The offer of a local pastor to translate portions of the Dover's web site into Spanish has sparked a controversy in this fast-changing town, where Hispanics -- most of recent immigrant background -- now comprise a majority of the town's 18,000 residents.
 
Three council members spoke out with passion on the subject, arguing that English is our national language -- the glue that holds us together as one people despite our differences - and that any accommodations to language differences would undermine the goal of linguistic unity by making it easy for people to get along in foreign language and avoid learning English. Mayor James Dodd, also an opponent of translation, asserted that previous generations of immigrants, including his ancestors, had to learn English, and that he sees no reason to change that policy now.
 
Although Dover's mayor and council members are right about the need to promote unity, to forge a common American identity that transcends but does not disallow group identity, and to maintain the great American equilibrium of peoples and cultures, there are much better ways to pursue that goal. Indeed, a multi-lingual communication policy can be considered one of those ways -- an approach that not only promotes public safety and fairness, but has ample precedent in American history.
 
It's simply not true to say that past immigrants embraced English without resistance and that local officials consistently followed an "English-only" policy. If anything, conditions were such that people, especially women (including my Sicilian immigrant grandmother who lived in this country for 60 years without ever learning English), could hold on to their languages longer and live in self-contained ethnic communities, untouched by the communications revolution that has altered modern life and catapulted English into its current preeminent status.
 
Moreover, governments at all levels, as well as civic and charitable groups which in those days bore the major burden of caring for the needy, routinely reached out immigrants in foreign languages, not only to inform them about their rights and responsibilities as new Americans, but also to ease their transition into their new homeland. After World War I broke out in Europe in 1914, security concerns amplified this need to communicate with millions of immigrants in languages they could understand.

In a pre-internet era, print media, in the form of pamphlets and newspapers, and bilingual outreach workers, speaking languages like Italian, Polish, and Yiddish, were the primary techniques used to reach the immigrant population. During World War I, the Foreign Language Information Service was established as the major intermediary between the federal government and the nation's foreign-born community, feeding information in foreign language to immigrant organizations and to the thousands of foreign-language newspapers and periodicals that flourished at that time.
 
Other public institutions also got into the act. A "foreign language movement" in American libraries resulted in major investments in purchasing books and periodicals in foreign language for the enjoyment of their immigrant patrons. Providing reading materials in foreign languages was not seen as subversive of the goal of integration, but rather as facilitating it. As the Chief Librarian of Newark said in 1915, "It is easy to believe that they (the immigrants) find their new home still more homelike, and become sooner attached to it, when they find one of its public institutions giving them a welcome in their native tongues."
 
Schools also, both public and private, made vigorous efforts to enable the second generation to learn the native languages of their parents. In New Jersey, where Germans were a major population element throughout the 19th century, German was taught widely in the elementary schools up to World War I. In Hoboken, the most German of New Jersey's cities, German was used commonly in business and public affairs.
 
In an influential pamphlet published in 1919, providing general guidance to "Americanization" workers, the following advice was given: "Remember that the language of the immigrant is dear to him for home and religious purposes and the intimate relations of his life. Respect his language and he will learn ours more willingly" - not a bad piece of advice for today.