The Americanizing process takes place in the street, in the cars, in the stores, in the workshop, at the theater, and the nickel show, in the wheatfield and on the icefield; best and quickest of all in the school, and nowhere so consciously as in the trade union, for all that section of foreigners whom organized labor has been able to reach and draw into its fold.  Carried out for the most part in crude and haphazard fashion the process goes on, only in the vast majority of cases it is far slower than it need be.

Too many are but little touched, or touched only in painful ways by the Americanizing process, especially the married women who stay in their homes.  Their lot is so often a tragedy.  They have lost their own country and yet have not gained another.  Even this is not the worst.  The younger folks are in some fashion made over into American men and women.  And here comes in the crucial question which concerns something more than universality of opportunity, quality of opportunity.  These little Poles and Ruthenians and Bohemians are finally made over into Americans.  Their life-contribution will be given to the generation now growing up, of which they will form a part.  We want that contribution to be as fine as possible.  They cannot give more than they themselves are.  And what they are to be in very large part we are making them.  Will they not be all the finer citizens-to-be if we come closer to them and to their parents in the warm friendly social relations of life?

The plane of social intercourse is the last to be transformed by democracy.  Here is it that aristocratic and undemocratic limitations hamper us the longest.  Here we are still far behind the fine, free and admirable planing out of differences, and rounding off of angles and making over of characters that is part of the democracy of the street and the marketplace.  Here between strangers is the closest physical nearness.  Here the common need to live and earn a living supplies a mutual education through the very acts of serving and being served, of buying and selling and using the common thoroughfares and means of transportation.  And that basic democracy of the street and the marketplace is all between strangers.

It is the very fact that this blending of peoples, this rubbing off of racial angles, takes place in and through the commonplace surroundings of everyday life, that blinds most to the greatness and the wonder of the transformation and to the pressing importance of the right adjustments being made, and made early.  But to the observer whose eyes are not holden, there comes a sense that he is every day witnessing a warfare of Titans, that in these prosaic American communities it is world powers that are in clash and in conflict while in preparation for the harmony to be.