LITMIR.BIZ

      THE SOUND OF AMERICA at its inception would have been lilting, susurrating, singsong, guttural. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French immigrant to New York, wrote in Letters from an American Farmer, his best-selling survey of revolutionary America, of “whole counties where not a word of English is spoken.” In 1794, a bill that would have mandated the translation of official documents into German failed in the House of Representatives by a single vote. Dutch dominated the Hudson Valley, where the courts struggled to find English speakers to serve on juries. As François Furstenberg writes in When the United States Spoke French, Philadelphia was overrun with refugees from the French Revolution. During the 1790s, sixty-five Frenchmen lived on Second Street alone, including a Berniaud (china merchant), a Dumoutet (goldsmith), a Morel (hairdresser and perfumer), a Duprot (dancing master), and a Chemerinot (pastry cook). At the orchestra, audiences demanded that musicians play “La Marseillaise” and “Ça ira,” leading Abigail Adams to complain, “French tunes have for a long time usurped an uncontrould sway.” In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the nation’s French-speaking population. Louisiana entered the union as a bilingual state. Its second governor, Jacques Villeré, conducted the entirety of his official business in his only language: French.

      Americans of the nineteenth century continued to accept linguistic pluralism as a fact of life. (Their tolerance notably did not extend to Native Americans, who were conscripted into English-only boarding schools, nor to slaves, whose masters forced them to speak English, while denying them the opportunity to learn to read and write.) During the Civil War, regiments such as New York’s Second Infantry recruited soldiers with German posters—“Vorwärts Marsch!”—and maintained German as their language of command. Even as nativism surged in the 1850s, with the arrival of greater numbers of Catholic immigrants, the chorus persisted. In 1880 there were 641 German newspapers in the United States. (Even Benjamin Franklin founded a German newspaper, which failed after two issues.) One of them, Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote, had been in 1776 the first publication to announce that the Declaration of Independence had been adopted. English speakers had to wait until the next day, when the document’s full text appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Post.

      Twenty-four million foreigners came to America between 1800 and 1924. They hailed from different places than their predecessors: Italy, Russia, Greece, Hungary, Poland. In the West, the frontier was closing. In Europe, multilingual empires were giving way to monolingual nation-states, founded on the link between language and identity. As the country filled up, Americans of older standing began to cast doubt on the ability of the “new immigrants” to assimilate. In the Atlantic, a poem warned of “Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes / Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav … In street and alley what strange tongues are loud / Accents of menace alien to our air / Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!” In 1906 Congress passed a law precluding citizenship for any alien “who can not speak the English language.” (According to the 1910 census, this amounted to 23 percent of the foreign-born population.)

      World War I transformed bilingualism from an annoyance to a threat. As American soldiers fought Germans in the trenches, American citizens carried out a domestic purge of the “language of the enemy.” In Columbus, Ohio, music teachers pasted blank sheets of paper over the scores of “The Watch on the Rhine.” In New York, City College subtracted one point from the credit value of every course in German. Women’s clubs distributed “Watch Your Speech” pledges to schoolchildren:

      I love the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

      I love my country’s LANGUAGE.

      I PROMISE: