gat

Industrial Efficiency
After the Civil War, the guaranteed customer was not a thing prudent businessmen were willing to
surrender. Could there be some different way to bring about uniformity again without another
conflict? Vast fortunes awaited those who would hasten such a jubilee. Consolidation.
Specialization. These were the magical principles President Harper was to preach forty years later
at the University of Chicago. Whatever sustained national unity was good, including war,
whatever retarded it was bad. School was an answer, but it seemed hopelessly far away in 1865.
Things were moving slowly on these appointed tracks when a gigantic mass of Latin, and then
Slavic, immigrants was summoned to the United States to labor, in the 1870s and afterwards. It
came colorfully dressed, swilling wine, hugging and kissing children, eyes full of hope. Latin
immigration would seem to represent a major setback for the realization of any systematic utopia
and its schools. But a president had been shot dead in 1865. Soon another was shot dead by a
presumed (though not actual) immigrant barely fifteen years later. Rioting followed, bloody
strikes, national dissension. It was a time tailor-made for schoolmen, an opportunity to manage
history.
The Americanization movement, which guaranteed forced schooling to its first mass clientele, was
managed from several bases; three important ones were social settlement houses, newly minted
patriotic hereditary societies, and elite private schools (which sprang up in profusion after 1880).
Madison Grant was a charter member of one of the patriotic groups, "The Society of Colonial
Wars." All compartments of the Americanization machine cooperated to rack the immigrant
family to its breaking point. But some, like settlement houses, were relatively subtle in their
effects. Here, the home culture was inadvertently denigrated through automatic daily comparison
with the settlement culture, a genteel world constructed by society ladies dedicated to serving the
poor.
Hereditary societies worked a different way: Through educational channels, lectures, rallies,
literature they broadcast a code of attitudes directed at the top of society. Mainline Protestant
churches were next to climb on the Americanization bandwagon, and the "home-missions"
program became a principal gathering station for adoptable foreign children. By 1907 the YMCA
was heavily into this work, but the still embryonic undertaking of leveling the masses lacked
leadership and direction.
Such would eventually be supplied by Frances Kellor, a muckraker and a tremendous force for
conformity in government schooling. Kellor, the official presiding genius of the American-ization
movement, came out of an unlikely quarter, yet in retrospect an entirely natural one. She was the
daughter of a washerwoman, informally adopted out of poverty by two wealthy local spinsters,
who eventually sent her to Cornell where she took a law degree through their generosity. After a
turn toward sociology at the University of Chicago, Kellor mastered Harper’s twin lessons of
specialization and consolidation and set out boldly to reform America’s immigrant families.
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