During World War I, This Woman Asked Americans to Welcome Immigrants—and Urged New Arrivals to Assimilate

Progressive reformer Frances Kellor spearheaded efforts to celebrate Americanization Day, arguing that immigrants should fully embrace U.S. culture to better adapt to life in their new home

Kellie B. Gormly | Contributing Writer

June 30, 2026 7:45 a.m.

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For a brief period in the early 20th century, the Fourth of July wasn’t simply Independence Day. Between 1915 and 1918, communities across the United States combined commemorations of the nation’s founding with Americanization Day, a holiday held to encourage immigrants to fully assimilate into American society.

Centered on the motto “many peoples—but one nation,” the celebration arrived on the heels of a decade-long immigration boom that brought an average of one million newcomers to the U.S. annually, ending only with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

More than a century later, few people know the name of the driving force behind Americanization Day: Frances Kellor, a progressive social reformer and activist. Although Americanization—the idea that immigrants should detach themselves from their heritage to adopt American customs—is often associated with anti-immigrant sentiment today, Kellor had a different goal in mind.

As biographer John Kenneth Press writes in Founding Mother: Frances Kellor and the Creation of Modern America, the activist viewed Americanization as a way of “breaking down the walls that separated people” and asking individuals who had lived in the U.S. for decades “to understand and accept immigrants.”

Press argues that Kellor—a lesbian at a time when few people were openly gay, whose masculine personality often led her to be mistaken for a man—was bold and relentless in fighting for the rights of minority groups. She kept her personal life private, and Press could find no record of her discussing her sexuality publicly. But the author maintains that Kellor’s identity as a lesbian influenced her lifelong advocacy on behalf of outsiders.

“I don’t know why she is completely ignored,” Press tells Smithsonian magazine. An instrumental proponent of women’s suffrage and immigrant rights, she deserves to be celebrated, the biographer adds.

Frances Kellor’s activism

Born into a working-class family in Ohio in 1873, Frances Alice Kellar (she would later change the spelling of her last name) grew up in Coldwater, Michigan. Abandoned by her father, she was raised largely by her mother, who took on domestic work to make a living. Kellor, too, had to work from a young age; she left high school after two years to work full time, securing a job as a reporter at the local newspaper.

With the financial support of a pair of wealthy sisters who recognized her potential, Kellor graduated from Cornell University with a law degree in 1897. Soon after, she moved to Chicago to study criminal sociology at the University of Chicago. While living in the city, Kellor met progressive reformer Jane Addams, co-founder of Hull-House, one of the first and most influential social settlement houses in North America. The duo went on to collaborate on a series of progressive campaigns.

Kellor moved to New York City in 1903, around the same time that she met and fell in love with the wealthy Brooklyn social activist Mary Dreier. Three years later, Kellor organized a study addressing the hardships faced by immigrants. As historian Lillian Faderman writes in To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America—a History, Kellor found that immigrants were being “worked to death” at labor camps and sweatshops. Officials who were supposed to ease the new arrivals’ transition to the U.S. instead took advantage of them, providing invalid leases and counterfeit money.

When Kellor visited work sites throughout New York State, she was horrified by what she saw. She became a passionate advocate for improving these individuals’ quality of life, petitioning President Theodore Roosevelt and powerful politicians in New York to establish laws that would protect immigrants from exploitation.

Before Kellor’s intervention, Press says, life for immigrants in the U.S. was “an unregulated mess.”

In 1910, Kellor’s efforts culminated in the creation of the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration. Governor Charles Evans Hughes—who would later serve as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court—appointed Kellor head of the bureau, making her the first woman to lead a state agency in New York. In this role, she moved “beyond legislative matters to practical services,” such as offering English lessons to children and working adults, Faderman writes.

Kellor believed that learning English and the civic responsibilities associated with citizenship would help immigrants better adjust to life in their new home. She wanted factory workers to speak English, for example, so they could understand orders and avoid accidents, Press says. As Kellor once put it, “industrial justice,” or the fair treatment of employees in the workplace, “is the essence of Americanization.”

In Faderman’s view, Kellor’s “optimistic conviction about the simple and inevitable Americanization of even first-generation immigrants was perhaps somewhat naive.” Still, the historian writes, “there is no doubt that through her policies and the laws that her bureau helped get passed, she lightened the burdens of millions of immigrants.”

Americanization Day

Backed by wealthy private donors, the National Americanization Committee kicked off under Kellor’s leadership in 1915. Kellor and her colleagues embraced the Fourth of July as the perfect timing for Americanization Day, hoping that the outpouring of patriotism associated with celebrations of American independence would also help unify diverse communities.

“What can we do to help [immigrants] become Americans first?” a poster distributed by the committee asked. “We must do something as a nation to make them feel at home—feel that their interests and their affections are deeply rooted in America.”

