324 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

continuing to consort with other birds of the same feather. Immigrants
of the same national origin were not only apt to work side by side in the
same factories; they were apt to live next door to one another in the same
blocks of tenements; and so, when the time came for them to retire, most
of them knew little more English than they had known when they had
first landed on American shores. They did not have to know any more up
to this point in the American chapter of their life, because they com-
manded the services of home-bred interpreters. Their children had
arrived in America young enough to go to the public school before
entering the factory in their turn, and the combination of an American
education with, let us say, an Italian infancy had made them thoroughly
bilingual; they talked English in the factory, street, and store and Italian
in their parents' homes almost without noticing that they were constantly
switching back and forth from one language to the other; and their
effortless and ungrudging bilingualism was highly convenient for their
old parents. Indeed, it abetted their parents' inclination, after their
retirement, to forget even the smattering of English that they had once
picked up during their working life in the factory. However, this is not
the end of the story; for in due course the retired immigrants' children
married and had children of their own, and, for these representatives of
a third generation, English was the language of the home as well as the
school. Since their own parents had married after having been educated
in the United States, one of them would be of non-Italian origin as often
as not, and then English would be the lingua franca in which the father
and mother would communicate with one another. So the American-
born children of bilingual parents would not know their grandparents*
Italian mother tongue, and, moreover, would have no use for it. Why
should they put themselves out in order to learn a foreign lingo that
would convict them of an un-American origin which they were eager to
slough off and consign to oblivion ? So the grandparents found that their
grandchildren could not be induced to communicate with them in the
only language in which the grandparents were able to talk with any ease,
and they were thus confronted suddenly, in their old age, with the appal-
ling prospect of being unable to establish any human contact with their
own living descendants. For Italians and other non-English-speaking
Continental Europeans with a strong sense of family solidarity, this pro-
spect was intolerable. For the first time in their lives they now had an in-
centive for mastering the hitherto unattractive language of their adopted
country; and last year they thought of applying to me for help. Of course
I was eager to arrange special classes for them; and, though it is no-
torious that the enterprise of learning a foreign language becomes more
difficult progressively as one grows older, I can assure you that these
English lessons for grandparents have been one of the most successful and
rewarding pieces of work that we have ever taken in hand in our depart-
ment/

This tale of Troy shows how a series of three generations can achieve,
through the cumulative effect of two successive caesuras, a social meta-
morphosis which could never have been achieved by representatives of a
single generation within the span of a single lifetime. The process by