From 1899 to World War II, a ii woman with strong opinions on usage published a magazine to teach middle-class Americans proper use of their language, and Christopher Gould tells her story. é M= PEOPLE WHO bother with the mat- ter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way.” With this grim appraisal, George Orwell opens “Politics and the En- slish Language,” an essay long regarded as an example of expository prose. Two generations of college stu- dents have reed and discussed Orwell's stern warning that the ruination of the English language is at hand. Published in 1948, against the menacing backdrop of communist and fascist propaganda, Orwell's essay as- sumes an air of compelling urgency. Ironically, though, its opening sentence could have been written in 1975, 1983. or even 1892, In fact, the past century has brought four separate “literacy crises” during which other, less November/December 1988 famous guardians of the mother tongue have delivered similar prophecies of doom. The first such crisis coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of technical education in the United States, at atime when enrollments in public universities increased and the influence of newer scien. tific disciplines grew. People began to worry about the erosion of academie standards and the decline of the traditional liberal-arts curriculum, The perception of crisis ean be traced to 187, when more than half the applicants to Harvard College failed a newly estab- lished written examination. Eighteen years later, when matters had not improved, the first of three celebrated Harvard Reports concluded that students must learn,to write correctly in high school; those who did not would be denied admission to college. It was the pub- lication of the Harvard Reports, between 1892 and 1897, that brought the first modern literacy crisis toa head. In the aftermath of this erisis anew type of magazine, dedicated to the preservation of correctness in lan- guage, appeared on the market. The most popular and enduring was Correct English, issued continuousiy be- ‘tween 1899 and 1950, a period that saw two other liter- acy crises come and go. Until 1942, Correct English was published in Evanston, Ill, by its founder and long-time editor, Josephine Turck Baker. Circulation increased gradually during the first three decades of publication and then doubled to 30,000 over a five-year period in the early 1930s. Thereafter, the number of subscribers held steady until the magazine suspended publication. : ‘The influence of Correct English was enhanced by the enduring appeal of aseries of books about grammar and vocabulary published by the Correct English Pub- lishing Company, which Baker and her husband owned and managed. Between 1900 and 1938, sixteen of these books, all written by Josephine Baker, were issued in fifty-three separate editions. Additionally, the Bakers marketed scores of pamphlets, monographs, and tests for distribution in public schools. Josephine Baker ad- ministered correspondence courses; offered seminars and workshops on such topics as business letters, leadership, etiquette, will power, and salesmanship; and supervised a “Revision Department” that would, for a fee, “write your articles, prepare your speeches, or correct and type your manuscripts.” In 1941, Baker boasted that she had become “the final arbiter of what is correct in English” for the United States Senate and Department of Agriculture, the New York Public Li- brary, and several large corporations, including Ns tional Cash Register, Du Pont, and Sears, Roebuck. Few biographical details about Josephine Turck Baker survive. She was born in Milwaul:ee around 1865 and was graduated from Downer College. Her literary accomplishments include publication of a novel, five plays, and a collection of verse. In 1888, she married F. Sherman Baker and settled in Illinois. Continuing her studies, Baker developed remarkable expertise in the history of language and established Correct En- glish as “the outgrowth of lectures on the English lan- guage given before women's clubs, teachers of public schools, and graduates of colleges.” The first twelve issues of her magazine amply demonstrate that exper- tise through a series of articles relating the history of English and tracing its Indo-European ancestry. Baker was influenced by the work of Max Muller, whose Lectures on the Science of Language is a land- mark in linguistic study. It was Muller who tried to make linguistics a science, thus giving it a more ele- vated status than that of the humanities in the new technically oriented universities of the nineteenth cen- tury. To support his claims, Muller advanced the re volutionary notion that language does not obey any grammatical laws; instead, he argued that. grammati cal conventions must be inferred from the way people use the language. In other words, grammar derives from usage, instead of the other way round. 'NTIL 1920, Baker frequently cited Muller as an authority and eagerly invoked the name of science in defending her views. However, her- beliefs about grammar and usage differed radically from those of most academic linguists. Those scholars, more faithful to Muller’s position, argued that the sci- entist must regard all usage —every regional or class dialect — as equal. Notions of grammatical correct- ness, they believed, arose entirely from historical cir- cumstances — from the ability of one group of speakers to impose its arbitrary conventions of usage on other less powerful groups. The scientist only recorded the factual details of usage. Baker agreed that grammar derives from usage, but unlike her academic counterparts, she clung to a rigid normative view of grammar. In other words, she under- stood that English grammar had evolved over the cen- turies, but she considered further change undesirable. Like many other people of her time, Baker was con- vinced that institutions such as government, language, and etiquette had emerged gradually from a period of “parbarisrs" to arrive at their modern enlightened ideal. Therefore Correct English was designed to “pre- serve language in its purity” from the mistakes of “the careless speaker” on the one hand and from the permis- siveness of academic linguists on the other. Correct English targeted the former group—edu- cated people who made errors in their speech and writ- ing. More specifically, Baker's readers included “busi- Righting Wordsness executives and their secretaries, clergymen and school teachers, as well as men and women who wish they had paid more attention to the rules of English back in their school days.” In particular, Baker dis- dained the hyper-correctness of insecure or pretentious people. In the magazine's inaugural issue, for example, she observed that “it is the educated person, frequently the college graduate, who is very particular to say, ‘T feel badly.’ The uneducated person would never be guilty of the offense.” Baker exploited every occasion to urouse the insecurities of her educated readers, many of whom had attended the less prestigious state universities, majoring in the newer technological fields. “Common Errors of the Careful Speaker” was aregular monthly feature, along with dialogues such as the fol- lowing, guaranteed to make most readers squirm: Mrs. A: I don’t think we know how many errors we make until yur attention iy called to them, ‘Mrs. B: What you should say is: “I think one does'nt (sic) know how many errors one makes until one’s attention is ealled to them.” Many people object to ‘I don't think,” claiming that one Mrs, A: I think this is instructive, but as Tam going in town, on the one o'clock train, I shall be obliged Scenic a itil Gobun, to discontinue our talk. You see that I remembered to say “I shall be obliged” instead of “I will be obliged.” Mrs. B: Yes, that is right, but you should say: “I am going to town” instead of “I am going in town.” ‘And when you are in town, you may ask for the new magazine Correct English ‘Mrs. A: Thank you for your suggestion, think will. Mrs. B: No, that is wrong, you should say: “I think T shall." ‘Mrs. A: Now I am going to go; itis twenty minutes to one. Mrs. B: “I am going” is sufficient, and itis twenty minutes of one, not twenty minutes fo one. Baker's advice was not always scolding and pedantic, however. She also wrote tactful responses to readers’ queries about points of dietion, usage, and punctuation. ‘There were vocabulary quizzes, tips on writing for pub- lication, and items of cultural news. Correct English also featured self-help columns relating to “the art of conversation,” the power of positive thinking, voice improvement, the supervision of servants, and etiquette. Baker reprinted exemplary passages from the best prose stylists — including Ralph Waldo Emer- son, Charles Lamb, and Henry James—as well as timely and provocative articles from such magazines