{"id":152749,"date":"2021-05-27T14:23:41","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T18:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=152749"},"modified":"2021-05-27T14:23:41","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T18:23:41","slug":"new-yorks-hyphenated-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/05\/27\/new-yorks-hyphenated-history\/","title":{"rendered":"New York\u2019s Hyphenated History"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Pardis Mahdavi\u2019s new book <\/em>Hyphen<\/a>, she explores the way hyphenation became not only a copyediting quirk but a complex issue of identity, assimilation, and xenophobia amid anti-immigration movements at the turn of the twentieth century. In the excerpt below, Mahdavi gives the little-known history of New York\u2019s hyphenation debate.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Flyer for the New-York hyphen debate, 1774 copyright \u00a9 New-York Historical Society<\/p><\/div>\n

In the midst of an unusually hot New York City spring in 1945, Chief Magistrate Henry H. Curran was riding the metro downtown to a meeting at City Hall. Curran, the former commissioner of immigration at the Port of New York, and former president of the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, had forgotten to bring his copy of the paper that morning. As a result, he found himself reading the various ads surrounding him on the colorful New York City subway.<\/p>\n

Curran tried to focus on different advertisements to distract himself from the heat, and from his growing restlessness. Until, that is, one particular ad seized his attention. It was an ad for the \u201cNew-York Historical Society.\u201d Innocuous enough at first, it was the tiny piece of orthography that caught Curran\u2019s eye and sent a wave of heat through his body. Was that\u2014could that be a hyphen? Sitting unabashedly between the words New<\/em> and York<\/em>? The anti-hyphenate politician was furious.<\/p>\n

Curran swiftly exited the subway, marched into City Hall, and got his friend Newbold Morris, president of the New York City Council, on the phone. Later that week, the New York World<\/em>–Telegram<\/em>\u2014oh, the irony of the hyphen placement in the publication that reported the incident\u2014documented the conversation between Morris and Curran.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis thing\u2014this hyphen\u2014is like a gremlin which sneaks around in the dark \u2026 you should call a special meeting of City Council immediately and have a surgical operation on it! We won\u2019t be hyphenated by anyone!\u201d Curran reportedly said to Morris. <\/p>\n

What Curran either didn\u2019t know, or wanted to erase, was the fact that up until the late 1890s, cities like \u201cNew-York\u201d and \u201cNew-Jersey\u201d were usually hyphenated to be consistent with other phrases that had both a noun and an adjective. In 1804, when the \u201cNew-York Historical Society\u201d was founded, therefore, hyphenation was de rigueur. The practice of hyphenating New York was adhered to in books and newspapers, and adopted by other states. Even the New York Times <\/em>featured a masthead written as The New<\/em>–York Times <\/em>until the late 1890s.<\/p>\n

It was only when the pejorative phrasing of \u201chyphenated Americans\u201d came into vogue in the 1890s, emboldened by Roosevelt\u2019s anti-hyphen speech, that the pressure for the hyphen\u2019s erasure came to pass.<\/p>\n

Curran was no exception to the wave of anti-immigrant xenophobia sweeping the nation at the time of Roosevelt\u2019s speech and in the lead-up to World Wars I and II. During his time as commissioner of immigration, he penned a famous article that appeared in the recently unhyphenated New York Times <\/em>entitled, \u201cThe Commissioner of Immigration Shows How He Is Hampered.\u201d The essay was Curran\u2019s response to outrage over the deportation of an immigrant mother who had arrived at Ellis Island with her young children, only to be sent back \u201chome\u201d while her children were to remain in the U.S. In the piece, Curran called for the public to afford the judges of such decisions \u201csympathy more than censure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing in 1924, several years after Roosevelt\u2019s speech, Curran accused New York society of being overly judgmental, noting that \u201cit is Ellis Island that catches the devil whenever a decision comes along that does not suit somebody. Of course, we are now in the midst of the open season for attacks on Ellis Island. We have usurped the place of the sea serpent and hay fever. We are ready to be roasted.\u201d For the next twelve years he served as commissioner of immigration, Curran became more staunchly anti-immigrant, and his hatred was fueled by the anti\u2013hyphenated Americanism espoused by people like Roosevelt and, later, Woodrow Wilson.<\/p>\n

