Noah Webster: The Man Who Gave America Its Voice

On this episode of Our American Stories, Noah Webster believed winning the Revolution was only the beginning. If Americans were going to become a truly independent people, he thought they needed to stop speaking, spelling, and learning like the British. So the stubborn and obsessive Connecticut writer set out to give the new nation a language of its own. His schoolbooks taught generations of American children, his spelling reforms changed the words they wrote, and his dictionary consumed decades of his life.

Joshua Kendall, author of The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture, shares the story of the man whose name became synonymous with the dictionary. Webster also fought for copyright protections, carried an early plan for a stronger federal government to George Washington, and spent much of his long life trying to shape the country the Revolution had created. Audio courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.
Up next, the story of the man who quite literally
wrote the dictionary, but not just any dictionary, the first
truly American dictionary. Here to share the story of Noah
Webster is Joshua Kendall, author of The Forgotten Founding Father,
Noah Webster's Obsession, and the Creation of an American Culture.

(00:34):
We'd like to thank the U.S. Library of Congress for
providing this audio. Let's get into the story.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
He has what I call some Forrest Gump moments. He's
born in West Hartford in 1758, graduates from Yale in 1778.
In his freshman year at Yale, he's a member of
the Yale militia, and he makes eye contact with George
Washington en route to Cambridge, where he's going to take
over command of the Continental Army. In the summer before

(01:02):
his senior year at Yale, he, his two brothers, and
his father fight in the Battle of Saratoga. That's the
one battle that we won, and Webster was very proud
to have been there at the creation of America. But
those are small moments. Webster wants to be a writer.

(01:25):
He loves Yale. He has insatiable intellectual curiosity, but the
economy is tanking. There's hyperinflation. They're printing $ 60 bills, $ 70 bills.
They're all worthless. So he comes home to his father's house,
his farm in West Hartford, and says, Dad, I want
to be a writer. And his father says, son, he
gives him an $ 8 bill, which is worthless. And son,

(01:47):
you're on your own now. And here's Webster's reaction. The
subject of this memoir was cast upon the world at
the age of 20 without property, without patrons, and in
the midst of a war which had disturbed all occupations.
For the next couple of days, he locks himself in

(02:07):
his room and reads Samuel Johnson's moral essays. And then
he decides that Samuel Johnson, the author of the great
1755 dictionary, is going to be his spiritual father. Some
of you may have seen the Facebook movie, which starts
with a rejection. The fellow, Mark Zuckerberg, is rejected by
his girlfriend and then spends 20 hours on computer code

(02:30):
and comes up with Facebook. And I think Webster has
the same kind of character type as obsessive. that he
gets rejected, the economy's tanking, his father says forget about it,
and he's just determined. And out of this pain and
frustration comes the dictionary. But the reason he was so
well-known wasn't his dictionary. In the 1780s, he publishes a speller.

(02:56):
That's a three-parter. It has a speller, a grammar, and
a reader. And the speller was the Harry Potter of
its day. It sold 100 million copies. This man really
knew how to sell books. Every American school kid for
five generations learned how to read using Webster's Speller. And
one of those kids was Jefferson Davis, who in 1858

(03:19):
is a senator from Mississippi, and on the 100th anniversary
of Noah Webster's birth, he says, We have a unity
of language which no other people possess, and we owe
this unity, above all, to Noah Webster's Yankee spelling book.
Now Davis, three years later, became the president of the Confederacy.

(03:39):
And his day job was to kill us in New England.
But that's really Webster's central achievement. He gave us American English.
We're the most ethnically diverse nation on the face of
the earth. But from Maine to California, we all speak
the same language. As I told you, it's the Harry Potter.
It's selling like crazy. And he's afraid of piracy. He's

(04:03):
very enterprising. What he ends up doing is he becomes
the father of copyright law. Remember, we have the Articles
of Confederation and states of all the power. So he
goes on a book tour to every single state capital
and gets copyright law passed. And he's a compiling and
organizing machine. During his book tour, he did a personal

(04:25):
house count of the houses in every one of America's
major cities. Philadelphia had 4582. but he has to deal
with round numbers, so it becomes 4,600. And that data
set was folded into the first census. And I argue
that he had obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, that he loved rules, order,

(04:45):
and lists. Now, that's not the same as obsessive-compulsive disorder.
People with OCD have trouble functioning. They may be so
anxious that they're going to set the house on fire.
They have to check the burner. People with severe cases
of the disease can spend hours doing that. They're not
going to write dictionaries. But people with OCPD, with a
personality disorder, they function better than well as long as

(05:07):
they find a project they can focus on. And people
with OCPD are the types of people who won't go
into treatment, but they'll drive other family members into treatment.
And Webster had a son, William, who got very depressed
and he never finished Yale. And he was an editor,
but he never really had a career of his own.

