[In the following essay, Woolley discusses the issues surrounding the use of dialect and immigrant speech in the writings of the authors of the Chicago Renaissance, noting that although these practices seem somewhat racist due to the stereotypes they represent, the use of linguistic dialect in the writing of the time was in fact a response to prejudice in language and expression.]

[T]h' best way to masther th' language iv anny furrin' counthry is to inthrajooce ye'er own. … Faith, whin us free born Americans get through with th' English language we'll make it look as though it had been run over be a musical comedy.

—Mr. Dooley, in “Mr. Dooley on Slang,” by Finley Peter Dunne, 39

In addition to reporting the struggles of reformers, workers, farmers, women, African Americans, and immigrants, turn-of-the-century Chicago writers responded to linguistic conflicts, both legislative and literary. The craze for representing the speech of immigrants, African Americans, and the working classes became part of a program to represent changing social realities. Most of these efforts appear racist or classist today, in part because writing in dialect often affirmed the era's linguistic stereotypes. Yet seeing nonstandard English in print pushed readers to confront their prejudices as well. Indeed, the context in which dialect literature was produced and commented upon explains the nature of its popularity among Chicago writers, many of whom professed that they abhorred racial and class prejudice. As two long-standing attitudes toward the English language in the United States contended in Chicago's literary production, artists, editors, journalists, and critics insisted—with varying levels of intensity—on either the consistency of English across time and geography or the distinctness of the American version. These conflicting attitudes pitted proponents of linguistic purity against writers who challenged their taste.¹ Because the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of these philosophies of language ultimately overlapped, however, experiments with dialect produced contradictory effects.

Chicago served as a laboratory for testing literary and legislative approaches to polylingualism and variations within English at a time when the nation as a whole was arguing about the purity of the English language. Although Henry James's complaints about American speech being “an absolutely inexpert daub of unapplied tone” (Question 25) take the debate to esoteric levels, his making the 1905 Bryn Mawr commencement ceremony a forum addressing orthoepic decline indicates the currency of such topics. “[T]he early 1890s, the period during and after World War I, and the present” have seen debate about the official status of the English language, according to Dennis Baron, who finds that Illinois has historically taken a stand “firmly in the middle of the road” (“Legal Status” 14). Both British traditions of standardizing English and American patterns of proclaiming linguistic uniqueness created a climate for attempts to declare an official language in the United States. In the United States and Great Britain, maintaining standard language traditionally has involved moralism; discrimination in education, employment, and social standing; an assumption that spoken usage should be modeled on the written form; and outraged letters over issues of correctness to editors of newspapers and magazines (Milroy and Milroy 2-3, 21-22, 37-38, 40-41). James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, who define standardization as an “intolerance of optional variability in language,” trace what they call “the complaint tradition” in English as far back as Jonathan Swift's “Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue” (26, 33).

Advocates of a unique American English have praised the language's no-frills, no-nonsense, down-to-earth serviceability. Its lack of pretension has been credited to its use by a wide range of people. Baron discusses the American notion that the character of language is shaped by democracy, including in his discussion examples from Noah Webster, John Adams, Walt Whitman, and James Fenimore Cooper.² While in England, Cooper “idealized his compatriots as living more simply, and communicating more naturally and directly, with less deviousness and artificiality, than their English counterparts” (English-Only 50). Such attitudes had a strong influence on the course of Chicago's literature as midwestern speech came to be linked with a mythical, forthright, truly American form of communication. The popular association of the Midwest with democracy also occurred outside literary circles. The connection arises, for example, in the arguments Illinois legislators made for and against prohibiting instruction in languages other than English and requiring English literacy of voters. Chicago's Charles J. Michal “argued that prescribing education was despotic and inimical, something more appropriate to New England (where nativism had been strong in the mid-nineteenth century) than to an all-American midwestern state: ‘I think it is blue-bellied Yankeeism. I think it is not Americanism’” (Baron English-Only 125).

Protectionist and laissez-faire linguistic philosophies overlapped because associating a New World language with patriotism encouraged linguistic chauvinism that resulted in attempts to keep American English consistent throughout the country (43). The Chicago writers illustrate the shortcomings of both standard English and “all-American” views, and they vary in their awareness of these complicated issues. As Baron writes, “the very definition of what constitutes a language or a dialect is influenced by political factors as well as by linguistic ones” (5). For my purposes, writing in dialect refers to any attempt to call attention to the speech of a particular region, social class, or ethnic group, especially when the effort involves a departure from conventional spelling, syntax, or word choice. By continuing to use the categories of dialect and standard English, I reluctantly reaffirm the hierarchy that the terms connote but also confirm the failure of dialect literature to silence the call for standardization. The distinction between dialect and standard English still exists, but standards have become less rigid.³

American and British authors long have attempted to render “language really used by men” (Wordsworth 434) into written form, and the portrayal of local color has a lengthy history in the United States. By the 1890s, however, a large influx of non-English-speaking immigrants to America, the African-American migration from South to North, labor movements that captured the imaginations of writers, especially those in Chicago, and the new prominence of certain regions of the country made literary experiments with dialect a charged subject in the United States. Not all writers from Chicago communities took an interest in making the colloquial literary, but writers there did become more involved with questions of empowering the public, uniting citizens through language, and applying folk wisdom to the industrial world than with the questions of perception, vision, and defamiliarization that concerned other modern writers. A fascination with American accents extended Chicago writers' interests beyond their own city, and passages from midwestern literature suggest that performing in dialect also became an American pastime. As early as 1893, one of the characters in Henry Fuller's novel of Chicago, The Cliff-Dwellers, asks a young man about the kind of writing he does: “Well, what is it—dialect or psychological?” (27). In Babbitt (1922), Sinclair Lewis satirized the popularity of imitating varieties of the American vernacular when he described correspondence courses in public speaking that offered, among other lessons, instruction in “how to tell dialect stories” (66). Lewis also parodied the trend by making the idiom of Babbitt and his friends a source of humor. Hence Lewis gave middle-class, Anglo-Saxon citizens the same treatment that other writers were giving the lower classes.

