by Bill Bryson
It was these poor eastern Europeans, however, who would more than any other group reshape America’s concept of itself. They would create Hollywood, revivify the entertainment industry and provide many of America’s most cherished creative talents, from the Marx Brothers to the composers George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. The latter two would get their start in the New York music district known as Tin Pan Alley (so called because of the cacophony of noise to be heard there), Gershwin with ‘Swanee’ and Berlin with the 1908 hit ‘Yidl with Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime’, a song that, in the words of the writer Marvin Gelfind, ‘speaks volumes on the process called assimilation’.24
Among the Yiddish words that found their way to a greater or lesser extent into mainstream English were to kibbitz, schmaltz (literally ‘chicken fat’), schlemiel, schlock, keister (rear end), nosh, phooey, mashuggah (crazy), schmo (a backward person), schnozzle, to schlep, chutzpah, schikse (a Christian female), bagel, pastrami and glitch (from glitschen, ’to slip’), plus a raft of expressions without which American English would be very much the poorer: I should live so long, I should worry, get lost, I’m coming already, I need it like I need a hole in the head, and many others. *22
Many Yiddish terms convey degrees of nuance that make them practically untranslatable, except perhaps through humour, a quality never far off when Yiddish is under discussion. Chutzpah, for example, is usually defined in dictionaries as a kind of brazenness, but its subtleties cannot be better conveyed than by the old joke about the boy who kills his parents, then begs mercy from the court because he has only recently been orphaned.
Such was the scale of immigration that by 1930 more than 35 per cent of white Americans were foreign born or had at least one foreign-born parent.25 Confined as they often were to ethnic enclaves by a combination of economics, prejudice and convenience, it is a wonder that America didn’t splinter into scores of linguistic pockets. But it did not, and for several reasons. First, as we have already seen, people moved on as assimilation and economic circumstances permitted. An area like that around Hester Street in New York might remain Yiddish-speaking for several generations, but the speakers were a constantly changing mass. For the most part, foreign immigrants couldn’t wait to learn English and circulate in the wider world. Indeed many, particularly among the children of immigrants, refused to speak their ancestral tongue or otherwise acknowledge their ethnic grounding. In 1927, Time magazine pointed out, older Jews were complaining that the younger generation didn’t understand Yiddish.26 At about the same time H. L. Mencken was noting: ‘In cities such as Cleveland and Chicago it is a rare second-generation American of Polish, Hungarian or Croatian stock who even pretends to know his parents’ native language.‘27
Children not only refused to learn their parents’ language, but ‘would reprove their parents for speaking it in front of strangers’.28 As the historian Maldwyn Allen Jones has put it: ‘Culturally estranged from their parents by their American education, and wanting nothing so much as to become and to be accepted as Americans, many second-generation immigrants made deliberate efforts to rid themselves of their heritage. The adoption of American clothes, speech, and interests, often accompanied by the shedding of an exotic surname, were all part of a process whereby antecedents were repudiated as a means of improving status.‘29
‘Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country,’ barked Theodore Roosevelt in 1918. In fact, almost all did. Of the 13.4 million foreign-born inhabitants of the United States in 1930, all but 870,000 were deemed by census enumerators to have a workable grasp of English, and most of those who did not were recent arrivals or temporary residents (many Italians in particular came for a part of every year when there was no farm work to be had at home), or felt themselves too old to learn. Although most urban, non-native speakers of English could get by without English, most chose not to. There were to be sure troubling disparities. Only 3 per cent of German immigrants did not speak English in 1930, while almost 13 per cent of Poles and 16 per cent of Italians (rising to over 25 per cent for Italian women) existed in linguistic isolation, though within a generation those proportions would become negligible.30
Occasionally rearguard actions were fought. In 1890, when a law was introduced requiring English to be used exclusively in parochial schools in Milwaukee, the German community was so incensed that it turfed out the city’s Republican administration and brought in a Democratic one. As late as the outbreak of World War I, Baltimore had four elementary schools that taught exclusively in German. Already, however, those trying to protect their linguistic heritage were fighting a losing battle.
All this is understandable in urban areas where it was necessary and desirable to venture out of the neighbourhood from time to time, and where mingling between various immigrant groups was inevitable. It doesn’t so easily explain more isolated communities. At the turn of the century throughout the Midwest there existed hundreds of towns or clusters of towns inhabited almost exclusively by specific linguistic groups. Iowa, for instance, had Elk Horn (founded by Danes), Pella (by the Dutch) and the Amana Colonies (by Germans), among many others. In each of these places, the local populace was both homogeneous and sufficiently remote to escape the general pressure to become Americanized. Even if they learned English in order to listen to the radio and converse with outsiders, we might reasonably expect them to preserve their mother tongue for private use. In fact, almost without exception, they did not. By the 1930s in such towns English was not only the main language spoken but the only language spoken. Even those German immigrants who came to America with the intention of founding a Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany, in Texas or Wisconsin, eventually gave up the fight. Today it is unusual to find anyone in any such town who knows more than a few words of his ancestors’ tongue. Clearly even here the desire to feel a part of the wider culture proved irresistible in the long term.