(05:28):
He had six daughters and one son. And I have
a sense that being Noah Webster's only son was tough.
He was very crotchety. When he turns 50, he says
that no one under 45 should be allowed to vote.
Doesn't make any sense as policy. He's just kind of
popping off. And he alienated during his lifetime a lot
of people. And Ambrose Bierce, the satirist, captures that in

(05:52):
his Devil's Dictionary in 1911. Bierce takes potshots at everyone,
but he can't resist taking one of Webster. And he
defines hell as the eternal resting place of the late Dr.
Noah Webster, dictionary maker. He's arrogant, and he always thinks
he knows it all, and sometimes he really does. And

(06:15):
in 1785, he diagnoses what's wrong with America. He thinks
that the Articles of Confederation aren't working, and he writes
this pamphlet called Sketches of American Policy, and he takes
the pamphlet to George Washington and this Yale whippersnapper, this
25-year-old kid, is going to tell Washington what to do
to fix the country. I get this from Washington's diary.

(06:37):
Washington was a farmer and always kept close track of
the weather. So the morning of Friday, May 20th, 1785,
was bright and sunny, though there was a slight chill
in the air. In the early afternoon, just as the
mercury hit 68 degrees, the brisk southerly wind began to
calm down. But not so Noah Webster Jr. He kept

(06:57):
beating his horse with a cane as he traipsed across
the rocky roads just south of Alexandria. A young man
in a hurry, the gangly six-footer with the flaming red hair,
square jaw, and gray eyes was dashing off to keep
an important appointment. He's headed to Mount Vernon to tell
Washington what to do. Webster came from Connecticut, and he

(07:18):
found that Connecticut was very reasonable. And in the Sketches
of American Policy, this pamphlet that he takes to Washington,
What he wants to do is bring the reasonableness of
Connecticut to the country as a whole. And he says
in Connecticut, thus the whole point of the state is
brought to a single point, united in a single person.
And that's his argument for the presidency. He argues for

(07:40):
the president, and you'll see that James Madison takes this
notion over when he gets to thinking about the Constitution.
Sipping a glass of Madeira, Webster got a chance to
explain the crucial fourth and final sketch of that pamphlet.
The Articles of Confederation, passed in haste by the Second
Continental Congress, had, according to Webster, failed to unite the

(08:02):
13 colonies sufficiently. Summarizing his main concern, and he's a
brilliant wordsmith, and he puts it beautifully, he told Washington
that since each state retained the power to defeat the
will of the other states, quote, our union is but
a name and our confederation a cobweb. A stronger federal government,
Webster emphasized, could improve the advantages of the American states

(08:26):
as provincial interest would become inseparable from national interest. Remember
that I told you that he sort of nationalizes our language,
and here I'm arguing that he also nationalizes our politics.
Now at this point in the dinner, I think Washington
is a little bit nervous because he's not a college guy,
and he's very impressed by Webster, and he thinks he's

(08:46):
on to something, but he's a little bit out of
his depth. He wasn't a policy guy. He didn't do details. And,
you know, Webster's a Yale-y, James Madison is a Princeton guy,
John Adams is a Harvard guy. So here's what Washington does,
and he always seems to know what to do. He
nods his assent and then promises Webster that he would
ask his friend, the Virginia legislator, to read the entire

(09:06):
work as soon as possible. And Madison reads it and
works those ideas into the Constitution.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
When we come back, More of this story, the story
of Noah Webster, the man who wrote the dictionary, here
on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American

(09:41):
Stories and Josh Kendall, author of The Forgotten Founding Father,
sharing the story of Noah Webster, the man who gave
the world American English. When we last left off, a
20-something-year-old Noah Webster had inserted himself into the creation of
our Constitution after coming to believe that our of Confederation

