Frederick Hoxie's
A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 argues that the attitudes and goals of policy reformers, educators, and politicians involved in Indian assimilation at the turn of the century changed radically in 1900. From 1880 to 1900, the assimilation campaign combined ethnocentric intolerance with a "racially optimistic" belief that Indians should and could fully assimilate with American culture; after 1900, this optimism shifted to a pessimistic view that Indians and other "backward" people could never become fully equal to whites. By contextualizing assimilation policy within a broader context of social upheavals and reform at the turn of the century, Hoxie links this shift in policy to a growing pessimism in American culture about the value of racial diversity as a result of economic expansion, industrialization, immigration, and urbanization. He argues that with social institutions straining to serve increasingly diverse populations, after 1900 the old goal of maintaining cultural homogeneity and equality was replaced by a new social order that connected race and ethnicity with economic class. Assimilation from 1900 to 1920 thus meant assimilating into society as the other to American whiteness.
