Making English Official: Writing and Resisting Local Language Policies 9781009278027, 9781009278058

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Making English Official

In communities across the United States, people wrestle with which ­languages to use and who gets to decide. Despite more than sixty-seven million US residents using a language other than English at home, over half of the states in the United States have successfully passed English-only policies. Drawing on archives and interviews, this book tells the origin story of the English-only movement, as well as the stories of contemporary language policy campaigns in four Maryland county governments, giving a rare glimpse into what motivates the people who most directly shape language policy in the United States. It demonstrates that English-only policies grow from more local levels, rather than from nationalist ideologies, where they are downplayed as harmless community initiatives, but result in monolingual approaches to language remaining increasingly pervasive. This title is part of the Flip it Open program and may also be available as Open Access. Check our website, Cambridge Core, for details. Katherine S. Flowers is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She specializes in language policy, writing studies, and the English language.

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Making English Official Writing and Resisting Local Language Policies Katherine S. Flowers University of Massachusetts Lowell

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Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009278027 DOI: 10.1017/9781009278058 © Katherine S. Flowers 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Flowers, Katherine S., author. Title: Making English official : writing and resisting local language policies / Katherine S. Flowers, University of Massachusetts Lowell. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023028335 | ISBN 9781009278027 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009278058 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Language policy – United States. | English-only movement – United States. Classification: LCC P119.32.U6 F58 2024 | DDC 306.442/21073–dc23/eng/20231023 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023028335 ISBN 978-1-009-27802-7 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For everyone who shapes language policy

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Contents

List of Figures page viii List of Tables ix Acknowledgments x Introduction

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1 The Origins of the English-Only Movement

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2 Creating English-Only Policies: Ghostwriting, Templates, and Genre Choices

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3 Emphasizing the Local in Language Policy: From Upscaling to Downscaling

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4 Resisting and Rewriting: How People Undo English-Only Policies112 Conclusion

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Appendix A: Research Methods 152 Appendix B: Policy Texts 156 References 178 Index 206

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Figures

1.1 John Tanton with pen and paper at his desk in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1986page 53 2.1 A map showing the location of the four counties in Maryland that passed or proposed English-only policies between 2012 and 2013: Frederick County, Carroll County, Anne Arundel County, and Queen Anne’s County; Washington, DC, is marked as a point for reference 62 3.1 A map showing Carroll County, which passed an English-only policy; two more linguistically and racially diverse nearby counties, Montgomery County and Howard County; and the two major cities in the region, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, Maryland 91

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Figures

1.1 John Tanton with pen and paper at his desk in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1986page 53 2.1 A map showing the location of the four counties in Maryland that passed or proposed English-only policies between 2012 and 2013: Frederick County, Carroll County, Anne Arundel County, and Queen Anne’s County; Washington, DC, is marked as a point for reference 62 3.1 A map showing Carroll County, which passed an English-only policy; two more linguistically and racially diverse nearby counties, Montgomery County and Howard County; and the two major cities in the region, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, Maryland 91

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Tables

2.1 A timeline of the key language policies discussed in this chapter. Information includes dates, sponsors, names, genres, outcomes, and whether the policy shares language with a templatepage 68 4.1 A three-and-a-half-year timeline of events between the English-only ordinance’s passage and repeal 116 A.1 List of interview participants, including details on their role at the time, the location, and the date 153

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Acknowledgments

Many people helped me write this book. Thank you especially to everyone who agreed to an interview or donated their papers to a university archive. If people had not generously shared their time, texts, and perspectives, this book could not exist. Archivists were instrumental in making my research possible at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University, and the Special Collections Research Center at the George Washington University. In particular, I am indebted to Diana Bachman, Nancy Bartlett, Bronweyn Coleman, Karen Jania, Kathy Lafferty, Gayle Martinson, Malgosia Myc, Caitlin Moriarty, Cinda Nofziger, Sarah Patton, Corinne Robertson, Joni Rosenthal, Danielle Scott Taylor, and Kierra Verdun for their expertise. I worked with four talented research assistants. Shelby Gordon located, sifted, and sorted through many of the contemporary news sources and gave perceptive feedback on an early draft of Chapter 4. Amy LaFleur and Carolyn Angelo did impeccable work on archival research and reviewing the contemporary literature in sociolinguistics. Makayla Camp read early chapter drafts and prepared citations with aplomb. My students, too, have shaped and reshaped much of my thinking about how writers navigate language. I owe a debt of gratitude to my students in First-Year Writing, Writing across Media, Professional Writing, Language and Society, and Structure and Variation of the English Language. For funding this research, I would like to thank the Bentley Historical Library, for their Bordin/Gillette Research Travel Fellowship, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, for their Scholar Research Support Award, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), for their Emergent Researcher Award, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Mississippi State University, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell. At the University of Washington, Gail Stygall first sparked my interest in language policy and the English language. I was also lucky to work with so many excellent mentors there who taught me about language, writing, and research, including Todd Borlik, Anne Browning, Jamie Oldham Feather, x

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Acknowledgments

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Gillian Harkins, Becca Herman, Emily James, Rick Keil, Colette Moore, Michael Oishi, Tanvi Patel, Paul Quay, and Johnny Stutsman. The Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign was the ideal place for me to push my research further. Paul Prior, Dennis Baron, Spencer Schaffner, and Michèle Koven totally transformed how I approached research, both by showing me what it could look like and by spending countless hours helping me make sense of my own work. Andrea Olinger welcomed me to Illinois and has continued to be an awe-inspiring and dear friend ever since. Annie Kelvie makes this work meaningful and fun – she always knows the right thing to say, and she helps me keep everything in perspective. Yu-Kyung Kang showed me it was possible to foreground language, literacy, and the local, and her work continues to inspire my own. Lindsay Rose Russell offered peerless advice during the late stages of the writing process. I am also grateful to many other colleagues I first met in ChampaignUrbana, including Paul Beilstein, Teresa Bertram, Andy Bowman, María Paz Carvajal Regidor, Anne Haas Dyson, Melissa Forbes, John Gallagher, Bonny Graham, Evin Groundwater, Lauri Harden, Douglas Kibbee, Gesa Kirsch, Bruce Kovanen, Allison Kranek, Eileen Lagman, Adrienne Lo, Kristi McDuffie, Thomas McNamara, Logan Middleton, Catherine Prendergast, Eric Darnell Pritchard, Jenn Raskauskas, Pamela Saunders, Maggie Shelledy, Kaia Simon, Siobhan Somerville, Jonathan Stone, Nicole Turnipseed, Kate Vieira, Amy Wan, Carolyn Wisniewski, Vivian Yan-Gonzalez, and Dan Zhang. Scott Wible showed me it was possible to write the kind of book I wanted to write and to have the kind of career I wanted to have. He has paved the way for me in many ways. My colleagues at Mississippi State University were exceptionally supportive and they made the research process fun. My writing group friends, Elizabeth Ellis Miller and Melanie Loehwing, were at once great company and great role models for how to write about activism and advocacy. My department head, Daniel Punday, helped me in many ways, not least of which was graciously matching my CCCC grant with an additional course release, which gave me a semester to focus on writing. Dhanashree Thorat was there for me, especially during lockdown. I am also grateful to Ted Atkinson, Diana Brown, Xi Chen, Shalyn Claggett, Lara Dodds, Kayleigh Few, Taylor Garner, Aaron Grimes, Margaret Hagerman, Wendy Herd, Holly Johnson, Anne Marshall, Lisa McReynolds, Ginger Pizer, Donald Shaffer, Megan Smith, Eric Vivier, Abigail Voller, and Jervette Ward. I wrote several chapters and navigated the publishing process at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Thank you to Luis Falcón and Todd Tietchen for the opportunity. Jenna Vinson and Robert Forrant provided invaluable feedback on an early draft of my book proposal. Anthony Szczesiul gave me crucial comments on a draft of my introduction. Bridget Marshall advised me at the

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contract stage. Rebecca Richards led by example and cheered me on every step of the way. Ann Dean created space for conversations about writing, and at one point she wrote me to say, “Your goals should be (a) survive, (b) work on your book. Everything else can wait,” which is the best thing someone can say. Stacy Szczesiul, Sue Kim, Christa Hodapp, and Darcie Boyer brought junior women faculty in Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences together for valuable mentoring and camaraderie. Julie Nash created the opportunity to do the Faculty Success Program, where I was lucky to work with coach Dione King and group members Nozomi Tanaka, Rebekah Slodounik, and Hwanhee Hong. I am fortunate to be going through the assistant professor experience with friends like Larissa Gaias, Anita Li, and Kristen Stern. Rose Paton and her colleagues at the University Library helped me track down dozens of sources through Interlibrary Loan. I have benefited from so many conversations with Sara Backer, Laura Barefield, Shelley Barish, Dina Bozicas, Rosemarie Buxton, Mary Kate Cragg, Katherine Conlon, Kelly Drummey, Bernardo Feliciano, Milena Gueorguieva, Paula Haines, Natalie Houston, Andrew Johnson, Jacqueline Ledoux, Sean McCreery, Tracy Michaels, Keith Mitchell, Shaima Ragab, Nancy Selleck, Richard Serna, Katherine Shrieves, Jonathan Silverman, and Wilson Valentín-Escobar. I wrote Chapter 1 last. When I was stuck, Brendan O’Connor’s work helped me realize that I should try to follow the money. Helen Barton, Isabel Collins, Christian Green, Snadha Suresh Babu, Edward Street, and their colleagues at Cambridge University Press have expertly shepherded the manuscript through the publishing process. Thomas Ricento and the anonymous reviewers were uncommonly brilliant and generous, and they motivated me to keep writing and revising. Parts of Chapter 3 first appeared as “Upscaling and downscaling: Negotiating scale in the English-only movement,” in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, 25(2), 235–252, copyright © 2021, published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. An earlier version of Chapter 4 first appeared in 2019 as “Resisting and rewriting English-only policies: Navigating multilingual, raciolinguistic, and translingual approaches to language advocacy,” in Literacy in Composition Studies, 7(1), 67–89. Finally, I owe everything to my family, especially Jean Luchi, Garner Vogt, Patty Vogt, Alex Vogt, Victor Vogt, Lisa Vogt-Wolfgang, Max Wolfgang, Marie Poage, Debbie Streck-Black, David Black, Ann Black, Jenna Black, Thomas Black, Amanda Hightower, Velma Black, Emily Kesheimer, Benjamin Flowers, Otero Flowers, James Flowers, and Mike Black. Thank you all for being so generous, funny, supportive, and patient.

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Introduction

On November 11, 2000, the executive director of the organization ProEnglish, K. C. McAlpin, gave a speech at the Social Contract Writer’s Workshop called “Language as the entry point for the debate: Population numbers, immigration policy, culture.” The speech proposed language as a litmus test of who belongs in the United States and who does not. McAlpin (2000) described “multilingualism” as “troubling” (p. 124). From this perspective, people who have “no intention of abandoning their native language” are a sign of “the growing occupation of our land by alien cultures” (McAlpin, 2000, pp. 123–124). But to whom exactly was he referring? The speech touched on several different (albeit overlapping) groups, including “Hispanic” people, “East Indian” people, “Muslims,” and “Native American groups” (pp. 123–124). The inclusion of Native Americans is one particularly telling clue that this discussion is not just about immigration – it is about perceptions of language, race, and citizenship more broadly.1 After establishing who he saw as the problem, McAlpin (2000) suggested a solution: making English the only official language. The reasoning was that “the official English movement gives us the rare opportunity to play offense. We can capitalize on this to force the issue wherever we can – through initiatives and laws to scrap bilingual education, declare English our official language, and overturn executive actions via the courts” (p. 124). A number of assumptions appeared to be in play: that multilingualism is new; that multilingualism is bad; that people of color deserve scrutiny; and that white people do not. These beliefs are not necessarily novel; what set the speech apart was its strategy. This speech anticipated an approach that would go on to play a key role in language policy in the twenty-first-century United States: making English seem like an at-risk language in need of community protection. Language policy includes any institutional efforts to shape how people learn, view, or use a language, and the English-only movement exemplifies how piecemeal those 1

On language, race, citizenship, and other identities as intertwined social constructions, see Brayboy (2005), Zentella (2014), Rosa and Flores (2017), Balzhiser, Pimentel, and Scott (2019), and Khan (2020).

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Making English Official

efforts can be: The operative phrase here is “wherever we can” (McAlpin, 2000, p. 124).2 While the United States has never had an official language, localized English-only campaigns have proved more successful. Since 1980, twenty-six states,3 along with at least eighty-three city and county governments, have made English the only official language.4 These policies serve as symbols: As one activist put it, enacting one of these policies is like putting out an “unwelcome mat” (Wilgoren, 2002, July 19). Activists and politicians have spent decades testing and refining this approach. Underlying this English-only movement is the idea that language is a zerosum game: In order for English to thrive, other languages need to lose.5 This zero-sum framing matters, both because language is more complex in practice (Canagarajah, 2013) and because judgments about language are also judgments about people (Baugh, 2018). The people active in this movement have successfully made English official in communities and institutions around the country. These successes raise questions about what drives people to create English-only policies and how they do it. Rather than call for reducing the number of people of color in the United States, McAlpin (2000) suggested a different, more oblique approach, one that framed the issue in terms of language policy and specifically in terms of protecting English in a variety of smaller jurisdictions. Many of the people most directly involved in successfully creating English-only policies situate their work locally, in the sense that they make English official in their own local governments and downplay these policies as harmless community initiatives. These patterns predate McAlpin. The leading activist in this movement, John Tanton, started the annual Writer’s Workshop event in 1976 and went on to found a series of organizations that worked on Official English, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1978, U.S. English in 1983, and English Language Advocates (later renamed ProEnglish) in 1994.6 2

I define language policy fairly capaciously, but for a comparison of various definitions of language policy and related terms like “language planning,” “linguistic culture,” and “language management,” see Calvet (1987/1998), Cooper (1989), Tollefson (1991), Schiffman (1996), Spolsky (2009), Johnson (2013), and Spolsky (2021). 3 Of these twenty-six policies, twenty-five are still in effect; Alaska’s policy was ruled unconstitutional (ACLU of Alaska, 2007). There are also two state policies that predate the current movement: Nebraska’s policy is from 1920 and Illinois’ is from 1969 (Faingold, 2018, p. 10). So, there are currently twenty-seven state policies in effect (Faingold, 2018, p. 12). 4 Herman (2003) lists eleven local policies (p. 101), Flowers (2017) compiles an additional sixtyfive, and I discuss seven more local California policies in Chapter 1, for a total of eighty-three. 5 “English-only” and “Official English” have become the two most common terms, and I use them interchangeably. Both have their advantages: It is important to emphasize the official aspect, but it is also important to recognize that these policies are about making English the only official language (see Diamond, 1990, p. 119). 6 See Lamb (2008) on the 1976 origins of the Writer’s Workshop. There are conflicting accounts of the history of each of the organizations, but I err on the side of contemporaneous internal documents, government records, and news interviews. On FAIR, see Morgan (1978, August

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Introduction

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I have spent the last decade studying the English-only movement and the people who shape local English-only policies. I have interviewed them, observed their events and meetings, collected drafts of their writing, read through their organizations’ records, looked through their historical documents in archives, and followed their work in the news and online, all with the aim of piecing together where this movement came from, how it works, and how it might evolve. Specifically, I aimed to address the following questions: 1 . How did the current English-only movement begin around 1980? 2. How do people write English-only policies? What is the role of strategies like ghostwriting, choosing genres, and using templates? 3. How do people in this movement discuss the scale of their work? How do they situate English as a local, regional, national, and/or global language? 4. How do people resist and rewrite English-only policies? As I began to answer these questions in 2012, I sought out communities that were in the midst of proposing English-only policies so that I could examine language policy discourse as it unfolded. I focused on four local governments in the state of Maryland: Frederick County, Anne Arundel County, Queen Anne’s County, and Carroll County. What drew me to these particular counties was their swell of twenty-first-century language policy campaigns (2006–2015), their ties to one another, and the fact that despite these common threads the campaigns had divergent outcomes. These counties are all geographically close to one another and to English-only organizations in Washington, DC, which allowed me to also interview the CEO of U.S. English and the then executive director of ProEnglish. Notably, three of the four policies share some text in common with a template that ProEnglish makes publicly available. Despite this common template, the outcomes were different: One policy passed but was later repealed in 2015 (Frederick County), two policies passed easily (Queen Anne’s County and Carroll County), and one policy was withdrawn from consideration before there could be a vote (Anne Arundel County). While each county is different, they also share many qualities: They are all more white, higher income, and with more people who report speaking English at home than the rest of Maryland and the rest of the United States. Researching these four counties allowed me to examine how certain policymaking practices have become common throughout the Englishonly movement, yet still with some variation across situations. What I found is that most local governments passing English-only policies had the help of other local governments and at least one English-only 30). On U.S. English, see Tanton (1983, January 17) and Stanley (1983, June 24). On English Language Advocates, see Tanton (1994, January 1). On the name change from English Language Advocates to ProEnglish, see Tanton (2000, October 23).

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Making English Official

organization, most often ProEnglish. At the same time, what that help looked like, how welcome it was, and how successful it was have varied significantly. On one hand, when I asked Kirby Delauter about what it was like to establish an Official English policy in Frederick County, he described the process this way: You can make it the official language any way you want, but I would do that same thing that we did. I would get outside input, you know, from people that have been in through the court system before, that’s had it challenged, and get your legal team together, and get something written that’s not going to be challenged in court, and explain exactly why you’re doing it. And, you know, if you have the votes, do it.

Here, Delauter identifies a number of steps, including assessing the amount of support, getting “outside input” (ProEnglish, in this county’s case), drafting a policy that is forceful but not too forceful, and giving reasons for “exactly why you’re doing it.” Through careful coordination between elected officials, legal counsel, ProEnglish, and other people in and around the community, the Board of County Commissioners in Frederick County, Maryland, not only passed an English-only ordinance in 2012 but inspired three other Maryland counties to try and do the same. ProEnglish (2014, Fall) echoed Delauter’s account in its newsletter: “During the last three years, ProEnglish has enjoyed widespread success getting official English passed at the county level, most notably in Maryland, where Frederick County, Queen Anne County [sic], and Carroll County all passed official English legislation in 2012 and 2013” (p. 2). Not everyone was on the same page, however. In a very different interview, a conservative activist in Frederick County named Hayden Duke told me, “If there was an organization behind it, a national organization, I don’t like that. At all. I’m sorry, I’m getting a little agitated.  …. I don’t like the groups where the people who parachute themselves into a locale, get people worked up, to fulfill their own agenda, and then leave. And they leave the people fighting each other.” Still others disagreed not just on process but on rhetoric. At one public government meeting, Frederick County commissioner Billy Shreve complained that people were too quick to focus on culture, as opposed to economics: “This is truly a business decision. You guys are missing the point. This is about dollars and protecting taxpayer dollars. When it costs $170 to translate an 8½” × 11” memo, we have to be sure that we’re doing the right thing with taxpayer dollars.” As these statements reveal, there is not necessarily a consensus about who should be involved, and what they should say, even among people who are open to English being the official language. These dynamics and tensions are at the heart of the English-only movement. US language policy has always been a relatively localized, contingent phenomenon, with significant variation across communities and situations (Baron, 1990, p. 185; Hopkins, 2010; Dick, 2011; Urbano and Daugherty, 2021).

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Introduction

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In 1980, activist Emmy Shafer sparked the modern movement when she had her lawyer draft an “Anti-Bilingualism” Ordinance for her local government of Dade County, Florida. In 1981, US Senator S. I. Hayakawa began recruiting local government leaders to pass resolutions in support of Official English in his home state of California. By 1982, there were so many such policies that Tanton had trouble keeping up with all of them, and he asked his staff to find a list of the “school boards, city councils and other bodies which have adopted resolutions” on Official English (Bikales, 1982, March 28). Once Tanton launched U.S. English, his first symbolic victory was a 1983 campaign against bilingual ballots in San Francisco, California (Woolard, 1989). While the earliest examples of these local language policies emerged relatively independently of each other, that gradually changed. People in this movement began not only observing one another’s work but also coordinating with, hiring, and taking advice from each other, even though they still could disagree over the details. While the English-only movement may seem like a relatively stable, united front, the people involved are actually quite varied in their approaches. Understanding the nuances of how these policies emerge and change is important because they can have serious implications for people and language, and I turn to those stakes next. Why Official English Matters When Carroll County, Maryland, passed an Official English ordinance in 2013, the policy’s preamble gave some reasons why. One was to “promote proficiency in English”; another was “to protect and preserve the rights of those who speak only the English language to use or obtain government programs, services, and benefits.” These explanations suggest that English is an endangered language, its users are an at-risk group, and both need government protection in order to survive. The vote on Carroll County’s ordinance was unanimous, and it is still in place today. Furthermore, this government was not alone in using this rationale: Identical wording appears in several other local English-only policies that all stem from the same template. Similar sentiments have also been part of the English-only movement since its origins (Baron, 1990, p. 79; Lo Bianco, 1999, p. 17). If one switched out “English” for any other language, this passage could fit into any treatise on language maintenance and revitalization (e.g. Fishman, 1991). And yet, English is not just any language, and the United States is not just any linguistic environment. English enjoys the most cachet of any language in the world (Pennycook, 1994; Prendergast, 2008; Park, 2021). What’s more, people involved in the English-only movement know so. Whether they are pushing for English-only policies or protesting against them, the people I interviewed, observed, and studied in the archives are highly attuned to context.

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In this section I unpack some of this context, in order to show why these policies matter. I approach this question with humility, because the people I profile in this book articulate the stakes of the issue more memorably than I ever could. What I hope to add here is a sense of what the academic research indicates and what I have witnessed in my own life. From my perspective, English-only policies matter for four main reasons: (1) they target people who are already marginalized, (2) they oversimplify how language works, (3) they are popular, and (4) the strategies people use to write and promote these policies are ingenious. That fourth reason is where I focus my original research – I am most curious about the processes of how people shape language policies like the one in Carroll County. Before I delve into the details of my study, however, I want to step back and explain why I find these policies worth studying. In the subsections that follow, I begin with people, by thinking through who is really the target of English-only policies and who is not. Second, I loop back around to language, by analyzing the language ideologies that underly English-only policies. While I will primarily draw examples from the United States, these ideologies have their roots in global histories of modernity and colonialism (Bauman and Briggs, 2003). Finally, I address the popularity of these policies, in order to show that they are not fringe; rather, they appear popular across the board in the United States. The point is that the beliefs in question are important not because they are so extreme but because they are so typical. A quick note on facts, beliefs, and the stories we tell: Fact-checking people’s beliefs about language may seem like a rather naïve and futile impulse. After all, not all policymakers are striving for fairness and accuracy. For some, the opportunity to sow discord may be a feature, not a bug (Tollefson, 1991, p. 7). Sometimes the cruelty is the point (Serwer, 2021). Facts may not be enough in the face of people’s “imperviousness to the data” (Fishman, 1988, p. 31; see also Tse, 2001; Haddix, 2008; Lejano and Nero, 2020). However, I have to believe that people can change their minds, because I changed my mind. When I was young, if a pollster had asked me if English should be the only official language, I would have said, “Sure, why not?” My English classes ignored authors who wrote across languages or cultures. My Spanish classes treated Spanish like something people only used in foreign countries. My US history classes glossed over anyone who did not grow up using English. Those narratives were not the whole story; they were not even half the story. That is why it is worth carving out a place for new, more truthful stories about language. I say all this to say: For readers who have lived experiences with multilingualism, migration, and/or discrimination, the content in this section may seem obvious, and for readers who favor English-only policies, the content may seem beside the point. For readers who are still making up their mind, I wrote this part for you.

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Introduction

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Targeting People Roger Conner was one of the men involved in the early days of the Englishonly movement, and at one point he had an epiphany. Conner (1989) recalled, “I would later come to see the English language initiative as our analog to the literacy tests in the early part of the century” (p. 80). He came to this conclusion after reading John Higham’s (1955) Strangers in the Land, a classic (and critical) history of nativism in the United States. Starting in the mid-1800s, state and local governments used literacy tests as a tool to exclude certain people from becoming citizens and/or voting. These tests were not about actually identifying people who were illiterate in some objective sense (although that would have been problematic, too); people designed these tests with certain groups in mind. Depending on the time and place, literacy tests targeted Jewish Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans, immigrant women in general, Black Americans, Latinx Americans (including Puerto Ricans), and Asian Americans (Baron, 1990, p. x; Wan, 2014, pp. 43–49). Today’s Englishonly policies are not the same as these literacy tests, thankfully. If English-only policies are like an unwelcome mat, then those literacy tests were more like an electric fence. As Conner observed, however, they are part of the same impulse. Like literacy tests, English-only language policies affect some people more than others. They marginalize people who already tend to be relatively marginalized. I purposefully say “people” rather than a more specific term like “immigrants.” Put simply, there are immigrants who are not targets, and there are nonimmigrants who are. Immigration receives a lot of attention, which is understandable since the United States has such a push–pull, love–hate, “xenophobia”–“xenophilia” relationship with the figure of the “foreigner” (Honig, 2001, p. 75). As citizens of a settler colony, people in the United States are often invested in the idea that people want to come here, work hard, and contribute to society; yet they can also resent immigrants who shine a little too brightly and threaten to overshadow them (Honig, 2001, p. 76). There is a desire for immigrants to succeed but not to stand out. To illustrate, Zentella (2014) points out “the rising number of cases of people hired for speaking Spanish, and then fired for speaking Spanish” (p. 623). These employers seem to have wanted someone who could use Spanish in a pinch, not someone who would actually use Spanish without shame. While I find Honig’s (2001) analysis of immigration indispensable, she and Zentella (2014) both point out the United States is not just a nation of immigrants (see also Dunbar-Ortiz, 2021).7 When Puerto Ricans or African Americans are targets, for instance, 7

For a different, quantitative-data-driven argument that comes to a similar conclusion, see Fitzsimmons-Doolan (2009). This corpus study of newspapers found surprisingly little overlap between discourse about language policy and discourse about immigration.

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that is a sign that just being a natural-born US citizen is not enough to be safe (Richardson, 1998; Zentella, 2014, p. 623). Meanwhile, there are many white people in the world who are multilingual or who do not even know English, but I have never heard of them experiencing the brunt of an English-only policy during the past fifty years. As Schildkraut (2005) points out, when people complain about there being too many foreign-language signs today, they are not talking about the signage outside white-owned French and Italian restaurants (p. 3). Conversely, Latinx and Asian American people do tend to be the target of contemporary English-only policies, even when they may be perfectly competent in English (Zentella, 2014; Lo, 2016). In a series of focus groups about language and American identity, participants often “refused to distinguish between recent immigrants and minorities who are also U.S. citizens” (Schildkraut, 2005, p. 168). If people are conflating all these different groups and different characteristics, then any restrictive language policy, even one that is well-meaning, will inevitably have disparate impacts. English-only policies become more meaningful in light of people’s willingness to conflate people who do not use English, people who are learning English, multilingual people, immigrants, refugees, and people of color, as though all these groups were the same, all these groups are undesirable, and all these groups are the opposite of the ideal English user. *** In my own fieldwork, I quickly realized I myself am part of these assumptions around who merits linguistic scrutiny and who does not. One day in 2015, I was walking around a local fair in Frederick, Maryland, when I suddenly flinched. A man was calling out to me from a booth several feet away, trying to get my attention. He exclaimed, “Hey, you look smart!” and then asked if I would be interested in tutoring. I looked up at the booth’s banner: “Literacy Council of Frederick County.” I walked closer and replied with something like “I might be … what would that involve?” and we started talking about their tutoring services, which focus on teaching adults to read and write in English. I had read about this organization online before and had taken note of their waitlists for classes (a sign that their services are in high demand). At one point, he asked if I was an English teacher or student, and I said I was both. We started to discuss my study. I wrote down my contact information on their volunteer sign-up sheet, in case they ever wanted someone to do tutoring or editing online. As I walked away, I was happy I had had a chance to meet him, share my study, and get some new leads, but I also thought about how easily he clocked me. Out of the hundreds of people at the fair, I was one of the few white people present, and I was the one who he invited to be an English literacy tutor, without ever saying or writing a single word of English.

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I had heard about the fair from someone I interviewed, Angela Spencer. Spencer had played a key role in helping Frederick County repeal its official language policy. As we wrapped up our interview, Spencer let me know about a health fair that the Asian American Center of Frederick was organizing at the Frederick Fairgrounds later that week. I was excited to go and learn more about the linguistic and cultural landscape of the community. So, that Saturday, I drove to the location and walked into a bustling space lined with booths offering complementary medical services (everything from flu vaccines to osteoporosis screenings), as well as booths representing various social services and nonprofit organizations. I quickly realized that I was one of the only white people who were not standing behind a booth. Most of the people milling about with me were Latinx, Asian American, or Black.8 I also noticed that almost everyone else was dressed casually in jeans, whether they were behind a booth or not, whereas I stuck out like a sore thumb in my blouse, scarf, skirt, and tights. Once I got back to my car, I wrote in my field notes, “I guess it was just a reminder that it’s impossible to move around the world and seem ‘neutral.’ [The man at the booth] pegged me as an outsider in general but a potential ally for himself immediately, even with no language or literacy cues.” Now, I would flip that initial analysis: What this encounter really reflects is that from many people’s perspectives, signifiers of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and style are the language and literacy cues. If you look like a straight, white, able-bodied, white-collar American woman, then you do not have to say a peep; you are presumed to be competent (not for everything, necessarily, but at least for tutoring literacy and English!). The reverse is also true. Decades of US research suggests that people of color, immigrants, multilingual people, disabled people, and queer people (groups that sometimes overlap and sometimes do not, of course) often have their linguistic abilities discounted, particularly by white people in positions of authority (Alim and Smitherman, 2012; Davila, 2012; Flores and Rosa, 2015; Baugh, 2018; Yergeau, 2018; Flores and Rosa, 2022). Perhaps most strangely, people who know multiple languages or dialects often receive the worst treatment, despite the fact that being able to communicate across language varieties can be a resource rather than a problem (Ruíz, 1984) and historically and globally the norm rather than the exception (Canagarajah, 2013).9 To borrow a phrase from a collection on discrimination in higher education, many people 8

The makeup of this event is similar to their other offerings. In an annual report, the Asian American Center of Frederick (2018) notes that the most common participants are “non-white/ black Hispanic/Latino” (54.2 percent), followed by Asian Pacific Islanders (22 percent), Black people (10.9 percent), white people (9.2 percent), and multiracial people (3.7 percent) (p. 3). 9 On the promise and pitfalls of the language-as-resource orientation, see Ricento (2005) and Kaveh (2022).

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Making English Official

are presumed incompetent when it comes to the English language (Gutiérrez y Muhs, Niemann, González, and Harris, 2012). Dyson (2015) captured this point about presumed incompetence poignantly in her study of one Black kindergartner whose white teacher remarks that he is a better writer than the “bright” kids in class but she still does not categorize him as “bright,” simply because of who he is (p. 205). The teacher called students bright only if they were white (with one exception for a Korean American student) (p. 205). Essentially, this teacher did the opposite of what the Literacy Council of Frederick County representative did to me: I was called smart without having to say anything, while the student in Dyson’s study was not called bright, no matter how well he writes. These dynamics are all contingent on the situation and the people involved, of course, and there are certainly exceptions. Nevertheless, I dwell on these ideas because the point is that language and literacy are not separate from power and identity. When language is already serving as a proxy for who you are, where you are from, and what level of respect people think you deserve, then language policies can become vectors of xenophobia, racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression. Oversimplifying Language Most English-only policies rest on a linked set of assumptions not just about people but about language itself. If I were to distill these assumptions down to their narrative essence, it would go as follows: Everything was fine until recently, when immigrants started bringing in other languages and refusing to learn English. Now, this new rise in multilingualism is creating tension and putting English at risk. If immigrants would switch over to English, then the rest of society would treat them better. Making English the official language is a way to solve this problem, by incentivizing immigrants to assimilate faster.10

By that logic, English-only policies are helpful and harmless. The issue is that none of these statements are true. Instead, this description vastly oversimplifies how language works and has worked throughout US history. The following account comes closer to the truth: 10

As an early example of this narrative, Senator S. I. Hayakawa (1981, April 14) once remarked in a TV interview: Up to now, people who came from Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Italy or Egypt all hurried to learn the English language. … I’m not trying to impose hardships on immigrants. These are hardships that come by virtue of being immigrants not being able to speak the language. … It’s a way of inviting them into the mainstream of American life more quickly. … If we accept a second language in any American city other than English as the official language of that city, or municipality or state, then we begin to breed the seeds of possible dissension and possible division within our country. So what I’m trying to do is to head off trouble in the future.

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The US has always been multilingual. This multilingualism has been societal (different communities using different languages) and individual (people using multiple languages). Sometimes using a language other than English is tied to recent immigration, but not always: historically, using other languages has also been common among Indigenous people, enslaved people, people whose families had already moved here before their region became part of US territory, Deaf people and their interlocutors, and refugees. People often want to improve their English, but there are barriers in the way. English-only policies create more tension than they alleviate. Even if everyone did master English, it would not be enough to stop linguistic discrimination, particularly against people of color. Finally, one can be adept at a language while still not knowing every single variety or register of that language.

I believe some of the oversimplification is unintentional and some is intentional. Some people involved in the English-only movement know quite a bit about this subject, whether through personal experience or academic study or both. Roger Conner, who made the comparison to literacy tests, is clearly aware. However, I do think many members of the general public are unfamiliar with these facets of history, education, and linguistics. I want to begin with history, in order to emphasize that multilingualism is not new. As Dowling (2021) notes, making multilingualism seem new makes English seem “natural to this region” (p. 442). In reality, what is now the United States used to be more multilingual than it is now. The state of Maryland exemplifies this history of language contact: It is home to Indigenous nations that use Algonquin and Iroquoian languages (among others),11 it was the site of one of the earliest colonial settlements in the early 1600s, it was an early hub of the enslavement of African people (including in all four counties I studied),12 and by the 1800s it was home to many German Americans. Traces of this history are everywhere. There are Indigenous place names, such as the Monocacy River that runs through Frederick and Carroll Counties. There are reminders of slavery: At the beginning of an interview, when I asked Bob Simmons how he would describe Queen Anne’s County, he described it as “a plantation environment.” There were busts of famous figures who shaped American understandings of slavery, including Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney in Frederick. Taney was a one-time resident who later wrote the 1857 proslavery opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the landmark case that prioritized slave owners’ property rights over Black Americans’ citizenship rights (I return to Taney in Chapter 4). I also walked by a statue 11

At Nolands Ferry, in present-day Frederick County, archeologists have found Indigenous artifacts from approximately 8500 BC (Maryland Historical Trust, 2018). The state currently recognizes three Indigenous nations: the Accohannock Indian Tribe, the Piscataway Indian Nation, and the Piscataway Conoy Tribe. 12 While slavery existed in Frederick and Carroll Counties, it was particularly entrenched in the more coastal plantations in Anne Arundel and Queen Anne’s Counties (Jones, 1724/1956; Bianca, 2007; Stories of Flight, 2022).

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Making English Official

of Roots author Alex Haley in Annapolis, Anne Arundel County.13 One time when I was driving into Western Maryland, I noticed a sign for a place called New Germany State Park. In Frederick County, the county’s Human Relations Commission cited the community’s rich German heritage as one reason why their English-only policy seemed out of step. Since 1868, Frederick has also been home to the Maryland School for the Deaf. To be sure, almost all contemporary English-only policies generally have carveouts for language instruction in schools and services for people with disabilities. The issue is not so much about enforcement as it is about justification. Any argument that there are unprecedented levels of multilingualism, or that the earlier generations learned English with more alacrity, is simply untrue. The story of Maryland reflects broader truths about language in the United States. No one was using English in this hemisphere until a few hundred years ago. Throughout US history, English has never been the official national language, and language policy has remained an open question (Heath, 1976; Baron, 1990). Before European colonialism began, Indigenous people often learned multiple Indigenous languages in order to be able to communicate across communities (Spack, 2002). When Europeans began colonizing North America, they were initially ambivalent about Indigenous people switching to European languages. At first, there was a bigger push for missionaries to learn Indigenous languages than for Indigenous people to adopt European languages (Heath, 1972, p. 6). And besides, most of the earliest colonizers were not using English. The first long-term Spanish settlement began in 1565 in St. Augustine, Florida (decades before the first English settlement), and included both free and enslaved Africans (Parker, 2014, p. 561). The first French speaker arrived in what would become Louisiana in 1682 (Dajko, 2019, p. 69). In addition to knowing one or more African languages, many Black people in early colonial history had to learn languages like English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, and French, because those were the languages of the white people enslaving them (Read, 1937;14 Picone, 2003). Eventually, slavery in the United States became more of an anglophone enterprise, and free and enslaved Black people were generally using English by the time slavery ended in 1865.15 However, 13

The city of Annapolis was the port of call in Roots, which Haley later adapted into what may be the United States’ most-watched TV depiction of slavery. The novel and show include a famous scene where the character Kunta Kinte is punished for wanting to keep his name rather than answer to a new English name. 14 During early American history, many of the references are to “Dutch” rather than “German,” but the language in question is usually what we would think of as German today (Read, 1937, p. 94). This pattern lives on in the term “Pennsylvania Dutch.” 15 Histories of African American language suggest that enslaved people learned English relatively quickly, albeit with variation depending on when they arrived, where they lived, who they interacted with on a daily basis, and whether they came directly from Africa or from plantations

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Smitherman (1977) notes that newly enslaved people were arriving from Africa as late as 1858 (p. 12). Meanwhile, many Indigenous people did learn European languages, but at first it was more about adding something new than subtracting Indigenous languages. There was no concerted effort to eliminate Indigenous languages until the late 1800s (Spack, 2002). Even when anglophone settlers began expecting Black people and Indigenous people to use only English, multilingualism often persisted among people who immigrated voluntarily. Then, as today, Black and Indigenous people were held to different standards (a point I return to when discussing the origins of the English-only movement in Chapter 1). New immigrants brought in languages like German, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and Polish. At one point there were at least thirty-eight German-medium newspapers in the United States (Pavlenko, 2002, p. 168). Even as late as the early 1900s, immigrants from Germany often maintained their heritage languages well past three generations, such that even the grandchildren of immigrants might not use English as their primary language (Wilkerson and Salmons, 2008, p. 260). The United States also expanded its empire. Places like Puerto Rico and the American Southwest already had large numbers of Spanish speakers before they became US territory (Lozano, 2018). In these cases, then, it was not so much that people crossed the border but rather that the border crossed them (Anzaldúa, 1987; Zentella, 1999; Cisneros, 2013; Enoch and Ramirez, 2019). One other key moment was the development of American Sign Language in the early 1800s, which grew out of French Sign Language (Reagan, 2010, p. 97). Overall, the early-mid nineteenth century was a time of acceptance for many heritage languages. In response, some supporters of Official English might reasonably suggest that the past is the past, and what really matters is that people use English now. I am sympathetic to that view. The trouble is that everyone already has strong incentives to use English, that English-only policies do not help people learn English, and that learning English is, unfortunately, not enough to succeed in the United States. Of course, there are people in the United States who have less experience using English, but they tend to want to learn. In one large-scale survey study, Mexican Americans who opted to answer the survey questions in Spanish were three times as likely to say that knowing the English language is “very important” compared with people who chose to take the survey in English (Dowling, Ellison, and Leal, 2012, p. 370). In other words, Spanish users were much more likely to place a premium on English, not less likely. in the Caribbean (Read, 1939; Smitherman, 1977; Morgan, 2002; Mufwene, 2008; Mufwene, 2015). Debates remain over the details of African American language, and especially over the historical possibility of creole influence (Weldon, 2003).

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Making English Official

Because people are so motivated to learn and use English, there is great demand around the country for classes in ESOL (English for speakers of other languages). At my local public library in Lowell, Massachusetts, there is a six-to-nine-month waiting list for an English tutor (Learn to Speak English, 2022). The situation has been similar in Maryland. The Literacy Council of Carroll County, which offers tutoring in English, “always has a waiting list of people needing its services” (Oland, 2012, May 18). The Literacy Council of Frederick County’s (2012) ESL coordinator reports “12 students on the waiting list,” even though the organization already has “68 active tutors” (p. 2). Four years after that newsletter, and one year after I met the man at the fair, the Literacy Council of Frederick County (2016) was still reporting, “There’s always a waiting list of students who need tutors.” Unfortunately, policies making English the official language of local governments generally do not come with any strategies or resources for actually alleviating any of these wait lists. Tollefson (1989) argued that this sort of gap may be more than an oversight. In his study of how the United States works with refugees from Southeast Asia, he documented a system in which refugees are purposefully provided with subpar education in English. He found that the US government wants refugees to assimilate into US life but not so much that they actually qualify for white-collar jobs. Ricento (2021) reported a similar dynamic in a recent study of refugees in Canada who were medical doctors in their countries of origin, which emphasizes that this problem has not gone away and it is not limited to the United States.16 When refugees try to practice academic and professional registers of English, some teachers actively discourage them (Ricento, 2021, p. 81). In these systems, the goal seems to be for these people to form a sort of permanent underclass. Tollefson’s (1989) study is particularly haunting because these were refugees who had to leave their countries due to US military interventions in and around the Vietnam War. These refugees’ experiences thus show that language issues are not just a product of outside forces. Instead, policymakers often set language learners up to fail and then blame them for failing. To be sure, the county governments I study have little to no control over US foreign policy or even US education policy (much to their chagrin). The point is that scapegoating multilingual people can be a crude way to try to gain some semblance of control. Readers may be wondering whether the solution could be to revise Englishonly policies so that they are more about actually helping people learn English. I agree that there should be much more societal investment in language education. However, it is important to recognize that learning English may never be 16

In the United Kingdom and Europe too, language policies around asylum seekers, refugees, and incoming migrants tend to be exceptionally Kafkaesque (Blommaert, 2010; Khan, 2022).

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Introduction

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enough (Flores and Rosa, 2015; Rosa, 2021). Fishman (1988) tartly observed that if knowing English were enough to escape discrimination, then Black Americans would experience much less discrimination (since nearly all Black families whose ancestors were enslaved here have been using English as their primary language for more than 150 years) (p. 131). Furthermore, some people do not believe bilingualism is really possible for people of color, and so if they still use a first language, then it does not matter how fluent they become in English: They are still tainted. Conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. (1983, November 10), made this point on an episode of his TV show Firing Line: “My own experience with bilingualism is that it’s an utter and total phony. What you end up doing is having a society in which people speak either English or Spanish, and understand a few frijol-y words in between.” Buckley is likely talking specifically about bilingualism among Mexican Americans, based on the facts that the overall episode is about immigration in Texas and he chooses “frijol-y” as his example of a bivalent word (Woolard, 1998). From his perspective, anyone in this group who claims to be bilingual is stretching the truth; at best they know one language plus a few words of Spanglish. Rosa (2019) documented a similar ideology even among bilingual people, like a bilingual principal at a high school with predominantly Mexican American and Puerto Rican students, who equates bilingualism with students who lack English, who “don’t know the language,” who “need help” (p. 128). While bilingual people do push back and even make fun of this ideology of languagelessness,17 there is still a pervasive assumption that people of color have to choose one language; it’s an “either/or”, rather than a “both/ and.”18 From that perspective, if a person of color is using a language other than English in any everyday context, then that means they have failed to learn English. Tanton (1994a) went a step further, by questioning bilingual people’s abilities in both languages: He wrote that “bilingual” is more like “bi-illiterate” (p. 47). If people believe that bilingualism is not really possible for people of color, then English proficiency is not the crux of the issue. This “either/or” framing also makes it difficult to accept that knowing a language is always necessarily partial. This point is not just about particular identities or about the English language but about the very foundations of how language works. In the immortal words of Blommaert (2010), “No one knows all of a language”; there are always a variety of repertoires, registers, genres, dialects, and, often, literacies in play (p. 103; see also Rymes, 2014).

17

See Rosa (2019) on the ideology of languagelessness, as well as people’s playful and reclamative forms of Inverted Spanglish (pp. 160–176). 18 See Subtirelu (2017) and Panaligan and Curran (2022) for an example of how this dynamic results in lower salaries for multilingual people of color, both in the United States and in the Philippines, a former US colony.

