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Chapter Twenty-Four RESPECTING DIVERSITY, PROMOTING UNITY The Language Issue THE NEW federal Constitution said nothing about language, but Noah Webster, creator and conservator ofAmerican English, wrote in 1789 that "our political harmony is therefore concerned in a uniformity of language."l Webster was partly right. English became the public language of almost all citizens, but non-English-speaking immigrants , and sometimes their children and grandchildren, too, maintained their ancestral languages in family, church, and neighborhood. Non-English-speakers from Europe typically established parochial schools and churches in which German, Swedish, Norwegian, and other languages were spoken, periodically arousing anxieties among Englishspeaking Americans that German immigrants did not want to belong to the American nation. An editorial in the North American Review urged the Germans to speak the language their neighbors could understand, "the language in which the laws of the land . . . are made and administered ."2 As German immigration increased in response to an open immigration policy in the 1830S and 18+os, midwestern states began to accommodate the needs of the newcomers. Several legislatures passed laws permitting German to be taught in public schools in districts where large German populations resided.3 Only Pennsylvania permitted establishment ofGerman schools with all instruction in German. In Wisconsin, instruction was sometimes conducted either exclusively in German or in both German and English in newly created school districts with large German populations.4 Not until the nineteenth century were laws enacted to ensure the primacy of English. In 1882, the federal government passed the Pendleton Act establishing the civil service merit system; it limited federal government employment to citizens who could pass an examination in English. That stipulation spread quickly to cover jobs in local governments.s In 1906, congressional amendments to the Naturalization Act were passed to require petitioners for citizenship to be able to speak English.6 Many state and local legislators became concerned about the persistent use of foreign languages. Both Wisconsin and the city ofChicago in 1899 banned instruction in parochial as well as in public elementary schools in any THE lANGUAGE ISSUE 459 language other than English.7 English literacy tests as a requirement for suffrage passed in one state after another. In the South, the intention was principally to keep blacks from voting. In the North and West, the restriction was aimed at non-English-speakers from Europe. A law passed in 1918 in New York State, where the largest number of immigrants lived and worked, required the establishment of night schools and employermaintained schools with compulsory attendance ofevery employed minor sixteen to twenty-one who did not speak, read, or write English in order to correct those deficiencies. Much of the antiforeign feeling let loose during the First World War focused on the language question. But an editorial in the Syracuse Herald explained the purpose of the new law as one to "stimulate the taking out ofcitizenship papers, and to aid in other ways the assimilation of immigrants." Comparable laws were passed in dozens of other states, some providing evening education, others a comprehensive Americanization program.8 To former president Theodore Roosevelt, English was such a critical precondition of membership in the polity that he would require every immigrant to learn English, with instruction free. "If after five years he has not learned it," said Roosevelt, "let him be returned to the country from which he came."9 Roosevelt's view was extreme for the time, but most Americans probably believed that instruction in the public schools should be in English only, since by 1923 thirty-four states required it for all elementary schools.10 As noted in chapter 3, the Supreme Court overturned statutes that prohibited the teaching of non-English languages as second and third languages;11 it did not approve ofthe prohibition ofJapanese or any other private foreign language schools.12 But it upheld English literacy tests as a condition for voting, even after the Second World War, as long as such tests had no discriminatory intent.13 The naturalization requirement of an ability to speak English was strengthened in 1950 by Congress with additional requirements to read and write as well as speak "words in ordinary usage in the English language."14 In the 1960s, the policy emphasis shifted from concern with the requirements of the unum to the rights of members of the pluribus) with the focus on the educational rights of children and the voting rights of adults. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act prohibited denial of access to...

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