ENGLISH-ONLY?

Here's something I found in Ronald Steel's review of a new William Jennings Bryan biography in The New York Review of Books (subscribers only), about what the Republicans did after the Democrats made Bryan their presidential nominee in 1896:

They reacted by organizing, under the leadership of Mark Hannah, the most sophisticated political campaign Americans had ever witnessed. Hannah ... distributed 120 million pieces of literature, including pamphlets in nine European languages....

(Emphasis mine.)

Gee, I thought everybody who came to this country instantly spoke English as soon as they set foot on our shores. I thought reaching out to non-English speakers would lead to the immediate destruction of America.

(Mark Hanna, of course -- whose name Steel misspells -- was Karl Rove's role model. It's ironic that one of the last nails in the coffin of the Bush presidency might be his loss of his conservative base because he's sticking with a strategy of outreach to first- and second-generation Americans, possibly at the behest of Rove; that's one of the few non-reprehensible strategic choices these guys have made, and it's killing them.)