But Why Not to the Colonnade?
Webster seems not to have been pushed vigorously in the early elections. Director R.U. Johnson, commenting on the oddities of the first seven quinquennials, called the absence of men such as Webster “noticeable and unaccountable” though it would be easy to reason “too curiously as to why this or that elector did or did not vote for this or that name.” Johnson assumed that Webster, having held a “steadier course,” was one of several who would be elected. The electoral course for Webster was steady — unfalteringly up and down — for over seven decades. From start to finish Noah ran in crowded category #1 (Authors). Fair enough, he was an author. But he had worn many other mantles.
He predates Horace Mann as an advocate of public schools.As far as is known no one has challenged the election of Horace Mann (in 1900) as the father of public education in the United States. Noah Webster supporters merely point out sadly and correctly, that Webster, famous before Mann appeared on the public scene, was a forerunner to Mann in the latter’s great work — even in Massachusetts, which was Mann country. As a member of the Massachusetts legislature, indeed throughout his life, Webster championed education of the young. “I should rejoice to see a system adopted that should lay a foundation for a permanent fund for public schools,” he said, but the Massachusetts legislature did not act.
Mann, thirty-eight years younger, strongly disapproved of Webster’s method of teaching children to read — the “alphabet method,” Whereby the child first memorizes the alphabet and then works his way up, spelling aloud the letters of each word, beginning with words of one syllable and so on. Thus “No (n-o), man (m-a-n), may (m-a-y), put (p-u-t), off (o-f-f), the (t-h-e), law (l-a-w), of (o-f), God (great G-o-d). No man may put off the law of God.”
To Mann and others this was the “torture of the innocents.” Perhaps it was. But we tend to forget that while children were learning to spell for reading and writing, they were also in the same breath learning to pronounce the words. In fact the first Blue-Backed Speller was not called Speller at all. It was described as a “new and accurate standard of Pronunciation.” Webster came probably a lot closer than any other educator to seeing that standard prevail. He continued to sell. In fact he was the major producer of elementary textbooks between the woodcuts of the New England Primer and the McGuffey Reader. Biographers tell us that he was and is considered one of America’s greatest educators. Schoolmaster to America was his honorary title.
Nevertheless the triumph of American public education is directly attributable to the pressure on legislatures by Horace Mann, who ranks high in the body of America’s all-time great lobbyists. Few educationists will forget that Mann did more in one lifetime than most could in several to promote teacher training and salaries, and better buildings, books and curricula for the common school. Fewer still will care that in the hands of a buoyant Scottish health faddist and phrenologist named George Combe, the handsome Mann was persuaded that because of his high forehead and prominent brows he was a man of superior intellect. So great was his faith in science and the shape of this own head that he named his third son George Combe Mann. Horace Mann the Mighty (HoF, ’00). Frailty, thy name is Mann.
Webster was one of America’s greatest lobbyists. During most of his life he fought the lifting of his words by others for their own profit. And for years he advocated stronger and longer protection. Webster is probably the most persistent lobbyist for copyright in our history.
In 1826 he wrote to Daniel Webster in the U.S. Congress, requesting legislation that would extend copyright to fourteen years (plus another fourteen on renewal). Daniel was reluctant but changed his mind when Noah moved temporarily to Washington in 1830 and started lobbying. He received a warm and friendly reception from Congress. Virtually all of the members knew who he was and why he was famous. In February, through Noah’s persuasion and Daniel’s influence, both houses passed a bill that extended copyright to ten years and another fourteen on renewal.
Webster was founder of a college — and a newspaper. Mark Hopkins was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1915 for having been a preacher, an ad hoc talker, a lovable and perdurable president of Williams College, and been made famous by President James A. Garfield. After leaving New Haven for Amherst, Massachusetts, Noah Webster suggested that Williams College transfer to Amherst. On being turned down he became a principal founder of Amherst College. “In the body corporate Webster might be called the brains and the mouthpiece,” wrote his family. (Notes on the Life of Noah Webster.) At least five of the official founding documents, they said, are from the hand of Noah. And we know that he gave an address at the laying in 1820 of the cornerstone of South College, the oldest Amherst College building. The cornerstone itself was his platform.
