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Reviews
Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890–1930
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By Frank Van Nuys
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University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, 2002. Illustrations. 336 pages. $35.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by Gray H. Whaley
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
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| Frank Van Nuys has written a compelling account of the rise and fall of "Americanization" — the effort to assimilate so-called new immigrants to the United States from the 1890s through the 1920s — with a regional focus on the American West. American society faced many real problems and many more that were imagined with the mass arrival of southern and eastern Europeans, East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Mexicans. Beginning with optimistic Progressive views of immigrants' potential and probable contributions to the "melting pot," the movement collapsed during the First World War and was supplanted by fear, pessimism, and an increase in racist immigration restrictions. Scholars have produced several excellent studies of this transformative era, but the trans-Mississippi West has been neglected in favor of the urban Northeast and Midwest. Van Nuys successfully argues that western distinctiveness, particularly demographic factors such as racial diversity and a largely migratory labor force and the importance of natural resources, made his study necessary. Further, this regional distinctiveness combined with westerners' embrace of and influence on Americanization programs to shape national responses to immigration, notably racialization. |
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Van Nuys provides an additional, provocative thesis that raises the value and contribution of this book to both western and Progressive-era historiographies. He argues that, although Americanization failed as a Progressive attempt to assimilate immigrants, westerners' active participation and influence in these programs succeeded in Americanizing the West. Thus, Americanization had a crucial, unintended success: The West lost much of its former provinciality and became integrated into a modern, industrial United States with its regional distinctiveness contributing to the development of the nation, for better and worse. The centralized federal bureaucracies that designed and implemented Americanization programs provided the primary sites of interaction. Western social reformers, professional educators, and businessmen, among others, worked closely with federal bureaucrats and politicians in a reciprocal relationship that changed both region and nation. Van Nuys incorporates sufficient primary source materials from these individuals and groups to make his case convincing, and he organizes his disparate sources well, constructing a clear narrative. |
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Readers who have become accustomed to the New Western History, with its emphasis on regionalism and recasting the West's significance, may be surprised by the relatively small number of subaltern voices, also a hallmark of this growing field, that Van Nuys includes. Van Nuys relies mostly on secondary literature for information on groups such as Mexican and Japanese immigrants who were the subjects of Americanization, and their part in the text is limited. For example, Van Nuys provides an analysis of anti-German sentiment during World War I, beginning with the infamous Zimmerman telegraph in 1917 that supposedly revealed a German plot to invade the Southwest by recruiting a Mexican army. While Van Nuys does an excellent job with the resulting anti-Germanism in the United States, he barely explores the reactions of and effects on Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, although their presence is one of the distinguishing demographic features of the Southwest and Anglos were suspicious of their patriotism. Still, criticisms of what the book does not include should be tempered by its success in making an already complex story clear and advancing a compelling argument. Van Nuys's book should earn a place in graduate seminars on the West, immigration, race and ethnicity, and the Progressive era. |
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