Jennifer Scanlon's "Until There Is Justice"

Jennifer Scanlon is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities in Gender and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown.

Scanlon applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Until There Is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and reported the following:

My book provides the first biography of civil rights stalwart Anna Arnold Hedgeman, an understudied but enormously important activist, policy maker, and politician across the “long civil rights movement” of the 20th century. From her work in the YWCA in the 1920s, through her civil service work during the Great Depression, and from her work on behalf of fair employment in World War II, through her work on behalf of racial and gender justice in the 1960s and 1970s, Hedgeman was not only present in but vital to so many social movements that have shaped the nation.

Page 99 happens to open up chapter seven, “Fighting for Fair Employment, Fighting for Truman”, which outlines Hedgeman’s years in the nation’s capital, during which, she remembered later, she was “green enough” to think she and her colleagues could secure justice in the workplace for African Americans.

Still employed at the Office of Civilian Defense, Anna Arnold Hedgeman was sitting at her desk in the Empire State Building one snowy day in 1944 when A. Philip Randolph telephoned and asked to stop in to see her. He had come up a with a strategy for making the Fair Employment Practice Commission permanent, he told her, and he wanted her to lead the effort. Randolph envisioned a national push for equal opportunity in employment, equal wages for the same work, and a right to promotion without regard to race, creed, color, or origin. There would be an educational campaign and a drive for legislation granting far greater powers of enforcement to the FEPC than it had during wartime. The plan was in place, but he needed someone to implement it, and he hoped it would be Hedgeman. Believing in the cause, and in Randolph, she did not hesitate to sign on. The black press took note, referring to Hedgeman as the “young feminist” taking the helm.

Hedgeman’s years in Washington, D.C. were, in many ways, emblematic of her professional life more generally. With few resources, she gathered together a faithful staff and made inroads on fair employment. She drew on her various constituencies, including African Americans, women, and American Protestants. She also tangled with A. Philip Randolph and other men who refused to give her adequate respect or adequate means to fully wage the struggle. In the end, it was not possible to pass fair employment on a federal level at that time, but Hedgeman laid the groundwork for later civil rights successes.

While in Washington, she also fought for integration (as a black woman she could not eat with her white staff at any restaurants outside Union Station), and she organized the first attempt to have African Americans play a significant role in a presidential election (they helped Harry S. Truman win, in 1948).

It was a close race overall, and historians differ over whether it was labor, farmers, or African Americans who cinched the race for Truman. There is no doubt, though, that black Americans contributed to Truman’s margins in the key states of Ohio and Illinois, and they may have played the main role in securing his victory…. Anna Arnold Hedgeman took great pride, both publicly and in her writing, in having helped return to office the president she thought most likely to support fair employment and full and complete desegregation of the military, among other civil rights agendas.

In this, and in so many other of her efforts, Hedgeman worked in the center but on the margins, one of a powerful but largely unseen network of black women who played key roles in the African American freedom struggle.

Learn more about Until There Is Justice at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Cornell's "Unruly Equality"

Andrew Cornell is an educator and organizer who has taught at Williams College, Haverford College, and Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3. He is the author of Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for a New Society.

Cornell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

Turning to page 99 of Unruly Equality, we find a mild-mannered, mustachioed anarchist named Harry Kelly recounting the birth of the Mohegan Colony – a leafy planned community along the Hudson River, one hour north of New York City, developed by anti-capitalist radicals in 1923.

“Our purpose,” Kelly explained, “was to establish another children’s school, to be conducted along libertarian lines, to build a community wherein a larger measure of individual and social life could be realized.”

Although the page is devoted to describing a particular initiative, it does hint at the themes and questions animating the book as a whole. Many people assume anarchism – a political movement opposed to all forms of social and political domination – died out in the United States after the notorious Emma Goldman was deported during the First World War. In fact, Unruly Equality traces an unbroken line of anarchist activism and thought up through present-day phenomena such as Occupy Wall Street. It is true, however, that the face and focus of anarchism changed remarkably over the 20th century.

