Americanization

Americanization is presented as a contested ideal: a language of shared civic life that can offer belonging, but also a political instrument for defining which Americans count as sufficiently American. The novel sets the ordinary, already assimilated lives of Newark’s Jewish families against a government that calls for their further incorporation while subjecting them to programs designed specifically for them. Its central tension is not between American identity and an untouched foreign culture, but between citizens’ own claims to belong and an authority that makes belonging conditional on compliance.

An Ideal of Civic Belonging

Long before the Lindbergh administration, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf had made the development of American ideals the central priority of Jewish life. By 1940 he claimed the longest record of service at his temple of any rabbi in the country, and newspapers celebrated his public speaking and his fluency in ten languages. His reach extended beyond his congregation: he addressed Newark churches and schools, civic and cultural groups, and audiences around the country. In his account, Americanization of Americans was a means of protecting democracy against Bolshevism, radicalism, and anarchism. He invoked the principle that there could be no divided allegiance, presenting loyalty to the national community as an absolute civic requirement.

That position gives Americanization a distinctly public, political character. Bengelsdorf treated the language of national ideals as common ground on which Jews could demonstrate their belonging. Yet the principle of a single, unquestioned national allegiance also left little room for suspicion of the government or resistance to its policies. His rhetoric could therefore make conformity appear not merely patriotic, but a test of whether a person was American at all. When Lindbergh appointed him to direct the Office of American Absorption in New Jersey, an existing program of civic advocacy became closely identified with an administration that claimed authority to direct how minorities should enter the larger society.

The ideal’s apparent premise was especially uneasy in the Roths’ neighborhood. In Weequahic, residents generally spoke American English, and few displayed the outward signs of the older immigrant culture. Hebrew lettering appeared on synagogue lintels and the kosher butcher’s window, but ordinary public and household life was conducted in English. The neighborhood’s work, schools, shops, and family routines were not evidence of a community outside America; they were the substance of its American life. Against this background, official calls to make Jewish Americans more American sound less like an invitation to join than a declaration that their existing belonging is incomplete.

National Symbols and the Feeling of Belonging

The novel also shows how American identity gains force through shared symbols and ceremonies. On a family trip to Washington, a wrong turn brought the Roths to the United States Capitol. The building appeared as an inspiring embodiment of national history, and the family hoped that the history it represented would protect them against Lindbergh. At the Lincoln Memorial, the immense statue joined the sacred and the national in the child narrator’s perception; the solemn monument made the country’s democratic inheritance feel larger than ordinary political argument.

A moment with a stamp of Martha Washington offers a more intimate version of the same attachment. As the family discussed the stamp, the narrator felt the complications of being Jewish in Lindbergh’s Washington fall away. The feeling resembled standing for the national anthem at school and singing with complete commitment. The episode does not erase the family’s vulnerability. Rather, it shows that their national feeling is genuine even when the political climate makes their citizenship seem doubtful. Americanization, in this register, is not a government’s achievement imposed on outsiders: it is a lived attachment already present in a child’s knowledge, ritual, and affection for the country.

Herman Roth states that attachment in explicitly civic terms when a new neighbor asks how he would protect himself if trouble came. Herman answers that he was born in Newark in 1901, has paid rent, taxes, and bills on time, has never cheated an employer or the government, and believes in and loves the country. His account rests on a lifetime of ordinary obligations, not on a special performance of loyalty. The neighbor responds that he, too, loves the country, contrasting it with Italy under Mussolini. Their exchange briefly makes shared American belonging possible across ethnic difference, while the question that prompts it reveals why declarations of loyalty have become necessary.

Programs of Incorporation

Under Bengelsdorf’s administration, Americanization acquired an administrative form. The Office of American Absorption described its purpose as encouraging religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into society. In practice, the narrative observes, the office’s serious attention was directed at Jewish Americans. The Just Folks program carried that asymmetry into children’s lives: it proposed sending hundreds of Jewish boys between twelve and eighteen from cities to work for eight weeks as field hands and day laborers with farm families hundreds of miles away.

Sandy applied after a program representative spoke to boys at school and an application requiring parental permission reached the dinner table. His parents disagreed sharply over what the opportunity meant. Herman saw an effort to separate Jewish children from their families and weaken family solidarity; Sandy insisted that the program was a genuine opportunity. Evelyn, who worked for Bengelsdorf, supported Sandy and challenged Herman’s fear that his children would leave the neighborhood. For Herman, the issue was not simply whether farm work might benefit his son. The program’s language of opportunity concealed a larger question: why was a policy of American incorporation being directed at Jewish boys by removing them from their families and familiar communities?

Homestead 42 extended the same logic from children to households. A relocation offer dated May 22, 1942, presented the initiative as a modern counterpart to the Homestead Act of 1862: a government-supported chance for families to move, put down roots, and strengthen the country. The letter’s appeal to historic American opportunity made relocation sound voluntary and forward-looking. But the program assigned families destinations through a coordinated partnership involving the Office of American Absorption, government offices, and major corporations. Evelyn explained that maps covered in pins represented families selected for relocation and the places to which they had been assigned; she emphasized how many people and how much planning were involved, and that no one person made the decisions.

That procedural complexity did not reassure the families facing displacement. The announcement’s language of choice and enrichment stood beside the reality of being sorted, assigned, and moved. On Summit Avenue, Jewish families who had left their flats were replaced by Italian families brought up from Newark’s First Ward under the Good Neighbor Project. The arrangement offered a rent discount of fifteen percent—$6.37 on a monthly rent of $42.50—for five years, administered over the initial three-year lease and its renewal. Officially, the project would enrich the Americanness of everyone involved by bringing non-Jewish residents into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. At home, however, people feared that it would weaken Jewish social ties and electoral influence. The promise of integration thus accompanied a state-directed reordering of who lived together and where.

Competing Claims to the Nation

The novel’s contrast is between Americanization as a shared civic inheritance and Americanization as a demand enforced on a marked minority. The government’s vocabulary—opportunity, incorporation, enrichment—casts its programs as benevolent, while maps, assignments, corporate participation, and replacement tenants reveal their power to reorganize lives. The crucial distinction is between belonging as a fact of ordinary citizenship and belonging as a status officials claim the authority to grant, measure, or improve.

The final constitutional crisis makes that distinction explicit. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s broadcast against the acting administration invokes the founding language of American liberty to condemn illegal confinement and usurpation. Her appeal to the Declaration of Independence and to constitutional procedure claims the nation’s democratic inheritance against those acting in its name. The scene echoes the earlier moments at the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial: national symbols can comfort a family, but they can also supply grounds for resistance. Americanization is therefore not resolved as unquestioning assimilation. The novel leaves it as a struggle over whether American ideals belong to the government that invokes them or to the citizens who use them to demand equal rights and lawful government.