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Making English Official

Even among people who agree that English is important, there is no definitive, singular form of English that people are learning, or even aspiring to learn (Kachru, 1985; Ricento, 2014). To give an example, people in the English-only movement often worry about the fact that most jurisdictions in the United States will administer driver’s license exams in multiple languages (Schiffman and Weiner, 2012). The thinking is that if one cannot pass a written test in English, then one is not qualified to navigate streets filled with signs in English. The underlying ideology is that one either knows a language or not. And yet, as anyone who has rented a car in another country knows, proficiency in the language(s) of that country is neither necessary nor sufficient to driving well. Recognizing a Stop sign is not the same as taking a lengthy written exam. This point matters especially because contemporary English-only policies are about government documents, which can be notoriously specialized. Zentella (1988) captures this dynamic perfectly in a description of her Puerto Rican mother: “Although she can converse with anyone and read newspapers in English, she still needs federally funded bilingual services and documents for help with complicated medical, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits” (p. 41). If the tables were turned, I would feel the same way. I can read a newspaper in Spanish, but if I had to do government business in Spanish, I would have a hard time. Intuitively, I think everyone has experience with being more comfortable with some registers than others. However, people who understand the complexity of language in their own lives are not necessarily willing to extend any grace to others. By talking only about “English,” English-only policies invite people to express an all-or-nothing view of language and a stance for or against English. And when the question is framed this way, most people in the United States will side with English. The Popularity of English as an Official Language Most Americans seem to support making English the one and only official language. Political scientists have researched public opinion on this topic from a number of angles, from preexisting survey data (Tatalovich, 1995; Schildkraut, 2005; Dowling, Ellison, and Leal, 2012), to voting results (Tatalovich, 1995), to focus groups (Schildkraut, 2005, chapters 5 and 6), to original surveys and questionnaires designed to address this precise topic (Smitherman, 1992; Lawton, 2010; Schildkraut, 2011). In her Twenty-First-Century Americanism survey, Schildkraut (2011) found that 77 percent of respondents said English should become the official language (p. 71). In an earlier study, Schildkraut (2005) heard “little to no” support for bilingual education among her focus group participants (p. 148). These findings are consistent with Tatalovich’s (1995) landmark study, which reported that a majority of each racial group favors English-only policies, based on national survey data from 1990 and 1992

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(p. 180). Lawton (2010) found that immigrants often support the dominance of English (p. 335). Historically, English-only policies also have bipartisan support among politicians: Of the nine state-level policies Tatalovich (1995) studied, five passed with bipartisan support, and some were in Democrat-led state governments (p. 222). In other words, the issue is not just popular with white people or Republicans. People support English-only policies for a wide variety of reasons, but economics does not appear to be one. A person’s support for English-only policies has no clear correlation with perceived economic insecurity (Schildkraut, 2005, p. 173) or with their actual income (Tatalovich, 1995, pp. 180, 187; Schildkraut, 2005, p. 112; Dowling, Ellison, and Leal, 2012, pp. 370–371). Tatalovich (1995) also examined whether “the anti-Spanish backlash [is] tied to economic deprivation” (in other words, the “they’re taking our jobs” rationale), but he concluded that, if anything, higher poverty levels correlate with less support for Official English (p. 189). In sum, economic anxiety is not the driver. This finding may be surprising. I am someone who spent my twenties living through the 2008 recession, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the Tea Party. In my fieldwork, talk of the economy was ubiquitous, on both sides of the issue. People who passed English-only policies pointed to the potential money their county could save if they avoided translation and interpreting services. Meanwhile, one of the strongest voices against one of these policies came from a group called Occupy Frederick (a local play on Occupy Wall Street). For all these reasons, I cannot help but wonder if economic thought plays a more meaningful role than surveys detect. On the other hand, perhaps people are right not to rely on economic thinking to make up their mind on this issue, since Tatalovich (1995) finds that these policies generally do not save governments money. Social, cultural, and political factors seem to matter much more than economic factors. All 122 politicians who were primary sponsors of state-level English-only policies during the early years of the English-only movement were white (Tatalovich, 1995, p. 226). From Tatalovich’s perspective, racism may be the initial spark, but it cannot explain the widespread support (p. 129). When Tatalovich (1995) examined county-level voting data, there were certain factors that predicted which counties would vote for Official English, such as whiteness (p. 192), support for Reagan in the 1984 election (pp. 189, 246), and having lower levels of education (pp. 180–181). Meanwhile, Schildkraut (2005) found that some people thought making English official would be a way to instill unity, foster communication, fight balkanization, or encourage assimilation (p. 159). People can be relatively restrictive about language without extending those restrictions to other aspects of people’s identities. For example, 71.6 percent of Twenty-First-Century Americanism survey respondents said being able to speak English is “very important,” while only 24.2 percent

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Making English Official

of Americans said it is “very important” to have been “born in America” (Schildkraut, 2011, p. 45). The thinking is that if people were really using language as code for ethnicity, the percentages would match one another. These sorts of numbers are crucial to Tatalovich’s and Schildkraut’s arguments that English-only policies are not synonymous with racism and nativism. Baron (1990) came to this conclusion as well: The motivations behind these policies include but are by no means limited to nativism (p. 4). All this is true, and it is what makes Official English such an attractive political issue for activists. Making English official can be a way to bring together everyone from the most ardent white supremacist, on one extreme, to the person who just thinks communication is easier and more efficient in one language, on the other extreme. Importantly for this study, people’s beliefs about race do intersect with their beliefs about their local community. Schildkraut (2005) discusses how local language policies are “causing a stir in cities and towns across the country” (p. 16). One theme in her focus groups was “civic republicanism,” which means that someone values “local control over decision making” (p. 97). In one particularly potent combination, some people expressed both “civic republicanism” and “ethnoculturalism” (the notion that white English speakers are ideal citizens) (p. 169). A “civic republican-ethnocultural mix appears to be uniformly associated with a preference for language restrictions” (p. 169). This finding makes sense, because if people have a sense of local citizenship but only white English users can be good citizens, then there is no way for people of color and/or multilingual people to win. While all these findings are striking, that does not mean that these studies are representative of everyone or that people’s minds are set in stone. Most of the surveys I have discussed leave out Native Americans, do not account for multiracial people, and do not distinguish between different groups within large racial categories. Tatalovich (1995) acknowledged that one of the main national surveys included too few Hispanic people, making it difficult to analyze that part of the data with much confidence. One study that puts these limitations in stark relief is Smitherman (1992). Smitherman’s (1992) survey was more inclusive than other survey studies, and she reports that only 35.4 percent of respondents were in favor of Official English (p. 247). By race, 29.2 percent of African Americans were in support, compared with 46.4 percent of European Americans. These numbers are very different from the numbers (50+ percent) reported in Tatalovich (1995) and Schildkraut (2005, 2011). Smitherman (1992) pointed out two reasons why there may be a discrepancy between her findings and those of other national surveys. First, it really depends on how pollsters phrase the question. She cites a Gallup poll, carried out on behalf of U.S. English, which made the issue seem more symbolic, by asking “Would you favor or oppose making English the official language of government in the United States?” In contrast,

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Smitherman’s (1992) survey touched on the legal ramifications: “Some people want to pass laws to make English the official language of the United States. Have you heard of this? If these laws were passed, it would mean a lot of changes for many Americans. For example, courts, public, medical, and social services communications would be in English only. Are you in favor of such a law?” (p. 243). The use of words like “laws” and “changes” emphasizes the gravity of the situation and may give people pause. That brings me to the second difference: the people who took this survey. While many national surveys focus on likely voters and predominantly white areas of the country, Smitherman (1992) opted to take a more race-conscious approach by centering predominantly Black cities and by not excluding adults who were not likely voters. This study creates a sense of possibility: Even though politicians may promote English-only policies precisely by framing them as innocuous (rather than as laws) and by appealing to likely voters (as opposed to everyone else they represent), Smitherman (1992) showed that things could be otherwise. By asking the question differently, by centering Black people and other people of color, and by including people whether they are likely voters or not, the picture could look very different. These studies from previous decades raise questions about how public opinion may have evolved in recent years and how people’s lived experiences may be more nuanced than their answers on a survey. Indeed, when I started to actually talk to the people making and living with English-only policies, a more complex portrait started to emerge. That is one of my aims in this study: to go beyond the historical precedents, the polling data, and the policy texts, to listen to what it is actually like for the people who create, debate, and live with English-only policies in their communities. Looking for Language Policy in Action If other studies have focused on why Official English matters, I wanted to figure out how these policies emerge at all. In other words, I was curious about the policymaking process, rather than just the final policy product or the aftermath. When I first started looking into the English-only movement, I realized that it was not immediately apparent where these policies were coming from, why so many of them closely resembled each other, or why some policies passed while others failed. And because language policies do not write themselves,19 at least not yet, I try to understand the people involved in order to understand the processes by which English can 19

Not every language policy is written – many are more tacit (Watson and Shapiro, 2018). Much of my approach in this book is applicable to understanding tacit language policies, but my specific focus is on the most official, explicit, inscribed government language policies.

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become an official language.20 What interests me about the people who craft these official language policies is less their beliefs and more their actions. Of course, the two are inseparable in practice, since people’s thoughts and feelings shape how they act and vice versa. I argue, however, that it is crucial to recognize that language policymaking is not just a reflection of what people feel in their hearts and minds. Many people in the United States are racist, xenophobic, and/or value English and monolingualism over other languages and other ways of communicating, but only a few of those people have the time, motivation, expertise, and resources to successfully go through the process of enacting English-only policies. What are the keys to those people’s success? And, conversely, when people thwart English-only policies, what are the keys to their success? Those are the kinds of things I am curious about. There are two main reasons for my focus on people and their policymaking processes, one related to policy in general and the other more particular to English-only policies. In terms of policy more generally, the policymaking process is an important way for language advocates to generate meaning and power. Language policies typically do not spring fully formed from one person’s head. Rather, people form coalitions and develop their perspectives on language as part of the process. In other words, it is not that people have an idea and then they put it into policy form; rather, they decide to work on a policy and then their most effective ideas and strategies often come out of that process. That process often involves not just one text but many (Lo Bianco and Aliani, 2013, p. 3; Wible, 2013, p. 169; Branson, 2022, pp. 162–163). The initial idea may not even be for a language policy but for a policy on immigration, or housing, or education, or voting. For example, in Chapter 2 I discuss an English-only policy that started out under the umbrella of an “Illegal Immigration Relief Ordinance.” Even once someone or some small group decides to focus on language, most language policies can pass only through the collaborative efforts of a wide range of people, but many of those people become involved only in later stages of the process. In other words, many policymakers do not think about language issues on a regular basis, and so recruiting those people into the policymaking process is part of the work. To put it in numerical terms, most of the local governments I study have five to seven elected officials with the power to enact new ordinances, and usually only one or two are actually passionate about making English official. 20

This line of inquiry goes back to the beginning of language policy and planning as a field. In one of the field’s early texts, Rubin and Jernudd (1971) write, “We still do not know how language planning actually operates: what are the goals that planners have considered, what motivates their considerations of particular goals and their acceptance of certain goals, what are the alternative strategies that the planners consider, how do these express given goals, how do they evaluate the strategies, what outcomes do planners predict for various strategies, and what does in fact happen?” (p. xxii).

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That means that in order to make any headway at all, they have to convince several of their colleagues to agree. Even beyond getting their colleagues to cast their votes in their favor, people have to meet potential supporters and persuade them to support their policy idea, whether by signing a petition, giving an endorsement at a government meeting or public hearing, or contributing suggestions for how to write or revise the policy draft. These gradual steps of generating ideas and building connections with like-minded people are not trivial – they are crucial moments where language ideologies and strategies can be hammered out, tested, revised, refined, and ultimately shared with other policymakers in other communities. The second reason I focus on the policymaking process is more specific to the English-only movement in the United States. Because these policies tend to be primarily symbolic, they are actually at their most potent when they are on the cusp of passing. The days and months leading up to a vote are when an English-only policy will generate the most news coverage, when elected officials can use language as a campaign wedge issue, when lobbying groups can capitalize on the controversy to raise funds, when policymakers may be the most open to revising the policy draft, when activists can try to exert their influence, and when people in the community will be actively discussing and debating, in some cases for the first time, how language can and should work in their community. The aim of these local English-only policies is typically not to set up an enforcement apparatus but more so to dissuade multilingual people of color from moving to the community or engaging with the local government at all. Because the kinds of policies discussed in this book are rarely enforced after they pass, having a high-profile process becomes the purpose of the whole exercise. Not all language policies are like this: There are many situations where a language policy really makes a splash only when implementation begins. In the English-only movement, though, the publicity leading up to the policy passing is the point. To add one more layer of complexity, English-only campaigns are not isolated events. One year, there may be no official language policies in a given region, and by the next year there may be several, and that clustering is not a coincidence. So, one of my main points in this book is that these policies tend to be quite closely connected, in terms of intertextual ties between the policy texts (they often share some of the exact same wording) and interpersonal ties between the people involved (including across different governments and between elected officials, lobbyists, and activists). Furthermore, even identifying who the authors are is not straightforward, since most English-only policies are ghostwritten and collaboratively written. While this writing network became more refined in the 2000s, in truth the English-only movement has always operated this way. As I will discuss in Chapter 1, all of the English-only policies that started the modern movement in the early 1980s were written by

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people other than their official public sponsors, and they were all later emulated by policy writers in other communities and jurisdictions. The upshot is that I quickly realized that focusing on one English-only policy, or one person, or one government, or one organization would prevent me from learning what was really going on. To design a study that could shed light on all this complexity, I drew on research traditions in language policy (Tollefson, 1989; McCarty, 2011; Källkvist and Hult, 2016), writing studies (Prior, 1998; Lillis and Curry, 2010; Brandt, 2015), applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2010), sociolinguistics (Heller, 2011), sociocultural linguistics (Bucholtz and Hall, 2008), and rhetoric (Cintrón, 1997; Asen, 2015), as well as on the work of scholars whose research synthesizes much of the above, like Ana Celia Zentella (1996), Geneva Smitherman (1999), Jan Blommaert (2010), Scott Wible (2013), and Suresh Canagarajah (2013). I foreground people’s perspectives, triangulate multiple kinds of data, and reflect critically on my own role as a researcher (all hallmarks of ethnography), while also taking a decidedly writing-oriented approach. I prioritize methods that allow me to trace how a range of people write and otherwise shape the meaning of local language policies over time, both from their points of view and from mine. What ultimately unites all these bodies of work is an emphasis on how people navigate language, literacy, and power in the course of everyday life. At first glance, it may appear that language policy is not part of everyday life – it can seem like a lofty enterprise where nameless, faceless policymakers issue mandates from on high. For the people involved in language policy, though, it is a quotidian activity that happens through embodied conversations, reading, and writing. The grounded nature of language policy is especially apparent in firsthand accounts of cases where scholars themselves are part of the process (Rabin, 1971; Lo Bianco, 1989; Smitherman, 1999; Wee, 2018; Mihut, 2019). What this means in twenty-first-century terms is that it happens in meeting rooms, over email, in Microsoft Word, and on social media (and probably increasingly on Zoom and Slack as well). One of the key insights of Pennycook’s (2010) work on language as a local practice is that even the most powerful people are situated – no one’s discourse happens outside of context. That is why I resist framing language policy as micro versus macro.21 Language policy is a local practice; it’s just a question of whether people play up that localism (which I argue is common in the English-only movement) or whether they try to transcend their local context. Treating language policy as a local practice is important because “a focus on local action is a 21

For other arguments that phenomena cannot be dichotomized either being macro or micro, and that indeed this dyad may not be useful, see Wortham (2012), Wortham and Rhodes (2012), and Latour (2005).

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useful corrective to the bland work on language planning that has held sway for too long, doing little more than describing national policies” (Pennycook, 2010, p. 54; see also Liddicoat and Baldauf, 2008). Pennycook (2010) is not suggesting that national policies are irrelevant but rather that all studies, even of national policies, could be less “bland” if they focused on action situated in localized spaces, rather than pretending language policy is so exceptional as to exist outside of context. When language policy studies treat policymakers and policy texts as if they were voices from nowhere, it limits every aspect of the research. The Research Process Over the course of several years, I observed government meetings and hearings in Anne Arundel County, Carroll County, Frederick County, and Queen Anne’s County in Maryland; conducted and incorporated interviews with twenty-three of the people involved; and collected texts from the government, news media, social media, local Maryland organizations, the two major organizations focused on making English official (ProEnglish and U.S. English), and historical archives (see Appendix A on research methods). My archival research focused on people and organizations that have been involved in the English-only movement for longer periods of time, extending back to the 1980s. I sifted through the collections of activist John Tanton, FAIR, and Senator S. I. Hayakawa. I also consulted more isolated oral histories, pamphlets, and newsletters held in libraries around the country. Finally, I read through public tax records and registration records for relevant organizations, as a way to try to pin down historical details around timelines, names, and locations. In including materials from several decades, my purpose is not to compare and contrast earlier and later phases of this movement but to show connections across space and time. Specifically, some of the people who are working on language policy in the 2000s have been doing so since the 1980s. For example, the lawyer who reportedly wrote ProEnglish’s policy template around 2006 also worked for U.S. English when it first began in 1983, and I learned about this history in my 2015 interview with Robert Vandervoort. Similarly, the current CEO of U.S. English, Mauro Mujica, has led the organization since 1993 and got involved in language policy through interactions with Hayakawa in the 1980s, and I put this timeline together through my 2019 interview with Mujica. Including earlier English-only discourse is important, then, for showing that people’s strategies for making English official are neither new nor exceptional nor limited to local government policies but rather that these strategies have been central to the modern iteration of the English-only movement since its origins. The boundaries between historical and contemporary research can be particularly blurry in social movements or policy initiatives that unfold over many years.

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The Trump Factor Perhaps nowhere are these historical throughlines more consequential than in the rise of Donald Trump. When I began researching the English-only movement, I admit that I did not see Trump as part of the picture, and I do not think my participants did either. As a case in point, one of the people I interviewed is a Democratic county council member named Jerry Donald, and in the months leading up to the 2014 election, Donald (2014) was able to establish his campaign website at electdonald.com. When I was getting ready to interview him in 2015, I bookmarked the URL for my records and did not give the domain name a second thought. I never imagined that the phrase “Elect Donald” would come to take on a new valence with Trump’s presidential election in 2016. Most Republican politicians seemed to be caught off guard as well. Former president George W. Bush, for example, reportedly remarked after Trump’s inauguration speech, “That was some weird shit” (Ali, 2017). However, some of the people involved in the English-only movement were not so surprised. They were quick to notice connections between their work and Trump, and between past and present. Lou Barletta was one of the first politicians to endorse Trump in 2016. Barletta is one of the local politicians I discuss in Chapter 2. He was the mayor of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, when he enacted his Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which included an Official English clause (Dick, 2011). Barletta saw himself in Trump. In a news interview, he explained that he identified with the candidate because “Donald Trump was criticized the same way I was criticized when I was mayor” (Collins, 2016). Collins (2016) added, “Barletta is one of a handful of lawmakers who have endorsed Trump … Barletta said he hopes more of his colleagues will endorse Trump.” While Barletta took pride in Trump’s success, others seemed to feel shame. Roger Conner, the early figure who compared English-only policies to literacy tests, has since changed careers and become a woodworker. In 2021, Conner gave an interview to Georgia Public Broadcasting where he described the Trump administration’s approach to the US Census: “I can only understand it as a pure expression of racism and evil. And yet I have to own I took this same position 40  years ago” (Wang, 2021, February 15). Barletta’s and Conner’s comments get at a larger point: Trump was not so much inventing new strains of political thought as he was channeling, mixing, and matching old strains (Santa Ana et al., 2020; Jones, 2021; O’Connor, 2021; Continetti, 2022). The connections were not merely conceptual either, as the Trump administration hired people like Stephen Miller and Kris Kobach who had been part of some of the networks I discuss in this book. For instance, before Kobach worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and helped Trump contest the 2020 election, he worked on a number of state- and local-level policies around the country, including with Lou Barletta.

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I interpret Trump’s actions in light of the people who made his presidency possible: people like Kobach, Miller, and Barletta. They had high hopes for Trump, but overall he seems to have disappointed them. When Trump entered office in 2017, I predicted that one of two things would happen. The first possibility was that he would help sign into law a national English-only policy. Maybe it would be an executive order, or a bill in Congress, or a constitutional amendment, but whatever the genre, I was sure Trump would sign off on it. The other possibility was that language policy would seem beside the point during the Trump administration. Why make English official when it was possible to dream up even more ambitious policies, like Executive Order 13769 (the Muslim ban)? In the end, he took the latter approach. Trump has no language policy accomplishments to speak of, much to the disappointment of Englishonly organizations. In a way, his lack of language policy acumen seems to give credence to something that I heard local politicians say all along: They move to make English official precisely because they do not trust the higher levels of government to do so. At the same time, Trump took up so much oxygen that other areas of politics did seem to fall by the wayside. After the 2016 election, I did not come across any other new city- or county-level English-only policies. When I did my last round of fieldwork in 2019, the movement had lost some of its momentum. I found myself spending more time in historical archives, and only a few days on interviews; previously, the ratio had been the opposite. My aim is for the book to capture the whole trajectory of this movement, from its origins, to its early strategies and stumbles, to its peak period, to its current lull, to its possible futures. My Position Finally, a note on my role as a relative outsider in these communities. I am not a politician, lobbyist, lawyer, or activist, and so when I conducted interviews and asked people how they do what they do, I was genuinely asking. And for someone interested in studying the local, I certainly selected research sites and other data sources in which I was decidedly nonlocal. I had never spent much time in Maryland (except Baltimore) or Washington, DC, before this study. One of my earliest participants may have realized just how new I was to the area when we were trying to schedule an interview. I asked him if we could meet the next day, and he replied that he had to go to Gettysburg in the morning. At the time, in my mind, Gettysburg was like the Mariana Trench: I had heard of it, and I could even recite some facts about it, but I had absolutely no idea where it was. (This admission will likely horrify anyone from the East Coast and anyone better versed in US Civil War history.) My mind was racing, wondering whether we might need to schedule the interview for a different week to account for his trip. He must have been wondering why I was not

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replying, so he added that he would be available after lunch, since Gettysburg was only a short drive away after all. What can I say? I am from Port Angeles in the state of Washington, thousands of miles away. While that moment was unfortunate, in general my outsider position was not necessarily a problem. For example, once people realized I was unfamiliar with the area, they would go into greater detail about local history and politics, in a way that I doubt would have happened if we had shared more points of reference. On the other hand, I do not have the same perspective or access as someone studying their own local language policy (Tardy, 2011; Mihut, 2019). These differences aside, I did find much in common with many of my participants (and with the people whose archived papers I read). Like me, they tended to be white, US-born, middle-class people who use relatively unmarked varieties of English and who write professionally. Of all the elected officials I discuss in this book (including both supporters and critics of English-only policies), I believe all are white except for Senator S. I. Hayakawa. Nearly everyone I studied was at the top of their field, with careers in medicine, law, K–12 education, higher education, and business before and often during their time in elected office. They also tend to share an unusually high level of postsecondary education, with many having attended graduate school. When I started my fieldwork, I was still a PhD student, and I was struck by how many participants seemed to be very familiar with what academic life entailed. One participant asked me what stage I was at, and after I started to give some convoluted explanation about how I was finished taking classes but I would not graduate for a couple more years, he realized what I was saying and he said, “Oh, so how’s it feel to be ABD?” This acronym (“all but dissertation”) connotes that someone has completed their coursework and exams but not yet their dissertation. In another conversation, someone asked what kinds of classes I taught, and I again started to give some tortuous answer about how I was in an English Department but I don’t teach literature, and he said, with a dawning sense of recognition, “Oh, so you teach comp?” He sussed out that I teach composition (academic writing for first-year students), which struck me because in both these conversations I mistakenly assumed we were in separate spheres but we were not. This focus on education was not limited just to them as individuals. Many of my participants had children about the same age as me, and one of the most common forms of small talk we would have while I was setting up or putting away my recording equipment was about where they were in college or graduate school. Conversations like these are why, when people ask me what it is like to study the English-only movement, I say that it just feels very normal. Yes, the people in this book have developed a distinctive set of strategies around language policymaking, but the English-only movement is not off in its own separate world. English-only policies and the people who develop them are not

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worlds apart from other kinds of writing and other kinds of writers.22 It is all the same world. English-only policies are indicative of much broader patterns in how people write for change, and they represent the hopes and fears of hundreds of millions of people. Plan for the Book In Chapter 1, I go back to the beginning, in order to show local language policies were crucial to the formation of the English-only movement. From the 1970s into the 1980s and 1990s, relatively disparate activists and politicians started to notice each other, collaborate with each other, and form Englishonly organizations together. To tell this story, I focus on the perspectives and experiences of key figures like Emmy Shafer, who started the current English-only movement in 1980 when she started organizing support for an Anti-Bilingualism Ordinance targeting Spanish users in Dade County, Florida. Shafer pioneered a number of groundbreaking strategies that would become a blueprint, like emphasizing the local economy, starting a nonprofit, and hiring a ghostwriter. I also introduce the two figures who really popularized the idea of making English official: John Tanton and Senator S. I. Hayakawa. I explain how Tanton founded the organization U.S. English and then the organization English Language Advocates (later renamed ProEnglish). Ultimately, these people and organizations paved the way for the local language policies discussed in future chapters. Next, in Chapter 2, I analyze how people write and revise local English-only policies, through text histories of the four policies in Frederick County, Anne Arundel County, Queen Anne’s County, and Carroll County. Three of the four policies were adapted from one common template, and that template emerged out of an even earlier partnership between the organization ProEnglish and the town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. This state of affairs complicates previous accounts of local language policies, which tend to treat the phenomenon as either a purely grassroots phenomenon or a case of astroturfing. Instead, all language policymakers have agency and are strategic about their writing processes. I argue that three writing strategies are particularly important: ghostwriting, working with templates, and making conscious choices about genre. Once these Maryland communities started developing their English-only policies, each case unfolded quite differently, and so I also address what local circumstances and writing processes can facilitate or constrain these policies. Within each community, there were also mixed feelings about the existence of the language policy network: Some relished getting to work with colleagues 22

Prior (2018) articulates the problems with the “worlds apart” framework, particularly in the context of treating academic and professional writing as separate spheres.

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from other counties and from U.S. English and ProEnglish, whereas others resented these outsiders for interfering. Based on these findings, I argue that while language policies are sometimes treated as transparent windows into language ideology, the reality is more complex because there are so many other procedural and interpersonal factors involved. I then turn from how people write these policies to how they discuss their scale and scope. In contrast to the relatively chronological and narrative structure of Chapters 1 and 2, Chapter 3 examines how a penchant for localism permeates the whole movement. Drawing on Blommaert’s (2010) theory of upscaling, I argue that downscaling plays just as pivotal a role in the Englishonly movement, and I examine examples that cut across my interviews, archival research, observations, and policy documents. I begin by analyzing examples of downscaling on its own, then turn toward situations where people engage in both upscaling and downscaling in a single text or interaction. I argue that previous work on scaling in discourse oversimplifies how power works, since a policy seeming quaint and innocuous (and therefore impervious to criticism) can be just as powerful as a policy framed in terms of nationalism or globalization. Ultimately, scaling in either direction can be a way to claim linguistic authority. At the same time, sometimes policymakers do not walk this discursive tightrope successfully, and I argue that this is what ultimately happened in Frederick County, which led to that policy’s downfall. When Frederick County, Maryland, repealed its English-only policy in 2015, it marked the first community-driven repeal of its kind since 1993. To explore how Frederick County managed this feat, in Chapter 4 I analyze how activists and politicians worked in concert to dismantle the ordinance, both in terms of actually passing a repeal bill and by marshaling community support more broadly. I find that people used four strategies: flipping the economics script, linking language to race and racism, questioning whether English can even be defined and separated from other languages, and highlighting the role of collective action. At the same time, focusing on the economic benefits of multilingualism risked eclipsing the other approaches. In light of these people’s successful organizing, I also conclude that scholars have much to learn from activists’ expertise. In the Conclusion, I consider how this study complicates what success looks like in language policy. I also explore the implications of this study for future research on language, writing practices, and other areas of public policy. Finally, I consider possibilities for future organizing and social change in both governments and other institutions, including institutions that hit closer to home.

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1

The Origins of the English-Only Movement

“If there is an epicenter to the language earthquake, it is Miami and Dade County, Fla., where more than half of the people consider Spanish their first language” (Turbak, 1994, p. 55). A journalist wrote these words in a retrospective article surveying the English-only movement’s victories and losses. Dade County had both in spades.1 But why would someone call Dade County, Florida, the epicenter, and what were the aftershocks? On November 4, 1980, voters made English the official language of Dade County via ballot initiative. The new language policy was blunt: The government would begin “prohibiting the expenditure of County funds for the purpose of utilizing any language other than English, or promoting any culture other than that of the United States” (Dade County, 1980, November 2, p. 326). The ordinance passed handily, with 59.1 percent of the vote (Fisher, 1983, October 2). This campaign created a new playbook, one that has endured for more than forty years. Activist Emmy Shafer founded Citizens of Dade United, the group that led this campaign. In doing so, Shafer showed that English-only policies were not just possible but popular, and people took notice. Shafer’s policy lasted almost thirteen years, before the county government chose to repeal it in 1993 (Martin, 1993, May 19). Citizens of Dade United was soon eclipsed by larger organizations, such as U.S. English and ProEnglish, and by a spate of newer policies. But how did we get here? In the early years of the English-only movement, people began to recognize the appeal of local language policies, although they vacillated over whether local policies should be an end unto themselves (as in Dade County) or whether they could and should lead to something larger, like a constitutional amendment. The rise of multiple English-only organizations made it possible for people to collaborate and test out various approaches, to see what worked and what did not, and to change tack accordingly, in a way that was different from earlier periods in US history. While this sort of coordination led to a 1

Dade County contains the city of Miami, Florida. In 1997, the name was changed to “MiamiDade County,” but the language policy under discussion passed when it was still just called Dade.

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string of successes, there were also pitfalls, which have continued to plague the movement ever since. I tell the story of the English-only movement’s early years in five parts. First, I very briefly touch on US language policy before 1980. Second, I analyze how and why Shafer catalyzed the policy in Dade County. Third, I examine Senator S. I. Hayakawa, the public intellectual who brought a sense of legitimacy and visibility to the English-only movement. Fourth, I turn to John Tanton, the activist who made capital out of people like Shafer and Hayakawa to become the architect of U.S. English and related organizations. Finally, I show how ProEnglish rose from the ashes of internal strife within U.S. English, and I explain how the two organizations came to operate independently. In laying out this origin story, my aim is to show that the English-only movement has understood language policy as a local practice since the beginning (Pennycook, 2010). In other words, there was no “local turn,” no moment when they turned their attention from the national to the local. The strategies I discuss in later chapters have been present since the very beginning. At the same time, people do refine their strategies over time, and the English-only movement of today is generally savvier than it used to be. The early years were rife with internal conflicts and external criticisms, and understanding those dynamics is important, too, particularly since such clashes continue to play out in cases like Frederick County’s undoing of its English-only policy (Chapter 4). Looking at any origin story can offer valuable insight into what things were like before the edges were sanded down. Finding Origins The historical record can seem patchy, but this patchiness is part of the story. Some early accounts of English-only policies may seem invisible to some scholars, precisely because most of those accounts are in memoirs, oral histories, literature, and scholarship in fields such as Indigenous studies, race and ethnic studies, and linguistic anthropology, not in mainstream nonfiction or scholarship in fields such as sociolinguistics or applied linguistics. Official English can seem like a national issue because only the national-level politicians and organizations have their papers archived (often because they are the only ones asked). Research on the English-only movement may emphasize Congress in part because Congress keeps the most accessible records and transcripts, while local and state governments do not. Research on language policy may not discuss ghostwriting in part because ghostwriters are, by definition, not going to be the people with their name front and center on the policy text or in the surrounding news coverage. Official English can seem like it was most popular in the 1980s because during that time the people involved were trying to get as much publicity as possible, whereas before and after they tended to operate more under the radar.

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I am guilty of biases myself: For years, I had read that Citizens of Dade United had placed advertisements in the Miami Herald newspaper in 1980, but I could never find them. I only found them when I stopped looking in the front pages and instead turned to the “Neighbors” section at the back, a section that appears to be oriented toward women readers in the neighboring suburbs. There are gaps like this with any subject, as shown by work on feminist historiography (Russell, 2018) and public memory (Tupas, 2003; Trimbur, 2006), but they may be especially clear-cut in this particular policy movement. For example, the papers of Hayakawa, Tanton, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) are archived, while those of Shafer and Citizens of Dade United are not. Many papers from U.S. English are archived, but those of ProEnglish are not. To piece this story together, then, I draw on as wide a range of materials as possible, not just the usual suspects of institutional archives and academic databases (Groundwater, 2020). Language Policy before 1980 While English-only policies did not take off until the nineteenth century, there were precursors: By the eighteenth century, some people in the United States were aware of the Enlightenment theory of societal monolingualism as a path toward more efficient and rational communication (Bauman and Briggs, 2003), British ideologies about the English language and the law (Schiffman, 1996; Pennycook, 1998), and anti-German sentiments (Baron, 1990; Kibbee, 2016). Furthermore, most government discourse was already in English, most people knew English, and anglophone enslavers in particular expected enslaved people to use English. Still, outside the context of slavery, prescriptivism regarding English was more likely to focus on distinguishing American English from British English than on distinguishing English from other languages (Heath, 1976; Baron, 1982). Of course, it was not only settlers who were creating language policies in the region. For example, within the Cherokee Nation, new, community-driven, policies and initiatives emerged in the nineteenth century to promote both Cherokee literacy (Cushman, 2011) and higher education in English (Legg, 2014). Eventually, however, language policies began to explicitly promote English at the expense of all other languages. Colonies and Indigenous nations were the first to bear the brunt of these policies. The United States began occupying the Philippines in 1898, after winning the Spanish–American War, and then implemented English-only schools starting in 1901; soldiers were the first teachers (Tupas, 2003, p. 7). In an even more extreme development, eradicating Indigenous languages altogether became part of the mission of government and church-run boarding schools for Indigenous children (Spack, 2002; Lomawaima and McCarty, 2006). According to one 1886 report by the

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Commissioner of Indian Affairs, “Indians should be taught the English language only … the language of the greatest, most powerful, and enterprising nationalities under the sun” (Morgan, 2009, p. 91). These schools were not few and far between: Lajimodiere (2019) lists 366 different boarding schools across 29 different states. (While none of these schools existed around the towns I study in Maryland, in some parts of the United States and Canada these schools are the exemplars of local language policy.) Calling these institutions “schools” is a bit of a misnomer, because they were more like prisons. For example, many of the early children at the Carlisle Indian School had parents who were of “military interest,” in that they were “the children of detained prisoners of war” and other “incarcerated” Indigenous leaders (Klotz, 2021, p. 97). Hunger strikes, escape attempts, and suicides were common (Klotz, 2021). Children were not the only targets, as the US government also began coercing Indigenous adults into developing English literacy (Morgan, 2009). While these early English-only policies were damaging, it is also important to highlight the resistance and survival of Indigenous teachers and students at these colonial institutions (Enoch, 2002; Weiden, 2019; Gansworth, 2020; Jimenez, 2021). Before long, even settlers were not safe from English-only policies. Near the turn of the twentieth century, as part of the Americanization movement, the descendants of earlier waves of European immigration began to criticize the language practices of newer waves of Southern and Eastern European immigrants, often on anti-Catholic or antisemitic grounds (Bonfiglio, 2002; Pavlenko, 2002), and to reject even more harshly the practices and even the existence of Asian Americans (Hoang, 2015, p. 10). English was becoming a marker of American identity for the first time, such that not even European Americans could pass as American, or even necessarily white, unless they used English only (DaytonWood, 2008). The sort of literal and figurative “borderland subjectivity” that groups like the francophone Acadians had previously enjoyed was becoming illegal (Peters, 2013, p. 578). Peters (2013) points to laws like Rhode Island’s 1922 Peck Act, which “required parochial schools to make English the primary language of instruction” (p. 570). The new value of English was so strong that even sign language and deaf people came under attack (Pavlenko, 2002, p. 176). By the start of World War I, the tenor and scope of US language policy had already changed significantly. During World War I, the focus of language policy shifted from all immigrants and heritage languages toward Germans and German. Although German had once been “the most prestigious modern language” in the United States, by 1917 that status had changed (Crawford, 2000, p. 21). During and even after World War I, city and county governments passed ordinances “prohibiting German instruction” (Pavlenko, 2002, p. 179) and “forbidding the use of German” more generally (Baron, 1990, p. 110). Aside from such governmental

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language policies, businesses, churches, and telephone communication also became more monolingual in English, through some combination of choice and outside pressure (Bailey, 2012, p. 151). These local language policies were not enforced for long after the war, as people stopped learning and using European heritage languages, immigration restrictions tightened (culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924), and the idea of English-only communities became taken for granted. Americanization was so successful that for the descendants of the European immigrants most affected, memories of these events have “been forgotten or repressed,” such that some “third- and fourth-generation descendants have come to assume that their grandparents and great-grandparents all willingly deserted their ancestral tongues” (Wiley, 1998, p. 236). With German receding, US institutions eventually turned their attention to Spanish. For example, Chicana writer Anzaldúa (1987) was born in 1942 in south Texas, and she remembers growing up and “being caught speaking Spanish at recess – that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler” (p. 53). She continues: “At Pan American University,2 I, and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of our accents” (p. 54). Anzaldúa’s career of writing across English and Spanish is a sign that these attempts to limit Spanish were painful but not necessarily successful. Latinx Americans continued to use Spanish as well as English in places like the American Southwest, Puerto Rico, and eventually New York City, just as they had been for years. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a string of legal victories for language and literacy rights, each of which catalyzed major backlashes. Before this period, there had never been any federal support for languages other than English (Baron, 1990, p. 87), but new laws such as the Bilingual Education Act (1968) and the amended Voting Rights Act (1975) inadvertently created an occasion for Americans to debate anew the appropriate role for language policy in their communities. In Miami, “the first modern bilingual public school” opened in 1963 (Provenzo, 1990, p. xi) and a 1973 ordinance made Dade County officially bilingual and bicultural. Meanwhile, court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Lau v. Nichols (1974), and MLK Children v. Ann Arbor (1979) suggested that students of all races and linguistic backgrounds should have access to an equal education, although those rulings were never completely put into practice (Smitherman, 1981; Schiffman, 1996; Prendergast, 2003; Hoang, 2015). At the university level, more colleges adopted open admissions policies, and in 1974 the Conference on College Composition and Communication declared “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” (Wible, 2013). 2

Pan American University was in Edinburg, Texas, near where Anzaldúa grew up, and later became part of what is now the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.

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While it did not have to do with language directly, another key new law was the Hart–Celler Act of 1965. Hart–Celler was pivotal in two opposite ways (Ngai, 2015). On one hand, it reopened the door for many people to immigrate legally from Asia, Africa, and Europe, for the first time in over forty years. On the other hand, it placed harsh restrictions on migration from the Western hemisphere for the first time ever (Dick, 2011, pp. 43–44). Where once it was unremarkable for people to move back and forth across the US–Mexico border (and the US–Canada border), now after Hart–Celler it was more likely to be considered illegal. Many people in the United States resented all these new policies, especially given that the US students and citizens who stood to benefit were not the European immigrants of a previous era but rather people of color. Immigrants from Asia and Africa were about to become scapegoats for all sorts of societal ills (again). Latinx people were about to become criminalized in a way they had not been before. The kind of stigma Anzaldúa experienced growing up was about to become a whole lot more common. *** In sum, while 1980 saw the start of a more organized English-only movement, there had been language policies in the United States for much longer. These older policies, however, do not feature heavily in most histories of the United States, or even necessarily in early studies of language policy. For example, in the opening pages of his landmark book about Norwegian language policy, Haugen (1966) warns anglophone readers that “the ideas and motivations underlying a program of language planning are so remote from the experience of educated Americans or Englishmen that they may find it difficult even to understand them” (p. 2). In other words, he suggests that language policy might literally be a foreign concept to most scholars in the United States and England, because the English language has never been subject to much intervention. Haugen was right in the sense that the United States has never had an official national language and that multilingualism was common for much of US history, but there is also more to it than that. In part, the assumption about the United States not having a language policy may have been due to timing: At the same time that Haugen, Das Gupta (1970), Rubin and Jernudd (1971), and others were forming the field, the United States was in a relative lull in between the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 and the Hart–Celler Act of 1965 (since immigration took time to ramp up after 1965). Another factor, however, is that US language policies have always emerged more locally. Language policy in the United States has been so decentralized, uneven, and inconsistent that it can appear laissez-faire or nonexistent when viewed through a national lens. I bring up Haugen not because I think Haugen (1966) was wrong but because he was usually right – his Language conflict

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and language planning is one of my favorite books. (I also think Haugen may have just included that passage because he was trying to persuade skeptical academic readers that he was studying something truly novel.) But if he was addressing a particular academic audience, that raises the question of why that audience might have believed that the United States had no language policies to speak of. My sense is that the field of language policy prioritized the national scale for a long time, whereas US language policymakers have always thought more locally. This national lens makes sense in the context of newly independent nations that began embarking on language planning in the twentieth century,3 but in the US context, I believe it obscures more than it reveals. US language policymakers tend to value and highlight the local scale, either as a model for, a haven from, or an authentic counterpart to some larger scale. In other words, it is not as though people in the United States usually work locally but frame their work as national, nor is it the other way around. Instead, US language policy is often local all the way down, even as it is inevitably connected to other scales too. Because US language policies tend to be so varied, Schiffman (1996) suggests that “nothing can be more challenging to the language-policy analyst, I think, than to try to make sense of US language policy” (p. 211). Even beyond language policy, federalism and local control are baked into US society in complex ways – unlike in some nations, things like taxes, rights, election procedures, and education systems vary significantly by state, county, and city. In his work on cities and counties that pass anti-immigration policies, Hopkins (2010) stresses the importance of “politicized places”: small communities where big issues become salient. In the United States, language policy succeeds in those politicized places, and Miami was about to become one of those places. Emmy Shafer and Citizens of Dade United Dade County’s English-only policy was Shafer’s brainchild. In 1980, Shafer began trying to undo Dade County’s 1973 Bilingualism/Biculturalism Ordinance, because she was dismayed by the fact that the people she encountered at government offices, malls, and hospitals often used Spanish more than English (Rimer, 1980, October 26; De Lama, 1980, November 2). She proposed the idea for an “Anti-Bilingualism Ordinance,” cofounded the organization Citizens of Dade United with fellow activist Marion Plunske (Rimer, 1980, October 26), and then had her lawyer Jeff Rosenthal draft the text of the ordinance (Fisher, 1983, October 2). Leading up to the election, she placed 3

See, for example, Das Gupta (1970) on India, the various case studies in Rubin and Jernudd (1971), Spolsky and Shohamy (1999) on Israel, and Park (2021) on South Korea.

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ads in the “Neighbors” section of the Miami Herald. One such ad included slogans like “STOP wasting our TAX DOLLARS to promote bi-lingualism” and “ONE LANGUAGE … ONE COMMUNITY” (Citizens of Dade United, 1980, October 19). The latter offers an intriguing twist on the well-known refrain in language policy, “one nation, one language,” which I focus on more in Chapter 3. From the beginning, the policy was popular: Citizens of Dade United needed to collect 26,213 signatures to get the issue on the ballot; they collected more than 137,000 (Rimer, 1980). Shafer’s team consisted of herself, Plunske, Rosenthal, treasurer Sharon Haider, and a cadre of “housewife volunteers” (Rimer, 1980, October 26). In leading a conservative grassroots organization of almost exclusively white women, and advertising to suburban women, Shafer was following the road map of activists like Phyllis Schlafly, whether consciously or unconsciously (Critchlow, 2005). This feminized approach to language policy did not really catch on outside Dade County, but it does still surface in related causes, like Moms for Liberty, an organization that advocates against critical race theory (Williams, 2022, November 7). And Citizens of Dade United did eventually grow to include more people, particularly since Plunske left and Shafer grew “disgruntled and depressed” that the English-only policy was not always being strictly enforced (Fisher, 1983, October 2). Mark Benson became Vice President and Enos Schera became Secretary (and eventually the acting leader). Citizens of Dade United continued until 2015 (Schera, 2015). When Shafer’s measure passed, the resulting English-only ordinance was what Crawford (2000) calls “arguably the most draconian language law in US history” (p. 26). Unlike most other modern government language policies, there were none of the typical exceptions for public health and safety, which meant that things like multilingual “hurricane warnings” were banned (Crawford, 2000, p. 26). Another news article reported that “the fire department was prevented from distributing fire prevention information and hospitals could distribute information on prenatal care only in English” (Blake, 1990, February 25). An even harsher element of the policy, bordering on vindictive, was that it was not just about saving time and money in the future: The government removed signs and other materials that had already been translated and printed (Crawford, 2000, p. 26). This impulse to enforce the English-only policy, no matter the cost, raises the question of why Shafer was so highly motivated. Her motivation was not so much that she was pro-English or anti-​ multilingualism as she was anti-Cuban and anti-Haitian. Shafer was specifically frustrated with Cuban refugees who used Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Haitian refugees who used Kreyòl. The Wall Street Journal puts her mindset this way: “About four years ago, 160,000 Cubans and Haitians washed up on Miami’s shores, and Emmy Shafer decided she had had enough” (Nazario, 1984, May 30). This description clarifies who Shafer was targeting, but the

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expression “washed up on Miami’s shores” is less clear. The expression makes it seem as though these people’s arrival was some sort of random occurrence, as though the Caribbean ocean currents just happened to be especially strong in 1980. This framing is misleading as well as dehumanizing (as though these people were just flotsam and jetsam). In reality, the situation was more complex. There had been two earlier cohorts of refugees seeking to escape Cuban president Fidel Castro’s repressive government, first from 1959 to 1962 and then from 1965 to 1973 (Crawford, 1992, p. 92). These early refugees included middle-class professionals who bristled against the communist government. The US government was generally willing to have them, both because of their class status and because it was a way to shame Cuba on the world stage. And, for a while, the federal government put its money where its mouth was: Up until 1974, the federal government provided “nearly $1 billion in resettlement assistance,” much of which went to Dade County (Crawford, 1992, p. 93). At first, the situation seemed like a win-win: Refugees were able to leave Cuba, and the Miami economy boomed in return (Crawford, 1992, p. 94). Still, many Anglos started to feel resentful, not least because Cuban refugees did not seem to feel sufficient shame about using Spanish. According to Crawford (1992), “Unlike Mexican Americans, they had never been humiliated at school for speaking their native tongue or persuaded that their children must speak only English to get ahead. … [T]hey felt no need to forsake Spanish as a token of loyalty to the United States” (p. 96). In other words, they had not had experiences like Anzaldúa’s (1987) school punishment for using Spanish. Some people in the United States are willing to embrace newcomers, but only if the newcomers are willing to prostrate themselves. There seemed to be a desire to put Cuban refugees in their place. This already tense situation erupted in 1980, when a third cohort of Cuban refugees arrived, as well as a new cohort of Haitian refugees. The circumstances were changing. From his vantage point in Michigan, Tanton would later observe, “The Cuban refugees created a beneficial disaster which has helped get immigration on the national agenda” (Dammann, 1981, p. 336). On the US end, the federal government had already tapered down its funding for refugee resettlement. So, people who the government may have helped in the past were now neglected, or worse, incarcerated (Jaynes, 1981, September 23; Hamm, 1995). Perceptions of race, class, health, and criminality played a role. In the US racial imaginary, many of the earliest Cuban refugees read as white-collar and white-adjacent. In contrast, the later Cuban refugees of 1980 were more likely to have been seen as Black, working class, disabled, and/or incarcerated (Hamm, 1995, p. 75). The Haitian context was somewhat different, in that people were fleeing the repressive government of President Jean-Claude Duvalier, as well as the instability and inequality spurred by an

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earlier period of French slavery and colonialism (Trouillot, 1990). The racial dynamic in the United States was such that once Haitians arrived in the United States, white Americans either did not know or did not care about this history; they simply noticed that these refugees were Black. For people like Shafer, this demographic shift was the last straw. Notice that in this situation, there is almost no way for refugees to win. For many white onlookers in Miami, the lighter-skinned Cuban refugees seemed too elite; the Black Cuban and Haitian refugees seemed too wretched. Lorimer Leonard (2017) finds a similar unwinnable dynamic today: “[I]f migrants appear to need too little help,” that can become an excuse to say that “they do not belong,” because they cannot really be refugees (emphasis in original) (p. 125). In Miami, another factor in play was stereotypes about Latino masculinity in general. For example, in a front-page article in the Miami Herald just two weeks before the election, Shafer’s colleague Marion Plunske joked that one of her critics had told her, “What you need is a good Cuban man,” to which she replied, “too bad there aren’t any” (Rimer, 1980, October 26). With quips like these, the media seemed to find Citizens of Dade United an irresistible subject. Perhaps because of all this media coverage, other activists took notice. Almost immediately, Roger Conner and Gerda Bikales started following what was going on in Dade County. Both were proteges of Tanton, and both worked for FAIR, Tanton’s relatively new organization in Washington, DC. None of these three were working on language policy yet, but Conner (1989) remembers feeling uneasy: There was a group called Citizens of Dade County United [sic]. It was a group that was simply filled with free-floating anger, hostility, and anxiety. They wanted to drive around and blow horns and tell the Cubans to get the you-know-what out. It was sort of the blue collar, lower middle-class to upper middle-class whites, who had a feeling that the control of their community had been wrested from them…. And I tell you, it was like a mean breeze, a cold breeze, when you felt it. (p. 56)

Conner found the whole campaign to be unseemly. Hayakawa, the first ­sponsor of an English-only constitutional amendment, felt much the same. When a reporter asked Hayakawa for his thoughts on Dade County’s policy, he replied, “I wouldn’t go that far myself” (Nazario, 1984, May 30). However, some of Conner’s and Hayakawa’s colleagues saw great potential in Shafer’s work. Conner (1989) recalls that “Gerda Bikales, who was on our staff at the time, began coming into my office within a couple of weeks to say something big was happening in Miami, and we ought to do something about it” (p. 51). They did respond, and quickly, by placing an advertisement in the Miami News that provided readers with two templates that they could cut out of the paper: one to send a letter to President Carter asking him “to stop the boats” and “declare a ceiling on refugee admissions,”

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and the other a letter to sign up for their mailing list (FAIR, 1980, May 16). In 1980, that was as far as the organization went: They capitalized on the issue, but they did not actually work with Citizens of Dade United. Tanton did not forget about Shafer, though. Three years later, Tanton (1983, July 7) asked Bikales, “Are we in touch with Emmy Shafer, the lady who led the 1981 [sic] Dade County referendum against the spread of Spanish?” Tanton went on to suggest that Bikales give Shafer a call to talk strategy and ask for her mailing list. The reason why people like Tanton remembered her is because she and her colleagues accomplished something no one else had done in recent memory. In making English the only official language, they showed that this sort of language policy was possible. Shafer also demonstrated the importance of community organizing and community-specific talking points. Still, she was a polarizing figure, and Citizens of Dade United was a polarizing organization. Whereas people like Hayakawa and Conner saw Shafer as someone who went a bit too far, people like Tanton and Bikales saw her as someone worth emulating. Nevertheless, in the coming years, all these people would work together on a whole host of English-only policies, even Hayakawa. I turn now to Hayakawa’s journey. Senator S. I. Hayakawa and the English Language Amendment In 1981, when Hayakawa decided he wanted to make English the only official language, it took the movement to a whole new level of visibility and credibility. As someone who had already been a public intellectual for forty years, Hayakawa was uniquely poised to make the case for Official English around the country (Yan-Gonzalez, 2022). He had the experience, the bona fides, and the reputation the movement needed. His fame was not primarily from his term in the US Senate (1977–1983), although that was part of it. While many other early figures in the English-only movement (including Shafer) were relatively new to questions of language, Senator Hayakawa had been studying language for a long time. Before he became a politician, Hayakawa was a teacher, scholar, writer, and university president. He earned his BA from the University of Manitoba, his MA from McGill University, and his PhD, in English, from the University of Wisconsin. While at Wisconsin, he started teaching freshman composition and working as an assistant on the landmark Middle English dictionary.4 Hayakawa’s (1941) defining achievement was Language in action, a book 4

In Hayakawa (1939), his biographical statement includes that he is “a staff member of the Middle English Dictionary which is in process of compilation at the University of Michigan” (p. 197). This dictionary was an enormous undertaking and was completed only in 2001.