Some Chicagoans made dialect literature notorious rather than popular, as was apparent in the literary magazine the Dial. Unlike Hobart Chatfield-Taylor's and Slason Thompson's Chicago-based periodical America (1888-1891), which stood explicitly for anti-immigration in its hyperpatriotism (Duffey 57-62, K. Williams “Pretzel to Grobnik” 174, Szuberla “Reborn” 39), the Dial stood for the New England philosophy of its editors and expressed what Fredric John Mosher has called an “intelligent conservatism” (107, 430). Its founder, Francis Fisher Browne, opposed imperialism and protested publicly against the execution of the anarchists involved in the Haymarket affair (Mosher 158, 153). Fluent in French, Norwegian, German, and Italian, and a self-taught expert on European literature (187, 389), Dial associate editor William Morton Payne did not base his judgments opposing dialect literature on the common prejudice against anything that sounded foreign.⁴ Yet, despite the editors' interest in questions of justice and their endorsement of such issues as non-English library books for immigrants, the Dial's appeals for the maintenance of standard English often relied on the rhetoric of xenophobia.

For many of its thirty-eight years in Chicago, the Dial “was widely regarded as the leading literary review in the United States” (Mosher 42). Founded in 1880, the journal was meant to stimulate cultural activity in Chicago, involve area writers as contributors (81), and participate in national debates about publishing, libraries, education, the arts, literary criticism, and other forms of scholarship (“Dial” 28:328).⁵ The Dial had a national circulation but also reported on news at the University of Chicago and cultural events in the city. Its editors struggled to avoid appearing provincial while simultaneously publicizing their city's cosmopolitan accomplishments. In order to maintain this balance yet ensure that Chicago writers of merit received critical attention, Browne adopted a policy of either encouraging local writers or overlooking them altogether. “[I]f a book was not worthy of some commendation,” writes Mosher, “it was simply ignored and not mentioned in Browne's columns” (81). Despite this attempt to accommodate local and national interests, some felt that the Dial did not do enough to promote Chicago writers, and readers sought to even the score by writing letters in praise of what was happening in the area or to complain about the general lack of publicity local authors received. One reader lamented, “Whenever there shall be, among our millions, a few thousands, who on seeing any Chicago book announced, cry, ‘Hello! What's this? I must buy it and see,’ there will be a Western literature. Then it will be the second book of a worthless writer which is neglected; now it is the first book of a worthy writer—if he happens to be ‘a Westerner’” (“Who Reads” 13:131).

The Dial's attitude toward the use of dialect in literature stemmed in part from associate editor Payne's dislike of realism (Mosher 331) and from the desire to raise the quality of books written and published in the midwestern and western United States. Arguments for and against the notion of a uniquely “western” literature raged in the Dial for months. The magazine took an unequivocal position in an 1893 editorial by Payne⁶ entitled “The Literary West”:

Some composer of dialect doggerel, cheaply pathetic or sentimental, gains the ear of the public; his work has nothing more than novelty to recommend it, but the advent of a new poet is heralded, and we are told by Eastern critics that the literary West has at last found a voice. Some strong-lunged but untrained product of the prairies recounts the monotonous routine of life on the farm or in the country town, and is straightway hailed as the apostle of the newest and consequently the best realism. Some professional buffoon strikes a new note of bad taste in the columns of the local newspaper, and the admiring East holds him up as the exemplar of the coming humor.

(15:174)

Here the burlesque of eastern critics' attitudes toward western literature illustrates the intersection of regional issues and linguistic purity movements.

For Payne and some readers, the debate over a western literature—and its characterization as a new breed of written American English—was tied to the question of America's literary relationship to England. Payne drew parallels between Easterners condescending to Westerners and the way British critics earlier had treated American writers, concluding that literature in English could be grouped by era of publication but not by geography (15:173). Critics of American literature still argue that the notion of a national literature is flawed and that American literature cannot be divorced either from the European traditions out of which it grew or from European concepts of a land called America. Unlike the Dial's position, these challenges emphasize that American literature has not all been written in English and cannot be separated from the history and culture of the other countries of the Americas (Spengemann 26-27, Wiget 209). For its part, the Dial rested its case against a distinct American or regional literature on notions of literary excellence and the unifying power of the English language: “Except in their relation to choice of subject-matter, the terms Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern, have absolutely no literary meaning in a country all of whose parts have a common speech. The same standards apply to all the literature written in the English language” (15:175).

Editors and contributors to the Dial saw literature ensuring that Americans shared this “common speech” with England. In another 1893 editorial, “The Future of American Speech,” Payne at once exalted in and was repulsed by the linguistic imperialism of Great Britain: “However desirable may be the increased use of our language by the nations of the earth, we cannot regard with equanimity the tendency of the language, in its territorial extensions, to assume corrupt dialectic forms.” Payne expresses his concern about the United States in his reminder that “the English language, in its native environment, is still substantially the language created by Chaucer and Shakespeare, but observers are not wanting who declare that the English language, transplanted to the American continent, is undergoing radical changes, and becoming a dialect of the parent form of speech” (14:233).

Issues of literature and speech raised the question of national identity, and Payne's answer—basing that identity on English culture—denied differences between speech and literature, the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States and Great Britain. It also indirectly denied differences among American citizens of various ethnic origins. A similar welding of English and American history had taken place in the 1880s with the publication of textbooks on literary history. “In view of the Americanizing aims of the American literary history textbooks,” Nina Baym writes, “the histories rather emphasized than played down the English origins of the American nation, thereby instructing classrooms of children of non-English ancestry to defer to the Anglo-Saxonism of their new country's heritage. This most important point was often left implicit, but it appears to have been well understood” (463). In “The Future of American Speech” Payne likewise emphasized the importance of schools in preserving Anglo-American culture, concluding with the thought that only proper education could bring us “once more into secure possession of the rich heritage, so nearly lost, of the speech of Shakespeare and of Tennyson” (14:235).

Two decades later, a Dial editorial would sound a desperate note that made explicit the cultural and political issues raised by an American literature:

All the white races represented in America are beginning to intermarry. But biology does not promise that the result will be a composite type in which the characters we call Anglo-Saxon will predominate. … Indeed, we know that there is no assimilation of races without modification. We cannot be certain that so much as the language will remain to us. Our vernacular may be so modified that there will be more difference between the speech of an American and an Englishman than there is now between the speech of an Italian and a Spaniard.

But long before that happens we shall have begun to produce an American literature distinct from English literature.

