CHAPTER XI

ASSIMILATION

I. INTRODUCTION

1. Popular Conceptions of Assimilation

The concept assimilation, so far as it has been defined in popular usage, gets its meaning from its relation to the problem of immigration. The more concrete and familiar terms are the abstract noun Americanization and the verbs Americanize, Anglicize, Germanize, and the like. All of these words are intended to describe the process by which the culture of a community or a country is transmitted to an adopted citizen. Negatively, assimilation is a process of denationalization, and this is, in fact, the form it has taken in Europe.

The difference between Europe and America, in relation to the problem of cultures, is that in Europe difficulties have arisen from the forcible incorporation of minor cultural groups, i.e., nationalities, within the limits of a larger political unit, i.e., an empire. In America the problem has arisen from the voluntary migration to this country of peoples who have abandoned the political allegiances of the old country and are gradually acquiring the culture of the new. In both cases the problem has its source in an effort to establish and maintain a political order in a community that has no common culture. Fundamentally the problem of maintaining a democratic form of government in a southern village composed of whites and blacks, and the problem of maintaining an international order based on anything but force are the same. The ultimate basis of the existing moral and political order is still kinship and culture. Where neither exist, a political order, not based on caste or class, is at least problematic.

Assimilation, as popularly conceived in the United States, was expressed symbolically some years ago in Zangwill’s dramatic parable of The Melting Pot. William Jennings Bryan has given oratorical expression to the faith in the beneficent outcome of the process: “Great has been the Greek, the Latin, the Slav, the Celt, the Teuton, and the Saxon; but greater than any of these is the American, who combines the virtues of them all.”

Assimilation, as thus conceived, is a natural and unassisted process, and practice, if not policy, has been in accord with this laissez faire conception, which the outcome has apparently justified. In the United States, at any rate, the tempo of assimilation has been more rapid than elsewhere.

Closely akin to this “magic crucible” notion of assimilation is the theory of “like-mindedness.” This idea was partly a product of Professor Giddings’ theory of sociology, partly an outcome of the popular notion that similarities and homogeneity are identical with unity. The ideal of assimilation was conceived to be that of feeling, thinking, and acting alike. Assimilation and socialization have both been described in these terms by contemporary sociologists.

Another and a different notion of assimilation or Americanization is based on the conviction that the immigrant has contributed in the past and may be expected in the future to contribute something of his own in temperament, culture, and philosophy of life to the future American civilization. This conception had its origin among the immigrants themselves, and has been formulated and interpreted by persons who are, like residents in social settlements, in close contact with them. This recognition of the diversity in the elements entering into the cultural process is not, of course, inconsistent with the expectation of an ultimate homogeneity of the product. It has called attention, at any rate, to the fact that the process of assimilation is concerned with differences quite as much as with likenesses.

2. The Sociology of Assimilation

Accommodation has been described as a process of adjustment, that is, an organization of social relations and attitudes to prevent or to reduce conflict, to control competition, and to maintain a basis of security in the social order for persons and groups of divergent interests and types to carry on together their varied life-activities. Accommodation in the sense of the composition of conflict is invariably the goal of the political process.

Assimilation is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experience and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life. In so far as assimilation denotes this sharing of tradition, this intimate participation in common experiences, assimilation is central in the historical and cultural processes.

This distinction between accommodation and assimilation, with reference to their rôle in society, explains certain significant formal differences between the two processes. An accommodation of a conflict, or an accommodation to a new situation, may take place with rapidity. The more intimate and subtle changes involved in assimilation are more gradual. The changes that occur in accommodation are frequently not only sudden but revolutionary, as in the mutation of attitudes in conversion. The modifications of attitudes in the process of assimilation are not only gradual, but moderate, even if they appear considerable in their accumulation over a long period of time. If mutation is the symbol for accommodation, growth is the metaphor for assimilation. In accommodation the person or the group is generally, though not always, highly conscious of the occasion, as in the peace treaty that ends the war, in the arbitration of an industrial controversy, in the adjustment of the person to the formal requirements of life in a new social world. In assimilation the process is typically unconscious; the person is incorporated into the common life of the group before he is aware and with little conception of the course of events which brought this incorporation about.

James has described the way in which the attitude of the person changes toward certain subjects, woman’s suffrage, for example, not as the result of conscious reflection, but as the outcome of the unreflective responses to a series of new experiences. The intimate associations of the family and of the play group, participation in the ceremonies of religious worship and in the celebrations of national holidays, all these activities transmit to the immigrant and to the alien a store of memories and sentiments common to the native-born, and these memories are the basis of all that is peculiar and sacred in our cultural life.

As social contact initiates interaction, assimilation is its final perfect product. The nature of the social contacts is decisive in the process. Assimilation naturally takes place most rapidly where contacts are primary, that is, where they are the most intimate and intense, as in the area of touch relationship, in the family circle and in intimate congenial groups. Secondary contacts facilitate accommodations, but do not greatly promote assimilation. The contacts here are external and too remote.

A common language is indispensable for the most intimate association of the members of the group; its absence is an insurmountable barrier to assimilation. The phenomenon “that every group has its own language,” its peculiar “universe of discourse,” and its cultural symbols is evidence of the interrelation between communication and assimilation.

Through the mechanisms of imitation and suggestion, communication effects a gradual and unconscious modification of the attitudes and sentiments of the members of the group. The unity thus achieved is not necessarily or even normally like-mindedness; it is rather a unity of experience and of orientation, out of which may develop a community of purpose and action.

3. Classification of the Materials

The selections in the materials on assimilation have been arranged under three heads: (a) biological aspects of assimilation; (b) the conflict and fusion of cultures; and (c) Americanization as a problem in assimilation. The readings proceed from an analysis of the nature of assimilation to a survey of its processes, as they have manifested themselves historically, and finally to a consideration of the problems of Americanization.

a) Biological aspects of assimilation.—Assimilation is to be distinguished from amalgamation, with which it is, however, closely related. Amalgamation is a biological process, the fusion of races by interbreeding and intermarriage. Assimilation, on the other hand, is limited to the fusion of cultures. Miscegenation, or the mingling of races, is a universal phenomenon among the historical races. There are no races, in other words, that do not interbreed. Acculturation, or the transmission of cultural elements from one social group to another, however, has invariably taken place on a larger scale and over a wider area than miscegenation.

Amalgamation, while it is limited to the crossing of racial traits through intermarriage, naturally promotes assimilation or the cross-fertilization of social heritages. The offspring of a “mixed” marriage not only biologically inherits physical and temperamental traits from both parents, but also acquires in the nurture of family life the attitudes, sentiments, and memories of both father and mother. Thus amalgamation of races insures the conditions of primary social contacts most favorable for assimilation.

b) The conflict and fusion of cultures.—The survey of the process of what the ethnologists call acculturation, as it is exhibited historically in the conflicts and fusions of cultures, indicates the wide range of the phenomena in this field.

(1) Social contact, even when slight or indirect, is sufficient for the transmission from one cultural group to another of the material elements of civilization. Stimulants and firearms spread rapidly upon the objective demonstration of their effects. The potato, a native of America, has preceded the white explorer in its penetration into many areas of Africa.

(2) The changes in languages in the course of the contacts, conflicts, and fusions of races and nationalities afford data for a more adequate description of the process of assimilation. Under what conditions does a ruling group impose its speech upon the masses, or finally capitulate to the vulgar tongue of the common people? In modern times the printing-press, the book, and the newspaper have tended to fix languages. The press has made feasible language revivals in connection with national movements on a scale impossible in earlier periods.

The emphasis placed upon language as a medium of cultural transmission rests upon a sound principle. For the idioms, particularly of a spoken language, probably reflect more accurately the historical experiences of a people than history itself. The basis of unity among most historical peoples is linguistic rather than racial. The Latin peoples are a convenient example of this fact. The experiment now in progress in the Philippine Islands is significant in this connection. To what extent will the national and cultural development of those islands be determined by native temperament, by Spanish speech and tradition, or by the English language and the American school system?

(3) Rivers in his study of Melanesian and Hawaiian cultures was impressed by the persistence of fundamental elements of the social structure. The basic patterns of family and social life remained practically unmodified despite profound transformations in technique, in language, and in religion. Evidently many material devices and formal expressions of an alien society can be adopted without significant changes in the native culture.

The question, however, may be raised whether or not the complete adoption of occidental science and organization of industry would not produce far-reaching changes in social organization. The trend of economic, social, and cultural changes in Japan will throw light on this question. Even if revolutionary social changes actually occur, the point may well be made that they will be the outcome of the new economic system, and therefore not effects of acculturation.

(4) The rapidity and completeness of assimilation depends directly upon the intimacy of social contact. By a curious paradox, slavery, and particularly household slavery, has probably been, aside from intermarriage, the most efficient device for promoting assimilation.

Adoption and initiation among primitive peoples provided a ceremonial method for inducting aliens and strangers into the group, the significance of which can only be understood after a more adequate study of ceremonial in general.

c) Americanization as a problem of assimilation.—Any consideration of policies, programs, and methods of Americanization gain perspective when related to the sociology of assimilation. The “Study of Methods of Americanization,” of the Carnegie Corporation, defines Americanization as “the participation of the immigrant in the life of the community in which he lives.” From this standpoint participation is both the medium and the goal of assimilation. Participation of the immigrant in American life in any area of life prepares him for participation in every other. What the immigrant and the alien need most is an opportunity for participation. Of first importance, of course, is the language. In addition he needs to know how to use our institutions for his own benefit and protection. But participation, to be real, must be spontaneous and intelligent, and that means, in the long run, that the immigrant’s life in America must be related to the life he already knows. Not by the suppression of old memories, but by their incorporation in his new life is assimilation achieved. The failure of conscious, coercive policies of denationalization in Europe and the great success of the early, passive phase of Americanization in this country afford in this connection an impressive contrast. It follows that assimilation cannot be promoted directly, but only indirectly, that is, by supplying the conditions that make for participation.

There is no process but life itself that can effectually wipe out the immigrant’s memory of his past. The inclusion of the immigrant in our common life may perhaps be best reached, therefore, in co-operation that looks not so much to the past as to the future. The second generation of the immigrant may share fully in our memories, but practically all that we can ask of the foreign-born is participation in our ideals, our wishes, and our common enterprises.

II. MATERIALS

A. BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF ASSIMILATION

1. Assimilation and Amalgamation[241]

Writers on historical and social science are just beginning to turn their attention to the large subject of social assimilation. That the subject has until recently received little attention is readily seen by a mere glance at the works of our leading sociologists and historians. The word itself rarely appears; and when the theme is touched upon, no clearly defined, stable idea seems to exist, even in the mind of the author. Thus Giddings at one time identifies assimilation with “reciprocal accommodation.” In another place he defines it as “the process of growing alike,” and once again he tells us it is the method by which foreigners in the United States society become Americans. Nor are M. Novicow’s ideas on the subject perfectly lucid, for he considers assimilation sometimes as a process, at other times as an art, and again as a result. He makes the term “denationalization” coextensive with our “assimilation,” and says that the ensemble of measures which a government takes for inducing a population to abandon one type of culture for another is denationalization. Denationalization by the authority of the state carries with it a certain amount of coercion; it is always accompanied by a measure of violence. In the next sentence, however, we are told that the word “denationalization” may also be used for the non-coercive process by which one nationality is assimilated with another. M. Novicow further speaks of the art of assimilation, and he tells us that the result of the intellectual struggle between races living under the same government, whether free or forced, is in every case assimilation. Burgess also takes a narrow view of the subject, restricting the operation of assimilating forces to the present and considering assimilation a result of modern political union. He says: “In modern times the political union of different races under the leadership of the dominant race results in assimilation.”