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with six editions and translations in at least nine languages.5 The book became a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection and then, ultimately, a college textbook.6 Hayakawa’s editor, James M. Reid (1947), wrote to say the book was “selling exceedingly well … in the colleges.” As a Japanese-Canadian-American scholar who happened to publish this book the same month as Pearl Harbor,7 his success was anything but guaranteed. At Wisconsin, and later at Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and finally at San Francisco State University,8 Hayakawa published articles, reviews, and notes in top US journals. These publications appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Speech, College Composition and Communication, English Journal, PMLA, Poetry, and Public Opinion Quarterly (Hayakawa, 1932, 1936, 1939, 1942, 1943, 1949, 1962). He also founded and edited the journal Etc.: A Review of General Semantics, a somewhat slight journal that nevertheless published luminaries such as Read (1955) and Gilman and Brown (1958). Through Etc., Hayakawa also published Stanley Diamond (1957). Diamond was an activist who would go on to work for Hayakawa and eventually even become the chairman of U.S. English. Hayakawa’s books were favorably reviewed in venues such as English Journal, The New England Quarterly, The New York Times, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech.9 He received tenure from San Francisco State College on November 29, 1966 (Wilson, 1966). Capping off his academic career, the Conference on College Composition and Communication favorably cited a later edition of Language in action (by then retitled Language in thought and action) in the groundbreaking Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) Resolution (CCCC, 1974). Some scholars find his scholarship to be lacking (e.g. Nunberg, 1992), perhaps because he never limited himself to one discipline or because he later became so controversial, but in my view there is no way around the fact that he was a successful scholar. More importantly for the English-only movement, he was the rare academic who crossed over to the mainstream. Over the years, he did several stints as a newspaper columnist, first for the Chicago Defender (a Black 5

The languages were, in chronological order, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Korean, Portuguese, Finnish, Spanish, French, and German (Hayakawa, 1974). 6 On the Book-of-the-Month-Club’s role in US society, see Radway (1997). 7 Within a week of Pearl Harbor, Hayakawa’s publisher wrote to say that they were not going to drop him, but the impulse to send that letter implies that it had been something on people’s minds (Davis, 1941, December 12). While almost all Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II under Executive Order 9066, Hayakawa was not incarcerated because he was living in Chicago, rather than on the West Coast. 8 When Hayakawa started teaching, Illinois University of Technology was still known as the Armour Institute of Technology, and San Francisco State University was still called San Francisco State College. 9 See Williams (1941), Conrad (1942), Hazlitt (1942), and Goldberg (1946).

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newspaper) (1942–1947) and eventually through a nationally syndicated column (Hayakawa, 1970, February 14). He first ventured into the political fray on December 2, 1968, when he pulled the plug, literally, on the sound system at a protest at San Francisco State College organized by the Black Students Union and the Third World Liberation Front. He had just become the college’s acting president, and he would go on to become the college’s official president from 1969 to 1973. Attempting to silence students and other activists became something of a pattern for Hayakawa (Maeda, 2009; Hoang, 2015). This side of him surprised some people, with one anonymous (1968) political cartoon even joking, “Man, I thought Hayakawa’s thing was words.” However, as Maeda (2009) points out, “From the 1930s through the 1980s, Hayakawa displayed a remarkably consistent commitment to assimilation, integration, and a shared public sphere as solutions to the problem of racism” (p. 42). In other words, Hayakawa criticized racism, but he thought that clearer communication was the solution. At various points, he criticized the burgeoning Asian American student movement (GIDRA, 1969), people who protested the Vietnam War (Anonymous, 1969, February 2), and Japanese Americans who were seeking redress for incarceration during World War II (Hayakawa, 1981, August 4). In his testimony on Japanese internment, Hayakawa (1981, August 4), said, “Of course the relocation was unjust” and “heartbreaking,” but at the idea of redress, “my flesh crawls with shame and embarrassment” (pp. 13–14). By the time his university presidency ended, his transition into a firebrand was nearly complete, and it had paid off. In Hayakawa’s (1974) CV, he lists then governor (future president) Ronald Reagan as a reference, and Reagan would go on to support his Senate run in 1976. While Hayakawa was clearly embroiled in many issues of the day, he did not focus on multilingualism or immigration before or during his Senate campaign. Crawford (1992) comes to the same conclusion in the context of Language in action: “Oddly, the book never mentions bilingualism, a problem that seems to have escaped the author’s notice until he entered politics” (p. 4). Hayakawa shared his agenda frequently, in news interviews and even a newsletter for children in California, but language never came up. I genuinely do not believe that he had his sights set on Official English until well into his Senate term. A year and a half into his term, however, Senator Hayakawa started to fixate on two things: bilingual ballots and bilingual education. The first time he publicly broached these topics seems to be on the Senate Floor on August 23, 1978, and again at a press conference the next day, August 24, 1978 (Barbieri and Hayakawa, 1978, August 23). The Associated Press (1978, August 25) recounted how Hayakawa described bilingual ballots as “ridiculous,” in an article reprinted in newspapers around the country. Perhaps surprisingly, his claim was not that no real citizen would need a bilingual ballot (a common refrain

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today). Rather, this was his reasoning: “Tens of thousands of Spanish-language ballots have to be discarded unused after California elections, he said, because voters who don’t read English well enough to vote usually are too embarrassed to ask for a ballot in their native language” (Associated Press, 1978, August 25). However, rather than work on reducing that stigma, he instead advocated for getting rid of bilingual ballots altogether. In the same press conference, Senator Hayakawa also took on bilingual education. Bilingual education can mean a lot of different things, but he was specifically criticizing programs that place an “emphasis on preserving the minority person’s native language” (Associated Press, 1978, August 25). From his perspective, there could be a role for using someone’s native language to help transition to English, but maintaining the first language would be pointless. While Hayakawa pointed to bilingual ballots and education as problems, he did not yet have a clear proposed solution in 1978. By 1981, he would. Hayakawa and his staff got to work on deciding what the optimal topic and genre would be for a new language policy. While he interacted with a wide range of people through the Senate, he worked particularly closely on this issue with legislative assistants Betty McKay and Patty White,10 as well as legislative aide George Brazier.11 McKay and White appear to have led the way on strategy, and Brazier seems to have been a ghostwriter. Hayakawa (1982, December 18) described how Brazier “wrote statements … and drafted and followed legislation.” The team had some stumbles. In 1979, Hayakawa introduced a bill that would have repealed the bilingual ballots aspect of the Voting Rights Act, but that did not go very far (McKay, 1979, August). In a memo to Hayakawa, McKay (1980, June 3) lays out why the optics are not ideal: “Statutes requiring English literacy as a condition of access to certain areas of American life have generally been designed to resist the entrance of certain racial groups” and “will be viewed by many as having been motivated by racism.” Trying to specifically target voting rights or bilingual education was risky; talking about the English language in more symbolic terms proved safer. The other main decision they had to make was about genre. As Hayakawa (1981, April 14) explained in a TV news interview, “What I’ve done so far is have my staff research the matter. They’ve come to the decision that a Constitutional Amendment is better than the law,” in part “so that it will last over the generations.” I find this genre choice surprising, and wish I could have been a fly on the wall for those conversations. Pursuing a constitutional 10

Toward the very end of Hayakawa’s term, White became the legislative director (Shurtleff, 1982, July 28). White had a particularly sterling reputation: A performance review described her as “Superb; has brilliant judgment and good analytical ability; can write; good management technique” (Orly, 1980, September 12). 1 1 Brazier appears to have been the most junior of the group. When he applied for the job, he was twenty-three years old (Brazier, 1979).

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amendment was by far the more ambitious option. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal (1981, May 6) called the English Language Amendment (ELA) “radical,” not because of the underlying ideology but because it was not the “ordinary” process. There are hundreds of traditional bills passed every year, whereas the United States has only ever ratified thirty-three constitutional amendments. One possible explanation is that they never assumed that the policy would pass in any form; they just wanted to raise awareness by throwing a Hail Mary. A note from White (1981, May 11) to Brazier supports this theory, because White says, “I think it’s time we started dealing with the Hayakawa amendment as though we could move it.” The subtext is that she did not originally think it had a chance. On April 27, 1981, Hayakawa officially introduced the ELA in the Senate. The proposed language was: Sec. 1. The English language shall be the official language of the United States. Sec. 2. Neither the United States nor any State shall make or enforce any law which requires the use of any language other than English. Sec. 3. This article shall apply to laws, ordinances, regulations, orders, programs, and policies. Sec. 4. No order or decree shall be issued by any court of the United States or of any State requiring that any proceedings, or matters to which this article applies be in any language other than English. Sec. 5. This article shall not prohibit educational instruction in a language other than English as required as a transitional method of making students who use a language other than English proficient in English. Sec. 6. The Congress and the States shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. (Hayakawa, 1981, April 27) While the ELA would go through a few more minor revisions,12 this first effort was important because it attracted the most media attention and because it was so different from what had come before. While policymakers do not still use this policy as a template (in terms of the exact wording), the overall approach endures. This policy is less bombastic than the one in Dade County. While the effect of the policy would be similar, the rhetoric is more measured. Hayakawa’s team was pleasantly surprised by the public reception. To marshal the growing public support for the ELA, Hayakawa looked to local governments. The chain of correspondence was complex, but essentially 12

Eventually, they lost confidence in the constitutional amendment genre and returned to an older idea of attaching Official English to a larger immigration bill (Brazier, 1982, August 17). This strategy did not go anywhere.

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there were three phases: soliciting letters, replying to those letters, and asking for formal resolutions. First, Hayakawa introduced the ELA, and thousands of constituents wrote to his Senate office with their thoughts on the policy proposal. This back-and-forth is typical, but what happened next was more innovative. Second, Hayakawa’s office made note of any constituent letters where the writer mentioned that they were a “local official” and wrote back to them, asking them to write with more details specific to their local government (Brazier, 1982, April 6). For example, the form letter included a question about how many bilingual ballots the local government had to print. Third, Hayakawa shifted from requesting information to requesting that city and county governments pass formal resolutions of support. In a speech to a group of county supervisors, Hayakawa (1981)13 explains, “One of my campaigns to gain support for this amendment is to get county supervisorial boards behind me, and I have gathered some 30 so far. In the near future, I would like to talk to you about the bill, explain its provisions, with the hope of securing your approval and a resolution supporting it.” Later that year, Hayakawa’s office compiled a list of forty-four cities, counties, and school boards that had indicated their support. Most of these local governments wrote letters of support, which I do not count as language policies per se. However, there were at least six cities and one county in California that passed more formal resolutions supporting making English the only official language of the United States: • City Council, Holtville • City Council, Huntington Park • City Council, Palos Verdes Estates • City Council, Placentia • City Council, Signal Hill • City Council, South Gate • County Board of Supervisors, Los Angeles County Surveying these resolutions and letters of support, these communities vary widely in terms of size, geography, and demographics. A letter of support from Tulelake, California, caught my attention because that was the location of the most notorious Japanese internment camp during World War II. Some local governments supported Hayakawa because their community was already relatively monolingual; others seemed to support him precisely because their community was not monolingual and they resented that. That same spread continues today. It is important to take these local documents with a grain of salt, of course. They may not have known that Hayakawa was not going

13

This source is undated, but based on context it is from 1981.

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to run for reelection, and they may have simply wanted to ingratiate themselves to their senator. As I discuss in Chapter 2, this dynamic also continued to play a role: Some people vote for language policies not for any ideological reason but out of a sense of collegiality or obligation. Whatever their motivations, Hayakawa’s constituents kept writing to him, and he kept saving that correspondence. That cache was about to catch the attention of the Tanton. When Tanton (1981, December 2) realized that Hayakawa’s mailing list was “a virtual goldmine,” it sparked the next phase of the English-only movement (emphasis in original). John Tanton and U.S. English Tanton (1989, October 4) believed that “[e]nvironmental, population, immigration, and language policy issues are inextricably intertwined.” That is not how people typically think about language policy, but Tanton was not a typical person. He came to language policy through his work in other social movements and activist organizations. As far back as the 1950s, Tanton was active in movements for conservation and population control, but it was not until 1980 that he started realizing language policy could be part of the equation. He began working on environmental conservation through local organizations in Petoskey, Michigan, as well as through chapters of the Audubon Society and Sierra Club (Tanton, 1976, November). Tanton came to believe that overpopulation was one of the primary threats to the natural environment. In 1965, he and his wife Mary Lou Tanton started the process of opening a Planned Parenthood office in Petoskey (Tanton, 1976, November).14 In 1969, he wrote to a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan to inquire about the existence of “any legislation which would allow a court to order sterilization” of local women who were having children outside of marriage (Tanton, 1969, March 10).15 He started chairing a new population committee in the Sierra Club’s Mackinac chapter that same year (Tanton, 1976, November). Tanton went on to chair a similar Sierra Club committee at the national level in 1971 (Berry, 1971, March 24). On that Sierra Club committee, he met one of his closest mentors, the ecologist Garrett Hardin (Tanton, 1989, p. 14). As his interest in population issues grew, he left some of his prior volunteer roles and devoted more time to a new organization, Zero Population Growth (ZPG), starting in 1973 (Tanton, 1976, November). All the while, he also worked as an ophthalmologist. 14

Today, Planned Parenthood generally advocates for reproductive justice, not involuntary sterilization. Even in the 1960s, Tanton’s approach was not the norm. 1 5 The professor wrote back and discouraged the practice of involuntary sterilization, while acknowledging that it was legal in some cases (Eliot, 1969, March 17).

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In these early roles, Tanton was testing out some of the genres and writing strategies that he would later incorporate into the English-only movement. As early as medical school, he joined an academic honors society and “rewrote the organization’s constitution and compiled the first directory” for members (Rohe, 2002, p. 24). According to a profile by the journalist Tom Dammann (1981), Tanton “helped write” Michigan’s 1970 Environmental Protection Act (p. 332). In addition to refining his writing, Tanton was also starting to think more locally. He once wrote and proposed a county ordinance that would ban mobile homes outside of designated areas (Tanton, 1974, June 14). He also helped initiate and raise money for several local environmental lawsuits to stop new development in his corner of Michigan. While this expression did not exist at the time, in today’s terms Tanton was becoming a NIMBY (“not in my backyard”). Mixing environmentalism and eugenics may seem unusual today, since I am writing this book in a moment when the two movements are associated with very different segments of the political spectrum. However, in the 1960s and 1970s this set of interests was not uncommon (Robertson, 2012). Jonathan Franzen’s (2010) bestselling novel Freedom may be the most recognizable portrait of this sort of politics. The novel follows Walter Berglund, a Tantonesque protagonist who is a staunch environmentalist, “annually renewing Student-level member of Zero Population Growth” in college in the 1970s (p. 119); Walter later goes on to promote population control (p. 223). Tanton was not alone in wanting to prevent some people from reproducing in the name of the environment. Eventually, however, Tanton’s work started to grow beyond purely environmental and population-focused causes. While ZPG primarily focused on sterilization and family planning worldwide, Tanton began to consider immigration to be the more problematic and more solvable source of new people in the United States. At the time, talking about reducing immigration as a way to reduce the population felt like “a forbidden topic” (Tanton, 1989, p. 13). ZPG allowed Tanton to study the possibility of adding immigration reform to its agenda in the future, but its lack of enthusiasm for this project ultimately spurred him to form FAIR in 1978 (Tanton, 1989, p. 16). The aim of FAIR was to minimize immigration into the United States. Starting up FAIR (and the related FAIR Congressional Task Force) was how Tanton started working with many of the people he would collaborate with over the rest of his career, including Roger Conner, Barnaby Zall, Kathy Bricker, Gerda Bikales, K. C. McAlpin, and Bob Park. While Tanton served as Chairman and focused on big-picture strategy, Conner came on as Executive Director in 1978, managed the day-to-day, and drew on his background in law (Conner, 1989). In 1979, Conner decided to hire Zall because the other

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finalist for the position “didn’t have Barnaby’s facility with writing at all” (p. 38). Their colleague William C. Paddock (1993) remembers Zall as “brilliant” and FAIR as “lucky” to have him (p. 17). Zall was talented, and he seemed to know it. When another colleague, Dan Stein (1994), recalls meeting Zall back in 1982, he wryly comments that Zall “fancied himself the greatest lawyer since Perry Mason and the greatest lobbyist since Jack Valente [sic]” (p. 18).16 Bricker also played an instrumental role when she joined in 1980, initially as Tanton’s assistant. Tanton (1989) recalls, “Finding Kathy Bricker was a big event in my organizational life in terms of being able to get more done” in Petoskey. Bikales was a “jill-of-all-trades,” policy analyst, and a prolific writer who worked out of FAIR’s Washington, DC, office (Conner, 1989, pp. 96–97). McAlpin and Park both started as lobbyists for the FAIR Congressional Task Force (p. 107). All of these people eventually went on to work with Tanton on either U.S. English or ProEnglish or both, but they spent several years at FAIR first. Understanding FAIR is crucial to understanding U.S. English. I say so not because of shared beliefs but because of shared resources. In public, FAIR and U.S. English kept each other at arm’s length.17 Internally, they shared a lot. They shared an office.18 They had a joint office Christmas party.19 They shared computer services.20 They shared their mailing lists.21 They applied for a grant together.22 The FAIR Congressional Task Force and U.S. English shared a phone bill.23 FAIR had U.S. English on speed dial.24 For most of the 1980s, it could be difficult to tell where FAIR ended and U.S. English began. 16

Perry Mason is a fictional lawyer in novels and on TV. Jack Valenti was a real lobbyist who worked for President Lyndon Johnson and later for the Motion Picture Association of America. Stein’s quip is akin to someone feeling they are the best detective since Sherlock Holmes. 17 Conner (1983, January 17) wrote in a memo to Tanton and Bikales, “In public or quasi-public utterances, we should avoid the idea that FAIR wanted to raise the spectre of bilingualism as a reason to limit immigration, and set up this group to do so. This smacks of trying to raise the issue while keeping FAIR’s skirts clear. Also, telling people that you decided to raise bilingualism as a way to curtail immigration could hurt you and FAIR.” 18 Starting in late 1983, FAIR signed a lease for an office space which it “split with USEnglish” (Stein, 1994, p. 45; see also McAlpin, 1983, November 1). 19 A FAIR employee wrote in a memo, “The Christmas party will be held jointly with U.S. English” (Wilkinson, 1987, November 16). 20 See Tanton (1984, March 11) and McAlpin and Bikales (1985, March 18). 21 Tanton (1989) explained, “I thought that setting up U.S. English would turn out to be a supportive move for FAIR, as it has been. It’s turned out that the list of donors that U.S. English developed has proved to be an excellent list for FAIR to mail to for recruits, better than any other list, as a matter of fact” (p. 58). 22 Conner and Bikales (1985, February 14) submitted a jointly authored grant application to the Kresge Foundation for new computing services. At the time, Conner was the executive director of FAIR and Bikales was the executive director of U.S. English. 23 The company C&P Telephone (1983, December 17) addressed its monthly bill to an account called “FAIR Congressional Tsk Frce-US English.” 24 See FAIR (1987, February 11) and FAIR (1989, May 2). It is notable that it kept U.S. English on speed dial both before and after Tanton resigned from U.S. English.

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Even though FAIR’s mission was nativist, the organization garnered external support from mainstream public figures.25 It also received ample funding from several benefactors, as well as from direct mail fundraising. The first key benefactor was Sidney Swensrud, whose family foundation donated “at least $2.7 million” to FAIR over the years (O’Connor, 2021, p. 35). The most generous benefactor was Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon family fortune and the person behind the Colcom Foundation (O’Connor, 2021, pp. 28–29).26 In a 1980s letter to a family member, May described Cuban refugees in dehumanizing terms: “They breed like hamsters” (Kulish and McIntire, 2019, August 14). Essentially, May had a similar mindset as Shafer, except that May was worth almost a billion dollars. May’s foundations donated at least $5.8 million to FAIR and other Tanton organizations in the 1980s, including at least $650,000 just to U.S. English (Crawford, 1992, p. 158). This funding source seems to have endured: Since 2006, the Colcom Foundation has donated “approximately $138 million into the Tanton network” (O’Connor, 2021, p. 30). Tanton’s team was aware that receiving funding from May was not ideal for their image. When an apparently naïve staffer tried to draft a comprehensive history of FAIR to distribute to new staff (perhaps for a sort of employee handbook), Bricker (1985, August 8) worried that this person may have been a little too candid about where FAIR got its funding: “I wonder if it would be a good idea for her to judiciously prune out the references to people like Mrs. May and the amounts of money given.” While FAIR started as a part-time activity for Tanton, in 1980 he decided to take a nine-month-long sabbatical to work on activism full time, and it was during this time when he became interested in language policy. His plan was to move to Washington, DC, work on lobbying for FAIR, and tour the country to drum up additional supporters and donors (Dr. Tanton to take FAIR fight to Washington, 1981, July). This was also the first year his archive included writing about “bilingualism,” in a grant application for FAIR (1980, July 1), and about “language policy,” in a letter to a colleague about driver’s license tests in multiple languages (Tanton, 1980, November 5). This sabbatical was about to change the course of Tanton’s life. Three moments in Tanton’s sabbatical spurred him to turn to language issues. First, his children enrolled in a public school in a Washington, DC, suburb. An article in the Petoskey News-Review reported that the Tantons “had some experience with the problems immigration brings to a community as 25

Its National Board of Advisors included the investor Warren Buffett, naturalist Roger Tory Peterson, former president of the National Audubon Society Elvis J. Stahr, former US senator Walter Huddleston, former governor of Illinois Richard Ogilvie, former governor of Colorado Richard D. Lamm, and tenured professors from Stanford University, New York University, Duke University, and Yeshiva University (FAIR, 1985, July). 2 6 Colcom is short for “cold comfort” (O’Connor, 2021, p. 35).

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well. They lived in Arlington, Va., which has a heavy Vietnamese concentration and often received notices from [one daughter’s] school which were written in five languages” (Holmes-Greeley, 1982, July 27). He (and the Petoskey journalist, it seems) considered linguistic pluralism to be one of “the problems immigration brings to a community.” Elsewhere, Tanton (1981, November 3) referred to the DC area as “the urban wasteland.” (Interestingly, Arlington, VA, has much in common with the diverse Maryland suburbs on the other side of Washington, DC, and the way Tanton described Arlington is the way some of my participants describe Montgomery County.) This sabbatical appears to have been his first sustained experience in a multilingual urban environment, and the experience was not a positive one. Second, at work in DC and on lobbying and fundraising trips around the country, Tanton described meeting people who were not all that sympathetic to his anti-immigration lobbying, until the question of language came up. Through these conversations, he realized that English-only policies could be a way to drum up interest for his broader agenda. In one letter, for instance, Tanton (1983, April 5) wrote, “I repeatedly ran into people who were uncertain about immigration, but were resolute in their feelings on the kindred issue of bilingualism.” In these situations, then, he gradually came to understand that many Americans were hesitant to enforce strict immigration laws, or to enact new ones, but they were much more ready to enforce and enact policies that would limit the use of the languages used by those immigrants, whether in “the public schools” or “the provision of government services and documents.”27 He seems to have realized that while language was not his first priority, other people considered it to be an important issue and that such people could eventually be brought on board to his other causes. The final and most important development was that Tanton learned about Hayakawa. Initially, Tanton was interested in Hayakawa for his mailing list. Hayakawa had something priceless: a ready-made list of likely voters who cared about language and immigration. According to a memo, Tanton (1981, December 2) first learned about this list when he met Stanley Diamond on November 19, 1981, at Diamond’s office in San Francisco. That was the same memo where Tanton called this mailing list “a virtual goldmine.” The day after writing that memo, Tanton asked lawyer Barnaby Zall if he could legally obtain that mailing list, but Zall (1981, December 3) replied that “there are ethical + election law problems in the way.” So, Tanton proposed that maybe he could invite Hayakawa to join a new organization and that they could collaborate in that way. Tanton knew an opportunity when he saw one. 27

He told similar stories in six other letters within the span of a year (1982, December 7; 1983, January 17; 1983, March 22; 1983, April 13; 1983, June 29; 1983, December 3).

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The process of courting Hayakawa’s team took place gradually over several years, from 1978 to late 1982. I say “courting” and “team” because this process was not about Tanton and Hayakawa meeting as two people already on the same page. Tanton and FAIR appear to have initiated every step of the process. For example, Hayakawa never reached out to FAIR; FAIR reached out to Hayakawa. Similarly, Hayakawa never came to FAIR; Tanton and his employees always went to Hayakawa’s Senate offices. Tanton often met with one of Hayakawa’s staff, as though Hayakawa himself were too aloof or too busy; when Hayakawa was there, though, Tanton was always there too. In what I believe was the first contact between FAIR and Hayakawa, Conner (1978, November 13) wrote to Hayakawa to express admiration toward the senator’s criticism of “bilingual education programs” and to ask if Hayakawa could send him more information. I do not know if Hayakawa’s office replied at the time, but a few years later, Tanton started trying harder. Tanton made his first attempt at that November 1981 meeting with Stanley Diamond. He also wrote individually to Diamond to say, “I hope you will want to work with us,” which presaged the fact that Diamond would later lead the California English Campaign and then U.S. English (Tanton, 1982, March 29). Bikales (1982, February 18) reached out to Hayakawa’s legislative assistant Patty White and said, hopefully, “We look forward to an exploratory meeting with the Senator.” Based on Hayakawa’s (1982) day calendar, Hayakawa and Tanton met for the first time on March 15 and then again on May 10. In the minutes from that first meeting, Bikales (1982a, March 15) wrote that Hayakawa “seems agreeable” to Tanton’s and her idea for “our new organization, ‘USEnglish.’” Later that fall, she wrote to Garrett Hardin to say that “getting USEnglish off the ground” was “taking longer than it should, because Senator Hayakawa is not the easiest person to activate” (Bikales, 1982, October 20). Soon after, Bikales (1982, November 10) wrote to another colleague that part of the motivation was that “we should have ‘ethnic’ names associated with U.S. English. Hayakawa and Bikales are good ones to start with, I suppose.” Amid all these details, the takeaway is that the relationship was asymmetric: Tanton and his colleagues really wanted Hayakawa on board, and Hayakawa seems to have let himself be brought on board. While Hayakawa was smart and talented, they did not really want him for that. They wanted his name and his mailing list. I would be remiss if I did not also mention that Hayakawa may not have had his full faculties at the time. In a rough draft of the minutes from that first big meeting, Bikales (1982b, March 15) included this passage: It quickly became apparent that Hayakawa is sluggish and forgetful. He could not recall the names of the Congressman [sic] who will be introducing his bill in the House; in a number of instances, he misinterpreted questions that arose; he wanted to refer to a favorite passage in a book he has on hand, but couldn’t locate the book on his shelves.

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He speaks very slowly and very quietly. … One can see why the Republican command insisted on his retirement. Alan and Patty are obviously well aware of his condition, and solicitous about his welfare.

That whole passage is scratched out in the rough draft and does not appear in the more polished draft (perhaps because a copy was being sent to Alan and Patty). Hayakawa may not have been in a position to take on a role at U.S. English, at least not at this specific time in 1982.28 A market research report on Hayakawa’s prospects for reelection indicated that while voters liked his proposed ELA, some voters considered him “Too old/senile” (Market Opinion Research, 1981, May). That same month, a letter to the editor criticized Hayakawa for his “advanced state of senility” (Haro, 1981, May 1). As Bikales alluded, Hayakawa did not run for reelection. Serving only one term is anomalous for a senator; the mean length of service in the Senate is 11 years, and senators run for reelection 88.5 percent of the time (Congressional Research Service, 2021). I cannot say how Hayakawa felt at the time, but I can say that if I had a meeting with someone who seemed that forgetful, I would not try to convince them to take on a new job. Nevertheless, the planning and recruitment process continued apace. This process took a little more than a year, during which time Tanton came up with the name “U.S. English,”29 hired more people, decided that operations would happen in Petoskey, Washington, DC, and San Francisco, and designed letterhead, a newsletter, pamphlets, and fundraising letters. Tanton also set up a new umbrella organization. This organization took a while to settle on a name: It was initially called the “Conservation Workshop, Inc.” in 1981, then renamed the “Futures Workshop, Inc.” in 1982, then renamed “U.S.” in 1983, then renamed “U.S., Inc.” in 2019.30 The original Tax ID number for U.S. English (and U.S., Inc. as the umbrella organization) was 38-2418377.31 (I return to this number shortly, because ProEnglish used the same one). Once Tanton (1982, June 9) had designed the organizational structure, he offered Hayakawa the position of “Honorary Chairman or Honorary President, whichever you 28

There are later appearances where he speaks lucidly and at length, such as a 1986 C-SPAN interview, and so his condition may very well have been temporary or a misinterpretation on Bikales’ part (Hayakawa, 1986, October 24). 29 In the early years, there were two different spellings, “U.S. English” and “USEnglish.” The latter had the benefit of a double meaning: either “U.S. English” or “Use English,” but now people typically just use the former. 30 See Tanton (1981, June 3, 1982, April 1), Tanton and Bricker (1983, May 23), and Calloway (2019, March 19). 31 For example, one of U.S. English’s (1983) earliest fundraising letters says, “U.S. English is a project of the Futures Workshop, a nonprofit, tax-exempt public interest organization. Your contribution is tax-deductible. Refer to IRS Identification Number 38-2418377.” U.S. English (1985, May/June) also includes this Tax ID number and sates, “U.S. English is a project of U.S., Inc.” See also Tanton (1985, August 5).

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prefer,” and assured him that either would come with “no official duties.” Hayakawa became something of a figurehead; he would sign off on letters and attend meetings, but it appears that he did not write or consult on most of those letters (Bricker, 1986, February 10). In mid-1982, someone created a detailed to-do list in preparation for U.S. English meeting its “goal” of being “in full operation by January 1, 1983.” There were nineteen items on the to-do list, from “Apply for tax exempt status” to “Write basic brochure” to “Write goals and principles,” each associated with a particular person or pair taking responsibility for that item, but Senator Hayakawa was nowhere on the list (U.S. English, 1982). Just a few months after U.S. English debuted, Hayakawa seemed to regret getting involved. He wrote to Tanton that he wanted to back out, but Tanton was not going to give up easily. In a three-page-single-spaced letter, Tanton (1983, May 7) responds to Hayakawa, “I was saddened to receive your letter instructing us to remove your name from formal association with U.S. English.” Tanton tries to placate him by saying that he would not have to attend board meetings; all Tanton would need is “the loan of your good name to validate for a skeptical public our cause.” He concludes, “I hope you will stay on board.” I have not found any follow-up correspondence, and so I do not know how it is that Hayakawa’s name was not removed. Whatever happened, Hayakawa’s name is still central to U.S. English’s brand. Tensions continued between different cliques within the organization: Stanley Diamond complained about a “serious lack of communication” between U.S. English’s San Francisco office (Hayakawa’s city) and the other offices (where Tanton spent more time) (Bricker, 1986, April 18). Up until 1989, though, the infighting stayed just that: internal. While U.S. English tried to keep Hayakawa contained, Tanton focused on writing materials that would reach a range of audiences, from politicians to potential donors. Tanton (1994b) believed that “[i]mmigration reform requires a lot of writing” (p. 165). He put that philosophy into practice by spending much of his time drafting, revising, circulating, and giving feedback on materials for U.S. English and his other organizations. Journalist Sara Gay Dammann (1986, November 19) photographed Tanton at his desk in Petoskey, where he likely did some of this writing (Figure 1.1). I find this photo meaningful on two levels. This photo shows one of Tanton’s workspaces and it suggests that being a writer was part of his public image. To put it another way, some activists are photographed giving speeches or marching in the street, but not Tanton. He is photographed at his desk or, even more often, outdoors in nature (S. G. Dammann, 1981, September). U.S. English’s first project was Proposition O, a successful 1983 San Francisco ballot measure that directed that the local government ask Congress and the president to make ballots English-only (Woolard, 1989; HoSang,

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Figure 1.1  John Tanton with pen and paper at his desk in Petoskey, Michigan, in 1986. Reproduced by permission of Sara Gay Dammann

2010, p. 135). U.S. English considered Proposition O to be a model for other parts of the United States. Immediately after the proposition passed, Tanton (1983, November 10) wrote, “On to the state level now!” The following week, in another letter, he elaborated, by saying, “An isolated vote in San Francisco,

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if not picked up on and coordinated by a group with a larger perspective, will simply go nowhere. We are for example looking into the possibility of an initiative in Florida” (Tanton, 1983, November 16). In this model, local policies are a means, not an end; the point is to move up to higher scales. Tanton (1983, April 26) often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’ description of states as laboratories of the nation. Proposition O therefore fit Tanton’s notion that local policies were valuable as templates and test cases. In an attempt to formalize this process, U.S. English sought a “Coordinator to Secure County Chairmen,” although it is not clear whether the position ever came to fruition (Tanton, 1985, June 3). The U.S. English newsletter began to feature “the text of an ideal state level ELA,” with the intention of “invit[ing] members in states where it has not been introduced to contact their own state legislator and push it” (Tanton, 1985, March 15). Throughout the early years of U.S. English, the organization operated under the premise that language policy ideas would seem more authentic if they seemed to come from the grassroots, rather than from them. Hayakawa, for his part, suggested to a resident of Monterey Park, California, that the town should pass an official language ordinance. Crawford (1992) interviewed that resident, Frank Arcuri, and he described him as a man who already “relished combat on numerous local issues” but who had not heard about the “new” idea of official language laws before 1985 (p. 7). In Monterey Park, the focus was not so much on ballots as on signs in languages other than English, especially Chinese (Fong, 1994; Saito, 1998).32 While the details were different in Monterey Park and San Francisco, the pattern was the same: Someone from U.S. English would suggest a local English-only law or a proposition but then leave it to the people in that community to be the most visible sponsors. The people making and living with those policies, however, did not always see themselves as in service to Tanton’s broader mission, nor did they always adhere to his playbook. As the modern English-only movement became more popular, it became more difficult for U.S. English to steer the decision-​ making of local governments. Tanton (1985, February 6) decided against encouraging local chapters of his organizations, because they seemed too “unmanagab[le].” Similarly, when he began working with English-only activists in Florida (some of whom had also worked with Shafer), he took great pains to try to influence them but also to distance himself from them, such that if they did anything embarrassing he would not share the blame. For example, after one of these activists, Robert Melby, did an NBC television interview with Bryant Gumbel to promote an English-only policy, Tanton wrote him a 32

The policy situation in Monterey Park continues to change. The law was revised in 1989 (Horton and Calderon, 2010) and then reconsidered again in 2013.

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long letter with suggested talking points and strategies, since he had found Melby’s performance too angry and abrasive. He encouraged Melby to adopt a calmer tone, make fewer blunt pronouncements, and ask more rhetorical questions. Tanton ended the letter by reminding Melby that “we should make every effort to keep the FEC [Florida English Campaign] and U.S. English separate in people’s minds and in fact. No one should speak for U.S. English or the Florida English campaign who has not been … found able to perform in front of the media” (1985, February 7). This kind of exchange, in which English-only organizations and local activists would collaborate but not necessarily agree or want to advertise that collaboration, became a common feature of English-only campaigns. Over the course of the 1980s and through the 1990s, several states and dozens of cities and counties considered or passed English-only legislation. Some of these governments had U.S. English’s assistance, some had help from other emerging English-only organizations such as English First and, later, ProEnglish, while some seem to have based their policies merely on word of mouth or news coverage. Geographically, there is no clear-cut pattern, but generally these policies emerged in conservative areas of liberal states, like the wealthy suburbs of Chicago, rural counties in Wisconsin, towns in Eastern Washington, and, on a personal note, my town in Massachusetts. In states that already had or were making English the official language, city and county policies may not have seemed as necessary (e.g. there has been only one in Arizona). In his quantitative study of local anti-immigrant policies between 1990 and 2000, Hopkins (2010) includes English-only policies as one subset of these policies and finds that they tend to appear in communities that are “wealthier,” “larger,” and with a higher percentage of immigrant residents (p. 54). While there are exceptions, the paradigmatic place for these policies is a red pocket in a blue state that used to be wealthy, with few immigrants, and recently became ever so slightly less wealthy and more ethnically diverse. Dade County exemplified this pattern, and it continued to be a touchstone. During her time as Executive Director of U.S. English, for instance, Bricker (1989, November 10) wrote a memo where she says, “We are watching Dade County’s plan to make language discrimination a two-way street, so a person has the same appeal rights whether Spanish or English-speaking.” The context is that her legal counsel, Barnaby Zall, had pointed out that there was no legal precedent for a monolingual English speaker filing a discrimination claim if they did not get a job where bilingualism was a requirement. Bricker was noting that Dade County was trying to change that, so that it would be effectively illegal for an employer to make bilingualism a job requirement. For its part, FAIR (1996) put a photo of Citizens for Dade United activists on one of its training guides for grassroots organizers.

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Reckonings at U.S. English and the Rise of ProEnglish Gradually, the cracks in U.S. English started to show. Something had to give. This period of tumult, between 1988 and 1994, could have been the end, but instead the movement emerged more sustainable and more savvy. Despite Tanton’s worries about wild cards at the local level, coordinating between U.S. English and local governments had actually worked fairly smoothly. In a reveral of fortune, it was not a local activist but Tanton himself who would almost bring the movement down. It began when someone leaked one of Tanton’s old memos to the press. The timing was strategic: The memo was from 1986, but the press received it only in the lead up to a key Arizona election in October 1988 (Crawford, 1992, p. 150). In this memo, Tanton (1986, October 10) lays out his fears of a “Latin onslaught” and asks rhetorical questions like “Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile?” Once the memo went public, Tanton promptly resigned from his role as Chairman. Linda Chavez also resigned around the same time, only a year after she had become President of U.S. English. Chavez (1991) remembers that the memo “struck me as anti-​Hispanic” (p. 92). Two years later, Tanton (1990, June 8) apologized to Chavez, saying, “I always felt sorry that through no fault of your own, you got caught up in the memo controversy.” In large part due to this scandal, Hayakawa and his inner circle worried that Hayakawa’s reputation would be tarnished too. In 1990, Hayakawa wrote to Diamond to say that “U.S. English will never fully recover” from the scandal and that he would vote “to dismiss any member of our staff or board who is associated with any Tanton organization.”33 Even after Hayakawa’s death in 1992, his personal assistant toward the end of his life explained that she and Hayakawa’s widow “both feel very uncomfortable that they [U.S. English] might be using his name. … [T]here’s nothing any of us can do” (Griffiths, 1993). It is worth pondering why a certain moment becomes a tipping point. As I hope I have shown in this chapter, the memo in question was not necessarily out of the ordinary for the people and organizations involved. The sentiments in that memo are a dime a dozen. So, why was it this moment when people resigned en masse from U.S. English? The only explanation I can think of is that it was not the racism that was intolerable; it was the public embarrassment. If the memo had stayed internal, I doubt anyone would have resigned. Indeed, I have not found any instances of people resigning over this memo when Tanton originally circulated it in 1986. Similarly, if the memo had surfaced someday in an academic article or even a piece of investigative journalism, I doubt anyone would have resigned. However, whoever the leaker was wise enough to 33

This 1990 letter is appended to Hayakawa’s (1989) oral history interview.

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pick one of the few moments when the memo would receive not just a little but a lot of media attention. In the United States, almost all elections happen in November, and so the “October surprise” is a time-honored tradition in which people release unflattering information about their opponents right before voters go to the polls. Of course, public shaming does not always lead to change, but in this case it did. But U.S. English was not out of the woods yet. U.S. English went through a second reckoning when Tanton’s successors left too. Kathy Bricker left sometime around 1990 or 1991, and in 1991 she complained to Tanton that she had been pushed out (Tanton, 1991, March 8). Stanley Diamond took over, but in 1992 he too was ousted. The circumstances are somewhat murky, but in Diamond’s case, it seems that colleagues felt that he was blackmailing them (Associated Press, 1992, March 17; Crawford, 1992, p. 172). When Diamond left, former California Republican member of Congress Norman Shumway took over briefly, and then Shumway appointed Mauro Mujica. Mujica first heard about U.S. English through his wife Dr. Bárbara Mujica. Dr. Mujica had known Hayakawa through academia. She joined the U.S. English Board of Advisors in 1983. She is now Professor Emerita of Spanish at Georgetown University. When I interviewed Mauro Mujica in 2019, he joked that when he first went to U.S. English events, he was just known as “the husband,” but eventually he got more involved. When Mujica took the helm in 1993, he brought a sense of equanimity to an organization that had been quite volatile. He recalled that initially the U.S. English office seemed shabby and disorganized – “it looked like the Salvation Army.” The disarray was not just on the surface; the organization was in debt. As one example of why they were in debt, Mujica described how U.S. English had organized a direct mail campaign but forgot to include return envelopes in the mailers. That kind of mistake is costly for an organization that does so much of its fundraising through the mail. In an effort to right-size, Mujica let several employees go. He remembered that Barnaby Zall had recommended that he “clean house.” Mujica also described how he had downsized the office, from a 15,000 square feet space to the more modest 1,500 square feet office U.S. English uses today. This smaller office is primarily due to a smaller staff, but Mujica also noted that remote work was a factor (even before the pandemic). Overall, Mujica made U.S. English more sustainable. At the same time, what U.S. English gained in stability it may have lost in vim and vigor. From his vantage point in Washington, DC, Mujica told me that U.S. English used to have some “crazy guys from Arizona,” and I would not necessarily dispute that characterization. At the same time, that level of passion did get results. Furthermore, the organization seems to have held more events in the past, such as a “National Membership Meeting” complete with “Guest speakers, panel discussions, and workshops” (U.S. English, 1989,

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March/April). I have not heard of any events like that happening lately. While U.S. English will still testify at public hearings and make statements to the press (including in the context of city and county language policies), it tends to stay above the fray. Meanwhile, Tanton’s second English-only organization was only too happy to jump in the fray. Tanton launched the new organization, English Language Advocates, in 1994. While Bob Park was the first official chair of English Language Advocates, Tanton still played a central role. For example, in an early press release from the organization, the contact information for the “National Office” is Tanton’s address in Petoskey, Michigan (Park, 1997, March 3). Also, Tanton’s (1990, October 23) name was on the government paperwork to register English Language Advocates as a new project under the umbrella organization U.S., Inc. When he filed this document, it meant that English Language Advocates was now using the same Tax ID number that U.S. English had been using a decade earlier (38-2418377). Meanwhile, at some point in the 1980s, U.S. English started operating under a different Tax ID number (38-2495938) and a different tax status altogether – 501(c)4, as opposed to a 501(c)3. As far as I know, it is not common for organizations to share a Tax ID number, nor is it common for an organization to operate under different Tax ID numbers at different points in time. Tanton’s new organization really came into its own and into the digital age in the year 2000. One of ProEnglish’s strengths has always been crafting policies for state and local governments and putting those texts online as templates. To help make their materials easier to find, the organization changed its name from “English Language Advocates” to “ProEnglish” in 2000. Park’s reasoning was prescient: “[H]aving a short, easy-to-remember name” is important “in the era of electronic communications when so many organizations are competing for the public’s attention via the Internet” (ProEnglish, 2000a). That same year, ProEnglish (2000b) put a fill-in-the-blank policy template on their website for the first time. Although this template is not explicitly dated, it does mention the year 2000, as well as “Vice President Gore” and “President Clinton,” which suggests that it was written before the November 2000 election. In contrast to the policies in Maryland, which are based on a different template (see Chapter 2), this precursor is oriented more toward the federal government: It explicitly criticizes “the Department of Education,” “federally coerced bilingual education,” “statehood for territories” that use other languages (Puerto Rico, etc.), and it calls for copies to be sent to the state county association, state representatives, senators, state governors, members of Congress, the Speaker of the House, and, most strikingly, Trent Lott, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and all the living former presidents and vice presidents. At this time, then, ProEnglish still viewed the local as a means to a more nationalist end. While this model may not have been taken up widely, it did establish the practice of publishing and

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circulating language policy templates online in the United States and laid the groundwork for the policies I examine in the chapters to come. Conclusion During the first twenty years of the modern English-only movement (1980– 2000), people forged relationships, organizations, and strategies that endure today. While the Dade County policy emerged quickly, it is worth noting how long the other policies took to take shape and how many disagreements there were along the way. Hayakawa took three years to develop his proposed ELA, and even then, it never quite passed. Tanton took two years to get U.S. English started and another few months after that to launch his first language policy campaign. Furthermore, even among people who wanted to make English the official language, there were serious disagreements over how best to do that. By the end of this chapter, almost all the people I discussed had become estranged from one or more of their fellow activists. These early years, then, presaged the English-only movement’s vulnerabilities as well as its strengths. Today, FAIR, U.S. English, and ProEnglish are still going. Furthermore, there are people from this phase who continued to play an influential role into the twenty-first century: I touched on McAlpin in the Introduction. I will return to Zall’s writing in Chapter 2, and I will expand on Tanton’s and Mujica’s work in Chapter 3. All three worked on language policy for more than thirty years. And even though most of the people in this chapter have passed away or retired or otherwise moved on, their influence continues. Shafer and her fellow activists showed that modern voters could and would support an English-only policy. Shafer also showed that you could have your lawyer ghostwrite your English-only policy for you. Finally, she also had the creative idea to start a nonprofit to promote an English-only policy. For his part, Hayakawa and his staff imagined a world where Official English could be the law of the land across the United States, a world in which the target was not just bilingual ballots or bilingual education or some other narrow domain but all of government communication. This team also showed the importance of genre choice, as they vacillated over whether to pursue a traditional bill or a constitutional amendment. Hayakawa also showed that local governments would be willing to pass resolutions in support of some larger language policy goal. Finally, he showed the value of having a public intellectual support English-only policies. His reputation was so valuable that it may have led people to take advantage of him. Meanwhile, Tanton was smart enough to notice that Shafer and Hayakawa were on to something. He was perceptive enough to listen, really listen, when he heard everyday people complain about language issues. Ultimately, Tanton was a once-in-a-generation organizer and fundraiser.

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In addition to detailing these early innovations on their own, I wanted to show that these innovations were all connected. People and organizations generally do not operate in isolation, and nowhere is that truer than in the Englishonly movement. Those who lived through these early years are aware of the level of cross-pollination. Tanton’s colleagues freely describe him as orchestrating multiple organizations, particularly when they are writing for an insider audience (e.g. Brimelow, 2006, p. 302). In their most public-facing materials, however, FAIR, U.S. English, and ProEnglish do not advertise their common origins. And, to be fair, they do not have as much in common anymore. U.S. English and FAIR no longer share an office. U.S. English and ProEnglish no longer exist under the same umbrella organization. While the organizations have branched out, it is important to recognize that they are each part of each other’s origin stories.

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Creating English-Only Policies Ghostwriting, Templates, and Genre Choices

Local language policies emerge out of local governments, yet they also tend to closely resemble each other. Three different counties in the state of Maryland, for example, enacted nearly identical English-only ordinances between 2012 and 2013 (Appendix B). While each policy begins and ends slightly differently, the middle content is consistent and the genre is the same. To illustrate, consider similar clauses in each of the three ordinances: F. No law, ordinance, decree, program, or policy of Frederick County shall penalize or impair the rights, obligations or opportunities available to any person solely because a person speaks only the English language. 7. No law, ordinance, decree, program, or policy of Queen Anne’s County or any of its subdivisions shall penalize or impair the rights, obligations or opportunities available to any person solely because a person speaks only the English language. G. No law, ordinance, decree, program, or policy of Carroll County shall penalize or impair the rights, obligations, or opportunities available to any person solely because a person speaks only the English language.

