The Forgotten Founding Father- Noah Webster (47 page)

In a cartoon that appeared a couple of weeks later, the magazine summed up the hullabaloo in five words. “Sorry. Dr. Gove ain’t in,” says a G. C. Merriam secretary to a surprised visitor. Dr. Gove didn’t just list “ain’t” in his treasure trove of 450,000 entries; he also gave this slang term his imprimatur, noting that it is “used orally in most parts of the U.S. by cultivated speakers.” The harsh attacks were widespread. In a review entitled, “Dig Those Words,”
The New York Times
went after Gove for citing actor Jimmy Durante’s quip, “What I don’t
dig
over there is the British money,” as an authoritative quotation. But in “Webster’s Way Out Dictionary,”
BusinessWeek
conceded that Merriam’s bold new direction might eventually turn out to be a canny business move, observing that “a one-product company . . . has just stuck its neck out with a version that could easily prove 20 years ahead of its market.” In fact, once the furor died down, the thirteen-and-a-half-pound volume was widely considered a trailblazer. As one of America’s preeminent lexicographers put it in 1997, “
Webster’s Third
. . . attempted to apply the best standards of mid-twentieth century linguistics to dictionary-making. . . . No dictionary provides a fuller or more reliable picture of the American vocabulary at mid-century. . . . [it] remains the greatest dictionary of current American English.”

While “W3” has been revised about every five years since 1961, it has not yet been replaced. Nor is there even a murmur about a “W4” over in Springfield. A major reason is that the digital revolution has turned the dictionary business, like all other branches of publishing, upside down. “W3” is already primarily a Web-based publication, as annual subscriptions for online access, which cost thirty dollars, now sell better than copies of the printed book. In contrast, the Collegiate edition, which can now be viewed for free on the Web, continues to do well at bookstores. Merriam-Webster still plans to publish a new edition of the Collegiate, which has sold 56 million copies since 1898, every decade. The next edition, the twelfth, is slated for 2013. And, true to the spirit of Noah Webster, the company continues to track every new word in the language so that it can release an updated version of its flagship dictionary every year. Recent changes include the additions of “chick flick,” “blogosphere” and “LOL” as well as the elimination of “hodad” (a nonsurfer, who pretends to be a surfer), a term that the
Gidget
movies of the early 1960s popularized. Despite the challenge of adjusting to technological change, John M. Morse, the current publisher, remains bullish about the future. He isn’t afraid that the wiki-model will ever replace the work of professional lexicographers. Sounding like Noah Webster, Jr., Morse observes, “Writing accurate definitions is not fun. It’s hard work.”

A
Yale degree may well be a prerequisite for writing about this quintessential “Yale man”—the vast majority of Webster biographers have had one—and a delightful by-product of this project was the chance to renew the ties with my alma mater. I thank Lauralee Field of the Office of the Vice President and Secretary at Yale for inviting me to speak at the conference, “Noah Webster 250: Shaping a Language, Defining a Nation,” held in New Haven on October 16 and 17, 2008. I was the lunchtime speaker on the seventeenth—I shared the bill with complimentary bowls of chowder (a word first defined by Webster). Portions of this lecture, “Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of America’s First Dictionary,” which argued that Webster’s personality disorder was instrumental to his literary success, worked their way into the prologue.

The previous day, October 16, 2008, Noah Webster’s 250th birthday, I had the distinct pleasure of dining with the roughly ten other presenters at Silliman College on the corner of Temple and Grove streets—the site of Webster’s second New Haven residence. Throughout the conference, I enjoyed extended conversations with this All-Star Team of Webster scholars and aficionados, which included Harvard professor Jill Lepore, the keynote speaker; Yale professors emeriti Howard Lamar and Fred Robinson; Judith Schiff, Chief Research Archivist at the Yale University Library; and Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster. I also met Michael Magruder, a direct descendant of Noah Webster—his grandmother, Rosalie Eugenia Stuart Webster was the daughter of William Webster’s son Eugene.

