Gerstle, Gary. “Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History 84:2 (1997): 524-58.

Summary
This article (historiographical essay) challenges the myth of Americanization – that Europeans came to the American to shed “the old ways” of Europe and embrace the political virtues of the American republic. This myth has four distinct claims: European immigrants wanted to shed their old world ways and become American; Americanization was quick and easy; Americanization “melted” immigrants into a single race, culture, or nation; and lastly, immigrants experience Americanization as emancipation from servitude, deference, and poverty (of the old world). He argues that scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s by Frank Thistlewaote, Rudolph J. Vecoli, and Herbert Gutman, challenged this myth: “Americanization was a coercive process forced on the newcomers, who preferred maintaining their old cultures to becoming ‘new,’ exploited men.” More recently, such scholars as Lawrence H. Fuchs and Werner Sollors, while rejecting the myth, present a more complex understanding of Americanization and recognize the varying aspirations of immigrants. Influenced by the culture/post-modern turn, these scholars presented the idea that ethnicity and other American identities were unstable and re-created. Thus, Gerstle contends, “Americanization lost the clean linearity it had possessed in earlier accounts and became a chaotic, pluralistic site of postmodern invention.” (527) However, Gerstle also argues that these scholars ignored historical contingency as part of the immigration experience. He thus concludes (unsurprisingly echoing his own work as well as that of Lizabeth Cohen) that class and gender constrained the process of invention and works by Fuchs and Hollinger fail to take into account these power hierarchies.

1880-1920 immigration (23 million)