The shared purpose of these clauses is to prioritize the privileges of monolingual English users in a particular county. The only sources of variation are which county is named, the list structure (the alphabetic “F” and “G” vs. the numerical “7”), the optional phrase “or any of its subdivisions,” and the optional serial comma after “obligations.” How does it happen that all these policies look the same? Furthermore, how is it that a fourth county in Maryland, Anne Arundel, tried to enact a much differently written policy, only to fail? In this chapter, I explore the writing practices that led to these outcomes in Frederick County, Carroll County, Anne Arundel County, and Queen Anne’s County (Figure 2.1). What all these textual similarities suggest is that writing is a crucial part of language policymaking, not just in the sense that policies are written documents but also in terms of how people draft, revise, discuss, circulate, and respond to policies. Writing’s role in local language policies is particularly important in the United States because so many now use language from the same written template. This template came to Maryland from a town 150 miles north of the state border – Hazleton, Pennsylvania. What began as 61

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40 Kilometers

20 Miles

Washington, DC

Anne Arundel County

Queen Anne's County

Figure 2.1  A map showing the location of the four counties in Maryland that passed or proposed English-only policies between 2012 and 2013: Frederick County, Carroll County, Anne Arundel County, and Queen Anne’s County; Washington, DC, is marked as a point for reference

0 10 20

0 5 10

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Frederick County

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a 2006 ordinance in Hazleton evolved into a fill-in-the-blank template for the organization ProEnglish. From ProEnglish, the template spread even further. Going back to this starting point is important because when Hazleton partnered with ProEnglish, they laid the groundwork for a series of new English-only policies. Over the course of several years, people adopted and adapted many iterations of this template for their own purposes in their own communities. As I traced the histories of how these matching policies emerged, I found that three writing strategies were particularly important: ghostwriting, working with templates, and choosing genres. These kinds of writing strategies have been part of the English-only movement since its origins, as I discuss in Chapter 1, but they play a particularly prominent role in the local language policies of the twenty-first century. At the same time, when people do not use these strategies and try to write something alone or from scratch, their efforts often stall or fail. For example, Anne Arundel County proposed a homegrown English-only policy, which was withdrawn before it could even come to a vote. Even in Frederick County, there was an earlier attempt to pass an Englishonly resolution, which went so awry that when it did come up for a vote, even the politician who had initiated the process voted against the final product. As I will discuss, however, even failure can be productive in unexpected ways: Anne Arundel’s attempt inspired next-door Queen Anne’s County, and Queen Anne’s County did succeed; similarly, Frederick County’s fraught early attempt in 2008 paved the way for its more successful 2012 policy. My aim is to tell the stories of these policy campaigns in a way that captures their many twists and turns. By focusing on collaborative writing processes in and across communities, I hope to go beyond common dichotomies in discussions of local language policy. I believe language policy scholarship too often gets caught up in whether these policies are top-down or bottom-up, macro or micro, grassroots or astroturfing. For example, in an otherwise nuanced account of language policy in various domains, Spolsky (2009) dismisses “local governments which are more easily manipulated by activist groups than are higher levels” (p. 173). This model of a three-layered system of “activist groups,” “local governments,” and then “higher levels,” as well as this notion of one group manipulating another, is more rigid than what tends to happen in practice. More recently, Spolsky (2021) has revised his approach and moved in the other direction, arguing persuasively that the individual might well be the fundamental unit for understanding language management. From my perspective, though, there is no need to identify one type of actor as having the most agency or playing the most important role. Instead, people usually play a variety of roles, and have a range of goals, and some policies have more impact than others, but in my research, there is no sense that any one person or group is really in control of another or that one person or group is acting more

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genuinely than others. Instead, like most people, language policymakers are constantly navigating between various collaborations, tensions, opportunities, and constraints. By focusing on the nuts and bolts of the writing processes that make local English-only policies possible, I also show that language policies are not merely manifestations of language ideologies. Instead, policies are connected to personal and professional experiences, to genres, to systems of government, to technologies, to histories, to geographies, and to all other aspects of people’s lives. For these reasons, language policy shifts are difficult to predict, or even plan. A corollary of this argument is that changing language policies requires much more than just changing language ideologies. In other words, it may be neither sufficient nor necessary to convince people of a particular language ideology. Policy campaigns can fail even with widespread community support, and they can succeed even if the majority of the policymakers are apathetic or even skeptical toward the text they are sponsoring. These observations are not meant to evoke a sense of hopeless relativism but rather to show that there are countless opportunities for negotiation, intervention, and serendipity in language policy. To tell the stories of these policies, I find it helpful to think in terms of what Lillis and Curry (2010) call text histories. Rather than analyze individual texts in isolation or, on the other end of the spectrum, try to construct history writ large, what matters to me here is being able to understand how a text changes over time as it changes hands, changes form, and changes in function. In the section that follows, I introduce some ways that text histories depend in large part on policymakers’ particular circumstances and ideologies about writing and writers. I then turn to the text histories themselves, which I share in four parts. First, I discuss the origins of the template and the role of ghostwriting in the 2006 Illegal Immigration Relief Act of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Next, I move to one of the first efforts to emulate Hazleton’s example, which met with mixed results because of a dispute over which genre to use: the 2008 Official Language Resolution of Frederick County, Maryland. In the third section, I analyze how Frederick switched from a resolution to an ordinance in 2012 and how that genre choice paved the way for the policy’s success. I then expand the scope to consider three other counties in Maryland that drew on templates and strategies from Hazleton, Frederick, and each other in 2012–2013, two of which ultimately succeeded and one of which did not. Carroll County adapted the same template and playbook as Frederick County, and that campaign went fairly smoothly. On the other hand, in Anne Arundel and Queen Anne’s Counties the process was more troubled, in part because there were multiple templates in play. What happened in those two counties exemplifies how governments copy each other in addition to organizations. I conclude by synthesizing how

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different writing strategies shaped these text histories and by posing some new questions raised by these findings. Text Histories of Language Policies The notion of a text history originally came out of Lillis and Curry’s (2010) groundbreaking long-term study of global academic publishing, but language policy can be a bit different from academic writing. Part of my work has been to expand and reconceptualize what this framework could look like for language policy. What remains consistent is the goal of “exploring the trajectories of texts toward publication” by gathering “as much information as possible about the history of a text, including the drafts produced, the different people involved … the chronology of involvement and the nature of their impact on the text and its trajectory” (Lillis and Curry, 2010, p. 4). A text history includes not just drafts, feedback, and revision but also broader practices of entextualization, recontextualization, and circulation (Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Prior and Thorne, 2014; Vieira, 2019). One feature that does separate policy texts from many others is that they are highly shareable (Urban, 1996, p. 24). Any elected official can copy or otherwise emulate any government policy without explicit citation or attribution, and it is not generally considered problematic or suspect. Government documents in the United States are not under copyright. In lobbying and nonprofit organizations, it is common to post templates for anyone interested in or willing to use them. In other words, policy plagiarism is almost an oxymoron. Of course, copied legislation can still fail, be amended, be superseded, or be deemed unconstitutional, but it is always on grounds other than the policy’s originality or lack thereof. Another specific feature of policy text histories is that while policies are tied to governments and organizations, they are not necessarily included in the domain of authorship. People who help shape language policies in the United States are what Brandt (2015) calls everyday writers, or those who may write prolifically, influentially, and profitably but who do not expect or even necessarily desire authorship credit for that writing (p. 12). They are professionals who may write as a routine part of their work, whose pay depends to some degree on their writing literacy, who often write anonymously and ephemerally, and who may not necessarily feel the designation of writer is even appropriate to their situation, given their place in a culture where that term is usually reserved for published professionals associated with a few, highly regarded genres. (p. 12)

In other words, while they may technically be “published professionals,” they are not writing in genres where they can expect to have their names publicly

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attached to their work. So, while Lillis and Curry (2010) find that some of their academic writer-participants were reticent about “report[ing] the involvement of others in their text production” (p. 5), writers outside academia may hesitate to even report their own involvement in writing texts. On one occasion, for example, I contacted a county employee because his supervisor had told me that he had helped craft the first draft of a proposed policy. After I emailed him to introduce my study and ask if he would be available for an interview, he replied that his role “was limited to assisting … with the wording” and then referred me to several other county committees and offices. Of course, he may simply not have been interested in participating, but the point is that it is difficult to imagine an academic or creative writer demurring by saying they merely helped “with the wording.” To some extent, it is normal for people to not identify as a writer (Eubanks, 2011). For instance, people who write a lot of text messages, diary entries, social media comments, emails, or post-it notes often do not identify as writers. The writers I am focusing on, however, have additional cultural and legal motivations for their stances on their writing. Most US workers have effectively no copyright claims over the texts they create. While an employee may receive some internal recognition (whether positive or negative) within an organization for what they produce, legally and officially they are usually not the author or the owner – “copyright turns inside out” (Brandt, 2015, p. 20). This system reaches its logical conclusion in ghostwriting, where writers work behind the scenes with some shelter from public scrutiny. So, coming up with a policy idea, conducting legal research, finding an appropriate template, tailoring the template, composing new sentences, publicizing the policy, revising the text, and voting on the actual bill or ordinance may all be done by different or overlapping groups of people. In policy contexts, Hall and Deardorff (2006) argue that providing templates and talking points is “a form of legislative subsidy – a matching grant of policy information, political intelligence, and legislative labor,” where the goal “is not to change legislators’ minds but to assist natural allies in achieving their own, coincident objectives” (p. 69). Legislative subsidies of this sort are ubiquitous in US politics, in part because many local and even state politicians receive only a part-time salary and so usually cannot not write all of their own policies even if they wanted to. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the most prominent source of policy templates in the United States, but ALEC focuses primarily on conservative policies around labor, business regulations, guns, and voter registration (Hertel-Fernandez, 2014). While ALEC has put out anti-sanctuary-city policy templates (which are essentially anti-immigrant policies) (Collingwood, El-Khatib, and O’Brien, 2018), they do not focus on language policy per se. That gap leaves plenty of room for an organization like ProEnglish to carve out a niche.

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While some of the practices differ between academic publishing and policy writing, the timespans, numbers of people, technologies, and drafting processes are quite similar, which is why the text history is an apt unit of analysis for exploring how people create and circulate local language policies. In other words, text histories are well-suited for studying a few texts that emerge over a few years with the participation of a few dozen people. I have conducted interviews with writers, collected “as many drafts as available,” and gathered evidence of “correspondence” (Lillis and Curry, 2010, p. 4). I now turn to the text histories of the policy template and its offshoots. Hazleton, ProEnglish, and Ghostwriting a Template The template’s origin story begins with a 2006 language policy in Hazleton, Pennsylvania (see Table 2.1 for a timeline of the policies discussed in this chapter). One could argue that the story goes back even further,1 but I focus on Hazleton because that was the point where the key template materialized. Hazleton is an industrial town of roughly 25,000 residents, although its population and economic landscape have fluctuated significantly in recent years. Like many communities in the United States, Hazleton’s immigrant population was negligible for several decades, due in large part to restrictive federal immigration quotas and a struggling coal-based economy (Dick, 2011). More immigrants began to move to Hazleton in the 1990s, and while this shift bolstered the town’s economy, many existing residents resented the demographic shift. This pattern of resentment is similar to what happened in Dade County, Florida. According to Mayor Lou Barletta (who later became Congressman Barletta), the straw “that broke the camel’s back” and inspired him to sponsor formal anti-immigrant legislation was a murder case where the alleged perpetrators were undocumented immigrants (although those charges were later dropped) (Associated Press, 2007, July 7). In addition to these local demographic shifts and events, spring 2006 was a period of heightened national discussion about immigration reform and language policy in the federal government, nationwide news coverage, and protests in several large US cities (Tardy, 2009, p. 268; see also Bleeden, Gottschalk-Druschke, and Cintrón, 2010; Dayton-Wood, 2010; Cisneros, 2013). Mayor Barletta initiated a long series of events when he enacted the original “Illegal Immigration Relief Act.” This policy transformed and expanded local governmental authority in a number of ways, from introducing fines 1

In fact, Hazleton’s first attempt at a policy was itself a close copy of an anti-immigration policy that the government of San Bernardino, California, had considered but ultimately rejected earlier that year (Dick, 2011, pp. 46–47; Tarone, 2015, October 18).

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Hazleton, PA ProEnglish Frederick County, MD

Frederick County, MD

Frederick County, MD

Anne Arundel County, MD Queen Anne’s County, MD Carroll County, MD

9/12/2006 2006 4/15/2008

4/24/2008

2/22/2012

3/5/2012

1/24/2013

5/8/2012

Sponsor

Date

An Act Concerning Recognition of English as the Official Language of Queen Anne’s County An Ordinance Adopting Amendments to the Code of Public Local Laws and Ordinances of Carroll County, Maryland, 2013-01

Official Language, Bill 13-12

Official English Ordinance, 2006-19 Model Municipal Official English Ordinance A Resolution by the Board of County Commissioners for Frederick County, Maryland, to Initiate an Ordinance to Provide that English Is the Official Language of County Government Resolution “Proclaiming English as the Official, Primary and Common Language,” 08-13 Frederick County Official English Ordinance, 12-03-598

Full policy name

Ordinance

Ordinance

Bill

Ordinance

Resolution

Ordinance Template Resolution and Ordinance

Genre

Passed

Passed

Yes

Yes

Passed; repealed Yes in 2015 Withdrawn No

No

No

Failed

Passed

Yes

Shares language with template?

Passed

Outcome

Table 2.1  A timeline of the key language policies discussed in this chapter. Information includes dates, sponsors, names, genres, outcomes, and whether the policy shares language with a template

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for landlords who rent to undocumented immigrants, to restricting employers’ hiring practices, to establishing the city as “English Only.” Later, the original policy was split into two, one covering language policy and the other covering everything else. How did Hazleton’s local immigration policy turn into a widely used language policy template? In an interview with Robert Vandervoort, who was the executive director of ProEnglish at the time of the interview, we discussed how the shift happened. I began by asking about the template, and then we discussed the role of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). When I asked, “About the model ordinance that’s on the website, do you know who wrote it?” Vandervoort replied: vandervoort: I believe, and I’d have to double-check to be sure, but I believe it was written by an attorney named Barnaby Zall. I believe that… flowers: Oh! vandervoort: It was, I believe he had helped for many years on these issues. And my understanding is that … when Hazleton, Pennsylvania, introduced their language … I believe the ACLU tried to challenge it, and so Barnaby Zall went back and I believe he tried to correct some of the things that were at issue and, and it was resubmitted with the changes that he had helped create, and … the changes that he made in that legislation, or that, you know, for the official law, were pretty airtight, to the point where the ACLU actually dropped their … challenge on the Official English ordinance at Hazleton … So that’s that language we’ve been using and promoting ever since.

This exchange suggests that Barnaby Zall authored the new Official Language ordinance and this ordinance in turn became the basis for ProEnglish’s model ordinance. His role appears multifaceted: Vandervoort describes him as having “written,” “helped,” “tried to correct” things, and “creat[ed]” changes. He emphasizes the fact that the new text was “pretty airtight,” even from the ACLU’s perspective. The trajectories between the two halves of the original law also began to diverge at this point: The housing and employment parts were the subject of the lawsuit Lozano v. Hazleton through 2014 and were ultimately ruled unconstitutional, while the language policy survived intact. When Vandervoort mentioned Zall, I exclaimed “Oh” because I recognized the name but was not expecting to hear it in this context. In retrospect I should not have been so surprised to hear about Zall’s role in Hazleton: He had been involved in similar kinds of writing for at least twenty-five years, going back to the early years of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and U.S. English. In 1979, he began working with John Tanton and Roger Conner while he was still in law school (Conner, 1989, pp. 39–40; Tanton, 1989, p. 61). He weighed in on Tanton’s early plans to work with Senator Hayakawa (Zall, 1981, December 3). A 1983 biographical note in a law review article identified him as the “Director of Government Relations” for FAIR (LeMaster

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and Zall, 1983). The Los Angeles Times described him as an attorney for both FAIR and U.S. English (Trombley, 1986, October 20). Zall did not just support or defend language policies; he wrote language policies. And not just in Hazleton. In a book chapter he cowrote on “the English Language movement,”2 his biography stated that he was “the author of California’s Proposition 63 and several other official language provisions,” as well as “the general counsel to U.S. English and other official language organizations” (Zall and Stein, 1990, p. 268). Proposition 63 was the ballot initiative that made English the symbolic official language of California in 1986 (HoSang, 2010). In a special issue of Tanton’s journal The Social Contract on the theme of “The battle for Official English,” Park (1996) explained how Zall “worked with the legislature’s lawyers to craft an initiative amending Arizona’s constitution to declare English the official language” (p. 245).3 In describing this writing process, Park (1996) described Zall as U.S. English’s “top lawyer,” someone “who performed miracles time and time again” (p.  248). In a newsletter, ProEnglish (2007, April) recounted how Hazleton’s ordinance “drew heavily on the legal expertise and work of ProEnglish’s general counsel, Barnaby Zall” (p. 4). To summarize, Zall has a long history of writing language policies that become law and of mediating between organizations and legislators. He also continued this kind of work after Hazleton. In 2009, for example, he wrote a brief on behalf of ProEnglish and other organizations in the Arizona bilingual education case Horne v. Flores (Zall, 2009). Zall (2017) has branched out from language; he mentions a medical-malpractice-related “ballot initiative I drafted in Florida” (p. 45). Most recently, he founded the Public Policy Legal Institute, which he continues to run (Zall, 2023). The way people characterize Zall’s role (including Zall himself) depends heavily on the audience and the venue. The sources that identify him as a policy writer (cited earlier) are aimed at two particular (although overlapping) audiences. The first is scholars, as in Zall’s chapter in Adams and Brink’s (1990) academic edited collection on language policy and in Vandervoort’s interview with me. The second audience is people sympathetic to the Englishonly movement, as in parts of Tanton’s archives, the special issue of Tanton’s journal, ProEnglish’s newsletter, and Zall’s descriptions of himself. In contrast, news coverage and elected officials tend to be more circumspect about Zall and about ghostwriting. For example, in a piece about the proposed “English law” in Jackson, New York, the journalist describes ProEnglish as “the organization that helped draft Hazleton, Pa.’s [sic] English ordinance” 2

Elsewhere in the article they call it “the official language movement” (Zall and Stein, 1990, p. 268). This proposition held for ten  years (1988–1998) but was ultimately ruled unconstitutional in Ruiz v. Hull. However, in 2006, Arizonans voted on a similar proposition that passed, and is still intact.

3

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(Taube, 2010, August 4). This kind of coverage mentions the organization but not individual people and uses more general terms like “help.” These two different kinds of description suggest that having a ghostwriter who can write for different jurisdictions around the country is an asset for an organization and for the overall social movement but that ProEnglish and elected officials usually prefer to emphasize the role of local actors more, particularly while the policy campaign is still unfolding. Zall’s work is thus key to the broader English-only movement, and his discretion is key to the localism permeating that movement. Yet while Zall’s role was important, the collaboration between ProEnglish and a local government was by no means unprecedented or even exceptional. As I discuss in Chapter 1, ghostwriting has always existed in organizations like Citizens of Dade United and U.S. English. Zall’s focus on actually writing government policy texts is therefore in keeping with the English-only movement’s broader prioritization of writing. After hearing Vandervoort’s account of how this template started, I was still curious about the precise nature of Zall’s collaboration with Hazleton’s elected officials so I continued that line of inquiry. Vandervoort elaborated, saying that the ACLU challenged Hazleton’s original ordinance and then Hazleton “contacted us for some help and assistance, and Barnaby Zall, who at that time was working with us on these issues, looked at it, made the changes and corrections based … on what the ACLU had found as problematic, and that was resolved and resubmitted and then the ACLU dropped the challenge.” Here Vandervoort reemphasizes how multifaceted ProEnglish’s role was in the writing process: There were “changes” and “corrections,” and the new policy was “resolved and resubmitted.” What did the ACLU find problematic? In the initial ordinance, race and legal immigration were absent on the surface, but they were implicitly quite relevant. As Dick (2011) meticulously describes, these absences allowed “[c]hampions of local immigration restrictions” to claim that there was nothing unjust about the policy: The law applied equally to everyone and did not discriminate against any particular race(s) (p. 50).4 On the other hand, the policy’s meaning is not just in its referential language but also in what other discourse and texts it indexes. The policy cites and resembles federal laws that disproportionately harm people of color, whether they are immigrants or not. Furthermore, Dick (2011) notes that terms like “Mexican immigrant” and “illegal alien” are so “conflated” in US discourse that the policy does not have to directly mention Latinx people in order to send harmful messages to and about them (p. 35). Amid local public outcry against the Illegal Immigration Relief Act,

4

The original Illegal Immigration Relief Act does explicitly discriminate against undocumented immigrants, of course.

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local landlords and employers began filing lawsuits against the city, and the ACLU filed a lawsuit of its own (Tarone, 2015, October 17). In response, the government took a number of steps to immunize the policy against legal complaints. First, and perhaps most significantly, they split the ordinance into two: No longer was the official language provision fused to the other provisions about housing, employment, and law enforcement. An article in Hazleton’s newspaper, The Standard-Speaker, hinted that the soon-to-bepassed “revisions are fairly substantive” (Tarone, 2006, September 8). Tarone (2006, September 8) paraphrases Mayor Barletta as saying that “if he’d had to do it over, he’d have introduced it [the language policy] as a separate bill” from the beginning but that “the group ProEnglish … has volunteered its help in defending that bill if it is challenged in court.” However, the revisions were also “designed to make the bills more likely to withstand the court challenge filed by” the ACLU and Latinx advocacy organizations, thereby obviating the need for further legal help (Tarone, 2006, September 8). Specifically, they revised the official language policy. Somewhat counterintuitively, making the language component more palatable involved not trimming it down but actually adding much more content. Zall made Hazleton’s new language policy different from the original in almost every way. The first one was two sentences; the revised one is three pages. New sections include an “Official English Declaration,” “Exceptions,” “Private Use Protected,” and “Interpretation.” There are two innovations in this policy that may have made it more difficult to legally challenge, for the ACLU and other plaintiffs and activists, and more appealing to other local governments. The first major innovation is that the revised text describes spatial and political scales with more nuance. The scope of the policy is more explicitly local; the city is mentioned fourteen times, while the state and federal government only appear three times. Furthermore, unlike in ProEnglish’s 2000 model policy (see Chapter 1), here the point of mentioning those other government scales is to acknowledge exceptions and limitations, not to ask for higher offices to adopt the same language policy. Paradoxically, then, this more locally oriented policy became the more widely usable template. The second key difference is that this ordinance depicts English as an at-risk language and English speakers as an at-risk group. This theme was not at all present in the initial ordinance, and it is an odd addition, given that English is the world’s most commonly used language and the number of English users is rising, not falling. There are four specific clauses that create this sense of vulnerability. On the first page, the policy states that “in today’s modern society, the City of Hazleton may also need to protect and preserve the rights of those who speak only the English language to use or obtain government programs and benefits.” The opening phrase suggests that English speakers may

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have been safe in the past but not necessarily anymore. Later on, the policy elaborates on these protections for monolingual English speakers by establishing that they are “eligible to participate in all programs, benefits and opportunities, including employment” and that no local government agent or policy “shall penalize or impair [their] rights, obligations, or opportunities.” In addition, there is one clause that focuses on the language itself (not just its users): The government “shall make no policy that diminishes or ignores the role of English.” This new stance makes the policy sound less like an imperialist or evangelical attempt to spread English and more like an innocent plea for mercy (a theme I return to in Chapter 3). When ProEnglish adopted Hazleton’s paper ordinance as its online template, there were few revisions, other than the step of removing all mentions of Hazleton and replacing them with blank stretches in brackets. For example, one of the first lines in Hazleton’s ordinance began with “The People of the City of Hazleton find and declare…” and the ProEnglish template begins with “The people of [NAME OF JURISDICTION] find and declare that….” Other minor changes including the following: The ProEnglish version does not have a “Title” section, the punctuation on the numbered/lettered lists is slightly different, and there are two instances of “that” that were changed to “which.” The most substantive change in wording was in a phrase that went from “a government of the people” to “a government accountable to the people,” although it is difficult to say how that might substantively change the meaning. Once ProEnglish had extracted the template’s language from its original Hazleton context and recontextualized it on its website, it quickly began to circulate to more sites and more geographic locations. The website smalltowndefenders.com posted the template, as did the anti-undocumentedimmigrant site illegalaliens.us (Model Ordinances, 2006; Small Town Defenders, 2006). Barletta also advertised the policy on talk radio (Dick, 2011, p. 47). The template did not circulate alone or just with casual commentary; people both within and beyond English-only organizations emphasized that legal consulting was crucial in order for a new policy to succeed. Internally, ProEnglish posted an offer of free consulting and their contact information on the same page as the template, which is still there in a similar form as of 2023. At the time, the more general site illegalaliens.us (2006) warned that it was “­essential that a local government representative, ideally a local attorney representing the government” (emphasis in original) reach out to ProEnglish “as far in advance as possible, to discuss critical technical issues in confidence,” so as to avoid “legal liability, including civil rights claims” (Model Ordinances, 2006). ProEnglish’s offer and this site’s warning highlight the fact that circulating and copying a policy text are not enough; the growing network also needed to

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involve introductions, conversations, legal expertise, “technical” troubleshooting, and tailoring by local lawyers for local governments. In the months and years to come, other communities emulated Hazleton’s policy. In some ways, those communities were following Hazleton just like Hazleton had followed San Bernardino. The differences, though, were that now ProEnglish was involved, now the policy was airtight, now the template was available on multiple websites, and now Hazleton was getting significant news coverage due to the multiyear-long lawsuit Lozano v. Hazleton. The earliest example of uptake that I found was from one of Hazleton’s neighboring communities, Shenandoah, in summer 2006. In a balancing act that other cityand county-level elected officials would also attempt in the upcoming years, Shenandoah representative Joseph Palubinsky said to a reporter, “I don’t want to come out and say that we’re going to copy Hazleton’s ordinance, but we’re going to use it as a guideline” (Light, 2006, June 19). Choosing between Genres in Frederick County When I interviewed Frederick County activist Hayden Duke about his county’s series of attempted language policies, he brought up the subject of Frederick’s first foray into this area. He mused, “There had been some type of English-only something, if I recall correctly.” I wanted to jog his memory and so I filled in the gap: “There was a resolution.” “Yes!” he exclaimed. I asked if he remembered the details of when that resolution passed, in 2008. “Vaguely,” he replied. In this section, I piece together the story of this “vaguely” remembered 2008 policy, which was fraught in terms of genre and murky in terms of purpose. This phase of the story is about language policy texts that took up the Hazleton ordinance’s general discourse more than its precise written form and function: The wording was all different, and the final product was a resolution rather than an ordinance. Charles Jenkins, the initial sponsor, had proposed both an ordinance and a resolution, but only a much-revised and much-diluted resolution won out, much to his chagrin. In tracing how this genre debate unfolded, I hope to signal the broader importance of genre choice as an important aspect of language policymaking. Genre is key. Like many other writers, people who write language policies can be knowledgeable enough to make informed choices about which genre they want to use (Shipka, 2011; Tardy, Sommer-Farias, and Gevers, 2020). Devitt (2004) notes that “[m]ost professional communities … have genre repertoires” (p. 57). Within a given community, people can deliberate over which genres to select, adapt, or invent (Miller, 2023, p. 17). Genre repertoires are not predetermined or set in stone; rather, they emerge out of writers’ goals and actions. In this phase of the English-only movement, the desire to develop policies that have teeth but are not illegal created a situation where people would

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argue over whether to draft stricter ordinances with teeth or milder resolutions that would not attract too much scrutiny. In 2006, newly elected Frederick County commissioner Charles Jenkins started considering the idea of making English the official language. While language policy had not come up during his campaign, a combination of budget issues, law enforcement developments, and media coverage of immigration debates came together soon after he entered office. In our interview, he described how he and his colleagues received requests “asking for more money for translators and interpreters” from approximately thirteen out of seventeen county divisions. He also recalled how the Board of Education “came across the street” to request about $250,000 to hire four new instructors for “ELLs” (English Language Learners).5 He considered these requests unreasonable. Meanwhile, Charles Jenkins was also serving as the liaison to the sheriff’s department. This was an eventful time to be in this position, as Sheriff Chuck Jenkins was in the process of rolling out a new program called 287(g).6 This ongoing program facilitates closer collaboration between local law enforcement and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to Sheriff Jenkins (2016), he and his office had helped detain and/or deport more than 1,400 undocumented immigrants over that decade. The sheriff had made 287(g) part of his 2006 campaign, in an effort to combat any reputation Maryland might have for being a sanctuary. For some of the people I spoke with, 287(g) was evidence that immigration was a problem; for others, its existence was a sign that treatment of immigrants was a problem. While there is not an inherent link between language and immigration (many immigrants use English fluently, and many people born in the United States use languages other than English), the link was very salient in this time and place. In addition to the budget session and the liaison work, Charles Jenkins also mentioned hearing about the language and immigration debates happening in Hazleton and other places, including Farmers Branch, Texas, and Prince William County, Virginia. In fact, his first policy ideas closely reflected Hazleton’s initial Illegal Immigration Relief Act. His initial goal was to “deny services” to people who could not prove their legal residence. His motion to move forward with this proposal failed, and it was at that point that he turned to a separate language policy as a consolation prize, just as Lou Barletta had done in Hazleton. Jenkins went through a sort of accelerated, streamlined version of what had taken Hazleton’s government years and lawsuits to decide. 5

The two government offices are a few blocks apart in downtown Frederick City. Yes, there are two people in Frederick County who are both named Charles Jenkins (no relation). One is a politician, and one is a sheriff. The latter goes by the nickname Chuck, so I refer to him as Sheriff Chuck Jenkins.

6

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He described his English-only policy as being born out of concern over potential future requests for government documents in other languages. According to county records, Jenkins introduced an ordinance, and a resolution that would “initiate” that ordinance, in April 2008. Jenkins says he put this package together on his own, and that is my impression as well. The wording of the proposal does not resemble ProEnglish’s policy or any other policy that I have found. While there are a few paragraphs of paratext, the substantive part of his ordinance is brief: “English is the official language of County government. All County government documents shall be written in English.” I asked about the authorship of his proposed policy from a couple of angles, to see how his answers would compare to my reading. First, I asked if anyone from ProEnglish had ever been in contact with him, and he said, emphatically, “no.” Then, I asked if he had ever had a chance to speak with elected officials in places like Hazleton, and he again replied, “no,” and went on to say that he had just followed those other cases through the news. He described himself as a committed writer and added that “I enjoy writing; once I get started, it’s hard to stop it.” As a testament to his penchant for writing, he wrote a newspaper column for several years after leaving office. Jenkins recalled that as he was preparing to introduce his legislative package, one of his colleagues, Democratic commissioner Jan Gardner, learned of his plan and quickly put together a different, competing Official English proposal. Her policy, which Jenkins referred to as a “watered down resolution,” was the one that ultimately passed on a 3–2 vote. Jenkins was very disappointed as Gardner’s policy sent a milder message – hers softens the blow by also touting how “the community benefits from acknowledging the rich and varied cultural heritage in our community,” while Jenkins’ declared quite bluntly that “all County government documents shall be written in English.” Genre was a central aspect of the dispute: Hypothetically, the government can enforce an ordinance, while a resolution “of course has no force of law” (in Charles Jenkins’ words), and Charles Jenkins wanted force of law. Vandervoort had a similar perspective when we discussed the question of genre. I began by asking him what he would advise someone trying to decide between the two most common options, “a resolution that’s maybe less controversial but also less official” or “an ordinance.” He replied, We would definitely lean on the side of an ordinance … something that has some teeth in it, something that can be enforced, as opposed to a resolution, because a resolution doesn’t really do anything. I mean, I suppose it would be better than nothing, if that’s all you could get, but I mean, at the same time, you know, it’s like a resolution saying, you know, ‘The cardinal will be our county bird,’ you know, or … ‘We have a resolution that the marigold is our county flower,’ you know. … It’s nice, but it doesn’t…

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and at that point he stopped and just sighed. He went on to say, “So that’s why an ordinance or a state law that actually directs government to operate in English would be preferable to just saying, ‘Oh, we really like English.’” “Oh, we really like English” is a pretty accurate encapsulation of Frederick’s 2008 resolution. While Vandervoort suggested that a resolution “would be better than nothing,” Jenkins felt differently and ultimately voted against Gardner’s resolution. His refusal to endorse this policy demonstrates how different one genre can feel from another: Jenkins had been excited about a potential ordinance and disappointed by a resolution. When I asked Jenkins if he had had a hard time deciding how to vote, he replied, “No, I was pretty disgusted with it. So, I didn’t have a problem voting against it.” That Jenkins voted against the resolution may seem odd, and, indeed, I was surprised when I learned about this turn of events. He wanted English to be the official language, and he had the opportunity to vote “yes” on a government declaration of that concept, so why didn’t he? Vandervoort’s analogies to a “county bird” and a “state flower” are helpful for understanding Jenkins’ perspective. For people genuinely concerned about the status of the English language, the situation was akin to if one politician had tried to introduce a law to protect an endangered species and another introduced a concurrent proposal to merely make the species the county’s mascot. In doing so, that second politician could effectively make a mockery of the whole issue while still being able to claim that they had taken action on it. Despite the discord surrounding this resolution at the time, now residents tend to remember it less as a compromise and more as the opening gambit in the county’s English-only movement. In the next section, I turn to how ProEnglish went from distant inspiration for Jenkins’ proposal in 2008 to active participant in 2012. Refining the Template: Passing English-Only Ordinances in Frederick and Carroll Counties The composition of Frederick’s Board of County Commissioners changed significantly in 2010, which in turn made a change in language policy possible. A group of conservative candidates ran together as a slate and won handily. Like Charles Jenkins before them, they considered a range of potential policies to discourage undocumented immigrants from living in the area, and they included an English-only ordinance in this package. Notably, what allowed Frederick County to refine what Hazleton and ProEnglish had started was the combination of a strong supporter and a tough editor. I contend that the policy’s most ardent and most reticent champions, Blaine Young and C. Paul Smith, respectively, both contributed in their own way to the policy’s initial success. Charles Jenkins said that he met with the new commissioner president, Blaine Young, to share his ideas for immigration-related

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policy reform during the transition period. Young was open to the concept, as were the other new commissioners to some extent. One of the other commissioners at the time, C. Paul Smith, described the different local, state, and national phenomena that prompted them to consider such policies around 2012. He explained, “Locally, a lot of the funds that the county has to raise and use are to educate illegal aliens … And so there’s a lot of discussion at that time about asking the public schools to identify how many illegal aliens are in the school. And the public school would not tell us … They said, ‘Oh, that’s private. We can’t tell you that.’” He and his colleagues were frustrated that the school district would not report how many undocumented students were there and that they “have to educate whoever lives – whether they’re illegal or not – in our county.” Smith went on to say that Young would say things like “We want to know how many there are, because this illegal alien problem, though we’re not next to the border, it’s affecting us,” particularly “right after the 2008 crash” when the government’s budget was stretched thin. Through reported speech (“we want to know how many there are”), Smith suggests that Young was the most outspoken and visible sponsor of these immigration-related proposals. Everyone I talked to about this policy shared Smith’s assessment of Young’s role at the time. Young’s official government title does not begin to capture his role in and beyond his community. He has described himself as Maryland’s “youngest good ol’ boy,” and he is part of a Maryland political dynasty (Blaine Young Biography, 2008; Cox, 2014, May 26). In addition to holding office, he also ran advertising and taxi businesses and hosted a daily talk radio show on WFMD. One resident I interviewed, Will Gardner (a pseudonym), stated that he had first heard about language policy as a local issue on Young’s radio show. Gardner recalled that Young announced an upcoming petition signing event that would take place at a local Route 40 Shell gas station and that one of the petitions was aimed at making English the official language of the state of Maryland. While I have not found other references to that language policy petition, Young has hosted a number of other events at that gas station, including a petition signing cohosted by the conservative organization MDPetitions.7 The proprietor of the Shell station, Joe Parsley, is so closely associated with Young that in 2013 some residents boycotted his business as part of a wider protest of Young’s actions (Frederick Editorial Board, 2013, July 5). While Young was undoubtedly the main sponsor, it is less clear who else was involved in crafting the policy, especially the first public draft. Duke suggested that it may have been the entire aforementioned slate, because “Blaine 7

See Cooper (2012, April 25) for the petition-signing event. See Williams (2008, November 1) for an earlier, different example of a kind of event hosted by Young at the Shell Station.

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[Young], Billy [Shreve], Kirby [Delauter], and Paul [Smith] worked very closely together,” and they may also have had “the county attorney write it up.” A memo from a month before the ordinance passed corroborates the point about the attorney being the one to “write it up.” County attorney John Mathias (2012, January 24) wrote to the commissioners to say that “In reviewing similar legislation from other jurisdictions, a Model Municipal English Language Ordinance was located. This model ordinance was on the website for ProEnglish. … A draft ordinance for Frederick County, very similar to this model ordinance, has been prepared.” The passive voice in those sentences leaves the precise identity of the person or group doing the locating and preparing unclear. One possible point of connection between the different actors may have been Sheriff Chuck Jenkins. I do not know if he ever met with anyone from ProEnglish, but Sheriff Jenkins (2017) is open about working with one of John Tanton’s other organizations, FAIR. According to Sheriff Jenkins (2017), “I’ve worked with FAIR for a number of years. I find FAIR to be a great and valuable resource as far as information/support on any topic related to illegal immigration.” One of the people I interviewed stated, “Blaine Young’s principal ally in his anti-immigrant endeavors was Sheriff Chuck Jenkins.” Regardless of the exact directionality or how many people were involved, the attorney clearly mediated between ProEnglish’s template and the commissioners. The other commissioners, however, do not seem to have participated until the later stages. Delauter explained that he gave his input once the draft was “on the agenda,” and Smith said he was not “the mover” on this issue. Delauter recalled that he advised Young to frame the policy as “a fiscal decision,” as a step toward “consistency,” especially when it came to “written” documents. When I raised the question of Mathias’s and ProEnglish’s role, Delauter explained that they “wanted a version that was tested in court.” In other words, Delauter and his colleagues realized an English-only policy might attract legal challenges, and they wanted a text that would be specific to Frederick yet be relatively risk-free, because it had already been developed elsewhere. While Delauter entered the policymaking process without major reservations, Smith entered it with concerns. In the course of laying out his account of the policy’s history, he described his initial reaction to the idea of an official language policy and threw up his hands in the air, as if remembering his mild frustration at the time. As he gestured, he recalled, When the issue came up … I was kind of saying, ‘Oh brother, do we have to deal with this?’ Now, now I voted for it, and I am in favor of it, but, there are so many people that, for totally irrational reasons and for reasons connected with all sorts of issues, just feel like, if you pass an English-only ordinance … it’s because you don’t like people from another country … Just all sorts of negative things.

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He defended his vote, explaining, “I don’t have any of that in my heart, but … I am concerned about the economics of it. I don’t want us to have to publish everything in more than one language.” Smith’s “Oh, brother” reaction and his worries that people might accuse him of thinking “all sorts of negative things” give a sense of his hesitation. He was initially skeptical but eventually leaned in and supported his colleagues. He also voices two possible motivations for supporting a policy like this, one more about disliking people from other countries and the other, with which he aligns himself, more about fiscal responsibility and properly portioning out the budget. When I sent this analysis to Smith to see what he thought, he replied: The summary you made of our conversation sounds correct. Looking back on that episode, I would say this: It makes sense to have a national language in which the nation’s business is conducted. It makes sense for new citizens to adopt the national language. This promotes national unity, and it is the most economical way to do business. In Frederick County, Maryland, it has always conducted business in English. I don’t think a special law is required to do this. Neither do I think that anyone should take offense if a law is passed declaring that the County will do business in English. It would be extremely expensive to provide government communications in many different languages. The people should learn English for the sake of governmental efficiency, economy and national unity. When we passed an English only law during our administration (2010–2014), this was seen by some as an insult against people of other languages and cultures. They should not have taken offense. But if people choose to be offended, that is their problem, and it is indicative of a broader societal problem.

In this statement, Smith reiterates one of his main points all along: This sort of local language policy is not necessarily “required” in order to have a functional government, but there are financial and cultural reasons to do so. This take is much more measured than Young’s, and the gulf between them indicates that policy campaigns do not necessarily require everyone involved to be on the same rhetorical page. On the contrary, Smith’s skepticism and experience as a lawyer may have helped make the policy more robust. At the Frederick County commissioners meeting the night the ordinance passed, Smith suggested making the policy more flexible. He advised adding a clause that allowed for the local government to carry out “any other worthy, justifiable, or appropriate action” in other languages (see Clause K, Frederick County’s 2012 Ordinance, Appendix B). In the video of the meeting, his colleagues seem more nonchalant about the wording but willing to listen and agree to his recommendations. The official minutes did not record the fact that it was Smith who introduced these changes, and in our interview, he did not recall having made the suggestions. However, he did describe himself as “the type of person that would look at details and say, ‘Wait a minute, why don’t you change this word or that,’” and that he

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would not be surprised if he had in fact taken the lead on these revisions. Immediately after they approved these changes, the ordinance passed, 4–1. In some ways, Young was highly effective at effecting change, persuading people, and circulating new ideas, not just in language policy but in other areas of politics too. At the same time, there was backlash. When speaking at government meetings or with reporters, he said things about language, race, and immigration that my participants considered to be a step too far. For example, he expressed a desire to make Frederick “the most unfriendly county in the state of Maryland to illegal aliens” (Anderson, 2011, November 13). He was also quite open about his relationships with people at ProEnglish, including inviting them on to his talk radio show at least twice. Young was also open about trying to help other counties take similar kinds of measures, in part through a tour he and Sheriff Jenkins did in late 2012 “to present an anti-illegal immigrant film throughout the state” (Watcher, 2012, December 5). He also framed the 2012 ordinance as a feather in his cap during his subsequent political endeavors. At the time, though, Young’s coordination between ProEnglish, the other commissioners, and county staff made it the most successful use of the ProEnglish template thus far. *** A few months later, a writer for the Carroll County Times wrote that “English has been the unofficial language of Carroll County since it was formed in 1837, but the Carroll County Board of Commissioners is looking to make things official” (Alexandersen, 2012, September 27). The article’s breezy tone foreshadowed the fact that this policy campaign seemed the smoothest in many ways. There were no significant revisions between the first and second drafts, as in Frederick and Queen Anne’s, no crises of credibility like in Anne Arundel, and, for the only time in this entire study, the policy passed unanimously with the support of all five county commissioners. Interestingly, Taneytown, a small town in Carroll County, had passed an Official English resolution in 2006, but the issue does not appear to have really surfaced again until Frederick County’s successful campaign (Malik, 2006, November 15). By the time of the first public meeting on the issue, Commissioner Haven Shoemaker had already assembled the county attorney, Suzanne Bibby from ProEnglish (who also testified in Frederick), and a set of talking points about the popularity and affordances of making English the official language. Shoemaker stated explicitly that the attorney had already drafted an ordinance that was “patterned” off of Frederick’s and that he was also aware of similar policies in Hazleton and Queen Anne’s County. As in the other counties, it is unclear how the government and ProEnglish initiated a relationship; the local paper described the situation as “Shoemaker received backing from Suzanne

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Bibby, director of government relations for ProEnglish” (Alexandersen, 2012, September 27). Young later arranged to interview her on his radio show about Carroll’s policy, around the time of Carroll County’s public hearing, which exemplifies the way that people in different counties and with different roles can coordinate a policy’s trajectory while still foregrounding the policy’s local scale (One Frederick Many Voices, 2012, October 5). The only significant obstacle to the ordinance passing turned out to be a hurricane that delayed the process for several months, making this campaign the longest one in Maryland. Weather and damage from Hurricane Sandy pushed back the public hearing from October to December and then the final vote to after the holidays, at the very end of January. I highlight this point because it represents my more general finding that there is little correlation between the length of a policy campaign and its outcome or tenor. Brief text histories can lead to failure, withdrawal, or success, just as drawn-out histories can exist for a number of different reasons, ranging from disruptions to careful deliberation to irreconcilable tensions. Despite the delay, the policy passed in early 2013, thereby joining Frederick County in using and refining the template and process first developed in Hazleton and at ProEnglish. I now turn to two counties that faced more stumbling blocks. Struggling with Templates: Anne Arundel County and Queen Anne’s County While Frederick and Carroll Counties took a while to develop their successful language policies, language policy in Anne Arundel County moved faster but also with more problems. Anne Arundel seems to have been inspired by Frederick County’s early success: A few days after Young started talking publicly about his ordinance, Kirby Delauter, one of the other Frederick commissioners, remembered receiving a “brief” phone call from another local lawmaker seeking advice. When I listed some of the possible counties the call could have come from, his hunch was that it was from Anne Arundel, which may explain the quick uptake. With Annapolis as its county seat, and its close proximity to both Baltimore and Washington, DC, Anne Arundel County is a more developed and more politically moderate part of the state. Perhaps in part because of the different political environment, the sponsor in Anne Arundel County, Jerry Walker, had a difficult time selling his bill, until he ultimately withdrew it a month later before it ever even came to a vote. According to an article published the day before the formal introduction, “the bill is the first in a series he plans to press that will attempt to stem illegal immigration locally,” and was being “co-sponsored” by three other council members (Fuller, 2012, February 5). In an interview, David Lee, a pseudonym for one of the Anne Arundel politicians who supported this bill

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but wished to stay anonymous, pointed to national immigration rates as one of his primary motivations for supporting the bill. Specifically, he was concerned about the prospect of immigrants insisting on using languages other than English. Lee’s fellow county council member Chris Trumbauer was critical of the bill from the beginning. He noted that the Maryland DREAM Act had recently passed, narrowly, which was a contributing factor to “this Englishonly movement,” particularly in Anne Arundel County, where the vote on the ballot measure had been split more than in most other parts of Maryland. Trumbauer also remarked that the language policy might have seemed like a steppingstone to higher office or at least more recognition for the cosponsors: “I think that some people were trying to beef up their, you know, conservative bona fides.” In other words, despite Walker’s framing of the issue as purely about addressing pressing local immigration and language issues, the cosponsors could have had a range of incentives for supporting the bill. Trumbauer said he never considered being one of the cosponsors, because he viewed “the whole movement” to make English an official language at the local level as “spurious” and “ridiculous” and said he had a certain “wonderment” at the whole phenomenon. While Walker’s framing of the bill is impossible to separate from the bill itself, the text does not mention immigration and only consisted of prefatory boilerplate and one brief paragraph. Importantly, the policy bore no resemblance to ProEnglish’s template. Here is the content that the ordinance would have added to the county’s code (the all-caps format is from the original): ENGLISH SHALL BE THE OFFICIAL AND COMMON LANGUAGE OF THE COUNTY. ALL OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS, COMMUNICATION AND AGREEMENTS ON BEHALF OF THE COUNTY SHALL BE IN ENGLISH UNLESS MANDATED BY FEDERAL OR STATE LAW OR AS NECESSARY TO PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF VICTIMS OF CRIME AND CRIMINAL DEFENDANTS, TO PROTECT PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY, TO TEACH ENGLISH TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS, OR TO PROMOTE TRADE AND TOURISM IN THE COUNTY.

