Made In America (29 page)

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.‘
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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:

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:

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:

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’.
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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 it
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– but the trend is implacably downward.

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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

In fact, all evidence points in the opposite direction. It was
because
America had a base of low-wage, adaptable, unskilled labour that it was able to become an industrial powerhouse.
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For over half a century American business had freely exploited its foreign-born workers, paying them appalling wages, dismissing them wholesale if they agitated for better pay or conditions, and replacing them with new supplies of compliant immigrants when necessary, and now it was blaming them for being poor and alienated. It failed to note that those who turned to crime or sought relief were only a small part of the immigrant whole, and that most were in fact loyal, productive, law-abiding citizens.

Fired by the oxygen of irrationality, America entered a period of grave intolerance, not just towards immigrants but towards any kind of anti-establishment behaviour. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it illegal, among much else, to make critical remarks about government expenditure or even the YMCA.
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So low did standards of civil liberty fall that police not only routinely arrested people suspected of sedition, but even those who came to visit them in jail.

In 1917, in an effort to weed out unfit immigrants, a literacy test of sorts was introduced. An aspiring immigrant had to show that he was capable of reading at least thirty words – though, oddly, these words did not have to be English. Quite why a Croat who could read thirty words of Croatian was perceived to be better prepared for life in
America than a fellow Croat who could not was never explained.

At the same time, the questions that were asked of immigrants at ports of entry became far more searching and insinuating. Arriving in America in 1921, G. K. Chesterton was astonished at the probing interview to which he had to submit. ‘I have stood on the other side of Jordan,’ he remarked later, ‘in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask me whether I had come to subvert the power of the
Shereef;
and they did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority.‘
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Finally, in 1924, a quota system was introduced and America’s open-door policy became a part of history.