the happy estate of the American workman, with his tongue in his cheek.90 The social groups which feel aggrieved under the present order are marking their defection by seceding from the educational system and setting up labour universities of their own. So serious is this secession that New York has passed the Lusk Law, designed to bring the independent movement under State control. ”

“ Now any educator can tell you that this very atmosphere of sympathy is of the very essence of the class room, it's a condition of education, and Americanization is an education in nationalism.
"And here is where the revolutionary idea of Americanization falls down. Are you going to prove to the immigrant in one lesson that he is all wrong? Are you going to undo with a single jerk what it has taken centuries to do? ”

“ Atlantic and the immigrant as an inferior because born on the other side, should keep his or her hands off Americanization if for no other reason, for this one: They are not themselves in any true sense Americans, lacking both the American spirit and ideals. It is such sociological tinkerers that often de-Americanize more immigrants than the others can Americanize. ”

“ Our religion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when it must be AMERICANIZED! Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in politics;—it means that a man shall have a vote because he is a man,—and shall vote for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's interference. If he chooses to vote for the Devil, that is his lookout;—perhaps he thinks the Devil is better than the other candidates ”

“ The city of Milwaukee is probably the most German city in the United States, although nothing in its business or residence portion suggests the Germany across the sea and, with sixty per cent. of its population German, it has not impressed upon the city the best things which we usually associate with that nationality. The intellectual life of its people does not receive that stimulus which one might expect; and whatever German culture there is outside of the ever-diminishing circle of the “forty-eighters” has been transplanted by Americans who have travelled and studied in the Fatherland. ”

“ At present, if we disregard sentiment, if we deny the alleged need of gross flattery whenever one writes of America for Americans, and state the bare facts of the case, they amount to this: that America, in the urgent process of individualistic industrial development, in its feverish haste to get through with its material possibilities, is importing a large portion of the peasantry of central and eastern Europe, and converting it into a practically illiterate industrial proletariat. ”

“ The overcrowded tenements and slums, the infection of long-entrenched corruption, the absence of light, fresh air, and playgrounds for the children, the unsanitary conditions and exorbitant rents, the political heelers teaching civic corruption, the saloons with their attendant temptations to vice and crime, the fraudulent naturalization—these work together upon the immigrant, for his undoing and thus to the detriment of the nation. ”

“ The immigrant moves into wretched houses and narrow streets and alleys because they are here. American citizens draw revenue from death traps and do it without a twinge of conscience; but even then these places are not slums. I venture to assert that in the real slums of American cities, the native Americans, using the word native in its true sense, outnumber these foreigners with whom we always associate the slums, with their grim twins—Poverty and Vice. ”

“ Sunk in misery, poverty, crime, filth, degradation, want; neglected by all the world; hated by those who should love; trodden down by those who should, if they did a Christian duty, lift up; living in habitations such as—but no matter, you shall go with me, by and by, to see where they live—how could they lift themselves up, how could they be industrious and improve their condition, how could they accept bibles and tracts, with any promise of good? ”

“ The rude individualist of Europe who felt the slow pressure of social atoms which precedes their welding, the beginning of socialism, is the father of America. He has little pity, little tolerance, little charity. In what States in America is there any poor law? Only an emigration agent, hungry for steamship percentages, will declare there are no poor there now. The survival of the fit is the survival of the strong; every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost might replace [Pg 4] the legend on the silver dollar and the golden eagle, without any American denying it in his heart. ”

“ The disappointed who have not sufficient fortitude, sink down in despair, having spent their little all to get here, and betake themselves to trifling in idleness and other bad practices. Many came here to get rid of so much hard work and pursue their determination so that they do no work, or very little and thus between the weak and the wicked we may easily convince how a nation of drunkards may be formed, and happy if no worse from such materials. ”

“ It only remained to define the meaning of “nation that has degenerated.” This was the rock on which they foundered; a degenerate people meant, they said, “A people which through bad government, misuse of wealth, fanaticism, or irreligion, had lost the characteristic virtues of its ancestors.” What a fall is there! Thus a people dies of its endemic diseases because it is degenerate, and is degenerate because it dies. This circular argument merely proves that the science of social anatomy is in its infancy. I quite agree that societies perish because they are degenerate, and for no other reason. ”

“ A society in decadence ‘produces too great a number of individuals unfit for the labours of common life’; [302] these individuals are precisely the degenerate; ‘they cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy,’ because they are ego-maniacs, and their stunted development has not attained to the height at which an individual reaches his moral and intellectual junction with the totality, and their ego-mania makes the degenerate necessarily anarchists, i.e., enemies of all institutions which they do not understand, and to which they cannot adapt themselves. ”

“ Here youth is ugly with loathsome diseases and the deformities which follow physical degeneracy. Here the decrepitude of old age is found at thirty. The poor themselves have a very expressive term for the slow process of decay which they suffer, viz.: “Tenant-house Rot.” ”

“ If an individual, in the pride of luxury and selfism, annihilates the fortunes of his whole generation, untouched by the laws as a criminal, he leaves behind him a race of the discontented and the seditious, who, having sunk in the scale of society, have to reascend from their degradation by industry and by humiliation ”

“ Discontent with the thing that existed was regarded as immoral, it was certainly an annoyance, and the only protest against it, the only effort against that universal tendency in all human institutions to thicken and clog, to work loosely and badly, to rust and weaken towards catastrophes, came from the young—the crude unmerciful young. ”

“ Disappointment, failure, and miasma are the certain products of such unregenerate regions, but, as is often the case with repressed and troublesome people, the evil traits of such soil result from a lack of balance, and a perversion of what is good. ”

“ Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction—perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known kinds of contemporary fiction. It habitually exhibits, not a man of delicate organization in revolt against the inexplicable tragedy of existence, but a man of low sensibilities and [Pg 40] elemental desires yielding himself gladly to his environment, and so achieving what, under a third-rate civilization, passes for success. To get on: this is the aim. To weigh and reflect, to doubt and rebel: this is the thing to be avoided. ”

“ It is not so much of fatty degeneration that we are in danger in America, but of calcareous. The fluids, moral and physical, are evaporating; surfaces are becoming encrusted, there is a deposit of flint in the veins and arteries, outlines are abnormally sharp and hard, nothing is held in solution, all is precipitated in well-defined ideas and opinions. ”