While the concepts and goals are certainly similar – English is official and documents are in English, with many exceptions – none of the precise wording is the same except for brief stock phrases. Like Jenkins’ proposed ordinance in Frederick County in 2008, this is a case of interdiscursivity but not of using a template: The topics and purposes are largely the same but there are almost no formal features in common. This standalone text mirrored the overall policy campaign, which included minimal input from any English-only organization. U.S. English’s Mauro Mujica (2012, February 13) wrote a letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun, but I found no evidence of U.S. English or ProEnglish working directly with any of the lawmakers involved or even testifying at any

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government hearings. For his part, Trumbauer did not recall any significant “advocacy around this on the pro side” other than “1–2” emails from constituents calling him “an idiot” for not supporting the bill. Soon after Walker introduced the policy, however, the language policy campaign was eclipsed by two other unfolding local crises. During this stretch of early 2012, the council was also trying to fill a vacancy on the county council. The vacancy stemmed from the fact that one of the council members had been convicted of some tax-related crimes and had gone to prison. At that point, his remaining colleagues were looking for a replacement to appoint. So, the local government was under more scrutiny than usual, because of both the circumstances surrounding the vacancy and the public process of interviewing potential replacements. The second crisis began during one of these interviews, which were held during open government meetings. One of the interviewers, Dick Ladd, asked a candidate about his military service, which led to the two swapping Vietnam and Korean War stories. At one point in the exchange, Ladd used a racial slur against Asian people as he described how “we thought the g---were coming over the perimeter” (Schuh, 2012, February 17). Trumbauer and Walker both pointed to this gaffe as the reason the bill had to be withdrawn. Unsurprisingly, the comment was “deemed offensive” by the other council members and many of their constituents, and so the “sponsors felt that the timing would be bad” to move forward with a bill so associated with immigration, according to Trumbauer. Similarly, Walker told a local newspaper that “due to the atmosphere created by some of my colleagues, the bill was being perceived as racist,” and he went on to clarify that he was referring to the anti-Asian comment (Bourg, 2012, March 7). In the same article, Walker expressed a desire to reintroduce the bill sometime in the future, but that has not happened so far, despite the fact that one of his colleagues, John Grasso, had already created a sign that announced “English: Anne Arundel’s official language” and despite Walker remaining active in Anne Arundel government until 2020. This case demonstrates that just writing an English-only policy is not sufficient grounds to enact it. Anne Arundel’s bill was blunt, with few of the usual exceptions or disclaimers, which meant that when one of the bill’s supporters went off script, there was nothing the other supporters could point to in the bill to neutralize public scrutiny. For example, recall that the ProEnglish template frames the problem as one of protecting at-risk English users rather than discriminating against multilingual people or immigrants. I suspect that if one or more English-only organizations had been involved, they would have helped steer the council members toward a more cautious policy text and a more circumspect strategy for talking about immigration and race. Furthermore, it’s possible that nothing could have salvaged the policy campaign after the racist

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comment at the meeting, which shows that even discourse in seemingly distinct events, like a public job interview, can make a difference. On one hand, Anne Arundel’s policy was the least successful of any discussed in this text history. On the other hand, even failed or unresolved policy campaigns can aid the English-only movement. In a prescient article, Gerda Bikales (1986), U.S. English’s executive director at the time, describes how failure can be helpful. Bikales’ piece was an invited response to an article in The International Journal of the Sociology of Language on a proposed English Language Amendment (ELA) to the US Constitution, making it a rare example of someone articulating an English-only argument for an academic publication. She explains that while her organization “does not expect it to become law in the near future,” nevertheless “it is hardly necessary to pass the ELA for it to have enormously beneficial results” (Bikales, 1986, p. 81). These results include heightened awareness of language policy as an issue, increased support for English as an official language, and higher membership numbers for the organization (Bikales, 1986, p. 82). In other words, a policy campaign can be politically and financially advantageous whether the policy actually passes or not. Bikales is describing a situation in which failures are salvageable, but opposition can actually even be preferable in some cases. For example, in a memo from the same year and the same organization, Kathy Bricker (1986, August 23) lamented the fact that the ACLU, MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund), LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), and the Chinese American Society “have not sued us yet.” Bricker goes on to explain: “That was actually a disappointment in a way, since we held a fund-raising letter based on the lawsuit. I suspect we will get to use it later, however.” Here, U.S. English is actively hoping to be sued, because the fundraising and publicity possibilities would outweigh legal costs. To be clear, the question of policy failure is one area where lobbyists and activists tend to feel differently than elected officials, even if they share views on language policy in general. I have never heard or read about a local lawmaker hoping that their policy would fail or that it would be the subject of a lawsuit. In the end, Anne Arundel County’s withdrawn policy did contribute to the Englishonly movement in its own way: It resurfaced a few weeks later, a few miles away, in the next county over. *** If Anne Arundel was the most dense and developed county in the group, Queen Anne’s was the most peaceful. When I asked former county commissioner Bob Simmons how he would describe Queen Anne’s County, he compared it to his home state of North Carolina and stated emphatically that it was “much more Southern than North Carolina ever thought about being.” He had moved

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to this Delmarva Peninsula county from the Piedmont in 1998 and had served a four-year term from 2010 to 2014. Whereas the Piedmont had been more “industrial,” Queen Anne’s County was more of “a plantation environment,” with “very much the Deep South orientation.” At the same time, Simmons also commented on the community’s “good education,” high education levels, and the ability to “speak pretty darn good English.” Phil Dumenil, who held the same office during the same term as Simmons, also described the county as quiet and agricultural. Simmons and Dumenil both voted for their local government’s Englishonly policy, despite some ambivalence about its origins and purpose. Commissioner David Olds was the primary sponsor of Queen Anne’s County’s ordinance. Olds had a reputation for being the most fiscally conservative commissioner, according to Dumenil. Dumenil added that Olds was the kind of lawmaker who, when a county office would ask for “two new trucks,” might be the one to ask if they were getting the best possible deal, if they really needed two, and how old the existing trucks were. Olds introduced the policy during a routine roundtable discussion in February 2012. Dumenil explained to me that roundtables were a common feature of government meetings and function as an opportunity for commissioners to make announcements, report on recent events in the community, or propose new ideas. As he described the scene for me, Dumenil laughed. While I mentally debated whether to ask what was so funny, he continued, saying, “I chuckle now,” because “on the grand scale” of things, language seemed like such a trivial issue to spend time addressing. Curiously, Olds’ first public draft was identical to Anne Arundel’s bill, except for a couple of small differences: It mentioned Queen Anne’s County, and it had a misspelled word (“promot” rather than “promote”). There were about three weeks in between when it appeared in the two counties, and it is unclear how this text made the trip. Perhaps in response to the bill being withdrawn in Anne Arundel County, or perhaps because of some other factor(s), Olds introduced a revised version of the policy two months later that matched the ProEnglish template instead. Essentially, for their rough draft, Queen Anne’s County copied Anne Arundel County. For their final draft, they copied ProEnglish. In both cases, Queen Anne’s County’s policy is still adapted to its own local context, particularly in the final draft. This is a case of one county using two different sources as templates, first another county and then an organization. ProEnglish (2012, August) explicitly notes in their newsletter that “ProEnglish recommended that the Queen Anne’s Commissioners amend the proposed ordinance to reflect the ProEnglish model” and that when Olds “offered the ProEnglish model language as a substitute,” his colleagues “agreed to adopt” it (p. 4). When I floated the question of who else besides Olds had

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been involved in writing either draft of the policy, Dumenil responded that the policy was Olds’ “baby” and that he did not know of anyone else who had worked on it locally. At the same time, he did think it was very possible that someone had “put a bug in his ear,” and he did recall receiving emails from ProEnglish offering more information about the issue if he was interested. He said he never responded or interacted directly with anyone from ProEnglish, however, and that he had not paid much attention to the emails because the issue was “so far down his radar.” I asked Dumenil whether he had ever considered voting against the ordinance if he was so skeptical. To my surprise, he said yes, because “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” He may have meant that language was not a problem in need of fixing or that the local government’s set of laws was already functional and not in need of an additional law. So, the ordinance did not pass out of some shared ideological commitment. Instead, it was part of the give and take of policymaking, where lawmakers tend to support each other’s proposals unless they consider it completely incompatible with their political party or other commitments. In other words, if they are skeptical or on the fence, there are many more incentives to pass a bill than to question it. Perhaps impatient with the fact that I kept naively trying to ask him about language ideology, Dumenil finally said, “Kathy, it’s politics!” and explained that he needed Olds’ support for other bills in the future. Simmons made a similar point. While the commissioners were willing to let the ordinance go through in its revised form, Queen Anne’s County’s policy did receive some attention in the final stretch. At the public hearing on May 9, 2012, the only two people to speak were Asgar Asgarov, a board member from ProEnglish, and Kevin Waterman, who criticized the policy on libertarian grounds. Waterman read from a prepared statement during his testimony, which I learned during our interview was later published as an op-ed on a local website (Waterman, 2012, April 24). In the published version of his remarks, Waterman said that he had talked to several of the commissioners about the bill before the hearing. Former county commissioner Simmons recalled that meeting warmly and spoke highly of Waterman. At that public event, however, Waterman delivered a scathing critique of the bill for its overreach (“nanny statism” and “in a limited government society, language is simply not a concern of government”), its economic implications (“there is no meaningful fiscal savings”), and its message that “foreigners need not apply” for local jobs or other opportunities. He concluded by describing it as “a bad bill, responding to a non-existent threat, that sends the wrong message about our county.” Waterman’s cogent critique reminds me of Schildkraut’s (2005) finding that people who place a high value on “freedom” are almost uniformly against English-only policies (p. 136). Ultimately, however, the commissioners made no new revisions that

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night, the ordinance passed 4–1, and Queen Anne’s County’s policy is still in effect today. While I have pieced together this account of how people write local Englishonly policies, questions remain about how they discuss the ideological implications of their work. What do they foreground or value, what do they downplay or deride, and how do they work toward consensus or handle differences, especially when it comes to the issue of the local scale? And how does it happen that occasionally people don’t just reframe or refine these policies but actually repeal them? I address these questions in Chapters 3 and 4.

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3

Emphasizing the Local in Language Policy From Upscaling to Downscaling

One of the last people I interviewed was Robin Bartlett Frazier. By the time we met up in Westminster, Maryland, in 2019, I had been hoping for a chance to speak with Frazier for years, ever since she had been one of the county commissioners who helped make English the official language of Carroll County back in 2013. Compared to the other local governments I studied, that Board of County Commissioners seemed particularly formidable. Whereas the Englishonly campaigns in the other counties went off the rails (Anne Arundel County), wavered along the way (Queen Anne’s County), or succeeded but later backfired (Frederick County), Frazier and her colleagues voted unanimously to make English official and faced comparatively little internal struggle or external criticism along the way. So, I was curious to hear the perspective of someone who was part of such a smooth language policy campaign. I wondered how she would contextualize Carroll County’s Official English ordinance – would she describe it as a model for the rest of the country, as a steppingstone to state- or national-level policies? Most of my participants did not speak in such sweeping terms, but if anyone might, I thought it would be someone from Carroll County. As we talked, I realized my hunch was wrong. I asked about language policy at the state and national levels, and she answered ambivalently, then turned the tables by asking me a question of her own and then bringing the conversation back down to local language policy: flowers: So, do you think that ideally English would be the official language of Maryland and of the United States? frazier: Mmm, I think most things should be decided at the state level. So, I’m not a big universal, ‘let’s make a law’ (laughs) thinker. So, you know, at the federal level I would say no. Mmm and you know, my mind tells me that there could be some states that have so many Spanish speaking people that, for example, that they might want to have two languages. … You know, I’d have to leave it up to them, but I don’t think Maryland is one of those states. … Because, like I said, it starts snowballing. Where do you stop? (laughs) And it’s very expensive to have documentation, signs, and all kinds of things in different languages. flowers: Mhmm. frazier: Howard County has a lot of it. Did you study Howard at all? 89

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flowers: Oh … no. I only study places that are … frazier: Considering? flowers: Want to make English the official language.

In response to my initial question, Frazier expresses skepticism toward making English the national official language. Rather than describe her own language policy as a model worth replicating at higher scales, she takes a markedly different approach, by pitching English as a more localized language and language policy as a more localized project. She distances herself from the notion of being “a big universal, ‘let’s make a law’ thinker” by laughing at the very thought. This interaction sticks with me because Frazier defies the expectation that people want their discourse to seem ever more universal. Through my questioning, I all but invited her to situate the policy in state- or national-level terms, but instead she consistently talks about her language policy as local by design, not just local by necessity or local for now. I had been thinking more about how Carroll County fits into US language policy overall, while she was focused on how Carroll County contrasts with the more multilingual community next door, Howard County. Frazier was not the only one in Carroll County making this kind of argument. Amid some debate over whether Carroll County should keep their English-only policy, the Carroll County Times published an opinion piece a few months after I interviewed Frazier. Christopher Tomlinson of the county’s Republican Central Committee pointed to Montgomery County, another linguistically and racially diverse neighboring county. While Howard County is closer to Baltimore, Montgomery is just southwest, closer to Washington, DC (Figure 3.1). Tomlinson (2020) warned: Look no further than Montgomery County. According to its county government website, Montgomery translates documents regularly into nearly a dozen languages, including Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish, Korean, French, Amharic, Russian, Hindi and Urdu. Heading in a direction completely opposite of Carroll, a 2010 executive order mandated that Montgomery County departments ‘implement plans for removing ­language bariers’ for limited English proficient individuals and to ‘build a linguistically accessible and culturally competent government.’

For both Tomlinson and Frazier, the best way to explain why their county enacted an English-only policy was to contrast Carroll with its neighbors, rather than to situate Carroll in some larger context. *** At the same time, not everyone took this localized approach. I witnessed the exact opposite sort of response when I interviewed David Lee (pseudonym), one of the politicians from Anne Arundel County. Like Robin Bartlett Frazier, he supported making English the official language. Unlike in Frazier’s

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Figure 3.1 A map showing Carroll County, which passed an Englishonly policy; two more linguistically and racially diverse nearby counties, Montgomery County and Howard County; and the two major cities in the region, Washington, DC, and Baltimore, Maryland

experience, Anne Arundel’s policy was withdrawn before it could come to a vote. Lee invited me to do the interview at his home, and throughout our interview, I would ask him a question that I thought was fairly localized, and he would respond with something much broader about the nation or the globe. For example, at one point I asked him “Why did you think it was important?” as I was gesturing toward a paper copy of his county’s proposed policy; from my perspective, the “it” in my question was that local bill printed on that piece of paper. We were both only a foot or two away from the paper. When Lee answered, however, he framed his beliefs in more global terms, saying “I think the roots come out of my views on Europe” and how, in his view, Europe has too many languages and too much linguistic strife. After I emailed Lee this interview excerpt during my writing process, he gave me a call. When I saw his number on my phone, I felt a sinking feeling

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because I assumed he was going to ask me to take it out or add some caveats. After I answered the phone, though, I realized he had called to urge me to add more emphasis on the global, not less. He noted that while the excerpt I quoted is just about language policy, really his focus is not just language but also media, culture, communication, and assimilation more broadly. He also let me know that he saw Official English as one way to prevent Sharia law from taking over.1 So, Lee was expanding the scope of this county-level bill in every way. He was taking my question about his county’s policy and framing his answer in much more transnational terms. This chapter explores the discourse of people like Frazier and Lee. Despite Lee’s desire for English-only policies to have a global reach, Frazier and many of the other people most directly involved in successfully passing Englishonly policies situate their work more locally, both in terms of how they enact language policies in their own local governments and in terms of how they discuss these policies as harmless community initiatives or as bulwarks against their neighboring counties. If Lee was engaging in what sociolinguist Jan Blommaert (2010) has called “upscaling,” then Frazier was doing the reverse, “downscaling.” When studying how people situate their discourse in space and time, or how they decide which scales are relevant in a given situation, most scholarship had focused on upscaling, but not everyone wants their language practices to seem more widespread. Not everyone is invested in the “one nation, one language” ideology that undergirds so many language policy initiatives. Irvine and Gal (2000) describe this ideology as the desire to have “one nation, speaking one language, ruled by one state, within one bounded territory” (p. 63).2 While scholars have noted the limitations of this ideology, what is notable in this study is that many US policymakers are not even attempting to achieve “one nation, one language.” These policymakers also tend to stay away from discourse about English as a global language. Where once figures like Thomas Babington Macaulay (1835/1972) described English as “preeminent even among the languages of the West,” “likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas,” and tied to “empire,” those tropes are not what tend to fuel the English-only movement today (pp. 241–242). Instead, I argue that people in this movement find traction in downscaling, or discourse

1

The specter of Sharia law (a body of law based in Islam) worries some people in the United States, particularly since 9/11. This scapegoating of Sharia law and Islam more generally is one area where the United States has much in common with other Western nations. See Khan (2020) on the United States and the United Kingdom, Haque (2010) on Canada, and Yaghi and Ryan (2022) on New Zealand. 2 There is a rich body of work detailing the origins and consequences of the “one nation, one language” ideology (see Baron, 1990, p. 28; Woolard and Schieffelin, 1994, p. 61; Woolard, 1998, pp. 16–17; Bauman and Briggs, 2003, p. 195; Silverstein, 2003, p. 531; Heller and McElhinny, 2017, p. 105; Zentella, 2017, p. 24).

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that makes people’s utterances and themselves seem more situated, local, innocuous, or authentic. Because people vary in how they value and attach meaning to different scales, scaling in either direction can be a way to strive for linguistic authority (Gal and Woolard, 2001; Woolard, 2016). What really strikes me, and what I will return to toward the end of the chapter, is that Frazier’s modest approach ultimately seems to be not just more common but also more effective at enacting English-only policies than Lee’s more brash approach. I do not think it is a coincidence that the policy proposal in Lee’s county ultimately failed before it could even come up for a vote, while Frazier’s county passed their English-only policy quite easily. People in the English-only movement are often invested in arguing that language policies are not necessarily racist or xenophobic (Bauman and Briggs, 2003, p. 302; Dick, 2011, p. 50), and downscaling can help create this sense of innocuousness. While adding downscaling to the mix usually makes English-only policies more impervious to criticism, it can also reveal their internal contradictions. When people mix different scaling practices in interaction, the combination occasionally comes across as more dissonant to their interlocutors and may create opportunities for questioning and undoing English-only policies. The larger point is that upscaling and downscaling are both common, viable, and effective forms of discourse. In making this argument, I hope to decouple the often-assumed link between power and upscaling; the people highlighted in this chapter are powerful by almost any definition of the word: They are white US citizens who use privileged varieties of English, who have in most cases won office as elected officials or led English-only organizations, and who use their positions to write, circulate, and support English-only policies. I hope to show that downscaling can be just as compatible with power as upscaling is. To make this case, I draw on data from across my study. While in Chapter 2 I take a more chronological approach to telling the story of how people write, revise, and circulate English-only policies, since writing is a process that unfolds over time, upscaling and downscaling are strategies that have truly permeated the whole movement since the beginning. I find that there have not been clear changes over time. What does vary, however, is how different scaling practices fit together and function. Specifically, I identify three kinds of downscaling: 1 . Downscaling on its own 2. Complementary upscaling and downscaling 3. Dissonant upscaling and downscaling In terms of downscaling on its own, I address moments where people downscale their English-only discourse by minimizing the scale and scope of English-only policies, which often has the effect of making them seem harmless and relatable.

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Next, I address what happens when people jump scales in both directions in the course of a single utterance or interaction. Rather than making English-only policies seem quaint, this move often has the effect of making English-only seem natural and desirable at any scale. While much of the analysis focuses on how downscaling can bolster the English-only movement, I also consider examples of when the juxtaposition of different scaling strategies backfires (from the perspectives of people involved in a given language policy campaign). In such moments, upscaling and downscaling come across as jarring and can create opportunities to question or resist the logic of English-only policies. From Upscaling to Downscaling The English-only movement’s penchant for emphasizing the local in local language policy ties into some much larger conversations about what makes some language practices seem more important, more valuable, more powerful, and more legitimate than others. Linguistic anthropologists and linguists such as Susan Gal, Kathryn Woolard, and Monica Heller have led the way in identifying how exactly linguistic authority emerges and evolves in the course of interaction, in terms of both what people say about language and what assumptions remain unspoken. Drawing on her work in Catalonia and Spain, Woolard (2016) identifies two very different forms of linguistic authority, both of which are relevant to US language policy as well: anonymity and authenticity. The first is the “ideology of anonymity,” which posits that the goal of language is to seem as universal and neutral as possible, as though the speaker could be from anywhere or nowhere (Woolard, 2016, p. 25). In this framework, what matters is “using a common, unmarked public language” (p. 25). This ideal is not necessarily realistic or desirable, of course, but it is what motivates phenomena like newscaster speak, education that focuses on Standard English, accent reduction training, and grammar guides that assume there is one correct way to write. Earlier in her career, Woolard (1989) observed this ideology of anonymity in the English-only movement, where people were making arguments that English was neutral and universal, whereas other languages were hopelessly tied to particular ethnic enclaves and interests. The other form of linguistic authority Woolard (2016) identifies is essentially the opposite: the “ideology of authenticity.” In this case, people’s goal is not to seem like they could be from anywhere but instead to seem like they are from somewhere particular (Woolard, 2016, p. 22). Authenticity can be tied to many facets of identity, of course, but Woolard (2016) points in particular to “the value of a language in its relationship to a particular community” and to how a language “must be perceived as deeply rooted in social and geographic territory in order to have value” (p. 22). Often, both approaches to linguistic authority are in play, and indeed they each can become more meaningful when juxtaposed.

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The “one nation, one language” ideology draws much of its power from the fact that both anonymity and authenticity have a part to play. Bonfiglio’s (2002) study of the rise of the Standard American English dialect epitomizes this duality. In his study of early 1900s language debates in the United States, Bonfiglio (2002) charts the ways that some white people in the United States began to want their speech to seem at once neutral and specifically white, protestant, and American. The ideologies around this dialect did not develop in a vacuum but were very much about some white people’s desire not to seem Jewish, Catholic, Southern European, or Eastern European. The issue is that when it comes to language policy and other institutional sorts of discourse, there has been a lot of attention to situations where people try to make their discourse as universal as possible, and only recently more attention is being given to cases where people are more invested in establishing local authenticity or in trying to combine the two forms of linguistic authority. Jan Blommaert’s theory of scale jumping is key here. Over the course of almost twenty years, Blommaert first developed and then continually revised and refined a new approach to scale. Before his too-soon death in 2021, he made a huge impact on how people, including myself, think about how language is situated in space, time, and hierarchies. Blommaert (2003) helped popularize the concept of scale in a special issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics on globalization. Scale taps into some much older questions about the nature of discourse, power, communicative events, context, and contextualization (Koven, 2016, p.  27). While Blommaert has always treated scale as almost entirely a discursive phenomenon, Lemke (2000) had recently called attention to scales as both discursive and nondiscursive. Specifically, Lemke (2000) identifies twenty-two timescales relevant to understanding human activity, from the time required for chemical reactions to the school day to the lifespan to geological eras (p. 277). Lemke (2000) argues that while scales are not merely discursive, determining and negotiating what scales are relevant are also meaning-making practices, for both researchers and participants. Despite these preexisting bodies of work, I do not see Blommaert’s treatment of scale as just a way to reinvent the wheel. In an era of heightened awareness of globalization and localization (Johnstone, 2016), it makes sense to pay particular attention to how people situate their discourse and themselves in hierarchical spaces and times. Blommaert’s approach offered something new with a more fine-grained way to track how people establish what aspects of context are relevant in a given moment. Upscaling happens when people respond to an utterance with one that seems situated in a larger and more rhetorically powerful scale (Blommaert, 2007, 2010; Irvine, 2016). In a composite scenario Blommaert (2007) describes between a student and a tutor, for example, a student says they plan to do their

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dissertation one way, while the tutor retorts that the university-wide norm is to do dissertations another way (p. 6). In this interaction, Blommaert (2007) suggests that the tutor is “invoking practices that have validity beyond the hereand-now – normative validity” (p. 6). This scenario is similar to my interaction with David Lee, discussed earlier, where I was thinking about his county’s policy and he was framing the issue in transatlantic terms. These examples make a certain sense on their own, but the issue is that people may not want to seem more authoritative, or they may not even agree on what counts as authoritative. Even within universities and academic disciplines, for example, people disagree about how dissertations should be written (Prior, 1998). Elsewhere, Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck (2005) write, “[a] move from Kenya to the UK is a move from the periphery of the world to one of its centers” (p. 202). In the next sentence, they add, even more bluntly, that “[s]ome spaces are affluent and prestigious, others are not” (p. 203). With any two places, however, whether the UK and Kenya or, in the case of my study, Carroll County and Howard County, or rural Maryland and Washington, DC, or Baltimore, what counts as central or peripheral, affluent or not, prestigious or not, desirable or not will be highly subjective. There is not always clarity or consensus around what counts as what. Scales may be hierarchical, in other words, but those hierarchies are ideological, perspectival, and contingent. Interventions into theories of scaling have tended to take two forms: exploring upscaling as a more complex phenomenon and turning attention from upscaling to downscaling. In terms of the former, Blommaert (2003) himself admits that “it is hard to determine which scale would hierarchically dominate the others” (p. 608). In a discussion of Heller’s (2003) article in the same special issue on globalization, about the local commodification of French in Canadian tourist sites and call centers, he acknowledges that “the direction of value changes again appears to be unpredictable” (p. 613). Blommaert (2003) concludes, “we shall need more ethnography” going forward (p. 615) (emphasis in original). Blommaert, Westinen, and Leppänen (2015) push this self-reflection even further, suggesting that “[t]he 2007 paper [Blommaert, 2007] was a clumsy and altogether unsuccessful attempt,” especially in light of Westinen’s finding that while scale does matter to her participants, their views on what would even count as high/low or center/periphery are quite dynamic (p. 121). In a trenchant critique, Canagarajah (2013) describes Blommaert’s (2010) model of scale as “static,” “rigid,” and limited because it “doesn’t leave room for agency and maneuver” (p. 156). To address these problems, he argues, “rather than scales shaping people, we have to consider how people invoke scales for their communicative and social objectives” (p. 158). This argument builds on some of Canagarajah’s (2005) earlier work on local language policy. Examining people’s actual discourse is important because their “objectives” are not always going to revolve around upscaling. A few years later,

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Canagarajah and De Costa (2016) turn from theoretical critique to a methodological call: “The specificity of strategies of scaling/rescaling practice needs more analysis. To explore these practices, we need a more negotiated and interactional orientation to data. Such a research orientation could help bring out the contested nature of scales” (p. 8). In my own work, I too find that “a more negotiated and interactional orientation to data” leads to more insight into “the contested nature of scales.” I have found this orientation helpful in revealing how flexible people are in how they talk about language policy. It is this flexibility that allows them to align with or distance themselves from the local, the regional, the national, the transnational, or the global scale at will, in whatever way might make their discourse seem most authoritative in the moment, even if that means taking a different approach than other people in their same social movement. In addition to complicating the notion of upscaling, there has also been a push to explore downscaling. In the context of literacy education, Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc (2016) argue for further attention to both downscaling and the language ideologies that make downscaling desirable. They define downscaling as “the inverse of upscaling by invoking the local,” which “can be an effective way of redistributing authority or reframing an issue in different spatial or temporal relations” (pp. 272–273). Whether the issue is governmental language policy or literacy education, it is not necessarily a sign of a lack of authority to “rescale the encounter” downward. Rather, downscaling can be a way to alter what counts as authority and who counts as authoritative. Analyzing instances of downscaling can be a nuanced way to track such ideologies as they emerge, sediment, and dissolve in interactions. In the English-only movement, where so much of the conversation revolves around people’s perspectives on the scope of their work, scaling plays a particularly important role. To explore how scaling practices vary in the English-only movement, I marked instances of scale jumping across my research: interviews, observations, policy texts, archival materials, and other media. I noted utterances where people seemed to make themselves, their language policy, their organization, or the English language seem more national, global, or universal (upscaling) or more local, authentic, or innocuous (downscaling). I also focused on what people were responding to and how their discourse was subsequently taken up. For example, if someone argues for situating a language policy at the state level, it matters whether they are arguing against someone who wanted to situate it at the city level or the national level – the former would be upscaling, the latter would be downscaling. I include myself in this analysis, since research interviews are communicative events too (Briggs, 1986; Koven, 2014). When I designate certain kinds of upscaling and downscaling as “complementary” or “dissonant” in this chapter, those assessments are not about my own personal views, nor are they from the perspective of the people who

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protested some of these policies (see Chapter 4). Rather, in categorizing my findings in this way, my aim is to represent the perspectives of the people who are in favor of making English the official language. So, when I describe an example in positive terms, I am pointing to the way that utterance has been praised, emulated, or treated as unmarked by other people in the English-only movement. Conversely, when I describe an utterance in more negative terms, I refer to the ways it has been criticized by the people involved. Downscaling in Action Over time and across campaigns, organizations, people, and texts, downscaling is common and performs a range of functions, both on its own and in conjunction with upscaling. While I opened the chapter with two contemporary examples, I go into more detail here about instances of downscaling from earlier in the movement’s history, in order to show how this practice has been key to making English-only policies seem more meaningful and desirable since the beginning. I then turn to examples of complementary upscaling and downscaling within the same utterance, to demonstrate how these two kinds of scale jumping can work effectively together. I conclude by addressing instances in which upscaling and downscaling clashed, in order to consider the limits of scale jumping. The founders and employees of the organizations U.S. English and ProEnglish have talked about scale throughout their history. To be sure, some people affiliated with English-only organizations have taken a more national approach. Senator S. I. Hayakawa, for example, proposed the English Language Amendment to the US Constitution and authored pamphlets with titles like “The English Language Amendment: One Nation … Indivisible?” after becoming Honorary Chairman of U.S. English (Hayakawa, 1985). However, many of Hayakawa’s colleagues did not share his approach. John Tanton in particular took a much different tack in his capacity as the founder of U.S. English and, more than a decade later, ProEnglish. Even before he started U.S. English in 1983, he explicitly called for moving from global to local. In a letter to Harry Haines, a fellow activist, Tanton (1981, June 30) writes: If I can offer anything in return, it’s a word of caution against depicting mankind’s problems in a global context where local terms will do. I’ll let my friend and colleague Garrett Hardin carry the burden of the argument in his enclosed writings. The higher up the scale of a dilemma, the easier it is to lose most of us local folks!

While it is unclear in the letter which of “mankind’s problems” they are discussing, or what the favor is “in return” for, what is significant is the general advice to frame issues in “local terms,” because “the higher up the scale…,

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the easier it is to lose most of us local folks!” This letter is also notable because Tanton had already worked for years with national organizations such as the Sierra Club, Zero Population Growth, and his own Federation for American Immigration Reform, all of which had members in and shaped the politics of every state in the United States. So, it is not obvious that Tanton would count himself as one of “us local folks.” Significantly, Tanton is not talking about whether certain phenomena are local or not but rather about the relative advantages and disadvantages of describing those phenomena as local. His focus is not so much on material understandings of scale (Lemke, 2000) or the local (Pennycook, 2010) but on the discourse about scale. Tanton may have been purposefully presenting himself as someone with local credibility or trying to establish common ground with Haines as a fellow resident of Petoskey, a small town in Michigan. Either way, he is both calling for and performing downscaling. The other significant aspect of this letter is the reference to Tanton’s “friend and colleague,” Garrett Hardin. Hardin was a professor of ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is most known for popularizing the interdisciplinary theory of “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968). This theory has been taken up in biology, environmental studies, economics, and philosophy and in social movements ranging from environmentalism to anti-immigration activism. Hardin wrote to Tanton at least as early as 1971, initially in the context of the Sierra Club (Hardin, 1971, March 6). Their several decades of correspondence, coupled with the fact that Tanton leans on Hardin to “carry the burden of the argument” for localism, makes it worth briefly examining the nature of those “enclosed writings.” While the particular texts sent to Haines were not included or named in Tanton’s archived papers, I suspect that they consisted of Hardin’s work on the topic of framing issues locally as opposed to globally. For example, the year before Tanton’s letter, Hardin (1980) had published an editorial in an academic journal titled “What is a ‘global’ problem?” In this editorial, he argues against global framing using examples of disease: We never speak of the ‘global mosquito problem’ or the ‘global dysentery problem.’ Why not? Because we recognize that these problems have to be dealt with locally, e.g., by adding Gambusia to local ponds to ingest mosquito larvae or by chlorinating local waters to kill local bacteria. Malaria and dysentery may be ubiquitous problems, but it does no good to label them ‘global,’ because that might discourage local action. (Hardin, 1980, p. 136)

The premise of this argument seems flawed or at least dated, since in the 2020s we have been hearing quite a bit about the global COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, Hardin’s broader points about how “problems have to be dealt with locally” and how global framing might “discourage local action” seem

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to have resonated with Tanton. Neither Hardin nor Tanton is arguing over whether certain phenomena are local or not but rather about the relative advantages and disadvantages of describing those phenomena as local. For example, Hardin talks about how to “label” and how people “speak,” and Tanton talks about the “terms” of debate and about the risk of “losing” an audience. This attention to discourse, or language about scales, complements the practices discussed in Chapter 2, which hinged more on the material composition and circulation of texts between and around several cities and counties. Both kinds of localism are important to the English-only movement. Hardin was not just talking about downscaling in his own academic writing; he also consulted for U.S. English during a period when Tanton and his colleagues continued to develop this strategy of downscaling. For example, in 1982 Tanton wrote a letter to Hardin thanking him for his “comments to Gerda [Bikales] on the U.S. English brochure” (Tanton, 1982, November 11). Although not all their promotional materials have been archived, there are clues as to how U.S. English’s discourse evolved during its early years. In a memo to Bikales, Tanton (1984, March 29) wrote, “I felt it would be very useful to have a third pamphlet, or actually a series of pamphlets, reducing the question down to a state level where it would have more meaning to people than does the national scope of the first pamphlet or the regional view of the second.” This memo is representative of an ongoing pattern, in which Tanton’s colleagues try to frame language policy nationally, only to have him urge them to keep “reducing the question down” to a smaller scale. Downscaling can, in his words, “have more meaning to people” who might be open to supporting English-only policies. U.S. English not only incorporated Hardin’s and Tanton’s strategies but maintained that approach even after Tanton departed the organization in 1988. Newsletters from the early 1990s almost all feature page-length features with titles like “What’s happening in the states?” and subsections on several different states (in one example: Missouri, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Florida) (U.S. English, 1991, May). One issue of the newsletter included items from cities ranging from Seattle, Washington; to Los Angeles, California; to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; to Washington, DC (U.S. English, 1991, July). In an article particularly relevant to this study, a later issue covered a debate in the Maryland House of Delegates Judiciary Committee, called “U.S. English Members Help Defeat ‘Linguistic Diversity’ Resolution” (U.S. English, Spring 1993). There are connections between this early period and the twenty-first century, in terms of the same organizations being involved throughout and some of the same people. At the same time, even English-only activists and writers who have never heard of Tanton have long been aware that people care about the local. The experience of one of my participants, Farrell Keough, illustrates how downscaling can be more persuasive than upscaling. He lives in Frederick,

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Maryland, and he has worked in business and as a writer. For several years, he ran a site called engagedcitizen.com and had written for local news and commentary sites, like The Tentacle. He supported his county’s 2012 English-only ordinance. I first met Keough in 2015, after he saw one of my flyers and sent me an email. In preparation for our interview, I found and watched a televised appearance he had made at a public hearing earlier in the year, on July 21, 2015, when his government was considering repealing the ordinance. In this appearance, he talked about why he wanted the government to keep the existing English-only policy. To my surprise, he started his statement by talking about an argument with his wife. He dryly explained, “Before coming here, I decided to consult with an expert. I happen to live with her. We had a rigorous debate. She won … which is common in our household.” Keough went on to spend a few minutes discussing why having English be the official language could save the local government money and could make communication more efficient. His opening sentences had been somewhat cryptic, and I initially assumed that this was an example of a couple in which one half was in favor of an English-only policy and the other was against it, and they had hashed it out, and the Englishonly argument had won. When I interviewed Keough, however, I realized something else was going on. He told me that their argument was not about whether to support the 2012 language policy but about why. He had been treating the issue as one of national culture, pride, and sovereignty, whereas she was thinking more in terms of local economic savings and efficiency. So, their argument was not so much about language as about scale. Specifically, they were debating whether the issue was primarily local or national. As we kept talking, he even made fun of himself for initially focusing so much on the national. He explained that he realized he needed to “step back from all the politics” around national language and immigration issues. Then he jokingly did an impression of people who say “foreigners are coming in and taking our jobs,” to which he quickly added, “as they say on South Park.”3 Keough decided to “step back” from these largescale questions of immigration and economics and instead highlight what was going on locally. This sort of “step[ping] back” is an example of downscaling. In his public statement, he talked about his own business experiences. Later, during our interview, he went into more detail and talked about what it was like to get a government permit and how much worse he thought that experience would have been if the people involved had not all used the same language. Notably, although he and his wife initially differed in their approach, her strategy of downscaling ultimately eclipsed his initial impulse to upscale the issue.

3

For the episode Keough is quoting, see Parker (2004).

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While people like Frazier, Lee, Tanton, Hardin, and Keough were thinking in terms of relevant scales (Wortham and Rhodes, 2012), there are other instances that are more about value. In other words, sometimes the issue is not how the local scale seems more relevant than higher scales but about how it seems better than higher scales. The conservative activist Hayden Duke exemplified this kind of downscaling in our interview. At one point, Duke returned to one of my earlier questions about why local governments might be creating language policies, which I had raised in our conversation before the interview officially started. He explained: You had mentioned localities, and I think the reason Frederick County and other localities are doing what they’re doing, not to justify or otherwise, but just, I think they’re doing what they’re doing as a sense of frustration … There’s absolutely no leadership coming out of Washington. It’s that the federal government is both inept and incompetent and would be more dangerous if they could actually get stuff done.

Here Duke suggests that local governments, including not just his own but “other” ones as well, create language policies out of a sense of “frustration” with higher levels of government. From this perspective, the “federal government” is “inept,” “incompetent,” and potentially “dangerous.” Interestingly, he does not necessarily endorse this perspective, as he makes clear by repeatedly saying “they’re” (instead of “we’re”) and by emphasizing that he is not trying to “justify” this approach. Nevertheless, he does give voice to a certain kind of downscaling, one that situates English in the local scale not because people do not care about higher scales but because they do not like them. This perspective is in line with recent small-government movements in the United States. Over the past fifteen  years, localized, restrictive approaches to language and immigration have become hypervisible, in the form of local laws (Dick, 2011) and conservative movements like the Minutemen (Bleeden, Gottschalk-Druschke, and Cintrón, 2010) and the Tea Party (Westermeyer, 2019). While there is some overlap, Minutemen groups are more explicitly antiimmigration, whereas the Tea Party was about a wider range of conservative and libertarian causes. As Westermeyer (2019) argues in his ethnography of “Local Tea Party groups,” these groups “created the possibility for everyday citizens to produce, materialize, and perform practices and activities” around austerity and small government (p. 9). In particular, several of my participants mentioned the Tea Party unprompted in discussing how they got interested in politics. For people who favor these laws and movements, there is often a belief that the federal government is unlikely to curb immigration and linguistic diversity (either due to reticence or incompetence) and that local groups are better equipped to do so. While scholars agree that the Minutemen and the Tea Party are important, they disagree about whether such groups are on the fringe or whether they are truly indicative of how the United States operates as a whole. When people do

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not trust the federal government to accomplish anything, is that a feature of American politics or a bug? Scholars have come to conflicting conclusions. On one hand, Hopkins (2018) suggests that most people actually still care more about national issues, perhaps now more than ever. For example, people care more about who is the president compared with who is their mayor or state senator, even though the latter might actually have more of an effect on their everyday life. On the other hand, Grumbach (2022) argues that because the federal government is so gridlocked, people do not really expect much to happen at the national level. Instead, the real policymaking happens more locally, because that is the only place where it can happen. There is a need for further research, but I suspect that people’s perspectives can align with both of these theories, depending on how the question is asked. If the question is “do you care about national issues more?”, most people would answer yes. But if the question is “do you think effective policymaking is possible at the national level?” the answer would more likely be maybe. These introductory examples have leaned heavily toward downscaling, yet more often people in the Englishonly movement combine both. Complementary Upscaling and Downscaling While downscaling can happen on its own, people often combine multiple scaling strategies in a single situation. Examples of the same person or text deploying upscaling and downscaling in quick succession are especially common in the most official, public, and legal aspects of English-only discourse. I will discuss two examples, one from language policy texts and one from a public hearing. In terms of written policies, complementary upscaling and downscaling appear in the ordinances passed in Queen Anne’s County, Carroll County, and Frederick County. Queen Anne’s County’s 2012 policy, for example, includes these clauses: (1) the English language is the common language of Queen Anne’s County, of the State of Maryland and of the United States … (5) in today’s society, Queen Anne’s County may also need to protect and preserve the rights of those who speak only the English language to use or obtain governmental programs and benefits; and (6) the government of Queen Anne’s County can reduce costs and promote efficiency, in its roles as employer and a government accountable to the people, by using the English language in its official actions and activities.

The first clause of the policy sets up a synergy between the local government, the state, and the nation. In other words, the clause suggests that English is rightfully countywide, statewide, and national. The distinction between English and other languages maps onto multiple levels, in an example of fractal recursivity

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(Irvine and Gal, 2000, p. 38). I see this clause as an example of scaling in both directions because the goal is not just to make English seem more local, or more widespread, but to legitimize its official status at a range of levels. Of course, it is worth noting that the scale jumping only goes so far: There is no attempt here to make English the official language of the school, classroom, workplace, home, neighborhood, or street. Downscaling to that degree would invite lawsuits and may not even seem desirable to the policy’s sponsors. Conversely, there is no attempt to frame English as a transnational, global, or spreading language. As the policy goes on, downscaling comes to eclipse upscaling. The later clauses have nothing to do with promoting the rise and spread of English around the nation, much less around the world. Instead, the focus is on the need to “protect and preserve” monolingual English users’ access to “governmental programs and benefits” in the context of the “County.” The last clause elaborates, by addressing the ways the “County” might benefit financially in its capacity as “employer” and “government.” This policy successfully passed, is still in effect, and shares most of this content with both the ProEnglish template and with the policies from Carroll County and Frederick County. Situating the English language and the English-only movement in several different scales is not limited to policy texts but also happens in other kinds of discourse. At Carroll County’s December 2012 public hearing, Jesse Tyler of U.S. English made a similar move in a public statement. In his brief statement, he addressed the Board of County Commissioners, as well as a room full of local constituents and a representative of ProEnglish. Tyler began by introducing himself, then introduced U.S. English as “the nation’s oldest and largest non-partisan citizen’s action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States. Our organization currently has 1.8 million members nationwide, including 2,500 active members from Maryland and 98 active members from Carroll County.” This statement is an example of complementary upscaling and downscaling because he is not just citing local membership, and not just national membership, but rather listing multiple levels. He argues that U.S. English has an established presence, and is therefore a stakeholder, in the county, the state of Maryland, and the United States. He also emphasizes more than one temporal scale, by highlighting U.S. English’s status as the “oldest” organization of its kind, on one hand, and its current number of “active members,” on the other hand. Of course, it is not clear what counts as “active” or how precise those “2,500” and “1.8 million” numbers are, but he seems less focused on the details than on making his organization and the broader movement seem ubiquitous and inevitable across scales. These policy and public hearing examples of upscaling and downscaling contrast with those in earlier examples of downscaling alone. On one hand, downscaling can have the effect of making the local seem like a positive exception to higher scales (as in the discourse of Frazier and Duke). On the

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other hand, when people strategically combine upscaling and downscaling, the effect is often to make the local seem consistent with higher scales. They are both tactics for bolstering the linguistic authority of local English-only policies, but they each rest on a different language ideology about where authority comes from (Woolard, 2016). English, and its monolingual users, can seem authoritative by seeming authentically local or by seeming more like a voice from nowhere, or both. While from my outsider perspective, these two different strategies might seem at odds with each other, my sense is that the people most immersed in shaping English-only policies have a different take. Even when different sections of the same language policy take different approaches (as in the examples from the Queen Anne’s County policy), these differences do not seem noteworthy to most of my participants, most of the time. So, upscaling and downscaling can not only coexist but mutually thrive. Even people who are critical of English-only policies, ranging from Kevin Waterman and his libertarian public statement and editorial (see Chapter 2) to everyone involved in Frederick County’s repeal campaign (see Chapter 4), did not focus their critiques on questions of scale. Across all my data, no one expressed anything along the lines of “I can’t figure out if this policy is supposed to be in harmony with or in contrast with state and federal law.” In retrospect, I realize that I even fished, unsuccessfully, for such statements in my interviews. I was curious to see what my participants would make of the scaling strategies at work in things like policy texts and public hearings, and so I asked some version of the following questions in most of the interviews: • Did you get the sense that the people supporting the ordinance were all on the same page about why they supported it, or were there multiple reasons? • Was there ever a time when you disagreed with people who also [supported/ were critical of] the ordinance, over the details, or the right way to promote it? While people answered the questions, no one answered in terms of scale. Usually, then, combining upscaling and downscaling is effective, but not so remarkable that it draws attention to itself. Occasionally, however, people do notice scale jumping, and it does bother them. In order to address the full range of constraints as well as the affordances of downscaling, in the next section I discuss two moments where people explicitly problematized the practice. Dissonant Upscaling and Downscaling Taking a flexible approach to scaling the English language has been largely effective in helping legitimize and enact new English-only policies in Frederick

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County, Queen Anne’s County, and Carroll County. However, that flexibility can occasionally seem more like dissonance, especially when it comes to the organizations and laws involved. In other words, the idea that English would be a local language and the idea that English would be at once local, statewide, and national are both more popular than the idea that outside activists and lobbyists would shape local language policies. In Frederick County, in particular, some people resented the idea that their language policy existed due in large part to ProEnglish’s and U.S. English’s help. To be sure, some of this resentment came from people who were already against English-only laws: For example, the writers of a progressive blog called Frederick Local Yokel (2015, August 13) wrote a post addressing ProEnglish directly as “you ProEnglish carpetbaggers” (a pointed, historically loaded insult in the United States akin to “interlopers”). However, even people who were open in theory to the idea of English being the official language made this kind of criticism. The employees of ProEnglish and U.S. English, the two organizations that aspire to shape policy around the country, were particularly attuned to this dissonance. Robert Vandervoort, who was Executive Director of ProEnglish at the time, highlighted this issue during our interview. He recalled: I mean, we were attacked as being like this outside group, ‘They’re not even FROM Frederick.’ It’s like, ‘Well, we’re a national organization, you know, we’re going to support this wherever it comes up,’ you know, it’d be like telling, you know, the American Red Cross, ‘Oh, well you shouldn’t do a blood drive in Wichita, Kansas, because you’re a Washington, DC-based organization.’ Well, of course the Red Cross is going to be…

Mid-sentence, his office phone rang, and I turned off the recorder as he answered it, and then after the phone call we moved on to other topics. Nevertheless, before he was cut off, he voices the kind of thing he heard from his critics in Frederick, which hinged on the fact that ProEnglish was “not even FROM Frederick.” To point out the potential problems with this kind of attack, he lays out a hypothetical situation in which people make similar complaints about the Red Cross’ humanitarian aid. His point is that not everything can or should be just local – few people would argue that the Red Cross should limit itself to just Washington, DC. Interestingly, Vandervoort seems to use “national” and “Washington, DC-based” interchangeably, or at least he voices them being used interchangeably in the bits of reported speech. Part of the tension he sensed may stem from the fact that people in Frederick, and Maryland more generally, do not see them as synonymous. In the region, DC is not so much a symbol of the nation as it is a big urban city an hour’s drive away. Therefore, people have multiple possible reasons to oppose ProEnglish’s involvement: It can be either because the organization is a symbol of the nation’s capital or because it is a symbol of a relatively unpopular and nearby city. Although Vandervoort had helped ProEnglish sponsor several English-only policies in

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and beyond Maryland, he seemed frustrated and left the organization a few months after our interview. Such conflicts were not limited to ProEnglish; there were also differences in scaling strategies between some local politicians and U.S. English. Just after Frederick County’s ordinance passed, the Frederick News-Post (2012, February 26) published an editorial arguing that while the law had passed, “We have conflicting messages here about what this English-only ruling is meant to achieve.” The article goes on to unpack this conflict in more detail, beginning with the perspective of a county official: “On the one hand, Commissioners President Blaine Young has said the ordinance will discourage illegal immigrants from coming to Frederick County. ‘It sets the tone,’ he said.” By connecting English to federal immigration law, Young is shifting the scale from local to national. However, the editorial continues: On the other, we have what Mauro E. Mujica, chairman and CEO of U.S. English, wrote in a letter responding to an editorial in The (Baltimore) Sun: ‘Making English the official language of the county, state or national government will not have a significant effect on illegal immigration. Granted such legislation may have an impact on immigrants, but the issue of illegal immigration does not belong in the context of the English as official language debate.’

