being American?

During the late 1910s and earls '20s, immigrant workers at the Ford automotive plant in Dearborn, Michigan, were given free, compulsory "Americanization" classes. In addition to English lessons, there were lectres on work habits, personal hygene, and table manners. The first sentence they memorized was "I am a good American." During their graduation ceremony they gathered next to a gigantic wooden pot, which their teachers stirred with 10-foot ladles. The students walked through a door into the pot, wearing traditional costumes from their countries of oragin and singing songs in their native languages. A few minutes later, the door in the pot opened, and the students walked out again, wearing suits and ties, waving American flags, and singing "The Star-Spangled Banner"


It is like making a dessert with little kids when you let them choose how you make it. You put in all sorts of good things like mac & cheese, brownies, cookie dough and fruit loops, blend it all together and get a dull colored ill-consistant mass of goop. And odds are it tastes like you found it in the gutter. Is this what we want, something that looks good individually but we force it through a massive digestive system to become assimilated turds?

Great to teach our culture, immigrants probably will benefit from adapting to our way of life to a degree, and we all love singing good 'ol American songs (does Pink Houses count?). But I'm American and don't wear suits and carry a flag everywhere (heck, most Americans carry a Canadian flag abroad). Though to be fair, I also don't march around in a lehderhosen carring a fork full of sourkraut (though I wish I could speak German better, even with very few cases where this would do me any good).

Lou Dobbs, I'm talking to you. Don't cancel St Patricks Day, b/c sometimes even a German girl likes to celebrate all things Irish.

A person can stay who they are and adapt to a new culture without conforming.. this part of the article scared me. Then again this was 1910, and as a woman I didn't have much of a vote back then.

Did anyone else have a reaction to this, or have I reached a point of sleep deprivation where I've got an opinion about everything?