(“American Literature” 58:38)

The call to clean up speech—and to keep written English standard—was an attempt to hold together a national myth that had little basis in the nation's history or in the heritage of its citizens. At times, the Dial's rhetoric suggested that everyone must exercise vigilance in an effort to maintain what William Cranston Lawton called the “ties which still bind us to the happiest of our many fatherlands” in his praise for the Dial's “effective warfare, of argument and ridicule, against the notion that American literature in general, and sectional Western literature in particular, should cut loose from the English traditions that make up the past” (25:39). “The Future of American Speech” stressed that “Americanisms”—or the coining of new words or idioms—were not the problem. “But we do refer to the mushroom growths of speech that spring up everywhere among us, the modes of expression that result from mere slovenliness of mind, and find no warrant either in the genius of the language or in the necessities of the situation,” Payne explained (14:234). Everybody's slouchy speech habits and their proliferation in dialect literature, then, threatened the national identity. Beginning around 1918, the National Council of Teachers of English cosponsored “Better Speech Week” in American schools, where children pledged to “not dishonor my country's speech by leaving off the last syllable of words”; to “say a good American ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in place of an Indian grunt ‘um-hum’ and ‘nup-um’ or a foreign ‘ya’ or ‘yeh’ and ‘nope’”; to “improve American speech by avoiding loud rough tones”; and to “learn to articulate correctly as many words as possible during the year” (Daniels 9).

The shape the debate took in the Dial intimated that crusaders against solecisms were trying to help the lower classes come into their American heritage on an equal basis with other citizens. For instance, in his article “Conversational English,” Percy F. Bicknell chides the upper classes, the clergy, and members of the bar for letting their speaking habits slip and concludes, “Let us beware of reaching the condition of Greece and Rome of old, and of Turkey and parts of Germany and France and other European countries of to-day, where the literary and the spoken languages are entirely distinct, and the uneducated man is obliged to study a book in his own tongue as he would a foreign language” (21:107). Evidently, as Bicknell suggests, careless speech on anyone's part could lead to the development of a two-tier language that would alienate the working classes in their pursuit of education. Rampant variability in spoken language was feared because it might eventually make the written form unrecognizable to all but an elite group.

Despite the Dial's concern for the working classes, some of its commentary suggests that insisting on proper speech was a way of maintaining class distinctions and keeping inferiors in their places. Moreover, there was the implied concern that representation in literature might also correspond to admittance into other exclusive, but vaguely defined, institutions. For instance, a letter from Marion E. Sparks of Urbana, Illinois, implies that allowing the speech of the lower classes into literature may be only a first step toward letting them into other spheres:

The growth and popularity of the dialect story has caused words unknown to polite literature to appear in conservative periodicals. That seems to be accepted as necessary. But how far can we permit this to go? Can we afford to admit these tramps in the world of words into the society of their betters on terms of equality? Can dialect and colloquial terms take the place of words which are acknowledged as standards in literature apart from the dialect story?

(24:39)⁷

In an 1899 editorial entitled “Idiom and Ideal,” the Dial used a similar metaphor, expressing a fear of educated citizens and undesirable people competing for space:

There are few features of the recent literary situation as noteworthy as the large production and wide vogue of writings which exploit some special form of idiom and rely for their main interest upon the appeal to curiosity thus made. The idiom of the sailor and the soldier, the rustic and the mechanic, have elbowed their way into literature, and demand their share of the attention hitherto accorded chiefly to educated speech. The normal type of English expression has to jostle for recognition with the local and abnormal types of the Scotchman and the Irishman, the negro and the baboo, and, in our own country particularly, with such uncouth mixtures as those of the German-American and Scandinavian-American.

(27:305)

Dialect literature created controversy because it introduced variability, did not sustain the myth of an Anglo-Saxon-based American culture, and gave “Others” legitimacy through writing. Elizabeth Frick has observed that throughout American history “the immigration of non-English speakers is almost always described as a problem, but with remarkable consistency it is seen more specifically as a disaster by water” (27). In addition to making an occasional reference of this type (see, for example, Duffield 15:86), the Dial often associated nonstandard language with disease. Payne's 1895 editorial on “The Use and Abuse of Dialect” identifies incorrect English as the agent causing a national literary illness:

There are indications—not very marked as yet, but still indications—that the day of the dialect versifier and story-teller is waning. The literary epidemic for which he is responsible has raged with unabated virulence in this country for the past ten years or more. It has had almost complete possession of the bric-a-brac popular magazine. Its contagion has even extended to those periodicals which we too fondly fancied to stand for the dignities, as opposed to the freaks, of literature. At the other extreme, it has been disseminated and vulgarized by the newspaper and the popular reciter. A few of the men and women whom we count as real forces in American letters have been numbered among its victims. But all epidemics exhaust themselves in time, and we are encouraged to believe that this one is nearly spent.

(18:67)

As Sander L. Gilman argues, “The most powerful stereotypes in nineteenth-century Western Europe and the United States were those that associated images of race, sexuality, and the all-pervasive idea of pathology” (11-12). These stereotypes attached themselves to languages because, according to Gilman, “language implies the correct and meaningful use of language. Any other use is ‘crazy.’ Thus one of the inherent definitions of any linguistic group is that it is the norm of sanity. The Other is always ‘mad’” (129). In the nineteenth century, literature, popular dialect fiction, and vaudeville had depicted African Americans, among others, as incapable of using language correctly. As a result, there existed many good reasons for objecting to the use of dialect; yet in protesting the worthlessness of dialect literature, the Dial associated ideas about race, class, and country of origin with metaphors of disease, thereby reaffirming the stereotypes perpetuated by the conventions of writing in dialect. Payne's conceit emphasized physical health, rather than sanity, but conformity to standard written English nevertheless became a test of cultural well-being.

The editorial “Idiom and Ideal” asked, “Does the speech of Tommy Atkins and Marse Chan, the dialect of Drumtochty and Donegal, the locution of the Hoosier farmer and the Bowery tough, have anything of the antiseptic quality that preserves a story or a poem and enables it to delight successive generations of readers?” (27:305-306). If great literature had an “antiseptic quality,” then were nonstandard versions of English toxic? According to one of the Dial's contributors, even college students, who presumably had many positive models, were not immune to the dangers of poor speech. In a Dial opinion piece from 1897, W. H. Johnson complains about college students not reading enough good literature, getting credit for working on the school newspaper, and making a “habit of taking the most grotesque liberties in its [English's] morphology, phonetics, syntax, and meaning, for no more adequate reason than the supposition that such linguistic butchery is humorous.” Johnson warns, “Now it is utterly impossible that such loose habits of speech indulged in constantly during student life should have no permanently deleterious effect upon the speech of after days” (22:271). Venereal disease appears to provide the analogy here, and an earlier Dial editorial entitled “The Use and Abuse of Dialect” had similarly connected speech and sexuality by alerting readers about textbooks containing “examples of perverted diction that cannot fail to exert an evil influence upon the impressionable years of childhood” (18:68). Metaphors of pathology represented written dialect as unhealthy or deviant despite the legitimacy that writing granted nonstandard speech.