The contrast is stark: While Young, a local politician, is framing English-only as a national issue, the national organization is framing it as local, as disconnected from and “not belong[ing]” to the issue of immigration across national borders. What the editorial writer(s) had noticed is that while Young was upscaling, by arguing that a local law would have an impact on transnational migration, the national organization was downscaling, by trying to separate the two issues. Later, I asked Mujica about the tension described in this editorial, and his answer heightened the contrast even further. During our interview, I read the above quote from the editorial aloud to him and asked him how it felt when local politicians made comments like Young’s. I was expecting a diplomatic answer that would elide the differences between strategies for the sake of presenting a united, English-only front, but instead, Mujica tied Young’s discourse to what he sees as a broader problem with there being “so many stupid people.” In other words, he seemed to suggest that what Young said was just “stupid” and not worth analyzing in depth. Mujica may have also been picking up on the fact that Young was a particularly polarizing policymaker. As I touched on in Chapter 2, when speaking at government meetings or with reporters, Young said things about language, race, and immigration that some of my participants considered blunt or even shameless. People in these communities take notice when someone like Young openly celebrates the ability of language policies to marginalize some people more than others. For example,

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recall that Young expressed a desire to make Frederick “the most unfriendly county in the state of Maryland to illegal aliens” (Anderson, 2011, November 13). When I reiterated my question about whether it bothered him when local politicians said things like that, Mujica said, “It was frustrating in the beginning,” but that he no longer cares. If Young’s discourse plays up the potential reach and racism of local English-only policies, Mujica’s discourse downplays them. Both discursive strategies could potentially work, of course, but Mujica and the journalists in Young’s own community found the dissonance to be too jarring. People like Vandervoort, Young, and Mujica are all in favor of making English the only official language. The tension stems from different understandings of how far language policy should extend and how explicit Englishonly proponents are willing to be about potential links between English-only policies and racism and xenophobia more generally. While there is a variety of factors that go into any language policy outcome, it is worth noting that the most striking examples of dissonant upscaling and downscaling came from Frederick County. Of the four Maryland communities where I did fieldwork, Frederick County was the only one to eventually repeal their policy. After Frederick County’s English-only policy passed in 2012, sponsor Blaine Young explored but ultimately dropped out of the race for the governor of the state of Maryland. Even people who respect his work acknowledge that Young’s bold approach had its drawbacks. For example, one of his colleagues remarked to me, “Blaine overplayed his hand on a number of things.” Hayden Duke, the activist quoted in the earlier section, said that people got “Young fatigue” after a while, in large part because he “governed as if he was not going to run again.” In other words, he did not try to make modest, incremental changes; he set out to drastically change the linguistic and demographic landscape of his community to feature more English and fewer immigrants. This “Young fatigue” that Duke references would eventually turn into a backlash so strong that Frederick County repealed this policy in 2015. After being in effect for three years, a group of activists and newly elected local politicians lobbied for the ordinance’s undoing, on the grounds that the English-only policy was bad for the economy, that it was racist, and that it oversimplified language issues, and Chapter 4 is devoted to telling that story. Meanwhile, David Lee’s home county, Anne Arundel, never got their English-only policy off the ground, while Carroll County’s and Queen Anne’s County’s policies remain comfortably in place. Situating English-only policies as modest local initiatives appears to be a durable legitimizing strategy across people and communities, as seen in the discourse from Robin Bartlett Frazier’s, Hayden Duke’s, and Farrell Keough’s interviews; Jesse Tyler’s public statement at the Carroll County meeting; and the Queen Anne’s policy text. In counties like Carroll and Queen Anne’s, the people who shape language

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policy have achieved something remarkable: They have successfully made the powerful and controversial English-only movement seem innocuous and evenhanded. In terms of linguistic authority, these policymakers have realized the advantages of striving for local “authenticity” instead of or in addition to the ideal of “one nation, one language” or more universal “anonymity.” I turn now to some implications of and remaining questions about downscaling as a common practice in language policy discourse. What It Means to Go beyond “One Nation, One Language” in Language Policy The roles of upscaling and downscaling in the English-only movement suggest the need for a complex, dynamic understanding of scale. While many of my examples have come from contemporary English-only campaigns in local governments, these strategies clearly have a longer history: People like Tanton made them key components of the English-only movement from the beginning. Importantly, I find that this strategy exists across genres, modes, people, communities, and times: It truly permeates the English-only movement, even if it can occasionally backfire. Tensions come to light especially when people who work for English-only organizations talk about the policies differently than the politicians and activists they purport to assist. I hope I have offered a new understanding of scaling, as a flexible strategy for legitimation, as well as a new account of the English-only movement, as not necessarily reliant on nationalism. Rather, this language policy movement can thrive even or especially at more localized scales. Downscaling can make language policy seem more innocuous than powerful and more about specific circumstances than broader patterns of racism and xenophobia. These findings raise questions about how the contemporary policymakers and activists from Maryland, U.S. English, and ProEnglish fit into the history and scope of the English-only movement. While the full extent and effectiveness of downscaling in language policy is a subject for future study, Subtirelu (2013) provides valuable initial insight into this issue. Subtirelu (2013) documents how US members of Congress (national-level politicians) take civic and ethnic nationalist approaches to English-only policies (pp. 59–60). At the same time, the politicians in that study ultimately lost the 2006 debate in question (much to their chagrin, the legal provision about multilingual ballots was renewed for another twenty-five years) (p. 39). In other words, attempts to portray English as a national language may be common, but efforts to make English a local language may actually be more likely to succeed in terms of concrete policy changes. Of course, language policies and ideologies are rarely set in stone. Subtirelu (2013) points out that while the United States still does not have a national language, the nationalist language ideologies live on. Conversely, my

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participants succeeded in enacting local English-only laws, but one has since been repealed. Nevertheless, there may be a pattern of upscaling gaining more public visibility but downscaling resulting in passing more language policies. Favoring city-, county-, or state-level policies over national policies is common in US history and politics, and English-only activists began capitalizing on that localist impulse. The strategic benefits of downscaling raise a question. One of the most common queries I get is whether people in the English-only movement really believe in what they say. When they frame English-only policies as local, do they mean it? I admit I have wondered the same question. After all, it may be difficult to see a relationship between how people discuss scale and how they live the rest of their lives. Most of the people discussed in this chapter who deploy localist discourse were born elsewhere and have lived elsewhere, gone away to college, traveled for work, traveled for fun, written news articles or social media posts that had a national or international audience, or helped write laws that were taken up and copied by other lawmakers in other parts of the country. While it is difficult to know for sure, I have two responses to this issue. The discourse analyst in me says that it does not necessarily matter what people believe internally. In other words, from a discourse perspective, what matters is what people say and how, since that is what their interlocutors will hear or read. But of course, it does matter on some level what people really think. What I can say with confidence is that I see a big difference between how people in the English-only movement discuss their writing practices (as in Chapter 2) and their language ideologies. When it comes to things like ghostwriting and using templates, some English-only policymakers tended to say very different things to me in interviews and in public discourse compared to what they say when they are communicating among themselves. For example, some people interviewed told me they had not collaborated much or at all with ProEnglish, and I later found evidence that they indeed had. Understandably, people may disclose only certain things about their collaborative writing to certain audiences because those writing practices can be highly stigmatized. Policymakers have essentially nothing to gain from saying “I let someone else help write my policies for me.” So, piecing together that story involved a lot more detective work. In my experience, the same is not true for language ideologies about the scale of the movement. At least among US conservatives, there is no real stigma about supporting English as a national language, state language, or local language, or all of the above, or just not prioritizing language policy at all. When it comes to this topic, I seldom, if ever, noticed outright contradictions between how people in the English-only movements spoke with me and how they spoke to other audiences. When I was piecing together how

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the English-only movement first formed (Chapter 1), I did not notice contradictions across archival records and media coverage. For example, there was never a situation where someone expressed to me or in public that they think of English-only policies in local terms and then I found evidence elsewhere that they secretly are hard at work on some larger initiative. Instead, I find that many people do not feel constrained to only say certain things on this topic, and many people’s affinity for local government and local policies is real. The English-only movement’s penchant for both upscaling and downscaling means that there is no simple way to counter their scaling practices with alternative ones. In light of this chapter’s findings, I am increasingly skeptical of attempts to advocate for certain kinds of language policies by advocating for certain kinds of scales. To give one brief example, Tardy (2011) calls for more work on local language policies and writes that “[a] local view can also afford us a way to imagine possibilities for bottom-up change,” in the form of local language policies that place more value on multilingual writers’ linguistic resources (p. 638). And yet, as Tardy (2011) herself shows, more monolingual policies can also emerge locally. In language policy research, there is a sense that “local” and things like “English-only” are opposites, when in fact they can be quite compatible. Instead of taking for granted the ideological valences of the local, future research must approach the concept in a more open-ended way. In terms of implications for language advocacy, there may be problems with English-only policies, but none of those problems would be alleviated if the policies were more or less local. Scaling practices are important to the English-only movement, but not in the sense that if the scaling practices changed, the movement’s overarching goal of elevating English and English users would necessarily change. Upscaling and downscaling may be effective strategies, but they are still just means to an end. In Chapter 4, I examine a case study of people tackling that end more directly, by resisting and rewriting their local English-only policy.

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4

Resisting and Rewriting How People Undo English-Only Policies

While language policies may be difficult to enact, they can be even more difficult to undo. When Frederick County, Maryland, repealed its English-only policy in 2015, for example, it marked the first community-driven repeal of its kind since 1993 in Dade County, Florida (Associated Press, 1993, May 19). This twenty-two-year gap reflects the fact that while institutions may tacitly reinterpret language policies over time, or alter them due to external pressure,1 actively working against them from the inside is relatively rare. Of the English-only policies I studied in Maryland, this is the only one that people repealed. Many institutions remain committed to what Canagarajah (2013) calls a “monolingual orientation” toward language (p. 20), and this commitment grants English-only policies a certain inertia. The monolingual orientation can make using only one language or language variety seem more natural, normal, correct, efficient, or otherwise authoritative than other ways of communicating (Watson and Shapiro, 2018). So, how did Frederick County break out of this inertia? How do people resist and rewrite Englishonly policies? Activists and politicians spent more than a year working in concert to ­dismantle the ordinance, both in terms of actually passing a repeal bill and marshaling community support more broadly. I explore how people used four approaches to argue for undoing their community’s English-only policy, each of which emerged from a particular, alternative, orientation toward language. First, they flipped the economics script. Since the people who passed the English-only ordinance had argued it could save the county money, they argued back that it would not and that indeed it could actually be hurting the local economy. This strategy was about articulating the value of multilingualism. Second, they made connections between the English-only policy and racism. Since the original ordinance did not mention race or immigration on its face, people had to actively make the case that the policy did indeed target people of color and that this racism made the community look bad. 1

This pressure could come from the state government (Wright, 2011, June 3) or from other groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union (Eichelkraut, 2007, February 16; Dick, 2011).

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This strategy was not so much about monolingualism versus multilingualism as it was about highlighting the importance of a raciolinguistic perspective. The third strategy was questioning the nature of English. Some of the protesters approached language as something too fluid to be contained and bounded by a restrictive language policy, thereby offering a more translingual understanding of how language works. Finally, almost everyone involved highlighted the role of collective action. This strategy emphasized that while English-only policies may be popular, their alternative policy proposal was popular too. All these strategies were indispensable. This small group of people pulled off something that almost no one in the United States has ever accomplished before or since. The Frederick County repeal campaign thus offers a critical window into how language policies emerge and change in practice and a possible model for future language advocacy. There is much to learn from their strategies, in terms of both what works and what pitfalls to be wary of along the way. Scholars have long debated about what the alternatives to English-only policies could be in the United States and what the alternatives to restrictive and colonial language policies could be around the world. For many observers and practitioners of language policy, including myself, critique is easy but change is hard. In part, it is hard because there is no one right answer. There is probably no one-size-fits-all language policy that will do everyone justice. Nevertheless, we have to try. People in Frederick County show what that can look like. In contrast with earlier chapters, here I narrow in on one policy, one community, and a few of the actors. The nine people whose interviews I highlight in this chapter all play a number of roles, as activists, writers, public speakers, employees, and volunteers, but for the purposes of this study, I would say that three are primarily elected officials, three are primarily activists and community organizers, and three are primarily bloggers. The elected officials are county council members Jessica Fitzwater, M. C. Keegan-Ayer, and Jerry Donald. The activists and community organizers are Jay Mason, Angela Spencer, and the man who organizes the Occupy Frederick Facebook page.2 I include the Occupy Facebook writer in this group because he is also outspoken at public hearings. Finally, three women operate Frederick Local Yokel, a blog offering “a humorous yet informative look at politics in Frederick County, Maryland.”3 Everyone I spoke with was confident about their decision to support repealing the English-only policy: As Keegan-Ayer put it, wryly, “there wasn’t a whole lot of, you know, inner struggle.” 2

Of the nine participants highlighted in this article, everyone requested that I use their real name, or the real name of their blog or social media profile. 3 I will cite individual posts along the way, but in general see https://fredericklocalyokel.com/ and www.facebook.com/occupyfrederick/

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Alternatives to English-Only Policies Scholars have theorized several alternatives to monolingual language policies, each of which has potential and each of which leaves something to be desired. One possibility is a more multilingual orientation, which emphasizes the existence and the value of using multiple different languages. That orientation is foundational to dual language education and other additive programs, like English Plus in the United States, the European Union’s language policy, the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s own National Language Policy (CCCC, 1988; Wible, 2013; Flowers, 2019), and academic fields like second language writing (Jordan, 2012). However, additive approaches to language carry the risk of re-essentializing the languages and identities involved (Horner et al., 2011). To put it another way, if Englishonly policies suggest that there is one worthwhile category of language, then some multilingual language policies suggest that there are, perhaps, two or three worthwhile categories of language, rather than actually dismantling those rigid categories or taking into account that the people policing these categories may be racist or otherwise prejudiced. A more translingual approach offers a way to reconcile some of the issues with both monolingual and multilingual orientations (Canagarajah, 2013). Translingual theory has emerged in response to growing awareness that “language mixing is the norm and does not need explanation, that communication occurs across what have been thought of as languages, that speakers draw on repertoires of semiotic resources, and that language is best understood in terms of social practices” (Pennycook, 2016, p. 212). Communication in this framework is about drawing on a range of semiotic resources that transcend tidy categories. While this approach to language can seem like a radical break from more traditional ways of thinking about language, I actually think people in the United States are already primed to think about language in this way, at least in some contexts. For example, the First Amendment to the US Constitution simply says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” There is nothing there about freedom of speech in one or two or three particular languages or particular dialects. Of course, the First Amendment plays out in complicated and paradoxical ways in practice (Baron, 2023), but my point is that thinking about language in terms of open-ended practices is not a new or foreign concept. However, neither multilingual nor translingual approaches tend to center identity and inequality. There are bodies of work that tackle questions of power more directly, particularly around race and racism. For example, scholars like Smitherman (1999) and May (2001) have focused on language rights, while others have moved toward raciolinguistic inquiry into how language and race shape each other (Flores and Rosa, 2015; Alim, 2016; Rosa and Flores, 2017;

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Rosa, 2019). Alim (2016) describes how, for him, this inquiry stems from his work with Smitherman on the language of President Barack Obama (Alim and Smitherman, 2012) and aims to “ask and answer critical questions about the relations between language, race, and power across diverse ethnoracial contexts and societies” (p. 3). A raciolinguistic perspective draws attention to how language and race shape each other and how this shaping is at once historical and ongoing. This framework allows for a much more clear-eyed understanding of how language policy works and how it could work differently. In the context of language policy, studies like Flores, Tseng, and Subtirelu (2021) have led the way toward a raciolinguistic perspective, particularly in education. This body of work tends to focus on scholars’ perspectives, but what interests me is that activists and politicians are also quite aware (perhaps even more aware) of how to talk about language and race in such a way as to push back against unjust language policies. To be sure, I am not suggesting that a raciolinguistic perspective is completely distinct from theories of multilingualism and translingualism. Indeed, some of the most fruitful work on language has focused on how people could and should synthesize understandings of race and racism with understandings of how language works in practice (Smitherman, 1977; Young, 2009; Zentella, 2014; Gilyard, 2016; Guerra, 2016; Simon, 2019; Milu, 2021). What I am suggesting is a need to build on such work, particularly in the form of inquiry into how people navigate these alternatives to monolingual language policies in the context of community organizing. Sometimes, there is a sense that new language policy ideas need to come from scholars, but what interests me is cases where policymakers develop their own innovative approaches. In order to examine what made this repeal campaign so innovative, I first set the stage for what was happening in Frederick when the repeal process began and then I examine each of the four strategies in turn. The section on flipping the economics script focuses on the repeal bill itself, why some sectors of the economy were so locally relevant, and why this strategy partially eclipsed the others. I turn next to the ways people situated the English-only policy in the area’s long history of segregation and civil rights activism, recent rise in anti-Latinx and anti-Asian xenophobia, and growing controversy over their “Fredneck” reputation. After these two prominent strategies, I analyze one that was more rare yet also better-received by bloggers and activists: one council member’s decision to focus on the unruliness of English and how that fluidity made the English-only policy untenable. By emphasizing collaboration and cooperation, the people involved wove the other strategies together into a multifaceted yet coherent campaign, and I conclude by discussing how that strategy shaped my interview questioning and resulted in multiple coauthored documents, from a communitywide petition to the new policy text. In the final discussion, I consider the implications of this case study.

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Setting the Stage for Frederick County’s Repeal Campaign In 2013, where Chapters 2 and 3 left off, Frederick County had an Englishonly policy; now it does not. What changed? While my interest is primarily in the people who shaped the new language policy in 2015, there was also a structural transformation of the county government that facilitated their work (see timeline in Table 4.1). Voters approved this transformation by referendum in late 2012 (nine months after the English-only ordinance passed). The new form of government involved both new kinds of office and new voting districts. Before, five commissioners were elected by the whole county (not by districts); now, seven council members and a county executive are elected by a combination of district-specific and countywide elections. During the 2014 election cycle, one effect of the new system was that there were no true incumbent candidates: Districts were electing their first-ever representatives, and even people running at large still had to shift their political identities from commissioners (an administrative and legislative office) to council members (a purely legislative office). Another effect was that the city was no longer overshadowed by the county’s rural majority. In one fell swoop, and in the absence of major demographic or ideological changes, the government changed structure dramatically. Fitzwater won office and went on to sponsor the repeal bill. In an interview, she told me that “this was a great time for a candidate like myself to jump” in. At the time, Fitzwater had nine years of experience as an elementary music teacher for the local school district. When I interviewed her, she also explained Table 4.1  A three-and-a-half-year timeline of events between the English-only ordinance’s passage and repeal Date

Events

February 24, 2012 November 2012 Summer 2014 November 4, 2014

English-only ordinance passed Referendum approving new form of government Voting guide raises possibility of repeal Election (Jessica Fitzwater, M. C. Keegan-Ayer, Jerry Donald, and others win office) Inauguration Initial meetings to plan repeal Human Relations Commission (HRC) discusses resolution, petition, and repeal at meetings HRC resolution Repeal bill introduced Public hearing Final meeting and vote; ordinance is repealed Repeal is in effect

December 1, 2014 January–February, 2015 February–August, 2015 April 28, 2015 June 16, 2015 July 21, 2015 August 18, 2015 October 17, 2015

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that before running for office, she was “very active” in the local teachers association and the State Education Association as well as the National Education Association (NEA), which included “attend[ing] local budget hearings,” lobbying in Annapolis, and winning the 2014 NEA award for Political Activist of the Year. In an article describing her initial nomination for that award, she brought up her support of Maryland’s recently passed DREAM Act (Nuñez and Flaherty, 2014, June 25). In 2013, she completed a seven-month-long program called Emerge Maryland (2012), which aims to “chang[e] the face of Maryland politics by identifying, training and encouraging women to run for office, get elected and to seek higher office.” Many people I talked to in Frederick went out of their way, unsolicited, to praise her work, whether they were colleagues or constituents, Democrat or not, an official participant or not. They described her as “a prime mover,” “very impressive,” “very intelligent,” “excellent,” “serious,” with “the best work ethic,” and as someone who is “going someplace.”4 I am not surprised that her star has continued to rise in the years since I interviewed her; she recently became the new Frederick County executive in December 2022. Fitzwater’s colleague M. C. Keegan-Ayer also won office in that same 2014 election and became the council’s vice president. The two eventually cosponsored the repeal bill. Keegan-Ayer ran for office after an earlier career as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill and after more than twenty years of being active in the community. While she sees national and local politics as similar – “local isn’t that different” – the move from constituent to politician was more significant. She recalled thinking, “I’m always out there yelling at them, it’s time for me to step up and take the heat for a while.” In a voter guide published by the Frederick County Chamber of Commerce (2014) for the primary election, she stated that if she were elected, “The first thing I will do is to repeal the English as the official language ordinance.” She learned how to craft and move legislation when she was working in Washington, DC, and this experience helped her put together the repeal bill. Together, Fitzwater and Keegan-Ayer were a dynamic duo. In November 2014, these two, along with five other people, became the first cohort of county council members, and plans to engineer a repeal started in earnest. In early 2015, Fitzwater discussed the issue with Keegan-Ayer and the county’s Human Relations Commission (HRC), as part of her role as HRC government liaison (see Human Relations Commission, 2015, February–August). Other community activists also started talking about the issue, well before any bill was formally introduced. In April, the HRC put out a resolution calling for a repeal. Around the same time, the blog Frederick Local Yokel began. As the blog’s title suggests, their style is tongue in cheek. The three friends behind 4

The first four quotes are from Hayden Duke, and the last three are from the Occupy Frederick writer.

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the blog were inspired by both the DC blog Wonkette and the spectacle of county politics to write about nearly every council meeting, as well as other local events. They started their blog in response to Blaine Young’s actions. On Facebook one night, they recalled deciding, “We need to do something about this, so this guy doesn’t get elected again.”5 They initially considered writing a book on the topic, but they decided to start with a blog instead. They wrote several posts about the repeal in terms of both county council events and ProEnglish’s attempts to sway the council members. In June, Fitzwater publicly introduced the bill, in July, the council held a public hearing, and in August, they voted. During this summer stretch, ProEnglish and U.S. English defended the original ordinance and worked to sway some of the council members. People also debated the policy online, in the media, and, as a few participants recalled, in church. Within the county council, two Republican members floated ideas for amendments (as an alternative to an all-out repeal).6 In the end, the bill passed 4–3, with three Democrats and one Republican voting for the repeal. In striking contrast to the English-only policy case studies, I never found any evidence that these people ever received support from any non-Frederick-based advocacy organizations or any other lawmakers who had gone through a similar process. The repeal went into effect in October, while I was conducting interviews. This chronology describes what happened, and now I turn to the question of how it happened, beginning with the first of the four strategies. Flipping the Economics Script Economic arguments had propelled Frederick County’s English-only policy to success, and much of the repeal campaign focused on flipping that economics script. Flipping the script entails taking a relatively established kind of discourse and reproducing some of the formal features but doing so with a different goal (Carr, 2011, p. 3). In this case, the established discourse involved linking language to the economy. One of the original policy’s stated aims was to “reduce costs and promote efficiency.” Supporters of the original ordinance had argued that a monolingual government would be best for the local economy, saving money on translation and interpreter services. This sentiment 5

In using Facebook as a platform for feminist and progressive activism and commiseration, they exemplified a kind of activism that was about to get even more popular after the 2016 election (Zentz, 2021). 6 Immediately after Jessica Fitzwater introduced the bill, on June 16, 2015, fellow council member Billy Shreve said to her, “I think we can just modify it to include the things that you’re looking for.” Fitzwater replied that if he sent her a draft in writing, she would “be happy to look at it.” Later in the summer, council member Tony Chmelik drafted an actual amendment but it never passed.

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echoes Wible’s (2017) research on the “common argument that public and private organizations – and by extension, taxpayers – incur significant financial costs” when they allow for multilingualism (p. 187). Many people who were critical of the English-only policy nevertheless took this economic angle seriously. These politicians and activists argued that money does matter but that multilingualism would be more lucrative than monolingualism. The repeal bill itself exemplified this strategy. When county council member Jessica Fitzwater introduced cosponsored Bill No. 15-08 at a June 2015 public meeting, she read the first section aloud to the audience. According to the unedited text, the purpose of the bill is to Repeal Ordinance No. 12-03-598 [the English-only policy], for the purpose of promoting a competitive business climate for Frederick County’s existing 6,200 businesses which employ 79,000 workers; attracting new life science businesses and jobs that will move Frederick County closer to becoming the State’s bio-tech hub; ensuring that nonEnglish language speakers are not deterred from reporting crimes, seeking medical care or other human services; and generally relating to Frederick County’s encouragement of multi-linguistic acceptance, tolerance and multi-cultural diversity in an increasingly global economy.

There are several themes present, from crime to healthcare to multiculturalism. The overarching strategy, however, is to frame multilingualism as an economic resource rather than a problem (Ruíz, 1984). Specifically, the bill argues that repealing the English-only policy matters to the county’s thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of employees and hinders the county’s ability to become “the State’s bio-tech hub.” Even the concepts of “acceptance,” “tolerance,” and “diversity” appear only in the immediate context of “an increasingly global economy.” Importantly, the preamble does not focus on all economic activities equally: It is primarily about science, technology, engineering, and medicine. In other words, lower-paying jobs and other kinds of industries are not the priority. Finally, the focus on the “increasingly global” has a significant temporal and spatial component and frames multilingualism as a new incoming factor, in contrast to monolingualism, which begins to seem more traditional and more provincial by comparison. This dichotomy, with English-only tradition on one end and emerging multilingualism on the other, elides histories of local multilingualism, heritage languages, and Indigenous languages. This sort of discourse also appears in defenses of bilingual education, as though the only goal is achieving an economic advantage (Katznelson and Bernstein, 2017). In this sense, this bill is actually quite similar to some English-only policies: Both link the fate of the economy to rising levels of multilingualism. At the same time, this policy also has a twist: Its authors used the possibility of multilingual people moving in to argue against an English-only policy, rather than for it. They flipped the script. In our interview, I asked Jessica

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Fitzwater how she and her colleagues decided to “foreground … the business community and different industries.” She explained: fitzwater: We really felt that for some of our more conservative colleagues, whereas for me … this is the right thing to do, and that’s enough of an argument for me, making the economic argument, we thought, was really important, and it is a… flowers: Valid? fitzwater: It’s a powerful, valid argument.

In this exchange, she answers thoughtfully, by explaining that although “for me … this is the right thing to do, and that’s enough,” economic arguments offered a more “powerful” rationale for the repeal for her “conservative colleagues.” When I interjected and said the economic argument was “valid,” she echoed the sentiment; she could marshal substantial quantitative and qualitative evidence to support this argument. In other words, flipping the economics script was the rare, possibly the only, strategy that she, her supporters, and her skeptics could all find persuasive. They used the same kinds of economic terms and sources, but with a more multilingual orientation toward language, in order to advance their goal of repealing the English-only policy. Economic arguments for individual or societal multilingualism are common (Grin, 2003; Duchêne and Heller, 2012; Park and Wee, 2012). According to Flores (2013), “the desire for flexible workers and lifelong learners to serve service-oriented and technological jobs” has become the top policy justification for promoting multilingualism, ahead of cognitive, social, cultural, or historical reasons (p. 500).7 However, while the scholars above tend to approach the economics of language policy by focusing on “acquisition planning,” otherwise known as teaching and learning, in Frederick the focus was more on “status planning” (Spolsky, 2004, p. 11). The worst-case scenario here was not Americans lacking the language skills to secure jobs and contracts but rather multinational corporations skipping over Frederick for being too Englishoriented and instead planting their new offices in some other part of Maryland or, even worse, Virginia. Concerns over the local economic landscape had been brewing for several years, not so much because the economy was struggling but because it was finally succeeding. As far back as 2008, Charles Jenkins cited rising school district costs as one reason why he wanted an English-only policy (Chapter 2). On the other side of the political spectrum, one of the bloggers for the site Frederick Local Yokel remembered how much shabbier the area seemed when she first moved there. At the time of our interview, the three women who founded this site had lived in Frederick for ten, sixteen, and twenty-nine years, 7

Flores uses the term “plurilingualism” instead of “multilingualism,” in keeping with the preferred terminology of the European Union (the specific topic of his article).

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respectively, and had just started blogging a few months back. As one of the writers described what Frederick was like when she first moved here, she explained how the downtown area, which surrounds a creek, used to be “all concrete,” with just “plywood bridges” and “blank” storefronts, while today it is “much, much different.” Her tableau was difficult for me to picture, since by the time I visited, the downtown area was a beautiful hub of stone bridges and bustling local businesses. It was hard to imagine it struggling. She attributed the rise in prosperity to the local influx of biomedical and biotech businesses and military initiatives. For example, Fort Detrick is a longtime employer in the county, but the army base’s cancer research center became elevated in 2012 to a “Federally Funded Research and Development Center” (National Cancer Institute, 2015). Other top local employers included Leidos Biomedical Research, AstraZeneca (pharmaceuticals), Lonza Walkersville (“Biological media, cultures & reagents”), and Life Technologies (Maryland Department of Commerce, 2015). People wanted these businesses to stay and thrive, and more businesses like them to move in, but they worried that the English-only policy was a repellent to more cosmopolitan corporations and employees, and so they developed a two-pronged approach to flipping the economics script. First, I briefly discuss how the bill’s cosponsors undermined the idea that the ordinance was saving the government money. Next, I turn to how a variety of participants forwarded the alternate theory that a repeal could actually make the government and the community money. Finally, I explain how and why this strategy started to eclipse some of the others. Assessing the Fiscal Impact One way people yoked economic success to multilingualism was to unyoke it from monolingualism. Fitzwater, Keegan-Ayer, and others all did so by critiquing the original promise of the English-only policy to reduce government costs. Crucially, they also cited county budget data and a fiscal report to support the idea. The county’s finance director prepared a fiscal report that asserted that repealing the English-only policy would result in “No fiscal impact.” In other words, whether the policy were in place or not, it would not make any difference to the government’s bottom line. Once this report came out in July, council members brought it up during council meetings, media interviews, and to me. In addition to the report, they also turned to actual raw budget data. For example, they provided quotes on the county budget in an interview with the local newspaper (Loos, 2015, August 7). The newspaper article featured a table with the county’s interpretation services budget over the past decade, as well as interpretations of that table from six out of the seven council members (Loos, 2015, August 7). The table offers information that could be interpreted any number of ways. Some years, costs go up; other years, they go down, and

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of course there is no agreement about what numbers would be appropriate, or what annual variation could be normal, for a community with a given demographic makeup and population size. Overall, though, the county spent much more on interpreting services in 2015 than it did the previous decade – from $8,183 back then to $59,084. However, it is hard to tell what role the Englishonly policy played in that trajectory. For example, I could imagine many of my participants from earlier chapters suggesting that the cost might have risen to $100,000 or more if it were not for the policy’s deterrent effect. Everyone offered a slightly different reading about why costs had risen, not gone down. The article quotes Keegan-Ayer as saying, “I’m looking for a precipitous drop from when the ordinance went into effect, … and I don’t see that drop,” except for a brief one-year decline from 2012 to 2013. In our interview, she added that she had decided to “track how much money is actually being saved” and had found that much of the budget went to American Sign Language interpreters, which the English-only policy does not officially affect (following the ProEnglish template, it included an exception for anything relating to the Americans with Disabilities Act).8 These literacy practices of sponsoring, citing, and interpreting this fiscal report are examples of flipping the economics script. At no point did these writers suggest that money does not matter or that language rights are priceless, or anything along those lines. Instead, granting that money does matter to nearly everyone, they concluded that the most effective way to criticize the English-only policy’s economic discourse about multilingualism would be to offer their own. Making the connection between economic development and accepting multilingualism became central to the repeal campaign. For example, in the midst of a longer explanation of why they thought the repeal happened, one of the Frederick Local Yokel writers explained that while the English-only policy was “specifically targeted at Hispanics,” one of the consequences of the policy was that “biomedical firms,” which employ “a lot of Asian workers,” would also be alienated. The misunderstanding they describe here is painful to contemplate: that “biomedical firms” might not care about the English-only policy if only they understood that it was really targeted at “Hispanics,” and not their own “Asians.” Furthermore, this story makes sense only if one recognizes a dichotomy between Latinx people, on one hand, and people who contribute to the economy, on the other. This dichotomy is flawed, of course (Pimentel, 2015). Perhaps for that reason, as they fleshed out this narrative, they also distanced themselves from all the parties involved by adding that for them “it’s not justifiable on any level.” After all, this account flatters no one: The English-only policy is racist, and business owners care only if it might affect their own employees. 8

But see Croft (2015, July 3) for a disability rights critique of the English-only policy.

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The Frederick Local Yokel blogger’s caveat echoes Fitzwater’s aside at the beginning of this section, where she stressed that “whereas for me, this is the right thing to do.” Both are conveying that they understand English-only discourse but do not endorse it. I interpret such statements as acknowledgments of the difficulty of flipping the script. On one hand, they knew the economic arguments were important and evidence-based: The English-only policy did not result in obvious government savings, there are large companies who consider moving to Frederick because of its proximity to military bases and bigger cities, those companies do tend to employ a more transnational and multilingual workforce than currently exists in Frederick, some of these potential transplants were openly expressing fear of the English-only policy, and repelling potential STEM workers could threaten the area’s fragile economic success. Furthermore, treating multilingualism as an economic resource is certainly more justifiable than many other ways people have historically treated the concept of using more than one language variety: as a problem (Ruíz, 1984), an aberration (Pavlenko, 2014, p. 12), a deficit (Shapiro, 2014; Dyson, 2015), or a “destructive” force (May, 2001, p. 205). And yet, for all the promise of economic arguments, the repeal’s supporters knew that there were other facets of the policy that mattered too. Jessica Fitzwater encapsulated some of these other facets as the more “emotional side of it.” When I asked if there were ever any disagreements over how to frame the repeal bill, she responded by saying that while they did not disagree per se, she did have “discussions” with activists and nonprofits about how much to emphasize the emotions surrounding the English-only policy: flowers: Was there any time when you disagreed among yourselves about how exactly to frame it, or how to publicize it or anything? fitzwater: I don’t want to say disagree, but, mmm, some… flowers: discuss? fitzwater: discussions, yeah, I mean, one of the things that came up is in 2012, when it was first passed, there was a big push by Casa de Maryland and the Frederick Immigration Coalition locally, which works a lot with Casa, that they had a lot of signs, and kind of, like, a big rally before, and they sort of … it ended up kind of feeding into it being an emotional issue, and … and rather than trying to make it more of an issue of, you know, economic development for the county, the county moving, you know, into the twenty-first century, which is what we tried to talk about, like, ‘What kind of workers and businesses do we want to attract? What do we want our tourism to be, who do we want to be coming to visit or live or work in Frederick County? And what how is this impacting people’s willingness to do that?’ basically, and so, we did have, kind of, discussions about, you know, ‘let’s not … we’re not going to have a rally beforehand, we’re not going to have, like, signs,’ we didn’t want it to feed into the potential kind of, like, emotional side of it, even though, obviously, emotions came out at the hearing, because it is emotional for

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In this exchange, she explains that while organizations like Casa de Maryland and the Frederick Immigration Coalition had held protests in the streets in the past, her view at the time was “let’s not … we’re not going to have a rally beforehand, we’re not going to have, like, signs.” She added that “we didn’t want it to … feed into the potential kind of, like, emotional side of it, even though, obviously emotions came out at the hearing, because it is emotional for people on both sides, but we didn’t want to add fuel to that fire.” As she goes, she sets up several dichotomies and positions herself in relation to each one. She distinguishes between “we” and “they” throughout, although the meaning of each of those words changes. Sometimes it’s “we” the politicians versus “they” the activists, other times it’s people who want to use rational arguments versus people who want to use emotional arguments, people who prioritize the economy and tourism versus people who prioritize immigrant and human rights, and even people who are versus are not into making signs. By asking about moments of disagreement, I did invite this sort of dichotomous answer, of course. And every protest movement has internal debates and divisions. What interests me is what all these dichotomies add up to: a sense that, on one hand, there are reasonable, linguistically tolerant people just looking out for the economy and, on the other, there are immigrants and people of color who are too emotional. While the repeal bill did successfully pass, this moment showed one of the risks of trying to isolate multilingualism and the economy from the broader language policy situation. It is tempting for policymakers to pit rights and resources, race and the economy, affect and logic against each other. On the other hand, I have to say that I do not think the repeal would have been so successful if she had not adopted this strategy. Connecting Language to Race The English-only policy’s racist reputation played a significant role in animating the repeal campaign. From many people’s perspectives, the original policy exacerbated ongoing racism against Black, Latinx, and Asian American people in the area, and it made white residents look like unwelcoming Frednecks (a well-established local portmanteau for Frederick rednecks). Participants drew attention to all these connections and tried to offer alternatives. Whites Only and English Only Jay Mason emphasized the policy’s ties to anti-Black racism. Mason has served on the Frederick County Board of Education and as President of the organization Eliminating Achievement Gaps, and he is involved in a number

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of other local causes. Like Jessica Fitzwater, he is also an elementary school teacher. He gave me a call after seeing a flyer I gave to a friend of a friend. After saying he was calling about my study, the next thing he asked was what I thought about English-only policies. I had heard that his friend was relatively conservative, and based on that information, I assumed that Mason would have similar views, and I was worried about alienating him if I answered too bluntly. So, I said something about how I probably would not pass a law like that if it were up to me, but I was trying to keep an open mind. I quickly realized that I had misread him, however, and I regretted responding so breezily. He was very critical of the policy, found it to be racist, and noted that the term “English only” evoked the “Whites Only” signs that were so ubiquitous in the Jim Crow era. Mason spoke at the public hearing about the repeal bill, at the suggestion of Jessica Fitzwater. In preparation for our upcoming interview, I watched streaming footage of Mason speaking at the public hearing, where he described the analogy to Jim Crow in depth. In his statement, he explained what his parents experienced as Black people in Frederick, before connecting that history to the present situation. He described what his parents went through: “They had to walk around and see a lot of signs that said, ‘Whites Only.’ That word ‘only’ speaks unacceptance. ‘English only’ speaks unacceptance.” As he spoke the phrase “whites only,” Mason raised his hands to shoulder level and moved them in unison in a rectangle, as if to trace one of the signs that characterized so many businesses and institutions before and during the 1960s civil rights movement. He then tied that phrase to the second phrase, “English only,” not just by listing both but by emphasizing the word in common – “only.” Later, during our interview, he said that during the public hearing, he had “felt like we were back in 1950 all over again.” In response, I asked him why he thought people felt more comfortable speaking about language-based exclusion than about “explicitly” racist exclusion. He laughed, sighed, and paused in quick succession, which made me realize that, as a white person, I had already assumed too much in the way I asked the question. I rethought the question: “Although maybe there was some explicitly racist stuff?” This time, he did reply, by saying, “I felt like they were explicit.” Mason was not alone in connecting language policy to racism. When the people involved in the repeal mentioned any political action in the area from more than ten years ago, it was much more likely to be related to the Civil Rights Movement than to any other social movement. A lot of local politics continues to revolve around racism, anti-racism, and, more recently, the Black Lives Matter movement.9 The point was to show how ideologies and histories of language and race have shaped each other in ways that have consequences. Mason’s and other 9

On local Black Lives Matter activism, see Loos (2016, July 17).

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local activists’ approach reflects the fact that race is a social construction, but it nevertheless plays an important role in people’s lives (Roberts, 2011). People’s experiences with and beliefs about language and race unfold in complex ways: While people can certainly use language and literacy to challenge racism, scholars who adopt a raciolinguistic perspective have argued that, in practice, entrenched language ideologies continue to pathologize people of color, regardless of how they actually speak or write (Flores and Rosa, 2015; Flores and Rosa, 2022). While Jim Crow policies like the ones Mason describes were common around the United States, their legacy in this area is particularly potent in conjunction with local histories of slavery and, into the present, Ku Klux Klan activity. While the Klan peaked in 1920s in some parts of the country (Rawlings, 2016), Maryland and a few other states saw a resurgence in the late 1970s (Sims, 1996, p. 267). In the 1990s, the Klan was so well established in the town of Thurmont, in northern Frederick County, that a resident could identify a business “as the local Klan bar,” where one could find members “there every Saturday night and most others” in two specially reserved booths (Davis, 1998, p. 33). Sims (1996) draws particular attention to Klan activity in Gamber, Maryland, a few miles from the Frederick County border. Several of my participants remembered Klan activity either firsthand or through their parents’ experiences. These phenomena are not just rooted in history but are continuing to unfold. During my first week in the county in 2015, I heard about and attended a protest against the Klan in the town of Braddock Heights. The Klan had raised enough publicity about the event that by the time I heard about it from a participant, there was already a Facebook event for people planning a silent walk around the proposed cross burning site. (Ultimately, I did not see any actual cross burning – I heard that they failed to get the correct kind of burn permit in time). Shortly after, someone poured a can of red paint over a bust of Justice Roger Taney to call attention to the statue’s continued, controversial display in downtown Frederick (Fifield, 2015, October 11). One of Taney’s former local properties has been made into a museum, complete with slave quarters (Historical Society of Frederick County, 2012). The city (not county) government had vacillated over what to do with the bust for years, and before the paint incident people had poured motor oil on and wrapped fabric around the statue on various occasions (Fifield, 2015, October 11), but it was not removed until March 2017 (Masters, 2017, March 18). Of course, these contemporary events are at least as much about people trying to move on, away from the Klan and Taney, as about the Klan and Taney themselves, but it is still striking to see slavery and segregation be a topic of genuine debate. These ongoing struggles against what Monroe (2021) calls “confederate rhetoric” made Mason’s public hearing statement all the more resonant (p. 2).

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Racism against Asian American and Latinx American People At the same time as all this activism around anti-Black racism, the past decade had also been a time of heightened local xenophobia and immigrant rights activism, particularly in the context of Latinx and Asian immigrants. As I touched on in earlier chapters, there were many reasons why immigrants were the center of attention in recent years: There had been immigrant rights protests around the country in 2006, Maryland had narrowly passed its version of the DREAM Act in 2012, county law enforcement had partnered with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement through the 287(g) program, and former county commissioner Young had explicitly expressed a desire to make Frederick “the most unfriendly county in the state of Maryland to illegal aliens” (Anderson, 2011, November 13). Among local activists, I never sensed any real tension between civil rights, immigrant rights, and economic activism, perhaps because so many of them felt that the English-only policy was an attack on all three. The writer for Occupy Frederick found Young’s policies to be particularly galling. After reading a few posts about the English-only ordinance on the Occupy Frederick Facebook page, I messaged the account and eventually interviewed the writer who maintains and updates the site. He is a longtime activist who also studied economics in college and later worked as a union organizer. He got interested in Occupy Wall Street when it started in 2011, around the same time that County Commissioner Young was introducing a number of new initiatives. This writer saw parallels between “the big bankers” in New York City and “the local Tea Party.” In fact, at the public hearing in 2012 about the original ordinance, most of the protesters were affiliated with Occupy Frederick. In addition to writing for the Facebook page, he also spoke at the same public hearing as Jay Mason. Throughout summer 2015, he wrote several Facebook posts about his own views on the issue. He quoted and linked to posts by Jessica Fitzwater (Occupy Frederick, July 9), summarized what happened at county council meetings (Occupy Frederick, August 18), and drafted a “sample email” message that people could send to the government in support of the repeal (Occupy Frederick, July 21). In these posts, he often made a point of connecting the English-only policy to its official sponsor, by describing it as “Blaine Young’s English-Only Ordinance” or “Mr. Young’s opinion.” On the surface, he was just stating a fact about sponsorship, but I also sensed that he was trying to convey some additional information to his local readers. When I asked him about why he decided to write about the issue, he answered bluntly and irreverently: The county has always had a problem with race, OK. Blaine Young’s an opportunist. He’s also a racist. But he sees an enormous political opportunity for himself here. So he

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immediately moves into this English-only stuff, which you’ve read is meaningless on the surface, but it’s like a little check box. ‘Blaine Young opposed illegal immigrants,’ which means, in Republican code, ‘He’s a racist,’ OK?

In this interview excerpt, he connects Young to racism, to opportunism, to opposition to undocumented immigrants, all in one utterance. He also suggests that the policy was a “check box” for Young to prove his Republican ethos. In his framework, all these concepts are nearly synonymous, and they all point to each other. This part of our interview struck me for a couple of reasons, the first of which was how deftly he untangled this web of English-only discourse. As a researcher, I always go in thinking I will have to do a lot of reading between the lines, but in this case, he spelled it out quite plainly. As Jay Mason’s and the Occupy Frederick writer’s experiences show, however, race was actually quite an explicit and central part of the repeal campaign’s discourse. Second, given Occupy Wall Street’s white-washed reputation (Milkman, Luce, and Lewis, 2013, p. 5), I was not expecting to see Occupy Frederick focus on racism to this extent. This example and the fact that Jessica Fitzwater invited Jay Mason to talk at the public hearing (despite the fact that she herself favored more economic arguments) both showed me that while certain people might have favored some strategies over others in certain situations, they all also embraced multiple strategies and worked with and on behalf of others. I will return to this theme later. While Mason and the Occupy Frederick writer were acting relatively independently of the local government, connecting language to race was also an important strategy within the county’s HRC. Like many similar commissions around the United States, the HRC emerged out of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, first as the “Inter-Racial Committee” and then later in its current form. Over time, the HRC has expanded its scope to include transnational issues: They organize an annual Naturalization Ceremony and weigh in on the county’s 287(g) program (which authorizes local law enforcement to help deport undocumented immigrants) (Human Relations Commission, 2014, June 24). Soon after she entered office, Jessica Fitzwater started serving as the government liaison to the HRC. In February 2015, she asked the commission to “create a package to present to the council in the future” about repealing the English-only policy (Human Relations Commission, 2015, February 24). What resulted was a two-page resolution. The chair of the HRC, Angela Spencer, was one of many who worked on the resolution (I discuss her stance on collaboration more in the section on collective action). Spencer is from Texas and has taught English as a second language in adult education and prison contexts. When I met her, she worked as an instructor teaching classes like cultural diversity to law enforcement and correctional officers for the state and had recently won a statewide teaching

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award. She joined the HRC in 2008, after seeing an ad in the newspaper, and so had been a member for about seven years when we met. As a Black woman, who has often been the only one in the room, she has seen a lot. During our interview, she told me about a particularly unsettling ice breaker experience, one in which when she had attended a local event where she was “the only minority in the room of about 200 non-minority people,” someone approached her and remarked, “I’m sure you feel like you’re at a KKK meeting!” Whether despite such experiences or because of them, she was highly dedicated to her volunteer work on the HRC: She put in enough hours that she joked that her acquaintances sometimes wonder, “Aren’t you employed with them?!” When I looked up Spencer to double-check some facts for the book, it did not surprise me that during the pandemic, she took on a new role as a community vaccine outreach project coordinator through the Asian American Center of Frederick, a role that likely saved lives. Back in 2015, she and her colleagues called for a repeal on several grounds. Their two-page HRC resolution touches on race, rights, language, the economy, and history. The authors contend that the English-only policy is inconsistent with their mission “to monitor and recommend civil rights policy” and with the “belie[f] that one of the most vital and valuable aspects of daily life in Frederick County is its diversity and cultural heritage where all races, religions, ages, and cultures are welcome, as should be all languages.” The history of European immigrants also gets a mention, in a clause recognizing the county’s “long history of multiple languages over the last three centuries, including our rich German heritage.” Finally, the text includes a description of the local economy that is both more accurate and more elegant than most: “[G]overnments, businesses, and individuals in Frederick County communicate freely and openly, most often in English but in many other languages as well.” This document suggests that there is no inherent need to pit economic, social, cultural, political, or anti-racist arguments against each other. In contrast to Fitzwater’s concerns over allowing any of the “emotional side of it” into the conversation, this document openly brings together multilingual and raciolinguistic arguments. Audiences seemed to appreciate the resolution, both out in public, by reposting it on several social media pages, and within the county council, by copying select passages directly into the repeal bill (I discuss the details of the copying later in the chapter). And yet, while some parts of the resolution did reappear in the bill, the parts about racism and civil rights did not. Ultimately, race played an important role in the discourse of public hearing, social media and blogs, and the HRC’s resolution, but not as much in the bill itself or in the discourse of the bill’s sponsors at the time. To return to Jessica Fitzwater’s discussion of why she did not want the situation to become too emotional, she and her council colleagues

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may have considered racism and rights to be too risky of topics to include in the most official aspects of the campaign. At first, I interpreted this divide in terms of the absence or presence of race. However, that was not quite right. My sense is that the divide was over whether to focus on racial justice for people of color or whether to focus on white people’s reputations. The Fear of Being a Fredneck Instead of naming racism and xenophobia explicitly, some of the people involved, particularly white people, preferred to focus on how the Englishonly policy might make white people look bad. I did not pick up on the importance of whiteness at first because it manifested primarily through a trope that I initially deemed negligible, both because it was just one or two words and because it seemed like a throwaway joke. Namely, I repeatedly encountered white people expressing how they did not want to be seen as unwelcoming rednecks. At a public hearing, one man (who I did not interview) expressed concern that outside corporations would not want to come there if it meant dealing with “Frednecks” (Frederick + rednecks). People in the audience laughed, and I initially wondered if their reaction was out of recognition of a known term or shock at a new one. In fact, “Fredneck” has been a word on Urban Dictionary since 2006, with the definition: “The inhabitants of Frederick, Maryland, who are mostly hicks and rednecks” (Vizzue, 2006, April 25). A secondary definition of the same word elaborates on the meaning and offers twenty-three different defining characteristics of a Fredneck, from “talks like a hick” to “doesn’t know manners” to “brags to everybody about guns.” The level of detail here suggests the figure of the Fredneck is well established. Several of my participants echoed this sentiment. For example, a Frederick Local Yokel (2015, July 21) blog post briefly mentioned that the policy “makes us look like uneducated, backwoods … rednecks,” and in our interview, one of the writers added, “this looks unwelcoming.” Very similarly, when I asked Keegan-Ayer how she decided to support the repeal, she talked about the economic problems with the old policy and concluded her answer by saying: keegan-ayer: And, I thought, ‘So, this is basically, in my opinion, just an unwelcoming image for Frederick County, and is that really the way I want it to appear?’ flowers: Mhmm. keegan-ayer: And, I just decided, no. And so, we repealed it.

In both situations, they flip the economics script, but they punctuate their statement by drawing attention to how it makes them look, literally: “look like,” “image,” “appear.” In other words, it’s not just about materially fewer dollars in the local economy, it’s also about the perception of “us,” or “my county.”

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This kind of discourse was not just internal to the group of people working against the English-only policy. Supporters of the original law were well aware of it, and the issue has been salient since well before either local language policy existed. For example, I asked Hayden Duke about his sense of the prorepeal side’s tactics, and he immediately brought up the unwelcoming redneck phenomenon: flowers: Did you have the sense that they had sort of a unified argument they were making? Or, even within a side, was there lots of variation? duke: I think for the prorepeal side, it was… ‘You’re making it unwelcoming, you’re making us look like a bunch of hicks, you’re making Frederick look like a backwater.’