Prior to WWI, most U.S. anarchists were immigrant wage-laborers hailing from eastern and southern Europe. Some worked to organize radical unions while others practiced “propaganda of the deed,” such as the assassination of business-owners and politicians. Following a wave of wartime repression, however, many anarchists turned their energies to raising “free,” ethically-minded children and other gradualist methods wherein they attempted to “prefigure,” or model, an ideal world in their own lives. Anarchist “colonies,” such as Mohegan, were meant to contribute to this strategy, but their achievements proved disappointing. On page 99, I argue:

The colonists’ initial desire to create social change through libertarian education, was, by 1923, compounded by a plan to collectivize the process of social mobility. Anarchist colonies offered their residents more pleasant surroundings and greater freedom of expression in daily life, but also distanced them from opportunities to organize fellow workers and from the direct conflicts with authorities that characterized the lives of prewar urban anarchists.

This change of scenery signaled broader shifts in the anarchist movement towards middle-class constituencies and concerns. In the 1940s, anarchists allied with radical pacifists and avant-garde poets, laying the foundation for the Beat Generation and 1960s counter-culture. In the process, however, they ceded their connections to working-class life and the influence they once had within organized labor.

Learn more about Unruly Equality at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Clif Stratton's "Education for Empire"

Clif Stratton is Clinical Assistant Professor of History and Assistant Director of the Roots of Contemporary Issues program at Washington State University. He is the 2014 recipient of the American Historical Association's Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award.

Stratton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship, and reported the following:

From page 99:

In the century’s second decade, the legacies of Richard and Samuel Chapman Armstrong loomed large as the board of education hoped that domestic and agricultural training would increase the “value” of non-white students “as a community asset for good citizenship.” The vocational committee assured board members that it remained proactive, “rather than commit the unpardonable sin of doing nothing.” More importantly, if Hawaiian parents and children objected to industrial agricultural training at Lahainaluna, the DPI [Department of Public Instruction] already had other means at their disposal through which to institutionalize manual work for at least a portion of the territory’s youth. Yet this program too, which relied on the criminalization of nonwhite children and adolescents and the parsimony to spend as little public money as possible on basic health and sanitary needs, met forceful resistance from those most affected by the structures of reform school and the subordinate paths to citizenship allotted them.

The page continues with a new section titled “Work and Criminality at Waiale‘e Boys’ Industrial School.” In April 1912, seven boys escaped the school grounds, taking cover in the sugar cane fields of the surrounding Kahuku plantation. Three of the boys made their way to nearby Waialua plantation camp before capture. The reform school’s superintendent Hugh Tucker could not fathom why the inmates (as he often referred to them in official correspondence), “…want to run off when their time is so near out…” (quoted from page 100). Waiale‘e embodied what public schooling in Hawai‘i had largely become by the early twentieth century – a project by which to normalize the territory’s youth to lives of manual labor, poverty, and disenfranchisement. But the escapes of Joseph Huli, Mike Hapai, Peter Pacheco, George Telles, Martin Telles, Palea Poe in the spring of 1912 signaled a groundswell of resistance to such subordination.

Page 99 encapsulates nicely Education for Empire’s central premise: that in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, American public schools became central to the nation’s imperial projects both at home and abroad. The chapter in which page 99 appears addresses the role of territorial school governance in Hawai‘i – a colonial crossroads in which America’s imperial ambitions for Asian markets and Pacific military dominance collided with Big Sugar’s demands for cheap Hawaiian, Chinese, and Japanese labor and haole visions of a white settlers’ paradise. But rather than the successful establishment of a white majority suited – in the minds of most haole – for republic government, the territory became a de facto oligarchy dominated by sugar. And the Department of Public Instruction increasingly focused on preparing natives and immigrants alike for cane work. Industrial training became the clarion call for uplifting the islands’ darker races, and by the turn of the century, its practitioners had successfully imported the manual training model to the mainland, where white school boards targeted Native Americans, blacks, Mexicans, and some European immigrants for industrial education and futures in menial drudgery. This, many white school administrators, teachers, and textbook authors argued, offered the best “path of good citizenship” for non-whites, foreign-born, and colonial subjects. But those affected fought back, demanding adequate facilities, their fair share of municipal and state educational funding, and a rigorous academic curriculum that would prepare them to participate in the American political economy as equals.

