“GOOD OLD IMMIGRANTS OF YESTERYEAR” WHO DIDN’T LEARN ENGLISH: GERMANS IN WISCONSIN MIRANDA E. WILKERSON JOSEPH SALMONS Western Illinois University University of Wisconsin–Madison abstract: One myth about language and immigration in North America is that nineteenth-century immigrants typically became bilingual almost immediately af- ter arriving, yet little systematic data has been presented for this view. We present quantitative and qualitative evidence about Germans in Wisconsin, where, into the twentieth century, many immigrants and their descendants remained monolingual, decades after immigration had ceased. Even those who claimed to speak English often had limited command. Quantitative data from the 1910 Census, augmented by qualitative evidence from newspapers, court records, literary texts, and other sources, suggest that Germans of various socioeconomic backgrounds often lacked English language skills. German continued to be the primary language in numer- ous Wisconsin communities, and some second- and third-generation descendants of immigrants were still monolingual as adults. Understanding this history can help inform contemporary debates about language and immigration and help dismantle the myth that successful immigrant groups of yesterday owed their prosperity to an immediate, voluntary shift to English. In the debates now raging over language and immigration, it is widely asserted by media commentators, members of the general public, and even scholars that earlier immigrants learned English quickly and that their chil- dren came to prefer it overwhelmingly over their imported or “heritage” languages. This view has recently been exploited as part of an effort to fault contemporary immigrants for purportedly not learning English fast enough. In fact, while considerable research has investigated the languages immigrants have brought to the United States over the centuries and the process of lan- guage shift to English, we find a striking gap when it comes to understanding when and how well these immigrants initially learned English. In this article, we first offer an overview of some popular and scholarly misconceptions about the learning of English among earlier immigrants. We then present quantitative evidence on the learning of English among ethnic American Speech, Vol. 83, No. 3, Fall 2008 doi 10.1215/00031283-2008-020 Copyright 2008 by the American Dialect Society 259 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/83/3/259/229704/ASp83.3.1Wilkerson-Salmons.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 260 american speech 83.3 (2008) Germans in Wisconsin from the 1910 U.S. Census. The basic picture is one of considerable German-only monolingualism. This view is then underpinned with direct and indirect reports from an array of qualitative sources. The full range of evidence shows that into the twentieth century, many immigrants, their children, and sometimes their grandchildren remained functionally monolingual many decades after immigration into their communities had ceased. We conclude with a word about the implications of the evidence for current political discussions in the United States about language and immigration. THE STAKES: WHY THIS MATTERS Crawford (2000, 6) succinctly (and skeptically) summarizes a popular view about language in the United States: “Today’s immigrants refuse to learn English, unlike the good old immigrants of yesteryear.” Adults often have difficulty acquiring new languages, of course, and it is impossible to control for many variables in their language learning, even things as basic as age of first real exposure to English. So, immigrant children reflect a more realistic gauge of mastery of English, and we will focus on them here. Some well-known research has shown the first part of this popular view to be false, presenting evidence for the rapid shift to English among contem- porary immigrants, such as Spanish speakers. For instance, Veltman (1988, 44) writes about Spanish-speaking immigrant children: Consider, for example, the language shift process of a hypothetical group of children aged 5–9 when they arrived in the United States. After an average stay of only nine months, 70 percent will speak English on a regular basis. After an average stay of four years, nearly all will speak English regularly, and 30 percent will have adopted English as their usual preferred language. After approximately nine years of residence, 60 percent will have been anglicized; after 14 years, 70 percent will have been anglicized and 10 percent will have abandoned the use of Spanish as a daily language. Similarly, Portes and Schauffler (1996) point out in their survey of 2,660 eighth- and ninth-grade students in Miami (Dade Co., Fla.) and Fort Lauder- dale (Broward Co., Fla.) schools that the evidence on the degree to which second-generation youth learn English is “unequivocal”: For the sample as a whole, 73 percent report that they are able to speak, understand, read, and write English “very well” and an additional 26 percent “well.” This leaves the sum total of those knowing little or no English at just 1 percent. [437] This and related evidence suggest that today’s immigrants are learning Eng- lish as fast as they can, and their children are not only learning English, but Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/83/3/259/229704/ASp83.3.1Wilkerson-Salmons.