Diverse peoples under one language - 13 April 1990

I was struck the other morning by a photograph in the paper, a news photograph of a rather splendid figure of a man, flanked, if that is the word, on each side, or flank, by two women wearing decorative peasant blouses.

They were standing in a church, in front of Romanesque arches and the commanding figure of the man was centred against a rather elaborate altar surmounted by a dome. So far, you can imagine, a straightforward if rather exotic religious group.

What made me look again and goggle was that all five of them were holding in front of them, like waiters about to serve a very fancy dish, cake stands containing what looked like great pies with poached eggs planted in the middle. If the photograph had not been so sharp and realistic, you might have thought you were seeing a missing work by the late Salvador Dali.

The man, who rose head and shoulders above the women was, I should guess, in his late 50s, early 60s, and mighty handsome, a cross between the young Sean Connery and the old Lord Mountbatten.

He was clothed in a capacious, evidently gold, dressing gown with wide lapels and flowing sleeves, a gold chain dangling on his chest and ending in a jewelled cross. Around his neck, a thin black band with a gold clasp. The really bizarre note was struck by the caption underneath the picture.

It said, "The Dean of St Paul's with, from left to right, Theodora Lourekas, Athena Philippides, Katherine Boulukos and Helen Milukas". Well, he was not any Dean of St Paul's I could recognise. All the way back to John Donne and all the way forward to the present occupant.

No wonder. Everything came clear in the first sentence of the news story. He was the Reverend Nicholas Magoulias, Dean of St Paul's Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Hempstead, Long Island and what he and the four women were proudly holding on display was tsoureki, a braided sweet bread, planted with dyed red hardboiled eggs. A dish that is to be consumed just after the traditional Greek service that begins on the stroke of midnight on Saturday.

Throughout the United States this Sunday, there will be hundreds of different Easter services to accommodate the traditions of all the Christian sects, of which, in this country, there are about 180. The Roman Catholic Church claims 55 million members.

In all, and including 4.5 million Jews, six million Muslims, about 150,000 Buddhists, the latest total of practising members of a religion in this country stands at 145 million, well over half the population, something we tend to forget when issues that appear to be secular political issues in other countries take on a strong religious bias in this country.

Abortion, for instance. And the annual fight in many towns, about mounting the Nativity scene in a public square. The paradox here is that the opposition to such a Christmas scene comes not only from irreligious people, but from non-Christian sects who are quick to remind the city fathers that when this nation was founded, it gave, in the very first article of the Bill of Rights, a promise that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

In other words, this is a nation without an established church, a point I constantly have to make to visiting Englishmen when they say aloud about some American they've just met, "What is his Christian name?" Americans, including Christians, do not have Christian names, they have first, or given, names.

This year, the ceremony at Hempstead, Long Island, coincided on Easter Monday with the publication of a book written by one of the ladies who flanked the priest. It's called "The Complete Book of Greek Cooking". The royalties from this book are estimated at just under a quarter of a million dollars. They will go to the maintenance of the cathedral. Hence the big photograph which blanketed half a page of a section of the New York Times celebrating the arrival of Easter and the availability of the Greek bread with the hardboiled eggs.

This detail, this little item, is a small reminder of a new movement among more recent American immigrants that greatly cheers some Americans and alarms others. It's a sort of militant pride in the native origins, in the native culture, which seems now to resist the immemorial habit of merging into the life and language of the new country. This is quite new.

In the first decade of this century, when something like 12 million immigrants came pouring in from central and southern and eastern Europe, the governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt, later to be president, saw these hoards of newcomers being assigned to pools of cheap labour, immigrants of all ages, from eight-year-olds to 60-year-olds, having little provision – no compulsory provision anyway – for education so that they would remain the useful victims of the wealthy employers. Perpetual dwellers, Roosevelt called them, in a polyglot boarding house.

Roosevelt dedicated himself to a brave mission, through laws which he passed through the state legislature of New York to require schooling to a certain age, and to set up in the public schools' night classes for new adult immigrants to learn English.

One of the first stories I covered in this city, as late as 1937, was such a night class in a school in the Bronx, where Italian mothers and fathers who'd been here some time were learning English so they would not be ridiculed or embarrassed by their teenage children who already had the language.

Roosevelt saw the first-generation immigrant, in his time, bound by the hampering liabilities of the native tongue. "We must," he said, "stop talking about German-Americans and Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans. We have room for but one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans. There must be no more hyphenated Americans".

There were no riots, no protests against this crusade, least of all from the immigrants themselves. They applauded it.

Well, today, it would arouse massive opposition, most of all from the so-called Hispanics who represent easily the largest new influx of immigrants from Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic.

At the other end from Teddy Roosevelt's view of America as a nation of diverse peoples unified by one language, stands today the mayor of Miami who said some time ago, "there is no need at all to learn the English language".

And this could well be true in the most populous county of Florida, Dade County, which, 30 years after the Castro revolution, has a large and flourishing Hispanic community, from its banks and businesses and city fathers down to its "barrios" in which the prevailing language is Spanish.

Mind you, nobody's saying that Spanish should replace English, only that, as in Quebec with English and French, here English and Spanish should have equal status.

On the west coast in California, most of all, there is the next largest population of Hispanic immigrants, legal and illegal, but also the largest number of Asians. Chinese, Hong Kong natives, Vietnamese, Koreans, Cambodians.

There is much less friction with them over the language problem because it's a striking fact, confirmed in recent surveys, of how immigrant children are doing in American schools, that the Asians not only learn English in record time and swim into the mainstream of the educational system, within five or six years they actually surpass the native American students, especially in science and mathematics.

Is this because they are more docile, more painlessly receptive to the idea of a diversity of peoples with a unity of language? No. The Asians have a firmly-rooted tradition, in whatever government they lived under, of hard, daily work, of pride in the accomplishments of their family, of respect for their elders. An Asian tradition they have not yet lost.

Maybe, like other strains, they will lose it in time. Remember the wise old bitter sentence of Henry Frick, Andrew Carnegie's partner, who for years had no trouble replacing striking steelworkers with the latest wave of immigrants. Then, after a year or two, they learned their union rights and struck.

Frick called up the newest incoming nationals as strike breakers, from Hungarians to Romanians to Italians. Soon, however, there was a shortage of gullible innocents and Frick moaned, "The immigrant, however illiterate or ignorant he may be, always learns too soon".

But in those days, the immigrants' children almost automatically shed the parents' language. Of course, then, as now, they had a natural bias in favour of the old foods, games and songs and dances, and nobody wants to snuff out those traditions, or the use of their language in most places.

But there are two national organisations believing that unless bilingual education helps children to learn English as soon as possible, believing in Pandit Nehru's contention that the independence of India would not have been possible without the English language, these people are alarmed that in many states now, ballots must be printed in several languages and students may go through college with their native language alone.

These people fear the fracturing of the republic, so they've succeeded in getting several state legislatures to pass a law making English the language for all official business. Official business.

Many people misunderstand their aim as an attempt to stifle native languages. Even Mrs Bush said the other day that their efforts amount to a racial slur. In Arizona, a federal judge has overturned the new state law. It comes down to the question "Does the pot still want to melt?"

Mayor Koch said there never was a melting pot, that it was always a bubbling stew. Not so. The customs, the folk ways, the tastes of the immigrants may have bubbled, but in the past, within one generation, the English language has been the one sure solvent.

Today, there are powerful forces, and powerful numbers of immigrants who resist the solution, or look forward, without alarm, to an America of diverse peoples and now of diverse languages.

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