From one point of view assimilation is a process with its active and passive elements; from another it is a result. In this discussion, however, assimilation is considered as a process due to prolonged contact. It may, perhaps, be defined as that process of adjustment or accommodation which occurs between the members of two different races, if their contact is prolonged and if the necessary psychic conditions are present. The result is group homogeneity to a greater or less degree. Figuratively speaking, it is the process by which the aggregation of peoples is changed from a mere mechanical mixture into a chemical compound.

The process of assimilation is of a psychological rather than of a biological nature, and refers to the growing alike in character, thoughts, and institutions, rather than to the blood-mingling brought about by intermarriage. The intellectual results of the process of assimilation are far more lasting than the physiological. Thus in France today, though nineteen-twentieths of the blood is that of the aboriginal races, the language is directly derived from that imposed by the Romans in their conquest of Gaul. Intermarriage, the inevitable result to a greater or less extent of race contact, plays its part in the process of assimilation, but mere mixture of races will not cause assimilation. Moreover, assimilation is possible, partially at least, without intermarriage. Instances of this are furnished by the partial assimilation of the Negro and the Indian of the United States. Thinkers are beginning to doubt the great importance once attributed to intermarriage as a factor in civilization. Says Mayo-Smith, “It is not in unity of blood but in unity of institutions and social habits and ideals that we are to seek that which we call nationality,” and nationality is the result of assimilation.

2. The Instinctive Basis of Assimilation[242]

It is a striking fact that among animals there are some whose conduct can be generalized very readily in the categories of self-preservation, nutrition, and sex, while there are others whose conduct cannot be thus summarized. The behavior of the tiger and the cat is simple and easily comprehensible, whereas that of the dog with his conscience, his humor, his terror of loneliness, his capacity for devotion to a brutal master, or that of the bee with her selfless devotion to the hive, furnishes phenomena which no sophistry can assimilate without the aid of a fourth instinct. But little examination will show that the animals whose conduct it is difficult to generalize under the three primitive instinctive categories are gregarious. If, then, it can be shown that gregariousness is of a biological significance approaching in importance that of the other instincts we may expect to find in it the source of these anomalies of conduct, and of the complexity of human behavior.

Gregariousness seems frequently to be regarded as a somewhat superficial character, scarcely deserving, as it were, the name of an instinct, advantageous, it is true, but not of fundamental importance or likely to be deeply ingrained in the inheritance of the species. This attitude may be due to the fact that among mammals, at any rate, the appearance of gregariousness has not been accompanied by any very gross physical changes which are obviously associated with it.

To whatever it may be due, this method of regarding the social habit is, in the opinion of the present writer, not justified by the facts, and prevents the attainment of conclusions of considerable fruitfulness.

A study of bees and ants shows at once how fundamental the importance of gregariousness may become. The individual in such communities is completely incapable, often physically, of existing apart from the community, and this fact at once gives rise to the suspicion that, even in communities less closely knit than those of the ant and the bee, the individual may in fact be more dependent on communal life than appears at first sight.

Another very striking piece of general evidence of the significance of gregariousness as no mere late acquirement is the remarkable coincidence of its occurrence with that of exceptional grades of intelligence or the possibility of very complex reactions to environment. It can scarcely be regarded as an unmeaning accident that the dog, the horse, the ape, the elephant, and man are all social animals. The instances of the bee and the ant are perhaps the most amazing. Here the advantages of gregariousness seem actually to outweigh the most prodigious differences of structure, and we find a condition which is often thought of as a mere habit, capable of enabling the insect nervous system to compete in the complexity of its power of adaptation with that of the higher vertebrates.

From the biological standpoint the probability of gregariousness being a primitive and fundamental quality in man seems to be considerable. It would appear to have the effect of enlarging the advantages of variation. Varieties not immediately favorable, varieties departing widely from the standard, varieties even unfavorable to the individual, may be supposed to be given by it a chance of survival. Now the course of the development of man seems to present many features incompatible with its having proceeded among isolated individuals exposed to the unmodified action of natural selection. Changes so serious as the assumption of the upright posture, the reduction in the jaw and its musculature, the reduction in the acuity of smell and hearing, demand, if the species is to survive, either a delicacy of adjustment with the compensatingly developing intelligence so minute as to be almost inconceivable, or the existence of some kind of protective enclosure, however imperfect, in which the varying individuals may be sheltered from the direct influence of natural selection. The existence of such a mechanism would compensate losses of physical strength in the individual by the greatly increased strength of the larger unit, of the unit, that is to say, upon which natural selection still acts unmodified.

The cardinal quality of the herd is homogeneity. It is clear that the great advantage of the social habit is to enable large numbers to act as one, whereby in the case of the hunting gregarious animal strength in pursuit and attack is at once increased beyond that of the creatures preyed upon, and in protective socialism the sensitiveness of the new unit to alarms is greatly in excess of that of the individual member of the flock.

To secure these advantages of homogeneity, it is evident that the members of the herd must possess sensitiveness to the behavior of their fellows. The individual isolated will be of no meaning; the individual as part of the herd will be capable of transmitting the most potent impulses. Each member of the flock tending to follow his neighbor, and in turn to be followed, each is in some sense capable of leadership; but no lead will be followed that departs widely from normal behavior. A lead will only be followed from its resemblance to the normal. If the leader go so far ahead as definitely to cease to be in the herd, he will necessarily be ignored.

The original in conduct, that is to say, resistiveness to the voice of the herd, will be suppressed by natural selection; the wolf which does not follow the impulses of the herd will be starved; the sheep which does not respond to the flock will be eaten.

Again, not only will the individual be responsive to impulses coming from the herd but he will treat the herd as his normal environment. The impulse to be in and always to remain with the herd will have the strongest instinctive weight. Anything which tends to separate him from his fellows, as soon as it becomes perceptible as such, will be strongly resisted.

So far we have regarded the gregarious animal objectively. Let us now try to estimate the mental aspects of these impulses. Suppose a species in possession of precisely the instinctive endowments which we have been considering to be also self-conscious, and let us ask what will be the forms under which these phenomena will present themselves in its mind. In the first place, it is quite evident that impulses derived from herd feeling will enter the mind with the value of instincts—they will present themselves as “a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort needing no proof but their own evidence.” They will not, however, it is important to remember, necessarily always give this quality to the same specific acts, but will show this great distinguishing characteristic that they may give to any opinion whatever the characters of instinctive belief, making it into an “a priori synthesis”; so that we shall expect to find acts which it would be absurd to look upon as the results of specific instincts carried out with all the enthusiasm of instinct and displaying all the marks of instinctive behavior.

In interpreting into mental terms the consequences of gregariousness we may conveniently begin with the simplest. The conscious individual will feel an unanalysable primary sense of comfort in the actual presence of his fellows and a similar sense of discomfort in their absence. It will be obvious truth to him that it is not good for man to be alone. Loneliness will be a real terror insurmountable by reason.

Again, certain conditions will become secondarily associated with presence with, or absence from, the herd. For example, take the sensations of heat and cold. The latter is prevented in gregarious animals by close crowding and experienced in the reverse condition; hence it comes to be connected in the mind with separation and so acquires altogether unreasonable associations of harmfulness. Similarly, the sensation of warmth is associated with feelings of the secure and salutary.

Slightly more complex manifestations of the same tendency to homogeneity are seen in the desire for identification with the herd in matters of opinion. Here we find the biological explanation of the ineradicable impulse mankind has always displayed toward segregation into classes. Each one of us in his opinions, and his conduct, in matters of dress, amusement, religion, and politics, is compelled to obtain the support of a class, of a herd within the herd. The most eccentric in opinion or conduct is, we may be sure, supported by the agreement of a class, the smallness of which accounts for his apparent eccentricity, and the preciousness of which accounts for his fortitude in defying general opinion. Again, anything which tends to emphasize difference from the herd is unpleasant. In the individual mind there will be an analysable dislike of the novel in action or thought. It will be “wrong,” “wicked,” “foolish,” “undesirable,” or, as we say, “bad form,” according to varying circumstances which we can already to some extent define.

Manifestations relatively more simple are shown in the dislike of being conspicuous, in shyness, and in stage fright. It is, however, sensitiveness to the behavior of the herd which has the most important effects upon the structure of the mind of the gregarious animal. This sensitiveness is, as Sidis has clearly seen, closely associated with the suggestibility of the gregarious animal, and therefore with that of man. The effect of it will clearly be to make acceptable those suggestions which come from the herd, and those only. It is of especial importance to note that this suggestibility is not general, and that it is only herd suggestions which are rendered acceptable by the action of instinct.

B. THE CONFLICT AND FUSION OF CULTURES

1. The Analysis of Blended Cultures[243]

In the analysis of any culture, a difficulty which soon meets the investigator is that he has to determine what is due to mere contact and what is due to intimate intermixture, such intermixture, for instance, as is produced by the permanent blending of one people with another, either through warlike invasion or peaceful settlement. The fundamental weakness of most of the attempts hitherto made to analyze existing cultures is that they have had their starting-point in the study of material objects, and the reason for this is obvious. Owing to the fact that material objects can be collected by anyone and subjected at leisure to prolonged study by experts, our knowledge of the distribution of material objects and of the technique of their manufacture has very far outrun that of the less material elements. What I wish now to point out is that in distinguishing between the effects of mere contact and the intermixture of peoples, material objects are the least trustworthy of all the constituents of culture. Thus in Melanesia we have the clearest evidence that material objects and processes can spread by mere contact, without any true admixture of peoples and without influence on other features of the culture. While the distribution of material objects is of the utmost importance in suggesting at the outset community of culture, and while it is of equal importance in the final process of determining points of contact and in filling in the details of the mixture of cultures, it is the least satisfactory guide to the actual blending of peoples which must form the solid foundation of the ethnological analysis of culture. The case for the value of magico-religious institutions is not much stronger. Here, again, in Melanesia there is little doubt that whole cults can pass from one people to another without any real intermixture of peoples. I do not wish to imply that such religious institutions can pass from people to people with the ease of material objects, but to point out that there is evidence that they can and do so pass with very little, if any, admixture of peoples or of the deeper and more fundamental elements of the culture. Much more important is language; and if you will think over the actual conditions when one people either visit or settle among another, this greater importance will be obvious. Let us imagine a party of Melanesians visiting a Polynesian island, staying there for a few weeks, and then returning home (and here I am not taking a fictitious occurrence, but one which really happens). We can readily understand that the visitors may take with them their betel-mixture, and thereby introduce the custom of betel-chewing into a new home; we can readily understand that they may introduce an ornament to be worn in the nose and another to be worn on the chest; that tales which they tell will be remembered, and dances they perform will be imitated. A few Milanesian words may pass into the language of the Polynesian island, especially as names for the objects or processes which the strangers have introduced; but it is incredible that the strangers should thus in a short visit produce any extensive change in the vocabulary, and still more that they should modify the structure of the language. Such changes can never be the result of mere contact or transient settlement but must always indicate a far more deeply seated and fundamental process of blending of peoples and cultures.

