by Bill Bryson
This tack struck many as more than a little pathetic. Lowell acidly observed: ‘Surely we may sleep in peace now, and our English cousins will forgive us, since we have cleared ourselves from any suspicion of being original in the matter.‘26
Lowell had a particular reason for feeling protective about the American dialect. His fame rested almost entirely on the creation of a fictional New England rustic, Hosea Biglow, whose comically quaint speech formed the basis of the hugely popular Biglow Papers. Unfortunately, Lowell’s effectiveness as a defender of American speech was somewhat diminished by his growing antipathy for his own creation. When the reading public continually ignored his more earnest poetical compositions (and rightly; they were unceasingly mediocre) he went so far as to preface a volume of Biglow poems with a veiled insult to the reader: ‘Margaritas, munde porcine, calcâsti: en, siliquas accipe’, which translates as ‘Oh, swinish world, you have trampled pearls; so take the husks.‘27
None the less, he left behind an invaluable mass of material recording the habits of New England speech in the first half of the nineteenth century. As an extract shows, it was very different from that of today:
Ez fer war, I call it murder, –
There you hev it plain an’ flat:
I don’t want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that;
God hez sed so plump an’ fairly
It’s ez long ez it is broad,
An’ you’ve gut to git up airly
Ef you want to take in God.
But this, it must be remembered, was the speech of an uneducated New Englander. Someone from a more refined background, like John Quincy Adams, say, would have sounded as different again. One of the paradoxes of the day was that as America was becoming more politically unified it was in danger of becoming linguistically fractured. Class differences and regional differences alike were acutely felt and remarked upon. The relative few who lived out along the frontier were not only cut off from changes in fashion but also changes in language. So when, for instance, Britons and eastern Americans began to change the diphthong in words like boil and join from bile and jine, or to insert a voiced r in some words while removing it from others, the frontier people were less likely to adopt the new trends. They continued for much longer (and in some cases continue yet) to say bar for bear, consarn for concern, varmint for vermin, virtoo for virtue, fortin for fortune, enjine for engine, cattel or kittle for kettle, cuss for curse, thrash for thresh, tetchy for touchy, wrastle for wrestle, chaw for chew, gal for girl, riled for roiled, critter for creature and so on. The further west one went the more pronounced the variations were, so that by mid-century when the English traveller Richard Francis Burton reached Salt Lake City he found the language scarcely recognizable as English.28
As the new breed of frontier people like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett and Abraham Lincoln brought their regional habits of speech to Washington, their distinctive turns of phrase and raw pronunciations increasingly grated on the sensibilities of their eastern colleagues and underlined the linguistic variability of the sprawling nation. Something of the flavour and pronunciation of frontier life is conveyed by a speech attributed to Davy Crockett (though in fact it was concocted in his behalf by a ghost-writer). ‘We are called upon to show our grit like a chain lightning agin a pine log, to extarminate, mollify and calumniate the foe like a niggar put into a holler log ... Cram his pesky carcass full of thunder and lightning like a stuffed sassidge and turtle him off with a red hot poker ... Split his countenance with a live airthquake, and tarrify him with a rale Injun yell ...’ Though the words are not Crockett’s there is no reason to suppose that the spellings are unfaithful to his pronunciations.29
Much the same country air applied to Lincoln, if at slightly less than gale force. However sophisticated his prose style, Lincoln’s spoken English always had a whiff of the backwoods about it. His invariable greeting was ‘Howdy’ and his conversation was sprinkled with folksy colloquialisms like ‘out yonder’ and ‘stay a spell’, which must have caused at least some of Washington’s more sophisticated politicos to cringe.30 Though we cannot be sure in each case, he very probably pronounced more than a few of his words in the antiquated frontier style. Certainly we know that he enjoyed an earthy story and took delight in showing his associates a letter he received from a disgruntled citizen in 1860. It read: ‘God damn your god damned old hell fired god damned soul to hell god damn you and goddam your god damned family’s god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell.‘31 The letter came, it hardly needs saying, from the frontier.
The friction between the direct, colourful, independent language of the West and the more reserved and bookish diction of the East was a constant leitmotif of American speech throughout the nineteenth century. And nowhere was it made more arrestingly manifest than at the commemoration of a cemetery for Civil War soldiers in the little Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg on 19 November 1863.
