Milton Gordon. 1964. Assimilation in American Life. New York: Oxford. University Press.
In preliminary fashion, we may say that the “Anglo-conformity” theory demanded the complete renunciation of the immigrant’s ancestral culture in favor of the behavior and values of the Anglo-Saxon core group…”Anglo-conformity” is really a broad “umbrella” term which may be used to cover a variety of viewpoints about assimilation and immigration. All have as a central assumption the desirability of maintaining English institutions (as modified by the American Revolution), the English language, and English-oriented cultural patterns as dominant and standard in American life….
[I]f the newer type of immigrant could not be excluded, at least all that could be done must be done to instill Anglo-Saxon virtues in these benighted creatures. Thus, one educator of the period, writing in 1909, could state routinely in one of his professional works: “These southern and eastern Europeans are of a very different type from the north Europeans who preceded them. Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative, and not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order, and government, their coming has served to dilute tremendously our national stock, and to corrupt our civic life.
The great bulk of these people have settled in the cities of the North Atlantic and North Central states, and the problems of proper housing and living, moral and sanitary conditions, honest and decent government, and proper education have everywhere been made more difficult by their presence. Everywhere these people tend to settle in groups or settlements, and to set up here their national manners, customs, and observances. Our task is to break up these groups or settlements, to assimilate and amalgamate these people as a part of our American race, and to implant in their children, so far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and popular government, and to awaken in them a reverence for our democratic institutions and for those things in our national life which we as a people hold to be of abiding worth.”
Anglo-conformity received its fullest expression in the so-called Americanization movement, which gripped the nation like a fever during World War I. While “Americanization” in its various stages had more than one emphasis, essentially it was a consciously articulated movement to strip the immigrant of his native culture and attachments and make him over into an American along Anglo-Saxon lines – all this to be accomplished with great rapidity. To use an image of a later day, it was an attempt at “pressure- cooking assimilation.”
From the long-range point of view, the goal of Anglo-conformity has been substantially, although not completely, achieved with regard to acculturation. It has, in the main, not been achieved or only partly been achieved with regard to the other assimilation variables. This statement requires, of course, considerable explication and qualification.
Let us consider, first, the impact of the assimilation process on the immigrants themselves – those, at least, that came in sizable numbers after the original English settlements. All such groups, with the probable exception of the British in the nineteenth century, have initially flocked together in “colonies,” urban or rural, and have developed a form of communal life oriented, in varying details, around their own burial and insurance societies, churches of their native faith with services conducted in their native language, organizations devoted to the defense of the group domestically and the memories or aspirations of the native land, recreational patterns involving native customs and tongue, and a network of personal friendships with their ethnic compatriots.
And why not? To have expected otherwise was absurd. The process of leaving one’s native land to take up permanent residence in an alien society with an alien culture is difficult enough in the most propitious of circumstances. When we consider that the American immigration experience in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries implicated, for the most part, peasants whose previous horizons rarely stretched beyond their native village, meagerly educated workmen and tradesmen, and refugees from medieval ghettoes, and that all of these immigrants were received by a society at best largely indifferent, at worst hostile to them, and concerned only with their instrumental economic skills in the context of a raw and untempered expanding capitalism, then we must recognize how fortunate it was that the immigrant groups were separately large enough to provide the warmth, familiar ways, and sense of acceptance that prevented the saga of “uprooting” from becoming a dislocating horror.
The self-contained communal life of the immigrant colonies (i.e., neighborhoods) served, then, as a kind of decompression chamber in which the newcomers could, at their own pace, make a reasonable adjustment to the new forces of a society vastly different from that which they had known in the Old World. The semi-hysterical attempt at pressure-cooking assimilation which was the Americanization crusade of World War I, while it contained worth-while instrumental elements, was fundamentally misguided in its demand for a rapid personal transformation and a draconic and abrupt detachment from the cultural patterns and memories of the homeland.
Instead of building on the positive values of the immigrant’s heritage, emphasizing the common denominator of understandings and aspirations which his native background shared with the American and assuring him of the elementary right of self-respect, it flayed his alienness with thinly veiled contempt, ignored his stabilizing ties to the groups which made him a person in the sociological sense, and widened the gap between himself and his children.
Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the Americanization movement in its formal aspects, as is generally conceded, had small success. The newcomers, in widely different ways and in varying degrees gradually made suitable progress in acculturation to the American patterns and integration into the civic (as distinguished from the area of primary group relationships) life of the society, but not in the forced march tempo demanded by “Americanization.”… In this entire process, it is worth emphasizing that the heartache, bewilderment, and tension of assimilation for the immigrant and his family could have been considerably decreased if American public opinion had been inclined and wise enough to build onto the newcomer’s heritage rather than treating it with disdain.
