Now that the Senate has failed once again to produce an immigration bill that the president might sign, it's time for those of us who'd rather welcome newcomers and deport xenophobes to rediscover an old and, for many progressives, scary word: “Americanization.” This is what Progressives did a century ago, and, with some fortuitous twists and turns, it worked.
They weren't all “progressives” in today's vaguely democratic-socialist, multiculturalist sense of that term. In the 1920s, members of the Progressive Party considered American national identity and what Herbert Croly called “The Promise of American LIfe” a true vessel of democracy, and some of them used commercial advertising to draw immigrants toward citizenship. Frances Kellor, head of the Progressive Party's research and publicity department, and, later, of the “Americanization” programs at the federal Bureau of Education, also had brands such as Mazola Oil and Washington Crisps Cereal place ads in the immigrant Italian Il Progresso, the Greek Atlantis, as well as Yiddish newspapers. “One million dollars… spent in selling American goods to the foreign-born in America will do more good than all the investigations [of foreign subversion] ever set on foot, simply because [immigrant newspaper] publishers will feel that America… wants them to make good, and they will return it,” she wrote.
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