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But others do. The sheer numbers of Hispanic immigrants, their cohesiveness and their growing political power set these immigrants apart from earlier groups who had to assimilate or fail. In the Miami area, for example, Spanish- language versions of everything from lottery tickets to televised game shows, as well as bilingual shops and restaurants and even jobs where only Spanish is acceptable, make it possible to live a full life without ever learning English. So widespread had Spanish become in Miami that in 1978 Emmy Shafer started the English-only movement when she could not find a clerk in the Dade County municipal offices who could speak English to her.
Those who believe that the movement inflames nativist resentments got some ammunition this fall. The ethnocentric views of U.S. English's co-founder and former chairman John Tanton came to light when initiative opponents uncovered a 1986 memo in which he expressed worry that low white birthrates and high Hispanic birthrates would endanger American society. Wrote Tanton: "Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down." Board member Linda Chavez, former staff director of the Civil Rights Commission and later candidate for the U.S. Senate from Maryland, quit in disgust, as did Walter Cronkite, and Tanton was forced to leave the organization.
Tanton aside, the English-language movement is something of a political hybrid, resisting categorization. Former and current members of the board of directors of U.S. English like Chavez and Cronkite, Bruno Bettelheim, Saul Bellow and Alistair Cooke are hardly xenophobes. They believe that, in a land that was founded by immigrants, English is the essential unifying force. The propositions they support may be little more than useless clutter, a reassurance that the U.S. is not vulnerable to a Quebec-style bilingualism with all its attendant bitterness. Ironically, it is the debate over the ballot initiatives themselves that has created so much rancor.