Education: Eclectic Reader

I don’t propose to be a Meddlesome Mattie, but . . .

When in 1910 Theodore Roosevelt thus roared at his rebellious protégé, William Howard Taft, most U. S. citizens knew instantly what he meant. Through the latter half of the 19th Century most of the nation’s schoolchildren learned about Meddlesome Mattie, many another moral, immoral or amoral character in William Holmes McGuffey’s famed series of Eclectic Readers. Today McGuffey’s Eclectics have vanished from most schoolrooms but William Holmes McGuffey lives on as the hero of a nostalgic cult unique in educational history.

To Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, where Educator McGuffey once taught classics, some 3,000 members of the Federated McGuffey Societies of America last week repaired to celebrate the Readers’ 100th anniversary. There McGuffeyites settled down to enjoy a pageant, a square dance, a barbecue, speeches. Said Ohio’s onetime (1929-31) Governor Myers Cooper: “McGuffey, if living today, would be a conservative!” Said Fred L. Black, speechmaker for absent Henry Ford who collects rare Readers, restored the crumbling log-cabin McGuffey birthplace near Claysville, Pa.: “Abraham Lincoln, William Holmes McGuffey and Thomas Edison are the three Americans Henry Ford reveres most.” Said Lieutenant Governor Harold G. Mosier: “Ohio’s most useful citizen.”

In his Ohio youth, William Holmes McGuffey, son of a Scotch-Irish Indian fighter from Pennsylvania, never set eyes on the two books which were the Eclectic Readers’ precursors—the didactic Webster Blue Back Speller and the holy, fearsome New England Primer. He worked on his father’s farm, did not go to school until he was 16. When Father McGuffey hacked a five-mile road through the forest to Youngstown, Ohio, Son William went there to study Latin with a clergyman. One day his devout mother knelt in her yard to pray that Son William might be educated for the ministry. Passing on horseback, Rev. Thomas Hughes heard her prayer, offered to take the lad free to his Old Stone School at nearby Darlington. William worked his waythrough Washington College, was licensed as a Presbyterian minister, branched out as a schoolmaster. Hired in 1826 by fledgling Miami, he arrived on his horse, in a sombre black coat and stovepipe hat, his saddlebags bulging with Livy, Horace, Ovid, Xenophon.

So industrious was the sobersided, carrot-topped young teacher that when Cincinnati’s Truman & Smith decided to publish a reader for Midwestern moppets everyone recommended him. Methodical Author McGuffey whistled for the neighbors’ children, read them each selection before he included it. In the monosyllabic First Reader, small scholars read of the lame dog, cured by a veterinary, which expressed its gratitude by searching out another lame dog for the same treatment. A Kind Boy freed his caged bird; a Cruel Boy pulled the legs from flies. AChimney Sweep, coming upon a gold watch, manfully overcame temptation, was rewarded when his employer provided him with an education. Only grim note in this moral feast was the Tease, who frightened a playmate into insanity.

As the Readers’ popularity spread and Professor McGuffey marched up to his famed Sixth Reader, he thought less of his pious models, drew freely on Shakespeare, Byron, Scott, Whittier, all of whom he hacked to suit his purpose. He launched a series of Great Characters, solemnlyrevealed that Louis XVI “took his very emetics in state, and vomited majestically in the presence of all his nobles.” Of Lafayette: “Others have lived in the love of their own people; but who, like this man, has drunk his sweetest cup of welcome with another?” But the editor’s favorite Great Character was Napoleon: “A Royalist, a republican, and an emperor; a Mohammedan, a Catholic, and a patron of the synagogue, a traitor and a tyrant, he was through all his vicissitudes a Man.” When Editor McGuffey clipped from the German Press a bloody, harrowing account of a railway wreck, called it The Crazed Engineer, his publishers objected, cut it from posthumous editions.

The Eclectic Readers and the spellers, co-edited by Brother Alexander McGuffey, have sold 124,000,000 copies in the U. S., yield only to the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary in circulation. The Readers spread to 37 States, reached their crest around 1880, still roll up small, steady royalties for American Book Co. which now holds the copyright. Of this wealth Author McGuffey had a modest share. He sold his copyright for $500 and 10% royalties up to $1,000. His publishers paid him a salary for supervising revisions, an annuity after the Civil War.

After the Readers’ success McGuffey left Miami in 1836 to become President of Cincinnati College, which foundered three years later. Invited to the presidency of Ohio University (Athens, Ohio), he was exasperated when that, too, was laid low by financial troubles. The last 27 years of his life he passed quietly as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia, where he died “just as the evening sun went down” on May 4, 1873.