Given our shared obsession with all things Noah Webster, it isn’t surprising that I would develop lasting friendships with these colleagues from the conference. I am particularly grateful to Howard Lamar for taking the time to read and comment on the entire manuscript. I am also indebted to Fred Robinson for his careful examination of chapters on the dictionary and for fielding all my questions about Anglo-Saxon (and Noah Webster’s dubious knowledge thereof). Likewise, Judith Schiff was kind enough to review the parts of the manuscript related to Webster’s life in New Haven. And I appreciate Peter Sokolowski’s willingness to host me for a day at his office in Springfield and for helping to set up the interviews with Stephen J. Perrault, Merriam-Webster’s director of defining, and John Morse, the company’s CEO. (This dictionary publisher is also a dictionary sleuth, and his assistance proved critical in determining W. C. Minor’s precise affiliation with
Webster’s.
) And I thank Jill Lepore for both grounding me in current Webster scholarship and sharing her considerable insight into Noah Webster’s troubled inner world. And thanks to Michael Magruder for filling me in on the family’s history over a series of lunches in Cambridge.

I also reconnected with my undergraduate home, Trumbull College, where I stayed during the October 2008 conference. I was pleased to accept Master Janet Henrich’s invitation to come back and give a Master’s Tea on November 6, 2008. That second Yale talk given before Trumbull undergraduates and assorted guests, “The Yale College of Three Run-Down Buildings, Three Thousand Books and ‘Injun Pudding’ that Launched the Literary Career of America’s Greatest Lexicographer” featured some of the material covered in chapter one.

One can’t write about Webster without wrestling with the legacy of his idol and predecessor, Samuel Johnson, and I am grateful for the input of several Samuel Johnson/James Boswell scholars, including Jack Lynch, Robert DeMaria, James Basker, Helen Deutsch, Gordon Turn-bull, Allen Reddick, Anne McDermott and Peter Martin. Fortunately, I was able to track all of them down in the same place—the thoroughly engaging conference commemorating Dr. Johnson’s three hundredth birthday hosted by Harvard’s Houghton Library in August 2009.

I would also like to acknowledge other scholars who graciously responded to my queries, including Bob Arnebeck, Philip Barnard, Richard Buel, Carolyn Cooper, Simon Finger, Earle Havens, Jane Kamensky, Kate Keller and Brooks Swett.

Spending time in museums and archive libraries is one of the highlights of my day job. While numerous museum directors, curators and archivists provided valuable assistance, a few deserve special mention: Chris Dobbs, the director of the Noah Webster House; Willis Bridgeam, the librarian emeritus of Amherst College’s Frost Library; James Rees, the executive director of George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate and Garden, and Brian Lemay, the executive director of the Bostonian Society.

At Putnam, I would like to thank my editor, Kathryn Davis, as well as Ivan Held for their steadfast dedication to this project. I’m also grateful to Marilyn Ducksworth, Stephanie Sorensen and Matthew Venzon in publicity and to Kate Stark and Chris Nelson in marketing.

My agent, Lane Zachary, provided insightful comments on the manuscript. And Rachel Youdelman conducted her impeccably thorough photo research, which unearthed several buried treasures.

I also thank the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for a fellowship that funded a two-week residency in January 2009.

A
few years after Webster’s death, his son-in-law Chauncey

Goodrich wrote the first detailed sketch of the lexicographer’s life, which was inserted into the 1847 edition of
The American Dictionary
. A generation later, journalist Horace Scudder, who would go on to become the editor of
The Atlantic Monthly,
published the first biography,
Noah Webster
(Boston, 1882). More interpretive essay than scholarly treatment, Scudder’s work focused on Webster’s major achievements—the speller, the political writings and the dictionary. Scudder’s occasional allusions to the Connecticut Yankee’s “idiosyncrasies” irked the family. Of Scudder’s slender volume, Webster’s granddaughter Emily Ford noted in 1892, “[it] seems to me to discolor his character, to belittle his work as well as his aims and to make him out an egotist of persistent self-conceit in his career.” In response, Ford began compiling Webster’s personal papers. After Ford’s death in 1902, her daughter, Emily Skeel, finished the two-volume biography,
Notes on a Life of Noah Webster
(New York, 1912). This privately printed work, which is available only at major research libraries, features a wealth of valuable primary-source materials, including the complete text of Webster’s diary, which he kept from 1784 to 1820, and extended excerpts from dozens of letters by and to Webster.