Learn more about Education for Empire at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua O. Reno's "Waste Away"

Joshua O. Reno is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Waste Away: Working and Living with a North American Landfill, and reported the following:

My book is about how the lives of North Americans have been shaped by waste disposal, especially landfilling, without our being aware of it. Strangely, page 99 not only reflects that overall focus of my book, but also encapsulates my scholarly career!

Here is an excerpt from Page 99:

So much focus has gone into what consumers do or do not wantonly throw away that it is easy to forget that being a mass consumer—one who buys things in shops that are made somewhere else by someone else—is itself a decision. The understanding of choice in consumer societies is often limited to what we buy, not whether we do so; it therefore involves implicit assumptions about how people are related to things and to each other. The question that goes unasked (except by scavengers) is why anyone would choose to be a consumer at all, with so much perfectly good waste lying around. That is, why would anyone spend money on new goods when they could shop for free by touring the neighborhood landfill or diving into the Dumpsters behind the supermarket?

In this passage, which comes from the introduction to the third chapter, I argue that people do not scrounge for things in the garbage purely out of necessity, as if they had no other choice (after a zombie apocalypse, for example). Rather, scavenging itself is a choice; it can be regarded as liberating and exciting by those who do it, and not at all as an act of desperation. In fact, this was one of the central arguments of my very first publication (“Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure,” which appeared in the Journal of Material Culture in 2009). Then, I argued that people who scavenge waste from landfills are much like consumers: they are looking to improve themselves and build relationships by acquiring valuable things.

Some of the evidence from that initial publication appears again in this chapter. Over subsequent years, however, I realized that much more could be said about the relationship between scavenging from waste and buying things from a store. One reason that there is so much recoverable waste to be found in landfills is that consumers throw away perfectly good stuff. But there is another connection between mass consumption and waste disposal infrastructure, one that we are not meant to see. Producers and retailers routinely dispose of commodities that “spoil” or simply do not meet their own quality control standards, which not only provides salvageable goods (sometimes in large quantities), but also makes mass consumption a repetitive and worry-free ritual. The scavenger and the consumer are not only similar (in that they both want stuff), but their different choices are a product of mass waste disposal. This subtracts unwanted materials from the official sphere of exchange so that the commodities we wish to buy appear new and untroubled. And being exposed to so many perfectly reproduced and reliable commodities can make mass consumption appear like the only possible choice.

That is the focus of the book as a whole, not only what happens to our waste, but how its subtraction unknowingly constrains our experiences and imaginations.

Learn more about Waste Away at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nancy Tomes's "Remaking the American Patient"

Nancy Tomes is SUNY Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University and author of The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers, and reported the following:

My book is about when and why we started expecting patients to act like consumers. Why in order to get good medical care do Americans have to shop for it with such determination and skill? Contrary to popular assumption, the transformation of patients into consumers did not start with the coming of the Internet, or even the rebellious baby boomers of the 1970s. In fact, the use of the term “consumer” to mean “patient” dates from the 1920s, when the many ways that modern consumer culture, advertising, and medicine influenced each other became glaringly apparent, both in the doctor’s office and the drug store.

Page 99 appears in a chapter titled “the New Corner Store,” about the transformation of the old style pharmacy into the new style drug store of the 1920s and 1930s, the ancestors of today’s CVS and Walgreens. It follows a chapter titled “The High Cost of Keeping Alive” about why Americans were starting to complain about the size of their doctor’s bill. Interwar drug stores tried to position themselves as a convenient alternative to a costly doctor’s visit. On page 99, I am discussing consumer concerns about prescription drugs. Some patients were starting to demand that prescriptions not be written in Latin, so they could understand them better. But surprisingly, the price of prescription drugs was not a big source of concern. People used far fewer of prescription medicines than today, and their prices were still low in comparison to over the counter products. The big uptick in drug prices only started in the 1940s, as powerful new drugs under patent protection came on the American market.

