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New Films for Teaching Americanism
ON E of the problems that is receiving a great deal of attention in the United States today is that of making better citizens not only of immigrants who have come to our shores, but also of native Americans. The term Americanization has become so common that many people are beginning to tire of it, but the problem is so serious and the need of its solution so great that no thinking citizen can fail to be concerned about it.
It required a world war to awake America to the need of solidarity among its citizens. For many years we had been perfectly content to idle along assimilating, more or less imperfectly, from 55 to 110 new arrivals for each thousand of native population during each decade. These newcomers for the most part settled in our large cities in compact masses, and it was only vigorous work on the part of the public schools and civic agencies that secured unity when the crisis came. The problem of making good citizens out of so great a mass of people has never before been met in any country in the world.
No country was subjected to such a large influx of foreigners as was America during the last half of the nineteenth century. In no country was there such great need of nationalization. It made no difference to the Empire of Eussia whether its citizens were loyal and true. The police cared for that. It made but little difference to Louis XIV whether the French were good citizens. His army took care of that. But America is not ruled by czar or emperor. It is ruled by people who are chosen from the masses, and chosen wisely or not according as the people are wise or not. So the problem of nationalization in America was more important than in any other country in the world — first, because of the large proportion of foreign born immigrants, and second, because of the peculiar need of true assimilation in a democracy.
The careless way in which America treated the immigrant and the almost entire freedom that was given him caused grave concern upon the part of many of our farseeing leaders. They knew that not all of these who became citizens were Americans in heart and soul. They knew that not all of them were coming to love this country. They knew that not all were learning to understand our government and the ways in which it worked. They felt that the complete assimilation which had taken place in the earlier half of the nineteenth century was not being achieved in these later years. They therefore expected grave difficulties in the face of a national crisis, and so widespread was this belief that the German Foreign Office felt that it could count with certainty upon the loyalty to the fatherland of the great German population in our midst.
But these alarmists were mistaken. The American public school had done its work, and the unity with which our country went into the great war and the almost universal support that was given it is, as a matter of fact, one of the wonders of the world. It was almost completely unexpected.
Just because, however, we were able to weather the storm in the past does not guarantee that we can face the crisis that is now confronting us. It is one thing to fight an enemy like the Kaiser with his great armies against which we
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