“Let us acknowledge the excellence of the metal flowing white hot to us from other lands,” Frank Cody, the superintendent of Detroit schools, said in 1921, “and seek by intelligent effort to direct it into the American mold.”57 Nor was this idle talk. In cities like Detroit, the educational system was transformed into a tool of acculturation, with night classes in English and civics offered to adult learners. Immigrants were met with a homogenous American ideal wherever they looked: in the factory, the museum, and the school alike.
