2130_American Lit Module 1 _Americanization
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This document discusses debates around the concept of "Americanization" from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It presents quotes from Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, Albert Beveridge, José Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Jane Addams that discuss different perspectives on what it means to become American and the assimilation of immigrants. The quotes reflect both support for immigrants becoming fully assimilated into American culture as well as concerns about maintaining heritage and identity.
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2130_American Lit Module 1 _Americanization
- 2. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Americanization: 1. trans. To make American; to absorb or assimilate into American culture or society; to give (a person) a sense of being American. 2. intr. To become American; esp. to acquire an American character, form, or style. —Oxford English Dictionary “Americanization”
- 3. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.” Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier”
- 4. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier”
- 5. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “The mighty tide of immigration to our shores has brought in its train much of good and much of evil; and whether the good or the evil shall predominate depends mainly on whether these newcomers do or do not throw themselves heartily into our national life, cease to be European, and become Americans like the rest of us.” Theodore Roosevelt: American Ideals
- 6. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Theodore Roosevelt: The Strenuous Life
- 7. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “It is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon His chosen people; a history heroic with faith in our mission and our future; . . . a history of prophets who saw the consequences of evils inherited from the past and of martyrs who died to save us from them; a history divinely logical, in the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves today.” Albert Beveridge: The March of the Flag
- 8. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company José Martí: Our America
- 9. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “For in what lands can men take more pride than in our long-suffering American republics, raised up from among the silent Indian masses[?]” “The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught in clear detail and to the letter.” José Martí: Our America
- 10. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “Poor, noble chief. . . . [He] shed tears as he was descanting on the poverty of his ill-fated little community, which he told me had ‘once been powerful and happy.’ ” Helen Hunt Jackson: A Century of Dishonor
- 11. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Jane Addams: Twenty Years at Hull-House
- 12. Visit the StudySpace at: http://wwnorton.com/studyspace For more learning resources, please visit the StudySpace site for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for Debates over “Americanization”
Editor's Notes
- Discuss with your students this definition of “Americanization” from the Oxford English Dictionary. Does this definition make sense to them? Does it reflect their understanding of the process of “Americanization”? Try to help your students understand the difference between the transitive and intransitive meanings of the verb, with the former suggesting that Americanization is placed on someone (or something), and the latter suggesting that Americanization is something that one takes upon oneself. As the readings in this cluster indicate, “Americanization” could refer either to the process that an individual immigrant went through as he or she adopted American customs or to the expansion of American political power (not to mention physical national borders).
- Turner’s thesis about the frontier is twofold: (a) that the continual expansion of the westward frontier defines the national character of the United States; (b) that Americans become Americans when they experience life on the frontier. How does Turner’s twofold thesis define “Americanization” as both an individual and a collective act? If the frontier is the central, defining feature of American life, how does “Americanization” apply to people living in urban areas in the East?
- John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress is a visual representation of the same ideas behind Turner’s frontier thesis. Discuss with your students the different elements of this painting—the angel, the train and telegraph, the pioneer wagons, the Native Americans receding into the west—and how they define a frontier-based version of “Americanization.”
- Theodore Roosevelt wrote these words only a few years before taking office as the twenty-fifth president of the United States. Here, Roosevelt neatly articulates the definition of “Americanization” as it applies to European immigrants: Give up the culture of the Old World and embrace American culture. What rationale does Roosevelt give for arguing that the only way immigrants can become productive citizens is by renouncing the cultural heritage of their countries of origin? Does he make his argument in the name of democracy and equality or conformity and oppression? Or a mixture of both?
- In The Strenuous Life, Roosevelt argues, much as Frederick Jackson Turner does, that the frontier is the defining character of American life, despite the fact that Roosevelt himself was a native New Yorker (this picture of himself dressed as a “mountain man” was taken in 1885 in New York City). In what ways does The Strenuous Life serve as an attempt to transplant a frontier ethos to the urban centers of the East? Does Roosevelt succeed in his efforts? Wikimedia Commons
- What do we make of Beveridge’s intent to present nineteenth-century Americans as latter-day Israelites (God’s “chosen people”), and how does such an allusion play into Beveridge’s insistence that the United States claim its destiny as an imperial power? Along the same lines, Beveridge refers to Thomas Jefferson as “the first Imperialist of the Republic.” Do your students tend to think of Jefferson as an imperialist? Would nineteenth-century Americans have thought of him in this way? Why would Beveridge choose to rely on historical allusion as a means of furthering his claims? Are such allusions accurate depictions of the material realities they are meant to describe? What are the ethical implications of making such allusions?
- José Martí was a Cuban writer and political activist. He is considered one of the greatest Latin American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Martí spent time in the United States during the 1890s, advocating for the rights of immigrant laborers. Wikimedia Commons
- Martí, a Cuban writer and political activist, makes a number of crucial interventions to the notion of “Americanization” as presented by Turner, Roosevelt, and Beveridge. To begin, Martí defines “Our America” as the “American republics.” What is he referring to here? How does it change our conception of “America” if we broaden our definition from “The United States of America” to include all the republican nations throughout North and South America? The next point that Martí makes is to emphasize that the history of the Americas does not begin with European settlement, but stretches back to include indigenous peoples (the “silent Indian masses” he refers to in general and “the Incas” in particular). Contrast Martí’s version of the history of the Americans with Beveridge’s. Beveridge calls the United States “A greater England with a nobler destiny,” which implicitly connects U.S. history (and its future) with its British heritage. How should we think about the past and present of the United States (and its neighboring American republics) differently if we focus on indigenous history rather than European settlement?
- Like Martí, Helen Hunt Jackson wants us to think more about the place of Native Americans in the history of “Americanization.” Specifically, Jackson focuses on the broken treaties between the U.S. government and Native tribes. Read with your class the selection from Jackson’s essay that begins with the excerpt included on this slide. How does Jackson use the list of injustices endured by the Ponca as a microcosm of U.S.–Native relations in general? What is her rhetorical strategy in doing so? Is she effective? Why or why not?
- Frederick Jackson Turner and Jane Addams describe two of the different ways that the United States has grown and developed as a nation: Turner focuses primarily on geographic expansion as U.S. territorial borders moved westward across North America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Addams, in contrast, focuses on population growth as immigrants from abroad move to urban areas, such as Addams’ own city, Chicago. What are the different versions of American identity that emerge from these two different accounts? Does being an American mean the same thing if the locus of national identity is the frontier rather than the city and if the engine for national growth is territorial expansion rather than the absorption of immigrant populations? This is a 1908 image of Hull House, a settlement house for recent immigrants to the United States. Wikimedia Commons