Some of the Dial's readers and contributors felt strongly enough about the threat to literature that they added their voices in support of legislation to restrict immigration to the United States. In a letter that appeared in the Dial under the title “A Literary Phase of the Immigration Question” in January 1893, Henry W. Thurston of La Grange, Illinois, refers to a writer from The Forum who “believes that the literary decay of New England has been largely due to the great influx of foreigners in recent years.” The writer continues, “Furthermore, … no considerable literary product of the highest excellence can possibly be obtained from a polyglot people.” Thurston wonders, “[S]hould all immigration to this country, except from Teutonic or possibly from English-speaking peoples, be entirely prohibited for a period of years, would there be an unmistakable literary gain to the United States?” (14:41). William Trent also advocates homogeneity in an article entitled “American Literature” for the Dial's twentieth-anniversary issue in 1900: “The great centres of artistic and literary production in the past, from Athens to the Boston of the Transcendentalists, have been also centres of a homogeneous population. Can a really great literature grow up in the midst of a heterogeneous population, and how far are we Americans a heterogeneous people?” (28:337).

Midwestern fiction writers, even though they were often the target of invectives against the use of colloquial language, expressed some of the same attitudes as the Dial had about the unhealthy effects of immigrant slang. Although Theodore Dreiser did not make overt moral judgments in Sister Carrie, he, too, characterized vernacular speech in terms of pathology by his juxtaposition of images. For instance, readers see the workers in a cap factory through the eyes of the newly arrived Carrie, who risks being corrupted by city life: “They were a fair type of nearly the lowest order of shop girls,—careless, rather slouchy, and more or less pale from confinement. They were not timid however, were rich in curiosity and strong in daring and slang” (25). Their physical deterioration and verbal aggressiveness exist side by side. Factory work can destroy their bodies, but seemingly nothing checks the spread of their language.

Henry Fuller's The Cliff-Dwellers (1893) also envisions the harmful effects of nonstandard speech. Fuller had grown up in Chicago and was one of the city's first writers to receive national recognition. Kenny J. Williams notes that, although he belonged to the generation of writers claiming “the genteel tradition” for Chicago, he was also one of the first to present it in unflattering realism (City of Men 171). In one scene in The Cliff-Dwellers, an architect tells a little girl at a party about the dollhouse he is going to build for her. When asked her opinion, she replies, with the accent that the family maid uses, “I shouldn't know whether to belave you” (93). Although the guests are amused, her mother is displeased: “‘That dreadful Norah!’ whimpered the poor woman. ‘She must go.’” The child has caught something embarrassing, if not downright harmful, from the maid. Yet the architect responds, “Don't dismiss your bonne … she'll produce a beautiful accent in time” (94).

His opinion is born out by Cornelia McNabb, a character who acquires standard English as she makes her way from being a maid in a boardinghouse to a waitress, a secretary, and the wife of a millionaire's son. Cornelia promises new life for the Brainard family, whose patriarch, Erastus Brainard, has gained his fortune as president of a large bank and through illegal activities. The family's corruption surfaces in a son, Marcus, who stabs his father with a book knife in a drunken rage. Marcus hangs himself a few days later, and Erastus, dying from the wound, has to picture the son's suicide in his own last seconds of life. Indeed, the language in which the news is communicated practically delivers the death blow: “The word was passed from man-servant to maid-servant, and came to their master through the voice of a Swedish girl whose mind was capable of dealing with emotions only in the most primitive way, and whose imperfect command of English made her communication come with a horrible and harrowing directness” (310).

The horrible and harrowing directness of the lower classes could be deadly, but Fuller also feared the loss of vitality that went with urbanization. The character George Ogden, for instance, tries every polite, legal means to get money from his brother-in-law, who has cheated him out of his inheritance. He finally expresses his rage by smashing a chair over the man's head: “Ogden, for the first time in his life, passed completely out of himself. There fell away from him all the fetters that shackle the supercivilized man who is habitually conscious of his civilization” (298). Although not advocating violence, Fuller must have felt that, in former times or in a more rural area, Ogden would have confronted the scoundrel sooner.

The novel's metaphorical title expresses a similar ambivalence toward both modern American entrepreneurial culture and past influences not British in origin. In naming his book The Cliff-Dwellers, Fuller in all likelihood was drawing on the interest in Native American ruins generated by Gustaf Nordenskiold's The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde, Southwestern Colorado, published in the same year. The introduction to Fuller's novel comparing the city of Chicago to the dwellings of the Anasazi suggests both that civilization has not come very far since then and that it has come too far and therefore degenerated.⁸ Thus, the story's immigrants both contribute to the primitive, unhealthy condition of the city and promise to renew a culture spoiled by greed and decadence. Fuller's ambivalence about the upper classes and his allusions to Native American culture hold out the possibility of assimilation and set the stage for the primitivism of later Chicago writing.

Disparagement of dialect literature and written slang, warnings against careless speech, worries about the lower classes' continued literacy, and the fear of immigrants' illiteracy all have in common the relationship between written and spoken language. Was nonstandard writing producing poor speech or vice versa? Either case threatened to introduce variability into the language, and countering that threat required a system that could both resist and withstand change. In its campaign for pure English, the Dial claimed sometimes that writing reflected proper pronunciation and at other times that comprehension of written English relied on visual, not phonetic, cues. Arguing against spelling reform often occasioned these formulations of the journal's linguistic concepts.

Proposals by professional societies, politicians, and educators to simplify English spelling paralleled the departure from tradition represented by dialect literature. Beginning in 1906, spelling reform was routinely attacked with the advent of a “Casual Comment” column that contained short, sometimes tongue-in-cheek editorials on current matters of interest. Topics included such ideas as the suggestion that phonograph records might be useful as an objective measure of correct pronunciation: “Like the standard metre preserved at Paris, we might have a standard pronunciation stored in a fire-proof vault of the British Museum or the Congressional Library” (“Casual Comment” 42:363). Although whimsical, this suggestion demonstrates the depth of the editors' desire to suppress linguistic variability. A more serious argument for standard language grounded pronunciation in English's traditional written form. An editorial reply to a letter written by a reader in favor of spelling reform explains the relation between conventional spelling and phonetics:

The reason why we consider “program” horrible is that it inevitably leads to a pronunciation which accents the first syllable, and reduces the second to an inconsiderable caudal appendix. … We know of no way to keep the full value of the second syllable (which means preserving the dignity of a fine old word) without spelling it in the orthodox way. “Epigram,” “monogram,” and “telegram” are not cases in point, for the excellent reason that they are three-syllabled words, which makes it almost impossible not to give the “gram” its full value in their pronunciation. This is so elementary that we are almost ashamed to write it.

