Only English Spoken Here

By MARGARET CARLSON

At a Los Angeles hospital, the head nurse forbade workers to speak anything but English and urged employees to report anyone overheard using another language. The city council in Monterey Park, a suburb of L.A., ousted the trustees of the library for buying foreign-language books and magazines. The manager of an insurance company in Los Angeles ordered Chinese-American staffers to speak only English unless they were dealing with a Chinese- speaking customer.

These incidents and others like them occurred in the wake of California's adoption two years ago of an initiative declaring English the official language. Until recently language, which has sparked wars and altered national boundaries abroad, was not a political issue in this country. Now a growing number of Americans seem to feel their mother tongue needs protection. Voters in Florida, Arizona and Colorado have approved similar initiatives, bringing to 17 the number of states with such laws.

These victories have made U.S. English, the group that sponsored the initiatives, a formidable political force. Founded with the guidance of linguist S.I. Hayakawa, a former U.S. Senator from California, the 350,000- member organization is seeking a constitutional amendment making English the official language of the U.S. Says Steve Workings, the group's director of government affairs: "Language is one of the very few things we have in common in the U.S." U.S. English urges a written English-proficiency test for naturalization. It also advocates an end to bilingual ballots and an increase in funds for bilingual education, though only for short-term, transitional programs. Current bilingual courses, the group claims, fail students by weaning them from their mother tongues too slowly. "It is cultural maintenance, not language acquisition," says Workings.

Opponents of the official-English movement consider it to be no more than a socially acceptable way of tapping into xenophobic fears: fear of being outnumbered by immigrants, fear that jobs are in jeopardy from cheap labor, just plain fear of anyone different. Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California, charges the initiatives are partly responsible for unleashing a backlash against foreign- language minorities. Colleen O'Connor, spokeswoman of the American Civil Liberties Union, says the initiatives shout, "You're here but we would like to make it difficult for you." Even conservatives like Arizona Senator John McCain oppose initiatives like the one just passed in his state. Says McCain: "Our nation and the English language have done quite well with Chinese spoken in California, German in Pennsylvania, Italian in New York, Swedish in Minnesota and Spanish in the Southwest. I fail to see the cause for alarm now."

But others do. The sheer numbers of Hispanic immigrants, their cohesiveness and their growing political power set these immigrants apart from earlier groups who had to assimilate or fail. In the Miami area, for example, Spanish- language versions of everything from lottery tickets to televised game shows, as well as bilingual shops and restaurants and even jobs where only Spanish is acceptable, make it possible to live a full life without ever learning English. So widespread had Spanish become in Miami that in 1978 Emmy Shafer started the English-only movement when she could not find a clerk in the Dade County municipal offices who could speak English to her.

Those who believe that the movement inflames nativist resentments got some ammunition this fall. The ethnocentric views of U.S. English's co-founder and former chairman John Tanton came to light when initiative opponents uncovered a 1986 memo in which he expressed worry that low white birthrates and high Hispanic birthrates would endanger American society. Wrote Tanton: "Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down." Board member Linda Chavez, former staff director of the Civil Rights Commission and later candidate for the U.S. Senate from Maryland, quit in disgust, as did Walter Cronkite, and Tanton was forced to leave the organization.

Tanton aside, the English-language movement is something of a political hybrid, resisting categorization. Former and current members of the board of directors of U.S. English like Chavez and Cronkite, Bruno Bettelheim, Saul Bellow and Alistair Cooke are hardly xenophobes. They believe that, in a land that was founded by immigrants, English is the essential unifying force. The propositions they support may be little more than useless clutter, a reassurance that the U.S. is not vulnerable to a Quebec-style bilingualism with all its attendant bitterness. Ironically, it is the debate over the ballot initiatives themselves that has created so much rancor.

With reporting by Careth Ellingson/Miami and Cristina Garcia/Los Angeles