Few will perhaps hesitate to accept this position; but I expect my next proposition to meet with more skepticism, and yet I believe it to be widely, though not universally, true. This proposition is that the social structure, the framework of society, is still more fundamentally important and still less easily changed except as the result of the intimate blending of peoples, and for that reason furnishes by far the firmest foundation on which to base the process of analysis of culture. I cannot hope to establish the truth of this proposition in the course of a brief address, and I propose to draw your attention to one line of evidence only.

At the present moment we have before our eyes an object-lesson in the spread of our own people over the earth’s surface, and we are thus able to study how external influence affects different elements of culture. What we find is that mere contact is able to transmit much in the way of material culture. A passing vessel, which does not even anchor, may be able to transmit iron, while European weapons may be used by people who have never even seen a white man. Again, missionaries introduce the Christian religion among people who cannot speak a word of English or any language but their own or only use such European words as have been found necessary to express ideas or objects connected with the new religion. There is evidence how readily language may be affected, and here again the present day suggests a mechanism by which such a change takes place. English is now becoming the language of the Pacific and of other parts of the world through its use as a lingua franca, which enables natives who speak different languages to converse not only with Europeans but with one another, and I believe that this has often been the mechanism in the past; that, for instance, the introduction of what we now call the Melanesian structure of language was due to the fact that the language of an immigrant people who settled in a region of great linguistic diversity came to be used as a lingua franca, and thus gradually became the basis of the languages of the whole people.

But now let us turn to social structure. We find in Oceania islands where Europeans have been settled as missionaries or traders perhaps for fifty or a hundred years; we find the people wearing European clothes and European ornaments, using European utensils and even European weapons when they fight; we find them holding the beliefs and practicing the ritual of a European religion; we find them speaking a European language, often even among themselves, and yet investigation shows that much of their social structure remains thoroughly native and uninfluenced, not only in its general form, but often even in its minute details. The external influence has swept away the whole material culture, so that objects of native origin are manufactured only to sell to tourists; it has substituted a wholly new religion and destroyed every material, if not every moral, vestige of the old; it has caused great modification and degeneration of the old language; and yet it may have left the social structure in the main untouched. And the reasons for this are clear. Most of the essential social structure of a people lies so below the surface, it is so literally the foundation of the whole life of the people, that it is not seen; it is not obvious, but can only be reached by patient and laborious exploration. I will give a few specific instances. In several islands of the Pacific, some of which have had European settlers on them for more than a century, a most important position in the community is occupied by the father’s sister. If any native of these islands were asked who is the most important person in the determination of his life-history, he would answer, “My father’s sister”; and yet the place of this relative in the social structure has remained absolutely unrecorded, and, I believe, absolutely unknown, to the European settlers in those islands. Again, Europeans have settled in Fiji for more than a century, and yet it is only during this summer that I have heard from Mr. A. M. Hocart, who is working there at present, that there is the clearest evidence of what is known as the dual organization of society as a working social institution at the present time. How unobtrusive such a fundamental fact of social structure may be comes home to me in this case very strongly, for it wholly eluded my own observation during a visit three years ago.

Lastly, the most striking example of the permanence of social structure which I have met is in the Hawaiian Islands. There the original native culture is reduced to the merest wreckage. So far as material objects are concerned, the people are like ourselves; the old religion has gone, though there probably still persists some of the ancient magic. The people themselves have so dwindled in number, and the political conditions are so altered, that the social structure has also necessarily been greatly modified, and yet I was able to ascertain that one of its elements, an element which I believe to form the deepest layer of the foundation, the very bedrock of social structure, the system of relationship, is still in use unchanged. I was able to obtain a full account of the system as actually used at the present time, and found it to be exactly the same as that recorded forty years ago by Morgan and Hyde, and I obtained evidence that the system is still deeply interwoven with the intimate mental life of the people.

If, then, social structure has this fundamental and deeply seated character, if it is the least easily changed, and only changed as the result either of actual blending of peoples or of the most profound political changes, the obvious inference is that it is with social structure that we must begin the attempt to analyze culture and to ascertain how far community of culture is due to the blending of peoples, how far to transmission through mere contact or transient settlement.

The considerations I have brought forward have, however, in my opinion an importance still more fundamental. If social institutions have this relatively great degree of permanence, if they are so deeply seated and so closely interwoven with the deepest instincts and sentiments of a people that they can only gradually suffer change, will not the study of this change give us our surest criterion of what is early and what is late in any given culture, and thereby furnish a guide for the analysis of culture? Such criteria of early and late are necessary if we are to arrange the cultural elements reached by our analysis in order of time, and it is very doubtful whether mere geographical distribution itself will ever furnish a sufficient basis for this purpose. I may remind you here that before the importance of the complexity of Melanesian culture had forced itself on my mind, I had already succeeded in tracing out a course for the development of the structure of Melanesian society, and after the complexity of the culture had been established, I did not find it necessary to alter anything of essential importance in this scheme. I suggest, therefore, that while the ethnological analysis of cultures must furnish a necessary preliminary to any general evolutionary speculations, there is one element of culture which has so relatively high a degree of permanence that its course of development may furnish a guide to the order in time of the different elements into which it is possible to analyze a given complex.

If the development of social structure is thus to be taken as a guide to assist the process of analysis, it is evident that there will be involved a logical process of considerable complexity in which there will be the danger of arguing in a circle. If, however, the analysis of culture is to be the primary task of the anthropologist, it is evident that the logical methods of the science will attain a complexity far exceeding those hitherto in vogue. I believe that the only logical process which will in general be found possible will be the formulation of hypothetical working schemes into which the facts can be fitted, and that the test of such schemes will be their capacity to fit in with themselves, or, as we generally express it, “explain” new facts as they come to our knowledge. This is the method of other sciences which deal with conditions as complex as those of human society. In many other sciences these new facts are discovered by experiment. In our science they must be found by exploration, not only of the cultures still existent in living form, but also of the buried cultures of past ages.

2. The Extension of Roman Culture in Gaul[244]

The Roman conquest of Gaul was partially a feat of arms; but it was much more a triumph of Roman diplomacy and a genius for colonial government. Roman power in Gaul was centered in the larger cities and in their strongly fortified camps. There the laws and decrees of Rome were promulgated and the tribute of the conquered tribes received. There, too, the law courts were held and justice administered. Rome bent her efforts to the Latinizing of her newly acquired possessions. Gradually she forced the inhabitants of the larger cities to use the Latin tongue. But this forcing was done in a diplomatic, though effective, manner. Even in the days of Caesar, Latin was made the only medium for the administration of the law, the promulgation of decrees, the exercise of the functions of government, the administration of justice, and the performing of the offices of religion. It was the only medium of commerce and trade with the Romans, of literature and art, of the theater and of social relations. Above all, it was the only road to office under the Roman government and to political preferment. The Roman officials in Gaul encouraged and rewarded the mastery of the Latin tongue and the acquirement of Roman culture, customs, and manners. Thanks to this well-defined policy of the Roman government, native Gauls were found in important offices even in Caesar’s time. The number of these Gallo-Roman offices increased rapidly, and their influence was steadily exercised in favor of the acquirement, by the natives, of the Latin language. A greater inducement still was held out to the Gauls to acquire the ways and culture of their conquerors. This was the prospect of employment or political preference and honors in the imperial city of Rome itself. Under this pressure so diplomatically applied, the study of the Latin language, grammar, literature, and oratory became a passion throughout the cities of Gaul, which were full of Roman merchants, traders, teachers, philosophers, lawyers, artists, sculptors, and seekers for political and other offices. Latin was the symbol of success in every avenue of life. Native Gauls became noted merchant princes, lawyers, soldiers, local potentates at home, and favorites of powerful political personages in Rome and even in the colonies outside Gaul. Natives of Gaul, too, reached the highest offices in the land, becoming even members of the Senate; and later on a native Gaul became one of the most noted of the Roman emperors. The political policy of Rome made the imposition of the Latin language upon the cities of Gaul a comparatively easy matter, requiring only time to assure its accomplishment. Everywhere throughout the populous cities of Gaul there sprang up schools that rivaled, in their efficacy and reputation, the most famous institutions of Rome. Rich Romans sent their sons to these schools because of their excellence and the added advantage that they could acquire there a first-hand knowledge of the life and customs of the natives, whom they might be called upon in the future to govern or to have political or other relations with. Thus all urban Gaul traveled Rome-ward—“all roads led to Rome.”

The influence of Roman culture extended itself much more slowly over the rural districts, the inhabitants of which, in addition to being much more conservative and passionately attached to their native institutions and language, lacked the incentive of ambition and of commercial and trade necessity. A powerful Druidical priesthood held the rural Celts together and set their faces against Roman culture and religion. But even in the rural districts Latin made its way slowly and in a mangled form, yet none the less surely. This was accomplished almost entirely through the natural pressure from without exercised by the growing power of the Latin tongue, which had greatly increased during the reign of the Emperor Claudius (41-54 A.D.). Claudius, who was born in Lyon and educated in Gaul, opened to the Gauls all the employments and dignities of the empire. On the construction of the many extensive public works he employed many inhabitants of Gaul in positions requiring faithfulness, honesty, and skill. These, in their turn, frequently drew laborers from the rural districts of Gaul. These latter, during their residence in Rome or other Italian cities, or in the populous centers of Gaul, acquired some knowledge of Latin. Thus, in time, through these and other agencies, a sort of lingua franca sprang up throughout the rural districts of Gaul and served as a medium of communication between the Celtic-speaking population and the inhabitants of the cities and towns. This consisted of a frame of Latin words stripped of most of their inflections and subjected to word-contractions and other modifications. Into this frame were fitted many native words which had already become the property of trade and commerce and the other activities of life in the city, town, and country. Thus, as the influence of Latin became stronger in the cities, it continued to exercise greater pressure on the rural districts. This pressure soon began to react upon the centers of Latin culture. The uneducated classes of Gaul everywhere, even in the cities, spoke very imperfect Latin, the genius of which is so different from that of the native tongues of Gaul. But while the cities afforded some correction for this universal tendency among the masses to corrupt the Latin language, the life of the rural districts, where the native tongues were still universally spoken, made the disintegration of the highly inflected Roman speech unavoidable. As the masses in the city and country became more Latinized, at the expense of their native tongues, the corrupted Latin spoken over immense districts of the country tended to pass current as the speech of the populace and to crowd out classical or school Latin. As this corrupted local Latin varied greatly in different parts of the country, due to linguistic and other influences, there resulted numerous Roman dialects throughout Gaul, many of which are still in existence.