(Editorial Response 55:105-106)

In an editorial entitled “The Cause” and dedicated to the topic of spelling reform, the Dial linked reformed spelling to dialect literature and reiterated its opinion that simplified spelling would ruin pronunciation. Reacting to the “Simplified Spelling Bulletin” (which used the improvements it advocated), the Dial editors wrote: “Hitherto, we have left this sort of license to the amateurs of dialect, who have alternately bored and puzzled us to the limit of endurance, but we have not had to read them. In the good time coming, it seems, everybody who writes will devise for his words spellings ad hoc, in accordance with some occult phonetic system of his own” (53:276). Idiosyncratic spelling was undesirable because it reflected the variability that already existed in American English. The Dial frequently mocked the cause of spelling reform by providing examples of proposed alterations, an effective strategy, given the extreme changes some of its promoters advised. Ultimately, though, the Dial's campaign questioned who would control further development of the language. “[A]s we scan this brief quotation … and try to read it aloud, giving the letters the values that we instinctively attach to them,” the editors wrote in response to an excerpt from the “Simplified Spelling Bulletin,” “we discover that just one-half of the deformed spellings indicate a pronunciation which is distinctly not that of the cultivated user of the English language” (53:275).

Yet, some “Casual Comment” columns argued that a written system determining standard pronunciation could never exist. Although dissimilarities between the English spoken in different areas chagrined the editors, they pragmatically cited this variety as a stumbling block to spelling changes. “But even supposing it to be at the outset faultlessly phonetic, not only for London, but also for Boston and Indianapolis and Cape Town and Melbourne,” the editors wrote, “how long would such an alphabet remain phonetic? Pronunciation is slowly but constantly changing, as we occasionally learn to our surprise in reading old poetry. The human throat itself, and the vocal chords, are not fashioned after one invariable pattern. … All spelling is and must be largely a matter of convention” (“Casual Comment” 41:231). When necessary for its position, then, Dial editorial policy marshaled pronunciation's relationship to spelling, but the impossibility of spelling ever representing the full range of pronunciation was also presented as a reason to forego change.

Readers and reviewers provided counterpoints to the Dial's editorial policies on the maintenance of standard language and the predominance of British influences on American culture, but a series of circular arguments founded the journal's official philosophy on what it called “the Anglicity of the English language” (“Casual Comment” 56:91). “Anglicity” became the center of a system in which writing could not fully represent speech because the latter varied over time and from place to place. Writing needed to remain stable in order to preserve a literary heritage in English, and to do so, speech had to stay anchored in writing. In other words, to preserve tradition, language needed a center, and writing needed to stay fixed, since speech does not provide that stability. Little did the Dial editors know that they were trying to postpone the fragmented sense of reality that later engaged modern and postmodern writers. In a fixed structure, “the center … closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible,” writes Jacques Derrida. “As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible” (Writing 279). Anglicity had to be the center because writing could not represent the variability of speech without speech undermining the stability of writing. In order to maintain the belief that an English heritage represented everything American, only speech that conformed to an English heritage could be represented. For that heritage to remain intelligible, writing needed to be reflective of speech or speech reflective of writing, and a convention that allowed anglicity to represent everything American accomplished these goals. Therefore, any change in conventions pointed to the failure of the Anglo-Saxon heritage to represent everything American.

In their “Casual Comment” column on anglicity, the Dial editors bewailed the coming separation between actual usage and great literature that changes in “[p]ronunciation, idiom, vocabulary, [and] spelling” were causing:

An effort to postpone that evil day is put forth by the new Society for Pure English, which has recently issued its first pamphlet … formulating certain basic principles and urging a return to dialectic naturalness and raciness of expression. Words and idioms that smack of the soil whence they sprang are to be revived and cherished, while the artificialities of urban speech need to be repressed. Not only does the thoughtless multitude require guidance and correction in this matter, but it is probable that the educated and the careful are doing their part, often unconsciously, toward breaking up the uniformity and purity of our English tongue. The arts and sciences are flooding the dictionary with new and in many instances ill-constructed terms, journalists are familiarizing us with modes of expression not always worthy of adoption, innovators in spelling are perniciously active, and the foreign languages spoken within our borders add an alien tinge to our speech.

(56:91)

This comment from 1914 covers many of the issues the Dial had addressed for two decades: the dangers to speech from immigrants and the uneducated and the dangers to writing from artists, journalists, scientists, and spelling reformers. All of these groups threatened to undermine the centrality of anglicity to American English. The call to preserve “dialectic naturalness and raciness of expression” sounds a relatively new note, although this idea had its basis in earlier positions.

The forces that led the Dial to indict both the educated and the uneducated in connection with linguistic change modified the language. The epidemic Payne believed to be “nearly spent” in 1895 had not played itself out, for instance, and the Dial eventually embraced such dialect creations as Mr. Dooley and George Ade's Fables in Slang (“Briefs” 32:207; “Briefs” 49:336). The journal also came to a qualified acceptance of common parlance in literature by conceding that certain kinds of slang were actually of Anglo-Saxon derivation.

From the beginning of the century, the Dial reminded readers that language shaped national character (“Three Centuries” 29:486). Like those who proclaimed the uniqueness of American literature, especially literature produced in the western half of the nation, the Dial editors argued that democracy and language were interdependent. While the former group claimed slang and dialect as instruments for democratic change, in literature at least, the journal subsequently reclaimed our slang heritage by asserting, “[S]ome of our raciest so-called Americanisms are nothing but survivals of old idioms that have died out in the home of their origin” (“Casual Comment” 50:149; see also “Casual Comment” 47:63). In “The Language of the Unlettered,” Bicknell recommended renewing American English by restoring Anglo-Saxon colloquialisms: “Dialectic regeneration is said to be the crying need at present of our effete and anaemic language, and the attempt to restore to it some of the vigorous and racy words and expressions of a ruder age is not to be frowned upon. There is something about the unaffectedness, the directness, the rugged strength and artless picturesqueness of untutored speech that refreshes the ear wearied with the studied correctness and self-conscious refinement of cultured utterance” (56:405). Just as immigrants had the power to corrupt or to renew Chicago society in The Cliff-Dwellers, “folk” speech could either poison or revitalize the English language, depending on who the folk were. One group's horrible and harrowing directness was another's rugged strength and artless picturesqueness—the qualities of the legendary American language.