The main speaker of the day was not Lincoln, but the orator Edward Everett – an easterner, naturally. Everett droned on for two hours. As was the custom of the day, his speech was full of literary allusions, Ciceronian pomp and obscure historical references that bore only the scantest significance to the occasion. The syntax was high-flown and decked out with phalanxes of subordinate clauses, convoluted constructions, and parenthetical excursions. Almost every sentence had an acre of flowery verbiage between the subject and predicate. A single sentence gives some hint of its denseness:
Lord Bacon, in ‘the true marshalling of the sovereign degrees of honour,’ assigns the first place to ‘the Condirotores Imperiorum, founders of States and Commonwealths;’ and truly, to build up from the discordant elements of our nature, the passions, the interests and the opinions of the individual man, the rivalries of family, clan and tribe, the influences of climate and geographical position, the accidents of peace and war accumulated for ages – to build up from those oftentimes warring elements a well-compacted, prosperous and powerful State, if it were to be accomplished by one effort or in one generation would require a more than mortal skill.
And this was just one of some 1,500 equally windy sentences. At 2 p.m., two long, cold hours after starting, Everett concluded his speech to thunderous applause – motivated, one is bound to suspect, more by the joy of realizing it was over than by any message derived from the content – and turned the dais over to President Lincoln. The audience of perhaps 15,000 people had been standing for four hours, and was tired, cold and hungry. Lincoln rose awkwardly, ‘like a telescope drawing out’, as one contemporary put it, adjusted his glasses, held the paper directly in front of his face and in a high, reedy voice delivered his address. ‘He barely took his eyes off the manuscript,’ according to one witness, as he intoned those famous words:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground. ‘The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion;
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Though Lincoln was never intended to provide anything other than some concluding remarks, this was breathtakingly brief. The Gettysburg address contained just 268 words, two-thirds of them of only one syllable, in ten mostly short, direct and memorably crystalline sentences. It took only a fraction over two minutes to deliver – so little, according to several contemporary accounts, that the official photographer was still making preliminary adjustments to his camera when the President sat down.
Far from taking the listener on a discursive trip through the majesties of imperial Rome or the glory that was Greece, the address contained no proper nouns at all. As Wills notes, it doesn’t mention Gettysburg or slavery or even the Union.32 Lincoln thought it a failure. ‘I failed: I failed: and that is about all that can be said about it,’ he remarked forlornly to Everett. Many agreed with him. The Chicago Times wrote: ‘The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.’ Even those newspapers sympathetic to Lincoln scarcely noted his address. Not until considerably later was it perceived as perhaps the greatest of American speeches.
The Gettysburg address also marked a small but telling lexical transition. Before the Civil War people generally spoke of the Union, with its implied emphasis on the voluntariness of the American confederation. In his first inaugural address Lincoln used Union twenty times, and nation not at all. By the time of the Gettysburg address, the position was reversed. The address contains five mentions of nation and not one of union.
We have come to take for granted the directness and accessibility of Lincoln’s prose, but we should remember that this was an age of ludicrously inflated diction, not only among politicians, orators and literary aesthetes, but even in newspapers. As Cmiel notes, no nineteenth-century journalist with any self-respect would write that a house had burned down, but must instead say that ‘a great conflagration consumed the edifice’. Nor would he be content with a sentiment as unexpressive as ‘a crowd came to see’ but instead would write ‘a vast concourse was assembled to witness’.33
In an era when no speaker would use two words when eight would do, or dream of using the same word twice in the same week, Lincoln revelled in simplicity and repetition. William Seward, his Secretary of State, drafted Lincoln’s first inaugural address. It was a masterpiece of the times. Lincoln pruned it and made it timeless. Where Seward wrote: ‘We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren,’ Lincoln changed it to ‘We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.‘34 Such succinctness and repetition were not just novel, but daring.
His speeches were constantly marked by a distinctive rhythm – what Garry Wills calls ‘preliminary eddyings that yield to lapidary monosyllables’, as in ‘The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here’ and ‘We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.‘35 Always there was a directness about his words that stood in marked contrast to the lofty circumlocutions of the East and marked him as a product of the frontier. ‘With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right ... let us strive ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations’ from Lincoln’s second inaugural address may not seem on the face of it to have a great deal in common with Davy Crockett’s ‘like a chain lightning agin a pine log’, but in fact it has precisely the same directness and simplicity of purpose, if phrased with somewhat more thoughtful elegance.
American English had at last found a voice to go with its flag and anthem and national symbol in the shape of Uncle Sam. At the same time it had found something else even more gratifying and more certain to guarantee its prospects in the world. It had found wealth – wealth beyond the dreams of other nations. And for that story we must embark on another chapter.
