Industrial Americanization is not, as we sometimes think, welfare work, or the introduction of a few makeshifts to keep men at work. It is the practi… - Frances Kellor

How can America be in a position to assimilate its many races and to select intelligently its future immigrants unless it has a clear understanding of each race, a clear comprehension of its ideals and achievements and of its contributive relation to its own development? We have tried the haphazard method. We concentrated races indiscriminately in cities, and the result was colonies and ghettos. We dumped them into industries, and got immigrant slums and "dagos" and "hunkies" and "kikes". We tried to shut them out, and could think of nothing better to accomplish this than a literacy test. We set the beauty-loving Italian digging ditches and put the Greek in factories, and in our negligence we wasted both.

Americanization, which is the achievement of identity of economic interest, is the granting to men of a fair share of the returns of their labor, with sufficient leisure to use these returns. It is the satisfaction of the impulse to create things for use and for beauty rather than for profit alone. It is the establishment of just relationships and equitable dealing with all men of all races, including respect and consideration. It is a share in the management of business, giving men enduring incentives and a permanent interest and voice in determining their own working conditions.

When we think of the crowded tenements, with hard asphalt pavements and never a blade of grass or a tree; of the ghettos and colonies in cities; of the unsightly industrial towns; of the labor shacks along our great construction works; of the derailed box cars; of the immigrant section across the railroad track; of the small towns without parks or playgrounds or music or books; and then turn to the villages from which most of the immigrants come friendly in their associations and restful in their relationship to the wider life outside the longing of the immigrant to return is understood. Even the crowded cities of their native countries have places where one may rest the spirit and satisfy the hunger for beauty, by the expenditure of a carfare or the effort of a short walk. The grim beauty of our cities, their vitality, their ambition and determination, and that crude joy of living through which many currents of our life flow, will not always keep the immigrants from returning even to the poverty of some of their native towns.