(10:01):
were deeply flawed. In doing so, he became one of
George Washington's top guys. Let's return to the story. Here
again is Joshua Kendall.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Shortly after Washington's death in 1799, Webster petitioned for access
to the family papers so that he'd become America's first
presidential biographer, but that assignment went to Marshall. And Webster
would have been terrible because he would have just idealized
Washington and just would have been dripping. He didn't really
have a sense of other people and their struggles. But
only when he failed to land this plum assignment did

(10:33):
the freelance writer begin work and would eventually become his
most illustrious monument to our national identity. He marries Rich.
In 1787, he's at the Constitutional Convention. He's there as
a journalist, and there he meets his future wife, Rebecca Greenleaf,

(10:54):
the 13th of 16 children in the Greenleaf family. Her father,
William Greenleaf, was the mayor of Boston, who read the
Declaration of Independence from the steps of the old statehouse.
And one of the brothers was one of the speculators
intimately involved with the building of Washington, D.C., It turns
out that he was the Bernie Madoff of his day.

(11:15):
But he finances Webster and helps Webster get married, and
Webster decides to retire because Webster can't wait to write
the dictionary. Our language was really up for grabs, and
English was the language of the oppressor. Think about it.
We had gotten rid of the king, so why do
we want to speak the king's English? And there was
a serious movement to make German, which was then like

(11:37):
Spanish today, language number two, spoken by about 10% of
the population. It was a serious movement to make German
the national language. There's a famous story about some guy
in Boston who said maybe we should do what the
Israelis did and make ancient Hebrew the national language. Webster's
idea was, you know, American English. He wanted to get
rid of silent E's, you know, changing theater from the

(11:59):
French to the E-R, getting rid of the U in color.
And he wanted American English because he wanted us to
be proud of our country. Samuel Johnson the author of
the great 1755 dictionary, wrote it for the money. Johnson
once said, no one but a blockhead ever wrote except
for money. And Johnson actually hated Americans. He once said,

(12:20):
I'm willing to love all mankind except an American. He
thought we were hypocrites. We had slavery, but we're yelping
for freedom. Now, what's that all about? Johnson does it
because the king is offering him a contract. Webster does
it because he's a compiling machine and loves Americans. Webster,
quoting Johnson, says the chief glory of a nation is
its authors. And in the 1828 Dictionary, he's going to

(12:43):
put American authors on the world stage. We don't have
a Shakespeare, we don't have a John Milton, but we
have great constitutional theorists like Madison and Jay, and he's
going to show the world that America has its own writers.
And he's a brilliant definer. James Murray, the first editor
of the OED Oxford English Dictionary, calls him a born
definer of words. And he's going to define American exactly

(13:06):
what it meant in 1828. And his masterpiece was twice
the heft of Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary. And Webster said
in 1828 that his dictionary, published at a time when
America had 13 million people, would furnish a standard of
our vernacular tongue to the 300 millions of people who

(13:26):
are destined to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.
Of course, that's exactly the population according to the 2010 census.
but it almost didn't happen. So he retires to New Haven.
He's making money from his speller, and he moves into
the fanciest house in town, and that's Arnold as in
Benedict Arnold. And he gets a good deal because there's

(13:49):
shame associated with the house, so he gets it for $ 2, 000.
I looked at the deed, and it's got all the
modern accoutrements, including the second outhouse. It's got fancy columns.
And from there, it's as if he went to Staples,
got a notebook, and says, today I'm going to start
on the dictionary. And he dates it November 3rd, 1807,
and then he spends the next 22 years writing the dictionary.

(14:14):
Writing a dictionary by oneself, as Webster repeatedly learned, always
takes longer than expected. He does A and B, and
then in 1808, he has a religious conversion, and he
begins to believe that all languages are related to the
language of Noah, his biblical namesake. And he comes up
with an etymology synopsis of 20 languages. And his etymology

(14:38):
is pure speculation. He spends 10 years on it. In
many cases, his arrogance put him on the map. This
is the one case where his arrogance got him into trouble.
If he hadn't been so determined, he wouldn't have been
able to finish the dictionary. But he spends 10 years
in this etymology. His publisher won't go near it. Some
of his funny ideas about etymology make it into the

(14:59):
1828 Dictionary. He had one assistant on the dictionary who
was a Yale medical student who was up on his etymology.
He was up on the Germans who were making the
major inroads. And he's so angry with Webster, he writes
to a friend, Molta absurda removi. Many absurd things I

