Eine Amtssprache?

A friend of mine who I’ve known for years has been after me for some time now to write a column about the English Language Amendment (ELA). The ELA, for those who don’t know, is a proposed amendment to our constitution that would make English the official language of our country.

My friend and I don’t agree on the ELA: he feels that it is vitally important, while I prefer to leave the constitution alone except in extraordinary circumstances. The ELA, in my opinion, just isn’t important enough to alter the most important document in our country. So my intent was just to leave the ELA issue alone. However, as is often the case, circumstances change.

My change of heart occurred when I received a newsletter from a nationally known organization that included a small column titled “The Power of One Vote.” Amid the various little facts that followed there was this: “In 1776, One Vote gave America the English language instead of German.”

Supporters of the ELA often use this particular “fact” to demonstrate how fragile English is as our language of choice. While I have enormous respect for this intentionally unnamed organization, this little “fact” is completely wrong and I am dumbfounded that the editor allowed it to be included.

There was never a vote on whether German should be our official language in 1776, or any other year. It never happened. What did happen is something very different, and it occurred in 1795. The story of what actually happened, however, begins on March 20, 1794, when a group of Germans living in Augusta, Virginia, petitioned Congress to print sets of federal laws in German. The petition was referred to a House committee that ultimately recommended printing the federal statutes in English for distribution to the states as a whole and the printing of three thousand sets of statutes in German.

So the issue of whether federal statutes should be printed in German came to the House floor for debate. On Jan. 13, 1795, during the course of this debate, a motion was made to adjourn and revisit the recommendation at a later date. The motion failed by a 42 – 41 vote (and please note that this vote did not take place on an actual piece of legislation, merely an adjournment), hence the “one vote” misrepresentation.

This adjournment vote is often referred to as the “Muhlenberg Vote,” taking its name from the then-Speaker of the House, Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania. Despite his name and despite the fact that Muhlenberg was from a noted family of assimilated German immigrants who favored English as the language of education, religion and government, it was widely assumed that he would support the recommendation that the federal statutes be printed in both English and German.

According to tradition, however, Muhlenberg excused himself from the vote (again, according to tradition, he missed the vote because he was busy sitting on the toilet). The adjournment failed and the House went on to defeat the recommendation.

Whether Muhlenberg was in the toilet at the time of the vote, far too much has been attributed to his “stepping down” and into the closeness of this vote. Speakers of the House frequently excuse themselves from the floor and the motion to adjourn seems to have been interpreted by members of the House as a vote of no-confidence in the committee’s recommendation and its ability to distribute the translated statutes when, and if, they were printed. The vote does not reflect a lack of faith or a wavering in the popular sentiment that English should be the official language of government.

Interestingly, the misrepresentation of this vote was actually the creation of Germans who hoped to build a sense a pride amongst ongoing, virulent attacks from Anglo-Americans. Consider the following characterization of the Pennsylvania Germans: “Why should the Palatine boors be suffered to swarm into our settlements and by herding together establish their language and manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion?” The author of this fear-based vitriol was Benjamin Franklin in 1751, folks.

Franklin wasn’t alone in his sentiments; during the 18th and 19th centuries, Germans were criticized by Anglos as lazy, illiterate, clannish, reluctant to assimilate, excessively fertile, and for being Catholic.

If these sentiments sound familiar…they should. Today, Hispanic immigrants are characterized in almost identical manner among ardent Anglophiles and particularly those who support the ELA. Supporters of the ELA like to characterize the threat to our language and our culture as something new, something that needs to be addressed now to preserve the America we know. Yet, this is simply not true.

The supposed “threat” has been around longer than America has been a country and we have endured and ultimately been strengthened. No one, other than an extreme radical supremist, would characterize Americans of German decent as threats to our language and culture.

America assimilates like no other country in the recorded history of the world and English, as our official language, remains constant by the very fact that all our great documents are written in English and by our government’s steadfast use of the English language in all its affairs. The ELA is a frivolity, which, if adopted, would do nothing more than further racial bigotry and undermine the very nature of a nation that is based on welcoming immigrants, no matter where they originate and no matter what customs and language they bring with them.