Henry Ford revered William Holmes McGuffey.
Clarence Darrow did not.
Ford collected the little readers that were omnipre-sent in 19th Century schools and bear McGuffey’s name, reprinting and distributing them to virtually anybody he met. Ford even bought McGuffey’s log cabin birthplace and put it in his Greenfield Village -the idealized form of the American community that his automobiles had done so much to destroy.
Darrow, the famed “attorney for the damned,” who grew up with the readers in the small Ohio town of Kinsman, was a tougher sell. The same man who demanded mercy for Leopold and Loeb exhibited none toward the McGuffeys. “Their religious and ethical stories seem silly now,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but at the time it never occurred to me that those tales were utterly impossible lies which average children should easily have seen through.”
It was one verdict the legendary Darrow has lost badly.
Americans continue to buy the legendary school primers that debuted in 1836. Annual sales recently ran as high as 150,000 copies. At least 50 million copies of the six readers and spelling book have been published over the years, with no end in sight.
For some current enthusiasts, the McGuffey reader is a piece of Americana worth a spot on the bookshelf. Others, especially some proponents of the home school movement, see them as an invaluable part of their children’s education.
“Except for the Bible, these were the most popular books in America in the 19th Century,” notes historian Elliott J. Gorn, who has followed in McGuffey’s footsteps. Not only does Gorn teach at Ohio’s Miami University as McGuffey did for 10 years — and where Gorn says his predecessor is still treated as “kind of a kitchen god” — he also has done a McGuffey reader for college students, based on the 1879 edition of the books.
“I think the readers give a kind of view of America that Americans liked,” Gorn says in explaining their initial popularity. “This even though the United States was rapidly industrializing, its population changing and urbanizing. The readers don’t acknowledge any of this. They’re all about small-town rural life, homogeneous in religion and culture. I think they present almost a kind of fantasy world.”
The man responsible for all the commotion was born in what Ford, if he were alive today, would call that “pre-owned” log cabin in western Pennsylvania in September of 1800. McGuffey was teaching school by the age of 14. Further study and teaching landed him at Miami University in 1826 as a professor of ancient languages. He was also an ordained Presbyterian minister.
The readers took shape when Cincinnati publisher Truman and Smith asked Catherine Beecher, sister of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet Beecher Stowe, to do a series of school primers. Beecher instead recommended McGuffey, whom she knew quite well because both frequented Cincinnati society. McGuffey set out writing lessons and selecting the work of respected authors, trying out some of his ideas on “test groups” of local children. The children were invited to his house so he could gauge their reaction to material.
McGuffey produced the first four readers, which were intended for grammar school, between 1836 and 1837. His brother Alexander compiled numbers five and six (aimed at high schoolers and collegians) as well as the speller. Revisions were carried out in 1857 and 1879, but without the assistance of the McGuffeys. Beyond an initial advance of $1,000, the brothers received nothing for their work, other than a form of immortality.
The result, Elliott Gorn says in his own reader, is a series of works that “expressed a powerful American mythology, a cluster of ideas and emotions–centered around Protestantism, individualism and patriotism–that were elevated to mystical faith in the nation’s destiny.”
The 1857 edition, for example, contains “The Death of Absalom” from the Bible; an excerpt from a Daniel Webster speech on the Battle of Bunker Hill (including the statement, “America has furnished to the world the character of Washington. And if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind”); and a dissertation on Death and Life that ends, “Awake! ascend! Thou are not now with those of mortal birth: The living God hath touched thy lips, Thou, who hast done with earth.”
In addition, the McGuffeys provided a strong rudimentary education at a time when American public schools were in their infancy. Children learned to read through simple sentences and phonics: “The dog. The dog ran.” They also got a sense of the world of art, history and letters that lay beyond the little red school house.
That was no small accomplishment in a place like the Dakota Territory, where the novelist Hamlin Garland grew up during the 1870s. “Our readers were almost the only counterattacks to the current of vulgarity and baseness which ran through the talk of the older boys,” wrote Garland in “A Son of the Middle Border,” “and I wish to acknowledge my deep oblnigation to Professor McGuffey, whoever he may have been, for the dignity and literary grace of his selections.
“From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth and a long line of the English masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes which I read in these books.”
Garland also got a strong taste of McGuffey morality. The lessons exhorted youngsters, as McGuffey did to his own son, “to pray to God to keep you from evil, and to prepare . . . for the duties of life and for the hour of death.” Children learned lessons on “When to Say No” and how to “Try, Try Again.”
And they learned about the goodness of God, often presented in passages of scripture out of the King James Bible. It was a WASP view of America without the sting of overt prejudice, Gorn says. “The McGuffeys don’t particularly denigrate blacks or Indians or Catholics. The readers just act like they’re not there, they don’t exist.”