To most living Americans Mark Hopkins is a famous hotel, and the Top of the Mark at the top of Nob Hill in San Francisco is a happy drinking place, where they occasionally toast the other Mark Hopkins, railroad man, for whom it was named. Amherst College goes abreast of Williams in the top rank of our small colleges; and its own famous preacher is Henry Ward Beecher.
Webster’s other “first” is seldom mentioned: in the 1790’s he founded, edited and wrote one of New York City’s first daily newspapers, the American Minerva. With it came a regular supplement called the Herald, forerunner of those now carried by most newspapers.
Webster also wrote a major book on disease.When he worked in New York, the practice of medicine was more advanced — but not much more advanced — than in the days of Hippocrates or the blood letting barbers. American cities, far from being the tidy and pleasant places one sees in historic restorations, were unsanitary and unsightly. Most of them stank of incredible filth; virtually every building had its own dump, or kitchen midden. Biographer Henry Warfel writes that cities took turns suffering epidemics. Learned physicians worked heroically with the only techniques available. They changed the foul sheets, “swabbed the floors with vinegar and water, blew tar smoke through the halls, and spoke comforting words to the dying.” These good men were not above writing viciously about one another, and their learned tracts and treatises will still give us some of the best comic reading since Moliere’s Le Medicin Malgre Lui (Physician in Spite of Himself).
Dr. Joseph Browne, drawing on Hippocrates for a clue, declared the cause of yellow fever, “to consist in heat and deficiency of oxgenous air or surplusage of azotic, which was vegetable vital air.” In parts of the United States given to kitchen cures, one still reads about animal/vegetable nostrums.Noah Webster spent months doing research and making surveys, and one day sat down to write, “without an amanuensis,” a two-volume treatise in 712 pages: A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Disease, “not only the best general summary of epidemiological opinion at the end of the eighteenth century, but it is surpassed by few works as a compendium of earlier speculations on this subject.”
Physicians quarreled over it — enthusiastically for and violently against. Webster was insulted and praised. He was getting accustomed to that sort of thing. More than half a century later, in 1851, a similar history was published by one Edward Bascome with the title History of Epidemic Pestilence. Much of it had been lifted from Webster, whose name Bascome never mentioned.
Webster had found no cures, but the accuracy of is historical survey prompted no less a person than Sir William Osler, famous Canadian physician and medical historian at Johns Hopkins, to call Webster’s history ” . . . the most important work written by a layman in this country.” For the pain of abut two years of hard labor, Webster never recovered as much as traveling expenses. Indeed, he lost seven hundred dollars.
Layman Noah Webster was learned not only in medicine but also in law. He had been a lawyer but gave more attention to the making of the law than to the practice of it. He first read law at the home of Oliver Ellsworth, Chief Justice of the United States, whose bust is in the U.S. Capitol. Then he entered Litchfield, Connecticut, Law School (where Horace Mann later studied). He passed the bar exam and practiced briefly in the profession that, even then, was overcrowded with ambitious young men.
Webster won his first case in court; it would seem that his father was on the bench without prejudice. Later, in New Haven he was a County Judge (1799-1804). For him, however, it was no way to earn a living. He was a law maker. His descendants record that he was for nine sessions a member of the Connecticut General Assembly, Councilman of New Haven, also Alderman. And in Massachusetts he was a member of the General Court (as the legislature is called). Had he made jurisprudence his life’s work, there would now be only one great Webster.
Narrow minded? Yet for all Webster’s accomplishments, William Cullen Bryant (HoF ’10) thought of him as a man of “narrow but forcible intellect.” True, his works, taken one by one, all show flaws of one kind or another; and a few may even be narrow minded in attitude. Taken together, they are awe inspiring. “In variety of interests and versatility of achievement there is probably no person in the early history of the United States, except perhaps Benjamin Franklin, who surpassed him,” said Professor E.E. Thompson (Amherst Graduates Quarterly, August, 1933. No. 4.)
On the less forcible side is Webster, music master by declaration, offering singing lessons in Baltimore as a young man in need of money, despite his knowing little about music. And playing the flute just well enough to pace a military company. After General Washington and Cavalry Commander Henry Lee stopped in New Haven to inspect a drill, they were escorted out of town in a line of march. Webster wrote, “It fell to my humble lot to lead the company,” with the flute. To tell the truth, wrote Professor Thompson, Webster “did not really appreciate music; nor even literature.” to lay it on a bit, Thompson adds, “Sports in general disgusted him; beautiful scenery found little response in his nature.”