Only one group has managed to resist in significant numbers the temptations of English. I refer to the speakers of the curious dialect that is known generally, if mistakenly, as Pennsylvania Dutch. The name is an accident of history. From the early eighteenth century to almost the end of the nineteenth, Dutch in American English was applied not just to the language of Holland and its environs, but to much else that was bewilderingly foreign, most especially the German language – doubtless in confusion with the German word ‘Deutsch’.
The Germans came to Pennsylvania at the invitation of William Penn, who believed that their ascetic religious principles fitted comfortably with his own Quaker beliefs. The German influx, eventually comprising about 100,000 people, or a third of Pennsylvania’s population, was made up of a variety of loosely related sects, notably Mennonites, Schwenkenfelders, Dunkards, Moravians and Amish, but it was the Amish in particular who spoke the Palatinate dialect of High German that eventually evolved into the tongue that most know as Pennsylvania Dutch. To the Pennsylvania Dutch the language is called Muddersrschprooch. To scholars and the linguistically fastidious it is Pennsylvania German.
For a century and a half Pennsylvania German was largely ignored by scholars. Not until 1924, when Marcus Bachman Lambert published a Dictionary of the Non-English Words of the Pennsylvania-German Dialect, with just under 17,000 entries, did it at last begin to receive serious attention. Even now it remains relatively neglected as a topic of academic interest, which is a pity because few dialects provide a more instructive example of what happens to languages when they exist in isolation. As the linguist and historian C. Richard Beam has put it: ‘In an age when there are billions of dollars available for trips to the moon and destruction abroad, it is very difficult to procure even a few hundred dollars to help finance the production of a dictionary of the language of the oldest and largest German language island on the North American continent.‘31
Because it has always been primarily a colloquial, spoken dialect, very different in form and content from standard German, Pennsylvania German presents
serious problems with orthography. Put simply, almost any statement can be rendered in a variety of spellings. Here, for instance, are three versions of the same text:
Die Hundstage kumme all Jahr un bleibe sechs ...
De hoons-dawga cooma allia yohr un bliva sex ...
Die Hundsdaage kumme aile Yaahr un blwewe sex ...32
During its long years of isolation, Pennsylvania German has become increasingly distinct from mainstream German. Many words bear the unmistakable mark of English influence, others preserve archaic or dialectal German forms, and still others have been coined in situ. The drift away from standard German can be seen in the following:
PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN STANDARD GERMAN ENGLISH
aageglesser Brillen eyeglasses
bauersleit Bauern farmers
bauerei Bauernhöfe farms
elfder elf eleven
feierblatz Kamin; Feuerplatz fireplace
eensich ebbes etwas; irgend etwas anything
Febber Februar February
dabbich ungeschickt clumsy
alde daage Alter old age
Schtaagefensich zick zack zigzag
Grischtdaag Weihnachten Christmas
Nei Yarick New York New York
A striking feature of Pennsylvania German is its wealth of curiously specific terms. Notions and situations that other languages require long clauses to convey can often be expressed with a single word in Pennsylvania German. For example:
fedderschei – the condition of being reluctant to write letters.
aagehaar – an eyelash hair that grows inwardly and irritates the sclera.
dachdrops – water dripping from a roof.
aarschgnoddle – the globules of dung found on hair in the vicinity of the anus. (And, no, I cannot think why they might need such a word.)
At its peak in the nineteenth century Pennsylvania German was spoken in communities as far afield as Canada, the upper Midwest and the deep South. Today, according to Beam, it constitutes ‘but the remnants of a unique German-American folk culture, so rapid has been the process of acculturation’.33 Estimates for the current number of speakers range as high as 16,000 – Marckwardt in 1980 said that up to a quarter of the inhabitants of Lehigh, Lebanon and Berks counties in Pennsylvania still spoke it34 – but the trend is implacably downward.
II
If one attitude can be said to characterize America’s regard for immigration over the past two hundred years it is the belief that while immigration was unquestionably a wise and prescient thing in the case of one’s parents or grandparents, it really ought to stop now. For two hundred years succeeding generations of Americans have persuaded themselves that the country faced imminent social dislocation, and eventual ruin, at the hands of the grasping foreign hordes pouring through her ports.
As early as the turn of the nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson responded to calls for restrictions on immigration by asking, a trifle plaintively, ‘Shall we refuse the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land?’ – though even he feared that immigrants with their ‘unbounded licentiousness’ would turn the United States into a ‘heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass’.35
From the earliest days, immigrants aroused alarm and attracted epithets. For the most part, early nicknames for foreigners were only mildly abusive – for example, calling the Germans cabbageheads or krauts (from their liking for sauerkraut) – or even rather backhandedly affectionate. This was particularly the case with the Irish, whose fondness for drinking and brawling and perceived lack of acquaintance with the higher mental processes inspired a number of mostly good-natured terms of derogation, so that a police station was an Irish clubhouse, a wheelbarrow was an Irish buggy, bricks were Irish confetti, an Irish beauty was a woman with two black eyes.
