The Evaluation Of The Movement To Americanize The Immigrant In The Early 20～(th) Century

In the late 19th century and the early 20th centuries, the U.S. was in a significant social transformation period, which was transformed from traditional agricultural society to modern industrial society, and from laissez-faire capitalism to monopoly capitalism. The replacement of new and old production relation brought new development opportunities, the demand for labor force increased dramatically in U.S. market, and the life style of people also changed constantly. However, the U.S. society was in a state of turbulence, economic crisis broke out frequently, the unemployment rate was instable, the contradiction of labor force and capital was increasingly getting worse and further caused upswing of strike by workers, and various social problems emerged in endlessly. All these contradictions are interlaced, and the inner conflict of U.S. society reached unprecedented complication. Meanwhile, groups of immigrants mainly from Eastern and Southern Europe swarmed into the U.S., their arrival not only promoted the prosperity of the U.S. economy, but also inevitably brought many problems. Undoubtedly, the steadily increased immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and the U.S. social problem are not mutually exclusive. It provoked a discussion that is focused on the assimilation problem for native U.S. citizen to immigrant with regard to this phenomenon, which further led to an Americanization movement aimed at assimilating immigrants launched in the U.S. society. Taking 1914 as time dividing point, the Americanization movement was a social assimilation movement before 1914. Thereafter, due to the break out of World War I and the intervention of the federal government, this movement finally evolved into a political movement. During this period, the federal government carried out compulsory assimilation policy to immigrants, the "Red Scare" after the World War I made this policy further intensified, and pushed the native U.S. citizens' feeling of anti-foreigners and sense of national crisis to the peak. Finally, the federal government enacted a serial of immigrants limitation bills, and the upsurge of immigration started to drop, therefore the Americanization movement ceased. The history proved that it is a lasting and complicate process for the assimilation of immigrants, while the pluralism of the U.S. culture was exactly the original engine of the U.S. development. The way that altered immigrants' culture identity by means of compulsory method was wrong, and it was also not advisable.