Webster was best with written words. In one issue of the American Minerva in 1794 we find an advertisement for “Webster’s Essays” a collection of “Remarks” on more than ten different “moral, historical, political and literary subjects,” and assorted others, as well as a book of “Dissertations on the English Language.” Narrow intellect? Not in prose
Poetry was not his metier. At best only a poetaster himself, at worst a jingler, Webster used elementary verse in his primers. The frontispiece of the American Spelling Book of 1829 and later editions shows a goddess-like teacher, presumably Minerva, pointing out to boy a temple on a hill. It looks not unlike Gould Library. The word Fame decorates the dome; Knowledge, the portico. And below the drawing, this verse:
Knowledge and Fame are gained not by surprise
He that would win must labor for the prize
‘Tis thus that the youth from lisping ABC
Attains at length a Master’s high degree.
At the American Magazine, which he published in New York (1787-88), Webster was on the lookout for verse. He described the magazine as, “a miscellaneous collection of original and other valuable essays in prose and verse and calculated for both instruction and amusement.” It has since been called the first truly American magazine — another Webster innovation.
Many of the prose articles were Webster’s own. To read an issue today is to take another measure of Noah’s breadth of interest and ability — and to have a few chuckles over his selections of verse:
The Virgin’s First Love
How sweet is the joy when our blushes impart
The youthful affection that grows in our heart,
When Prudence and duty and reason approve
The timid delight of the virgin’s first love.
Or the following, in which seven words of an eight-word line of Scottish poet James Thomson’s blank verse are “borrowed” by Webster to make a quatrain:
Winter
See! Winter comes to rule the varied year!!
A gloomy aspect saddens all the plains
Lo! Hopeless now, the trees disrobed appear
And tyrant death o’er vegetation reigns.
A revealing specimen of the continuous flow of the literary stream.
Webster’s renown was not based on spoken words. He had been an orator, of sorts — from the elementary to the elevated — and had even taught oratory. Most of the teaching, however, was in the printed word, in the Readers of the various editions of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language.
One edition of the Reader laid out rules in Elocution and Directions for ” . . . expressing the principal passions of the mind.” An example is rule IV of the Reader of 1795: “Let the sentiment you express be accompanied with proper tones and gestures. If a person is rehearsing the words of an angry man, he should assume the same furious looks, his eyes should flash with rage, his gestures should be violent, and the tone of his voice threatening: ‘Depart from me ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepare for the devil and his angels’.”
“He who shows remorse,” wrote Webster, “casts down the countenance and clouds it with anxiety. Sometimes the teeth gnash and the right hand beats the breast.” Tragedy and comedy are sometimes hard to separate.
Although a frequent lecturer, Webster was at times unpredictable. He was much less demonstrative than one would expect from his Readers. He was more interested in the thrust of his message and the words that carried his meaning. Though he had studied disputation and oratory at Yale, as students did in his day, Webster was not among the best. Though he lectured and preached during most of his life, he was no great platform orator to compare with the other Webster, the giant Daniel, who was “impressive even before he opened his mouth.” Noah suffers, fortunately, by comparison with overflowing Edward Everett, a human word processor, who as designated speaker at the Gettysburg battlefield, mesmerized a crowd of thousands for two hours before Abraham Lincoln delivered in abut as many minutes something since called The Gettysburg Address. Noah suffers by comparison with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose famous oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, “began nowhere and ended everywhere,” as James Russell Lowell described it.
Nevertheless Webster was still going at the age of 82 and spoke in church for one and a half hours. The listeners marveled at his presence and tenor, and they understood him. In much shorter compass — some 1500 words — was the text of his address at the laying of the cornerstone of Amherst College, founded, said Webster “to second the efforts of the Apostles themselves in extending the Redeemer’s empire of truth, . . . to raise the human race from ignorance and debasement . . . enlighten their minds . . . exalt their character and teach them the way to happiness and glory.”
One memorable thought from the address typifies Noah and his work: “Let us then take courage! The design is unquestionably good, and its success must be certain. Small efforts combined and continued cannot fail to produce the desired effect . . . ” Spoken or written, numbers of Webster’s other works revealed ideas that were questionable enough to give pause to some readers and anger others, whatever the extent of their admiration for him.
