Teaching English for “A Better America”

Abstract

Pedagogical materials from the early twentieth-century Americanization movement functioned rhetorically as responses to public discourse, which was highly critical of immigrants' language practices. In teachers' journals and language textbooks, educators engaged in a dialogue with the public, seeking to establish themselves as proponents of social progress and cultural stability. They framed English instruction as a tool for a refashioning of the nation and embraced monolingualism as a unifying force within that nation. As educators sought to engage native-born Americans and immigrants alike in the creation of this ideal nation, assumptions about national identity became embedded into pedagogical practices.

Notes

¹I wish to thank RR reviewers Deborah Brandt and Maureen Daly Goggin for their insightful suggestions. Thanks also to Catherine Mazak, Laura Vorachek, and Ralph Voss for their feedback. The University of Alabama provided a Research Advisory Committee grant to support this project. Reata Strickland and Teresa Golson assisted me in preparing the illustrations.

²The campaign was both a national and a grassroots movement championed by organizations such as Frances Kellor's National Americanization Committee. Local Americanization programs were sponsored by various groups, including the YMCA, public libraries, secondary schools, public evening schools, settlement houses (such as Jane Addams's Hull House), women's clubs, and labor unions. Corporations such as Ford and Packard joined the effort, offering factory-based classes for immigrants. See Carlson for a succinct account of the movement.

³The immigrants who came to the US after the Civil War tended to be from southern and eastern Europe rather than western or northern Europe. Mostly non-English-speaking and non-Protestant, they settled in urban areas and were slow to assimilate. In Coming to America, historian Roger Daniels cautions that the distinction between old and new immigrants is an oversimplification, masking changes in the economy that led to new immigration patterns. However, the old-new distinction is useful for my purposes because the perception that new immigrants were different from former immigrants contributed to the public backlash and the challenges that urban educators faced.

⁴This oversight results in part from the disciplinary boundaries separating researchers in composition-rhetoric, TESOL, and adult education. To understand the Americanization movement is to situate it within an interdisciplinary framework that includes histories of writing instruction, adult education, immigration and literacy legislation, and the progressive education movement. While the scope of this article must be somewhat more narrow, this essay points to the need for more interdisciplinary historical scholarship that examines how English instruction in a variety of sites has served a civic function. See Berlin and Connors for discussions of the evolution of modern composition pedagogy and Paul Kei Matsuda for an account of the historical forces that created a “disciplinary divide” between mainstream and ESL writing instruction. See Anne Ruggles Gere's Intimate Practices for a discussion of the Americanization work of US clubwomen and Susan Kates and Karyn Hollis for accounts of the postsecondary rhetorical education of minority and working-class students in specific local settings. For a general history of US adult education, see Joseph Kett.

⁵See Chris Gallagher for a discussion of the influence of progressive pedagogy on composition teaching.

⁶Dennis Baron explains that the Direct Method involved teaching simple phrases that could be built into larger sentences, using everyday vocabulary so that teachers could act out the sentences in class. Proponents of the method discouraged the use of translation or the students’ first language in the classroom. See Baron for a discussion of the treatment of grammar and the birth of ESL pedagogy in the Americanization movement.

⁷In their study of nineteenth-century composition textbooks, Carr, Carr, and Schultz note that these historical materials provide “occasions for dwelling on the eccentric, the distant, the humorous, [and] the strange” (2). Indeed, as this essay's illustrations show, textbooks for immigrants exhibit all of these qualities. Some appear to be blatantly intolerant of their students, describing them as lacking in cleanliness, self-control, moral values, and parenting skills. Others are merely unrealistic in their idealized depictions of life in America.

⁸The perception that new immigrants were generally illiterate was a myth. Harvey Graff notes that about seventy-five percent of turn-of-the-century immigrants could read and write in some language although “that does not signify that all immigrants embraced the ideology of success or assimilation through education or that they shared equally in accepting the importance of education” (366).

⁹The debate over a literacy test for new immigrants appeared frequently in the mass media between 1900–1917, and it provides a fascinating look at public beliefs about literacy. In its 1911 report, the Dillingham Commission recommended that the US deny entry to illiterate immigrants. The recommendation became law in 1917 despite Wilson's veto.

¹⁰The Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the “Wobblies,” is an activist labor group founded in 1905.

¹¹One of my readers urged me to account for this embrace of multilingualism within some branch of American pedagogy. Indeed, there is a need for more work that examines the relationship between Americanization and the progressive education movement. My purpose here, however, is to show how social movements and political ideologies shaped language instruction perhaps even more so than pre-existing pedagogies. Many Americanization workers were not teachers by trade but social workers, librarians, and community volunteers. They were influenced by trends such as industrialization, urbanization, changing demographics, the birth of progressivism, the social gospel movement, and the rise of nationalism as World War I approached.

¹²The use of the term unlettered is noteworthy here as it suggests the extent to which non-English-speaking immigrants were assumed to be illiterate, an assumption that is not borne out by historical census data. Nonetheless, in public as well as pedagogical discourse, illiteracy and a lack of English were often associated.

¹³In a 1985 TESOL Quarterly piece, Elsa Auerbach and Denise Burgess argue that in today's ESL classrooms a “survival English” approach, emphasizing functional English for work and daily living, masks a hidden curriculum that encourages learners to be passive in the face of social inequities. One could argue that early twentieth-century Americanization pedagogy was a precursor to the survival English approach.

¹⁴The settlement house's community-based, interdisciplinary, politically engaged pedagogy is a powerful model for today's rhetoric-composition scholars, who have become increasingly interested in the civic functions of literacy. In their 1995 College Composition and Communication article, Wayne Campbell Peck, Linda Flower, and Lorraine Higgins point to Pittsburgh's Community Literacy Center as an example of a university extension project that serves as a “re-invention of the settlement house tradition” with its emphasis on “community literacy as action and reflection” (200). Rhetoricians such as Wendy B. Sharer have also looked to the early twentieth-century settlement house as a site that exemplified “the potential of connecting artistic and real-life experiences in order to promote political involvement” (Vote and Voice 31).

¹⁵Of course, the movement's demise is also attributed to the end of World War I and the immigration legislation of 1921 and 1924, which drastically reduced the numbers of new immigrants and the need to Americanize them.