The chief competition that saints’ names encounter in the Republic today does not come, however, from Puritan names; it comes from the use of surnames as given-names and the wholesale invention of entirely new and unprecedented names in the Bible country of the South and Southwest. Many names of the former sort, e.g., Howard, Dudley, Douglas, Stanley, Sidney, Clifford, Spencer and Russell, are now in wide esteem in both England and the United States, but they did not appear in England until the latter part of the Sixteenth Century and were not imitated here until a little later. The first mention of them that I have been able to find is in William Camden’s “Remains Concerning Britain,” first published in 1605.2 Camden noted that their use was then a novelty of “late years” and sneered at an unnamed “wayward old man” for alleging that it went back to the reign of Edward VI (1547–53). He also noted that it was purely English and was to be encountered “nowhere else in Christendom.” He gave twelve current examples, to wit, Pickering, Worton,3 Grevil,4 Varney,5 Bassingburne, Gawdy, Calthorp, Parker, Pecsal,1 Brocas,2 Fitz-Raulf and Chamberlain. Of these only Parker appears to have ever attained any marked popularity, and it has been swamped in recent years by Cecil, Spencer, Seymour, Howard, Douglas, Dudley, Desmond, Stanley and Clifford, to mention only a few shining examples. At the start, according to Camden, the use of given-names as surnames was confined to “worshipful ancient families,” and proceeded “from hearty good will, and affection of the godfathers to shew their love,” but it soon spread to lower and lower strata, and by the middle of the Seventeenth Century Percy, Howard, Sidney and Cecil had become common given-names in England, though not, apparently, in Scotland and Ireland.
In the English colonies in America the favorite English names were soon reinforced by American additions, e.g., Chauncey (originally Chauncy), Clinton, Eliot, Dwight, Schuyler, Cotton, Bradford, Endicott, Leverett and Winthrop, and by the time of the Revolution the custom of naming children after conspicuous persons, not relatives, was already sufficiently noticeable to be remarked in the newspapers. Says Dr. Arthur M. Schlesinger:
The meeting of the first Continental Congress in the Fall of 1774 … crystallized the growing sense of nationality, helped to dissolve intercolonial prejudices, and highlighted leaders hitherto of only local renown. Thenceforth the giving of patriotic names to infants became a newsworthy event, reported by the press along with the latest political developments.… From the outset John Hancock proved a prime favorite on baptismal occasions.… Though his bold chirography was yet to appear on the Declaration of Independence he was president of the First Continental Congress (and later of the Second), and therefore personified the united colonial effort. Before 1774 drew to an end his namesakes were recorded in Providence, R. I., and Marblehead, Mass.8
But the outbreak of actual war, as Dr. Schlesinger records, offered stiff competition to Hancock’s popularity, and thereafter the favorite name for male babies was Washington. The first upon whom it was bestowed seems to have been the infant son of Col.
John Robinson of Dorchester, Mass., who was christened toward the end of July, 1775. After that infants named for the commander of the American forces began to be reported in all directions, and in April Alexander Anderson of New York, on being presented with twins of opposite sexes, named one George Washington and the other Martha Dandridge. The first real hero of the Revolution was Joseph Warren, who was killed at Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775. He was scarcely in his grave before babies were being named after him, and by the next year the custom was so firmly established that thousands were being baptized Franklin, Jefferson, Otis and Adams,1 to be followed in due course by Hamilton, Marshall, Jackson, Harrison, Lincoln, Grant, Lafayette,2 Madison, Tyler, Scott, Lee, Sherman, Sheridan and so on, not to mention Irving, leading down to the Grover Cleveland, George Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano of our own era.3 Among the thirty-two Presidents of the United States up to 1947, three had surnames as given-names, and seven had them as middle-names. Of the latter, three dropped their given-names and used their middle-names. The long survival of names taken over during the Revolutionary period was shown by the cases of Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt. Rather curiously, the most popular nomenclature relic of that time in vogue today, not excepting Washington, is Elmer, which is said to be derived from the name of two heroes so far forgotten otherwise that it does not appear in any of the ordinary reference books. Of it the New York Herald-Tribune said in 1935:
