Noah Webster
Unger, Harlow Giles
The Man Who Defined American Culture Noah Webster: The Life and Times of an American Patriot Harlow Giles Unger John Wiley & Sons /386 pages /$3o REVIEWED BY Florence King A s a member of the...
...Finally, when Jefferson became president, Webster abandoned political writing and returned to his first love...
...He grew increasingly conservative as time went on, coming to regard steadily expanding political freedom on a par with unregulated spelling and pronunciation...
...He argued passionately against extending the suffrage to non-property owners, stating unabashedly, "I would definitely prefer a limited monarchy, for I would sooner be subject to the caprice of one man, than to the ignorance and passions of the multitudes...
...The few available American texts followed the British alphabetical method, and terrorized children with practice sentences describing slow pupils being consumed by the fires of Hell...
...This he did, embarking on America's first book tour, networking and schmoozing his way from Massachusetts to Georgia, introducing himself to printers and schoolmasters and making friends with influential men such as James Madison, who obligingly introduced a copyright law in the Virginia legislature...
...We follow him around the room as he places himself at one end of a long table covered with dictionaries in all languages...
...Webster had come expecting warmth and mutual affection between his countrymen but found only strangers thrashing about in a raging sea of anarchy...
...Said a newspaper editorial after his death: "Here, five thousand miles change not the sound of a word...
...Existing primers grouped words that had no attributes in common except initial letters (age, all, are, ape...
...It may, however, be more than coincidental that after each such visit to Webster, Washington and the delegates returned to the convention and reached compromises suggested by Webster, or inserted language in the Constitution that was similar to or exactly that found in Webster's Sketches or other writings...
...necticut farming village of Hartford...
...The result was The American Spelling Book...
...Direct descendants of Mayflower leader William Bradford, the Websters were members of the Congregational church, then Connecticut's established church and still a Puritan theocracy...
...Webster achieved the cultural unity he sought...
...His greatest fear was the social and political divisions that invariably grew out of dialects...
...Property taxes supported the church, the vote was restricted to church members, the temporal offices of sheriff and aldermen were filled by clergymen and deacons, and Sunday morning worship services merged into afternoon town meetings in the church building: The political elite and the Calvinist Elect were one and the same...
...Today, writes all-the-time atmosphere, but Unger's Unger, bilingualism and multicultural- memorable final assessment says it all: ism have created: "Webster's life was not about a dictionary...
...We owe it to Webster...
...MODESTY, n Unaffected modesty is the sweetest charm of female excellence...
...What would happen in spacious America when a steadily growing immigrant population confronted the caprice of -ough and the subtly different vowel sounds in rove-move-dove...
...Separation of church and state was unknown...
...There is no concrete evidence that these visits directly affected deliberations or the Constitution's final form," writes Unger...
...Noah Webster is often confused with his younger distant cousin, Daniel, the senator from Massachusetts who famously proclaimed to Southern separatists, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable...
...To sever the cultural ties with the mother country that many Americans, especially former Tories, still clung to, he 72 May 1999 • The American Spectator eliminated all English spellings, dropped double consonants having no effect on pronunciation (traveller, waggon), and ruled that the last letter of the alphabet was "zee," not "zed...
...To his way of thinking, anarchy was anarchy and he was against it wherever it reared its head...
...The American Spectator May 1999 73 He also practiced "compassionate ing up semiliterate in both English and conservatism" without straining for it...
...Samuel Johnson's 4o,000-word Dictionary of the English Language was regarded as a sacred text on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Moreover, during the Constitutional convention of1787, Webster, who was then teaching in Philadelphia, received visits from Washington and other delegates...
...When it match...
...and we travel with him to Paris's Bibliotheque du Roi, remembering to keep very still while he pores over the first dictionary published by the Academie Francaise in 1694...
...Lacking the materials he needed, Webster had to write his own...
...looks up a word, makes a note, and moves on, circling the table again and again in his endless stroll through comparative philology...
...As most of them had been published in England they also contained British spellings such as "honour" and "theatre," and worse, word lists composed of English shires and towns exposed American children to the unhelpful news that Pontefract is pronounced "pumfret...
...At least one part of the Constitution as finally adopted has his fingerprints on it: Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8, proposed by his old friend James Madison, gives Congress the power to establish national copyright and patent laws...
...Cultural unity was the defining force in his life from his birth in 1758 in the ConFLORENCE KING'S most recent book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...The first form of government established by the newly independent colonies, the Confederation was a states' rights nightmare under a virtually powerless Congress...
...As we come to the end with him we can only bow our heads...
...differences and raising their self-esteem in ways no government program can Don't miss this stirring book...
...There was no national copyright law, nor much of a national anything...
...His efforts succeeded —he published his copyrighted primer in 1783—but the experience proved that the Articles of Confederation, like multilingualism, invited disunity and eventual anarchy and must be eliminated...
...Defining words is coming more and more to be seen as "judgmentalism" by definition, and dictionary editors, once serene pedants, now rate combat pay...
...Several American lexicographers had published dictionaries but they were slim (25,000 words), vague ("bemused" defined as "overcome with musing"), and idiosyncratic: One contained "cap-a-pie" but omitted "ocean" and "newspaper," another omitted words ending in -ly and -ness to save printing costs, and all contained lingering English spellings and references...
...Growing up diversity-deprived gave Noah Webster a rock-solid identity, but the world beyond his homogeneous Eden was fast becoming a multicultural caldron...
...The nations of Europe had been rent by them...
...INESTIMABLE, adj...The privileges of American citizens, civil and religious, are inestimable...
...Finally, there being no children's literature, the only available reader was the Bible with its polysyllabic Hebraic names and archaic verbs...