The introduction of Christianity gave additional impulse to the study of Latin, which soon became the official language of the Christian church; and it was taught everywhere by the priests to the middle and upper classes, and they also encouraged the masses to learn it. It seemed as if this was destined to maintain the prestige of Latin as the official language of the country. But in reality it hastened its downfall by making it more and more the language of the illiterate masses. Soon the rural districts furnished priests who spoke their own Roman tongue; and the struggle to rehabilitate the literary Latin among the masses was abandoned. The numerous French dialects of Latin had already begun to assume shape when the decline of the Roman Empire brought the Germanic tribes down upon Gaul and introduced a new element into the Romanic speech, which had already worked its will upon the tongue of the Caesars. Under its influence the loose Latin construction disappeared; articles and prepositions took the place of the inflectional terminations brought to a high state of artificial perfection in Latin; and the wholesale suppression of unaccented syllables had so contracted the Latin words that they were often scarcely recognizable. The modification of vowel sounds increased the efficacy of the disguise assumed by Latin words masquerading in the Romanic dialects throughout Gaul; and the Celtic and other native words in current use to designate the interests and occupations of the masses helped to differentiate the popular speech from the classical Latin. Already Celtic, as a spoken tongue, had almost entirely disappeared from the cities; and even in the rural districts it had fallen into a certain amount of neglect, as the lingua franca of the first centuries of Roman occupation, reaching out in every direction, became the ever-increasing popular speech.

3. The Competition of the Cultural Languages[245]

Some time ago a typewriter firm, in advertising a machine with Arabic characters, made the statement that the Arabic alphabet is used by more people than any other. A professor of Semitic languages was asked: “How big a lie is that?” He answered: “It is true.”

In a certain sense, it is true; the total population of all the countries whose inhabitants use the Arabic alphabet (if they use any) is slightly larger than that of those who use the Latin alphabet and its slight variations, or the Chinese characters (which of course are not an alphabet), or the Russian alphabet. If, however, the question is how many people can actually use any alphabet or system of writing, the Arabic stands lowest of the four.

The question of the relative importance of a language as a literary medium is a question of how many people want to read it. There are two classes of these: those to whom it is vernacular, and those who learn it in addition to their own language. The latter class is of the greater importance in proportion to its numbers; a man who has education enough to acquire a foreign language is pretty sure to use it, while many of the former class, who can read, really do read very little. Those who count in this matter are those who can get information from a printed page as easily as by listening to someone talking. A fair index of the relative number of these in a country is the newspaper circulation there.

A language must have a recognized literary standard and all the people in its territory must learn to use it as such before its influence goes far abroad. English, French, and German, and they alone, have reached this point. French and German have no new country, and practically the whole of their country is now literate; their relative share in the world’s reading can only increase as their population increases. Spanish and Russian, on the other hand, have both new country and room for a much higher percentage of literacy.

It is probable that all the countries in temperate zones will have universal literacy by the end of the century. In this case, even if no one read English outside its vernacular countries, it would still hold its own as the leading literary language. German and French are bound to fall off relatively as vernaculars, and this implies a falling off of their importance as culture languages; but the importance of English in this respect is bound to grow. The first place among foreign languages has been given to it in the schools of many European and South American countries; Mexico and Japan make it compulsory in all schools of upper grades; and China is to follow Japan in this respect as soon as the work can be organized.

The number of people who can actually read, or will learn if now too young, for the various languages of the world appears to be as follows:

Note A: Not a spoken language, but a system of writing.

Note B: None representing as much as 1 per cent of total.

English, therefore, now leads all other languages in the number of its readers. Three-fourths of the world’s mail matter is addressed in English. More than half of the world’s newspapers are printed in English, and, as they have a larger circulation than those in other languages, probably three-fourths of the world’s newspaper reading is done in English.

The languages next in importance, French and German, cannot maintain their relative positions because English has more than half of the new land in the temperate zone and they have none. The languages which have the rest of the new territory, Spanish and Russian, are not established as culture languages, as English is. No other language, not even French or German, has a vernacular so uniform and well established, and with so few variations from the literary language. English is spoken in the United States by more than fifty million people with so slight variations that no foreigner would ever notice them. No other language whatever can show more than a fraction of this number of persons who speak so nearly alike.

It is then probable that, within the century, English will be the vernacular of a quarter instead of a tenth of the people of the world, and be read by a half instead of a quarter of the people who can read.

4. The Assimilation of Races[246]

The race problem has sometimes been described as a problem in assimilation. It is not always clear, however, what assimilation means. Historically the word has had two distinct significations. According to earlier usage it meant “to compare” or “to make like.” According to later usage it signifies “to take up and incorporate.”

There is a process that goes on in society by which individuals spontaneously acquire one another’s language, characteristic attitudes, habits, and modes of behavior. There is also a process by which individuals and groups of individuals are taken over and incorporated into larger groups. Both processes have been concerned in the formation of modern nationalities. The modern Italian, Frenchman, and German is a composite of the broken fragments of several different racial groups. Interbreeding has broken up the ancient stocks, and interaction and imitation have created new national types which exhibit definite uniformities in language, manners, and formal behavior.

It has sometimes been assumed that the creation of a national type is the specific function of assimilation and that national solidarity is based upon national homogeneity and “like-mindedness.” The extent and importance of the kind of homogeneity that individuals of the same nationality exhibit have been greatly exaggerated. Neither interbreeding nor interaction has created, in what the French term “nationals,” a more than superficial likeness or like-mindedness. Racial differences have, to be sure, disappeared or been obscured, but individual differences remain. Individual differences, again, have been intensified by education, personal competition, and the division of labor, until individual members of cosmopolitan groups probably represent greater variations in disposition, temperament, and mental capacity than those which distinguished the more homogeneous races and peoples of an earlier civilization.

What then, precisely, is the nature of the homogeneity which characterizes cosmopolitan groups?

The growth of modern states exhibits the progressive merging of smaller, mutually exclusive, into larger and more inclusive, social groups. This result has been achieved in various ways, but it has usually been followed or accompanied by a more or less complete adoption by the members of the smaller groups of the language, technique, and mores of the larger and more inclusive ones. The immigrant readily takes over the language, manners, the social ritual, and outward forms of his adopted country. In America it has become proverbial that a Pole, Lithuanian, or Norwegian cannot be distinguished, in the second generation, from an American born of native parents.

There is no reason to assume that this assimilation of alien groups to native standards has modified to any great extent fundamental racial characteristics. It has, however, erased the external signs which formerly distinguished the members of one race from those of another.

On the other hand, the breaking up of the isolation of smaller groups has had the effect of emancipating the individual man, giving him room and freedom for the expansion and development of his individual aptitudes.

What one actually finds in cosmopolitan groups, then, is a superficial uniformity, a homogeneity in manners and fashion, associated with relatively profound differences in individual opinions, sentiments, and beliefs. This is just the reverse of what one meets among primitive peoples, where diversity in external forms, as between different groups, is accompanied by a monotonous sameness in the mental attitudes of individuals. There is a striking similarity in the sentiments and mental attitudes of peasant peoples in all parts of the world, although the external differences are often great. In the Black Forest, in Baden, Germany, almost every valley shows a different style of costume, a different type of architecture, although in each separate valley every house is like every other and the costume, as well as the religion, is for every member of each separate community absolutely after the same pattern. On the other hand, a German, Russian, or Negro peasant of the southern states, different as each is in some respects, are all very much alike in certain habitual attitudes and sentiments.

What, then, is the rôle of homogeneity and like-mindedness, such as we find them to be, in cosmopolitan states? So far as it makes each individual look like every other—no matter how different under the skin—homogeneity mobilizes the individual man. It removes the social taboo, permits the individual to move into strange groups, and thus facilitates new and adventurous contacts. In obliterating the external signs, which in secondary groups seem to be the sole basis of caste and class distinctions, it realizes, for the individual, the principle of laissez faire, laissez aller. Its ultimate economic effect is to substitute personal for racial competition, and to give free play to forces that tend to relegate every individual, irrespective of race or status, to the position he or she is best fitted to fill.

As a matter of fact, the ease and rapidity with which aliens, under existing conditions in the United States, have been able to assimilate themselves to the customs and manners of American life have enabled this country to swallow and digest every sort of normal human difference, except the purely external ones, like the color of the skin.

It is probably true, also, that like-mindedness of the kind that expresses itself in national types contributes indirectly by facilitating the intermingling of the different elements of the population to the national solidarity. This is due to the fact that the solidarity of modern states depends less on the homogeneity of population than, as James Bryce has suggested, upon the thoroughgoing mixture of heterogeneous elements. Like-mindedness, so far as that term signifies a standard grade of intelligence, contributes little or nothing to national solidarity. Likeness is, after all, a purely formal concept which of itself cannot hold anything together.

In the last analysis social solidarity is based on sentiment and habit. It is the sentiment of loyalty and the habit of what Sumner calls “concurrent action” that gives substance and insures unity to the state as to every other type of social group. This sentiment of loyalty has its basis in a modus vivendi, a working relation and mutual understanding of the members of the group. Social institutions are not founded in similarities any more than they are founded in differences, but in relations, and in the mutual interdependence of parts. When these relations have the sanction of custom and are fixed in individual habit, so that the activities of the group are running smoothly, personal attitudes and sentiments, which are the only forms in which individual minds collide and clash with one another, easily accommodate themselves to the existing situation.

It may, perhaps, be said that loyalty itself is a form of like-mindedness or that it is dependent in some way upon the like-mindedness of the individuals whom it binds together. This, however, cannot be true, for there is no greater loyalty than that which binds the dog to his master, and this is a sentiment which that faithful animal usually extends to other members of the household to which he belongs. A dog without a master is a dangerous animal, but the dog that has been domesticated is a member of society. He is not, of course, a citizen, although he is not entirely without rights. But he has got into some sort of practical working relations with the group to which he belongs.

It is this practical working arrangement, into which individuals with widely different mental capacities enter as co-ordinate parts, that gives the corporate character to social groups and insures their solidarity. It is the process of assimilation by which groups of individuals, originally indifferent or perhaps hostile, achieve this corporate character, rather than the process by which they acquire a formal like-mindedness, with which this paper is mainly concerned.

The difficulty with the conception of assimilation which one ordinarily meets in discussions of the race problem is that it is based on observations confined to individualistic groups where the characteristic relations are indirect and secondary. It takes no account of the kind of assimilation that takes place in primary groups where relations are direct and personal—in the tribe, for example, and in the family.

Thus Charles Francis Adams, referring to the race problem in an address at Richmond, Virginia, in November, 1908, said:

More recently an editorial in the Outlook, discussing the Japanese situation in California, made this statement:

All this is quite true and interesting, but it does not clearly recognize the fact that the chief obstacle to the assimilation of the Negro and the Oriental are not mental but physical traits. It is not because the Negro and the Japanese are so differently constituted that they do not assimilate. If they were given an opportunity, the Japanese are quite as capable as the Italians, the Armenians, or the Slavs of acquiring our culture and sharing our national ideals. The trouble is not with the Japanese mind but with the Japanese skin. The Jap is not the right color.