As early as the 1895 editorial “The Use and Abuse of Dialect,” the Dial had distinguished between proper and improper representations of the vernacular. A quote from Professor Willis Boughton of Ohio University parallels salvage anthropology⁹: “To preserve the speech of a vanishing people, dialect literature may be justified; but to propagate such language is vicious” ([Payne] “Use and Abuse” 18:68). The editorial then defines the proper use of dialect:

The facts of dialect speech, as distinguished from the inventions of the newspaper humorist, are of great importance to the history of language. No more important linguistic work remains to be done in this country than that of recording the thousands of local variations of our speech from what may be called standard English. To fix these colloquialisms in time and place, to trace them to their origins, to construct speech-maps embodying the salient facts of popular usage wherever it has distinctive features—these are scientific aims of the worthiest.

Payne concludes that he has done his duty if his essay “turn[s] even one misguided realist from a grinder-out of dialect ‘copy’ for the newspapers into an exact observer of local usage for the scientific purposes” of dialect dictionaries (18:69). If unable to fix the vernacular so that its purity was restored, “speech-maps” could at least restrict variability to its place.

This sifting of good and bad slang, dialect copy in journalism, and scientific observation left African-American speech and alleged representations of it in a complicated position, for African Americans were both native English speakers and the target of traditions mocking their usage. Even as Dial editorials listed them among groups of people corrupting the language, Dial reviewers wrote favorably of the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Joel Chandler Harris (“Holiday Publications” 31:447, “Casual Comment” 45:32). The journal also reviewed books by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Kelly Miller, with the last two serving occasionally as contributors, but a “Casual Comment” column on Harris's death indicates that what passed for exact observation of African-American speech and life could not be separated from paternalistic attitudes toward southern blacks: Harris's “negro dialect stories, rich in folklore but delightfully free from the dreary dryness of much that is published under that name, are full of laughter and sunshine and light-heartedness. The irresponsible, happy-go-lucky son of Africa has been with us, in abundance, for generations; but he waited for a Joel Chandler Harris to catch and reproduce his peculiar charms and graces” (“Casual Comment” 45:32).

Sometimes African Americans were categorized with city dwellers who were thought to be ruining the language; at other times their speech fell into the endangered species category. Distinctions were seldom made between representation and actual practice. For example, Alexander L. Bondurant of the State University of Mississippi marvels in a letter: “The negro dialect, as spoken on the plantations in the South, is rich in survivals; and that a number of these are still found in England, is shown by some examples taken from ‘Lorna Doone’—a well of English undefiled.” He concludes, after listing examples of undefiled survivals, “These words and expressions are all in common use among the negroes, and must have come to them from Old England” (18:105). E. W. Hopkins of Bryn Mawr College replied to Bondurant and others, insisting that their observations proved that American material for the English Dialect Dictionary should “be sifted first in America.” Hopkins reminds readers that Bondurant's list of words “may be heard on occasion on Yankee farms or in a Yankee schoolyard.” He plants doubt about his own qualifications, however, when he observes: “We venture to doubt whether an uneducated negro ever used exactly the expression (cited by Professor Bondurant), ‘How is your old 'oman?’ Does not the darkey say always ‘Howsya old?’” (18:136). Scientific observation does not appear to have shaken the prejudices of dialect literature or to have accounted for intergroup variability.

Several scholars of African-American literature have discussed the impression, created in part by written dialect, that Black English consists of misused language (Gates “Dis and Dat” 105). James Weldon Johnson wrote that a tradition of dialect writing was established to entertain white audiences (Book 4). For this reason, he believed his contemporaries needed “a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation” (Book 41). J. Saunders Redding traced dialect's conventions of mutilated English to minstrel shows (53) and to such European-American writers as Harris. Redding observes, “Harris's dialect is skillful and effective misrepresentation, a made language in every sense of the word, conveying the general type impression of untaught imagination, ignorance, and low cunning with which he believed the Negro endowed” (52).

Had it been separate from other ideological concerns, the Dial's call for an end to misspelled literature might have countered the problem of writers using nonstandard English to make characters seem unintelligent. A glance at George Ade's Pink Marsh shows that there were plenty of reasons for disliking dialect literature. A journalist and later a playwright, for over forty years Ade wrote pieces that were collected in Fables in Slang and sequels to that volume (Coyle 48). “Ade gave the ancient form of the fable a sharp twist,” Lee Coyle writes, “by retaining the archaic form and stilted manner and by steeping it in colloquial language generously laced with slang. The result was linguistic fire” (40). The technique used in the fables evolved gradually. Ade departed from straight news reporting with his “Stories of the Streets and of the Town,” sketches of life in Chicago and the rural Midwest. With a column featuring the adventures of Artie Blanchard, an imaginary, wisecracking Chicago office boy, he began to incorporate slang. He turned to dialect in his accounts of another Chicago type, Pink Marsh, a fictional shoeshiner who later becomes a Pullman Porter. In Marsh's episodes, a professional man, “the Morning Customer,” visits the shoeshine stand and flaunts his verbal superiority. In a typical scenario, Pink says of the morning customer's words, “I could n' ketch 'em boys; not 'ith a laddeh” (20).

Ade was a lifelong vaudeville fan, and his process of writing an African-American character into his early play “The County Chairman” illustrates how the conventions of minstrelsy made their way into his work. Biographer Fred C. Kelly relates that, in writing “The County Chairman,” Ade was trying to alter his reputation as a facile wit who knew street language: “He deliberately laid the scenes in the early eighties to avoid the kind of speech which adorned the Fables. If asked to do so in rehearsal he could assume a horrified air and explain that it would be an anachronism to use in a play of 1880 a phrase invented many years later” (174). Yet, when Ade heard of the plight of Willis Sweatnam, an out-of-work vaudeville performer, he rewrote the part of a “ne'er-do-well white-trash character” for the actor to do in blackface. Ade's description of this process demonstrates that, for at least one European-American writer, the sound of the minstrel had been internalized: “It was easy to write dialogue for Sweatnam. All I had to do after I wrote a speech for him was to close my eyes and listen to him repeating it and if it sounded like Sweatnam I left it in” (Kelly 176). Sweatman's character and Pink Marsh, we might say, relied heavily on convention and representations of representations.

In the context of linguistic purity movements, dialect literature represented a forbidden pleasure that challenged the stuffiness of upholders of correctness. Its disruptive potential depended on the author's relationship to the materials, awareness of the representation of speech as an illusion, and positioning of the dialect voices—for instance, whether the accented speech contrasted with the voice of a seemingly superior narrator coded as standard. As Cary Nelson writes, “Dialect in the end has no essential and unchanging meaning. Even the same dialect poem can have different effects in different contexts” (118).

Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne's creation, the Irish-American bartender Mr. Dooley, exemplifies Nelson's point. Authorial intention seems to matter in the case of dialect literature—and to account, in part, for the changing effects writing in dialect produces. Dunne himself came from an Irish-American family, so humor arising from Mr. Dooley's ethnicity had the quality of an inside joke.

According to Charles Fanning, Dunne began working as a journalist in Chicago in 1884, when he was sixteen. Working his way up the ranks of six newspapers during the next eight years, he took charge of the editorial page at the Evening Post, where Mr. Dooley was born (215). Dunne's politics are hard to categorize; he was a gadfly who stung people on both sides of almost any issue. He is quoted as saying that the inspiration for Mr. Dooley came from the desire to criticize local and national figures with more freedom than his regular editorials allowed: “It occurred to me that while it might be dangerous to call an alderman a thief in English no one could sue if a comic Irishman denounced the statesman as a thief” (Bander 20).

Dunne's technique surmounted many of the problems a character such as Pink Marsh presented. For instance, Mr. Dooley spoke for himself; his words were not framed by a narrator or reported to us by someone using a prestige dialect, an effect Ade also achieved with the Fables in Slang. As Edward J. Bander points out, “Mr. Dooley performs on paper” (95). His language is not meant as a transcription or a parody of Irish-American speech. “Mr. Dooley's Irish brogue made no pretense to be phonetically correct,” Max Eastman has observed, “it just went in for being funny. The author himself once described it to me as ‘a language never heard on land or sea’” (133). Mr. Dooley's language pitted wit and departure from the standard against each other. “Dunne employed the common techniques of dialect writers: misspellings, puns, funny names,” Bander writes. “He used ‘dishpot’ for despot, ‘autymobill’ to make the point that automobiles were expensive, and a James Joycian mind could detect hidden meanings in the use of words” (48). In the epigraph to this chapter, Mr. Dooley's “inthrajooce” suggests adding “juice” to a language by interjecting elements from other countries. The entire 1913 Boston Globe article, “Mr. Dooley on Slang,” from which this passage comes, demonstrates Dunne's cognizance of the linguistic debates he was engaging by writing dialect.

As early as 1892, Dunne editorially parodied the kinds of criticism of dialect literature that were going to be found in such places as the Dial:

There is no doubt that the dialect story is a very bad thing and abundantly deserves every uncomplimentary remark that anybody may find time to make about it. It has filled the magazines so full that we sometimes wonder why they do not explode; it has flooded the bookstands with its pink and yellow covers and its horrid drawings of Dakota farmers and Tennessee mountaineers; in short, it has added an immense weight to the already excessive burden of existence; but we may be pardoned if we say we think it has not perverted literary style or literary taste.

That is our honest opinion of the dialect story. Of course, it might be different if we had ever heard of anybody who had succeeded in reading one.

(Ellis 64)

Dunne saw beyond national debates and immediate trends to matters of speech and social status. He also commented indirectly on the imposition of European languages on other cultures. Indeed, “Mr. Dooley on Slang” begins with the bartender's reflections on a newspaper article about “a profissor at Oxfurd colledge, that's about ready to declare war on us because he says we're corruptin' th' dilect they call th' English language in England with our slang” (39). Mr. Dooley then produces a conceit based on a reversal of colonial relations between England and the United States: American productivity in vernacular commodities has led to the export of our product, and he counsels the English to be grateful for the ways in which their relationship with us has improved their quality of life. Given his use of language, Mr. Dooley's comment about mastering the language of a foreign country by introducing one's own suggests the process by which ethnic groups in America have modified the British form of the English language; in the context of imperialism, however, Mr. Dooley's observation is a cynical comment on the process by which European colonists “learned” the languages of the countries they invaded. His explanation, later in the essay, of his friend Hogan's theory of slang's dissemination—that first thieves “invint language to conceal thought fr'm th' polis” (39)—therefore becomes especially ironic. Even this tangential link between colonizers and foul-mouthed thugs offers a criticism of such rhetoric as the Dial employed, which opposed imperial impositions of culture but at some level also suggested that the subjected were unworthy of them.

The play that Dunne establishes between a representation of Dooley's accent and puns on standard English extends to the relationship between words and objects, signifiers and signifieds. Here Mr. Dooley explains Hogan's theory to his friends at the bar:

“Wan iv ye'er ancesthors frightens a hen an' sees she's left somthing on th' ground. He pints at it an' exclaims in surprise ‘Egg!’

“He happens to be a man iv standin' in th' community, havin' kilt a lot iv people with his stone hatchet, an' a fellow who hears him an' wants to be in style cries ‘Egg’ ivery time he sees th' thropy, an' so it goes ontil an egg is a egg ivrywhere English is spoke. But th' Fr-rinch calls it a ‘oof,’ which shows that whin th' first Fr-rinchman see wan he started back in alarm an' cried ‘Oof!’

“‘Now,’ says Hogan, ‘suppose ye're revered ancesthor had happened to use some other exclymation. Issintyally,’ says he, ‘an egg is no more entitled to be called an egg thin I am. We're used to eggs bein' called eggs, an' we think th' name describes thim, but if ol' Granpa Stone Hatchet Dooley had said ‘Glub’ we'd be orthrin' scrambled glubs at th' prisint minyit.’”

(39)

Coming from an Irish American who has not mastered the niceties of standard English, this discussion challenges popular prejudices that “dialect” speakers are so insensitive to language that they cannot remember the right names for things. Hogan's theory also confronts an idea expressed the next year in the Dial, in “The Language of the Unlettered”: “To a person with vigor and spontaneity unimpaired by meditation and introspection, words are, in a sense, the very things they stand for, and the application of a new name to a familiar object seems a gross absurdity, while the possibility that the same things may not have the same names the world over is hardly conceivable” (Bicknell 56:405). Mr. Dooley demonstrates that he is not romantic, primitive, or ignorant, despite his identifiably ethnic speech.