During World War I, thousands of people participated in Americanization Day festivities across the country. In Indianapolis in 1918, paradegoers packed the streets, with German immigrants waving the American flag and Slovenes dressed in folk costumes marching with a sign that read, “We are for America first, last and all the time.” In Cleveland, more than 75,000 immigrants marched in the city’s 1918 Americanization parade.

On Americanization Day, “everybody is to be an American, not a hyphenated American, but a genuine American, holding love of country and loyalty to its institutions high above all things else,” the Washington-based Vancouver Daily Columbian reported in 1915.

Faderman, a scholar who is often called the “mother of lesbian history,” tells Smithsonian that Kellor’s push for assimilation came from a place “of sensitivity and good nature,” although she acknowledges that this campaign might be viewed differently through a contemporary lens. “What Kellor believed is that immigrants would do better if they learned the American way of life,” Faderman says. “Immigrants had to join the melting pot and had to give up some of their ways—not for the comfort of Americans, but for their own good.”

The Americanization movement also encouraged lifelong U.S. citizens to be kind and helpful to immigrants at a time of rising xenophobia, particularly against those of German descent.

“If you have racial prejudice and inhospitality in your heart and a sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority in your mind,” Kellor once wrote, “… you will ultimately fail and will set America back rather than forward.”

According to Press, Kellor would tell Americans who complained about the state of immigrant neighborhoods that “there are more of you than them.” She would implore these individuals to “fix their streets, fix their water,” Press says. “Don’t just complain about immigrants. Help systematically, so we have a united front.”

After World War I ended in November 1918, Americanization Day celebrations lost traction. Kellor herself wasn’t happy with how the movement had evolved. In 1919, she wrote:

Many immigrants have come out of the war with a sense of resentment and, in some instances, of bitterness. … They have acquired a supercilious and critical attitude toward Americanization because its pretensions have not coincided with their experience.

Rejecting the cause she had once championed so fiercely, Kellor acknowledged that “true unity, true Americanization … would require acceptance of diversity,” Press writes in Founding Mother. From then on, she would encourage immigrants to embrace life in the U.S. without forgetting their native culture.

Kellor’s advocacy on behalf of immigrants came to an abrupt halt in 1921 when Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act. Introduced in response to an influx of new arrivals from Europe after World War I, this legislation (and subsequent quota acts) set a limit on the number of immigrants allowed into the U.S. from specific countries, making it more difficult for foreigners to seek refuge in America. The measure represented a major defeat for Kellor, prompting her to shift focus to other projects, including overseeing the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers and publishing books grounded in her activist experiences.

“When she lost the battle, she decided she was done,” Press says. “In an increasingly xenophobic atmosphere, her battle was uphill.”

One of Kellor’s other long-term passions was advocating for women’s suffrage. Influenced by Kellor and her fellow suffragists, Roosevelt championed women’s right to vote in his political platform when running (unsuccessfully) for a third term as president in 1912.

“Roosevelt really admired her,” Press says. “She helped influence many of his progressive ideas, along with other progressive women.” Collectively, the president referred to these advisers as his “Female Brain Trust.”

Kellor’s legacy

Kellor may not have seen her hopes for immigrants fulfilled, but she did live to see a key milestone in the fight for women’s rights: the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. She spent much of her later life working with the American Arbitration Association, which she’d co-founded in 1926 as “a promising tool for building goodwill and world peace,” per the organization’s website.

Frances Kellor: The Vision Behind Modern Dispute Resolution

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Kellor died in 1952 at age 78; Dreier, her longtime partner, died in 1963 at age 87. They were buried together in Dreier’s family plot at the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The couple had a complicated relationship but appeared to be deeply committed to each other, Faderman says. Her book includes an excerpt from one of Kellor’s letters to her partner. Written around 1905, not long after they met, the missive reads:

My own dear beautiful sweetheart. … I find I have been thinking many things to you out the window which do not appear here or anywhere perhaps unless it be [in] the silences of the night where you nestle close to me to be comforted and assured that you are not alone. This is a poor substitute for what I would give you tonight.

“They loved each other,” Faderman says. “There’s no doubt about that.”

Kellor’s extraordinary life and contributions to America stemmed from her identity as an empathetic woman who, at her core, wanted to reach people and encourage acceptance of those who were different, Press says.

“She was an outsider and being an outsider all your life kind of readies you to fight for outsiders,” the author explains. “She really managed to accomplish a great deal.”

Kellie B. Gormly | Read More

Kellie B. Gormly is an award-winning veteran journalist who freelances for national publications, including the Washington Post, History.com, Woman's World and First for Women. She is a former staff writer for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Associated Press and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.