The fact that the Japanese bears in his features a distinctive racial hallmark, that he wears, so to speak, a racial uniform, classifies him. He cannot become a mere individual, indistinguishable in the cosmopolitan mass of the population, as is true, for example, of the Irish, and, to a lesser extent, of some of the other immigrant races. The Japanese, like the Negro, is condemned to remain among us an abstraction, a symbol—and a symbol not merely of his own race but of the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to as the “yellow peril.” This not only determines to a very large extent the attitude of the white world toward the yellow man but it determines the attitude of the yellow man toward the white. It puts between the races the invisible but very real gulf of self-consciousness.

There is another consideration. Peoples we know intimately we respect and esteem. In our casual contact with aliens, however, it is the offensive rather than the pleasing traits that impress us. These impressions accumulate and reinforce natural prejudices. Where races are distinguished by certain external marks, these furnish a permanent physical substratum upon which and around which the irritations and animosities, incidental to all human intercourse, tend to accumulate and so gain strength and volume.

Assimilation, as the word is here used, brings with it a certain borrowed significance which it carried over from physiology, where it is employed to describe the process of nutrition. By a process of nutrition, somewhat similar to the physiological one, we may conceive alien peoples to be incorporated with, and made part of, the community or state. Ordinarily assimilation goes on silently and unconsciously, and only forces itself into popular conscience when there is some interruption or disturbance of the process.

At the outset it may be said, then, that assimilation rarely becomes a problem except in secondary groups. Admission to the primary group, that is to say, the group in which relationships are direct and personal, as, for example, in the family and in the tribe, makes assimilation comparatively easy and almost inevitable.

The most striking illustration of this is the fact of domestic slavery. Slavery has been, historically, the usual method by which peoples have been incorporated into alien groups. When a member of an alien race is adopted into the family as a servant or as a slave, and particularly when that status is made hereditary, as it was in the case of the Negro after his importation to America, assimilation followed rapidly and as a matter of course.

It is difficult to conceive two races farther removed from each other in temperament and tradition than the Anglo-Saxon and the Negro, and yet the Negro in the southern states, particularly where he was adopted into the household as a family servant, learned in a comparatively short time the manners and customs of his master’s family. He very soon possessed himself of so much of the language, religion, and the technique of the civilization of his master as, in his station, he was fitted or permitted to acquire. Eventually, also, Negro slaves transferred their allegiance to the state of which they were only indirectly members, or at least to their masters’ families, with whom they felt themselves in most things one in sentiment and interest.

The assimilation of the Negro field hand, where the contact of the slave with his master and his master’s family was less intimate, was naturally less complete. On the large plantations, where an overseer stood between the master and the majority of his slaves, and especially on the sea island plantations off the coast of South Carolina, where the master and his family were likely to be merely winter visitors, this distance between master and slave was greatly increased. The consequence is that the Negroes in these regions are less touched today by the white man’s influence and civilization than elsewhere in the southern states.

C. AMERICANIZATION AS A PROBLEM IN ASSIMILATION[247]

1. Americanization as Assimilation

The Americanization Study has assumed that the fundamental condition of what we call “Americanization” is the participation of the immigrant in the life of the community in which he lives. The point here emphasized is that patriotism, loyalty, and common sense are neither created nor transmitted by purely intellectual processes. Men must live and work and fight together in order to create that community of interest and sentiment which will enable them to meet the crises of their common life with a common will.

It is evident, however, that the word “participation” as here employed has a wide application, and it becomes important for working purposes to give a more definite and concrete meaning to the term.

2. Language as a Means and a Product of Participation

Obviously any organized social activity whatever and any participation in this activity implies “communication.” In human, as distinguished from animal, society common life is based on a common speech. To share a common speech does not guarantee participation in the community life but it is an instrument of participation, and its acquisition by the members of an immigrant group is rightly considered a sign and a rough index of Americanization.

It is, however, one of the ordinary experiences of social intercourse that words and things do not have the same meanings with different people, in different parts of the country, in different periods of time, and, in general, in different contexts. The same “thing” has a different meaning for the naïve person and the sophisticated person, for the child and the philosopher; the new experience derives its significance from the character and organization of the previous experiences. To the peasant a comet, a plague, and an epileptic person may mean a divine portent, a visitation of God, a possession by the devil; to the scientific man they mean something quite different. The word “slavery” had very different connotations in the ancient world and today. It has a very different significance today in the southern states and in the northern states. “Socialism” has a very different significance to the immigrant from the Russian pale living on the “East Side” of New York City, to the citizen on Riverside Drive, and to the native American in the hills of Georgia.

Psychologists explain this difference in the connotation of the same word among people using the same language in terms of difference in the “apperception mass” in different individuals and different groups of individuals. In their phraseology the “apperception mass” represents the body of memories and meanings deposited in the consciousness of the individual from the totality of his experiences. It is the body of material with which every new datum of experience comes into contact, to which it is related, and in connection with which it gets its meaning.

When persons interpret data on different grounds, when the apperception mass is radically different, we say popularly that they live in different worlds. The logician expresses this by saying that they occupy different “universes of discourse”—that is, they cannot talk in the same terms. The ecclesiastic, the artist, the mystic, the scientist, the Philistine, the Bohemian, represent more or less different “universes of discourse.” Even social workers occupy universes of discourse not mutually intelligible.

Similarly, different races and nationalities as wholes represent different apperception masses and consequently different universes of discourse and are not mutually intelligible. Even our remote forefathers are with difficulty intelligible to us, though always more intelligible than the Eastern immigrant because of the continuity of our tradition. Still it is almost as difficult for us to comprehend Elsie Dinsmore or the Westminster Catechism as the Koran or the Talmud.

It is apparent, therefore, that in the wide extension and vast complexity of modern life, in which peoples of different races and cultures are now coming into intimate contact, the divergences in the meanings and values which individuals and groups attach to objects and forms of behavior are deeper than anything expressed by differences in language.

Actually common participation in common activities implies a common “definition of the situation.” In fact, every single act, and eventually all moral life, is dependent upon the definition of the situation. A definition of the situation precedes and limits any possible action, and a redefinition of the situation changes the character of the action. An abusive person, for example, provokes anger and possibly violence, but if we realize that the man is insane this redefinition of the situation results in totally different behavior.

Every social group develops systematic and unsystematic means of defining the situation for its members. Among these means are the “don’ts” of the mother, the gossip of the community, epithets (“liar,” “traitor,” “scab”), the sneer, the shrug, the newspaper, the theater, the school, libraries, the law, and the gospel. Education in the widest sense—intellectual, moral, aesthetic—is the process of defining the situation. It is the process by which the definitions of an older generation are transmitted to a younger. In the case of the immigrant it is the process by which the definitions of one cultural group are transmitted to another.

Differences in meanings and values, referred to above in terms of the “apperception mass,” grow out of the fact that different individuals and different peoples have defined the situation in different ways. When we speak of the different “heritages” or “traditions” which our different immigrant groups bring, it means that, owing to different historical circumstances, they have defined the situation differently. Certain prominent personalities, schools of thought, bodies of doctrine, historical events, have contributed in defining the situation and determining the attitudes and values of our various immigrant groups in characteristic ways in their home countries. To the Sicilian, for example, marital infidelity means the stiletto; to the American, the divorce court. And even when the immigrant thinks that he understands us, he nevertheless does not do this completely. At the best he interprets our cultural traditions in terms of his own. Actually the situation is progressively redefined by the consequences of the actions, provoked by the previous definitions, and a prison experience is designed to provide a datum toward the redefinition of the situation.

It is evidently important that the people who compose a community and share in the common life should have a sufficient body of common memories to understand one another. This is particularly true in a democracy, where it is intended that the public institutions should be responsive to public opinion. There can be no public opinion except in so far as the persons who compose the public are able to live in the same world and speak and think in the same universe of discourse. For that reason it seems desirable that the immigrants should not only speak the language of the country but should know something of the history of the people among whom they have chosen to dwell. For the same reason it is important that native Americans should know the history and social life of the countries from which the immigrants come.

It is important also that every individual should share as fully as possible a fund of knowledge, experience, sentiments, and ideals common to the whole community and himself contribute to this fund. It is for this reason that we maintain and seek to maintain freedom of speech and free schools. The function of literature, including poetry, romance, and the newspaper, is to enable all to share victoriously and imaginatively in the inner life of each. The function of science is to gather up, classify, digest, and preserve, in a form in which they may become available to the community as a whole, the ideas, inventions, and technical experience of the individuals composing it. Thus not merely the possession of a common language but the wide extension of the opportunities for education become conditions of Americanization.

The immigration problem is unique in the sense that the immigrant brings divergent definitions of the situation, and this renders his participation in our activities difficult. At the same time this problem is of the same general type as the one exemplified by “syndicalism,” “bolshevism,” “socialism,” etc., where the definition of the situation does not agree with the traditional one. The modern “social unrest,” like the immigrant problem, is a sign of the lack of participation and this is true to the degree that certain elements feel that violence is the only available means of participating.

3. Assimilation and the Mediation of Individual Differences

In general, a period of unrest represents the stage in which a new definition of the situation is being prepared. Emotion and unrest are connected with situations where there is loss of control. Control is secured on the basis of habits and habits are built up on the basis of the definition of the situation. Habit represents a situation where the definition is working. When control is lost it means that the habits are no longer adequate, that the situation has changed and demands a redefinition. This is the point at which we have unrest—a heightened emotional state, random movements, unregulated behavior—and this continues until the situation is redefined. The unrest is associated with conditions in which the individual or society feels unable to act. It represents energy, and the problem is to use it constructively.

The older societies tended to treat unrest by defining the situation in terms of the suppression or postponement of the wish; they tried to make the repudiation of the wish itself a wish. “Contentment,” “conformity to the will of God,” ultimate “salvation” in a better world, are representative of this. The founders of America defined the situation in terms of participation, but this has actually taken too exclusively the form of “political participation.” The present tendency is to define the situation in terms of social participation, including demand for the improvement of social conditions to a degree which will enable all to participate.

But, while it is important that the people who are members of the same community should have a body of common memories and a common apperception mass, so that they may talk intelligibly to one another, it is neither possible nor necessary that everything should have the same meaning for everyone. A perfectly homogeneous consciousness would mean a tendency to define all situations rigidly and sacredly and once and forever. Something like this did happen in the Slavic village communities and among all savage people, and it was the ideal of the medieval church, but it implies a low level of efficiency and a slow rate of progress.

Mankind is distinguished, in fact, from the animal world by being composed of persons of divergent types, of varied tastes and interests, of different vocations and functions. Civilization is the product of an association of widely different individuals, and with the progress of civilization the divergence in individual human types has been and must continue to be constantly multiplied. Our progress in the arts and sciences and in the creation of values in general has been dependent on specialists whose distinctive worth was precisely their divergence from other individuals. It is even evident that we have been able to use productively individuals who in a savage or peasant society would have been classed as insane—who perhaps were indeed insane.

