The Politics of English Only in the United States: Historical, Social, and Legal Aspects

Abstract

In Noam Chomsky's words, "questions of language are basically questions of power" (1979, 191). This chapter is concerned with the process by which non-English languages were and are devalued, conquered, assimilated, and partially accommodated. The founding fathers and later policymakers held ambivalent attitudes toward languages other than English, ranging from pragmatic acceptance to deliberate policies of forced extermination and assimilation. The first section of this chapter explores the relationship between language movements and high levels of immigrants in the early and late twentieth century. High levels of immigration in the United States have typically led to two trends: an increase in various strains of xenophobia and a crusade to "Americanize" the new immigrants. As Higham (1967) observes, "When neither a preventative nativism nor the natural health of a free society seemed sufficient to cope with disunity, a conscious drive to hasten the assimilative process, to heat and stir the melting pot, emerged" (235). Both the post-1965 era and the period of Americanization campaigns, defined as the decades between the 1890s and the 1920s aimed at the "new immigration" from southern and eastern Europe, shared a significant upsurge of newcomers who were thought to be significantly different from the older native-born population and incapable of being assimilated into American culture (Graham and Koed 1993). High immigration is also an important factor in the emergence of political movements to abolish bilingual services, such as the recent initiatives in California.