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, wit… - Frances Kellor

America is today without the necessary information upon which to proceed intelligently. Much of the propaganda essential to winning the war has made the ground look like a battlefield after a tank has passed over it ploughed deep but unfit for culture for some time to come. Nowhere is there a clear authoritative statement of the contribution of the various races as such to America. Nowhere is there, an analysis of what they have brought or can bring, and of all that material which we have not used. Nowhere is there information as to what they take or of what they want most from America. Tons of literature are printed and sent out daily by all kinds of agencies, with seldom a consultation with the foreigner as to how it fits the needs of his race. We ignore in most racial meetings the knowledge which is there outlined, and violate very nearly every sound principle of race psychology. We get as a result the minds of the newcomers but not their hearts; their respectful attention but not their conversion. We get their cash contributions for American war activities and charities, but we do not succeed in creating in them the desire to stay here permanently.

For this reason neighborhoods should be American and a combination of the best of all the races that live in them. It is here that the school can become the conference center and the council chamber. It is the one American institution to be found in every town free, neutral, and powerful. During the daytime it has the children who can interpret it; during the evening it may have the parents who need it for their community expression. From the schoolhouse come the beliefs that living conditions should be decent, that laws should be enforced for all alike, that there should be no racial discriminations. From participation in neighborhood activities and in governing their own communities, the immigrant will grow into the larger responsibilities of State and nation. In order that American political ideals should be understood by him, they must be lived within his consciousness, in the small radius of his neighborhood, and in that way he must see exemplified whatever American literature, art, music, and science have to give.

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.