Hayakawa, S. I. (1906–1992)

Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa was a professor of English semantics who was elected to the U.S. Senate for the state of California in 1976. He is known for having written the first amendment proposing the establishment of English as the official language of the United States. This entry describes Hayakawa's life and career.

Hayakawa was born on July 18, 1906, in Vancouver, Canada. His parents were Japanese immigrants who eventually returned to Japan. By his own admission, Hayakawa did not speak Japanese. Hayakawa completed a bachelor's degree at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1927. He later pursued a master's degree in English literature at McGill University in Montreal, which he obtained in 1928. Awarded a graduate fellowship for doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he moved to the United States in 1929 and received his PhD in American literature in 1935. Upon graduation, he was hired as a full-time instructor by the University of Wisconsin.

In 1939, Hayakawa and his wife, Margedant Peters, moved to Chicago, where he worked as an associate professor of English at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In Chicago, he became acquainted with Alfred Korzybski, founder of the Institute of General Semantics. Hayakawa attended Korzybski's seminars and regarded Korzybski as an important influence in his own career. Hayakawa wrote a textbook with the purpose of making Korzybski's ideas accessible to the general public: Language in Action was first published in 1941, and it became the Book-of-the-Month Club selection. He published a revised edition in 1949, Language in Thought and Action. One of the key points in his work was the emphasis on the role of a common language in the unification of a society for conducting shared work and common goals. His career as a semanticist also included a position as the first editor of the journal ETC: A Review of General Semantics.

In 1952, Hayakawa was granted U.S. citizenship. Shortly after, he was invited to teach at San Francisco State College. He moved with his family to California in 1955, and later became president of the college in 1968, in the midst of student strikes with demands of equity for minority groups. He attracted public attention in this position, where he established a reputation for strict leadership and a determined attitude.

After he retired from the presidency of San Francisco State in 1973, Hayakawa joined the Republican party. In 1976, he was elected to the U.S. Senate from California at the age of 70. He sponsored the first version of the English Language Amendment in 1981, which stated that English should become the official language of the United States. Although his proposed amendment never passed, in his speeches and publications Hayakawa made a case for his belief in the dangers of multi-lingualism for national unity. As he had stated in his publications as a semanticist, he strongly believed in the power of language to bind together individuals from different countries. He cited as alarming the cases of countries like Sri Lanka, India, and Belgium, nations divided owing to what he regarded as language riots, cultural differences unable to be resolved because individuals could not understand each other. He also tapped on the case of his native country, Canada, in the province of Quebec, where the French-speaking majority was still in conflict with the English-speaking minority. He argued that unless the mastery of one common language was achieved by all groups in the society, common understanding and agreement could not be possible.

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