Collection Spotlight: North American Civic League for Immigrants Records, 1908-1946

In 1907, a committee was appointed by the Boston YMCA to investigate what was called “the immigration problem.” This committee, formed in 1908 and chaired by Dr. Chauncy Brewer, was the North American Civic League for Immigrants. The stated purpose of the League was “the betterment of the immigrant, with primary instruction in civics for a ‘patriotic purpose.’” The League’s agents met immigrants at ship ports and train terminals and aided them in the naturalization process. They helped immigrants secure employment and housing, as well as teaching night classes and giving lectures both in English and immigrants’ native languages. The library holds the League's records from 1908 through 1946 (MS Coll. 24). 

League offices formed in many other cities throughout the Northeast and their publications were distributed at libraries across the nation. Pamphlets within the collection list investigations the League conducted at ports of entry and industrial workplaces in an effort to ensure safe conditions. Annual reports describe individual instances in which immigrants were helped by members of the League. Some examples of this are as follows: securing a lawyer, assisting with bank loans and taxes, obtaining wages unlawfully withheld, and aiding a man “who wrongfully supposed wife had sunk on steamer Ancona.” 

While the League certainly provided practical and needed assistance to new and recent immigrants, the League’s stated purposes and goals for doing so reveal less than altruistic motivations. Materials within the collection describe the intention to assimilate and “Americanize” immigrants through League programs, discouraging the continued use of native languages and cultural practices deemed un-American. League publications also express antipathy to labor movements and organizations.

In the League’s 1915-1916 annual report, Dr. Brewer writes,

“The League was organized to do what it might to mitigate the greatest peril that has ever threatened the American people and the principles of its Democracy, - to bring home to loyal people the fact that the extraordinary immigration from over seas was nothing less than an invasion of people untrained in self-government, and, pending national action, to secure such retaining points among the great foreign population as should help it to thwart the plans of revolutionaries and agitators.”

The League’s 1918-1919 annual report states,

“The theory upon which the League bases its programs is as follows: most immigrants are well disposed on entering the United States but do not so continue because of the necessary struggle for existence or exploitation. The alien must therefore be reached as early as possible in his first year of residence. If this is done he may become a useful resident. If it is not done he becomes a menace. In order to rightly influence the immigrant the League has found it necessary to secure his confidence.”

The collection offers a glimpse into the struggles facing immigrants to the United States in the first half of the 20th century, as well as the attitudes surrounding their arrival by those within the League and adjacent organizations. The finding guide for the North American Civic League for Immigrants Records can be found on the State Library’s digital repository.

Alyssa Persson

Special Collections Processing Librarian