| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 588 words from this article are provided below; about 483 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Noah Pickus. True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 257. $35.00.
For most historians, the term "Americanization" conjures up unpleasant images of early twentieth-century xenophobia, coercion, and intolerance. The effort to make Americans out of aliens in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was born of intense anxiety among the native born about the perils immigrants supposedly posed to the nation. Proponents of Americanization began the twentieth century by trying to eradicate ethnic identities and ended by barring the door to immigrants.	1
This book is a serious, sustained effort to rehabilitate the discredited idea of Americanization. Noah Pickus does not whitewash the excesses of the early twentieth-century Americanizers, but he does sympathetically reconstruct their efforts to integrate newcomers into society and to teach immigrants about the meaning of democratic citizenship. The book's outstanding chapter, titled "Nationalism in the Progressive Era," draws on archival research to resurrect the Americanizing efforts of key figures within the Bureau of Naturalization and the Bureau of Education. Many of the forgotten voices that Pickus uncovers are worth listening to.	2
For instance, Pickus introduces Fred Butler, director of the Americanization Division within the Bureau of Education. Butler pressed for "citizenship training" that would teach "basic American principles" while also stressing that these principles had evolved since the founding and would continue to evolve in the future. Indifference toward immigrants was unacceptable, but so, too, was Americanization that taught rigid conformity. Such an approach to Americanizing immigrants, Butler insisted, was "the essence of Prussianism" (p. 104) and as such was antithetical to the principles of American freedom. Those charged with Americanizing newcomers, Butler cautioned, needed to undergo "a thorough schooling ... in humility" so as to avoid patronizing or demeaning newcomers. Ultimately, Butler concluded, Americanization meant drawing newcomers and the native born into common enterprises so that "we may all feel ourselves parts of the same people and not parts of separate groups" (p. 105). Who says bureaucrats can't be idealists?	3
Pickus contrasts the contemporary debate over naturalization and citizenship (the subject of chapters seven and eight) with the debates that characterized earlier periods in American history, specifically the early twentieth century (chapters four through six) and late eighteenth century (chapters one through three). Pickus argues that whereas the contemporary debate is polarized and characterized by positions that are one-sided and lacking in nuance, participants in the earlier debates grappled creatively with the need to balance protecting the interests and rights of immigrants with the fostering of national unity and citizenship. Pickus turns to the past in hopes of enriching the contemporary debate and of bolstering the case for what he describes as a "moderate civic nationalism."	4
Moderation is undoubtedly a virtue, and much of the contemporary rhetoric about immigration is undeniably overheated and even combustible. But Pickus's didactic aims are often at cross purposes with his history. Pickus's account of the Alien, Sedition, and Naturalization Acts of 1798 and the Free White Clause of 1790 as well as the "turn to coercion" during World War I suggest that the debates over naturalization and immigration in the early twentieth and the late eighteenth centuries were not any more clear-eyed or subtle than the debates today. And if many of the participants in those earlier debates were well-intentioned and deeply thoughtful—as Pickus persuasively shows they were—that is arguably all the more reason to beware the Americanizing impulse today.	. . .

There are about 483 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.