Subject: re : 6 . 793 , qs : mohawk , russian , banning of german i . mel ' cuk

3 ) date : tue , 6 jun 1995 01 : 44 : 22 - 0400 from : jpkirchner @ aol . com subject : q : german banned in iowa i ' ve recently received a message from a man who claims that during world war i , the use of german and other languages was made " illegal " in the state of iowa by decree of the governor . this is very interesting to me , since my own family 's stories of anti - german discrimination in michigan at that time are limited to a snide remark or two about our surname . below is the relevant part of the man 's message . can anyone vouch for the veracity of what he says ? james kirchner ) here in iowa where i grew up most household language was a > foreign language the early part of this century . the public ) schools were english of course . my uncle went to a local ) " german " school which was a parochial school . it was ) necessary because all the german lutheran church liturgy and > bibles were in luther 's german so the plattdeutsch speaking ) people had to go to school to learn it . world war i ended that . > the iowa governor issued a proclamation banning the speaking ) of any foreign language in public places . phone operators were ) instructed to pull the plug on any non english telephone ) conversations . party line patrons were to hold the telephone ) receiver up to the mouth piece so the resulting whistling ) would interfere with non english speech . all modern language > instruction was dropped from school curriculums . a blow ) from which the school system never really recovered . ) newspapers published reports of people arrested on the ) street for speaking german . this was a real hardship on older > immigrants . all german language newspapers were ) suppressed . our rural county had german papers at one time . ) in fact the editor of one was once elected the county ) treasurer . this day and age it is all somewhat embarrassing . i > stumbled on to the fact that the state of iowa organized what ) amounted to a secret police agency . the state formed an ) agency whose purpose was to investigate acts of disloyalty . ) they were given the power to levy fines and imprison people ) for the duration of the war without benefit of trial . america 's > active participation was relatively short lived so the agency ) was not around long . it would make an interesting research ) paper sometime if any records still exist . this happened in several midwest states . the issue reached the supreme court in the early 20 's in the case " meyer vs . nebraska " , the court ruled against nebraska , effectively eliminating the laws . frank anshen dept of linguistics state u of ny stony brook , ny 11794