As Duke emphasizes through a list of three rhythmic, similarly structured reported utterances, there was a strategy of drawing connections between acting “unwelcoming” and being “hicks” in a “backwater.” As Duke’s comment demonstrates, the figure of the unwelcoming redneck was legible to people across the ideological spectrum. As a white person, I identify with how these white Frederick County residents felt. When I hear about white people doing something racist in my predominately white hometown, or at one of the predominately white schools I have attended or worked at, or in one of the predominately white college towns I have lived in, my first and sometimes my only feeling is personal shame, and like I wish I could just disappear, rather than any impulse to work toward justice. This sort of reaction has consequences, though. Ultimately, this campaign turned out to be partially, but crucially, a struggle over the meaning of white identity. The only two viable options for white identity here appear to be the unwelcoming redneck and their polar opposite, the welcoming host. Anxieties over white identity (rather than racism and racial justice) thus threatened to oversaturate the discussions about this language policy’s connection to race. There are serious limitations to this discourse about unwelcoming Frednecks versus welcoming white people. One, people of color only appear as people to invite in or keep out, rather than as people with agency. Two, people of color only appear as stereotypes, whether as poor, undocumented immigrants or as cosmopolitan, STEM moneymakers. Three, white people only had two entrenched archetypes to align with, both of which seem to unilaterally control property and other people’s mobility (the only difference is whether they bring people in or keep them out). King and Bigelow (2019) capture a similar dynamic in their study of Minnesota language policy, in which the trope of “Minnesota Nice” can override all sorts of other considerations about why only white people are in power in the first place. This situation made me rethink a text that I have long appreciated. Ever since I read it, I loved the description of English-only policies as an “unwelcome

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mat,” because it is so vivid (Wilgoren, 2002, July 19). I still do. But I used to think the point was that a welcome mat would be better, and perhaps that was the original speaker’s point. There are other options, though. The limitation is with the mat, not the precise message on the mat. Who gets to decide what kind of message to send? And why is there such a narrow doorway in the first place? To be sure, deciding to be welcoming rather than unwelcoming can be powerful: This move in Frederick toward redefining whiteness contributed to one of the few repeals of an English-only policy in US history, ever. While Frederick County did successfully repeal their English-only policy, more widespread policy change may be difficult until discussions of language are driven more by people of color, transnational migrants, and multilingual people and less by monolingual white Americans worried about whether they appear unwelcoming. I now turn to the strategy focused not on the economy, nor on race, but on language itself. Questioning the Nature of English In addition to advocating for multilingualism and against racism, participants also used a third strategy: questioning the nature of English itself. In debates over this sort of language policy, most people tend to focus on the “only” aspect of “English-only,” as in “should English be the only language?” but people can also raise questions about the “English” half of that phrase, as in “What even counts as English?” Paradoxically, this strategy was less common but more highly praised than the first two. In other words, talking about multilingualism and racism was common yet controversial, while questioning the nature of English was rare yet popular when it did happen. Unlike the economic discourse about multilingualism, which argued for the value of multiple different languages (each associated with different nations around the world), this move was more about articulating the problems with taking such boundaries for granted. The difference is between a multilingual orientation toward communication in multiple languages and a translingual orientation toward the ways that “communication transcends individual languages” (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 6). From a translingual perspective, language use is inherently translingual because there are not clear boundaries between languages.10 In part, this is because people mix and match linguistic forms as part of everyday life, as in phenomena like code switching. But it is also about 10

Scholars vary over whether they view translingual practices as inherent or situational: Are everyone’s language practices translingual, or are some more translingual than others? In my view, language practices are inherently translingual (see Canagarajah, 2013, p. 56, 2017, p. 56), but I agree with Bou Ayash (2019), who argues that it is possible to “[turn] up the volume” on translingual “activism” (p. 141). Ultimately, I am interested not so much in whether language can be pure but rather in how language policymakers view language as pure (or not).

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the more fundamental fact that even a single language contains multitudes. Modern English is a hybrid of Old English, French, and many other linguistic varieties, for instance. Questioning what counts as “English” is a way to question the basic premise of having a monolingual language policy. In this section, I discuss how county council member Jerry Donald exemplified this strategy at a public meeting, to local acclaim. Jerry Donald teaches high school social studies by day and serves on the county council by night. During the repeal campaign, ProEnglish singled out Donald for criticism, perhaps because his vote may have seemed up for grabs. Unlike Fitzwater and Keegan-Ayer, Donald was not one of the main sponsors of the repeal bill, and his district does not include the city. For these reasons, people who wanted to keep the English-only policy seemed to believe that Donald could be persuaded to vote to keep the English-only policy. For example, ProEnglish (2015, August 12) posted a meme on Facebook saying, “Jerry Donald supports policies that hurt assimilation … Call [his work phone number] and tell Jerry Donald to keep official English on August 18.” Only nineteen Facebook accounts shared that meme, but a few days later, seventy-nine Facebook accounts shared a subsequent post by ProEnglish (2015, August 17), which included both his phone number and county email address. As a result, his office received many critical phone calls and emails from those organizations’ members and supporters. To explain what this time in his life was like, Donald compared the experience to the time when he had made an unpopular call as a football referee and had a large crowd of people all yell at him at once. By the night of the final vote, Donald had decided to interrogate the Englishonly policy’s underpinnings by framing his public comments as a sort of dialogue. The same night as the vote, he posed a number of questions about how the policy was defining the English language. For example, he mused: We keep using the phrase English. Is “burrito” in it? I don’t know. I mean that sounds strange, but we gain thousands of words REGULARLY. Do they count, or not? I don’t know. That’s a question.

At first, the questions seemed rhetorical, meant for the whole room of people to ponder, but then he started actually posing questions to a county attorney named John Mathias (who had helped with the drafting of the Englishonly ordinance). Donald asked about the first clause in the ordinance, labeled clause “A”: donald: … Actually, let’s start with letter “A.” “The English language is the official language of Frederick County.” Now, in other ordinances, we define things. How are we defining this? Oxford Dictionary? Webster’s Dictionary? Doesn’t say American English. What’s the definition we’re working with?

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mathias: Well, the uh, I mean, when a term’s not defined … under the typical legal principles, you look at the common usage of the words, and, I think, you know, I don’t have a problem knowing what the English language is in terms of the… donald: OK

The county attorney went on to say that the county has used a 2007 edition of Webster’s Dictionary to clarify definitions in the past. Donald wondered aloud how the government was supposed to handle words that had come into use after 2007. Through these questions, he was taking advantage of the fact that people in the English-only movement generally “fail to define English” (Horner et al., 2011, p. 309). After some more exchanges back and forth, the attorney grumbled, “I don’t appreciate being your foil. It’s getting a little annoying, frankly.” He may have been annoyed because Donald was asking questions that they both already knew the answers to: The government did not have a perfect definition of what English was, because there is no perfect definition. In the moment, Donald eased up on questioning the county attorney, but he continued to lay out his issues with the ordinance. Donald made the case that English is not really controllable by anyone or anything and that therefore an English-only policy is untenable on practical grounds. He described how English is “a complete free market,” where “things come and go and move on” beyond our control. “English moves,” he argued, and trying to legislate language is like “trying to nail currant jelly to a wall.”11 Later, in our interview, he made it clear that he was not just describing a contemporary phenomenon of globalization; he cited the way Middle English grew out of Old English and French and the long history of language contact in the United States between English, Yiddish, Spanish, and other languages. When I asked how he developed this perspective, he mentioned his general knowledge of US and world history, as well as Bill Bryson’s (1994) popular book Made in America: An informal history of the English language in the United States, which devotes space to language contact among Indigenous people, enslaved Black people, and early settlers. Donald’s description of English’s impurity reflects several increasingly accepted theories about the impossibility of drawing clear borders around the English language (Nero, 2001; Canagarajah, 2013). Historically, English has never been unitary: Old, Middle, and Modern varieties of English are different enough that they are considered to be all the same language only because of nationalist ideologies (Milroy, 2001, p. 549). Furthermore, contemporary 11

US president Theodore Roosevelt popularized the simile of nailing currant jelly to a wall a century earlier, both in news interviews and in personal letters (Decker, 1986). Roosevelt was also an early supporter of English-only policies. The fact that Donald would reference Roosevelt is typical of his familiarity with US political discourse and ability to adapt this discourse toward progressive ends.

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registers of English, like legal, medical, and academic discourse, feature terms from Latin and Greek as a matter of course. In other words, Donald made a persuasive argument not by eliding the linguistic complexity of the issue but by articulating it in all its messiness. I was curious how Donald decided to focus on linguistic complexity. During our interview, he explained, “I really kind of felt like I had to sell why I was voting the way I was voting to the public, because, honestly, if you had to poll my district, it would probably have been to keep the old law.” When I followed up and asked, “Why do you think so many of them would be in favor of keeping it?” he replied, “It’s a rural district.” In the moment, we moved on to other topics, but as I’ve thought about it more, my sense is that what matters is that the district is not just rural but rural, white, and conservative. While Donald is a progressive Democrat, his district is fairly conservative, and he won his first election in 2014 by just twenty-five votes. So, he had reason to be worried. What I find fascinating is that while scholars sometimes think of translingual approaches as being esoteric or out-of-touch, this policymaker thought it was a good way, maybe the only way, to persuade his constituents that the Englishonly policy was problematic. And I think he was right. Other people in the community welcomed Jerry Donald’s discourse, whether they were in the room that night or watching the live stream. The bloggers I interviewed singled out his performance as particularly persuasive. Toward the end of my interview with the Occupy Frederick writer, I asked if there were anyone else he would recommend that I contact, and he mentioned Jerry Donald immediately and began by saying “Oh, he’s awesome. He’s awesome.” He went on to explain: “At the hearing on the repeal, he made the most compelling argument against this English-only law that I have ever heard. He broke it down, basically saying, how do you define what English is?” This compliment is an example of how open people were to different strategies: The Occupy Frederick writer focused mostly on economics, race, and immigration in his own discourse but went out of his way to bring up and endorse Donald’s angle too. The bloggers for Frederick Local Yokel also singled out Jerry Donald’s performance. In a post from the night of the repeal vote (August 18), they attributed his rhetorical abilities in part to his background in education. They wrote, “Props to Jerry Donald for pointing out that the English-Only ordinance was a loser from the right-hand side, in that it created unnecessary and meaningless legislation to govern a free-market and constantly evolving language environment. Leave it to a teacher to go all debate team on it and show us he can rock it from the other angle.” Aside from the praise, what is notable about this blog post is how it repeats Donald’s own use of the term “free market” in his public statement. This finding resonates with other recent work on how policymakers, scholars, and teachers can associate both multilingualism and linguistic

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fluidity with a capitalist framework, in settings ranging from European Union language policy (Flores, 2013) to the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) (Kubota, 2016). The translingual approach may have appealed so strongly to people precisely because it synthesized a more familiar understanding of language as a resource with an incisive new set of questions about how language is defined and quantified in the first place. The way they identify him as a teacher, capable of going “all debate team on it,” is also notable. At their best, these two figures, the teacher and the debate team member, share a reputation for engaging in dialogue, introducing new knowledge, and being flexible. I think it is these qualities, in addition to the language-specific discourse, that resonated with people. The language component was important, though. At the start of my interview with the Frederick Local Yokel writers, they raised the issue as soon as I asked how they decided to write about the repeal in the first place. I was expecting them to answer in terms of county politics or the amount of news coverage it was getting, but instead, we had the following exchange: frederick local yokel writer: As an issue for me, I’m really interested in just the idea that you can regulate language. It’s super weird, right? flowers: Yes! (laughs) frederick local yokel writers: (laughing) frederick local yokel writer: It’s a Germanic language. It’s got heavily French vocabulary from… flowers: Mhmm. frederick local yokel writer: 1066? (laughs) flowers: Yeah. frederick local yokel writer: And just that alone, like, kind of motivated me to… flowers: Mhmm. frederick local yokel writer: Think about it in a certain light too.

She suggests that of all the things to regulate, targeting language seems “super weird,” and goes on to situate the current debate in the history of English in Britain. Furthermore, for her these were not fringe issues but the primary reason (“that alone”) she wanted to write about the issue. At that point, her fellow writers chimed in to add the history of multilingualism and language mixing in the United States, including in the context of the Acadian and French Creole communities in the Northeast and Louisiana. This kind of discourse about language even started to extend beyond the immediate context of the language policy debate, into discussions of other topics. For example, in a post from the same night the repeal took place, the Frederick Local Yokel (2015, August 18) writers were covering a completely separate issue. The county council had disagreed about how to handle the issue,

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and in the blog post they described the ensuing “kerfuffle.” Then, in an aside punctuated by dashes, they asked, “[I]s that an English word??? Who cares! Yay!” They are drawing attention to and then making fun of the question of what counts as an English word. In doing so, I see them participating in the same kind of discourse as Jerry Donald: They are all showing that there is no pure, natural version of English. Just as Phil Dumenil reminded me in Chapter 2 that “Kathy, it’s politics!”, Jerry Donald and these bloggers reminded me that it’s still about language too. What are the takeaways from Jerry Donald’s successful strategy of questioning the nature of English? Among scholars, there is a sense that this sort of translingual approach is risky, in that it is too theoretical. The thinking goes that while it may be true that there is no one single definition of the English language (or any language), it might be more effective to focus on practical implications of language policies. In this case, though, questioning the meaning of “English” was part of a successful effort to repeal an English-only policy. What’s more, Donald garnered praise from progressive activists in the city of Frederick without seeming to lose support from his district out in the county. When he was running for reelection, he used this issue as a talking point. Donald was reelected in 2018, and yet again in 2022. Highlighting the Role of Collective Action As I have tried to emphasize, this was not a campaign associated with just one person, one group, or one origin story. Instead, the people involved highlighted the role of collective action in their work, and this practice of highlighting is the fourth and final discourse strategy of the campaign I want to examine. This strategy functioned as a sort of harmonizing mechanism, by depicting the repeal as a group effort, but also as something that a lot of different people and groups conceived of independently. These two facets of the strategy may seem contradictory, but the common thread is that there was never a sense of one author or one inspiration for the bill. As a result, there was very little pressure on the bill’s sponsors to seem like they had all the power or all the answers. Instead, by the end of the campaign, they could point to many different sources of inspiration and requests that they take action. This strategy also framed the English-only policy as unpopular and undemocratic, given how much community support there was for a repeal. The practice of highlighting is important here. As discussed in Chapter 2, there is nothing notable about laws being coauthored or cosponsored. What is notable, however, is what parts of the policymaking process people choose to make most visible. More than the other strategies, which seemed to ebb and flow, this one seemed ever-present, including in interviews. My interview with Angela Spencer (the chair of the HRC at the time) offers one of the clearest examples.

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We had just started talking about the 2012 English-only ordinance, and I was asking what she thought of it: flowers: What did you think? At the time? spencer: Well, initially, I was … honestly, well, first, let me tell you about the Human Relations Commission. flowers: That’s fine. spencer: So, our ultimate goal is to speak with one voice, so even if we disagree with some things, we agree to disagree, OK? So that, as a body, we speak with one voice, so, we all discuss everything and have open conversations.

In this interaction, after I asked the question about 2012, she started to answer, but then switched gears and asked me to let her talk about the HRC instead. I was confused at what seemed to be a non sequitur, but I was also curious, so I said, “that’s fine.” I quickly realized that she was actually gently steering me away from my individualistic framing and inviting me to focus on her group instead. After describing how the HRC’s “goal is to speak with one voice,” she did go on to explain how they had interpreted the policy. As the interview went on, I tried to adapt to her framing, with some slip-ups. For example, I self-​ corrected in the middle of asking a question about something she had cowritten: flowers: And how did you … and how did the HRC get involved in writing the resolution supporting the repeal?

I was starting to ask about her actions, then changed tack and rephrased the question to be about the group, and put extra emphasis on the word “HRC” to try to emphasize my correction. I do want to note that I did not completely ignore the role of the individual and that none of my participants were unilaterally opposed to discussing their own motives or actions. Instead, I just realized that I tended to get more detailed answers if I asked about groups. While I have introduced this strategy through an interview example, in the rest of this section I want to focus on two key texts that resulted from this strategy: a petition in favor of the repeal and the text of the repeal bill itself. Both texts grew out of collaborative writing and were taken up due to purposeful highlighting of that collaboration. The Petition One of the first topics people discussed at early planning meetings was the possibility of a petition, according to Fitzwater and Spencer. In spring 2015, Angela Spencer told me that members of the HRC had started collecting signatures in support of repealing the English-only ordinance, both on their own and by sharing the petition with “civic groups, faith-based groups, community and neighborhood” groups. According to minutes from one HRC (2015, April 28) meeting, “everyone was asked to fill at least a page and bring them to the next

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meeting.” So, this was a collective effort to show community support. The petition soon started to appear around town: Keegan-Ayer, for example, recalled coming out of church one day and seeing the petition out in front, along with people who explained to parishioners leaving the building “what it was for, and what it was all about.” This moment shows that the goal was not merely to collect signatures from people who already wanted a repeal (although those signatures did become important later). Rather, the petition helped build what Keegan-Ayer called the “groundswell of support” for the repeal in different ways at different stages of the campaign. In moments like the after-church event, the petition created an occasion to discuss language policy. Spencer got even more specific and explained to me that it allowed people to “have that conversation, to say, ‘How do you feel about this? And would you like to sign?’” As her two-part question suggests, the goal was to raise the issue and, if possible, also get a signature. Floating the idea of a repeal was particularly important because while many people were aware of the 2012 policy, it had not been a very visible issue in the years since. These interactions were informative not just to the people being asked to sign but also for the people seeking signatures, in that they had more opportunities to hear people’s own arguments and experiences regarding the language policy. While it began as a conversation starter, by the end the petition functioned more like physical evidence. Specifically, it became an entextualization of public opinion (literally) that could be contextualized in subsequent events (Silverstein and Urban, 1996; Oddo, 2014; Andrus, 2015). In other words, people could take the petition into new situations and offer it as concrete proof that the English-only ordinance was controversial, or even unpopular, and that the democratic thing to do might be to repeal it. For example, at the public hearing, a community activist came up to the podium and held up the petition so that the council and the audience could all see it. She said the petition had 1,000 signatures, and as she lifted it up, she asked anyone in the room who had signed to stand up. In her statement, she also talked about the ordinance’s potential to harm local businesses, dissuade new business from moving to town, and its lack of potential to save the county money. So, she meshed two strategies: She argued for the repeal by flipping the economics script and by emphasizing the collective action behind this position, as manifested by the thick stack of paper and at least three people coming to their feet. While the prior example hinged on the numbers of people who signed, Jessica Fitzwater used the petition’s list of addresses to make a slightly different point in a public interaction with her colleague Kirby Delauter. Delauter had just argued that they should keep the original ordinance because his district was generally fine with it and his office had received many phone calls and emails in favor of keeping the ordinance intact. I suspect both of his claims were true.

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However, the petition’s existence allowed Fitzwater to respond skeptically. She asked how he knew his district’s opinion and, more pointedly, if he knew if all those calls and emails were really coming from within Frederick County, much less from his district. After all, ProEnglish had sent out social media and email alerts about the upcoming vote, which included the phone and email contact information for the county council. The issue had also been in the national news. Although it never quite came to this point, because Delauter moved on, Fitzwater told me later that she was prepared to use the addresses in the petition to “show how many people [who signed] were actually in his district.” In other words, she could show that a certain number of people in his district were on her side, while he could not necessarily do the same with his office’s phone calls and emails. Both county council members were citing their constituency, but Fitzwater had the written addresses at her fingertips. Over time and across different situations, then, the petition helped build grassroots support, demonstrate that support, and, finally, bolster the other strategies. The Repeal Bill Like the petition, the bill was both a result and an emblem of collective action. Rather than highlighting public support, however, the collective action involved in writing the repeal bill was more contained to the county government. Even within the government, there was a certain amount of winnowing, sifting, and sorting, so that some kinds of discourse made it into the final bill more than other kinds. In other words, if compiling the petition was about collecting as much evidence of community support as possible, writing the bill itself was about collecting and then filtering. When I asked the bill’s two sponsors who wrote the bill, they both listed many people and sources. A “county attorney” (Keegan-Ayer) and “some county staff” helped write the bill, both by expanding on “bullet points” that Fitzwater provided and by doing additional “research” on what the “typical arguments” against English-only policies might be (Fitzwater). Keegan-Ayer also talked about getting the idea for the bill’s structure – a long series of clauses – from texts she had encountered in her former career on Capitol Hill. Over time, she had developed genre knowledge about the multiple functions and affordances of policies, which she drew on in this situation when confronted with people who wanted the bill to accomplish only the bare minimum. Specifically, she recalled that the county attorney initially just wanted to bluntly convey something along the lines of “we want to repeal it,” which reminded me of Charles Jenkins’ goal in 2006 to pass an English-only policy that simply stated “English is the official language of County government” (Chapter 2). However, once again, a longer version won out. Keegan-Ayer remembered countering the attorney with “No, we want … we want there to be

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reasons why we’re repealing it.” The opportunity to lay out the many reasons for the repeal was one appeal of this structure, but a related reason was genre: She was drawing on the kinds of policy texts – resolutions, bills, proposals, briefs, reports – she had worked with before to create something innovative (Tardy, 2016). When she described to me how she mixed and matched different kinds of wording from different kinds of texts she had seen in the past, she gestured with her hands in a way reminiscent of someone picking out paint swatches, or ordering from a menu. Just as Keegan-Ayer drew on several sources of inspiration for the policy’s structure, Jessica Fitzwater played a comparable role in collecting material for the policy’s content. Her position as the government liaison to the HRC was key. Early on, Fitzwater had suggested that the HRC propose something about the possibility of a repeal to the council. According to Angela Spencer, the HRC and Fitzwater then had a sustained “conversation about the document [and] what exactly our statement would be,” and then the text was “compiled together.” As I discussed in the section on race, this resolution made a very holistic argument against the English-only policy, by deftly weaving together subarguments about the economy, race, diversity, culture, tolerance, and general quality of life in the community. Afterward, Fitzwater, Keegan-Ayer, and the county staff used this resolution as the source material for the final draft of the bill. In other words, Fitzwater created a sort of policy loop by encouraging the HRC to write the resolution and then incorporating some of it back into the bill. As content moved through this loop, though, its meaning did narrow. For example, both documents share the following statement, except for one word in the middle, marked by brackets: the English-only “Ordinance, and the perception it has created, [is/constitute] a barrier…” The difference between whether the ordinance “is” a barrier (according to the HRC) and whether it “constitute[s]” a barrier (according to the bill) seems to merely mark a register shift to a more formal or legal lexicon. However, the sentences also end differently, which is not just about the register but about orientations toward language. In the resolution, the barrier is “to making Frederick County the very best place to live, work, and raise a family.” Although that may sound vague, in the context of the whole document, each of those three terms, live, work, and raise a family, calls back to other parts of the text: “live” points to the parts on multiculturalism and civil rights, “work” points to those parts plus the ones on the local economy, and “raise a family” points to all of the above as well as the parts about education. So, the resolution is talking about a social, cultural, educational, and economic barrier. The meaning of “barrier” is much more specific in the bill, however. There, the sentence ends with “a barrier to good business and impedes the growth and development of business and commercial endeavors in Frederick County.” In this version of the clause, the focus

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is purely on the economy. Of course, there are other clauses in the bill that are less business-oriented. The point is that while the bill is transparently intertextual and coauthored, it is not just a more concise or more polished version of the HRC resolution, or any of the other discourse from the campaign. Rather, flipping the economics script clearly became the most enshrined strategy. The robust local discourse about race and rights appears more obliquely, in words like “tolerance,” “diversity,” and “multi-linguistic acceptance,” and there is no mention of questioning the nature of English. As a policy becomes more streamlined, it may also become more limited. At the same time, an official policy’s narrow focus does not, and indeed cannot, erase the more expansive vision of a long-term, communitywide campaign. Conclusion Years ago, as I was beginning to analyze what happened in Frederick County, one of my colleagues attending the American Association for Applied Linguistics conference live-tweeted a question. The question caught my interest because it was from a language policy presentation about how scholars could more effectively inform and influence policymakers on language issues. While I care about the answer to this question (and wish I had the perfect answer), my inclination has always been to begin with the exact opposite question. When I hear questions about how scholars could better inform policymakers, I flip the question around: How do the actual experiences of language policymakers, in all their complexity, inform and influence how I understand language? After all, most of what I have learned about language policymaking I learned from actual language policymakers. So, I want to conclude by distilling what this case study might mean for broader conversations about language policies and language ideologies. In Frederick County’s repeal campaign, politicians and activists used four main strategies to undo their English-only policy without damaging their reputations or their future election prospects. They flipped the economics script, they showed how the policy was racist, they questioned the nature of English, and they emphasized that this campaign was a team effort. People like Jessica Fitzwater and M.C. Keegan-Ayer argued that the English-only policy was actually hurting, rather than helping, the local economy. Others, like Jay Mason and the writer for Occupy Frederick’s Facebook page, argued against the original ordinance on the grounds that it was part of the county’s longer history of racism. Jerry Donald and the bloggers for Frederick Local Yokel took a more translingual approach, by questioning the very premise of English-only policies, which rests on assumptions about English being completely unitary and separate from other languages. At the same time, flipping the economics script risked overshadowing the other strategies. The bill’s cosponsors seemed to

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perceive the economic strategy as the most likely to win over skeptics, and in a predominantly white, middle-class community, this was a shrewd move to make. Because discourse about race and the nature of language appeared more on the margins of the campaign (on anonymous blogs, in audience comments at public hearings, and from a politician who was not an official sponsor), the notion that language policy is merely about how to maximize economic and communicative efficiency remained largely intact. Throughout my writing and research process, it has been so tempting to point to one of these strategies as “the best,” whether that means the most accurate, the most persuasive, or the most just. The truth is that they are all valuable. In addition to their individual strengths, there is an added advantage to combining them. I would argue that a combined approach is ultimately more effective than trying to deploy any one in isolation. Communication is translingual, multilingualism has economic consequences, and language cannot be separated from race in the United States. Melding different approaches does not necessarily have to be an individual undertaking or something that happens in one communicative event. In other words, there is no need for the language policy text itself to cover all possible bases, there is no need for one person to stand up and weave together all these approaches in one definitive speech, editorial, or mission statement, and there is no need for a group of like-minded people to present a united front. In Frederick, people unevenly distributed their discourse strategies across genres, audiences, and situations, which may actually be more likely to lead to policy change than any steady drumbeat of talking points, even if that change is always partial. Another insight is that plenty of people have already moved away from a monolingual orientation to language, if they ever were there in the first place. My participants did not so much choose to work on language policy as they were thrust into language policy work by the fact that they all lived in a community with an English-only ordinance. Nevertheless, they were able to navigate the policymaking process with aplomb. Tracing, listening to, and centering how people engage with language policies in their own communities, from their own perspectives, toward their own ends, show that it is possible to resist and rewrite English-only policies and that one does not need to be a linguist to do so. In fact, as all the activists I discuss in this book demonstrate, experience in community organizing, labor organizing, social movements, teaching, debating, accounting, writing for public audiences, forming and maintaining social ties, and just being enmeshed in one’s communities may be just as important.

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Conclusion

By some measures, the English-only movement has failed. The United States has never had an official language, and probably never will. There is nothing in the US Constitution about an official language. Every year, senators and members of Congress put forth the latest version of a national language policy (currently called the English Language Unity Act), but the bill never passes, no matter which party is in power or who is president. Most state and local governments provide at least some services in multiple languages. Some sovereign Indigenous nations within the borders of the United States prioritize language policies that include Indigenous language maintenance and revitalization. When Congress does take action on language, it tends to result in laws that explicitly endorse languages other than English, like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Native American Languages Act. By other measures, the English-only movement has succeeded. It is so successful that it can almost rest on its laurels. It is socially acceptable in the United States to be monolingual in English only. One can take English for granted. The United States may not have an explicit language policy, but I can walk into any government building (including any public school), I can log on to any government website, and I can read any government document and generally know what I will hear and what I will see: English. When I teach any university course, as a professor, students already know what language my syllabus will be in, what language class discussions will be in, and what language I will use most of the time: English. If you poll people in the United States, many think English already is our official language. No one has to tell people that English has won: People in the United States know it because we live it and breathe it. What scholars of language policy have long recognized, though, is that neither of these depictions of English in the United States fully captures what is going on. The situation is more complicated – the English-only movement has had victories and losses. People face linguistic constraints, but they also have some control over their language use. Language policies do not always match linguistic culture (Schiffman, 1996). When I was a student first learning about English and language policy, I had a hard time holding these somewhat 144

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conflicting patterns in my head. One day, I was reading about how English is a language of imperialism, colonialism, and global capitalism, while the next I was reading about how US language policy is more decentralized and haphazard than in many other countries (and all of these facts are true). But how to make sense of it? When I think about US language policy writ large, the image is very fuzzy. My aim in this book has been to show that if one looks locally, the situation becomes clearer. The United States does not have a national language policy, nor is there some overarching national language ideology. Instead, there are just a lot of instances of people working locally to shape how people learn, use, and view language in particular situations. What’s more, if you listen to them, so many people in the English-only movement are very open about this fact. With few exceptions, they do not necessarily aspire to make English official at larger scales. They are invested in focusing locally, both because they care about what happens in their communities and because the more localized the policy, the less likely it is to attract scrutiny. To make policies happen, people have developed a wide range of strategies around writing and pitching their policies, from forming nonprofit organizations to ghostwriting to templates to choosing genres to downscaling their work as much as possible. These strategies first emerged in Citizens of Dade United, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and U.S. English, and spread eventually through ProEnglish and in a variety of local governments. People like Emmy Shafer, Senator S. I. Hayakawa, John Tanton, and all of their colleagues walked so that the policymakers of the twenty-first century could run. And yet English-only policies still receive significant pushback. While sometimes protests are fleeting, in Frederick County people were able to work together to actually undo their county’s English-only ordinance. They flipped the economics script, they drew attention to racism and xenophobia, they questioned whether English can really be legislated in the first place, and they highlighted the importance of collaboration. There are several avenues for future work on language policy, in terms of both future research and future language advocacy. Regarding the specifics of the English-only movement, I feel I have just scratched the surface. To give a few examples, I came across several references to the fact that, in the early 1980s, Gerda Bikales wrote a 180-page white paper about US language policy that she gave to John Tanton and that that white paper helped him decide to start U.S. English. However, I have never found a copy of that white paper. Similarly, I know that someone leaked John Tanton’s memo to the press, but I still do not know who. Finally, I know that local governments use ProEnglish’s template, but I still do not know how people make the initial contact. There are countless stories still out there. There are also several relevant organizations that I have not discussed in depth, generally because they did not have as many policy wins, or

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because they are limited to K–12 education contexts, or because they simply were beyond the scope of this study. Suffice it to say, there is more to say about organizations like English First, the National English Campaign, the English Language Political Action Committee, the U.S. English Legislative Task Force, the U.S. English Foundation, the Immigration Political Action Committee, NumbersUSA Action, the NumbersUSA Education and Research Foundation, the NumbersUSA Support Organization, the Center for Immigration Studies, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, VDARE, and English for the Children, not to mention Citizens of Dade United, FAIR, U.S. English, and ProEnglish. There are also several more regional iterations of organizations that were beyond the scope of my study, like Arizonans for Official English, Alaskans for a Common Language, and Nashville English First. I hope future research will account for these organizations. Even more important, however, are the larger questions at hand about how people write and negotiate policies, both in terms of future research and in terms of future language advocacy. Future Directions for Research on Local Language Policy In addition to my own immediate work, I also see three broader questions about local language policy for future consideration. First, how do local language policies in governments compare to ones in other sites, including classes, schools, programs, departments, organizations, and workplaces? In asking this question, the goal is not to invite taxonomies. After all, most of my participants are serving in leadership roles outside government, whether as schoolteachers, business owners, or volunteers. So, it is not as though government language policymakers have no ties to other policy domains. At the same time, because my research has focused so heavily on governments, less is known about how people write and negotiate other kinds of local language policies. More research is needed on how these kinds of policies develop and play out, within and across institutions, and over time. Second, how do contemporary local language policies compare to historical examples? In Chapter 1, I argued that these policies are not new, although they have changed in some ways. For example, I mentioned that the World War I-era laws were more German-oriented and more restrictive than contemporary ones, by extending into domains like church and telephone conversations. However, with the exception of Peters (2013), there are few in-depth studies of local language policies in the United States before 1980. Future research could shed light on the prevalence of local language policies throughout US history, what those policies dictated, and how people interpreted, enforced (or not), reacted to, and either abandoned or maintained them. In addition to looking back, it will also be important to examine future policies.

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Third, how do US policies compare to ones outside the United States? I consider this issue to be the most significant gap. While this question is beyond the scope of my present study, it is crucial that language policy researchers not center on the United States or treat the United States as the default. It is also important to note that even within and across US borders, there are Indigenous nations, many of which are actively engaged in language maintenance and revitalization and in bilingual education (McCarty, 2013). Some of the questions may be similar across borders, such as what counts as “local”; whether language is a problem, right, or a resource (Ruíz, 1984); and who gets to shape language policy, but the answers will vary considerably. Outside the United States, the legal systems, economies, language ideologies, language practices, and histories involved tend to be different. Future Directions for Research on Policy and Writing For those interested in policy and writing, the sophisticated policy writing processes in the English-only movement raise questions about how policymaking unfolds more generally. As an entry point, I will admit that there was one moment during my research when I wondered if maybe I was studying the wrong area of policy. Before I started my fieldwork, I was watching a livestreamed local government meeting where an English-only policy was on the agenda. Before the language policy discussion could begin, there were other topics for the county to cover. I was tapping my toes on the floor and clacking my fingernails on my laptop, waiting for this phase to end, so that I could see what was, for me, the main event: language policy in the making. However, I stopped fidgeting when at one point a middle-aged man stood up from the audience and walked to the podium. The whole room grew quiet, and I sensed that people in the room knew who this man was and why he was about to speak. I wondered what he was about to say. He said his son had just died of an opioid overdose. The county did offer some resources to help people struggling with opioid addiction, but he pointed out that it was not enough. Dozens of young people were overdosing and dying. Families were desperate to find their loved ones beds in rehab centers, but there were no beds. Or if there were, they were out of state or they were not covered by health insurance. One of the local elected officials thanked him for his comments and said that they knew it was an issue they needed to keep working on. I could have heard a pin drop. I felt ashamed for having been so impatient as I waited for the meeting to get to the language issue. This man’s comments reminded me that language policy is just one topic within the larger policy landscape. I wish I knew what communities could and should do about all the intractable policy issues they face, like education, the opioid crisis, climate change, homelessness, and the pandemic, but I can speak to policy research methods.

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Of course, scholars have studied all these policy topics and more, and I drew inspiration from many of these studies as I completed my own (Asen, 2015; Graham, 2015; Loehwing, 2018; Lejano and Nero, 2020). While every policy context is different, I hope that experts in these and other areas of policy will find useful threads in my work. For example, I would predict that some of the writing processes I discuss in Chapter 2 are widespread, especially ghostwriting, using templates, and making genre choices. One implication of my study is that public and professional writing is highly collaborative and often anonymous. For anyone studying policies and related texts, I think it is worth asking who all are actually doing the writing, which genres they are using and why, and where they are getting templates and other writing assistance. There are opportunities to combine writing studies research with the work in political science on writing as a form of legislative subsidy (Hall and Deardorff, 2006). These practices are not tied to particular political ideologies – on the right, organizations like American Legislative Exchange Council have been generating templates for decades; on the left, there are readily available templates for policies around gun control and sanctuary cities. At an even more foundational level, I think it is always important to include rough drafts in policy analysis if possible, not just final drafts. One scholar who does excellent cutting-edge analysis of policy revisions and amendments is linguist Peter Joseph Torres. Torres (2021) studies, for instance, how a group of state policymakers in California increased their use of “shall” and decreased their use of “may” as the opioid crisis ramped up, in an apparent attempt to make state-level policies more restrictive. There needs to be more work in this vein. If policy writing is characterized by so much copying, ghostwriting, and collaboration, it also raises questions about other arenas of professional writing. Future research is necessary in order to see just how common, consistent, or longstanding these kinds of writing practices are in other kinds of social movements, legal and political discourse, workplaces, and digital spaces. And these writing practices are not limited to extracurricular writing; some kinds of academic discourse fit these patterns as well. Teachers copy each other’s syllabi and other materials, universities copy each other’s policies (Nizza, 2008, March 31), committees collaboratively write documents, researchers coauthor articles, no one claims credit for content on departmental websites, and students work and study together. As with language policies, these academic examples are not necessarily problematic, but they are worth analyzing in more depth. In addition to writing processes, I would also predict that downscaling is common in other areas of policy. Language is a local practice (Pennycook, 2010), but when do policymakers play that up, and when do they not? And why? Blommaert (2010) posited that upscaling was the key scaling practice for understanding the era of globalization; I have essentially argued the opposite

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in the context of English-only policies, but what about other contexts? Lejano and Nero (2020) suggest that people who may be skeptical of global climate change can nonetheless be engaged by stories of how their local climate is changing, and I think that is an area for further research. Importantly, none of these processes are inevitable. It takes a lot of work, both discursive and nondiscursive, to make something seem local. Furthermore, nothing is ever localized for good. The key question is not so much “is this local?” or “how do local things connect to larger context?” but rather “how did people come to treat this as local, and to what effect?” Future Language Advocacy For those interested in changing the language policies around them, I believe there is much to learn from the writers in this book. The two main takeaways are to look locally and to work collectively. I have never witnessed a successful language policy engineered by one person in isolation. Talking to people, reading other language policies, forming relationships, swapping ideas, getting feedback, picking between different genres, changing your mind and your strategies in response to local circumstances, and dealing with failure are all part of the process. As someone who was voted “Most Shy” in high school, I wish this were not the case, but it is. However, I will note that it is possible for this collective work to be asynchronous and distributed. For example, over the years I have gradually revised the language policies in the courses I teach, in consultation with colleagues like Yu-Kyung Kang (2022) and Ligia Mihut (2019), as well as through my professional organizations. My current language policies draw some of their framing from the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Students’ Right to Their Own Language Resolution (CCCC, 1974), and when I need additional inspiration, I revisit everything from the classic (e.g. Sledd, 1969) to the cutting-edge (e.g. Kilfoil, 2015; Gere et al., 2021; Franz et al., 2022). Even then, I customize every policy to my own linguistic repertoire, and I vary the policy depending on the particular class. Here are two examples from the syllabi of courses I have taught: 1. This is a course in academic writing, which can be done in any language and in many modes. In your work for this course, you have the right and you are welcome to use the language varieties and styles that best fit your own goals and audiences. You are also encouraged to cite sources in languages other than English. I know English, can read Spanish, and can figure out how to translate short passages in other languages. If you want to write an extended text in a language other than those two, please provide a translation so I can access your work.

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2. This is a course in grant writing, which can be done in any language and in many modes. You have the right and you are welcome to use the language varieties and styles that best fit your own goals and audiences, in conjunction with those of any campus or community partners you work with. You are also encouraged to cite sources in languages other than English. I know English, can read Spanish, and can figure out how to translate short passages in other languages. If you want to write an extended text in a language other than those two, please provide a translation so I can access your work. While these policies are brief and only a modest adjustment from the Englishonly norm of most college courses, they still have taken years to evolve, and that was only because I benefited from the expertise of dozens of people in my field. So, now one can imagine how many orders of magnitude more time and energy it would take to change something at the level of a program, institution, workplace, or government. This work can take its toll. For people who may not have the time or energy, or who may not be able to exercise the professional autonomy to change things in their immediate surroundings, it is still possible to support people who are doing this work. I have been heartened by the fact that in all the places I have lived, from Washington to Illinois to Mississippi to Massachusetts, there are always local leaders who want to support culturally sustaining K–12 education, accessible adult basic education, government services that meet people where they are at, and ample public funding for all of the above. In every community, there are also people who are already working toward increasing access to all the programs that would make it so more people have the opportunity to learn English and other languages (which, as Tollefson [1989] pointed out, are often sorely lacking). Such programs range from Medicare for all, to debt-free higher education, to housing for all, to universal basic income. Sometimes the people already working toward change are on the school board, sometimes they are the mayor, sometimes they are on a city or county council, sometimes they are a state representative, sometimes they direct a local organization, sometimes they are volunteering in a church basement, and sometimes they are involved in local mutual aid, but they are there. Asking “what can I do to help?” is often a welcome starting point. We are also living in a golden age of public writing around issues of language and justice, and one way to support more liberatory approaches to language is to seek out projects like Vocal Fries: The Podcast of Linguistic Discrimination (Figueroa, 2022). If I sound like I am declining to recommend that people try to fix US language policy on the national level, that is because I am. That is one thing I have in common with most of my participants. My reasoning is not just that I think a national policy would be unlikely and unwieldy but also that the most punishing language policies I encounter on a regular basis are not coming from my

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federal or state government but from my own specific fields. I often joke that the most English-only environments most students ever encounter are in the kinds of classes I teach, but it is not really a joke. Everywhere I have taught, my students come to school with rich communicative repertoires, able to make meaning and interact with people across contexts. And after they leave campus, I know they live and work in rich linguistic environments where people know language is more of a resource than a problem, whether those environments be their homes, restaurants, daycares, schools, hospitals, stores, offices, social media, or any number of other spaces. However, those years of standardized tests and college English classes can be something of an English-only bottleneck. It weighs on me that, historically, English classes are often as much about gatekeeping as about anything else, and more about language policing than linguistic liberation. And so, when I talk about language policy as a local practice, I am not just talking about policies out there but also in here. There is a lot of work to do.

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Appendix A Research Methods

I conducted the research for this book between 2011 and 2023, with fieldwork in 2015–2016 and 2019. For events that took place before my fieldwork began, I observed streaming video footage of public hearings and government meetings. These government-sponsored events typically lasted one to three hours, featured a variety of speakers, and were posted online with additional attachments such as meeting agendas and minutes. Because contemporary language policy campaigns tend to be sources of controversy and matters of public record, they have a significant online presence. Each of the four governments typically deliberated over the course of three to four public hearings and meetings over several months, resulting in several dozen hours of public interaction. In addition to analyzing these materials in their own right, collecting this data also informed the rest of the study, by giving an early sense of which people and organizations were involved. In cases where a key file was not available on a government’s or organization’s website, I sent a request over email or I used the Internet Archive to locate it on an older version of the website. The Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine (at http://archive.org) does not pinpoint when a website or a version of a site first appears online, but its automated web crawler has periodically collected and archived snapshots of public websites since 1996. So, this tool can be used both to find older versions of sites and to approximate when an older version was the current one. During the fieldwork phase of data collection, I interviewed people, observed and attended events relating to local politics and culture, wrote field notes, took photographs, and collected texts. Field notes were instrumental as a way to document my impressions of the communities I visited, the events I attended, the people I interacted with, the discourse I encountered, and the research methods I used. Interview recruitment focused on people directly involved in shaping, sponsoring, and/or protesting these language policies. Over the course of two rounds of Institutional Review Board-approved research, I interviewed twentysix people, and I include twenty-three of those people in this book (Table A.1). About half of them are in favor of making English the official language, and 152

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Table A.1  List of interview participants, including details on their role at the time, the location, and the date #

Name

Role

Location

Date

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Hayden Duke Farrell Keough C. Paul Smith Jay Mason Frederick Local Yokel writer Frederick Local Yokel writer Frederick Local Yokel writer Occupy Frederick writer Jerry Donald Angela Spencer M. C. Keegan-Ayer David Lee (pseudonym)

Activist Activist Elected official Activist Blogger Blogger Blogger Blogger/activist Elected official Activist Elected official Elected official

10/10/15 10/12/15 10/14/15 10/20/15 10/22/15 10/22/15 10/22/15 10/22/15 10/22/15 10/22/15 10/26/15 10/26/15

13

Robert Vandervoort

14

Bob Simmons

Executive Director of ProEnglish Elected official

Frederick County Frederick County Frederick County Frederick County Frederick County Frederick County Frederick County Frederick County Frederick County Frederick County Frederick County Anne Arundel County Washington, DC

10/28/15

15

Kevin Waterman

16 17 18

Jessica Fitzwater Kirby Delauter Phil Dumenil

19 20

Charles Jenkins Chris Trumbauer

21 22 23

Will Gardner (pseudonym) Robin Bartlett Frazier Mauro Mujica

Queen Anne’s County Activist Queen Anne’s County Elected official Frederick County Elected official Frederick County Elected official Queen Anne’s County Elected official Frederick County Elected official Anne Arundel County Activist Frederick County Elected official Carroll County CEO and Chair of U.S. Washington, DC English

10/28/15

10/29/15 10/30/15 10/30/15 11/6/15 11/10/15 11/12/15 1/30/16 6/25/19 6/26/19

the other half are against, although this designation is so blurry that I have chosen not to officially categorize each person’s stance. I define “activist” broadly, in order to include everything from speaking at public hearings, to participating in protests, to collecting signatures for a petition, to writing letters to the editor, to taking on more formal roles in organizations or commissions. Similarly, under the banner of “blogger,” I include both people who run their own blog on their own website and someone who runs a Facebook page. I would not characterize most Facebook accounts as blogs, but in this case, the page features frequent posts about current events that are several paragraphs long. The descriptions of each person’s role are not meant to be exhaustive but are merely aimed at giving a sense of the breadth of participants’ experiences.

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For example, most of the elected officials could also qualify as activists, and social media can be a form of activism (Zentz, 2021). To recruit these participants, I contacted all the elected officials involved, as well as people who spoke in depth at public hearings or who wrote prominent editorials or blog posts. To reach people who may have played more unassuming roles, I also distributed flyers and asked each interview participant if there were anyone else they recommended that I interview. Interviews were 30–120 minutes long, semi-structured, and tailored to each person’s particular roles and experiences. For example, my questions for a libertarian activist in Queen Anne’s County were nearly all different from my questions for a Democratic politician in Anne Arundel County. However, there were certain common threads: I always asked how long someone had lived in their current county, how they would describe that county, how they first learned about their county’s language policy, what surprised them the most, if they ever changed their mind on some aspect of language policy, if there is anything they would do differently next time, and what advice they would offer to someone in their position. For each person, I would also ask several more text-based questions, either focused on policy texts from their county, policies from ProEnglish, or materials they themselves had published or discussed at a public hearing. Participants had a high degree of control over the nature, setting, recording, and identifiability of the interview (Olinger, 2020, pp. 195–199). Twenty-one people agreed to be recorded, and two opted for no recording. In cases where I did not record, I took notes, but did not attempt to quote more than brief phrases. I also collected relevant news articles and social media posts. Because my focus is on policymakers and activists, rather than on the general public’s opinions or impressions per se, I used these sources sparingly. In other words, while there have been illuminating studies of language policy discourse in newspaper articles (Fitzsimmons-Doolan, 2009; Tardy, 2009) and online comments sections (Marlow, 2015), that was not my aim. Rather, I generally focused on articles that were by or about my participants. However, there were also moments when I analyzed a text from news or social media in its own right. For example, I started to conceptualize Chapter 3 after reading a Frederick NewsPost editorial (2012, February 26) about the English-only movement’s “conflicting messages,” and I first came across the Human Relations Commission’s Resolution on Facebook (Chapter 4). Finally, media discourse played a more important role in my analysis of people who played key roles in local language policy but who did not participate in interviews. During this whole period of contemporary research, I was also visiting archives and consulting librarians. Archival research does not always go together with ethnographic research, but I find it indispensable for studying language policy movements that unfold over several decades and for studying

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discourse beyond the speech event more generally (Wortham and Reyes, 2015; see also Inoue, 2006). Archival materials readily lend themselves to two of the key components of ethnography: foregrounding people’s perspectives on their own activities and triangulating multiple kinds of data. Data analysis began with transcribing the audio/video interviews and footage of government meetings, with an eye toward transcribing not just people’s words but also nonverbal activities like laughter and gestures (in the case of video). Because I am interested in discourse across events, I also made a point of marking instances of reported speech when possible and, furthermore, of distinguishing between reported thought, reported talk, reported writing, and reading aloud from a text at hand. On a very practical level, it is important to note when someone is speaking off the cuff versus when they are reading a text aloud. While I have experience with doing very fine-grained transcription, for this book my priority was to make people’s speech as readable and accessible as possible, and so I have taken the liberty of adding punctuation and deleting some stops, starts, and “um”s. Data analysis was a recursive process, as I continued to collect and compare data, take notes, follow up with participants, and revise my research questions (Sheridan, 2012, p. 76). While this kind of iteration is typical of ethnographic writing research, the process was amplified by the fact that when the study began Frederick County’s English-only policy seemed thoroughly entrenched, and so I only came to focus on questions of resisting and rewriting (Chapter 4) as the repeal campaign began. In order to check how my interpretations compared with those of my interview participants, I sent copies of earlier iterations of this project to relevant participants along the way, including for one final round of member checking in spring 2023. During the final check, I sent summaries of every chapter and copies of the specific paragraphs where I incorporated their interview, and people could respond over email or through comments on a GoogleDoc. I heard back from seven people across three counties. Four people had detailed feedback, which I was grateful to incorporate into the final manuscript.

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Appendix B Policy Texts

This appendix includes copies of the twenty-first-century language policies that I discuss in detail. I have included these texts because while they are ostensibly public information (and not under copyright because they are US government documents), they are not easily accessible. Many earlier key US language policies are published elsewhere, often in one of two places: Crawford’s (1992) Language loyalties: A source book on the Official English controversy and Crawford’s (2002) digital Language Legislation Archives. I have sought to capture the original structure, capitalization, and uses of bold as closely as possible. At times, the layouts and font styles may seem peculiar – sometimes text is in all caps and sometimes not, sometimes text is aligned to the right side of the page and sometimes not, sometimes clauses end with a period and sometimes not, and so on. This level of variation is typical of government policy texts in the United States. The one typographical intervention I make here is to indicate revisions made between rough and final drafts. Key revisions affected Frederick County’s 2012 Ordinance and Queen Anne’s County’s 2012 Ordinance. If words were present in a rough draft but people deleted them during the revision process, I show that by crossing out that passage. If people added content during the revision process, I show that by italicizing those words. I will note that there are a few instances in the original texts where text is italicized, but it was never used to emphasize particular ideas, and so I have opted to just leave those passages as plain text, so as to use italics only to designate newly added content. Finally, readers may wonder about a third kind of revision – rearranging text to go earlier or later in the document. I looked for those kinds of organizational edits, but they did not appear in any of these particular texts. List of Texts Frederick County’s Resolution, 2008 (passed) Frederick County’s Ordinance, 2012, with revisions marked (passed, later repealed) 156

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Anne Arundel County’s Bill, 2012 (did not pass) Queen Anne’s County’s Ordinance, 2012, with revisions marked (passed) Carroll County’s Ordinance, 2013 (passed) Frederick County’s Human Relations Commission’s Resolution, 2015 (passed) Frederick County’s Repeal Bill, 2015 (passed)

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Frederick County’s Resolution, 2008 (passed) THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF THIS RESOLUTION IS APRIL 24, 2008 RESOLUTION NO. 08-13 RESOLUTION OF BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF FREDERICK COUNTY, MARYLAND

Re: Proclaiming English as the Official, Primary and Common Language WHEREAS, the English language is the primary and common form of communication in Frederick County; and, WHEREAS, the Board of County Commissioners of Frederick County, Maryland promotes proficiency in the English language to encourage full economic and civic participation of all its citizens; and, WHEREAS, the community benefits from acknowledging and embracing the rich and varied cultural heritage in our community. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF FREDERICK COUNTY, MARYLAND that the Board hereby proclaims that the English language is the official, ­primary and common language of Frederick County Government. The undersigned hereby certifies that this Resolution was approved and adopted on the 24th day of April, 2008. ATTEST: 

BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF FREDERICK COUNTY, MARYLAND

Ronald A. Hart (signed) County Manager

By:

Jan H. Gardner, President (signed)

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Frederick County’s Ordinance, 2012 (passed, later repealed) THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF THIS ORDINANCE IS FEBRUARY 22, 2012 ORDINANCE NO. 12-03-598

RE: Frederick County Official English Ordinance The English language is the common language of Frederick County, Maryland and of the United States; The use of a common language removes barriers of misunderstanding and helps to unify the people of Frederick County, this State and the United States, and helps to enable the full economic and civic participation of all its citizens, regardless of national origin, creed, race or other characteristics, and thus a compelling governmental interest exists in promoting, preserving, and strengthening the use of the English language; Proficiency in the English language, as well as in languages other than the English language, benefits Frederick County both economically and culturally and should be encouraged; In addition to any other ways to promote proficiency in the English language, the Board of County Commissioners of Frederick County, Maryland (BOCC) can promote proficiency in English by using the English language in its official actions and activities; In today’s society, Frederick County may also need to protect and preserve the rights of those who speak only the English language to use or obtain governmental programs and benefits; and The BOCC can reduce costs and promote efficiency, in its roles as employer and a government accountable to the people, by using the English language in its official actions and activities. The BOCC held a duly advertised public hearing on this proposed Ordinance on February 21, 2012. The public had an opportunity to comment at this public hearing. Section 1. Official English Declaration . The English language is the official language of Frederick County. A B. The BOCC and officials of Frederick County shall take all steps necessary to ensure that the role of English as the common language of Frederick County is preserved and enhanced. C. The BOCC shall make no ordinance which diminishes or ignores the role of English as the common language of Frederick County.

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D. Official actions of Frederick County which bind or commit Frederick County or which give the appearance of presenting the official views or position of Frederick County shall be taken in the English language. Unofficial or non-binding translations or explanations of official actions may be provided separately in languages other than English, if they are appropriately labelled as such and reference is made to a method to obtain the official action; unless otherwise required by federal or state law, no person has a right to such an ­unofficial or non-binding translation or explanation, and no ­liability or commitment of Frederick County shall be based on such a ­translation or explanation. E. No ordinance, decree, program, or policy of Frederick County shall require the use of any language other than English for any documents, regulations, orders, transactions, proceedings, meetings, programs, or publications, except as provided in Section 2. F. A person who speaks only the English language shall be eligible to participate in all programs, benefits and opportunities, including employment, provided by Frederick County (providing all other eligibility requirements are satisfied), except when required to speak another language as provided in Section 2. G. No law, ordinance, decree, program, or policy of Frederick County shall penalize or impair the rights, obligations or opportunities available to any person solely because a person speaks only the English language. Section 2. Exceptions Frederick County may use a language other than English for any of the following purposes, whether or not the use would be considered part of an official action: . To teach or encourage the learning of languages other than English; A B. To protect the public health, sanitation, and public safety; C. To teach English to those who are not fluent in the language; D. To comply with the Native American Languages Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Voting Rights Act, or any other federal or state law; E. To protect the rights of criminal defendants and victims of crime; F. To promote trade, commerce, and tourism; G. To collect payments, fines, or other financial obligations due and payable to Frederick County;

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H. To create or promote mottos or designations, inscribe public monuments, and perform other acts involving the customary use of a language other than English; I. To utilize terms of art or terms or phrases from other languages which are commonly used in communications otherwise in English; J. Printed materials, signage, or other materials or documents of Frederick County printed in languages other than English at the time of the adoption of this ordinance and not otherwise excepted in this Section 2 shall not be discarded or reprinted solely in English at the addition [sic] cost or expense of the taxpayers of Frederick County until they are exhausted or become otherwise obsolete; K. For any other worthy, justifiable or appropriate action approved by the Board of County Commissioners. Section 3. Official Functions Notwithstanding any other state law and except as provided in section 2 of this Ordinance, nothing in this Ordinance shall be construed to prohibit any elected official, officer, agent, employee of the state or a political subdivision, while performing official functions, from communicating unofficially through any medium with another person in a language other than English (as long as official functions are performed in English). Section 4. Private Use Protected The declaration and use of English as the official language of Frederick County should not be construed as infringing upon the rights of any person to use a language other than English in private communications or actions, including the right of government officials (including elected officials) to communicate with others while not performing official actions of Frederick County. Section 5. Federal and State Preemption Nothing in this Ordinance shall be interpreted as conflicting with the laws of the United States, or of the laws of the State of Maryland. Section 6. No Cause of Action Created This Ordinance is not intended to create any cause of action or authorize any legal proceedings to enforce or interpret this Ordinance.

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Section 7. Repeal of Prior Resolution. This Ordinance replaces and supersedes Resolution No. 08-13 “Proclaiming English as the Official, Primary and Common Language” and therefore Resolution No. 08-13 is hereby repealed. Section 8. Effective Date. This Ordinance shall take effect on February 22, 2012. The undersigned hereby certifies that this Ordinance was approved and adopted on the 21st day of February, 2012. ATTEST: 

BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF FREDERICK COUNTY, MARYLAND

David B. Dunn (signed) County Manager

Blaine R. Young, President (signed)

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Anne Arundel County’s Bill, 2012 (did not pass) COUNTY COUNCIL OF ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY, MARYLAND

Legislative Session 2012, Legislative Day No. 3 Bill No. 13-12 Introduced by Mr. Walker, Mr. Grasso, Mr. Fink and Mr. Ladd By the County Council, February 6, 2012 _____ Introduced and first read on February 6, 2012 Public Hearing set for March 5, 2012 Bill expires May 11, 2012 By Order: Elizabeth E. Jones, Administrative Officer _____ A BILL ENTITLED AN ORDINANCE concerning: General Provisions – Miscellaneous Provisions –​ Official Language FOR the purpose of establishing English as the official language of Anne Arundel County; and generally related to County government. BY adding § 1-9-105 Anne Arundel County Code (2005, as amended) ARTICLE 1. GENERAL PROVISIONS TITLE 9. MISCELLANEOUS PROVISIONS

1-9-105. Official Language ENGLISH SHALL BE THE OFFICIAL AND COMMON LANGUAGE OF THE COUNTY. ALL OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS, COMMUNICATION AND AGREEMENTS ON BEHALF OF THE COUNTY SHALL BE IN ENGLISH UNLESS MANDATED BY FEDERAL OR STATE LAW OR AS NECESSARY TO PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF VICTIMS OF CRIME AND CRIMINAL DEFENDANTS, TO PROTECT PUBLIC HEALTH AND SAFETY, TO TEACH ENGLISH TO NONNATIVE SPEAKERS, OR TO PROMOTE TRADE AND TOURISM IN THE COUNTY.

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SECTION 2. And be it further enacted, That this Ordinance shall take effect 45 days from the date it becomes law. _____ EXPLANATION:

CAPITALS indicate new matter added to existing law. [Brackets] indicate matter stricken from existing law.

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Queen Anne’s County’s Ordinance, 2012 (passed) AMENDMENT NO. 1 TO COUNTY ORDINANCE NO. 12-06

AN AMENDMENT TO A BILL ENTITLED AN ACT CONCERNING Recognition of English as the Official Language of Queen Anne’s County. FOR THE PURPOSE of designating the English language amending pending County Ordinance No. 12-06 to clarify the provisions regarding the declaration and recognition of English as the official language of Queen Anne’s County. BY ADDING AMENDING the proposed new Section 4-14 to of the Code of Public Local Laws of Queen Anne’s County, Maryland.

SECTION I BE IT ENACTED BY THE COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF QUEEN ANNE’S COUNTY, MARYLAND that a new Section 4-14 be added to the Code of Public Local Laws of Queen Anne’s County, to read as follows: pending County Ordinance No. 12-06 be amended so that the new Section 4-14 of the Code of Public Local Laws shall read as follows: §4-14. Official Language of Queen Anne’s County. ENGLISH SHALL BE THE OFFICIAL AND COMMON LANGUAGE OF QUEEN ANNE’S COUNTY. ALL OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS, COMMUNICATION AND AGREEMENTS ON BEHALF OF THE COUNTY SHALL BE IN ENGLISH UNLESS MANDATED BY FEDERAL OR STATE LAW OR AS NECESSARY TO PROTECT THE RIGHTS OF VICTIMS OF CRIME AND CRIMINAL DEFENDANTS, TO PROTECT PUBLISH HEALTH AND SAFETY, TO TEACH ENGLISH TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS, OR TO PROMOT [SIC] TRADE AND TOURISM IN THE COUNTY. A. Findings The people of Queen Anne’s County, Maryland, find and declare that: (1) the English language is the common language of Queen Anne’s County, of the State of Maryland and of the United States; (2) the use of a common language removes barriers of misunderstanding and helps to unify the people of Queen Anne’s County, this State and the United States, and helps to enable the full economic and civil participation of all of its citizens, regardless of national

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(3) (4)

(5) (6)

origin, creed, race or other characteristics, and thus a compelling governmental interest exists in promoting, preserving, and strengthening the use of the English language; proficiency in the English language, as well as in languages other than the English language, benefits Queen Anne’s County both economically and culturally and should be encouraged; in addition to any other ways to promote proficiency in the English language, the government of Queen Anne’s County can promote proficiency in English by using the English language in its official actions and activities; in today’s society, Queen Anne’s County may also need to protect and preserve the rights of those who speak only the English language to use or obtain governmental programs and benefits; and the government of Queen Anne’s County can reduce costs and promote efficiency, in its roles as employer and a government accountable to the people, by using the English language in its official actions and activities.

B.  Official English Declaration (1) The English language is the official language of Queen Anne’s County. (2) The County Commissioners and officials of Queen Anne’s County shall take all necessary steps to insure [sic] that the role of English as the common language of Queen Anne’s County is preserved and enhanced. (3) The County Commissioners of Queen Anne’s County shall make no Ordinance which diminishes or ignores the role of English as the common language of Queen Anne’s County. (4) Official actions of Queen Anne’s County which bind or commit Queen Anne’s County or which give the appearance of presenting the official views or position of Queen Anne’s County shall be taken in the English language, and in no other language. Unofficial or non-binding translations or explanations of official actions may be provided separately in languages other than English, if they are appropriately labeled as such and reference is made to a method to obtain the official action; unless otherwise required by federal or State law, no person has a right to such an unofficial or nonbinding translation or explanation, and no liability or commitment of Queen Anne’s County shall be based on such a translation or explanation.

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(5) No ordinance, decree, program, or policy of Queen Anne’s County of any of its subdivisions, shall require the use of any language other than English for any documents, regulations, orders, transactions, proceedings, meetings, programs, or publications, except as provided in Section C. (6) A person who speaks only the English language shall be eligible to participate in all programs, benefits and opportunities, including employment, provided by Queen Anne’s County and its subdivisions, except when required to speak another language as provided in Section C. (7) No law, ordinance, decree, program, or policy of Queen Anne’s County or any of its subdivisions shall penalize or impair the rights, obligations or opportunities available to any person solely because a person speaks only the English language. C. Exceptions Queen Anne’s County and its subdivisions may use a language other than English for any of the following purposes, whether or not the use would be considered part of an official action: (1) To teach or encourage the learning of languages other than English; (2) To protect the public health, sanitation, and public safety; (3) To teach English to those who are not fluent in the language; (4) To comply with the Native American Languages Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Voting Rights Act, or any other federal or State law; (5) To protect the rights of criminal defendants and victims of crime; (6) To promote trade, commerce, and tourism; (7) To collect payments, fines, or other financial obligations due and payable to the court; (8) To create or promote mottos or designations, inscribe public monuments, and perform other acts involving the customary use of a language other than English; (9) To utilize terms of art or terms or phrases from other languages which are commonly used in communications otherwise in English; and (10) Printed materials, signage, or other materials or documents of Queen Anne’s County printed in languages other than English at the time of adoption of this Ordinance and not otherwise excepted in this section C shall not be discarded or reprinted solely in English at the addition [sic] cost or expense of the taxpayers of the County until they are exhausted or become otherwise obsolete.

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D.  Rules of Construction. Notwithstanding any other state law and except as provided in Section C of this chapter, nothing in this chapter shall be construed to prohibit any elected official, officer, agent, employee of the state or a political subdivision, while performing official functions, from communicating unofficially through any medium with another person in a language other than English (as long as official functions are performed in English). E.  Private Use Protected. The declaration and use of English as the official language of Queen Anne’s County should not be construed as infringing upon the rights of any person to use a language other than English in private communications or actions, including the right of government officials (including elected officials) to communicate with others while not performing official’s [sic] actions of Queen Anne’s County. F. Severability. If any provision of this ordinance, or the applicability of any provision to any person or circumstance, shall be held to be invalid by a court of competent jurisdiction, the remainder of this ordinance shall not be affected and shall be given effect to the fullest extent practicable. G.  Federal and State Preemption. Nothing in this Ordinance shall be interpreted as conflicting with the statutes of the United States, or the laws of the State of Maryland. SECTION II BE IT FURTHER ENACTED that this Amendment shall take effect immediately upon its adoption. INTRODUCED BY: Commissioner Olds DATE: April 10, 2012 VOTE: 4 Yea 1 Nay (Commissioner Dunmyer opposed) DATE OF ADOPTION OF AMENDMENT: May 8, 2012

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Carroll County’s Ordinance, 2013 (passed) ORDINANCE NO. 2013-01 AN ORDINANCE ADOPTING AMENDMENTS TO THE CODE OF PUBLIC LOCAL LAWS AND ORDINANCES OF CARROLL COUNTY, MARYLAND

WHEREAS, The Board of Commissioners of Carroll County, Maryland, has enacted and codified the “Code of Public Local Laws and Ordinances of Carroll County, Maryland”; WHEREAS, the Board of County Commissioners of Carroll County, Maryland, has determined that amendments to certain sections of Code are necessary to advance the public health, safety, and welfare; WHERAS [SIC], the English language is the common language of Carroll County, Maryland and of the United States of America; WHEREAS, the use of a common language removes barriers of misunderstanding and helps to unify the citizens of Carroll County, the State of Maryland, and the United States of America, and helps to enable the full economic and civic participation of all its citizens, regardless of national origin, creed, race, or other characteristics, and thus a compelling governmental interest exists in promoting, preserving, and strengthening the use of the English language; WHEREAS, proficiency in the English language, as well as other languages, benefits Carroll County both economically and culturally and should be encouraged; WHEREAS, in addition to other ways to promote efficiency in the English language, the Board of County Commissioners of Carroll County can promote proficiency in English by using the English language in its official actions and activities; WHEREAS, the Board of County Commissioners recognizes the need to protect and preserve the rights of those who speak only the English language to use or obtain governmental programs, services, and benefits; WHEREAS, the Board of County Commissioners of Carroll County can reduce costs and promote efficiency in its roles as employer and as a government accountable to its citizens by using the English language in its official actions and activities; and WHEREAS, the Board of County Commissioners of Carroll County, Maryland, desires to designate the English language as the official language of Carroll County, and for that purpose, it is necessary to adopt an ordinance.

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NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT ENACTED by the Board of County Commissioners of Carroll County, Maryland: ARTICLE I. AMENDMENTS. The Code of Public Local Laws and Ordinances of Carroll County, Chapter 10 (Reserved), is deleted in its entirety and replaced as follows: Chapter 10, OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF CARROLL COUNTY § 10-1.  Official English Declaration. A. The English language is the official language of Carroll County, Maryland. B. The Board of County Commissioners of Carroll County shall take all steps necessary to ensure that the role of English as the common language of Carroll County is preserved and enhanced. C. The Board of County Commissioners of Carroll County shall take no official action which would diminish or ignore the role of English as the common language of Carroll County. D. Official actions of Carroll County government which bind or commit Carroll County or which give the appearance of presenting the official views or position of Carroll County shall be taken in the English language, and in no other language. Unofficial or non-binding translations or explanations of official actions may be provided separately in languages other than English, if they are appropriately labeled as such and reference is made to a method to obtain the official action. Unless otherwise required by federal or state law, no person has a right to such an official or non-binding translation or explanation, and no liability or commitment of Carroll County shall be based on such a translation or explanation. E. No ordinance, decree, program, or policy of Carroll County shall require the use of any language other than English for any documents, regulations, orders, transactions, proceedings, meetings, programs, or publications, except as provided in § 10-2. F. A person who speaks only the English language shall be eligible to participate in all programs, benefits, and opportunities, including employment provided by Carroll County provided all other eligibility requirements are satisfied, except when required to speak another language as provided in § 10-2. G. No law, ordinance, decree, program, or policy of Carroll County shall penalize or impair the rights, obligations, or opportunities available to any person solely because a person speaks only the official language.

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§ 10-2.  Exceptions. Carroll County may use a language other than English for any of the following purposes, whether or not the use would be considered part of an official action: . To teach or encourage the learning of languages other than English; A B. To protect the public health, sanitation, and public safety; C. To teach English to those who are not fluent in the language; D. To comply with the Native American Languages Act, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the Voting Rights Act, or any other federal or state law; E. To protect the rights of criminal defendants and victims of crime; F. To promote trade, commerce, and tourism; G. To collect payments, fines, or other financial obligations due and payable to Carroll County; H. To create or promote mottos or designations, inscribe public monuments, and perform other acts involving the customary use of a language other than English; I. To utilize the terms of art of terms or phrases from other languages which are commonly used in communications otherwise in English; and J. Printed materials, signage, or other materials or documents of Carroll County printed in languages other than English at the time of the adoption of this ordinance and not otherwise excepted in this section shall not be discarded or reprinted solely in English at the additional cost or expense of the taxpayers of Carroll County until they are exhausted or become otherwise obsolete. § 10-3.  Official Functions. Notwithstanding any other state law and except as provided in § 10-2 of this ordinance, nothing in this ordinance shall be construed to prohibit any elected official, officer, agent, employee of the County or a political subdivision, while performing official functions, from communicating unofficially through any medium with another person in a language other than English, provided that all official functions are performed only in English. § 10-4.  Private Use Protected. The declaration and use of English as the official language of Carroll County should not be construed as infringing upon the rights of any person to use a language other than English in private communications or actions, including the right of government officials, including elected officials, to communicate with others while not performing official actions of Carroll County.

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§ 10-5.  Federal and State Preemption. Nothing in this ordinance shall be interpreted as conflicting with the laws of the United States of America or the laws of the State of Maryland. § 10-6.  No Cause of Action Created. This ordinance is not intended to create any cause of action or authorize any legal proceedings to enforce or interpret this ordinance. ARTICLE II. SEVERABILITY. Should any provision, section, paragraph or subparagraph of this Ordinance, including any code or text adopted hereby, be declared null and void, illegal, unconstitutional, or otherwise determined to be unenforceable by a court having jurisdiction; the same shall not effect the validity, legality, or enforceability of any other provision, section, paragraph or subparagraph hereof, including any code or text adopted hereby. Each such provision, section, paragraph or subparagraph is expressly declared to be and is deemed severable. ARTICLE III. EFFECTIVE DATE. This Ordinance shall become effective on January 30, 2013. Adopted this 24th day of January, 2013. Attest: Shawn D. Reese, County Clerk (signed) The COUNTY COMMISSIONERS OF CARROLL COUNTY, MARYLAND, a body corporate and politic of the state of Maryland J. Douglas Howard, President (signed) David H. Roush, Vice President (signed) Haven N. Shoemaker, Jr., Secretary (signed) Robin Bartlett Frazier, Commissioner (signed) Richard S. Rothschild, Commissioner (signed) Approved for legal sufficiency: Timothy C. Burke (with ink signature) County Attorney Notice of Public Hearing published: 10/15/12; 10/29/12; 11/27/12; 12/04/12 Public Hearing held: 12/11/12

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Public Meeting to adopt Ordinance: 01/24/13 Notice of Adoption of Ordinance published: 01/30/13 Ordinance filed with Clerk of Court: 01/30/13 I hereby certify that the actions described above took place on the dates referred to above and that this Ordinance is effective as of the 30th of January, 2013. Timothy C. Burke, County Attorney (signed)

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Frederick County’s Human Relations Commission’s Resolution, 2015 (passed) Repeal of the Frederick County Official English Ordinance Human Relations Commission HRC Resolution 2014-15A WHEREAS, on February 21, 2012, Frederick County adopted Ordinance Number 12-03-598 that declared English to be the official language in Frederick County, Maryland after one public hearing without significant public contribution or discussion, WHEREAS, the apparent purpose of this Ordinance is the denigration of people who speak languages other than English and has come to symbolize intolerance, narrow-mindedness and discrimination, WHEREAS, under the regulations of the Frederick County Human Relations Commission, this Commission is charged with the responsibility to “foster and encourage the elimination of discriminatory practices within Frederick County so that all persons in Frederick County are provided with an equal opportunity to be free from discrimination.” [Section 1(A)], and WHEREAS, The Commission is also required to monitor and recommend civil rights policy to the County. [Section 4(A)], WHEREAS, Frederick County has a long history of multiple languages over the last three centuries, including our rich German heritage to which we owe our founding, WHEREAS, governments, businesses, and individuals in Frederick County communicate freely and openly, most often in English but in many other languages as well, WHEREAS, Frederick County has many employers who participate in minority recruitment and hiring and recognize that embracing diversity is critical to recruiting and retaining the best and brightest to their respective fields, WHEREAS, we believe that one of the most vital and valuable aspects of daily life in Frederick County is its diversity and cultural heritage where all races, religions, ages, and cultures are welcome, as should be all languages, WHEREAS, we believe that this Ordinance, and the perception it has created, is a barrier to making Frederick County the very best place to live, work, and raise a family.

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THEREFORE, BE IT HEREBY RESOLVED on this 28th day of April, 2015, that the Human Relations Commission of Frederick County recommends to the Frederick County Council that Ordinance Number 12-03-598 be repealed. Angela H. Spencer (signed) Chair

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Tonya Amedon (signed) Vice Chair

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Frederick County Repeal Bill, 2015 (passed) Bill No. 15-08 Concerning: An Act to Repeal Ordinance No. 12-03-598 (Frederick County Official English Ordinance) Introduced: June 16, 2015 Enacted: August 18, 2015 Executive: Jan H. Gardner 8-25-15 (signed) Effective: October 17, 2015 COUNTY COUNCIL FOR FREDERICK COUNTY, MARYLAND

By: Council Member Fitzwater. Co-Sponsor Council Vice President Keegan-Ayer AN ACT to: Repeal Ordinance No. 12-03-598, for the purpose of promoting a competitive business climate for Frederick County’s existing 6,200 businesses which employ 79,000 workers; attracting new life science businesses and jobs that will move Frederick County closer to becoming the State’s bio-tech hub; ensuring that non-English language speakers are not deterred from reporting crimes, seeking medical care or other human services; and generally relating to Frederick County’s encouragement of multi-linguistic acceptance, tolerance and multi-cultural diversity in an increasingly global economy. By amending: Frederick County Code, Chapter N/A Bill No. 15-08 The Board of County Commissioners of Frederick County, Maryland, enacted Ordinance No. 12-03-598, titled “Frederick County Official English Ordinance” (Ordinance), effective February 22, 2012. The Ordinance proclaimed English as the official language of Frederick County. The Ordinance required that official actions which bind or commit Frederick County or which give the appearance of presenting the official views or positions of Frederick County be taken in the English language. The County Council of Frederick County, Maryland, (Council) finds that the Ordinance, and the perception it has created, constitutes a barrier to good business and impedes the growth and development of business and commercial endeavors in Frederick County.

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The Council has determined that in order to broaden the appeal of Frederick County to the business community, and to attract and retain businesses and employees in the biotech and life science segments of the commercial economy, Frederick County must and does embrace diversity. The Council determines and believes that Frederick County is, and should be, a welcoming community to all, with pride in the diversity of cultures and individuals who participate in and promote the well-being and growth of the County. The Council finds that there are numerous federal and Maryland State laws and regulations that currently exist which require translation and interpretation to facilitate and recognize the increasing diversity of persons residing in Frederick County. The Council further finds and determines that the Ordinance impedes the integration of diverse culture and values into our community and is contrary to the tolerance and acceptance of all individuals which is a hallmark of the community which is Frederick County. In light of these circumstances, the Council has determined that it is necessary and proper, and in the best interest of the residents of Frederick County, that the Ordinance be repealed. NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT ENACTED, that Ordinance 12-03-598, attached hereto as Exhibit A, be, and the same is hereby, REPEALED. Harold F. (Bud) Otis, President (signed) County Council of Frederick County, Maryland

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Index

academic writing, 66, 67, 148–150 linguistic authority and, 95–96 adult education, 14, 128, 150 Alaskans for a Common Language, 146 ALEC, 66, 148 Aliani, Renata, 20 Alim, H. Samy, 115 American Association for Applied Linguistics, 142 American Civil Liberties Union, 69, 71–72, 85 American Sign Language, 11, 13, 32, 122 Maryland School for the Deaf, 12 Anne Arundel County, 3, 23, 61, 63, 82, 90–92 bill 13-12 (2012), 63, 82–85, 91, 163–164 controversies, 81, 84–85 Queen Anne’s County and, 85, 86 antisemitism, 7, 32, 95 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 13, 33, 37 Arcuri, Frank, 54 Arizona, 56, 57, 70 Arizonans for Official English, 146 Horne v. Flores, 70 Arlington, Virginia, 49 Asgarov, Asgar, 87 Asian Americans, 1, 7–9, 13, 34, 122, 127–128 Asian American Center of Frederick, 9, 129 audience awareness, 55, 60, 70–71, 110, 143 media training and, 54–55 Baltimore, Maryland, 25, 82, 83, 90, 96, 107 Barletta, Lou, 24, 67–69, 73, 75 Baron, Dennis, 4, 5, 32, 114 Benson, Mark, 36 Bibby, Suzanne, 81–82 Bikales, Gerda, 47 Citizens of Dade United and, 38 failure as a strategy, 85 meeting S. I. Hayakawa, 50 Patty White and, 50 writing, 100, 145

bilingual education, 1, 16, 33, 58, 70 bilingualism. See multilingualism Black Americans, 7, 9, 11–13, 15, 134 Haitian refugees, 36–38 immigrants, 34 Jim Crow experiences of, 124–127 opinions on English-only policies, 18–19 Black Lives Matter, 125 Blommaert, Jan, 15, 22, 92, 95–97, 148 boarding schools for Indigenous children, 31–32 Bonfiglio, Thomas P., 95 Brandt, Deborah, 65, 66 Brazier, George, 42, 43 Bricker, Kathy, 47 as U.S. English executive director, 55 Brown v. Board of Education, 33 California Monterey Park, 54 Proposition 63, 70 Proposition O (San Francisco), 5, 52–54 San Bernardino, 74 San Francisco, 51 Tulelake, 44 Canada, 14, 32, 34 Canagarajah, Suresh, 9, 22, 96–97, 112, 114, 132, 134 capitalism, 145 Carroll County, 3, 23, 81, 89–90, 106 Hazleton and, 81 Monocacy River, 11 Ordinance 2013-01, 5, 61, 81–82, 89, 169–173 Queen Anne’s County and, 81 scale and, 104, 108–109 U.S. English and, 104 Carter, Jimmy, 38 Catholics, 32, 95 CCCC, 33, 114, 149 Chavez, Linda, 56

206

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Index Chinese Americans, 54 Chinese American Society, 85 church, 138–139, 150 Citizens of Dade United, 29–30, 35–39, 71, 145 FAIR and, 55 newspaper ads, 31, 36 civil rights, 125, 128–130 class, 3, 9, 26–27, 37, 55, 143 climate change, 148–149 Colcom Foundation, 48 collaborative writing, 29, 63, 137–138, 140–142 across local governments, 3, 86 between local governments and ProEnglish, 3, 4, 86 disclosure of, 110 in education, 148 ubiquity of, 21–22 colonialism, 6, 12–13, 145 compiling, 86, 140–142 Conner, Roger, 7, 39, 69 hiring Barnaby Zall, 46 Conservation Workshop. See U.S., Inc. (Tanton umbrella organization) copying, 65 among local governments, 61, 86 in education, 148 copyright, 65, 66 Crawford, James, 36, 37, 41, 156 Cuban refugees, 36–38, 48 Curry, Mary Jane, 65, 67 Dade County, Florida, 29–30, 33, 35–39, 67 anti-bilingualism ordinance, 5, 29, 36 repeal, 29, 112 Dammann, Sara Gay, 52 Dammann, Tom, 37, 46 De Costa, Peter, 96–97 Deardorff, Alan V., 66, 148 Delauter, Kirby, 4, 79, 139–140 Anne Arundel County and, 82 Devitt, Amy, 74 Diamond, Stanley, 40 California English Campaign, 50 John Tanton and, 49, 50 leading U.S. English, 50, 57 resignation, 57 tension with FAIR, 52 tension with John Tanton, 56 Dick, Hilary Parsons, 34, 71–72 disability, 122 Donald, Jerry, 24, 113, 133–137, 142 downscaling, 89–90, 92, 145 climate change and, 148–149 definitions of, 97

207 effectiveness of, 93, 108–110 as the main strategy, 98–103 upscaling combined with, 93, 94, 103–109 Dred Scott v. Sandford, 11 driver’s licenses, 16, 48 Duke, Hayden, 4, 78, 102, 104, 131 Dumenil, Phil, 86–87, 137 Dyson, Anne Haas, 10, 123 economic arguments, 4, 80, 100–102, 118, 120, 143 flipping the script, 87–88, 118–124, 129, 142 race and, 122–124 economies, local, 67, 120–121 English, 133–135 as a global language, 5, 92 myth of endangerment of, 2, 5, 72–73, 84, 104 translingual nature of, 132–137 in the United States, 144 English Language Amendment, 42–44, 85, 98 English Language Unity Act, 144 English-only policies. See also specific communities anti-immigrant effects of, 87–88 boarding schools and, 31–32 in comparison to other public policies, 147–148 disparate impact of, 2, 6–10 oversimplification of, 2, 6, 10–16 popularity of, 6, 16–18 racism and, 18, 124–132 symbolic function of, 76–77, 128 as test cases, 54 as unwelcome mats, 2, 7, 131–132 unpopularity of, 18–19, 138–140 whites-only policies and, 124–125 ethnography, 22, 96, 155 Europe, 114 everyday writers, 65–66 Facebook, 126, 153, 154 Frederick Local Yokel, 118 Occupy Frederick, 113, 127, 142 ProEnglish, 133 failure, 42, 61, 63, 82–85, 144 FAIR, 2, 69, 99, 145 Citizens of Dade United and, 38, 55 mailing lists, 39 nativism, 48 U.S. English and, 47–48, 60 Farmers Branch, Texas, 75 feedback on writing, 21–22, 65, 140–141 feminist historiography, 30–31

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208

Index

Fishman, Joshua, 5, 6, 15 Fitzwater, Jessica, 113, 128, 142 economic arguments, 119–122, 124, 129 election, 116–117 petition, 138–140 planning, 117–118 writing process, 141 Flores, Nelson, 9, 15, 114, 115, 120, 126, 136 Frazier, Robin Bartlett, 89–90, 92, 104 Frederick County, 3, 8–10, 23, 106, 116. See also Frederick County repeal campaign; Frederick Local Yokel; Occupy Frederick Anne Arundel County and, 82 Asian American Center of Frederick, 129 downscaling and, 100–102 Fredneck stereotype, 130–132 Human Relations Commission, 117 Jim Crow in, 124–125 Ku Klux Klan in, 126–127 Literacy Council of Frederick County, 10 Maryland School for the Deaf, 12 Monocacy River, 11 Ordinance 12-03-598 (2012), 61, 77–81, 160–162 Resolution 08-13 (2008), 74–77, 158 Frederick County repeal campaign, 105, 108, 112–113, 117–118 Bill 15-08 (2015), 119–120, 140–142, 145, 175–177 Frederick Local Yokel, 106 HRC resolution 2014-15A, 117, 128–130, 173–175 Human Relations Commission, 12, 137–138 Occupy Frederick, 142 petition, 138–140 ProEnglish and, 133, 140 Frederick Local Yokel, 113, 120–123, 130, 135–137, 142 French, 8, 12, 90, 96, 133 French Sign Language, 13 Futures Workshop. See U.S., Inc. (Tanton umbrella organization) Gal, Susan, 92–94, 104 Gardner, Jan, 76, 77 genre, 61, 65, 74 genre choices, 25, 63, 140, 141, 143 between bills and amendments, 42–43, 59 between resolutions and ordinances, 74–77 German, 12, 32–33, 146 German Americans, 7, 13, 31–33, 129, 146 Maryland and, 11, 12 ghostwriting, 5, 35, 42, 59, 63, 66, 81 disclosure of, 30, 110

in education, 148 for Hayakawa, S. I., 52 ubiquity of, 21–22 globalization, 95, 134, 148 grant writing, 47, 48 Grumbach, Jacob M., 103 Haitian refugees, 36–38 Haley, Alex, 12 Hall, Richard L., 66, 148 Hardin, Garrett, 50, 98–100 John Tanton and, 45 Haugen, Einar, 34–35 Hayakawa, S. I., 26, 69, 145 academic career, 40 bilingual ballots, 41–42 bilingual education, 41, 42 criticism of Citizens of Dade United, 38 English Language Amendment, 43–44 ghostwriting for, 52 ill health, 50–51 Japanese internment, comments on, 41 legacy, 59 mailing list, 45, 49, 50 Mauro Mujica and, 23 meeting John Tanton, 50 Monterey Park, California, 54 multilingualism, late interest in, 41 newspaper column, 41 public intellectual, 39 recruiting local policymakers, 5, 44 scale, 98 Senate election, 41 student activists, conflicts with, 41 U.S. English conflicts, 52 U.S. English, joining, 50–52 Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 24, 61–63, 67–74 Lozano v. Hazleton, 69, 74 health policy, 36, 119, 150 opioid crisis, 147–148 Heller, Monica, 94, 96 higher education, 14, 26–27 cost of, 150 English in, 151 Honig, Bonnie, 7–8 Hopkins, Daniel J., 35, 55, 103 Howard County, 89, 96 immigrants, 7, 8, 34, 87, 121–124, 127–130 conflation with people of color, 8 hostility toward, 18, 73, 81–83, 107–108 immigration policy DREAM Act (Maryland), 83, 117, 127 Hart-Celler Act, 34 Immigration Act (1924), 33, 34

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Index racism of, 71–72 287(g) program, 75, 127, 128 Indigenous nations, 1, 31, 147 Accohannock Indian Tribe, 11 Cherokee Nation, 31 Piscataway Conoy Tribe, 11 Piscataway Indian Nation, 11 Indigenous people, 12, 13, 18, 134 interpreters, 75 Irish Americans, 7 Irvine, Judith, 92, 104 Islamophobia, 1, 25, 92 Japanese internment camps, 41, 44 Jenkins, Charles, 74–77, 83, 140 Jenkins, Chuck, 75, 79, 81 Jewish Americans, 7, 95 K–12 education, 6, 14, 150 English language learners, students categorized as, 75 standardized tests, 151 Kachru, Braj, 16 Kang, Yu-Kyung, 149 Keegan-Ayer, M. C., 113, 130–131, 142 economic arguments, 121–122 election, 117 petition, 139 planning, 117–118 writing process, 140–141 Keough, Farrell, 100–102 Klotz, Sarah, 32 Kobach, Kris, 24–25 Kreyòl, 36 Ku Klux Klan, 126–127, 129 Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Memorial, 12 Ladd, Dick, 84–85 language ideology, 103 language policy as different from, 20, 64, 87, 109–111 linguistic authority, 54, 93–95, 105, 109 “one nation, one language,” 36, 92, 109 stigma, lack of, 110–111 language policy, 20–21 comparative approaches to, 146–147 definition of, 1–2 field of, 22, 34–35, 142 language ideology as different from, 20, 87, 109–111 as part of everyday life, 22 Latinx Americans, 1, 7–9, 18, 33, 34, 122, 127–128 differences between Mexican Americans and Cuban refugees, 37

209 Lau v. Nichols, 33 Lawton, Rachele, 17 LeBlanc, Robert John, 97 legislative subsidy, 66–67, 148 Lejano, Raul P., 6, 148, 149 Lemke, Jay, 95, 99 libertarian arguments, 87–88, 105 Lillis, Theresa, 65, 67 linguistic landscapes, 8, 12, 54, 89 literacy tests, 7 Lo Bianco, Joseph, 5, 20, 22 local practice, language policy as a, 22–23, 30, 109 English-only policies and, 111 from policymakers’ perspective, 2, 5, 34–35, 89–90, 109–110, 145 Lorimer Leonard, Rebecca, 38 Louisiana, 12 LULAC, 85 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 92 MALDEF, 85 Mason, Jay, 113, 124–128, 142 Mathias, John, 79, 133–134 May, Cordelia Scaife, 48 May, Stephen, 123 McAlpin, K. C., 1–3, 47 McKay, Betty, 42 Melby, Robert, 54–55 memorials. See statues, public Mexican Americans, 13, 15 Mexico, 34 Mihut, Ligia, 149 Miller, Stephen, 24–25 Minnesota, 131 Minutemen movement, 102–103 MLK Children v. Ann Arbor, 33 Moms for Liberty, 36 money, 17 costs of interpretation services, 121–122 direct mail as a source of, 48, 85 family foundations as a source of, 48 for refugee resettlement, 37 salaries, 66 school budgets, 75 monolingual orientation, 20, 31, 61, 112, 114 Montgomery County, 90 Mujica, Mauro, 57–59, 83, 107–108 S. I. Hayakawa and, 23 multilingual orientation, 112, 114, 118–121 multilingualism, 1, 8, 10–16, 118–124 employment discrimination and, 55 in Europe, 91

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210

Index

narratives, 6–7, 10–11, 128–130, 149 Nashville English First, 146 nationalism, 109 Nero, Shondel J., 6, 134, 148, 149 Occupy Frederick, 17, 113, 127–128, 135 Olds, David, 86–87 Park, Bob, 47, 70 Pavlenko, Aneta, 13, 32, 123 Pennycook, Alastair colonialism, 31 local practice, 22–23, 30, 99, 148 translingual theory, 114 petitions, 78, 138–140 Petoskey, Michigan, 51, 52 Philippines, 31 Plunske, Marion, 35, 36, 38 politicized places, 35, 55 Prior, Paul, 27n22, 65 ProEnglish, 1–3, 145 ALEC compared to, 66 Citizens of Dade United and, 29 English Language Advocates origins, 58 Facebook and, 140 Frederick County and, 133, 140 local mistrust of, 4, 106–107 name change, 58 public hearings, testimony at, 81–82, 87 publicizing role in local campaigns, 4, 86 scale, 98 U.S. English and, 60 ProEnglish model municipal ordinance absence in Anne Arundel County, 84 Carroll County and, 81 Frederick County and, 4 origins of, 23, 61–63, 67–70 Queen Anne’s County and, 86 ubiquity of, 3 ProEnglish model resolution, 58–59, 72 Puerto Ricans, 7, 13, 15, 16, 33, 58 Queen Anne’s County, 3, 11, 23, 85–86, 106 Anne Arundel County and, 63, 85 ordinance 12-06 (2012), 61, 81, 86–88, 103–105, 165–168 ProEnglish and, 86 scale and, 103–104, 108–109 raciolinguistic perspective, 113–115, 125–126 racism, 10, 15, 20 anti-Asian racism, 84–85 English-only policies and, 1, 81, 107–108, 124–132, 142

immigration policy and, 71–72 refugees and, 36–38 Reagan, Ronald, 17, 41 recommendations, 111 combining strategies, 143 supporting existing initiatives, 150 working collectively, 149–150 refugees, 8, 11, 14, 36–38 repertoires, linguistic, 15–16 research methods, 3, 23 analyzing scale jumping, 97–98 archival, 23–24, 30–31, 111, 154–155 checking interpretations with participants, 80, 155 digital, 152 drafts, comparing, 156 field notes, 9, 152 interviews, 105, 110, 124, 125, 152–154 looking locally, 145 meeting participants, 66, 125 news and social media, 154 observations, 152 transcription, 155 resource, language as a, 9, 119, 151 revision, 21–22, 65, 71–74, 81, 86, 141–142 Ricento, Thomas, 14, 16 Rosa, Jonathan, 9, 15, 114, 126 rough drafts, 65, 66, 81, 86, 148 Ruíz, Richard, 9, 119, 123 sanctuary cities, 66 scale, 29 discursivity of, 95, 99 materiality of, 95, 99, 110 policymakers’ perspective on, 145 relevant scales, 102 scale jumping, 95–97, 109–111. See also downscaling; upscaling critiques of, 96–97 research methods, 97–98 Schera, Enos, 36 Schiffman, Harold F., 35 Schildkraut, Deborah J., 8, 16–18, 87 Schlafly, Phyllis, 36 Shafer, Emmy, 5, 29–30, 35–39, 48, 54, 59, 145 Shoemaker, Haven, 81–82 Shreve, Billy, 4, 79, 118 Shumway, Norman, 57 Sierra Club, 45, 99 signs. See linguistic landscapes Simmons, Bob, 11, 85–87 slavery, 11–13, 15, 31, 126–127, 134 Smith, C. Paul, 77–81 Smitherman, Geneva, 13, 16, 18–19, 22, 33, 114–115

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Index Spanish, 13, 15, 16, 35–39, 89 employment, 7 higher education, 33, 149–150 history, 12 K–12 education, 6, 33 translations, 90 Spencer, Angela, 113, 128–130, 137–138 petition, 139 Spolsky, Bernard, 63–64, 120 St. Augustine, Florida, 12 state-level English-only policies, 2, 100 statues, public, 11, 12, 126–127 Stornaiuolo, Amy, 97 Students’ Right to their Own Language (resolution), 149–150 Subtirelu, Nicholas, 109–110, 115 Swensrud, Sydney, 48 syllabi, 149–150 Taney, Roger, 11, 126–127 Tanton, John, 59, 69, 145 Citizens of Dade United and, 38 downscaling and, 98–100, 109 Emmy Shafer and, 39 environmentalism, 45 forming FAIR, 46 Hardin, Garrett, 45 immigration, 46 interest in local policies, 5 meeting S. I. Hayakawa, 50 population control, 45–46 recruiting S. I. Hayakawa, 45, 49–52 refugees, 37 retaining S. I. Hayakawa, 52 sabbatical, 48–50 skepticism of bilingualism, 15 writer, 46, 52 Writer’s Workshop, 2 Tanton, Mary Lou, 45 Tardy, Christine, 111 Tatalovich, Raymond, 16–18 Tax ID numbers ProEnglish, 58 U.S. English, 51, 58 Tea Party movement, 17, 102–103, 127 templates, 63, 65, 127. See also ProEnglish model municipal ordinance disclosure of, 110 using multiple, 64, 81, 86 text histories, 64–67, 82 Tollefson, James, 6, 14, 150 Torres, Peter Joseph, 148 translators, 4, 75, 89 translingual practice, 113, 114, 132–137

211 Trumbauer, Chris, 83, 84 Trump, Donald, 24–25 Tseng, Amelia, 115 Tyler, Jesse, 104 upscaling, 90–92 definitions of, 95–97 downscaling combined with, 93, 94, 103–109 U.S. English, 2, 3, 69, 71, 145 choosing the name, 51 Citizens of Dade United and, 29 conflicts within, 30, 52, 54–55 direct mail fundraising, 85 downscaling and, 98–100 early local campaigns, 55 ethnic names strategy, 50 FAIR and, 47–48, 60 Frederick County and, 107–108 local mistrust of, 106 members, 104 Mujica era, 57–58 polls sponsored by, 18 ProEnglish and, 60 Proposition O (San Francisco), 5, 52–54 public hearings, testimony at, 104 recruiting S. I. Hayakawa, 50–52 scale and, 98, 107–108 tumult, 56–57 U.S., Inc. (Tanton umbrella organization), 51 Vandervoort, Robert, 23, 69, 70, 76–77, 106–108 Vietnam War, 14, 41, 84 voting, 33, 66 bilingual ballots, 41–42 multilingual ballots, 109 Walker, Jerry, 82–84 Washington, DC, 25, 38, 47, 48, 51, 57 Maryland counties and, 3, 82, 106–107 Waterman, Kevin, 87–88, 105 Westermeyer, William H., 102–103 White, Patty, 42, 43, 50 whiteness, 8–10, 26–27, 130–132, 143 Wible, Scott, 20, 22, 33, 114, 118–119 WITAN memo, 56–57, 145 Woolard, Kathryn, 93–95, 105 World War I, 32, 146 writer, identifying as a, 52, 66, 76 Writer’s Workshop, 1–3 writing as the focus of English-only policies, 76, 79 importance of, 21, 52, 61, 71

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212

Index

writing processes, 6, 52, 64, 93, 147–148. See also collaborative writing; compiling; copying; feedback on writing; ghostwriting; revision; rough drafts writing studies, 22, 148 Yiddish, 134 Young, Blaine, 77–79, 107–108

Anne Arundel County and, 82 backlash to, 81, 127–128 ProEnglish and, 79–81 Suzanne Bibby radio interview, 82 Zall, Barnaby, 47, 49, 55, 69–73 Zentella, Ana Celia, 7–8, 13, 16, 22, 115 Zero Population Growth, 45, 46, 99

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009278058.010 Published online by Cambridge University Press