by ERIC C. MILLER
First-grader Angel Huerta reads a book during a guided reading group. PHOTO/Craig F. Walker/The Denver Post/Getty Images
‘English-only’ advocacy in the United States dates at least as far back as 1919, when President Theodore Roosevelt declared: ‘We have room for but one language in this country, 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 as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.’ For Roosevelt, the connection between language and citizenship was explicit and unqualified – if Americans didn’t speak English, they weren’t Americans.
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It has become impolitic to attack a rising Mexican-American population on purely racial grounds, but it remains acceptable to criticise ‘illegal immigration’, policy and language standards. The tactic is neither new nor particularly subtle. Writing in 1753, Benjamin Franklin fretted about the increasing German population by noting that these immigrants are ‘generally the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation’ and that ‘they will soon out number us, that all the advantages we have will not, in My Opinion, be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious’.
Then, as now, such attitudes support the linguist John Nist’s claim in 1966 that language is used ‘primarily as a means of communion rather than as a means of communication’. Commonality of speech creates a web of connections that hold a people together. Language is a national identity, to be preserved and protected, generally by the expulsion of others. This might even override considerations of race, as the black cultural theorist Frantz Fanon noted in his book Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), published as Black Skin, White Masks in 1967: ‘The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter – that is, he will come closer to being a real human being – in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language.’
As Fanon argued – and Tim James understood – otherness is multifaceted, and should not be theorised on any one face to the detriment of all the rest. European immigrants, for example, have a long history of cold reception in the US, their foreign tongues or dialects revealing them as other even when their skin tone did not. For German, Polish, Swedish and Irish émigrés, their perceived humanity in America always increased in direct ratio to their mastery of English. For Hayakawa, author of the first ELA legislation, co-founder of US English, and a Canadian immigrant of Japanese ancestry himself, this reality was acknowledged, if slightly spun.
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