In a short sketch called “First Aid to the Alien” and published in Outlook in 1912, Mary Antin describes a trolley-car encounter between an American botanist and the little Italian immigrant boy Tomaso Verticelli. Upset by the mess that Italian children have made in the car, and by the helplessness of the conductor who cannot get through to the immigrants because they do not understand a word he is saying, the botanist sternly lectures the little boy, “No – rubbish – on – the – floor,” adding, “That’s not American.” The Italian boy and his sister seem to understand, and, “like a pair of brown monkeys,” they clean the car thoroughly. Later, the boy’s teacher discovers that “Thomas” Verticelli strangely believes that the Star-Spangled Banner stands for “America! No rubbish on the floor!”

This streetcar encounter resembles that of Stein’s “Gentle Lena” more than that of the Southern colored woman in the Independent, for it seems to show an act of kindness, of “first aid,” among strangers on an electric car. Yet Antin’s light and vaguely humorous vignette also represents the issue of “Americanization” as a problem of cleanliness, implies that it was foreign-tongued immigrants who made America dirty, and suggests that the problem could be resolved by education, and especially by teaching the English language and American patriotism. The story literally shows “dirty foreigners” (as xenophobic propaganda would vilify immigrants) but then proceeds to persuade the reader that a good-hearted, scholarly Yankee father figure can get the right message across, even to “monkey”-like little aliens.