Creating One People

. More than two million Europeans came to America between 1830 and 1850, mainly from Ireland and Germany. Leaders of public education faced the task of transforming these newcomers—speaking a babble of languages, clinging to diverse cultures, and owing loyalties to the Old World—into one people. Even before the arrival of this flood of non-English Europeans, prominent Americans such as Benjamin Franklin had voiced a concern that new immigrants were not melting into American society: "They will soon out number us, that all the advantages we have will not, in my opinion, be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious." Now the task of assimilating immigrants into a single American identity seemed paramount to many old-stock Americans. School reform, consequently, appealed to native-born Americans alarmed by the swelling tide of immigration. For those who believed that...