Read Online When in French by Lauren Collins - Free Book Online Page B

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 poemwarned 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:
    1.That I will not dishonor my country’s speech by leaving off the last syllables of words:
    2.That I will say a good American “yes” and “no” in place of an Indian grunt “un-hum” and “nup-um” or a foreign “ya” or “yeh” or “nope”:
    3.That I will do my best to improve American speech by avoiding loud harsh tones, by enunciating distinctly and speaking pleasantly, clearly, and sincerely:
    4.That I will try to make my country’s language beautiful for the many boys and girls of foreign nations who come to live here:
    5.That I will learn to articulate correctly one word a day for a year
    By 1918, authorities in thirty-six states had passed laws forbidding the teaching of German. In a famous speech, Teddy Roosevelt laid down English as the criterion of belonging. “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house,” he declared. In 1923 Illinois instituted American—
American
—as its official language. What began as subversion had become a shibboleth.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    â€œI PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” we three hundred girls intoned.
    â€œLet’s try again,” an older woman, clutching a microphone, commanded from the stage of the auditorium.
    We were rising high-school juniors, “citizens” of Tar Heel Girls State, a weeklong seminar in representative government sponsored by the women’s auxiliary of the American Legion. I had accepted the invitation under duress, having been led to believe that to decline the honor would lead to certain rejection by our great nation’s institutes of higher learning. As delegates, we were meant to emulate a municipal government—writing a charter, empaneling a school board, electing a mayor. I hadn’tventured away from home since the humiliation of camp. As the terminus of my first foray out of self-imposed house arrest, the campus of UNC–Greensboro—and the mock city we were building within it—offered few of the enticements of Marrakesh, Florida. Name tags were mandatory. Parliamentary procedure was in effect. Housemothers ensured that residents didn’t