There's an story that I hope is apocryphal, but I fear is not. During one of those interminable battles that sects in the United States wage over which version of the Bible to use, (they range from the traditional, "Verily, I say unto you,"  to something like, "Now, listen here, I ain't kiddin'") one staunch defender of the Authorized Version (1611) is reputed to have  said: "If King James English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me!" That story came to mind when I opened my mail the other day. Beneath a letter-head prominently featuring the torch of the Statue of Liberty and the logo "English First"  was a letter which read, in part:

"I don't know about your forefathers but when mine came to America, the first thing they did was learn English. They wanted to be part of the American dream and they knew that learning English wasn't just a practical necessity. It was a moral obligation. "Tragically, many immigrants these days refuse to learn English! They never become productive members of American society. They remain stuck in a linguistic and economic ghetto, many living off welfare and costing working Americans millions of tax dollars every year."

"Incredibly, there is a radical movement in this country that not only promotes such irresponsiblebehavior, but actually wants to give foreign languages the same status as English —the so-called 'bilingual' movement.

"That's why I urge you to sign the enclosed Petition calling for a Constitutional Amendment to makeEnglish the official language of the United States. This amendment will stop a direct attack on ourAmerican way of life…"

There followed a petition to the United States Senate and House of Representatives:

"Whereas English is the common bond that holds all Americans together and any society divided by language can never be truly united,

"Whereas failure to learn English guarantees that a foreign language speaker will never become a full and productive member  of American society,

"Whereas Hispanic and other groups are trying to give foreign languages the same status as English,

"Whereas bilingual ballots and education programs divide our  nation and reinforce the idea that immigrant groups can avoid learning English,

"Therefore as a concerned American, I urge Congress to make  English the official language of the United States by passing the English Language Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."

The proposed amendment, itself, was very short: "The English language shall be the official language of the United States. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

A number of prominent persons in the United States are in favor of such an amendment and, more importantly, there are now seventeen individual states in the US which have already passed legislation declaring  English the official language within the state. The laws have invariably been the results of referenda voted on by the populace at large, initiatives placed on the ballot by the efforts of groups such as English First.

There is a tremendous battle looming over this issue of "official language" in the United States. The lines are drawn, roughly, between those who claim that the U.S. has never had an official language and does not need one now, and those who claim that the new waves of immigration to the U.S. have produced a situation which is qualitatively different from anything which has gone before and that linguistic factionalism truly threatens the unity of the nation.

The debate over language goes back quite a ways in American history.  For example, in conversations with Germans, Americans sooner or later wind up hearing the story about how "German, but for a single vote, almost became the official language of the United States!"  That tale immediately conjures up visions of midnight caucuses, armtwisting and political infighting between English and German speakers, and cries of "Dummkopf!" and "Shame!"duelling it out in mid-air along the Colonial congressional corridors of the day. (And just who was that single vote, that staunch Anglophone who resisted  the Fräulein  sent to his chambers on the eve of the big vote to offer him herApfelstrudel ?)

Ah, what oaks of falsehood  spring  from  truthful acorns, for there is, indeed, some —but just barely some— historical basis to that story. It is this: There were a large number of German immigrants in Pennsylvania, the so-called "Pennsylvania Dutch", who were in favour of making German, in addition to English, the working language of their colonial parliament.  The Pennsylvania Colonial Congress rejected this motion by a single vote. That's all there was to it.

One more story, just to show how seriously questions of  language are taken, and how extreme things can get, even in a "melting pot" of immigrants. In May of 1920, in Hamilton County, Nebraska, a rural area of the United States, a teacher, a Mr. Meyer, was arrested for  violating a state law  forbidding the teaching of a second language to children under the age of 13. Specifically, Mr. Meyer had been teaching Bible stories in German at Zion Parochial school.  Following World War I, the teaching of foreign languages, except  "dead" languages such as Latin and Greek, was forbidden in 22 of the 48 states in the U.S. !  The main target, of course, was German. America had just finished a war with Germany and there was a hatred of Germany and all things German: social structure, military values, ideals, political institutions and, of course, language. The law reflected a belief held by many that the German language was the embodiment of all the evil that was exhibited in German culture.

The prosecution for the State of Nebraska argued the position espoused by the German philosopher Humboldt in 1836 that a language was the incarnation of the spirit and national character of a people. If this was true, argued theprosecution, then Mr. Meyer had, in fact, been harming the children by teaching them   the grammar, structure and vocabulary of a language which embodied ideals antithetical to American values. He was, in effect, turning the children into little Germans, little mini-Kaisers, home-grown Huns right there on the plains of Nebraska, just by teaching them the language. The court agreed with the prosecution, upheld the law and convicted the teacher.   The U.S. Supreme Court later overturned the conviction and declared unconstitutional all  laws in the United States which forbade the teaching of a foreign language. The Court ruled that: "Mere knowledge of the German language cannot reasonably be regarded as harmful." Although the court was more interested in the rights of an individual than in making  philosophical statements on the relationship of language and culture, their decision is extremely interesting in light of the English First movement.