Dunne's sophistication, however, did not overcome all the ethical quandaries that dialect literature presented. Dunne got a lesson in the power relations involved in representation when he created an Irish-American character named McNeery, a barely fictionalized Jim McGarry, who tended bar at an establishment Dunne and other journalists patronized. According to Elmer Ellis, “Jim McGarry's tolerance had limits and his personal dignity became affronted as more and more people called him McNeery and he began to think they were laughing at him” (75). Shortly afterward, McNeery was replaced by Mr. Dooley, who ran his business in a different neighborhood than McNeery or McGarry. Ellis comments, “Undoubtedly there were many levels of appreciation of Mr. Dooley. The lowest of these was the reader who found merely something comic in the fact that the saloon-keeper spoke in a quaint language, a dialect associated with unskilled laborers and household servants, and it was therefore an invitation for smiles to find it in print” (288-89). Overall, though, Dunne urged readers to overcome linguistic prejudices by calling attention to both spoken and written English and the arbitrary, sometimes violent, association between correctness and intelligence.

Despite the Dial's recognition of Dunne's and Ade's talent and its revised attitude toward slang, the conservative journal was not ready for the new generation of Chicago writers as epitomized by Carl Sandburg. Sandburg, like his fellow newspapermen Ade and Dunne, worked to elevate the subject matter by which he earned his living to an art. His choice of genre helped ensure his success, for, unlike humorous sketches, poetry was unquestionably literature and was experiencing a resurgence in which “the language of contemporary speech” (Monroe and Henderson New Poetry xxxvi) would be valued explicitly. Like his journalism, Sandburg's free verse contained few connectives or subordinate clauses and relied instead on the dramatic juxtaposition of simple sentences. The publication of some of his Chicago Poems in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1914 prompted the Dial's editors, in “New Lamps for Old,” to call Harriet Monroe's journal “a futile little periodical” and to “rally around the old standards,” “those who stand for sanity and the acceptance of the ripe fruits of the world's experience” (56:231). In the editorial, Sandburg's poem “Chicago” is described as a “collocation of words” (56:231), “ragged lines,” “unregulated word eruptions,” and “an impudent affront to the poetry-loving public” (56:232). Clearly, the form of the poem, or seeming lack thereof, caused some irritation, but its working-class content and use of the vernacular grated as well. The editorial fumed that the poem was “blurted out in such ugly fashion” and that “in these ‘hog-butcher’ pieces there is no discernible evidence that culture has been attained.” As for the poet himself, the Dial suggested that “this author would be more at home in the brickyard than on the slopes of Parnassus” (56:232). Apparently, dialect writing that knew its place as humor, journalism, or local color was one thing; everyday speech that pretended to be literature was quite another.

Given the strong sentiment for linguistic purity, dialect writing forced audiences to examine the relationship between democratic and literary representation and to ask, What does American English represent? Nevertheless, by appearing to transcribe the actual speech of a particular group of people, dialect writing could create the impression that standard written English corresponded to the idiom of some other, “normal” group. Whether they were of the older generation, such as Ade, or the younger one, such as Sandburg, Chicago writers interested in employing the vernacular grew up amid popular notions about how America sounded. By recharging old conventions with idealized sentiments about an American language, these authors limited what the groups they wrote about could say for themselves. Yet they also called attention to dialect at a time when many wanted the non-British in origin to stay out of sight and sound. At their best, then, experiments with the vernacular avoided distinguishing between “standard” and “nonstandard,” as Ade, Dunne, and Sandburg all learned. Perhaps for this reason, members of the Chicago group are cited as early influences on the poetry of both Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown (Hughes Big Sea 29, 212; Stuckey xxiv).

Who American English represents and what using English rather than another language means remain volatile issues in American education, literature, law, and culture. To date, twenty-two states have passed English-only laws (Headden 41). A growing number of Americans support making English the official language of the United States (38). English-only rules have been instituted in some workplaces (G. Flynn 87), and court cases addressing first amendment rights have dealt with issues relating to the use of languages other than English (Barringer 18). As we have seen, interpretations of the historical and cultural significance of American English will determine the rhetoric with which we conduct the debate. While the ability to understand the English of other centuries should remain a priority in American education, recourse to anglicity as a unifying concept clearly will no longer suffice. At the same time, using Americanness as a theme of rebellion may only serve to code nonanglicity as romantically primitive and leave unexamined our fears of variability and its spread.

Notes

1. By discussing confrontations that occurred among Chicago writers, I replicate Duffey's division of the Chicago Renaissance into a “genteel protest” and a “liberation” (51, 125). In emphasizing the similarities of some of their underlying assumptions, I depart from this pattern.

2. Today proponents of making English the official language of the United States argue that non-English speakers have no way to understand American notions of freedom. See, for example, Cannon.

3. Today, liberals and conservatives can agree that literacy in English is essential for advancement in the United States; making standard English more accessible and palatable to immigrants and the economically disadvantaged would help to reduce social inequalities. Accessibility would involve more courses in language skills, English as a Second Language classes, and tutors than are currently available. Accessibility would also mean offering classes at affordable prices and at convenient times for low-income wage earners. Consider the following example. In 1993 five hundred people participated in a lottery that would determine which fifty immigrants would be allowed to register for free English classes at New York City's Riverside Church (Sontag 29). It takes immigrants from four months to three years to get into free classes throughout the city (34). Children of non-English-speaking immigrants throughout the state sometimes find themselves placed in special education classes because of the lack of other alternatives in their school systems (Schemo 27). Palatability would mean not deprecating dialects considered nonstandard, languages other than English, or the cultures that speak them and acknowledging the physical and psychological violence that traditionally has accompanied efforts to assimilate non-English-speaking people into American culture.

4. Payne worked as a high school science teacher. The story of his education is worth noting. Payne's family was financially unable to send him to college, so when his friend Paul Shorey went to Harvard, Payne received detailed information about the curriculum there and completed the same reading at the Chicago Public Library that Shorey was doing at Harvard (Mosher 181).

5. References to the Dial will be cited with a volume and page number.

6. Because the lead editorial in each number of the Dial was typically not signed, I usually do not attribute these pieces to any individual. In his work at the Newberry Library, Mosher found that associate editor William Morton Payne wrote a large share of the editorials. When Mosher has attributed a particular column to Payne or when an essay from the Dial appears in Payne's Little Leaders, I also refer to Payne as its author. Mosher stresses the degree of agreement between Payne and founding editor Francis F. Browne (343) and Browne's desire for a unified philosophy for the magazine (342).

7. See also Payne, “The Future of American Speech,” 14:234.

8. For an account of degeneration, see Pick.

9. Marcus and Fischer write that “the main motif that ethnography as a science developed was that of salvaging cultural diversity, threatened with global Westernization, especially during the age of colonialism. The ethnographer would capture in writing the authenticity of changing cultures, so they could be entered into the record for the great comparative project of anthropology, which was to support the Western goal of social and economic progress” (24).