(15:20):
have removed. So he's trying to take out the speculative parts,
and Webster fires him. So Webster does it by himself.
And Webster was most proud of that. So that's the
one thing. flaw in his otherwise exemplary oeuvre. He gets
back to the dictionary in 1817, and in his correspondence

(15:41):
he'll say he's up to C. 1821, he's up to H.
And now a little bit about his method. He leans
on Samuel Johnson. Webster took about one-third of his definitions
from Johnson. He adds a lot of scientific terms, from
like physics, chemistry, and biology. Johnson's dictionary was very literary.
And Johnson is always quoting Shakespeare. And Webster puts little

(16:04):
black marks next to Shakespeare. He rarely quotes Shakespeare. And
one of the reasons is that at Yale in the
1770s in Congregational New Haven, drama was considered two steps
away from sex. Yale students were penalized for attending a
play and penalized twice as much for putting on a play.

(16:26):
And Webster hates Shakespeare. He says his language is full
of errors. And what he ends up doing in Shakespeare
is he blames Shakespeare for the dirty words in the
English language. So there's a word like whoreson, son of
a whore. And Webster will just put... He won't even
quote Shakespeare. There are a few Shakespeare quotations, but not many.

(16:48):
So next to whoreson, he'll just write S-H-A-K, shack. So
it's like, that's Shakespeare. That's what he gave us, yeah, whoreson. Now,
a dictionary... in the days of the one-man band, was
part autobiography. Webster has a love affair, it doesn't go
over well, and he's going to express his feelings in
the dictionary. Remember, he's a born-again Christian. So here's how

(17:08):
he defines marriage. Toward the end of that definition, marriage
was instituted by God himself for the purpose of preventing
the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes. Now, there's an age-old
debate in lexicography about whether lexicographers should describe language or
prescribe language. Webster here is prescribing how to live. In
terms of language, he was a descriptivist. He was going

(17:30):
to describe the language that people actually use. And that's
part of his legacy. And the Merriam-Webster Company has taken
that position. In their big fat dictionary in 1961, they
decided to put the word ain't in the dictionary. The
New Yorker immediately came out with a cartoon saying the
editor ain't in. There was a big furor that lasted

(17:51):
for 10 years. But Webster's position is now accepted in
almost all dictionaries, especially now where language is getting more
and more slippery and people are making up all kinds
of stuff on the Internet. That's the way our language
is evolving. And Webster wants to chart the American language
that people actually use, although in his dictionary he was
telling people how to live. No one's interested, and that's

(18:15):
part of the persistence. If he didn't have this persistence,
he would have given up. And he has this idea
in about 1825 that, He's always changing his ideas, and
it's ironic because he's the guy who gives us a
national language. He figures, well, I'm going to go for
a double market. I'm going to try to sell my
book in England and America and come up with a
new language called Universal English. And while he's in England,

(18:36):
he tries to set up a conference between Oxford, Cambridge,
and him to decide what Universal English is going to be.
And Oxford and Cambridge aren't buying, and the plan fizzles out.
He goes back to New Haven, publishes the first dictionary.
It comes out in 1825. 2,500 copies are published. It's
not a big seller, but the abridged dictionary sells like crazy.

(18:57):
That makes him some money. But his heart is with
the unabridged. And to the horror of his family, he
mortgages his second house at the age of 80 to
keep going. And that comes out in 1841, and he's
still working on definitions when he dies in 1843 at
the age of 84. And some of the words he's
doing are aerodynamics, agronomy, and puritanically. At Harvard Houghton Library,

(19:22):
they have Emily Dickinson's copy of the 1844 dictionary. And
Emily Dickinson refers to it as her sole companion. And
that tells you as much about Emily Dickinson herself, she
was kind of quirky, as about how beloved the dictionary was.
Most American writers, the Melvilles, the great 19th century writers
all used it. And at the time of his death,

(19:42):
historians said that he was in America's trinity of fame
with Washington and Columbus.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
We'd like to thank the U.S. Library of Congress for
providing this audio. And what a story he told. What
he wanted to do was create American English because, well,
he loved America and he was a compiling maniac. He
was giving America its voice and American authors. Their Voices,

(20:11):
the story of Noah Webster, here on Our American Stories.