78-14-A3
- Main Page \ Reagan Radio Commentaries \ 1978
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Bi-Lingual[edit]
Transcript[edit]How far do we go in our effort to change this land from a melting pot into an all nation smorgasbord. I'll be right back. From the very first, this nation has been made up of a collection of minorities, forming a majority we call Americans. We hyphenated ourselves, yes, to explain the origin of family; calling ourselves German-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, whatever. And as first-generation Americans, the success of the melting pot became evident as more and more of us began describing our heritage as French and Dutch or Irish, Scottish and English, Austrian and Italian—you name the mix we had them all. Our ancestry traces to every corner of the world but with one common characteristic which makes us Americans. Those forefathers of ours, and yes, today's modern immigrants had and have an extra love of Liberty and an extra ounce of courage which made it possible for them to tear up roots and journey to a faraway land in search of more personal freedom and better opportunities for themselves and their children. Yes we keep our pride of origin, perpetuate the memory of ancestral song and custom, dress up in ethnic costume for certain ceremonial days. We also carry the Stars and Stripes and sing the Star-Spangled Banner on those occasions. Of late, however and possibly for political purposes, we seem bent on doing away with the melting pot, recreating strict ethnic divisions. A few weeks back, I commented on bilingual education and its failure to do anything toward improving the ability of students speaking a foreign tongue, to master English. The other day a typical American drove me to the airport in a town where I'd been speaking. He decried our law which requires the printing of our ballots in two languages. Then he told me how he had come to this country from Italy when he was 10 years old. Like millions before and since he learned English without the help of special programs and he said at home in the evenings he and his brothers and sisters would help their parents learn English. He's still a fairly young man and as American as baseball. A California news item the other day reported on the cost of printing ballots in two languages and the waste because hundreds of thousands of them were thrown away as uncalled for polling places in our neighborhoods. Now from the National Review bulletin I gleaned the following item. The federal government has ordered three counties of North Carolina to print ballots in the language of the Lumbee Indians. There's a problem--there is no Lumbee language. There was once, but when white settlers moved into the area the Indians abandoned it in favor of English. County officials are considering asking for a federal grant to invent a Lumbee language and teach it to the Lumbees so they can carry out the law requiring dual language ballots. Washington isn't doing well in English these days. Here's an H.E.W. working paper: "In terms of heads who worked, as one would expect, the proportion of heads who worked is greater for total poor heads compared to poor heads eligible for welfare, greater still for non-poor heads eligible for welfare." Unquote. Try that in Lumbee. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening. |
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