No one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater comfort and freedom. In America this belief in the future was only a projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction against the European habit of assuming that the children would, with luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income, in the same way. The elder son was fairly assured of this; war and disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others. The less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much. At various times the Jew in Russia, the liberal in Germany, the Sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless Irish, and families in a dozen other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the new world.
And this confidence—which was always justified—became as much a part of the atmosphere of America as our inherited parliamentary system, our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our passion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from all other nations.
The immigrant knew his children would be born Americans; for himself there was a more difficult and in some ways more satisfying fate: he could become an American. It was not a cant phrase; it had absolute specific meaning. The immigrant became in essence one of the people of the country.
As soon as he was admitted, he had the same civil rights as the native; within a few years he could acquire all the basic political rights; and neither the habits of the people nor the laws of the government placed anything in the way of social equality; the immigrant's life was his own to make.
This did not mean that the immigrant instantly ceased to be a Slav or Saxon or Latin any more than it meant that he ceased to be freckled or brunette. The immigrant became a part of American life because the life of America was prepared to receive him and could not, for six generations, get along without him.
America Is Various
During the years in which big business solicited immigration and organized labor attacked it, the argument about the immigrant took an unfortunate shift. The question was whether the melting pot was "working", whether immigrants could be Americanized. There were people who worried if an immigrant wore a shawl, when "old Americans" were wearing capes; (the "old Americans" wore shawls when they arrived, forty years earlier); it was "unfortunate" if new arrivals spoke with an "accent" different from the particular American speech developed at the moment. There were others who worried if an immigrant too quickly foreswore the costume or customs of his native land. Employers of unskilled labor liked to prevent superficial Americanization; sometimes immigrants were kept in company villages, deliberately isolated from earlier arrivals and native Americans; wages could be kept low so long as the newcomers remained at their own level of comfort, not at ours. Others felt the danger (foreseen by Franklin and Jefferson) of established groups, solidified by common memories, living outside the circle of common interests. The actual danger to the American system was that it wouldn't work, that immigrants coming in vast numbers would form separate bodies, associated not with America but with their homeland. (This is precisely what happened in Argentina, by the deliberate action of the German government, and it is not an invention of Hitler's. Thomas Beer reports that "in 1892 ... a German imperialist invited the Reichstag to secure the ... dismemberment of the United States by planting colonies of civilized Europeans" within our borders, colonies with their own religious leaders, speaking their own language; German leaders never could accept the American idea of change; in Hitler's mind a mystic "blood" difference makes changing of nationality impossible.)
The first World War proved that the "new immigrants", the masses from South Europe, as well as the Germans, could keep their ancient customs and be good Americans; then observers saw that their worries over "assimilation" were beside the point; because the essence of America's existence was to create a unity in which almost all variety could find a place—not to create a totality brooking no variation, demanding uniformity. In the flush of the young century William James, as typical of America as Edison or Theodore Roosevelt, looking about him, seeing an America made up of many combining into one, made our variety the base of his religious outlook. He had studied "the varieties of religious experience", and he began, experimentally, to think of a universe not necessarily totalitarian. He saw us building a country out of diverse elements and found approval in philosophy. He saw infinite change; "it would have depressed him," said a cynical and admiring friend, "if he had had to confess that any important action was finally settled"; just as it would have depressed America to admit that the important action of creating America had come to an end. James "felt the call of the future"; he believed that the future "could be far better, totally other than the past". He was living in an atmosphere of transformation, seeing men and women becoming "far better, totally other" than they had been. He looked to a better world; he helped by assuring us that we need never have one King, one ruler, one fixed and unalterable fate. He said that there was no proof of the one single Truth. He threw out all the old totalitarians, and cast his vote for a pluralistic universe. We were building it politically every day; without knowing it, James helped to fortify us against the totalitarians who were yet to come.
This was, to be sure, not Americanization. It was the far more practical thing: becoming American. Americanization was something celebrated on "days"; it implied something to be done to the foreigners. The truth was that the immigrant needed only one thing, to be allowed to experience America; then slowly, partially, but consistently, he became an American. The immigrant of 1880 did not become an American of the type of 1845; he became an American as Americans were in his time; in every generation the mutual experience of the immigrant, naturalized citizens and native born, created the America of the next generation. And in every generation, the native born and the older immigrants wept because their America and their way of becoming American had been outmoded. The process passed them by; America had to be reborn.
So long as the immigrant thought of "taking out citizen papers" and the native born was annoyed by accents, odd customs, beards and prolific parenthood, the process of becoming American was not observed, and the process of Americanization seemed obvious and relatively unimportant.