Introduction

Abstract

American Speech was born in 1925, in the middle of an era in North America comparable in many ways to the present. As a result of World War I, America's power became international, and Americans felt an energizing new identity, culturally and linguistically independent of colonial and migrant ties. The nation was experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. Opportunity to participate in the political process had been extended to women in 1922. The government experienced and survived scandal at the highest levels. In rapid succession, technological advances brought new and quicker forms of transportation and communication. By 1922, 15 million passenger cars were in use. Between 1920 and 1924, households with radios increased from 5,000 to 2.5 million. By 1924, the first tabloid, the New York Daily News, claimed the nation's largest newspaper circulation. By the end of the decade movies were drawing 90 million viewers a week. But prosperity and developing communication did not eradicate old emotional prejudices. Then, as now, forces of social fragmentation and isolation that affect language were operating. In 1921 immigration was drastically restricted. Several states curtailed the use of immigrant languages in schools. In 1925, the year of the first issue of American Speech, 40,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington, D.C., and a schoolteacher in Tennessee was brought to trial for violating laws against teaching the theory of evolution. Racial segregation was the norm, and discrimination by race or religion was acceptable. This was the milieu that generated the receptive audience for three editions of H. L. Mencken's The American Language (1919, 1921, 1923) in four years. By all accounts, it was Mencken who first proposed a journal devoted to the language of North America-a journal that is now completing 75 years of publication. On 16 November 1924, Louise Pound wrote from Nebraska to the Williams and Wilkins Company of Baltimore, "I believe with H. L. Mencken that a journal of the living language is needed.. .. Mr. Mencken tells me