However the question of official language in the United States is finally resolved, the  issue  has to be understood within a broader  framework. The metaphor which Americans traditionally prefer as a description of their society is the "melting pot".  Whatever its descriptive weaknesses, (such as avoiding the ethnic and racial tension always bubbling beneath the surface of American society), it serves to describe at least the ideal, if not the real picture of traditional immigration to the United States. Like so many millions of others, my own grandparents came to America in the steerage hold of a steamer from Europe. When the boat landed, that was it. The boat never went back. Many immigrants changed their names and stopped speaking their native languages in order to be "real Americans" that much faster.

Much of the idealized view which Americans have of themselves stems from one of the most influential  concepts in American history: Frederick Jackson Turner's so-called "frontier thesis," set forth in his 1893 paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History".  It is a rejection of the idea that Americans were simpy transplanted Europeans; Americans were a new breed with new values.  For all of its oversimplification, that idea served very well to define America's image of itself as a monolith.  That image did not then, and does not today,  lend itself well to pluralism, the idea of a nation as a kaleidescopic jumble of different races, cultures and languages.

There is no doubt that for much of its history, the self-image of the nation as a white English-speaking monolith created a de facto official language in the United States. It was virtually impossible to move up, find a good job and send your kids to the right schools, or become socially or politcially active or prominent, speaking any other language. That situation is changing. Modern transportation and electronic communication virtually guarantee that we will never again see a time when immigrants break as definitively with their past as they were forced to do in the last century. Nowadays, the boats not only go back, but they go back and forth  and have turned into jumbo jets, making hundreds of return trips a week between  American cities and metropolitan centers all over the globe more easily than horse-drawn coaches once shuttled between Boston and Philadelphia. This  ease of movement and communication has rendered unnecessary, even impossible, the kind of "psychic distance" which used to be an inevitable part of physical separation.  Bonds with the past are no longer broken  by moving away; giving up one's family, language and culture  is  no longer part and parcel of being an American. Enormous immigration from Asia, for example, has taken place in the last decade. Large American cities now have Little Koreas, Little Cambodias and Little Thailands.

These are not the  ethnic ghettos they used to be, either — stopping places  on the way to suburbia and attainment of the American Dream. They are — solidly entrenched in the United States— scaled-down versions of Korea, Cambodia and Thailand, the inhabitants of which  maintain emotional and physical attachments to their native  languages and cultures. Thanks to communication satellites  it is  as easy to buy a Korean language daily newspaper on the streets of Los Angeles as   on the streets of Seoul, and  you can sit back in your living room on the west coast of the United States and watch the evening news from the Phillipines or Thailand.

Another example is Spanish, a language that has been in North America  for almost five hundred years and is the first language of millions of native-born US citizens who live in the states bordering on Mexico. In terms of market and circulation, Spanish radio, TV and newspapers in Los Angeles and, more recently, Miami, are second in the Western Hemisphere only to those in Mexico City. Millions of persons in the United States get all of their entertainment and information in the Spanish language; indeed, in some places even ballots are printed in English and Spanish. You can, thus, participate in the electoral process without knowing English.

It is not yet really clear what "official language" would even mean in the United States. At the very least, it would mean that all official business conducted within the nation be in English: no more ballots in Spanish, for example —and no more speaking Spanish when you go down to get your driver's license in Los Angeles or Miami, even if—as is quite possible— both you and the Department of Motor Vehicles clerk are native speakers of that language. It would almost certainly have a devastating effect on  bilingual education in the United States. There are dozens of such programs which aim  to guarantee that primary school students have access to education to their native language as an aid to learning English. That will no longer be the case.

Language is a badge of group identity, and in the United States of America  it has always been a very prominent badge. Cultural and linguistic pluralism would represent a profound change in American society, one which supporters of the English First movement feel threatened by in spite of ample historical evidence that language is much less important a factor than, say, politics or religion in uniting or dividing a people.  Civil wars are not generally fought over language, and even the "language riots" which occur in some parts of the world are usually prompted by socioeconomic factors. The numerous countries where different languages coexist make it clear that a nation's sucess largely depends on the extent to which the speakers of those languages  have equal access to opportunity and equal protection under the law.