This article explores citizenship's multiple meanings in Los Angeles by describing five different types of Americanization, or immigrant education, in the city of angels from 1910 to 1940. The federal racialization of access to citizenship influenced these alternative approaches to Americanization at a local level. In the context of Supreme Court rulings and federal laws that made it difficult for immigrants of color to naturalize in the United States during the Progressive Era, Anglo officials in the school district and settlement houses developed an English-only curriculum that benefited only European immigrants. In response to such restrictions, Mexican and Japanese educators in turn developed programs that showed how learning Spanish and Japanese made their children loyal Americans worthy of citizenship. In the decades before internment and the Zoot Suit Riots, language instruction was one of the few vehicles that allowed Mexican and Japanese Angelinos the opportunity to take control of their Americanization experiences despite the racialized constraints they faced.

During the mid-1960s, the War on Poverty ushered in a change in outlook on the poor and stimulated Neighborhood House (a social service agency that began as a settlement house) to focus on educative, community-building initiatives. Yet ironically, while staffers offered educational programs for residents, they were themselves becoming educated. The space Neighborhood House provided emerged as a powerful venue in which staffers developed their talents to become socially minded civic leaders. This study of the post–World War II transformation of settlement work in a city in the Pacific Northwest reveals commonalities with other places as well as distinctiveness to Seattle conditions. The article expands the extant scholarship on multi-ethnoracial communities, War on Poverty programs, and settlement house responses to societal changes. In doing so, it reveals the ways in which Neighborhood House provided an important educative space for those who worked there, a place that nurtured their growth as civically minded community builders.

The college accreditation movement that arose at the turn of the twentieth century had an important antecedent in the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West. Founded in 1843, this nondenominational philanthropy aspired to direct the development of higher education by dispersing eastern funds to Protestant colleges that met its standards for instruction, administration, and piety. For all its ambitions, the Society did not always offer dependable or disinterested supervision. Its relationships with Knox College and Iowa College (now Grinnell) exposed its shortcomings. Coinciding with the rising sectional conflict over slavery, the activities of these institutions forced the regulatory association to engage in the very brand of ecclesiastical politics it had vowed to transcend. This article shows how institutional resistance and church rivalry helped delay the growth of accreditation until the turn of the twentieth century, when secular organizations took up the reins of regulation.

In his 1916 book, The Measurement of Intelligence, Lewis Terman presented the first version of the Stanford-Binet scale and his testing results for groups of California children. Singling out a few children whose scores fell in the range he categorized as “feeble-minded,” Terman commented: