Nostalgia: Fond Personal Memories

Nostalgia, which originally was a medical definition for homesickness, describes fond personal memories from an earlier stage in life. Although nostalgia can be a collective experience, as in the case of the McGuffey societies, it originates in reminiscences of a personally experienced past. (1) Such reminiscences motivated individuals to revitalize McGuffey because of fond personal memories of the Readers from their childhoods. According to Miami historian Walter Havinghurst, by the 1930s, "McGuffey meant the horse and buggy days, the Saturday night bath, the creak of the kitchen pump and the woodbox behind the stove, the lost American innocence and piety. He had become a myth as American as Uncle Sam and as homespun as linsey-woolsey." (2)

McGuffeyites literally relived their childhoods by participating in classroom reenactments like the "McGuffey Miniatures" at the 1941 annual meeting. In June 1930, the Ohio Society of Chicago held a "McGuffey night" celebration. "For the celebration, a real honest-to-goodness country school of older days is planned with school seats, blackboards, school bell, district superintendent, etc. For the night the society members will become boys again, take part in class recitations and in general live over the school days with the McGuffey reader and speller." (3)

McGuffeyites also relived their childhoods in their imaginations by honoring McGuffey and gathering together to praise the Readers. The McGuffey Societies' motto, coined by Solomon B. Prater of the Indianapolis Society, was "Join the McGuffey Society and Grow Younger."

As all of the following individuals attest, the McGuffey Readers had a profound effect on young readers. Dr. Harvey C. Minnich, Miami University President Ernest Hahne, Henry Ford, and writer Hamlin Garland read the Readers as children and became ardent McGuffeyites late in life.

• In addresses, Dr. Harvey Minnich often referred to pieces from the Readers by saying "Who can forget McGuffey's..." Speaking of Harvey Minnich, one article noted, "Until he was twelve years old, McGuffey's readers, the Bible and the life of Boone were his principle reading." (4)
  
• Referring to Miami University President Ernest Hahne, one article said, "Dr. Hahne remembers the McGuffey Readers well, for as a boy he attended schools in Iowa where the books were in use." The article continued: "The McGuffey devotees convening at Oxford will relive the days of their childhood as readers of McGuffey's books." (5)
  
• According to a 1950 address by John Carlisle, President of the McGuffey Societies, "[Henry Ford] never attended school after he was 15 years of age, but what schooling he did get was in large part gleaned from The Great Edition of Dr. McGuffey." Also, according to historian Neil Baldwin, "As an adult, Ford could quote spontaneously line-for-line from McGuffey." (6)
  
• Writer Hamlin Garland said in his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border, "I wish to acknowledge my deep obligation to Professor McGuffey, whoever he may have been, for the dignity and grace of his selections. From the pages of his Readers I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, and a long line of English masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selections which I read in those books."
  
• Another McGuffeyite, Charlotte Conover, wrote an article reminiscing, "How did I love the look and feel of the new binding when I was promoted from the third to the fourth reader and started to school in the morning. And how did I gobble through the pages ahead of the rest of the class, holding the book down under the edge of my desk so as not to be seen when I should have been studying my arithmetic lesson." (7)
  
• A 1927 Time magazine article described the roots of the nostalgia: "McGuffey, a gentle old pedant who received $1,000 for each of the six Readers in his series, remained a shadowy figure to his multitudinous public; for his death in 1873 no literary reviews, no editorial pages were boxed in heavy black. He remained, even to the urchins who pursed small mouths and whistled or gargled the words of his wan fables, a somewhat severe shade, one to be kept properly prisoned in the dusty darkness of a schoolroom desk. The urchins, now grown into babbitts or clowns or bigwigs, sang their geography, etched Spencerian parabolas into their copy books, played "duck on a rock" at recess, spelled out the stories in McGuffey's; then they walked home on dusty roads, swinging their book straps and talking to each other, stopping to cut their initials into fence rails or the bark of a tree. The songs they sang, the books they read, the things they learned made them make the U. S. into whatever it is now." (8)