But perhaps because the cost of prescription drugs remained comparatively small—on average only a few dollars--- the economic sleights-of-hand going on in the prescription department attracted less hostile commentary than did the changes in doctors’ billing practices. Since so many drugs were more or less equivalent, no single seller could raise prices very high without losing trade, and the cost differential between prescription and over-the-counter drugs remained relatively small. Moreover, prices for prescription medications did not vary as dramatically as did physicians’ fees. Pharmacists relied on standardized systems for calculating drug costs, such as the Evans Rule, used by the National Association of Retail Druggists and named in honor of its pharmacist inventor. In essence, these systems doubled the cost of the ingredients to cover containers and overhead and added a set rate for the labor of compounding the prescription, with an ultimate goal of achieving a profit of between 10 and 20 percent.

On page 99, I also discuss how pharmacists developed ciphers to ensure consistency in their pricing.

At a time when patients could repeatedly get the same prescription filled, so long as it was for non-habit-forming drugs, pharmacists also had to be careful not to vary prices, lest the refill cost be higher than the original. Instead of putting the price right on the label, pharmacists substituted ciphers: in the early 1900s, the phrase “COME AND BUY” stood for the numbers one through ten, so a dollar would be written “C.Y.Y.” In the late 1930s, the National Association of Retail Druggists had replaced the overt commercialism of the earlier code with a more neutral cipher, “PHARMOCIST,” in which a dollar would be written “P.T.T.” In another indication of price sensitivity, physicians and pharmacists developed codes to recognize very poor patients for whom the customary pricing should be waived. Explained Remington’s, “It frequently happens that physicians desire to indicate that a patient is poor and is a proper subject for charity”; in such cases, doctors would write the letter P in the lower corner of the prescription, “or if very poor PP.” Continued the text, “It is customary and humane to regard these marks if assured of their genuineness.”

How quaint this language of “customary and humane” sounds today. Drug companies and pharmacists once operated in a business culture where keeping prices low mattered even for prescription drugs. What happened to that world? In the rest of the book, I show how and why the pharmaceutical industry changed so that the “high price of keeping alive” came to apply to prescription drugs as well as physicians’ services. How did we get to a world in which Martin Shkreli can mark up the price of a drug by 5000 percent? Read Remaking the American Patient and find out why.

Learn more about Remaking the American Patient at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin M. Jensen's "Forging the Sword"

Benjamin M. Jensen holds a dual appointment as a Donald L. Bren Chair of Creative Problem Solving at Marine Corps University and as a Scholar-in-Residence at the American University, School of International Service.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Forging the Sword: Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army, and reported the following:

A strategic dilemma marks page 99 of Forging the Sword: Doctrinal Change in the U.S. Army. The section charts how the Clinton administration sought to reduce defense expenditures and transition to a Post-Cold War security environment. In the previous Bush administration, the national security team developed a two major theater war strategy to define national security priorities. This strategy, based in a large part on the Gulf War, called for maintaining enough military strength to fight two conflicts the size of Desert Storm/Desert Shield simultaneously.

These larger debates about national security strategy and defense posture provide the context in which the military profession develops new ways of thinking about warfare. These ideas form doctrine, organizing principles that shape how soldiers think about warfare. Central periods of military change often parallel fundamental changes to military doctrine. No change to armored and combined arms doctrine in the interwar period in Germany, no blitzkrieg.

My book explores how the military profession develops new doctrine through looking at the major ideas that shaped the U.S. Army from 1973 to 2008. What makes my work unique is that I focus on the military as a profession. Most treatments of doctrinal change tend to preface the constraints of military bureaucracy, searching instead for external shocks – from defeat in war to threats to budgets - that cause otherwise reluctant officers to change.

My work shows how officers solving new problems, from the dilemmas of combined arms in the Fulda Gap to modern counterinsurgency, changed the way they thought about warfare and initiated changes to their fighting organizations. The book is a good news story. It shows how even the largest, hierarchical organizations are capable of innovation. As such, it will be of interest to readers interested in modern military history, organizational change and innovation.