...We look on, stunned, as he teaches himself to read Chaldaic, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon so that he can trace the history of each word...
...Noah fought for liberty as a member of Yale's class of 1778, marching out with other student Minutemen to meet the redcoats at Saratoga, but he fought for union on the battleground of American culture...
...INDULGENCE, n...How many children are ruined by indulgence...
...French was the language of Vermont and Maine, Dutch was spoken in New York, and the dominant German-speaking farmers of Pennsylvania fired on English-speaking migrants who tried to settle there...
...Far from producing unity, the independence for which they had fought so long and hard had turned them into a nasty, squalling mob...
...The impact of this work, in the opinion of his present biographer, makes him more of a Founding Father than he has been given credit for...
...and bawled renditions of "La Marseillaise," Webster called them "the French Democratic Party consisting of American citizens" and said that Jefferson, who was Washington's secretary of state at the time, should be charged with treason...
...even in tiny England, Yorkshire-men and Cornishmen could not understand each other...
...America developed regional accents but we are the only major country in history without dialects...
...In religion the Great Awakening was replacing predestination with equality of salvation, while the political situation resembled the Tower of Babel...
...The two-volume work took him zo years: 70,000 words, definitions, and origins, all researched and written by hand by a 66year-old scholar working entirely alone —the last lexicographer to do so...
...Reasoning that no one would say "sparrowgrass" and "chimbley" who learned how to spell "asparagus" and "chimney," he decided to change the traditional alphabetical method of teaching reading to one that emphasized syllables and sounds...
...74 May 1999 • The American Spectator...
...He could not understand them, and the sporadic fights he saw told him that many of them could not understand one another, either...
...We see the aging Minuteman pursuing the magisterial Dr...
...Giving up law for teaching, he opened an academy and threw himself into the task of imposing order on the chaos of 18th-century American speech...
...He expressed his increasingly unpopular views in his capacity as editor of a variety of newspapers and magazines, butall lost money...
...As the dissimulative purveyors of schools for more than a century and in ngualismdividethenationculturally some areas until the early 1930's, taught multili , under the banner of individual liberty', they generations of children, native-born and of o voice i vo e gl n si a in i k ea sp to , rant ig mm i will all but surely divide the nation politically and provoke anarchy, as their predeStandard American English, erasing their cessors have done throughout history...
...It was about creating a new nation—the a huge new nation within the United United States of America—and making States—a nation whose children are grow- everyone in America an American...
...How sweet it is, then, to review this superb biography of Noah Webster and read some of the entries in the first (1828) edition of his magnum opus, An American Dictionary of the English Language: LOVE, v.t...The Christian loves his Bible...
...He suspected Jefferson of complicity with "Citizen Genet," Revolutionary France's minister to the United States, whose fiery speeches accusing Washington's Federalist administration of monarchical aspirations incited pro-Jefferson mobs to riot, nearly destroying Philadelphia...
...Harlow Giles Unger's account of Webster at work on his dictionary is the most evocative description of a labor of love since the "Black Coffee" chapter in Stefan Zweig's biography of Balzac...
...Martin's...
...The linguistic conflicts in the Revolutionary Army were even worse and pointed Noah toward his life's work when he observed the troops awaiting mustering-out in Newburgh, New York, after the war: [H]e heard a dizzying cacophony of languages and accents...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...I t is known that George Washington read the Sketches because James Madison borrowed his copy during a visit to Mount Vernon in 1785...
...Around every fireside, and from every tribune, in every field of labor, and every factory of toil, is heard the same tongue...
...first came to my attention I wondered if Unfortunately, government strained the subject of lexicography could hold its for compassionate liberalism and now its- own in a post-impeachment, all-Monicaforts have virtually erased his...
...An ardent Federalist, Webster was incensed by Thomas Jefferson's enthusiastic support of the bloody excesses of the French Revolution and his statement that "France is our true mother country...
...He grouped words according to sound (bug, dug, tug) to appeal to children's natural love of rhymes, used homophones (bear, bare) to construct jokes and games, and emphasized syllables instead of the sound of each letter so that pupils readily understood that "example" was pronounced "exampul" and not "examplee...
...At this time, Dr...
...Disgusted by their shouts of "Vive la France...
...H]e realized that only a uniform method of speaking—a common language—would ever ensure the fraternity Americans needed to remain united in nationhood and govern themselves peacefully...
...Johnson through word thickets, sniping at "the last vestige of British rule in America...
...Although ignored by most historians, Webster's Sketches preceded by two and a half years the publication of the Federalist essays, which appeared in 1787-88, and both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison borrowed almost all of Webster's concepts for their essays...
...His spelling book proved so popular with his pupils and their parents that he decided to publish it, but authorship was a perilous business under the Articles of Confederation...
...states issued their own money, levied customs duties on each other, and flirted with the right to declare war...
...their native tongues and who are developHis spelling book, used in American ing little or no love or allegiance to their new land...
...To this end, he wrote four powerful political essays published as Sketches of American Policy, in which he outlined a plan for the creation of a strong federal government...
...To realize his goal of "a national language," the Minuteman-turned-pedant practiced his own version of ethnic cleansing...
...The Man Who Defined American Culture Noah Webster: The Life and Times of an American Patriot Harlow Giles Unger John Wiley & Sons /386 pages /$3o REVIEWED BY Florence King A s a member of the usage panel of a major American dictionary, I am often struck by the attention given to diversity and multiculturalism in the ballots I am asked to submit...
...To copyright his book, Webster would have to petition each of the 13 legislatures separately...
Vol. 32 • May 1999 • No. 5
