Conservative Values: Individualism

The Readers became symbols of an individualistic, pioneer America. In 1978, an article summed up the Readers' spirit of individualism: "In a sense, the Readers were an American bible. It is almost impossible to calculate the religious, moral and ethical influence McGuffey had on shaping the American mind. Rugged individualism, the dignity of labor, the basic virtues of charity, thrift and honest - these and more, were clearly defined and thrust upon millions of American boys and girls as models for living." (1)

At the 1934 McGuffey birthplace memorial dedication Mark Sullivan, Harvey Minnich, and William Cameron appealed to the memory of McGuffey to critique New Deal collectivism.

• Sullivan wrote, "America's great men of the past have been, during recent years, prophets without honor in their own country. We have turned from them for leadership and guidance, to Messiahs of alien birth, alien background, alien point of view. To problems bedded in local American conditions we have sought to apply remedies designed for countries where despotism has always reigned and freedom has been unknown... Though William Holmes McGuffey is dead, there can be no doubt, in my opinion, as to what his counsel would be if he were alive today and could speak to us. The choice America must make is between, on the one hand, the old, independent, liberty-loving ways of the past, and, on the other, the 'new order,' which is founded on the subordination of the individual to the state and to society as a whole. Can any one doubt that McGuffey would be for the individual? Outstanding in his character were the qualities of self-reliance, independence of spirit, insistence on the individual's responsibility for his own destiny." (2)
  
• At the same dedication, Harvey Minnich spoke to the same anxieties: "Modern higher critics of school readers allege that as McGuffey's moral lessons were written to appeal to a social order of rugged individualism and laissez faire economics they are not effective today. One may ask when in the history of the race has any social order - sacred, empirical, communistic, or democratic - found it possible to relieve wholly the individual from from moral responsibility? His principles of human behavior are eternal, and any social order, sovietism, naziism, fascism, the New Deal, or democracy, not established upon these principles, I believe under God is destined to perish." (3)
  
• William Cameron, Henry Ford's representative echoed the theme of individualism: "The man himself, so far as we can glimpse him through the years, stands clearly before us as an individual. In our day, when attempts are being made to extract individualism from the American character, the man McGuffey becomes a symbol. One of his fundamental principles of teaching was to recognize the individual in the child." (4)

(1) Schuessler in 1986 booklet, 5.
(2) Sullivan in 1934 booklet, 19-20.
(3) Minnich in 1934 booklet, 14.
(4) Cameron in 1934 booklet, 9.