garians, Rumanians, Greeks, Belgians, Armenians, and other peoples.

The mills which made Detroit great in size and popular prestige threatened to destroy its Americanism, and when business became demoralized by the outbreak of the war abroad these mills seemed unable to maintain the level of prosperity which they had introduced. The fall of 1914 found Detroit suffering from an acute attack of indigestion. The city had bitten off more immigration than it could chew. Factories ran down and 80,000 men lost their jobs. Great melancholy mobs of the jobless prowled through the chilly streets.

Then the Detroit Board of Commerce came to the relief of the city. Under the leadership of Mr. Charles B. Warren and Mr. Byres H. Gitchell, its President and Secretary respectively, the Board organized help for the men out of work. Doctors who volunteered their services were formed into squads to provide free treatment for the sick children and wives of the unemployed, lawyers of similar altruism came forward to save penniless families from ejectment, drug-store proprietors donated medicines, and well-to-do citizens donated sacks of food, each sack sufficient to keep two people alive for three days. In the meantime the Board of Commerce tried to get work for those who had lost it. The effort was successful in the cases of those foreign laborers who could speak English, but most of the sixty thousand men who knew only the tongue of the land of their birth remained jobless. Then and there the Board of Commerce found the germ of the trouble. learned that most of the unemployment was due to the inability of foreign laborers to fit American jobs, which was due primarily, of course, to their inability to understand English.

They

Thereupon the members of the Board of Commerce went to work to remedy the evil by striking at its root. They assisted the Board of Education in opening night schools where the foreigners might learn English. The Board of Education, by the way, had been more than anxious to do this for several years, but without the assistance of the

manufacturers who employed all this foreign labor the educators were almost helpless. The leaders of the Board of Commerce got the manufacturers to help, and in the winter of 1914-15 the work of Americanizing Detroit began on a large scale. It has not ceased, until now Detroit begins to deserve, as perhaps it deserved formerly, the flattering characterization of "the most American city in the United States."

Other cities have also become aroused to the importance of being American, and have taken steps to hurry the process of digesting the foreign lumps in their midst. Roches

ter, New York, has been a pioneer in this direction. But at Rochester the task of making Americans from immigrants was taken up and carried through by the public schools of the city. The most interesting thing about the situation in Detroit is that this work was begun by the business men. It is true that the schools had been trying to do it before the manufacturers took hold. But until the interest of the great employers of labor was secured the efforts of the Board of Education bore little fruit. By the help of the business men the good intentions of the schoolmen have been converted into fruitful accomplishment.

Realizing the value of having the assistance of experienced advisers, the Detroit Board of Commerce invited the help of the Committee for Immigrants in America. Letters were then sent to every employer of more than one hundred laborers in Detroit, pointing out the disadvantage of having to employ men who could not speak English, asking each employer to take a census of such "dumb" workers in his factory, and requesting the direct help of the manufacturers in inducing the laborers to go to night school and learn English.

The employers, who had learned their lesson in the terrible winter of 1914-15, were not slow to respond. They met the investigators of the Board of Commerce and of the Committee for Immigrants in America, and suggested means of making it practicable for the workers in their factories to go to school. As a result of these suggestions the Board of Commerce submitted a plan to every manufacturer in Detroit who hired more than a fixed minimum of employees. In some factories the Safety First Department took the work in charge; in others control was assumed by the so-called welfare departments -which have become very popular in De

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troit; in others an executive of the company made himself personally responsible.

In all factories posters were placed on bulletin boards urging the men to go to school in order to "become better citizens and get better jobs." In all factories slips bearing similar advice were inserted in pay envelopes. Every one in Detroit jumped into the campaign with enthusiasm. Saloon-keepers pasted on saloon walls the posters adjuring the alien to embrace Uncle Sam, department stores put slips of information about the night schools. in the packages of every customer who looked like a foreigner, ministers preached "Americanization in the churches of the foreign quarters, and the editors of foreign newspapers harped on the same key in editorial addresses to their people. Whenever an Italian or Polish young woman drew a book from the public library she found therein one of the ubiquitous slips telling how her friends. who knew no English might learn it free.

The Board of Health, the Poor Commission, the juvenile courts, the Associated Charities, the employment bureaus, the Boy Scouts, and the Young Men's Christian Association all put their shoulders to the wheel which has been rolling Detroit out of the mire of hyphenism. Foreign consuls helped too, for eign priests caught hold, and some Greeks lent the Board of Trade some Greek type in order that their countrymen might get the helpful advice in their own language.