Learn more about Forging the Sword at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elanah Uretsky's "Occupational Hazards"

Elanah Uretsky is Assistant Professor of Global Health, Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Occupational Hazards: Sex, Business, and HIV in Post-Mao China, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Occupational Hazards offers thoughts on state regulation of sexuality:

“The state,” argue Elizabeth Bernstein and Laurie Shaffner, “has a sexual agenda” (Bernstein and Shaffner 2005:xiii). In the West states rely on a moral vision to regulate sexual conduct. The Chinese state does not regulate sexual conduct. Instead, it has historically relegated sex in a way that allows individuals to express themselves sexually in spaces that protect the state from the threat of personal expression. Confucian order relegated erotic desire outside the home as a means of preserving both family and its associated state order. Prohibitions against sex, still for the purpose of state preservation, did not come until the late Qing dynasty when the Yongzheng Emperor declared that gender and not status should be used to structure China’s system of sexual values. He made this decision in an effort to avoid the potential disruption in marriage markets and a rise in concubinage that often preceded dynastic decline (Sommer 2000). Consequently, sex, which had been celebrated as a vital force of both health and enjoyment for the individual in premodern China, was suddenly transformed into a burden truly reserved to serve the state (Van Gulik 1974).

Discussions of sexuality in China often focus on an ongoing sexual revolution and awakening. But China has a long and rich sexual history that was traditionally celebrated as an essential part of life. But it was not only a private affair. As we see from the quote on page 99, sex was also integral to maintaining state order.

Confucian political order relied on a continuum between the individual, family, and state where the family was a microcosm of the government. An individual who had his personal and family affairs in order was capable of maintaining a harmonious state. While Confucius recognized the primordial function of sex he also recognized that erotic sex could introduce chaos into the family and hence the state. Erotic sex, he cautioned government officials, should thus be reserved for outside the home.

This continuum between state and individual still exists in China today. The communist party expects individuals to be loyal, first and foremost, to the state. This protects the state and supports its legitimacy. The post-Mao state has receded from many of its duties but it still monitors private life as a means of maintaining harmony and protecting party legitimacy. Representatives of the government and the Party are first and foremost expected to serve as moral role models. Any transgression on their part is a reflection on the Party. Many men in China still adhere to Confucian principles when it comes to their sexual lives. Stories of government officials and businessmen who keep multiple wives and/or lovers are not rare but these days their behavior is associated with inciting chaos in the government through corruption rather than protecting state order. Market reforms under a Leninist government have given rise to a series of activities needed to build the type of trust traditionally needed to redistribute resources within a Leninist economy, including the exchange of commercial sex between the businessmen and government officials who have fueled the rise of China’s economy. These practices are socially sanctioned but politically proscribed, leaving these men in a virtual vacuum where they strive to fulfill their Confucian ideals and serve their party obligations.

This argument is vital to the book, which demonstrates how these types of competing discourses incited and shaped China’s HIV epidemic.

Learn more about Occupational Hazards at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carson Holloway's "Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration"

Carson Holloway is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska, Omaha and is the author of several works of political philosophy.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration: Completing the Founding or Betraying the Founding?, and reported the following:

Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration passes the “page 99 test.” The book is a detailed account of the political disputes between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson while both served in George Washington’s cabinet—Hamilton as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury and Jefferson as its first secretary of state. The book focuses especially on these two great men’s disagreements about the meaning of the Constitution and the scope of the power it bestows on the federal government, questions that are still very much with us today.

As it happens, page 99 is part of a discussion of Hamilton’s understanding of the Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution. Such a discussion is an excellent window on the book as a whole because this is the most famous debate between Hamilton and Jefferson.

The public policy measure that provoked this argument was Hamilton’s plan for a national bank. Jefferson argued that the bank was unconstitutional. Since the Constitution does not mention any express power to create such an institution, the bank could only be authorized by the Necessary and Proper Clause, which empowers Congress to make any law “necessary and proper” to the execution of its expressly granted powers. Jefferson, however, insisted that “necessary” here meant “absolutely necessary.” A bank might make it easier for the government to exercise its taxing, spending, and borrowing powers, but it could not be said to be absolutely necessary to them. Therefore, according to Jefferson, it was unconstitutional.