— He set both clergy and laity against him by rewriting the Bible to correct what he considered its errors and to remove references to bodily functions. In short, he bowdlerized — and failed to understand why sales were poor.
— A champion of constitutional democracy? He was, yes, one of the strongest ever. An egalitarian, a Populist, never. He believed ownership of property to be basic to the right to vote.
— An abolitionist, yes. Slavery was wrong, said Webster, a founder in Connecticut of one of America’s first abolitionist societies. His concern, however, was more economic than humanitarian — specifically, what it would cost the national treasury to free the slaves.
— Like another great American, Jefferson Davis, leader of the Confederacy and eight-time reject at the Hall of Fame, Webster had been a political shifter. He once swung from belief in federalism to advocacy for states’ rights, and in one of his spontaneous-combustion articles had suggested that the nation be divided into not two but three parts. Some Websterites prefer to forget this. Webster had a way of changing his mind, openly admitting, and defending his new position resolutely.
–Jefferson Davis too had changed his mind. In ante-bellum days he praised the union of states with the remark that “above all people we are one, and above all books which have united us in the bond of American language I place Noah Webster’s Yankee spelling book” The sentence, printed up front in a prewar speller was a neat piece of self-promotion, and helped sell it in the South.
— Webster in fact did most of his own promotion, energetically, in person, by post, or in print. And thereby turned off some people. As a guest for dinner at Mt. Vernon, he could not persuade Washington to endorse his Speller without reading it. He is said, however, to have been one of the few persons to make Washington laugh: by refusing maple syrup with remark that “we get enough of that where I come from.” If the story is true, at least one of them had a rare sense of humor.
He often sought endorsements of a work already published, or subscriptions for one in progress. One unpublished letter in Webster’s hand (In the New London County Historical Society, Connecticut) typifies both man and method. Sent from New Haven, dated November 7, 1809, it asks Judge Jeremiah G. Brainared of New London to help him raise money for his great dictionary.
Sir:
In pursuance of the advice of my friends I have issued a Prospectus of my Dictionary, with a view to obtain subscriptions. I am assured by gentlemen in Boston, New York &c that many persons will be found willing to advance a small sum to aid me in this undertaking. I enclose one of these papers for the subscription of such gentlemen and the other Eastern counties as may be willing to give me encouragement . . . In the course of two or three months, you will have an opportunity of seeing most of the men of talents, property and liberality who will be disposed to run a small risk for the sake of promoting my great object.
It is an unusual thing in this country to issue such proposals so long before publication of a cook, but is not uncommon in Europe; & I cannot but hope that the greatness of the undertaking will remove all objections on this score; especially as I risk not only a large & valuable portion of my life but most of my property on this subject . . .
It did not work.
A group of heavyweight advocates might have put him into the Hall of Fame. Had he been alive, he might even have made application, himself, who knows. He was capable of it. But the best he ever got until the last election was an occasional plea on his behalf, such as appeared in the New York Times: “It is something of a shock to find that the man who embraced all of American literature and journalism within his single person has yet to reach the Hall of Fame. He is Noah Webster!”
It did not work.
The assumption in the 1930’s by Robert Underwood Johnson that sooner or later Webster would be elected must have been the same at G & C Merriam. president William Llewellyn of Merriam-Webster, Inc., knows of “no record that we did very much at all” in the way of campaigning, until the elections of the early seventies when corporate vice president Crawford Lincoln, on behalf of the Noah Webster Foundation (founded 1965), spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to get Noah voted in. Mr. Lincoln writes;
It simply was not possible to develop a lobbying group of sufficient size and effectiveness to sway enough electors to win the day. Somehow other groups with larger memberships had better luck with their candidates — and more political savvy. As far as AI know, efforts to elect him were dropped when the Hall fell on hard times.
Efforts will probably not soon be revived. It may be just as well. Webster has the distinction of being the greatest also-ran of all time as his sales go marching on. Perhaps justice would best be done by mounting not a bust but a conceptual sculpture of his right hand in an external niche in Gould Library next to Lafayette, outside the Hall of Fame pointing in.
Should you ever have the opportunity to see a copy of the 1828 Great Dictionary, or an old edition of the Blue-Backed Speller, lay your hand on it gently. If you are a true follower of Noah and his “Ark” you will get a warm feeling.