The Making of an American (1920)
Pete, an Italian immigrant, cannot find steady work because he speaks no English. After a workplace accident caused by a warning sign he cannot read puts him in the hospital, he enrolls in night school, learns the language, and earns a better job.
Produced by the Worcester Film Corporation for Connecticut’s state “Americanization” program and directed by Guy Hedlund, The Making of an American is a candid artifact of the assimilation campaigns that followed World War I. It was later named to the National Film Registry.
Background
The Making of an American is a 1920 educational short directed by Guy Hedlund for the Worcester Film Corporation, produced for the Connecticut State Department of Americanization and released March 8, 1920. It follows Pete, a recent Italian immigrant who cannot find steady work because he speaks no English; after a workplace accident caused by a warning sign he cannot read puts him in the hospital, he enrolls in night school, learns English, and earns a better job. Hedlund, primarily a silent-era character actor who appeared in more than 120 films between 1906 and 1947, directed it as part of a wave of state-sponsored films meant to encourage immigrant assimilation in the years after World War I.
What to watch for
The film functions less as drama than as a piece of government-sponsored persuasion, and it is worth seeing with that purpose in mind: every story beat, the accident, the night classes, the promotion, exists to argue for a specific policy outcome rather than to develop character for its own sake. Connecticut’s Americanization program, like similar state efforts elsewhere in this period, treated English instruction as a tool of civic control as much as practical assistance, and the film’s tidy cause-and-effect structure reflects that institutional origin. Seen now, it is a direct, unselfconscious artifact of how government viewed the task of absorbing immigrant labor into the postwar workforce.