The ability to participate productively implies thus a diversity of attitudes and values in the participants, but a diversity not so great as to lower the morals of the community and to prevent effective co-operation. It is important to have ready definitions for all immediate situations, but progress is dependent on the constant redefinitions for all immediate situations, and the ideal condition for this is the presence of individuals with divergent definitions, who contribute, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, through their individualism and labors to a common task and a common end. It is only in this way that an intelligible world, in which each can participate according to his intelligence, comes into existence. For it is only through their consequences that words get their meanings or that situations become defined. It is through conflict and co-operation, or, to use a current phrase of economists, through “competitive co-operation,” that a distinctively human type of society does anywhere exist. Privacy and publicity, “society” and solitude, public ends and private enterprises, are each and all distinctive factors in human society everywhere. They are particularly characteristic of historic American democracy.

In this whole connection it appears that the group consciousness and the individual himself are formed by communication and participation, and that the communication and participation are themselves dependent for their meaning on common interests.

But it would be an error to assume that participation always implies an intimate personal, face-to-face relation. Specialists participate notably and productively in our common life, but this is evidently not on the basis of personal association with their neighbors. Darwin was assisted by Lyell, Owen, and other contemporaries in working out a new definition of the situation, but these men were not his neighbors. When Mayer worked out his theory of the transmutation of energy, his neighbors in the village of Heilbronn were so far from participating that they twice confined him in insane asylums. A postage stamp may be a more efficient instrument of participation than a village meeting.

Defining the situation with reference to the participation of the immigrant is of course not solving the problem of immigration. This involves an analysis of the whole significance of the qualitative and quantitative character of a population, with reference to any given values—standards of living, individual level of efficiency, liberty and determinism, etc. We have, for instance, in America a certain level of culture, depending, let us say as a minimum, on the perpetuation of our public-school system. But, if by some conceivable lusus naturae the birth rate was multiplied a hundred fold, or by some conceivable cataclysm a hundred million African blacks were landed annually on our eastern coast and an equal number of Chinese coolies on our western coast, then we should have neither teachers enough nor buildings enough nor material resources enough to impart even the three R’s to a fraction of the population, and the outlook of democracy, so far as it is dependent upon participation, would become very dismal. On the other hand, it is conceivable that certain immigrant populations in certain numbers, with their special temperaments, endowments, and social heritages, would contribute positively and increasingly to our stock of civilization. These are questions to be determined, but certainly if the immigrant is admitted on any basis whatever the condition of his Americanization is that he shall have the widest and freest opportunity to contribute in his own way to the common fund of knowledge, ideas, and ideals which makes up the culture of our common country. It is only in this way that the immigrant can “participate” in the fullest sense of the term.

III. INVESTIGATIONS AND PROBLEMS

1. Assimilation and Amalgamation

The literature upon assimilation falls naturally under three main heads: (1) assimilation and amalgamation; (2) the conflict and fusion of cultures; and (3) immigration and Americanization.

Literature on assimilation is very largely a by-product of the controversy in regard to the relative superiority and inferiority of races. This controversy owes its existence, in the present century, to the publication in 1854 of Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races. This treatise appeared at a time when the dominant peoples of Europe were engaged in extending their benevolent protection over all the “unprotected” lesser breeds, and this book offered a justification, on biological grounds, of the domination of the “inferior” by the “superior” races.

Gobineau’s theory, and that of the schools which have perpetuated and elaborated his doctrines, defined culture as an essentially racial trait. Other races might accommodate themselves to, but could not originate nor maintain a superior culture. This is the aristocratic theory of the inequalities of races and, as might be expected, was received with enthusiasm by the chauvinists of the “strong” nations.

The opposing school is disposed to treat the existing civilizations as largely the result of historical accident. The superior peoples are those who have had access to the accumulated cultural materials of the peoples that preceded them. Modern Europe owes its civilization to the fact that it went to school to the ancients. The inferior peoples are those who did not have this advantage.

Ratzel was one of the first to venture the theory that the natural and the cultural peoples were fundamentally alike and that the existing differences, great as they are, were due to geographical and cultural isolation of the less advanced races. Boas’ Mind of Primitive Man is the most systematic and critical statement of that view of the matter.

The discussion which these rival theories provoked has led students to closer studies of the effects of racial contacts and to a more penetrating analysis of the cultural process.

The contacts of races have invariably led to racial intermixture, and the mixed breed, as in the case of the mulatto, the result of the white-Negro cross, has tended to create a distinct cultural as well as a racial type. E. B. Reuter’s volume on The Mulatto is the first serious attempt to study the mixed blood as a cultural type and define his rôle in the conflict of races and cultures.

Historical cases of the assimilation of one group by another are frequent. Kaindl’s investigations of the German settlements in the Carpathian lands are particularly instructive. The story of the manner in which the early German settlers in Cracow, Galicia, were Polonized mainly under the influence of the Polish nobility, is all the more interesting when it is contrasted with the German colonists in the Siebenbürgen, which have remained strongholds of the German language and culture in the midst of a population of Roumanian peasants for nearly eight hundred years. Still more interesting are the recent attempts of the Prussians to Germanize the former province of Posen, now reunited to Poland. Prussia’s policy of colonization of German peasants in Posen failed for several reasons, but it failed finally because the German peasant, finding himself isolated in the midst of a Polish community, either gave up the land the government had acquired for him and returned to his native German province, or identified himself with the Polish community and was thus lost to the cause of German nationalism. The whole interesting history of that episode is related in Bernard’s Die Polenfrage, which is at the same time an account of the organization of an autonomous Polish community within the limits of a German state.

The competition and survival of languages affords interesting material for the study of cultural contacts and the conditions that determine assimilation. Investigations of the racial origins of European peoples have discovered a great number of curious cultural anomalies. There are peoples like the Spreewälder who inhabit a little cultural island of about 240 miles square in the Province of Brandenburg, Prussia. Surviving remnants of a Slavic people, they still preserve their language and their tribal costumes, and, although but thirty thousand in number and surrounded by Germans, maintain a lively literary movement all their own. On the other hand, the most vigorous and powerful of the Germanic nationalities, the Prussian, bears the name of a conquered Slavic people whose language, “Old Prussian,” not spoken since the seventeenth century, is preserved only in a few printed books, including a catechism and German-Prussian vocabulary, which the German philologists have rescued from oblivion.

2. The Conflict and Fusion of Cultures

The contacts and transmission of cultures have been investigated in different regions of social life under different titles. The ethnologists have investigated the process among primitive peoples under the title acculturation. Among historical peoples, on the other hand, acculturation has been called assimilation. The aim of missions has been, on the whole, to bring the world under the domination of a single moral order; but in seeking to accomplish this task they have contributed greatly to the fusion and cross-fertilization of racial and national cultures.

The problem of origin is the first and often the most perplexing problem which the study of primitive cultures presents.[248] Was a given cultural trait, i.e., a weapon, a tool, or a myth, borrowed or invented? For example, there are several independent centers of origin and propagation of the bow and arrow. Writing approached or reached perfection in at least five different, widely separated regions. Other problems of acculturation which have been studied include the following: the degree and order of transmissibility of different cultural traits; the persistence or the immunity against change of different traits; the modification of cultural traits in the process of transmission; the character of social contacts between cultural groups; the distance that divides cultural levels; and the rôle of prestige in stimulating imitation and copying.

The development of a world-commerce, the era of European colonization and imperial expansion in America, Asia, and Africa and Australia, the forward drive of occidental science and the Western system of large-scale competitive industry have created racial contacts, cultural changes, conflicts, and fusions of unprecedented and unforeseen extent, intensity, and immediateness. The crash of a fallen social order in Russia reverberates throughout the world; reports of the capitalization of new enterprises indicate that India is copying the economic organization of Europe; the feminist movement has invaded Japan; representatives of close to fifty nations of the earth meet in conclave in the assembly of the League of Nations.

So complete has been in recent years the interpenetration of peoples and cultures that nations are now seeking to preserve their existence not alone from assault from without by force of arms, but they are equally concerned to protect themselves from the more insidious attacks of propaganda from within. Under these circumstances the ancient liberties of speech and press are being scrutinized and questioned. Particularly is this true when this freedom of speech and press is exercised by alien peoples, who criticize our institutions in a foreign tongue and claim the right to reform native institutions before they have become citizens and even before they are able to use the native language.

3. Immigration and Americanization

The presence of large groups of foreign-born in the United States was first conceived of as a problem of immigration. From the period of the large Irish immigration to this country in the decades following 1820 each new immigrant group called forth a popular literature of protest against the evils its presence threatened. After 1890 the increasing volume of immigration and the change in the source of the immigrants from northwestern Europe to southeastern Europe intensified the general concern. In 1907 the Congress of the United States created the Immigration Commission to make “full inquiry, examination, and investigation into the subject of immigration.” The plan and scope of the work as outlined by the Commission “included a study of the sources of recent immigration in Europe, the general character of incoming immigrants, the methods employed here and abroad to prevent the immigration of persons classed as undesirable in the United States immigration law, and finally a thorough investigation into the general status of the more recent immigrants as residents of the United States, and the effect of such immigration upon the institutions, industries, and people of this country.” In 1910 the Commission made a report of its investigations and findings together with its conclusions and recommendations which were published in forty-one volumes.

The European War focused the attention of the country upon the problem of Americanization. The public mind became conscious of the fact that “the stranger within our gates,” whether naturalized or unnaturalized, tended to maintain his loyalty to the land of his origin, even when it seemed to conflict with loyalty to the country of his sojourn or his adoption. A large number of superficial investigations called “surveys” were made of immigrant colonies in the larger cities of the country. Americanization work of many varieties developed apace. A vast literature sprang up to meet the public demand for information and instruction on this topic. In view of this situation the Carnegie Corporation of New York City undertook in 1918 a “Study of the Methods of Americanization or Fusion of Native and Foreign Born.” The point of view from which the study was made may be inferred from the following statement by its director, Allen T. Burns:

The study, as originally planned, was divided into ten divisions, as follows: the schooling of the immigrant, the press and the theater, adjustment of homes and family life, legal protection and correction, health standards and care, naturalization and political life, industrial and economic amalgamation, treatment of immigrant heritages, neighborhood agencies, and rural developments. The findings of these different parts of the study are presented in separate volumes.

This is the most recent important survey-investigation of the immigrant, although there are many less imposing but significant studies in this field. Among these are the interesting analyses of the assimilation process in Julius Drachsler’s Democracy and Assimilation and in A. M. Dushkin’s study of Jewish Education in New York City.

