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New York: Babel's Secret
The story of America's national unity and the Homogenized Baby is not without interest at this point. If memory serves, it was on a prewar February day that the office boy was told to run down to the big newspaper stand on the corner and bring back the current issue of half a dozen foreign-language dailies.
Some one had made a speech the night before on New York as an un-American city. The speaker offered in evidence the babel of tongues you hear on the subway and in front of the Broadway movie palaces. He was even more deeply impressed by the numerous publications he saw displayed on the Broadway newsstands in outlandish tongues and alphabets. Our foreign-language papers are a long-standing grievance. As far back as one can remember they have been deplored as an obstacle to the assimilation of the newer Americans. It is, on the face of things, a charge not to be lightly dismissed.
That particular February morning, however, it occurred to some one to raise a question. Just how foreign are the city's foreign-language newspapers? How much do they differ from their local contemporaries written in the language of the country, and to what extent are they alike? It seemed a good idea to send out the office boy for half a dozen specimens and then mobilize all the available linguistic talent in the office for an intensive study of the material. It would be a good test not merely of the foreign language press, but perhaps of the foreignness of New York in general.
Even before the boy came back with his assortment of papers it was decided that for the purposes of our inquiry the front page was of comparatively little importance. It was a critical day in the war news and a person was prepared to find the first page in all the papers pretty much the same. Minor differences within the general context of the day's war news there would be, no doubt. The relative emphasis would be determined by the particular reading public -- German, Hungarian, Italian, Yiddish, Greek, Russian. According to the special public there would be special dispatches. But on the whole the front page need not long detain us. The research must concentrate on the inside pages, and in particular on the advertising columns.
People's opinions about a world war or anything else are apt to be expressed in general formulas which they borrow from others. People reveal their own selves in what they eat, drink and wear, in their cultural practices and their recreations. It is commonly said that the heart of a newspaper, or at least the heart of the newspaper owner, is in the advertising pages.
When the boy came back with his half-dozen papers, then, the front page received just a glance. For that matter, if we had only this minute not forsworn all argument from the news pages we might take some time to point out the exceedingly American look of the front page makeup. A person standing far enough away to make it impossible to identify the particular language would find it hard to say if these were foreign-language newspapers at all. Five out of the six papers that morning had a bold ribbon headline running all the way across the page, and four of the six papers had a double ribbon. Below the main headlines, five out of six papers had the familiar bold-faced interior headlines, two or three columns wide, scattered all over the page. It is a make-up which gives to a newspaper page the appearance of being divided into squat chunks of type instead of the traditional columns. If a person stood far enough away to get only the general effect without recognizing language or alphabet it would be extremely difficult to say that morning which was Staats-Zeitung und Herold, which was Il Progresso ItaloAmericano, which was Magyar Nepszava or Voice of Hungary, which was Russky Golos or Voice of Russia, which was Atlantis, or the daily voice of the Greek-Americans, and which were The Jewish Daily Forward and the Jewish Day; and whether they were not any or all of them Mr. Hearst Journal-American.
But our concern is with the inside pages, and especially with the life-sustaining advertising columns. On that particular day the big feature in five out of the six papers was the double-column Homogenized Baby, as we venture to call her for short. A very large picture of a very chubby and happy infant invited the attention of all parents to the virtues of a new homogenized and vitaminized milk for modern babies. The picture in all the papers was the same, from the identical cut or mat provided by the advertiser. Readers of the Staats-Zeitung were urged to buy this "Gleichartige Milch für Moderne". Italian-American parents were advised to buy "Il latte pei nuovi arrivati (omogeneizzato)". The attention of readers of the Yiddish press was called to the virtues of the milk in a language almost identical with the Staats-Zeitung above, but in an utterly different alphabet running across the page from right to left. Hungarian parents could do no better than buy the milk "Egyforma a modernek szamara valo tej." Russian babies were sure to thrive on "Odnorodnoye moloko dlya modernikh lyudi." But always it was the same chubby baby with the topknot and the curl down the neck, four inches by four inches display.
