To celebrate Foreign Language Week, established by proclamation by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to “highlight programs that encourage American youth to broaden their horizons...and understand and communicate with people of other nationalities and nations,” a student at Pine Bush High School in upstate New York recited the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic over the school’s PA system during morning announcements. Students immediately protested, and the school superintendent received “complaints from district residents who had lost family members in Afghanistan and from Jewish parents who were equally outraged by the reading” (the school had been sued in 2013 for antisemitism). FoxNews headlined their report of the story, “One nation under Allah.”
Responding to the furor, Pine Bush High School immediately canceled Foreign Language Week and ditched plans to have the Pledge recited in Japanese, Spanish, or Klingon. From now on, Pine Bush will only pledge in English, and it will only celebrate Foreign Language Week in English. After all, English is a foreign language in North America.
Critics of the Arabic Pledge lodged two major objections: Arabic is the language of the enemy; and translating patriotic texts like the Pledge of Allegiance, the Star-Spangled Banner, and the Declaration of Independence borders on treason, especially when you use the language of the enemy.
Neither objection makes much sense. If we don’t understand the language of the enemy, we won’t understand what the enemy is doing. And most people read their bibles or other sacred books in translation, so why fear translating our civic texts as well?
Back in the 1780s, a few American superpatriots even viewed English as the language of the enemy because the United States had just fought a war with England. Some of these original Tea Partiers thought their new nation should pick a new language. French was an option, since it was the language of pure rationality, or that’s what the French said, anyway. Then there was Greek, the language of the world’s first democracy—democratic if you weren’t a foreigner, a woman, or a slave. Or Hebrew, the language Adam and Eve spoke in the Garden of Eden (at least that’s what they thought in the eighteenth century). There’s also a myth that German came one vote short of replacing English as America’s official language. But that’s a myth; it never happened. One revolutionary snark concluded that it would be easier for Americans to keep English for themselves and make the British speak Greek.
Plus, English bore the name of another country, which seemed unpatriotic, so some critics suggested that even if we did speak English, we should rename it Columbian, Federal language, or American. That idea went nowhere.
Speaking the language of our former colonial masters wasn’t, in the end, an act of treason, and neither was translating America’s foundational texts. In 1777, the Continental Congress authorized a French translation of the Articles of Confederation to encourage Canadians to join in the revolution. A French version of the Declaration of Independence, printed in Philadelphia in 1778, was popular among French revolutionaries. And a month after the American Constitution was published, German and French translations were the talk of Europe.
Translation seemed a good way to carry the idea of America abroad and to Americanize nonanglophone immigrants at home. In 1919, the U.S. Bureau of Education commissioned a translation of the national anthem into Spanish in an effort to encourage patriotism. And the U.S. State Department currently has on its website translations of the Bill of Rights and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence in fifty-one languages, from Amharic to Khmer to Uighur. In case anyone in Pine Bush is wondering, Arabic is there as well. And publishers of educational materials have long offered posters of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish and other languages to encourage immigrants and expose Americans to other languages, which is the idea behind Foreign Language Week.
The U.S. Bureau of Education commissioned this Spanish translation of the Star-Spangled Banner in 1919 as part of its Americanization program for new immigrants. Image: Library of Congress.
The Pledge of Allegiance itself has a history that some of today’s superpatriots would find alarming. It was written by Francis Bellamy in 1892 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the Americas, a voyage that is seen by historians now as one of conquest as much as discovery. Bellamy was a loyal American, to be sure, but he was also an ardent socialist. If FoxNews ran a story about him, it would be titled “One nation under Karl Marx.” To make matters worse, Bellamy accompanied his Pledge with a Roman military salute, the one later adopted by the Nazis in Germany and Mussolini’s Fascists. So troubling were the fascist associations of the Pledge’s raised-arm salute that in 1942, Congress replaced it with the hand-over-heart salute still used today.
Schoolchildren in 1915 reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, accompanied by Bellamy’s military salute, the same salute that would be adopted in the 1930s in Germany and Italy by Nazis and Fascists.
Banning language in the name of patriotism can get out of hand. In May, 1918, to support our troops overseas and promote American unity at home, the governor of Iowa forbade the use of all foreign languages in public—in schools and church services, on trains, on the telephone. The target was German, the language of the enemy in World War I. But two months later, Iowans with torches and pitchforks decided Dutch was as bad as German and burned down a church and school in Peoria because Dutch was being used in services and classrooms.
Another governor, another proclamation. In this one, Iowa Gov. William Harding banned the use of any foreign language in public.
Banning language is just a more polite way of banning people. Banning German in Iowa didn’t affect the outcome of the war. Banning the pledge in Arabic won’t reduce the antisemitism at Pine Bush. And it won’t dishonor those Americans who died in Afghanistan, in part because the principal languages of Afghanistan are Pashto and Dari, not Arabic. More important, though, the pledge in any language is a pledge of allegiance to the American flag and to the country for which it stands, not to some other country. That is what the words say, even when they’re translated into Arabic, or Navajo, or Klingon.
