The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924 by Cristina Stanciu (review)

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• The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924 by Cristina Stanciu
• Ellyn Ruhlmann

The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Literature and Culture, 1879–1924. By Cristina Stanciu. Yale University Press, 2023. 370 pp.

After America declared its sovereignty, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur sought to define a unique American identity in Letters from an American Farmer (1782). His question, "What is an American?" (48), set off a centuries-long debate that grew especially strident during peak immigration years at the turn of the twentieth century. Cristina Stanciu's illuminating new book, The Makings and Unmakings of Americans (2023), traces patterns of inclusion and exclusion marking America's treatment of two so-called "problem" groups in the debate, Indigenous people and new immigrants (1). Historians have uncovered similar patterns before, but Stanciu advances the scholarship by demonstrating parallels in how these two groups responded to their common plight of not counting as "Americans." The book doesn't try to answer Crèvecœur's sweeping question, since the criteria for being considered American are fickle and, as Stanciu observes in describing the "myth" of an American identity, often contradictory (26). Rather, it builds a case through compelling and comprehensive archival research that, during the period of Stanciu's study, Indigenous people and new immigrants employed strategies to both adapt to and rewrite the ever-evolving terms of being accepted as American—hence [End Page 171] the phrase "Makings and Unmakings." Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of this back-and-forth process of assimilation, exploring it within legal and cultural frameworks.

In the first chapter, Stanciu sets the groundwork for her study by describing legal strategies the US government used to regulate citizenship among the two groups—strategies that show a shifting sequence of inclusion and exclusion policies dating back to the 1787 Constitutional Convention (35–36). During one week in 1924, President Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Act and the Indian Citizenship Act (ICA). The Immigration Act established a quota system that discriminated against settlers from southern and eastern Europe, gradually barring them from citizenship because of "new hierarchies of difference and (racial) desirability" (29). Meanwhile, the ICA freed Native Americans from the necessity of renouncing tribal affiliations but at a great cost: colonization, genocide, territory dispossession, and finally, forced American citizenship (30). After discussing key legislative acts, Stanciu turns to ideological constructs of the term Americanization and state and federal programs designed to instill patriotism and manage public perception alongside public policy.

Political cartoons and propaganda posters bolstered this Americanization process, and Stanciu offers a cogent sampling in chapter 2. An 1880 Puck cartoon depicts an open-armed Sam at the portal of the "U.S. Ark of Refuge," where he's welcoming the masses (77). Other visuals depict Sam as markedly inhospitable in his reception of those exhibiting racial differences, including a 1901 Judge cartoon, "The American Policy," showing Sam tugging a wayward Filipino boy back to "Liberty School" (78–79). These illustrations and Stanciu's insightful analysis reveal fraught complexities behind the phrase "makings of Americans," a trope grounded in American exceptionalism. The chapter title "You Can't Come In!" highlights efforts to preclude settlers who appear irredeemably foreign.

From illustrations, the book turns to real-life examples of Americanization efforts in schools and classrooms. Chapter 3 demonstrates how students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School cleaved to the institution's American ideology while simultaneously criticizing sacrifices demanded of its students. One student poem describes the daily regimen at Carlisle in militaristic terms—from the first bugle call, when [End Page 172] "the troops fall in," to the moment when students salute the American flag "with our hats in our hands" (101). This chapter also features fascinating before-and-after photographs showing children first arriving at Carlisle and a cohort of uniformly clad, grim-faced students assembled after training. Like the Carlisle students, immigrants taking Americanization classes demonstrated both acquiescence and indications of dissent in letters written to their teachers. Chapter 4 demonstrates how public schools, adult education programs, and the popular press imposed a nationalist agenda...