In the Region of Babel: Public Bilingual Schooling in the Midwest, 1840s–1880s

The city was to be “called Babel,” according to the book of Genesis, “because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth.” Although the Midwest of the nineteenth century had never been “of one language, and of one speech” as the ancient city with the tower to heaven, America's heartland was confounded by linguistic diversity, particularly as more and more immigrants poured into the region after the 1830s. Yet, these foreign-language speakers brought with them more than “ax and hoe and rifle,” as Mark Twain once wrote of the “poor immigrant” settlers. They also brought with them a desire to maintain their linguistic and cultural traditions—particularly in the emerging common schools—and the area that spanned along and east of the Mississippi and north of the Mason–Dixon line proved to be an excellent environment for that endeavor. Bilingual education took hold in the Midwestern schools not only because of the enormous amount of foreign-language speakers who settled there—making the region a modern Babel—but also because it was a developing area when the immigrants arrived, thus allowing them to become “co-founders and partners” in the region's affairs.