Reply #24: Actually that's not true. It's an urban legend

[Bucky]

Early America was very much a multilingual society. The first Congress in 1790 voted to translate our new Law Code into German at the request of a German-speaking community in Virginia (note: not Pennsylvania). They referred the matter to a committee because money was kind of tight back then, and Congress adjourned before ever fully considering the matter.

From this odd incident, the American Nazi Party in the late 1930s concocted the lie that the Founders nearly voted to make German our official language in the 1770s. It was a Nazi propaganda lie and one that no one in 1939 believed. It still gets refreshed every now and then, but less than 10% of Americans in the Founding years spoken German, so such a proposal would have been laugh out of congress