Americanization Now and Then: The “Nation of Immigrants” in the Early Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

Whereas in 1915 Theodore Roosevelt could proclaim with great conviction that there was no room in the United States for hyphenated Americans, today it is common for Americans to identify precisely as hyphenated Americans, proud of their ethnic heritage. And whilst in 2015 the debate on undocumented immigration is perceived to have reached crisis point, the US continues to project itself as a “nation of immigrants.” These reversals and contradictions in American political discourse are scrutinized here in a historical survey of the Americanization movement of a hundred years ago and the concept of the “nation of immigrants” that originated with John F. Kennedy in the Cold War sixty years later. In the analysis of primary and key historiographical sources on twentieth-century American immigration, a change from ethnic shame to ethnic pride is tracked down, revealing both the long-term effects of Americanization as a programme of social engineering and the ongoing ideological work that the “nation of immigrants” slogan performs for American national identity.