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 “Good Old Immigrants of Yesteryear”: Germans in Wisconsin 261 are rapidly abandoning the languages of their parents. The most familiar exceptions to this are small, quite well-established groups like Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites, who continue to use Pennsylvania Dutch and teach it to their children, and many Hasidic Jews, who do the same with Yiddish. But note that both of these communities are today bilingual (Louden 2006)—people learn English early and most use it regularly. This issue reaches far beyond the usual scholarly realm, into public discussion and debate. For instance, one prominent commentator, Michael Reagan (2006), recently wrote: All across the U.S., hordes of immigrants . are chattering away in their native lan- guage and have no intention of learning English—the all-but-official language of the United States where they now live. Can you blame them? They are being enabled by all those diversity fanatics to defy the age-old custom of immigrants to our shores who made it one of their first priorities to learn to speak English and to teach their offspring to do likewise. It was a case of sink or swim. If you couldn’t speak English you couldn’t get by, go to school, get a job, or become a citizen and vote. If we strip away the bombast—like why “hordes of” people speaking a lan- guage other than English are “chattering away” rather than just “talking,” or what the role of “diversity fanatics” might be in “enabling” how and what immigrants speak—Reagan makes two concrete assertions about history in this passage. First, those “good old immigrants” were compliant and sought to assimilate as quickly as possible, and as part of that they learned English immediately; in contrast, today’s immigrants have no intention of learning it. Second, the old immigrants had to know English to survive, with the implica- tion that we now coddle immigrants by providing them with official documents and other social and health services in languages other than English.1 Similar views are widespread in the general public and often appear in letters to the editors of major newspapers, including those in Wisconsin, where awareness of immigrant heritage is very high. For instance, the June 22, 1997, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Crossroads sec., p. 5) ran a set of letters (all, as it happens, by people with German-sounding surnames) complaining about recent arrivals to the state. The first describes the writer’s father as “having immigrated from Germany in his teens. He . learned English and quickly became a citizen” (Keith Kramer). The next refers to the story that prompted these letters: “One woman has been here for 23 years, according to the article, and hasn’t even bothered to learn our language!” (Denise Ingeman). In outreach talks about language and immigration and other public forums, we have often heard this narrative repeated: my ancestors mastered English quickly and without help; why can’t these new immigrants do the same? Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/83/3/259/229704/ASp83.3.1Wilkerson-Salmons.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 262 american speech 83.3 (2008) More remarkably, the same basic views can be found among scholars who work on language and immigration. With regard to German immigrants, for example, some version of it has been adopted by modern scholars from Kloss (1977) to Nicolini (2004, 84–85). Typically, the view is that immigrants, German-speaking in the cases at hand, quickly mastered English but only abandoned German later, accounting for their many German-speaking descendants across the Midwest and Texas down to the present. These two examples both focus on Low German speakers from the North (emphasis ours, in both cases):2 Die meisten deutschen Migranten des 19. Jahrhunderts waren monolingual nieder- deutsch aufgewachsen und hatten die englische Sprache bis zum Zeitpunkt der Aus- wanderung nicht erlernt. Sofern die Auswanderer als Eltern beim Niederdeutschen blieben, wuchsen ihre Kinder during die Integration in die englischsprachige Umgebung bilingual auf. ‘Most German immigrants of the 19th century had grown up as monolingual speakers of Low German and had not acquired English at the time of immigration. Inasmuch as the parents remained speakers of Low German, their children grew up bilin- gual through their integration into the English-speaking community’[Jacob 2002, 78; translation and emphasis ours] Wisconsin’s German-speaking immigrants came from nearly all areas of Germany. Many spoke the North German dialects known as Low German or Plattdeutsch.