History of Reading News. Vol.XIX No.2 (1996:Spring)
by Allen Berger

William Holmes McGuffey: Schoolmaster to the Nation, by Dolores P. Sullivan, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994, Pp. 244. $39.50.

For nearly ten years now I've worked in a building called McGuffey Hall. Outside is a statue of William Holmes McGuffey reading to children. The eight-sided, rotating table on which he compiled his readers is in his home across Spring Street. On the porch is where he is said to have sat with children trying out his stories. Inside is one of the most complete collection of McGuffey readers, spellers, and rhetorics in existence.

In her acknowledgments Dolores Sullivan expresses her gratitude for the "invaluable assistance" from library and museum personnel here and for the information from the collections in McGuffey's home and museum, which is now a National Historic Landmark.

Leaving his family and friends in western Pennsylvania and northeastern Ohio, the 25-year-old arrived here in Oxford, Ohio, in 1826 and began a decade of great productivity. His education up to that point included Latin, Greek, Hebrew, ancient history, and philosophy. When he had no money to buy a needed book, he "copied out the contents of a borrowed volume, word for word, and bound the pages by hand. A copy of William's Hebrew grammar, written painstakingly by hand, is still in the possession of Washington and Jefferson College" (p.44).

Sullivan vividly describes Professor McGuffey's life in Oxford, which at that time was a village of 500 residents. (Today about 10,000 people, excluding the students, live in Oxford.) He arrived with his ten-year-old brother, Alex, who is credited with assisting, years later, with the entire McGuffey series and "responsible entirely for the Speller of 1838, and the popular Fifth Reader" (p.106). She tells about Professor McGuffey's marriage to Harriet Spining of Dayton, Ohio, and the birth of four of their five children in Oxford.

Sullivan also relates his life as a professor who had great expectations for his students and his running battle with Miami University's first president, Robert Hamilton Bishop, who expressed the belief that students should have a say in their governance. Professor McGuffey evidently felt otherwise. Their disagreements extended to courses with Professor McGuffey yearning "for an opportunity to be reassigned (from Latin and Greek) to philosophy and religion courses, taught ably by Dr. Bishop."(p.61).

In 1836, Professor McGuffey quit Miami University to become the president of the newly founded Cincinnati College. As head of Cincinnati College, he is quoted as advising parents not to send their sons to Miami "where it is more likely that they would be made Drunkards and Gamblers than good scholars" (p. 63). The college went bankrupt in the financial panic of 1837. President McGuffey landed on his feet by accepting an offer to be the president of Ohio University located in southeastern Athens, Ohio.

Sullivan details the professional and personal lives of Mr. and Mrs. McGuffey. Their three sons died early in life. The third son, Edward, was born in Cincinnati and died soon after they arrived in Athens. Only their two daughters--Mary and Henrietta--survived: Mary married Walker Stewart, a physician in Dayton; and Henrietta married Andrew Dousa Hepburn, chair of the English department and for one year president of Miami University.

Before and during their lives in Cincinnati, William was building a prodigious reputation as a teacher, preacher/orator, and writer. His students were in awe of his phenomenal memory and manner in the classroom. He fulfilled his mother's hope (a year after her death) that he become a minister--he was ordained on October 8, 1830, by the Presbytery of Oxford. And in 1836, the year he left Miami University, his First Reader and Second Reader were published with the other books following shortly.

Seven years later half a million copies of his series were sold. His publishers became millionaires. McGuffey, however, was paid only $1,000 and, in later years, he was given a barrel of ham each Christmas.

As Sullivan makes clear, McGuffey was not a good businessman. Nor was he an able university administrator. His years as president of Ohio University "were the unhappiest of his life" (p.70). Shortly after arriving in Athens to cope with his despondence over his infant son's death, he planted young elm trees on the campus. This, however, infuriated the villagers because the fenced-in trees prevented their cows from grazing where they used to. From time to time President McGuffey came home caked with mud thrown by the villagers. After four years he had had enough, packed up, and moved the family into his brother Alexander's home in Cincinnati.

During this time Alexander was establishing himself as a lawyer whose home became the social setting of Cincinnati. Friends of the family included the Beechers, whose daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, and guests included General Tom Thumb. Alexander fathered fifteen children with his two wives, Elizabeth and Caroline, whom he married two years after Elizabeth's death. His brother, William, taught at Woodward College, a small school in Cincinnati, until he received an invitation to become the Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Virginia, where he spent the last twenty-eight years of his life.

In her preface Sullivan tells how she learned the where-abouts of a former colleague, Helen Bair Owen, who had collected McGuffey memorabilia. Sullivan visited her home "on a tree-lined street where all the houses were at least one hundred years old. . . . She led me up the narrow steps to a second-floor room, but I was totally unprepared for the vastness of the accumulated McGuffey treasures. . . . There I saw box upon box of newspaper clippings and magazine articles dating back to the early 1900s, collections of books, pictures--a veritable researcher's dream come true!" (p.8).

Sullivan makes excellent use of these materials and weaves facts and anecdotes into what should be considered the definitive biography of William Holmes McGuffey. (She points out little known information such as the extremely religious McGuffey laboring hard and long to help establish state-wide public school systems in Ohio and Virginia.) She has written well-documented chapters ranging from McGuffey's "Formative Years" to "The Federation of McGuffey Clubs: Perpetuating the Memories."

The only regret I have is when Sullivan leaves the data and jumps into explanations of current social and educational problems in the United States. While I agree with her concerns, she makes a startling leap from not using the McGuffey Readers in schools to crime in the streets, "teenage pregnancy and drug abuse, and . . . the functional illiteracy of adult Americans" (p. 190). She quotes and paraphrases individuals who have similar views. "Much of the blame for this social malaise must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the liberal educational establishment," believes E. Merrill Root in "What McGuffey Readers Read," an article that appeared in the Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, April 1973. Articulating similar beliefs are Gary L. Bauer and "his former 'boss,' then Secretary of Education William Bennett" (p.191). In a speech at the 50th annual meeting of the Federated McGuffey Societies of America, Bauer is quoted as decrying the lack of values in our schools. Without a shred of evidence he says that "it is my firm belief that this trend toward 'value-neutral' classroom instruction has contributed significantly to massive increases in youth drug and alcohol abuse, delinquency, promiscuity and illegitimacy, violent crime in school, and disregard for the authority of parents, teachers, and elders" (p. 191).

Both Bauer and Sullivan then praise home values for the educational success of the Indo-Chinese Boat People. She quotes others to make her point about what seems to be the demise of education for not using the McGuffey Readers more widely. For example, James W. Kirchansky, who uses the McGuffey Readers in his 3R Schools in California, says that "80 percent of American children are cripples in their reading ability." Half the adults of the postwar generation are "functional illiterates who cannot understand a newspaper editorial page" (p. 197). Sullivan presents these questionable data as facts. She also assumes that today's teachers have little or no concern for values and traits such as honesty, truthfulness, obedience, kindness, thrift, industry, patriot-ism, piety and others found in McGuffey's Readers. It would add to the overall value of the book if the chapter entitled "A Final Appraisal" were revised or omitted in newer editions.

Allen Berger is the Heckert Professor of Reading and Writing at Miami University. He has chaired IRA's Studies and Research Implementation Sub-Committee. He is on IRA's Book Proposal and Manuscript Board and is a liaison for five states in IRA's State/NCATE Partnership Program.