Americanization During the Late 19th Century and Early 20th Century

Between 1880 and 1930, despite heavy restrictions on immigration, millions of people from Eastern and Southern Europe emigrated to the United States. As they settled into the urban cities, native-born and second-generation American citizens saw these immigrants and their foreign values and behaviors as a threat and thus sought to “Americanize” and assimilate them into the mainstream American society. However, Americanization in the eyes of the native-born was different from how immigrants understood Americanization. There were formal institutions for learning English and the American government system but the new immigrants learned just as much about the American way of life on the factory floor from their co-workers, on the streets from gangs, and at radical political party rallies from the Socialist recruiters. The three major factors in the Americanization process were the influence of Irish American culture, the working class culture, and the “support” for a melting pot society. The Irish were unavoidable in the urban cities of the Northeast and Midwest. By 1920, ninety percent of the urban population was Irish and they were dispersed throughout the inner city and the city limits (“The Irish and the ‘Americanization’” 4). If a new immigrant moved to New York or Chicago, their neighbors were most likely Irish. For many new immigrants, whose lives remained within the city limits where there was work, the Irish people were American people and if they were to learn the American way of life, it was the Irish and their way of life that they observed (“The Irish and the ‘Americanization’” 4). Irish American women played a vital role in the process of Americanization as public school teachers, as labor organizers and social reform activists, as marriage partners with men from various ethnic backgrounds, and as spouses and mothers within the Irish American community helping to produce notions of citizenship (“The Irish and the ‘Americanization’” 6).
Irish street