Politics & Power Quote by Sheldon Jackson

Assimilation is framed here not as a contested political project but as a tidy shopping list: home, furniture, clothes, lifestyle, citizenship. Sheldon Jackson’s genius - and menace - is how calmly he collapses identity into consumer space, turning “American” into a set of purchasable props. The line reads like a progress report on “those best known,” implying a hierarchy of visibility and worth: the people legible to power are the ones already reassembling themselves in the nation’s image.

Jackson was a leading Presbyterian missionary and federal education official deeply entangled with late-19th-century U.S. colonial expansion, especially in Alaska. That context matters because the quote isn’t neutral description; it’s administrative desire. It converts Indigenous and immigrant lives into a measurable outcome: domestic conformity. “Highest ambition” does a lot of work, ventriloquizing the targets of assimilation as if they freely chose the project, as if coercive schooling, mission discipline, and legal pressure were simply helpful nudges toward better taste.

The subtext is that “American” is not a plural identity but a single template, and that citizenship is the reward for performing it correctly. Notice how civic belonging comes last, as the final certification after the aesthetics and habits are in place. Democracy becomes a finishing stamp on a remodel.

What makes the rhetoric effective is its softness. No threats, no slurs, just the soothing language of aspiration. It sells cultural erasure as self-improvement, and empire as interior design.