The natural history of assimilation may be best studied in personal narratives and documents, such as letters and autobiographies, or in monographs upon urban and rural immigrant communities. In recent years a series of personal narrative and autobiographical sketches have revealed the intimate personal aspects of the assimilation process. The expectancy and disillusionment of the first experiences, the consequent nostalgia and homesickness, gradual accommodation to the new situation, the first participations in American life, the fixation of wishes in the opportunities of the American social environment, the ultimate identification of the person with the memories, sentiments, and future of his adopted country—all these steps in assimilation are portrayed in such interesting books as The Far Journey by Abraham Rihbany, The Promised Land by Mary Antin, Out of the Shadow by Rose Cohen, An American in the Making by M. E. Ravage, My Mother and I by E. C. Stern.

The most reflective use of personal documents for the study of the problems of the immigrant has been made by Thomas and Znaniecki in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. In these studies letters and life-histories have been, for the first time, methodically employed to exhibit the processes of adjustment in the transition from a European peasant village to the immigrant colony of an American industrial community.

The work of Thomas and Znaniecki is in a real sense a study of the Polish community in Europe and America. Less ambitious studies have been made of individual immigrant communities. Several religious communities composed of isolated and unassimilated groups, such as the German Mennonites, have been intensively studied.

Materials valuable for the study of certain immigrant communities, assembled for quite other purposes, are contained in the almanacs, yearbooks, and local histories of the various immigrant communities. The most interesting of these are the Jewish Communal Register of New York and the studies made by the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America under the direction of O. M. Norlie.[249]

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. ASSIMILATION AND AMALGAMATION

A. The Psychology and Sociology of Assimilation

(1) Wundt, Wilhelm. “Bermerkungen zur Associationslehre,” Philosophische Studien, VII (1892), 329-61. [“Complication und Assimilation,” pp. 334-53.]

(2) ——. Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. “Assimilationen,” III, 528-35. 5th ed. Leipzig, 1903.

(3) Ward, James. “Association and Assimilation,” Mind, N.S., II (1893), 347-62; III (1894), 509-32.

(4) Baldwin, J. Mark. Mental Development in the Child and the Race. Methods and processes. “Assimilation, Recognition,” pp. 308-19. New York, 1895.

(5) Novicow, J. Les Luttes entre sociétés humaines et leur phases successives. Book II, chap. vii, “La Dénationalisation,” pp. 125-53. Paris, 1893. [Definition of denationalization.]

(6) Ratzenhofer, Gustav. Die sociologische Erkenntnis, pp. 41-42. Leipzig, 1898.

(7) Park, Robert E. “Racial Assimilation in Secondary Groups with Particular Reference to the Negro,” American Journal of Sociology, XIX (1913-14), 606-23.

(8) Simons, Sarah E. “Social Assimilation,” American Journal of Sociology, VI (1900-1901), 790-822; VII (1901-2), 53-79, 234-48, 386-404, 539-56. [Bibliography.]

(9) Jenks, Albert E. “Assimilation in the Philippines as Interpreted in Terms of Assimilation in America,” Publications of the American Sociological Society, VIII (1913), 140-58.

(10) McKenzie, F. A. “The Assimilation of the American Indian,” Publications of the American Sociological Society, VIII (1913), 37-48. [Bibliography.]

(11) Ciszewski, S. Kunstliche Verwandschaft bei den Südslaven. Leipzig, 1897.

(12) Windisch, H. Taufe und Sünde im ältesten Christentum bis auf Origines. Ein Beitrag zur altchristlichen Dogmengeschichte. Tübingen, 1908.

B. Assimilation and Amalgamation

(1) Gumplowicz, Ludwig. Der Rassenkampf. Sociologische Untersuchungen, sec. 38, “Wie die Amalgamirung vor sich geht,” pp. 253-63. Innsbruck, 1883.

(2) Commons, John R. Races and Immigrants in America. Chap. ix, “Amalgamation and Assimilation,” pp. 198-238. New ed. New York, 1920. [See also pp. 17-21.]

(3) Ripley, William Z. The Races of Europe. A sociological study. Chap. ii, “Language, Nationality, and Race,” pp. 15-36. Chap. xviii, “European Origins: Race and Culture,” pp. 486-512. New York, 1899.

(4) Fischer, Eugen. Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen. Anthropologische und ethnographische Studien am Rehobother Bastardvolk in Deutsch-Südwest Afrika. Jena, 1913.

(5) Mayo-Smith, Richmond. “Theories of Mixture of Races and Nationalities,” Yale Review, III (1894), 166-86.

(6) Smith, G. Elliot. “The Influence of Racial Admixture in Egypt,” Eugenics Review, VII (1915-16), 163-83.

(7) Reuter, E. B. The Mulatto in the United States. Including a study of the rôle of mixed-blood races throughout the world. Boston, 1918.

(8) Weatherly, Ulysses G. “The Racial Element in Social Assimilation,” Publications of the American Sociological Society, V (1910), 57-76.

(9) ——. “Race and Marriage,” American Journal of Sociology, XV (1909-10), 433-53.

(10) Roosevelt, Theodore. “Brazil and the Negro,” Outlook, CVI (1904), 409-11.

II. THE CONFLICT AND FUSION OF CULTURES

A. Process of Acculturation

(1) Ratzel, Friedrich. The History of Mankind. Vol. I, Book I, sec. 4, “Nature, Rise and Spread of Civilization,” pp. 20-30. Vol. II, Book II, sec. 31, “Origin and Development of the Old American Civilization,” pp. 160-70. Translated from the 2d German ed. by A. J. Butler. 3 vols. London, 1896-98.

(2) Rivers, W. H. R. “The Ethnological Analysis of Culture,” Report of the 81st Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1911, pp. 490-99.

(3) Frobenius, L. Der Ursprung der afrikanischen Kulturen. Berlin, 1898.

(4) Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. Chap. vi, “The Universality of Cultural Traits,” pp. 155-73. Chap. vii, “The Evolutionary Viewpoint,” pp. 174-96. New York, 1911.

(5) Vierkandt, A. Die Stetigkeit im Kulturwandel. Eine sociologische Studie. Leipzig, 1908.

(6) McGee, W. J. “Piratical Acculturation,” American Anthropologist, XI (1898), 243-51.

(7) Crooke, W. “Method of Investigation and Folklore Origins,” Folklore, XXIV (1913), 14-40.

(8) Graebner, F. “Die melanesische Bogenkultur und ihre Verwandten,” Anthropos, IV (1909), 726-80, 998-1032.

(9) Lowie, Robert H. “On the Principle of Convergence in Ethnology,” Journal of American Folklore, XXV (1912), 24-42.

(10) Goldenweiser, A. A. “The Principle of Limited Possibilities in the Development of Culture,” Journal of American Folklore, XXVI (1913), 259-90.

(11) Dixon, R. B. “The Independence of the Culture of the American Indian,” Science, N.S., XXXV (1912), 46-55.

(12) Johnson, W. Folk-Memory. Or the continuity of British archaeology. Oxford, 1908.

(13) Wundt, Wilhelm. Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus, und Sitte. Band I, “Die Sprache.” 3 vols. Leipzig, 1900-1909.

(14) Tarde, Gabriel. The Laws of Imitation. Translated from the 2d French ed. by Elsie Clews Parsons. New York, 1903.

B. Nationalization and Denationalization

(1) Bauer, Otto. Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie. Wien, 1907. Chap. vi, sec. 30, “Der Sozialismus und das Nationalitätsprinzip,” pp. 507-21. (In: Adler, M. and Hildering, R. Marx-Studien; Blätter zur Theorie und Politik des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus. Band II. Wien, 1904.

(2) Kerner, R. J. Slavic Europe. A selected bibliography in the western European languages, comprising history, languages, and literature. “The Slavs and Germanization,” Nos. 2612-13, pp. 193-95. Cambridge, Mass., 1918.

(3) Delbrück, Hans. “Das Polenthum,” Preussische Jahrbücher, LXXVI (April, 1894), 173-86.

(4) Warren, H. C. “Social Forces and International Ethics,” International Journal of Ethics, XXVII (1917), 350-56.

(5) Prince, M. “A World Consciousness and Future Peace,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, XI (1917), 287-304.

(6) Reich, Emil. General History of Western Nations, from 5000 B.C. to 1900 A.D. “Europeanization of Humanity,” pp. 33-65, 480-82. (Vols. I-II published.) London, 1908.

(7) Thomas, William I. “The Prussian-Polish Situation: an Experiment in Assimilation,” American Journal of Sociology, XIX (1913-14), 624-39.

(8) Parkman, Francis. Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian Wars after the Conquest of Canada. 8th ed., 2 vols. Boston, 1877. [Discusses the cultural effects of the mingling of French and Indians in Canada.]

(9) Moore, William H. The Clash. A study in nationalities. New York, 1919. [French and English cultural contacts in Canada.]

(10) Mayo-Smith, Richmond. “Assimilation of Nationalities in the United States,” Political Science Quarterly, IX (1894), 426-44, 649-70.

(11) Kelly, J. Liddell. “New Race in the Making; Many Nationalities in the Territory of Hawaii—Process of Fusion Proceeding—the Coming Pacific Race,” Westminster Review, CLXXV (1911), 357-66.

(12) Kallen, H. M. Structure of Lasting Peace. An inquiry into the motives of war and peace. Boston, 1918.

(13) Westermarck, Edward. “Finland and the Czar,” Contemporary Review, LXXV (1899), 652-59.

(14) Brandes, Georg. “Denmark and Germany,” Contemporary Review, LXXVI (1899), 92-104.

(15) Marvin, Francis S. The Unity of Western Civilization. Essays. London and New York, 1915.

(16) Fishberg, Maurice. The Jews: a Study in Race and Environment. London and New York, 1911. [Chap. xxii deals with assimilation versus nationalism.]

(17) Bailey, W. F., and Bates, Jean V. “The Early German Settlers in Transylvania,” Fortnightly Review, CVII (1917), 661-74.

(18) Auerbach, Bertrand. Les Races et les nationalités en Autriche-Hongrie. Paris, 1898.

(19) Cunningham, William. Alien Immigrants to England. London and New York, 1897.

(20) Kaindl, Raimund Friedrich. Geschichte der Deutschen in den Karpathenländern. Vol. I, “Geschichte der Deutschen in Galizien bis 1772.” 3 vols. in 2. Gotha, 1907-11.

C. Missions

(1) Moore, Edward C. The Spread of Christianity in the Modern World. Chicago, 1919. [Bibliography.]

(2) World Missionary Conference. Report of the World Missionary Conference, 1910. 9 vols. Chicago, 1910.

(3) Robinson, Charles H. History of Christian Missions. New York, 1915.

(4) Speer, Robert E. Missions and Modern History. A study of the missionary aspects of some great movements of the nineteenth century. 2 vols. New York, 1904.

(5) Warneck, Gustav. Outline of a History of Protestant Missions from the Reformation to the Present Time. A contribution to modern church history. Translated from the German by George Robson. Chicago, 1901.

(6) Creighton, Louise. Missions. Their rise and development. New York, 1912. [Bibliography.]

(7) Pascoe, C. F. Two Hundred Years of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1701-1900. Based on a digest of the Society’s records. London, 1901.

(8) Parkman, Francis. The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century. Part II. “France and England in North America.” Boston, 1902.