The name does not occur in Burke’s or any other peerage, knightage or companionage. Nor is it found in any easily available English or American histories; but if the curious inquirer will delve into old collections of biography or into American histories written in the middle of the last century, he will soon encounter the brothers Ebenezer and Jonathan Elmer, of Cumberland county, New Jersey. They were Revolutionary pamphleteers, organizers of Revolutionary militia, surgeons and officers in command of troops throughout the Revolution, members of Congress and fierce debaters of a hundred stirring issues of their times, enjoying a fame and popularity that is easier to understand than their present oblivion. The name Elmer therefore has such an honorable genealogy that it is time for America’s countless Elmers to know it and stand up for it.1
Elmer is encountered from end to end of the United States, but it seems to be most popular in the Middle West. In 1940, traveling through Central Indiana by automobile, I found that it was in common use there as a greeting-name for strangers.2 Waldo, though it is not unknown elsewhere, is a specialty of New England: it seems to have come in as a surname, but its early history is obscure.3 In the same way Truman is mainly found in the Pennsylvania German country and its colonies, Clay in Kentucky, Randolph in Virginia, Harlan in Iowa1 and Pinckney in South Carolina.2 On the origin of Chester as a given-name (it has been borne by one President of the United States) I can throw no light. The names of the Protestant heroes, Luther, Calvin and Wesley, have become so common in the United States that they are often borrowed by immigrants of non-British stock, usually in an attempt to Americanize names they have brought with them, e.g., Wesley for the Czech Václav.3 All three sometimes appear in Catholics, though Canon 761 forbids them, just as it forbids Jupiter, Mohammed and Satan.4
Though the English invented the use of surnames as given-names, and have acquired a large répertoire of them, they make less frequent and less bold additions to it than we do. Nevertheless, such additions are not unknown among them, as the cases of Rudyard Kipling, Nassau W. Senior, Hartley Coleridge, Hallam Tennyson, Aldous Huxley, Almroth Wright and Garnet Wolsley bear witness.5 Where they run ahead of us is in the multiplication of given-names, sometimes all of them saints’ names but usually a mixture of saints’ names and family names. Those of the Duke of Windsor are Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, and those of the Earl of Carrick are Theobald Walter Somerset Henry. The American custom of giving a boy his mother’s surname as a middle-name originated in England, but is now far more widespread in this country. Many girls are similarly named, and in the South, at least, some are given surnames as their first-names, e.g., Sidney and Beverly. The English eschew the American custom whereby a woman, at marriage, drops her baptismal middle-name and substitutes her maiden surname. This custom was launched, though perhaps not established, before the Civil War.1 After Harriet Elizabeth Beecher, the sister of Henry Ward Beecher, married the Rev. Calvin E. Stowe in 1836 she thus dropped the Elizabeth in her name and substituted Beecher. Said an English commentator in 1867, apparently forgetting (or unaware) that Mrs. Stowe no longer used Elizabeth:
It is not a bad plan for girls to have only one name, so that they may retain their maiden surname after their marriage, as that honored lady, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, has done.2
But this English commendation of Mrs. Stowe’s example has not been followed by imitation.3 Nor does an English grass-widow, on getting rid of her husband, John, cease, in the American fashion, to be Mrs. John Smith and become Mrs. Jones Smith, the Jones being her m
aiden surname. The American custom of representing a middle name by its simple initial, though it is not altogether unknown in Britain, is not common, and such a form as George B. Shaw would strike most Englishmen as odd. Said Simeon Strunsky in one of his “Topics of the Times” columns in the New York Times:4
This middle initial in American personal names continues to puzzle the British mildly and amuses them enormously. The late G. K. Chesterton was always writing about American multi-millionaires called Philoxenus K. Hunks, in which most of the fun was in the middle K. The serious Englishman simply drops the middle letter and speaks of Mr. Myron Taylor or Mr. William Tilden, Jr. When an American spells out his middle name, as in William Allen White or James Branch Cabell the English drop the first name and say Allen White or Branch Cabell. The gentleman from Emporia still calls himself William, but Mr. Cabell has actually gone over to the British practice and dropped his James.5 The practice is becoming common over here.
We must not call it British obtuseness. Perhaps the people over there are misled by the habit of our Presidents, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge; so the British fail to see why not Myron Taylor or William Bullitt.1
Camden says that second given-names were “rare in England” in his time, c. 1605, though common in the Catholic countries. James I had been christened Charles James and his son was Henry Frederick, but it was not until his other son, later Charles I, married Henrietta Maria of France in 1625 that they came into any popularity. Even so, they were confined for a long while to the gentry. In America they were adopted only slowly. The first graduate of Harvard to have one is said to have been Anmi Ruhamah Corlet, who set up as a schoolmaster at Plymouth, Mass., in 1672. Mr. Gustavus Swift Paine, of Southbury, Conn., who has made an extensive study of nomenclature on Cape Cod, tells me that middle names were not in general use there until late in the Eighteenth Century. Before then, he says,
the naming of children was something like this: Frequently, but not always, the first son was named after the father’s father or the mother’s father; the first daughter was named after the father’s mother or the mother’s mother; the second son and daughter were named after the grandparents previously neglected; then the next children were named after the father and mother. If a child died in infancy its name was often repeated for the next child of that sex, and sometimes three or four were thus given the same name successively. Some children were named after brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, of the parents. When middle names came in, the mother’s family name was often thus preserved in the naming of offspring. Sometimes, however, a child was named after an admired friend or distant relative.
Of all the remembered worthies of the early days only John Quincy Adams,2 Robert Treat Paine and the two Virginia Lees, Richard Henry and Francis Lightfoot, had middle names,3 and of the first seventeen Presidents only John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison and James Knox Polk. They were more numerous among the literati, e.g., James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Francis Scott Key, Charles Brockden Brown and William Ellery Channing, but so late as 1859 they were still rare enough in the general population, even on the educated level, for a writer in Harper’s Magazine to be arguing that they should be bestowed more frequently. He said:
We might very easily, and perhaps wisely, revive the Roman usage, and give children, besides their own proper name and that of the family, a middle name, taken from the most important ancestor or the most characteristic branch that has been grafted into the family tree. No harm would be done if several, or even all the children had the same middle name. The mother’s own family name may furnish the needed cognomen; and if variety is needed, it may be, according to a frequent classic usage, found in the name of the father’s mother or the mother’s mother, so as to perpetuate in the children the ancestral surnames of the paternal and maternal side. Such a custom does good by cherishing a proper family feeling, and suggesting the important truth that a man’s blood is a fact significant enough to be looked after, whether to correct failings or to encourage virtues that run in its arteries.1
In late years there have been three curious tendencies in the naming of American children: (a) the growing popularity of nicknames as given-names, (b) the bestowal of mere initials on boys instead of names, and (c) the fashion for inventing new and unprecedented names for girls, often of an unearthly and supercolossal character. All three tendencies are most marked among the evangelical tribesmen of the South and Southwest. Until the political explosion of 1946 the Texan who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives, officially the third in rank among all American statesmen, described himself in the Congressional Directory as Sam – not as Samuel but as plain Sam —, and under his eye, when an appropriation bill was on its passage and all hands crowded up to vote, were two other Sams, five Freds, four Joes, two Eds, two Wills, a Pat, a Pete, a Ben, a Mike, a Sol, a Thad, a Fritz, a Dan, a Jack, a Nat, a Jed, a Jere, a Jerry, a Cliff, a Newt and a Harve. Many of these homespun Hampdens succumbed to the explosion aforesaid, but even in the Eightieth Congress, with its Republican majority,2 there were five Freds, three Joes, two Sams, two Mikes, and a Jack, a Wat, an Abe, a Walt, a Si, a Cliff, a Jere, a Ben, an Ed, a Chet, a Hal, a Pete, a Jay, a Ray, a Toby, a Tom, a Harry, a Sid, a Harve, a Jamie and a Runt,3 though Sam the Speaker had returned to the floor and was displaced by a sedate Joseph from Massachusetts. Nor were all of these bob-tailed brethren Southerners: some came from the outposts of Biblical science in the upper Middle West and on the Pacific coast and several actually emanated from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.