Working closely with William Chauncey Fowler (Webster’s great-grandson), Harry Warfel, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, published the first modern biography,
Noah Webster: Schoolmaster to America
(New York, 1936), as well as
The Letters of Noah Webster
(New York, 1953). John Morgan’s
Noah Webster
(New York, 1975) leans heavily on Warfel’s work. While Harlow Unger’s
Noah Webster
:
The Life and Times of an American Patriot
(New York, 1998) is the most comprehensive biography to date, his account adheres to the idealized portrait painted by both Ford/Skeel and Warfel. Webster has also been the subject of two published doctoral dissertations. K. Alan Snyder’s
Defining Noah Webster: A Spiritual Biography
(Washington, 2002) highlights the lexicographer’s Christian faith. In contrast, Richard Rollins’
The Long Journey of Noah Webster
(Philadelphia, 1989) emphasizes Webster’s turn toward reactionary politics in his old age. Rollins also edited
The Autobiographies of Noah Webster
(Columbia, S.C., 1989), which contains both Webster’s diary as well as his previously unpublished sixty-three-page memoir written in 1832.

Besides the biographies, a few books cover specific aspects of Webster’s legacy. In
Noah Webster: Pioneer of Learning
(New York, 1966), Erwin Shoemaker explores the impact of the speller, the reader and the dictionary on American education. Likewise, in
A Common Heritage : Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller (
Hamden, Conn., 1983), Jennifer Monaghan delves deeply into his most commercially successful book, dissecting all the complicated publishing deals. David Micklethwait conducts a thorough scholarly investigation of the origins of Webster’s magnum opus in
Noah Webster and the American Dictionary
(Jefferson, N.C., 2000).

I aimed not to write the definitive academic biography but to introduce Noah Webster to the broad reading public, who know him largely as a name pasted onto a reference book. Intrigued by the psychological turmoil which fueled his literary activity, particularly the dictionary, I was interested in bringing the full-bodied human being to life. To tackle this assignment, I deemed it necessary to peruse as many primary source materials as possible, especially since Webster’s descendants had done so much to sculpt his public image. I examined the Websteriana at the following institutions:

Among my major finds were the first pages of the 1828 dictionary in the New Haven Museum as well as Webster’s marked-up pages of Robert Ainsworth’s Latin-English dictionary at the Morgan Library, which illustrate his extensive reliance on that book. At Yale, I located several dozen letters by Webster to his daughter Harriet Fowler and her husband, William Fowler, which the Beinecke Library purchased a few years ago from the family. Warfel was the only previous writer to have had access to these documents, which deepen our understanding of Webster’s complicated relationships with his children—but he was under the watchful eye of Webster’s heirs. In 2007, Yale’s Sterling Library acquired Webster’s commonplace book, a term defined in his 1828 dictionary as “a book in which are registered such facts, opinions or observations as are deemed worthy of remembrance, so disposed as any one may be easily found.” This hundred-page manuscript of his favorite literary passages extends our knowledge of his intellectual formation. At the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., I located letters addressed to his brother-in-law Daniel Greenleaf, in which Webster revealed his sense of being betrayed by James Greenleaf, the speculator who helped build our nation’s capital. Previous biographers have downplayed the scandalous behavior of this brother-in-law, with whom Webster was once extremely close. At Amherst College, I found some letters by Webster’s wife, Rebecca, concerning the couple’s disabled daughter, Louisa, which helped to clarify what ailed her.