The readers may have endured as perhaps the most popular textbooks of their era because they had something of their creator’s guile about them. McGuffey’s great opportunity came courtesy of Catherine Beecher, a member of one of the leading abolitionist families in American history, and yet McGuffey never publicly embraced abolitionism. Instead, after leaving Miami University and working at three other Ohio schools, in 1845 he became a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Once there, McGuffey apparently gave no hint of Northern sympathies before or during the Civil War. Yet afterwards, no one accused him of having been a rebel, either.
The readers themselves, which he no longer had a hand in, either ignored the war, or found ways to straddle the issue, as when the fourth reader ran a poem in 1866 about “The Dying Soldiers.” It treated the deaths of New Hampshire and Georgia soldier/fathers, not the causes they fought for.
By the time of McGuffey’s death in 1873, the readers were just entering the period of their greatest popularity, only becoming outdated, at last, by the turn of the century, when the reality of urban life could no longer be ignored. Educational approaches also had changed. Where McGuffey tried to do several things at once, schools now taught separate subjects. English, history and spelling all came with their own textbooks.
It was up to the likes of Henry Ford to be keeper of McGuffey memories.
Not that the readers ever disappeared. They could be found in attics, second-hand bookstores and libraries. Illinet Online, a computerized card catalog of more than 800 Illinois libraries, suggests how well the McGuffeys survived. “William H. McGuffey/Author” generates 164 entries. With the readers, it was less a matter of forgetting the past than putting it in storage.
McGuffey also carried on, in a way, through the Dick and Jane books, which taught reading to most of America’s schoolchildren until well into the middle of the 20th Century. The same simple reading lessons were used, as were the lessons on the importance of being good. The only element missing was the Almighty. In a more secular era, the sacred gave way to Spot.
The current popularity of McGuffey’s readers is the product of “two markets that are very different,” says Gerard Helferich, publisher of general interest and children’s books for John Wiley and Sons. Wiley publishes a line of the readers, which are in the public domain and do not require the purchase of rights. “The first and biggest market consists of nostalgia buffs,” says Helferich. “For them the McGuffey readers capture a sort of grace of bygone days.”
The other market comes from the home school movement. But not everyone endorses the Wiley editions. Some Christian home schoolers only use the earliest, pre-Civil War McGuffeys, which are published by Mott Media. Mott eschews the 1879 edition because, as general manager Joyce Bohn explains, “that was when they began to remove the Christian content, and we are a Christian publishing company.”
Mott, which is based in Milford, Mich., sells about 5,000 McGuffeys a year. Wiley and Sons will not discuss sales figures, but says the books sell well. When asked if the McGuffeys were something of a cash cow for the firm, Helferich replied, “More like a cash calf.”
Bohn praises the books for the way they teach reading, spelling and phonics. “And while the children are reading, they’re getting excellent moral messages.”
Could non-Protestants make use of the McGuffeys? “I don’t think they would find a lot of things to get upset about,” Bohn says. “(The readers) aren’t teaching a particular theology or faith, but everything is presented with the idea that we are to be moral creatures and believing.” Even non-believers, she says, could make use of the McGuffeys “because they’re moral and not talking about Ouija boards or Goosebump books.”
But use of the McGuffey readers is not a hallmark of the home school movement. The National Homeschool Association in Hartland, Mich., does not take a position on such questions as textbooks. In Chicago, a member of one Northwest Side home school group of 30 to 40 families reports that none of the parents involved has advocated or even mentioned the readers.
Mott reports that orders for the McGuffeys primarily come from the Sunbelt states — Texas, California, Colorado, Florida, Tennessee and Washington State.
The McGuffeys best use is a matter of perspective. Elliott Gorn praises them for their emphasis on respect for others, the value of work and the importance of education. “I don’t think you have to shoehorn yourself into the kind of specific Protestant morality the McGuffeys had in order to do that,” he contends.
“I think we can do it in a lot of ways and teach lots of other values at the same time, including the realization that America is a very, very diverse nation and part of its greatness in many ways is its diversity.”
To the customers of Mott Media, diversity is not part of the equation; studying the word of God is. The Bible, obviously, counts, and because there is so much of the Bible in them, so do the McGuffey readers.
The uncertain legacy of William Holmes McGuffey extends even to the University of Virginia, where he is buried and a reading center bears his name. A wreath is laid on his grave in the university cemetery every May 4th, the date of his death. In summer, children attending the reading center make rubbings of McGuffey’s gravestone.
“We do it so they know where they are and who McGuffey was,” says Professor Marcia Invernizzi, clinical coordinator for the reading center. “We give them a little education about him, show them the readers, and take them out to see his grave so they know they’re at a real place, and that a real man really did these things, and here he lies buried.”
The children do not, however, study from McGuffey readers.