From August 17 to September 13, 1915, the whole city embarked on a gigantic campaign of publicity for the benefit of its adopted children from Europe and Asia. The city was bedecked with thousands of handbills. The Detroit Federation of Labor, the Brewery Workers, and the Bill Posters' Union added their approval. The Michigan Workmen's Compensation Mutual Insurance Company issued a special night school bulletin to all employers on their list throughout Michigan suggesting how the night school attendance of employees might be encouraged. This was a particularly happy move, as Mr. I. Walton Schmidt, Secretary of the Americanization Committee of the Board of Commerce, points out, because of "the immediate connection between English First and Safety First." Last, but not least, during this period Detroit's newspapers of whatever language were filled with allusions to the campaign of Americanization.

As a result of this tremendous activity the Detroit night schools opened on Monday

evening, September 13, 1915, with an attendance increased over the previous record by one hundred and fifty-three per cent, and with thousands of would-be pupils turned away from school doors.

The

The means used by different employers in encouraging their employees to go to school varied greatly. The Saxon Motor Company made night school attendance compulsory for its non-English-speaking workmen. Solvay Process Company offered a wage increase of two cents an hour to all employees who learned English. The Northway Motor and Manufacturing Company started a class in its own factory and announced that workers who attended neither that nor the classes in the public schools would be discharged. The Ford Motor Company, which has also had a school of its own, has rather discouraged its employees who have wanted to attend the public schools rather than the school in the Ford plant. But most concerns, like the Cadillac Company, neither organized schools of their own nor made attendance on the night schools compulsory, but encouraged this attendance in every fair way in their power.

But it remained for the Packard Motor Car Company to stir the whole industrial country with the announcement of the policy summed up in two words which to-day express the spirit of all Detroit-" Americans first."

"From and after this date," announced the Packard Company on January 31, 1916, "promotions to positions of importance in the organization of this company will be given only to those who are native born or naturalized citizens of the United States, or to those of foreign birth who have relinquished their foreign citizenship, and who have filed with our Government their first papers applying for citizenship, which application for citizenship must be diligently followed to its completion."

"Americans first." Those words are on the tongue of every Detroiter to-day. They mean, of course, not America über Alles, but Put only Americans on guard.

Instead of slackening, the efforts to eradicate hyphenism in Detroit are steadily increasing. When I stepped off the train there in the latter part of last month, there were almost no signs of the Presidential campaign which had already begun to set the rest of the country by the ears, but everywhere were evidences of this campaign of internal adjustment. "Learn English and Get Better Pay

was the advice, appropriate enough, indeed, flashed at me from a bulletin-board in the railway station and later flung at me from windows and billboards everywhere." English-Speaking Workmen Wanted," said a sign on a building under construction. One plant, I was later told, which uses gang labor has been forced to employ Negroes because of the scarcity in Detroit of white workmen who speak English.

Detroit to-day is a wonderful spectacle of team work. There is none of the petty jealousy between different agencies working toward the same goal which usually is found in even the most praiseworthy movements engaging many men. Never have I seen a city so united for a common end, not even in the case of a city fighting a deadly epidemic. In its great desire to digest the alien ingre dients which it has swallowed Detroit has achieved what Maeterlinck calls "the spirit of the hive."

Although supporters of both President Wilson and Mr. Hughes have claimed for these gentlemen the credit for the Americanizing of Detroit-as politicians claim the credit for everything from accidental prosperity to providential rain-the sober truth. is that the unifying and purifying of Detroit have been accomplished by united non-partisan action, and could have been accomplished in no other way. It is true that Mr. Charles B. Warren, who was the President of the Board of Commerce when that body began the great drive on immigrant ignorance, is now a Republican National Committeeman, but at that time he had no official political connections. It is true that at first the Board of Trade had the help of the Committee for Immigrants in America, which has since become the National Americanization Committee, but the Committee then had not evinced the political partisanship which it has shown recently.

United, non-partisan action, with nearly everybody helping from the multi-millionaire manufacturer to the humblest Hungarian ward leader, has been responsible for the great change that has come over Detroit. The shrewdness of the leaders of the movement in enlisting the aid of the chief men in the various foreign colonies, by the way, has been an important factor in the success of the work.

Not that Detroit has entirely worked her way out of the woods of ignorance and divided allegiance yet, however. There are