Americanizing Native
Americans and "Foreign Aliens"
In his
correspondence, Benjamin Franklin tells a quaint story about how the Iroquois
came to place little value on Western education. He relates that at a
conference with representatives of the Six Nations, Pennsylvania authorities
offered to provide college scholarships to Iroquois youths. The Indians
considered this proposal and recalled that they had accepted just such an offer
some years back, but when the young scholars returned from their “education”
among the English, their elders said they proved “absolutely good for
nothing”—not for killing deer, catching beaver or surprising an enemy. In
refusing the colonists' offer, however, the Indians wanted the English to know
that they appreciated the sentiment behind the invitation. And so, as a gesture
of goodwill, they proposed that if the colonists would “send a dozen or two of
their children to the Iroquois, the Great Council would take care of their
education, bring them up in what was really the best manner and make men of
them.”
Needless
to say, the colonists did not accept the Indians' offer. A hundred years later,
Pennsylvania became home to the Carlisle Indian School, which operated from
1879 through 1918 and sought to remove every vestige of Indian culture from its
students under the profoundly ironic mandate to “Americanize” its Native
American students.
At roughly the same time, the United
States was experiencing a record number of immigrant arrivals from Europe, an
influx remembered today as the “Great Wave." This influx hit its peak
around World War I (1914-1918), which ushered in the “100% Americanization”
movement, the purpose of which was to fully assimilate the "foreign
aliens" from southern and eastern Europe. The most extreme proponents of
this philosophy believed that the process of becoming American was a zero-sum
game, newcomers had to abjure every aspect of their old selves--language, culture,
even demeanor--before they could assume American identity, and that they could
only do so by wholeheartedly embracing American habits and values.
It
would be a mistake to think that most Americanizers did not want the immigrant.
Of course, there were many who did oppose immigration, but it was not the
Americanizers. Those who sought to stop immigration, like the blueblood members
of the Immigration Restriction League, believed the alien was constitutionally
inferior and incapable of change. Teaching the Jewish peddler to speak English
or the Italian laborer to give up what Americans considered his revolting food
was like teaching a mongrel dog tricks. The mutt might learn to roll over, but
it would never be a greyhound.
The
most prominent restrictionists traced their ancestry to New England, notably to
Puritans like Cotton Mather, who believed the Indians were devils incarnate and
deserved extinction. The same attitude prevailed among the Paxton Boys, a gang
of Pennsylvanian frontiersmen who slaughtered nearly a hundred unarmed Indians
less than fifty miles from Carlisle in 1764. That their victims were
"praying Indians," that is, Indians who had embraced Christianity,
meant little to the killers. They were still Indians.
As
ethnocentric and condescending as were the Americanizers of the early 20th
century, they at least recognized shared humanity with the Native American
students at Carlisle and the new immigrants pouring in from steerage at New
York Harbor.
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