This is not to say that the parents of the homogenized baby were neglected that day in the advertising columns. The new automobile models were pictured and described in Hungarian, in German, in Italian and in the two Yiddish newspapers -- those were happier pre-Pearl Harbor and pre-ration days. That day the Greek-reading public of New York was alone in failing to have its attention called to the modern milk or the new automobiles. But an advertisement in Atlantis four columns wide and twothirds of a page deep did offer for sale the new encyclopedia in twenty-five volumes. Among the oldest and most outstanding of American traits, even older than highstandard milk for babies and smooth-running automobiles for adults, is the custom of buying encyclopedias in numerous volumes for a small down payment and so much a month.
There was no intention that February morning to embark on an exhaustive survey of American realities operating beneath the surface of foreign languages and alphabets. But plainly a good many Americanization forces were at work that day in the inside pages of our half-dozen foreign-language journals, other than vitamin milk, new automobiles, and encyclopedias. They were by no means confined to the advertising columns. The local news and the special features were in essence American news and American newspaper features. In the woman's world columns the health hints and the budgets for newlyweds were startlingly alike in all the papers, almost like the modern milk baby with the topknot and the neck curl. Identical, of course, were the pictures of the prize fighters and the movie queens.
National peculiarities and special interests did appear, and should not be minimized. But our question was how much? How far does national and racial differentiation
really persist beneath the alien guise? Here, for instance, is a big display advertisement, urging the readers of Atlantis to attend without fail the twentieth annual St. Nicholas Eve masquerade and ball, featuring national songs and dances. Now the songs are in the Greek tongue of course, and the dances will be Hellenic, but the Grand Prize which will be raffled off at this Greek national festival is not a crown of wild olive or a sprig of parsley as once upon a time at the Olympian Games. The Grand Prize will be a Super De Luxe 1941 Sedan. Wherefore it may be contended that if readers of the Atlantis newspaper are more interested in the super de luxe sedan than in the national songs and dances then this Atlantis is only an American newspaper making use of Greek words.
The page on which the St. Nicholas Eve masquerade and ball is advertised has a standing banner head which reads "Hoi Hellaines ana tayn Amerikain" -- Greek Life in America. But since the main features on that page are the de luxe sedan and the picture of the new lightweight champion leading with his left, we really do not know if the life depicted on that page is Hellas or the U.S.A.
It seems more like Hellas when you read an advance story about big doings in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Astor by the Associated Societies of Laconia. This is apparently the same regional idea as the annual picnic of the County Mayo men or the County Monaghan men. The sound is undeniably Old World, quite old. Laconia is the native name for what we call the Peloponnesus, where Sparta used to be, where Leonidas came from who died at Thermopylae. But close to this story about the forthcoming Grand Ball of the old folk neighbors from the Peloponnesus there is a quiz box with the familiar ten questions, and the answers will be found on page five. In the alphabet and language of Homer the reader is asked who was the mother of Abraham Lincoln. What famous Polish general fought on the side of George Washington in the Revolutionary War? What is a mezzotint, a lithotint, an aquatint?
The questions and answers are in the language of Homer and Aristotle, but the thing itself is as American as corn pone. When people who read Greek newspapers ride in super sedans and inflict information quizzes on each other, are they Greeks or Americans?
Says the Magyar Nepszava under a very familiar set of pictures, Tarzan észrevette Bohgdu közeledését és készen allt a cselekuésre. Says the Atlantis, "Ho Tarzan den epausse na tous parakolouthe". Does it mean that Plato and Louis Kossuth have assimilated Edgar Rice Burroughs, or the other way about? It makes a pretty question, whether an American's heart is where the ancestral language is, or where the super de luxe sedan is along with Tarzan and the Modern Homogenized Milk for the Modern Baby.
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 Points of Interest
History
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