[conserve-it]

"BTW, the Founders didn't believe that they had the right to tell people what language to speak. I guess they understood the meaning of the word "freedom"."

Yeah, they all also wrote and spoke English!!

[Luis Gonzalez]

''Measures of great temper are necessary with the Germans,''Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1753. ''Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant, stupid sort of their own nation, and ... 'tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they entertain.... Few of their children in the country learn English ... Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch [i.e., Deutsch] and English; the signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all their ... legal writings in their own language, which ... are allowed in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continual need of interpreters.''

Stop the flow of Germans into Pennsylvania, Franklin warned, or ''they will soon so outnumber us, that ... we will not in my opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.''

A few generations after Franklin agonized over immigration flows from Germany, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge worried about the influx from Central and Southern Europe. To slow it, he proposed a literacy requirement - one that immigrants from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Italy would be less likely to meet.

''The races most affected by the illiteracy test are those whose emigration to this country has begun within the last 20 years,'' Lodge explained in March 1896, ''races with which the English-speaking people have never hitherto assimilated, and who are most alien to the great body of the people of the United States.''

[Luis Gonzalez]

Let me know what your ancestry is, and I'll tell you what Americans thought of them when they arrived here.

Funny thing is, anytime I ask that question, the answer comes back invariably that their ancestors came here on the Mayflower, and married a native American.

According to my findings, we should change the name of Cooper's book to "The Next To The Last Mohican."

[Luis Gonzalez]

"Yeah, they all also wrote and spoke English!!"

And having the opportunity to put a clause in the constitution that would establish an official language (they debated the issue) they chose not to do so.