Curran was outraged that his beloved city would appear hyphenated, and he continually insisted that Morris call a meeting to pass a law that barred the use of a hyphen in New York<\/em>. Meanwhile, curators, historians, and librarians banded together with antidiscrimination and immigrants\u2019 rights defenders to defend a hyphenated New-York. Curran could not win this time, they insisted. The curators and librarians at the Historical Society bravely stood by the hyphen in their name, confirming that they had been founded in 1804, that the hyphen was in the original configuration of New-York<\/em>, and that, no, this hyphen would not be erased. Hyphenated Americans and activists throughout New York City worried that this erasure would signal that they would not be welcome in the one city that was supposed to be a bastion of openness in America.<\/p>\n

In the days leading up to the meeting, head librarian Dorothy Barch proclaimed that despite all of their research, no one had found any documentation indicating that the hyphen in New-York<\/em> had ever been officially deleted by the government or any lawmaking body in the city, state, or country. The day before the meeting, curator Donald A. Shelley declared that they couldn\u2019t even change their name if they wanted to because it is \u201cchiseled in stone on the front of our building.\u201d<\/p>\n

The press and the pressure to enact an anti-hyphenation law were mounting in the lead-up to the meeting. Curran insisted that the hyphen was a scourge and that it should be erased completely, as it threatened to divide American society. In erasing the hyphen, Curran wanted to delete hyphenated Americanism altogether. He was firm: the hyphen divides, and as a divider, it threatened the future of the city, the state, the country. As he had done in his role as commissioner of immigration, he felt strongly that any immigrant or child of immigrants who identified as anything other than an American should be returned to whatever country was on the other side of that \u201cfilthy hyphen.\u201d As such, he was emphatic in his attempt to whip the votes of his fellow council members in the lead up to the meeting.<\/p>\n

All of this activity garnered a range of emotional reactions. Some people felt that this anger and energy, coming amid World War II, was misplaced. The upcoming meeting became the subject of mockery for artists and social commentators alike. At the meeting, a group of musicians and composers performed a song they had written entitled \u201cThe Hyphen-Song.\u201d The words, written by popular songwriter Leonard Whitcup, included:<\/p>\n

\n

Take a boy like me, dear<\/em><\/p>\n

Take the girl I\u2019m dreaming of\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

Add a hyphen, what\u2019ve you got?<\/em><\/p>\n

You got<\/em>–UM<\/em>–M<\/em>–you\u2019ve got love!<\/em><\/p>\n

Me without you<\/em>–you without me<\/em><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sad affair\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

But take a tip from the hyphen\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n

And baby we\u2019ll get somewhere<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The musicians performed to great acclaim. Activists gathered outside, tying ribbons to the stone etching of the hyphen to highlight the need to protect the orthographic mark that suddenly had so many political and social reverberations.<\/p>\n

In the end, much to his chagrin, Curran lost this contest. No law was ever passed outlawing the hyphen, and it remains to this day, etched in stone on the building of the New-York Historical Society, a homage to the journey of the city and the hyphenated individuals who fought the good fight to keep the hyphen\u2014and its many meanings\u2014alive.<\/p>\n

Today, the New-York Historical Society hosts hyphen festivals and blogs, and their softball team is named the Hyphens. Henry Curran died in 1966 at the age of eighty-eight. Before his death, and after his hyphen assassination attempt, he went on to be LaGuardia\u2019s deputy mayor and the borough president of Manhattan. He died at Saint Barnabas Hospital in New-York.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Pardis Mahdavi is dean of social sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is a nonfiction writer with twenty years of experience as an anthropologist, a public health researcher, and an expert in sexual politics across the globe. She is the author of <\/em>Hyphen, as well as five other books, including the first book on sexual politics of modern Iran, <\/em>Passionate Uprisings: Iran\u2019s Sexual Revolution. A former journalist turned academic, she has written for <\/em>Ms. Magazine,\u00a0<\/em>Foreign Affairs,\u00a0<\/em>The Conversation,\u00a0<\/em>The Huffington Post,\u00a0<\/em>Jaddaliyya, and\u00a0<\/em>The Los Angeles Times Magazine.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Extracted from\u00a0<\/em>Hyphen<\/a>, by Pardis Mahdavi, which will be published in Bloomsbury\u2019s Object Lessons series on June 3.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an excerpt from Pardis Mahdavi\u2019s book \u2018Hyphen,\u2019 the debate over New-York\u2019s historical hyphen becomes a grammatical battle with vast social implications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-152749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNew York\u2019s Hyphenated History by Pardis Mahdavi<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In an excerpt from Pardis Mahdavi\u2019s book \u2018Hyphen,\u2019 the debate over New-York\u2019s historical hyphen becomes a grammatical battle with vast social implications.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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