The Making of an American
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The Making of an American, was named to the National Film Registry in December 2005 by Dr. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress.
The film was rediscovered and preserved by Northeast Historic Film (NHF) [1] a regional moving image archive in New England. It is a concisely executed short drama about an Italian immigrant who arrives in America unable to speak English and, following disappointments and misfortunes, takes language classes and ascends the ladder of success.
The Making of an American was made in 1920 to be used as an educational tool in the governmental Americanization initiatives to assimilate immigrants into mainstream culture, especially by encouraging them to learn the English language. It was produced for the State of Connecticut Department of Americanization by the Worcester Film Corp., a company founded in 1918 in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Vintage Connecticut government reports on the making of the film and its dissemination, indicate that the film was shown to more than 112,500 people the year it was made, and that copies were sold to other states interested in Americanization programs. The film was targeted to industrial workers and contains location filming at the Hartford Rubber Works Company.
The film was lost until 1999 when Alan Kattelle [2] donated a film copy among a collection of other reels to Northeast Historic Film. The Kattelle print was on 28mm film stock, an extremely rare format that was primarily used for educational film distribution from 1913 to 1923.
