| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Frank Van Nuys. Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890–1930. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2002. pp. xv, 294. $35.00.
More squarely than any other recent work of scholarship, this book by Frank Van Nuys addresses the Americanization movement in its classic early twentieth century years as a great reform cause, a prospect that Edward George Hartmann did not quite capture in The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (1948), that Gerd Korman in Industrialization, Immigrants, and Americanizers: The View from Milwaukee, 1866–1921 (1967) did not presume to entertain, and that even John Higham in his magisterial Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (1955) did not pursue to closure.	1
Van Nuys places the Americanization movement in a distinctively novel context. He is the first historian to select the semi-mythic, all-American West, that other United States, extending from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, as the focus for his research. He then turns to the crucial juncture in the West's modernization, even as that vast region was being driven to confront its virtually unacknowledged and formidable ethnic diversity. As Walter Nugent has reminded us, urbanization and industrialization at the turn of the twentieth century were transforming America's once remote, indeterminate, and exploited frontier colony into "an integral part of the United States" (p. 3). In short, nation-building with its commitment to order, efficiency, centralization, and standardization was being equipped with the keys for implementing the absolute mandate to unite a divided America in the throes of a supreme national crisis. A purposively formative process and no incidental engagement, nation-building had received the blessing of Frances Kellor of Chicago and New York, whom Higham called "a presiding genius of the still amorphous movement for Americanization." Most conspicuously of all, in California Progressivism sprang up as a full-throated, innovative political culture with the Lincoln-Roosevelt-Republican League opening the way to singular triumphs for popular government. When the 1912 Progressive ticket of Theodore Roosevelt and Governor Hiram Johnson, "the party of social justice," endorsed the first party plank (drafted by Kellor and Jane Addams) ever designated to promote the welfare of the immigrant, the new West rocketed to national attention.	. . .

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