Historians of ESL have tended to concentrate on higher education as the primary site of their research, alluding to immigration and Americanization yet ultimately regarding them as peripheral. This article situates the Americanization Movement within an existing scholarly framework with particular attention to how teachers were selected and trained for working with adult immigrant populations. Similar to many contingent faculty situations today, these teachers were trained to deliver content that was heavily prescribed by manuals and other training materials. Documents from the period collected at Harvard University's Monroe C. Gutman Library show that local, state, and federal agencies worked with normal schools and university extension programs to cultivate a body of teachers that effectively functioned as "comp droids," a term used by Joe Harris to describe a labor pool lacking the agency and professional investment of tenure-track faculty. Although material conditions of contingent faculty today differ from those of Americanization teachers, the term helps to articulate the relevance of this period for contemporary discussions about teacher agency and contingent labor.