It is in the South, however, that such stable-names are most frequently conferred upon he-babies at the sacrament of baptism. I turn to the Register of the Texas Christian University for 1942–43 and find two Joes, two Dons, a Jack, a Fred, a Herb, a Sam, a Harry and a Bob among the students listed upon a single page.1 I linger a bit in the same instructive work and find an Ed, a Dan and a Harry among the trustees and a Lew, a Mack, a Fred and a Will on the faculty. I reach into my collectanea and bring forth a Lum,2 an Artie, an Andy, a Dick, a Dolph, a Cal, a Bennie, a Bernie, a Charley,3 a Zach,4 a Gene,5 a Billie, an Alex, a Louie, an Eddie, a Jimmie, an Archie, a Terry,6 a Phil, a Link, a Jeffie,7 a Josh,8 a Larry, a Sammy,9 a Hy, a Jess,10 a Nels,11 a Jed,12 a Nat,13 a Bert, a Fritz, a Johnnye,14 a Wash,15 an Edd,16 a Ned,17 an Ollie18 and a Gus.19 Nearly all these names come from official records, in which both given-names and surnames are recorded with care.1
The custom of giving boys simple initials instead of given-names2 is not quite new, but it seems to have been growing rapidly of late, especially in the South. The President of the United States at the time I write is the Hon. Harry S. Truman of Missouri, whose middle initial, according to the Associated Press,
is just an initial – it has no name significance. It represents a compromise by his parents. One of his grandfathers had the first-name of Solomon; the other, Shippe. Not wanting to play favorites the President’s parents decided on the S.3
Mr. Truman was born in 1884, when the custom under discussion was in its cradle days, but he had forerunners. One of them may have been U. S. Grant, for Captain Charles King says in “The True Ulysses S. Grant,” published in 1915: “Grant was never formally baptized until late in life, and then, by his own choice, as Ulysses S. He would not take the full [middle] name of Simpson [the surname of his mother], but elected to be baptized as he had been so long and well known to the nation.”4 In the generation between Grant’s and Truman’s there were a number of conspicuous Americans bearing initials as given names, e.g., W J (no periods) McGee, the anthropologist (1853–1912), and D-Cady Herrick, candidate for the governorship of New York in 1904 (1846–1926). Also, there have been others among Mr. Truman’s contemporaries, e.g., Ferris J Stephens, curator of the Babylonian collection at Yale;1 Dr. J Milton Cowan, secretary of the Linguistic Society of America, who signs himself J M.; 2 J Spencer Weed, former president of the National Horse Show; DR Scott, of the University of Missouri;
3 Mrs. Bj Kidd, secretary of the Advertising Federation of America and a well-known writer of and on advertising,4 and the late Ed L Keen, vice-president of the United Press.5 But the fashion for giving boys initials instead of given-names did not make any progress among the plain people until the interval between the two World Wars. By the time World War II was on us it had developed so vastly that the Army and Navy had to devise means of dealing with it, to avoid uncertainty and confusion. The Navy’s plan was to distinguish between simple initials and those representing actual names by enclosing the former in quotation marks, without periods, e.g., “C” “L” Keedy, Frank “A” Downs, Harold “B” “J” Barnes, Herbert J. “A” Hillson and John “C” S. Coffin.1 The Army, in the early days of World War II, marked off the bearers of initials by inserting (IO), i.e., initials only, between the initials and the surnames, and used (NMI), i.e., no middle initial, after the given-names of those who had but one. But by Army Regulation No. 345–1, March 11, 1944, these marks were abandoned, and John James Jones and J J Jones both became Jones, J. J.2
The craze for afflicting girl babies with bizarre and unheard of given-names is a phenomenon of relatively recent years and is principally manifest, as I have noted, in the South and the rural Middle West, but it appeared sporadically in the North before the Civil War, and the swarming of the underprivileged before and during World War II carried it to the Pacific Coast. In a list of “the most usual names” of American women, published in an 1814 edition of Webster’s Spelling Book the 69 names given included such old favorites as Ann, Dorothy, Elizabeth, Helen, Jane, Katharine, Margaret and Mary, along with such Puritan survivals as Abigail, Deborah, Faith, Priscilla, Prudence and Temperance, but the utmost advance of fancy forms was represented by Clarissa, Huldah and Susannah, none of them novel. In 1834, however, Longworth’s Directory listed Aletta, Blandina, Coritha, Dovinda, Elima, Hilah, Keturah, Parnethia and Zina.3 This was a beginning, and in a little while there were contemporary Connecticut records of Minuleta, Typhosa, Irista, Zeriah and Wealthena – all of them worthy of the best efforts of an Oklahoma mother today.4 Other name-lists of the 1840–60 period show Rodintha, Finette, Sula, Delvina, Luzertta, Auria, Calina, Milma,1 Isaphene, Algeline, Levantia and Philena.2 After the Civil War there was a great access of romanticism in all departments of American life, and the naming of infants marched shoulder to shoulder with the crocheting of tidies and the jig-saw adornment of suburban villas. Says Van Wyck Brooks:
American Language Supplement 2 Page 68