As time went on, however, the terms grew uglier and more barbed, and tended to duster around harsh mono- or disyllables that were not so much spoken as spat: chink, kike, dago, polack, spic, hebe. Many of these had been floating around in English long before they became common in America. Polack was current in Elizabethan England and can be found in Hamlet. Chink appears to have been coined in Australia. Sheeny, a term of uncertain provenance, arose in the East End of London, where it was first noted in 1824. Kike, however, is an Americanism first recorded in 1917. It is thought to come from the -ki terminations on names like Levinski. Bohunk, probably a blend of Bohemian and Hungarian, is also of American origin and dates from the early 1900s. Spic, for Latin Americans, is said by Mencken to derive from ‘no spik Inglis’. Wop, from guappo, a Neapolitan expression for a dandy or fop, was brought from Italy but took on its unseemly, more generalized shadings in the New World. (The idea that wop is short for ‘without passport’ is simply untrue.)
Geographical precision has never been a hallmark of terms of abuse. Guinea began, accurately, as a term to describe an African in the late eighteenth century, then attached itself to Italians in the 1880s. Dago originated as a shortening of Diego and was at first applied to Spaniards before becoming associated with Italians, Greeks, Mexicans and anyone else suspiciously foreign and swarthy in the 1880s, as did greaser (dating from as far back as 1836) and the more recent grease-ball. Many others have mercifully fallen by the wayside, notably skibby for a Japanese (possibly, if somewhat mysteriously, from sukebei, ’lewdness’), and the even more obscure gu-gu for a Filipino, both once very common on the west coast.
Until the closing years of the nineteenth century America preserved most of its official racist animus for blacks and Indians, but in 1882 it added a new category when Chinese were expressly denied entry to the United States, and those already in the country were forbidden the rights and protections of citizenship. In 1907 the exclusion was extended to the Japanese. Throughout the early decades of this century, Orientals were compelled to attend segregated schools, and barred from owning property, providing landlords with considerable scope for abuse.36 Into the 1950s, the immigration quotas for Asian countries were niggardly, to say the least: 185 for Japan, 105 for China, 100 each for Korea and the Philippines.
But beginning in the 1890s, as the flood of immigrants from the poorer parts of Europe turned into a deluge, racism became more sweeping, more rabid and less focused. Anti-immigrant fraternities like the American Protective Association and the Immigration Restriction League sprang up and found large followings, and books like Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (which argued ‘scientifically’ that unrestricted immigration was leading to the dilution and degeneration of the national character) became best-sellers. William J. H. Traynor of the American Protective Association spoke for the mood of America when he argued against giving the vote to ‘every ignorant Dago and Pole, Hun and Slav’ and all the other ‘criminal riffraff of Europe’ that washed up on American shores.37 Such sentiments appealed not only to the masses but extended even to people of considerable eminence. The Immigration Restriction League numbered among its supporters the heads of Harvard, Stanford, Georgia Tech, the University of Chicago and the Wharton School of Finance.38
Even Woodrow Wilson, who many would argue was as enlightened a President as there has been this century, could write in his History of the American People in 1902 that the recent immigrations had been characterized by ‘multitudes of men of lowest class from the south of Italy, and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland’ who collectively were endowed with neither skills nor energy ‘nor any initiative of quick intelligence’. The Chinese, he added a trifle daringly, ‘were more to be desired, as workmen if not as citizens’.39
When several Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans for associating with blacks, President Theodore Roosevelt made appropriate lamentations in public, but remarked in a letter to his sister that he thought it was really ‘rather a good thing’ and added derogatory comments about the tiresomeness of ‘various dago diplomats’ who had protested to him about the lynchings.40 Even Margaret Sanger,
the esteemed birth-control activist, was motivated not by a desire to give women more control over their destiny but merely by the wish to reduce the lower orders through the new science of eugenics. ‘More children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control,’ she wrote.41 Never before nor since have intolerance and prejudice been more visible, fashionable or universal among all levels of American society.
In 1907, to give vent to the growing concerns that America was being swept to oblivion by a tide of rabble, Congress established a panel called the Dillingham Commission. Its forty-two-volume report concluded essentially that immigration before 1880 had been no bad thing – the immigrants, primarily from northern Europe, were (by implication) industrious, decent, trustworthy, and largely Protestant, and as a result had assimilated well – while immigration after 1880 had been marked by the entrance into America of uneducated, unsophisticated, largely shiftless and certainly non-Protestant masses from southern and eastern Europe. It maintained that the Germans and Scandinavians had bought farms and become productive members of American society, while the second wave merely soaked up charity and acted as a drug on industrial earnings.
As evidence the commission pointed out that 77 per cent of arrested suspects in New York were foreign born, as were 86 per cent of those on some form of relief.42 And the poor were not just overwhelmingly, but almost unanimously, of immigrant stock. When the commission investigators examined housing conditions in New York, they could not find a single case of a white native American living in a tenement. The commission concluded that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe had increased overall unemployment and depressed wages.