Dame Railway and Her Choo-Choo Court, Cincinnati Ironmongery Fair, 1852
6
We’re in the Money: The Age of Invention
On the morning of 2 July 1881 President James Garfield, accompanied by his Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, was passing through the central railway station in Washington, DC, to spend the Fourth of July holiday on the New Jersey shore with his family. His wife had only recently recovered from a nearly fatal bout of malaria and he was naturally anxious to be with her. In those days there was no Secret Service protection for the President. On occasions such as this the President was quite literally a public figure. Anyone could approach him, and one man did – a quietly deranged lawyer named Charles Guiteau, who walked up to the President and calmly shot him twice with a .44-calibre revolver, then stepped aside and awaited arrest. Despite a notable absence of qualifications Guiteau had long pestered the President to make him chief consul in Paris.
The nation waited breathlessly for news of the President’s recovery. Newspapers all over the country posted frequent, not to say strikingly candid, bulletins outside their main offices. ‘The President was somewhat restless and vomited several times during the early part of the night. Nutritious enemata were successfully employed to sustain him,’ read a typical one on the façade of the New York Herald office.1
As the President slipped in and out of consciousness, the greatest minds in the country were brought to his bedside in the hope that someone could offer something more positively beneficial than rectal sustenance. Alexander Graham Bell, at the peak of his fame, devised a makeshift metal-detector, which he called an ‘induction balance’ and which employed his recently invented telephone as a listening aid. The intention was to locate the bullets lodged in the President’s frame, but to Bell’s considerable consternation, it appeared to show bullets practically everywhere in the President’s body. Not until much later was it realized that the device had been reading the bed springs.
The summer of 1881 was one of the sultriest for years in the nation’s capital. To provide some relief for the stricken President, a corps of naval engineers who specialized in ventilating mine shafts was summoned to the White House and instructed to build a cooling device. They rigged up a large iron box filled with ice, salt and water, and a series of terry-cloth filters which were saturated by the melting ice. A fan drew in warm air from outside, which was cooled as it passed over the damp terry-cloth and cleansed by charcoal filters, and was propelled onwards into the President’s bedroom. The device was not terribly efficient – in fifty-eight days it consumed a quarter of a million tons of ice – but it worked up to a point. It cooled the President’s room to a more or less tolerable 81 °F, and stands in history as the world’s first air-conditioner.2
Nothing, alas, could revive the sinking President, and on the evening of 19 September, two and a half months after he had been shot, he quietly passed away.
The shooting of President Garfield was significant in two ways. First, it proved once and for all the folly of the spoils system, a term inspired by the famous utterance of New York politician William E. Marcy sixty years earlier: ‘To the victor belong the spoils.‘3 Under the spoils system it fell to a newly elected President to appoint hundreds of officials, from rural postmasters and lighthouse keepers to ambassadors. It was a handy way to reward political loyalty, but it was a tediously time-consuming process for a new President and – as Charles Guiteau conclusively demonstrated – it bred dissatisfaction among disappointed aspirants. Two years later Congress abolished the practice. But the shooting of the President – or more precisely the response to the shooting – was significant in another way. It underlined the distinctively American belief that almost any problem, whether it be finding a bullet buried in soft tissue or cooling the bedroom of a dying Chief Executive, could be solved with the judicious application of a l
ittle know-how.
Know-how, dating from 1857, is a quintessentially American term and something of a leitmotif for the nineteenth century. Thanks to it, and some other not insignificant factors like an abundance of natural resources and a steady supply of cheap immigrant labour, America was by 1881 well on its way to completing a remarkable transformation from an agrarian society on the periphery of world events to an economic colossus. In the thirty years that lay either side of Garfield’s death America enjoyed a period of growth unlike that seen anywhere in history. In almost every area of economic activity, America rose like a giant, producing quantities of raw materials and finished products that dwarfed the output of other countries – sometimes dwarfed the output of all other countries put together. Between 1850 and 1900, American coal production rose from 14 million tons to over 100 million, steel output went from barely 1 million tons to over 25 million, paper production increased ninefold, pig-iron production sevenfold, cotton-seed oil by a factor of fourteen, copper wire by a factor of almost twenty. In 1850 America’s 23 million people had a cumulative wealth of $7.1 billion. Fifty years later, the population had tripled to 76 million, but the wealth had increased thirteen-fold to $94.3 billion.4 In 1894 America displaced Britain as the world’s leading manufacturer. By 1914 it was the world’s leading producer of coal, natural gas, oil, copper, iron ore and silver, and its factories were producing more goods than those of Britain, Germany and France together. Within thirty years of Garfield’s death, one-fourth of all the world’s wealth was in American hands.
