When in French: Love in a Second Language

“What is the number after nineteen?”

“TWEN-ty.”

“What is the number after nine?”

“TEN.”

“What am I holding in my hand?”

“A PEN.”

“All together now!”

“TEN PENS!”

A FEW YEARS LATER, southeastern North Carolina gave rise to its own neologism. It was 2003. France had just promised to veto the United Nations Security Council’s resolution to invade Iraq. Neal Rowland, the owner of Cubbie’s, a burger joint in Beau-fort—two hours north of Wilmington on Highway 17—decided to strike back. A customer had reminded him that during World War I, sauerkraut makers had euphemized their product as “liberty cabbage,” and frankfurters had been rechristened “hot dogs.” Rowland bought stickers and slapped them on top of such menu items as fries and dressing, scrawling in “freedom” wherever it had once read “French.” “At first, they thought I was crazy,” he told CNN, of the employees of the restaurant’s eleven branches across the state, as the stunt took off. “And then now, they think it’s a great idea, and all the stores have started to change—Wilmington, Greenville, Kinston, all over.”

In Washington, a North Carolina congressman urged his colleagues to join the “freedom fries” movement. Soon, the word French was purged from congressional dining rooms. The French issued an eye-rolling reply: “We are at a very serious moment dealing with very serious issues, and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes.” They noted that frites were Belgian. Nonetheless, the trend caught on. The makers of French’s mustard were forced to issue a press release: “The only thing French about French’s mustard is the name.” Aboard Air Force One, President George W. Bush’s chefs served “stuffed Freedom toast,” with strawberries and powdered sugar.

The next year, in the 2004 presidential election, Rush Limbaugh mocked John Kerry as Jean F. Chéri, a lover of Evian and brie. Tom DeLay, a wit of the era, began his fund-raising speeches with the line, “Good afternoon, or, as John Kerry might say, ‘Bonjour.’” In 2012, when Mitt Romney—who had spent two years as a missionary in Bordeaux—ran for president, the trope that foreign languages, especially French, were unpatriotic remained in evidence. An ad entitled “The French Connection” was set to accordion music. It warned, of Romney, “And just like John Kerry—he speaks French.” The gotcha shot was a clip of Romney saying “Je m’appelle Mitt Romney” in a promotional video for the Salt Lake City Olympics.

Foreign languages were not always taboo in America. The word English appears nowhere in the Constitution, whose framers declined to establish an official language. Many of them were multilingual. Perhaps they thought it obvious that English would prevail. Perhaps they were ambivalent about enshrining the tongue of their former oppressor in the foundational document of a nation that meant to overturn orthodoxies, welcoming men of varying origins.

English, in some sense, meant the monarchy, an association that gave rise to a number of revolutionary schemes. In 1783, when Noah Webster issued his blue-backed speller, freeing his countrymen to spell gaol “jail” and drop the u in honour (spunge and soop, sadly, never caught on), American English itself was a novel language, a runaway strain. One magazine justified it as the inevitable outgrowth of the dry American climate, writing, “The result is apt to be that the pronunciation is not only distinct, but has a nasal twang, which our English friends declare to be even more unpleasant than their wheeziness can be to us.”

Americans were bursting with ideas about what language could be. They saw it as a church or a parliament, another institution to remake. Benjamin Franklin wanted to reform the alphabet so that each letter indicated a single sound. He invented six new letters including ish (to indicate the sh sound) and edth (for the th of this). A letter he wrote to demonstrate the system brings to mind a proto–I Can Has Cheezburger:

THE SOUND OF AMERICA at its inception would have been lilting, susurrating, singsong, guttural. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French immigrant to New York, wrote in Letters from an American Farmer, his best-selling survey of revolutionary America, of “whole counties where not a word of English is spoken.” In 1794, a bill that would have mandated the translation of official documents into German failed in the House of Representatives by a single vote. Dutch dominated the Hudson Valley, where the courts struggled to find English speakers to serve on juries. As François Furstenberg writes in When the United States Spoke French, Philadelphia was overrun with refugees from the French Revolution. During the 1790s, sixty-five Frenchmen lived on Second Street alone, including a Berniaud (china merchant), a Dumoutet (goldsmith), a Morel (hairdresser and perfumer), a Duprot (dancing master), and a Chemerinot (pastry cook). At the orchestra, audiences demanded that musicians play “La Marseillaise” and “Ça ira,” leading Abigail Adams to complain, “French tunes have for a long time usurped an uncontrould sway.” In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the nation’s French-speaking population. Louisiana entered the union as a bilingual state. Its second governor, Jacques Villeré, conducted the entirety of his official business in his only language: French.

Americans of the nineteenth century continued to accept linguistic pluralism as a fact of life. (Their tolerance notably did not extend to Native Americans, who were conscripted into English-only boarding schools, nor to slaves, whose masters forced them to speak English, while denying them the opportunity to learn to read and write.) During the Civil War, regiments such as New York’s Second Infantry recruited soldiers with German posters—“Vorwärts Marsch!”—and maintained German as their language of command. Even as nativism surged in the 1850s, with the arrival of greater numbers of Catholic immigrants, the chorus persisted. In 1880 there were 641 German newspapers in the United States. (Even Benjamin Franklin founded a German newspaper, which failed after two issues.) One of them, Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote, had been in 1776 the first publication to announce that the Declaration of Independence had been adopted. English speakers had to wait until the next day, when the document’s full text appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Post.

Twenty-four million foreigners came to America between 1800 and 1924. They hailed from different places than their predecessors: Italy, Russia, Greece, Hungary, Poland. In the West, the frontier was closing. In Europe, multilingual empires were giving way to monolingual nation-states, founded on the link between language and identity. As the country filled up, Americans of older standing began to cast doubt on the ability of the “new immigrants” to assimilate. In the Atlantic, a poem warned of “Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes / Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav … In street and alley what strange tongues are loud / Accents of menace alien to our air / Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!” In 1906 Congress passed a law precluding citizenship for any alien “who can not speak the English language.” (According to the 1910 census, this amounted to 23 percent of the foreign-born population.)

World War I transformed bilingualism from an annoyance to a threat. As American soldiers fought Germans in the trenches, American citizens carried out a domestic purge of the “language of the enemy.” In Columbus, Ohio, music teachers pasted blank sheets of paper over the scores of “The Watch on the Rhine.” In New York, City College subtracted one point from the credit value of every course in German. Women’s clubs distributed “Watch Your Speech” pledges to schoolchildren:

I love the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

I love my country’s LANGUAGE.

I PROMISE:

1 That I will not dishonor my country’s speech by leaving off the last syllables of words:

2 That I will say a good American “yes” and “no” in place of an Indian grunt “un-hum” and “nup-um” or a foreign “ya” or “yeh” or “nope”:

3 That I will do my best to improve American speech by avoiding loud harsh tones, by enunciating distinctly and speaking pleasantly, clearly, and sincerely:

4 That I will try to make my country’s language beautiful for the many boys and girls of foreign nations who come to live here: