Politics & Power Quote by Charles Horton Cooley

Cooley lands the punch by making “Americanize” the ugliest word in the sentence. He isn’t arguing for kinder manners toward immigrants; he’s indicting a national self-image that congratulates itself for opportunity while practicing exclusion, then doubling down with assimilation-as-virtue. The line’s structure is a trap: he starts with “neglect,” a passive sin Americans can admit to without feeling accused, then tightens the vise with “arrogance,” the active moral failure that exposes neglect as policy, not oversight.

The intent is sociological, but the rhetoric is moral. Cooley’s “less to our credit” frames immigration not as a problem foreigners bring, but as a test the host society keeps failing. It’s also quietly strategic: “foreigner and his children” widens the indictment beyond first arrivals to the second generation, where the myth of seamless integration is supposed to pay off. If even the children are neglected, the issue isn’t cultural distance; it’s the boundaries of belonging.

The scare quotes around “Americanize” do heavy lifting. They signal a project sold as benevolence but experienced as erasure: a demand to trade language, customs, even dignity for conditional acceptance. In the early 20th-century U.S., amid mass European immigration, nativist politics, and “Americanization” campaigns in schools and factories, Cooley is calling out the soft power of conformity. He anticipates a modern critique: assimilation isn’t neutral; it often masks who gets to define “American” and who gets treated as raw material for it.