They're children were taught in schools that ensured that they learned English but many adult immigrants never learned to speak English. Carnegie Steel used to try to avoid having too many workers with a common language as part of a strategy to make unionization more difficult. And when Norman Borlaug was growing up in Saude, Iowa in the 1920s there were still a lot of older people around who only spoke Norweigen.

I think English was not set as an official language since... Trump?

It was the de facto language, but not the official language. What was baffling.

yea, when did they make the law forbidding german speakers speaking German? Which year?