(9) Bryce, James. Impressions of South Africa. Chap. xxii, “Missions,” pp. 384-93. 3d ed. New York, 1900.

(10) Sumner, W. G. Folkways. “Missions and Antagonistic Mores,” pp. 111-14, 629-31. New York, 1906.

(11) Coffin, Ernest W. “On the Education of Backward Races,” Pedagogical Seminary, XV (1908), 1-62. [Bibliography.]

(12) Blackmar, Frank W. Spanish Colonization in the South West. “The Mission System,” pp. 28-48. “Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science.” Baltimore, 1890.

(13) Johnston, Harry H. George Grenfell and the Congo. A history and description of the Congo Independent State and adjoining districts of Congoland, together with some account of the native peoples and their languages, the fauna and flora, and similar notes on the Cameroons, and the Island of Fernando Pô, the whole founded on the diaries and researches of the late Rev. George Grenfell, B.M.S., F.R.S.G.; and on the records of the British Baptist Missionary society; and on additional information contributed by the author, by the Rev. Lawson Forfeitt, Mr. Emil Torday, and others. 2 vols. London, 1908.

(14) Kingsley, Mary H. West African Studies. Pp. 107-9, 272-75. 2d ed. London, 1901.

(15) Morel, E. D. Affairs of West Africa. Chaps. xxii-xxiii, “Islam in West Africa,” pp. 208-37. London, 1902.

(16) Sapper, Karl. “Der Charakter der mittelamerikanischen Indianer,” Globus, LXXXVII (1905), 128-31.

(17) Fleming, Daniel J. Devolution in Mission Administration. As exemplified by the legislative history of five American missionary societies in India. New York, 1916. [Bibliography.]

III. IMMIGRATION AND AMERICANIZATION

A. Immigration and the Immigrant

(1) United States Immigration Commission. Reports of the Immigration Commission. 41 vols. Washington, 1911.

(2) Lauck, William J., and Jenks, Jeremiah. The Immigration Problem. New York, 1912.

(3) Commons, John R. Races and Immigrants in America. New ed. New York, 1920.

(4) Fairchild, Henry P. Immigration. A world-movement and its American significance. New York, 1913. [Bibliography.]

(5) Ross, E. A. The Old World in the New. The significance of past and present immigration to the American people. New York, 1914.

(6) Abbott, Grace. The Immigrant and the Community. With an introduction by Judge Julian W. Mack. New York, 1917.

(7) Steiner, Edward A. On the Trail of the Immigrant. New York, 1906.

(8) ——. The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow. Chicago, 1909.

(9) Brandenburg, Broughton. Imported Americans. The story of the experiences of a disguised American and his wife studying the immigration question. New York, 1904.

(10) Kapp, Friedrich. Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York. New York, 1880.

B. Immigrant Communities

(1) Faust, Albert B. The German Element in the United States. With special reference to its political, moral, social, and educational influence. New York, 1909.

(2) Green, Samuel S. The Scotch-Irish in America, 1895. A paper read as the report of the Council of the American Antiquarian Society, at the semi-annual meeting, April 24, 1895, with correspondence called out by the paper. Worcester, Mass., 1895.

(3) Hanna, Charles A. The Scotch-Irish. Or the Scot in North Britain, North Ireland, and North America. New York and London, 1902.

(4) Jewish Publication Society of America. The American Jewish Yearbook. Philadelphia, 1899.

(5) Jewish Communal Register, 1917-1918. 2d ed. Edited and published by the Kehillah (Jewish Community) of New York City. New York, 1919.

(6) Balch, Emily G. Our Slavic Fellow Citizens. New York, 1910.

(7) Horak, Jakub. Assimilation of Czechs in Chicago. [In press.]

(8) Millis, Harry A. The Japanese Problem in the United States. An investigation for the Commission on Relations with Japan appointed by the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. New York, 1915.

(9) Fairchild, Henry P. Greek Immigration to the United States. New Haven, 1911.

(10) Burgess, Thomas. Greeks in America. An account of their coming, progress, customs, living, and aspirations; with a historical introduction and the stories of some famous American-Greeks. Boston, 1913.

(11) Coolidge, Mary R. Chinese Immigration. New York, 1909.

(12) Foerster, Robert F. The Italian Emigration of Our Times. Cambridge, Mass., 1919.

(13) Lord, Eliot, Trenor, John J. D., and Barrows, Samuel J. The Italian in America. New York, 1905.

(14) DuBois, W. E. Burghardt. The Philadelphia Negro, A Social Study. Together with a special report on domestic service by Isabel Eaton. “Publications of the University of Pennsylvania, Series in Political Economy and Public Law,” No. 14. Philadelphia, 1899.

(15) Williams, Daniel J. The Welsh of Columbus, Ohio. A study in adaptation and assimilation. Oshkosh, Wis., 1913.

C. Americanization

(1) Drachsler, Julius. Democracy and Assimilation. The blending of immigrant heritages in America. New York, 1920. [Bibliography.]

(2) Dushkin, Alexander M. Jewish Education in New York City. New York, 1918.

(3) Thompson, Frank V. Schooling of the Immigrant. New York, 1920.

(4) Daniels, John. America via the Neighborhood. New York, 1920.

(5) Park, Robert E., and Miller, Herbert A. Old World Traits Transplanted. New York, 1921.

(6) Speek, Peter A. A Stake in the Land. New York, 1921.

(7) Davis, Michael M. Immigrant Health and the Community. New York, 1921.

(8) Breckinridge, Sophonisba P. New Homes for Old. New York, 1921.

(9) Leiserson, William M. Adjusting Immigrant and Industry. [In press.]

(10) Gavit, John P. Americans by Choice. [In press.]

(11) Claghorn, Kate H. The Immigrant’s Day in Court. [In press.]

(12) Park, Robert E. The Immigrant Press and Its Control. [In press.] New York, 1921.

(13) Burns, Allen T. Summary of the Americanization Studies of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [In press.]

(14) Miller, Herbert A. The School and the Immigrant. Cleveland Education Survey. Cleveland, 1916.

(15) Kallen, Horace M. “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot, a Study of American Nationality.” Nation, C (1915), 190-94, 217-20.

(16) Gulick, Sidney L. American Democracy and Asiatic Citizenship. New York, 1918.

(17) Talbot, Winthrop, editor. Americanization. Principles of Americanism; essentials of Americanization; technic of race-assimilation. New York, 1917. [Annotated bibliography.]

(18) Stead, W. T. The Americanization of the World. Or the trend of the twentieth century. New York and London, 1901.

(19) Aronovici, Carol. Americanization. St. Paul, 1919. [Also in American Journal of Sociology, XXV (1919-20), 695-730.]

D. Personal Documents

(1) Bridges, Horace. On Becoming an American. Some meditations of a newly naturalized immigrant. Boston, 1919.

(2) Riis, Jacob A. The Making of an American. New York, 1901.

(3) Rihbany, Abraham Mitrie. A Far Journey. Boston, 1914.

(4) Hasanovitz, Elizabeth. One of Them. Chapters from a passionate autobiography. Boston, 1918.

(5) Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow. New York, 1918.

(6) Ravage, M. E. An American in the Making. The life-story of an immigrant. New York, 1917.

(7) Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. A novel. New York, 1917.

(8) Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. New York, 1912.

(9) ——. They Who Knock at Our Gates. A complete gospel of immigration. New York, 1914.

(10) Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. An autobiography. New York, 1901.

(11) Steiner, Edward A. From Alien to Citizen. The story of my life in America. New York, 1914.

(12) Stern, Mrs. Elizabeth Gertrude (Levin). My Mother and I. New York, 1919.

(13) DuBois, W. E. Burghardt. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. New York, 1920.

(14) ——. The Souls of Black Folk. Essays and sketches. Chicago, 1903.

(15) Hapgood, Hutchins. The Spirit of the Ghetto. Studies of the Jewish quarter in New York. Rev. ed. New York, 1909.

TOPICS FOR WRITTEN THEMES

1. Race and Culture, and the Problem of the Relative Superiority and Inferiority of Races.

2. The Relation of Assimilation to Amalgamation.

3. The Mulatto as a Cultural Type.

4. Language as a Means of Assimilation and a Basis of National Solidarity.

5. History and Literature as Means for Preserving National Solidarity.

6. Race Prejudice and Segregation in Their Relations to Assimilation and Accommodation.

7. Domestic Slavery and the Assimilation of the Negro.

8. A Study of Historical Experiments in Denationalization; the Germanization of Posen, the Russianization of Poland, the Japanese Policy in Korea, etc.

9. The “Melting-Pot” versus “Hyphen” in Their Relation to Americanization.

10. A Study of Policies, Programs, and Experiments in Americanization from the Standpoint of Sociology.

11. The Immigrant Community as a Means of Americanization.

12. The Process of Assimilation as Revealed in Personal Documents, as Antin, The Promised Land; Rihbany, A Far Journey; Ravage, An American in the Making; etc.

13. Foreign Missions and Native Cultures.

14. The Rôle of Assimilation and Accommodation in the Personal Development of the Individual Man.

15. Assimilation and Accommodation in Their Relations to the Educational Process.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. What do you understand Simons to mean by the term “assimilation”?

2. What is the difference between amalgamation and assimilation?

3. How are assimilation and amalgamation interrelated?

4. What do you consider to be the difference between Trotter’s explanation of human evolution and that of Crile?

5. What do you understand Trotter to mean by the gregarious instinct as a mechanism controlling conduct?

6. Of what significance is the distinction made by Trotter between (a) the three individual instincts, and (b) the gregarious instincts?

7. What is the significance of material and non-material cultural elements for the study of race contact and intermixture?

8. How do you explain the difference in rapidity of assimilation of the various types of cultural elements?

9. What factors promoted and impeded the extension of Roman culture in Gaul?

10. What social factors were involved in the origin of the French language?

11. To what extent does the extension of a cultural language involve assimilation?

12. In what sense do the cultural languages compete with each other?

13. Do you agree with the prediction that within a century English will be the vernacular of a quarter of the people of the world? Justify your position.

14. Does Park’s definition of assimilation differ from that of Simons?

15. What do you understand Park to mean when he says, “Social institutions are not founded in similarities any more than they are founded in differences, but in relations, and in the mutual interdependence of the parts”? What is the relation of this principle to the process of assimilation?

16. What do you understand to be the difference between the type of assimilation (a) that makes for group solidarity and corporate action, and (b) that makes for formal like-mindedness? What conditions favor the one or the other type of assimilation?

17. What do you understand by the term “Americanization”?

18. Is there a difference between Americanization and Prussianization?

19. With what programs of Americanization are you familiar? Are they adequate from the standpoint of the sociological interpretation of assimilation?

20. In what way is language both a means and a product of assimilation?

21. What is meant by the phrases “apperception mass,” “universes of discourse,” and “definitions of the situations”? What is their significance for assimilation?

22. In what way does assimilation involve the mediation of individual differences?

23. Does the segregation of immigrants make for or against assimilation?

24. In what ways do primary and secondary contacts, imitation and suggestion, competition, conflict and accommodation, enter into the process of assimilation?