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:
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:
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