Nostalgia: Perceived Crises

The seemingly tranquil past of their childhood that people associated with the McGuffey Readers appealed to those who experienced the rapid technological and social change of the 1920s and suffered through the anxieties of the Great Depression, World War II and the atom bomb. These crises, along with the disappearance of the McGuffey Readers and one-room, country schools, prompted some McGuffeyites to look to the past to address the perceived discontinuities and resolve modern moral decay.

In 1936 Henry Ford gave one reporter a guided tour of his Greenfield Village. The reporter, in describing Ford said, "Hardy as nails in some ways, he is in others as sentimental as a schoolboy." He quoted Ford: "Observing the type of character produced in the schools of the McGuffey period, I am convinced that we must seek in our educational methods the causes of some of our faults today... Today there are too many frills in education... when this country adopted a system which put less stress upon moral principles, the children grew up and seemed like ships without rudders." (1)

In the midst of the Great Depression and the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the 1934 memorial dedication at McGuffey's birthplace heard several references to crises.

• Historian Mark Sullivan wrote the following to the 1934 memorial dedication: "Today America is confronted with a crisis, one of the most serious of our history. The dislocations ensuing from a grave business depression have been taken as justifying our voyaging upon new and strange seas. We have cut adrift from our old moorings and are sailing away from the land of the past, the America which we, supremely privileged, inherited from the Founding Fathers. Before us lies the unknown. There is yet time for a choice. Shall we go on? Shall we retrace our course?" (2)
  
• At the 1934 memorial, McGuffey's granddaughter, Katherine Stweart, said, "If I might offer a message to the young folks who are coming out of college today, finding no jobs ready for them, and a spirit of pessimism and revolt possibly resulting, I would ask them to cast a glance backward, to call on their imagination for the picture of their great-great-grandparents hewing a nation out of the forest - they went out and found them... if they can but get the vision, develop the creative faculty, not wait to be helped, but to accept the challenge of their day, as the pioneers did in theirs, to go out and seek and build for themselves, and are not afraid to acknowledge that they do owe allegiance to their God and Country before all else... the greatest period of our history is yet before us." (3)
  
• McGuffey's great-grandson, Andrew Hepburn, echoed this theme. "The man who has made this occasion possible, Henry Ford, found in the teachings of McGuffey the secret of an abundant life... he seeks to preserve the simple graces, the gentle manners, the human values which have eluded so many of us. In an industrial world where he is our greatest industrialist he has revealed the possibility of a new order of life... In his splendid Village and Museum at Dearborn he is preserving for us the outward symbols of all that was best in the past of our fathers." (4)
  
• William Cameron, Henry Ford's representative, said, "The school of that day represented a forward-looking and sacrificial community interest. The great gulf which now yawns between community and school did not exist... It was the third pillar of community life, of which the other two were Church and Home." (5)
  
• R. E. Offenhauer, the Treasurer of the National Education Association, said, "In these days when the public schools are battling for their life, it is interesting to look back to the life of Dr. McGuffey." (6)

More than the Great Depression, the crises of the Second World War and the anxieties that followed inspired similar nostalgia:

• The Minnichs' Christmas card for 1945 illustrated the connections between McGuffey and anxieties of the era: On the front was a photo of children on the McGuffey Statue with the words "The World's Only Hope - McGuffey." On the back was the text: "While our World Peace seems like the torn edges of the myriads of wounds of war there abides new feelings of trust and the unsplit atoms of Home may yet destroy greed and bring the reign of our Lord's Second Commandment to threatening chauvinism. Be still my heart and wait. The Minnichs December Twenty-Five, Nineteen Hundred Forty-Five" (7)
  
• Harvey Minnich, one of the founders of the national society said in his biography of McGuffey, "It is believed by many that a return to this epoch-making series of readers in the public schools would assure a more dependable social life in the United States; that if these lessons that once established a virile, law-abiding, and devout citizenry were again taught in the schools, the social evils of our day would be corrected. Whether such a contention is valid may be disputed, but unless the youth of America is grounded in moral truths so cogently taught in the McGuffey series; unless the traits of character which these lessons established in the alumni of this great course of moral instruction; unless resistance to the deteriorating forces of society be raised to a power greater that the strength of the organized forces of crime, immorality, and disrespect for law and order, America may not expect to be exempt from the decadence which befell the great dynasties of history." (8)
  
• A group called "Committee of Americans" wrote Harvey Minnich to inquire whether the McGuffey Societies would cooperate on a program "to arouse the American people to an understanding of the right and privileges they enjoy under the powers of Government of the United States as compared with the loss of those privileges under a totalitarian systems (sic)... We are rather anxious to get at the bottom of this situation and we are also anxious to find out if the McGuffey Society would be at all interested in this program, which is one greatly needed in these days so perilous to our country... Although I am not a product of the public school system, I know that the McGuffey Readers have been a great influence in this country and we should have more of this McGuffey type of philosophy today." (9)
  
• The McGuffey Societies' 1950 sesquicentennial program read: "The McGuffey Readers have been replaced by other texts in our public schools. Patriot fervor for builders of the republic were succeeded by an era that take it for granted." (10)

A song from the McGuffey Societies' song book sought McGuffey's values as a cure to present ills:
"An Ode to William Holmes McGuffey" (sung to the tuen of "Battle Hymn of the Republic") (11)

1. We've studied McGuffey's Readers and the Spelling Book as well,
   They're very educational wherever you may dwell.
   And the good that htye have done mankind no human tongue can tell.
   McGuffey's name lives on.
   Chorus:
   Students of McGuffey's Readers
   Students of McGuffey's Readers
   Students of McGuffey's Readers
   His name goes marching on.
2. He was born in eighteen hundred in the good old Quaker state,
   He came to beautiful Ohio and there he found his mate.
   In seventy-two he died and was buried in old Virginia state.
   McGuffey's name lives on.
3. Listen, world, and I'll give you a tip - get busy draft some bills
   Put McGuffey's books back in our schools, omit the fads and frills.
   If we study them, they'll help cure the nation's ills.
   McGuffey's name lives on.
4. His name shall be our watchword, his books our battle-cry.
   They teach you to be honorable and never tell a lie.
   They will teach you how to live so you will be prepared to die.
   McGuffey's name lives on.