THE AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL COLLEGES FOR IMMIGRANTS HENRY M. BOWDEN, PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE FOR IMMIGRANTS, SPRINGFIELD, MASS. THE HE American International College grew out of the recognition by the Rev. Calvin E. Amaron, then of Lowell, and others, of the educational needs of the French Canadian population which came into New England with the return of business prosperity in 1878. The rapidly changing character of the foreign population and the ambitions of Italians and Armenians to take advantage of the opportunities of the school rapidly broadened the scope of the work, and after several changes of name to correspond with the broadened scope, the school has become what it is to-day: an institution given specifically to meeting the needs of the foreigner in America, offering definitely the instruction and training required to fit the stranger for life here, at a price within the reach of those who must live by work. In its present location for more than thirty years, and under its present name for more than ten, it has gone about its business of aiding in making Americans. It often has representatives of twenty or more distinct races or nations within its walls at one time, though the proportion of the various elements changes from year to year. Certain well-defined groups, however, always have prominent representatives. The larger groups are usually among the Greeks, Italians, Poles, and Armenians; there are always Russians, and Hebrews, and usually a considerable number from Latin America, with some from Spain as well; the various Balkan states send students, and no country in Europe ever remains long unrepresented. Usually there are Chinese students, sometimes Japanese, frequently Turkish. Religious statistics are kept, and attendance at chapel exercises is required; but no religious discrimination is practiced, and Confucianist, Christian, Jew, and Mohammedan live in peace. The school owns property which gives it about eighty rooms for boys and twenty for girls, and some students live away from the campus; the schoolroom accommodation allows the attendance of approximately one hundred and thirty students. There are always applicants waiting for admission, and were the accommodations doubled there would still be a waiting list. The classroom work divides itself into departments growing naturally out of actual conditions. There are many students who wish to gain familiarity with the English language and with the fundamental conditions and ideas of American life, in order to gain a higher position in the business world. Such students may stay a few months, perhaps a year or two years. The introductory work is planned to give an early command of the language and a knowledge of American government and trade. Then there are students who wish to enter upon a more extended course, who are planning for college or university work. Some of these have perhaps had a good deal of training in European gymnasia; some have only their ambitions, as yet undeveloped. A complete academic course is offered, of such value as to be recognized by the College Entrance Examination Board; and students are admitted to most of the New England colleges on the certificate of this school. Within the last few years the school has sent students to Bates, Dartmouth, Middlebury, Tufts, Boston University, Yale, and others in New England, and to many prominent colleges and universities elsewhere. The school has the right under its charter to grant all the customary degrees given by colleges in Massachusetts. For the most part, it confines itself to the B.A. degree in course, though it confers also B.S. It grants no degrees without residence, but it recognizes work done in other schools when properly evidenced, and substantiated by the actual classroom work of the resident student. Frequently there are students who need but a year or two of preparation to fit them for entrance upon the work of some professional school, and the ideal college student here is one who wishes to fit for such a school. From the beginning the ideal of the school, in common with the original ideals of all schools, has been training for public service. It would seem, at least on a cursory examination of the work of those formerly connected with its classes, that an unusual proportion were now engaged in occupations distinctly connected with community service. Professors and teachers in various universities and schools, officials in government service, secretaries and agents of public and private social agencies, physicians and nurses, ministers and lawyers, they are found from Massachusetts to California, from Nova Scotia and Quebec to Texas. They are also guarding trenches "somewhere in France" and, clad in Greek uniforms, are watching the Allies from the side lines in Macedonia. But the alien in this land, from the very fact that he is an alien, is capable of a peculiar service to the state. The large foreign population of the United States, amounting in some large districts to more than half the total number of inhabitants and in many to more than one fourth of this total, can be brought into a common social and political consciousness with the older elements only through the mediation of such as are both alien and American. The college has from the start recognized the demand for intelligent work toward the Americanization of alien groups. It is now working more directly to meet this need through a course of training for social service among foreign populations. This course includes a study of the facts of immigration, the conditions of immigrant communities, the relation of the alien to the law, the agencies for social betterment now in operation, methods of teaching English and civics, and methods of investigating social conditions and classifying social material. It is accompanied by actual work in investigating and teaching, and the certificate for the course will imply adequate qualification in civics, history, sociology, economics, and educational philosophy. The work of the course covers two years, and may be counted on the requirements for the B.A. degree. All of the students who are now taking the course are engaged in practical teaching in day or evening classes. Not only in this formal work does the school engage in meeting the social needs of the immigrant population, but great service has been rendered through the activities of students who have been active in various societies and organizations of their fellow countrymen in the vicinity. There are many societies with an educational tendency among aliens in America, most of them being specially interested in the teaching of history and civics, or in the discussion of historic or political questions; some of them with an eye toward European conditions, some of them particularly American in their interests. The events of the last two years have probaby made it clear to every one that there is no divorcing American from European problems, however much any one may desire such a divorce. The problem is to present and interpret these problems in such a way as to strengthen American idealism and unify American life. In this work, aside from any school exercises, the students have frequently met, in classes, lectures, addresses, and more or less formal discussion, as many as fifteen hundred of their people in a single week; the total amount of such work is not capable of any exact definition, but it is very large. No day passes that does not see some contribution to its total. This brings the school through its students into the most vital contact with the most essential problems connected with immigration and with alien life, especially in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. It is quite the fashion to say that the immigration problems are economic, and to think that in saying this a real contribution has been made to the solution of some of these problems. In truth, in common with all questions of social life, the immigration problems have their economic basis, and are to be understood and met only as this basis is recognized; but, here also, in common with all of the real questions of life, immigration is to be truly estimated only by a consideration of social values, and its problems are to be solved only by adjustments of society which recognize all the ways of reaction of human life, and not simply the economic reactions. It is with this conception of immigration as a social phenomenon, a conception which makes economics a department of sociology rather than sociology a department of economics, that these courses of study in immigration and in practical work among immigrants are guided. The definite work of the school in this connection is extending and defining itself; the recognized needs of the communities surrounding the school give scope for the application of laboratory methods in developing the theoretical study of the problems; and the large number of organizations among the foreign populations offers opportunities for many enterprises in the way of courses of lectures, addresses, classes and discussions which are hardly limited by anything except the individual desire and initiative of the one who is interested to work. XI. AMERICANISM ADDRESS AT CONVENTION HALL, PHILADELPHIA, MAY 10, 1915 MR WOODROW WILSON R. MAYOR, FELLOW CITIZENS: It warms my heart that you should give me such a reception; but it is not of myself that I wish to think to-night, but of those who have just become citizens of the United States. This is the only country in the world which experiences this constant and repeated rebirth. Other countries depend upon the multiplication of their own native people. This country is constantly drinking strength out of new sources by the voluntary association with it of great bodies of strong men and forwardlooking women out of other lands. And so by the gift of the free will of independent people it is being constantly renewed from generation to generation by the same process by which it was originally created. It is as if humanity had determined to see to it that this great Nation, founded for the benefit of humanity, should not lack for the allegiance of the people of the world. You have just taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one, unless it be God- certainly not of allegiance to those who temporarily represent this great Government. You have taken an oath of allegiance to a great ideal, to a great body of principles, to a great hope of the human race. You have said, "We are going to America, not only to earn a living, not only to seek the things which it was more difficult to obtain where we were born, but to help forward the great enterprises of the human spirit- to let men know that everywhere in the world there are men who will cross strange oceans and go where a speech is spoken which is alien to them if they can but satisfy their quest for what their spirits crave; knowing that whatever the speech there is but |