This internal unification was accomplished by a high emotional tension, a national and personal uncertainty, and a common hate. The prejudice against the various immigrant groups, arising as a result of the great wave of immigration, was abated for the moment; all the little prejudices were summed up in one great hatred of the common enemy, Germany. This was reflected in avoidance of everything German in this country as well; German instruction was withdrawn from many high schools, German music from the opera houses, German fried potatoes from the restaurants. The term, “German-American,” formerly in good repute, now became a byword, and with it every form of “hyphen.” The demand now was for “hundred per cent.” Americanism. In the prevailing ignorance of foreign languages and peoples, or even if this ignorance had not existed in its full measure, the hatred against the Germans was transferred in part to other groups as well, even those with most reason to be anti-German or anti-Austrian. Foreign language newspapers fell under popular suspicion and official censorship much heavier than that of the English language periodicals. Some states passed laws, later declared unconstitutional, forbidding teaching, preaching or public meetings in languages other than English. Foreign sounding names attracted suspicion, and were changed in large numbers. Altogether, America begun to repeat the oppression of subject groups which had caused permanent resentment and sown the seeds of rebellion in almost every land in Europe, to create her own Ireland, Alsace-Lorraine or Poland. Americanization became a synonym for compulsory adoption of American standards and group habits. Americanization had had a long, if somewhat unsatisfactory, trial before the war. It was the attempt, at that time, to bring American culture to the supposedly uncultured immigrant through settlements, night schools, and other cultural agencies. The attempt was satisfactory in a comparatively small proportion of the total immigrant population; and the earnest workers blamed this fact on the poorness of their textbooks, the unsuitability of their buildings, or the weariness of the people after a day of arduous labor. Now, all of these were undoubtedly true, but a more fundamental cause of the weakness of Americanization methods lay in the fact that they were all one-sided; they consisted in attempts to change the immigrant into an American, rather than attempts to join many groups together into a composite unity. Even the conference on Americanization called by the Secretary of the Interior in 1918 passed friendly and practical resolutions, but still one-sided and consequently superficial.