A 1916 photo of Frances Kellor Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division For a brief period in the early 20th century, the Fourth of July wasn’t simply Independence Day. Between 1915 and 1918, communities across the United States combined commemorations of the nation’s founding with Americanization Day, a holiday held to encourage immigrants to fully assimilate into American society.
Centered on the motto “many peoples—but one nation,” the celebration arrived on the heels of a decade-long immigration boom that brought an average of one million newcomers to the U.S. annually, ending only with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
More than a century later, few people know the name of the driving force behind Americanization Day: Frances Kellor, a progressive social reformer and activist. Although Americanization—the idea that immigrants should detach themselves from their heritage to adopt American customs—is often associated with anti-immigrant sentiment today, Kellor had a different goal in mind.
As biographer John Kenneth Press writes in Founding Mother: Frances Kellor and the Creation of Modern America, the activist viewed Americanization as a way of “breaking down the walls that separated people” and asking individuals who had lived in the U.S. for decades “to understand and accept immigrants.”
Press argues that Kellor—a lesbian at a time when few people were openly gay, whose masculine personality often led her to be mistaken for a man—was bold and relentless in fighting for the rights of minority groups. She kept her personal life private, and Press could find no record of her discussing her sexuality publicly. But the author maintains that Kellor’s identity as a lesbian influenced her lifelong advocacy on behalf of outsiders.
“I don’t know why she is completely ignored,” Press tells Smithsonian magazine. An instrumental proponent of women’s suffrage and immigrant rights, she deserves to be celebrated, the biographer adds.
Born into a working-class family in Ohio in 1873, Frances Alice Kellar (she would later change the spelling of her last name) grew up in Coldwater, Michigan. Abandoned by her father, she was raised largely by her mother, who took on domestic work to make a living. Kellor, too, had to work from a young age; she left high school after two years to work full time, securing a job as a reporter at the local newspaper.
With the financial support of a pair of wealthy sisters who recognized her potential, Kellor graduated from Cornell University with a law degree in 1897. Soon after, she moved to Chicago to study criminal sociology at the University of Chicago. While living in the city, Kellor met progressive reformer Jane Addams, co-founder of Hull-House, one of the first and most influential social settlement houses in North America. The duo went on to collaborate on a series of progressive campaigns.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these spaces essentially served as urban community centers, connecting immigrants and working mothers with reformers who offered educational resources, child care and other forms of support.
Kellor moved to New York City in 1903, around the same time that she met and fell in love with the wealthy Brooklyn social activist Mary Dreier. Three years later, Kellor organized a study addressing the hardships faced by immigrants. As historian Lillian Faderman writes in To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America—a History, Kellor found that immigrants were being “worked to death” at labor camps and sweatshops. Officials who were supposed to ease the new arrivals’ transition to the U.S. instead took advantage of them, providing invalid leases and counterfeit money.
When Kellor visited work sites throughout New York State, she was horrified by what she saw. She became a passionate advocate for improving these individuals’ quality of life, petitioning President Theodore Roosevelt and powerful politicians in New York to establish laws that would protect immigrants from exploitation.
Before Kellor’s intervention, Press says, life for immigrants in the U.S. was “an unregulated mess.”
In 1910, Kellor’s efforts culminated in the creation of the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration. Governor Charles Evans Hughes—who would later serve as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court—appointed Kellor head of the bureau, making her the first woman to lead a state agency in New York. In this role, she moved “beyond legislative matters to practical services,” such as offering English lessons to children and working adults, Faderman writes.
Kellor believed that learning English and the civic responsibilities associated with citizenship would help immigrants better adjust to life in their new home. She wanted factory workers to speak English, for example, so they could understand orders and avoid accidents, Press says. As Kellor once put it, “industrial justice,” or the fair treatment of employees in the workplace, “is the essence of Americanization.”
In Faderman’s view, Kellor’s “optimistic conviction about the simple and inevitable Americanization of even first-generation immigrants was perhaps somewhat naive.” Still, the historian writes, “there is no doubt that through her policies and the laws that her bureau helped get passed, she lightened the burdens of millions of immigrants.”
Backed by wealthy private donors, the National Americanization Committee kicked off under Kellor’s leadership in 1915. Kellor and her colleagues embraced the Fourth of July as the perfect timing for Americanization Day, hoping that the outpouring of patriotism associated with celebrations of American independence would also help unify diverse communities.
“What can we do to help [immigrants] become Americans first?” a poster distributed by the committee asked. “We must do something as a nation to make them feel at home—feel that their interests and their affections are deeply rooted in America.”
During World War I, thousands of people participated in Americanization Day festivities across the country. In Indianapolis in 1918, paradegoers packed the streets, with German immigrants waving the American flag and Slovenes dressed in folk costumes marching with a sign that read, “We are for America first, last and all the time.” In Cleveland, more than 75,000 immigrants marched in the city’s 1918 Americanization parade.
On Americanization Day, “everybody is to be an American, not a hyphenated American, but a genuine American, holding love of country and loyalty to its institutions high above all things else,” the Washington-based Vancouver Daily Columbian reported in 1915.
Faderman, a scholar who is often called the “mother of lesbian history,” tells Smithsonian that Kellor’s push for assimilation came from a place “of sensitivity and good nature,” although she acknowledges that this campaign might be viewed differently through a contemporary lens. “What Kellor believed is that immigrants would do better if they learned the American way of life,” Faderman says. “Immigrants had to join the melting pot and had to give up some of their ways—not for the comfort of Americans, but for their own good.”