In reply, Hamilton suggested that Jefferson was inventing a new interpretation of the Constitution in order to block a public policy—the bank—that he just did not like. Thus page 99 of my book begins as follows:

The unsoundness of Jefferson’s restrictive interpretation was further indicated, Hamilton argued, by its novelty. Such a conception had “never before” been “entertained” and was in fact inconsistent with the previously established practice of the government. As an example he pointed to the “act concerning light houses, beacons, buoys and public piers.” That act could only be “referred” to Congress’s enumerated power of “regulating trade,” according to Hamilton, and was in fact “fairly relative to it.” It was therefore constitutional according to Hamilton’s standards. Yet the act was certainly not “strictly necessary,” as Jefferson’s interpretation demanded. No one could contend that the Commerce power would be “nugatory” without the Congressional provision of such facilities. Hamilton suggested by this example that Jefferson’s was not the theory on which the government had in fact operated up to the time the bank became controversial and its opponents sought a constitutional argument against it.

Hamilton won this round. President Washington, persuaded by Hamilton’s arguments, signed the bank bill into law. But there were many more clashes to come—clashes that became more bitter and angry as Hamilton and Jefferson began to suspect each other of trying to undermine the Constitution and destroy the new republic.

Learn more about Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amy E. Eckert's "Outsourcing War"

Amy E. Eckert is Associate Professor of Political Science at Metropolitan State University of Denver. She is coeditor of The Future of Just War and Rethinking the 21st Century: "New" Problems, “Old” Solutions.

Eckert applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Outsourcing War: The Just War Tradition in the Age of Military Privatization, and reported the following:

The involvement of private military companies (PMCs) in war often becomes apparent only through dramatic, typically violent, incidents like the killing and mutilation of Blackwater contractors by militants in Fallujah or the shooting of civilians by contractors in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. These incidents are undeniably attention-grabbing, and suggest that the principal problem PMCs pose for just war norms is that of how PMCs relate to civilians during conflict. This is an important and pressing problem, but page 99 of Outsourcing War is at the end of the chapter that looks at how PMCs also pose problems for the norms that apply to our decision to go to war. In other words, we have PMC problems to deal with before the first shot is even fired or the first contractor sets foot near the battlespace. These jus ad bellum norms have become centered around the assumption that war occurs only between state militaries.

Page 99 states in part:

Reliance on PMCs has become so pervasive that the state’s conduct in war cannot be adequately understood without taking into account the contributions of these private actors to the war effort…their participation alters the empirical context to which the just war principles apply.

This section goes on to argue that jus ad bellum principles are intended to act as a restraint on states’ more aggressive tendencies and to give us a basis for moral critique. In keeping with the spirit of this set of principles, I suggest that the capabilities of, actions by, and losses incurred among PMCs be attributed to the state that employs them so that when we try to assess the question of whether a war is just, we do so with an accurate picture of the war.

This is a central claim of the book and is, in this sense, representative of the book’s project of calling attention to the significance of PMCs, the places where the incorporation of private actors is at odds with assumptions of the just war tradition, and formulating just war arguments about assessing the ethics of privatized war. In this respect, I would agree with Ford Madox Ford’s claim that we can treat page 99 as representative of the whole book.

Learn more about Outsourcing War at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lynda Mugglestone's "Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words"

Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of the History of English and Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College. She is the editor of Lexicography and the OED (2002), The Oxford History of English (2006, 2012) and, with Freya Johnston, of Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (2012). Her books include Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (1995, 2003), Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2004) and Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2011).

Mugglestone applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Johnson’s caution is marked. His subsequent comments offer a careful critique of spelling reform and those who, in various ways, ‘take pleasure in departing from custom’ in their attempts to impose individual preferences on the language as a whole.

In terms of information on spelling within the Dictionary, the primary focus is, of course, Johnson’s specification of the headword. Set apart from the body of the entry, this is rendered visibly distinct through capitalization, hence DA’CTYLE, DA’LLIANCE (Johnson’s inserted apostrophe indicates the expected position of stress). As such, it provides a reference model by which Chesterfield’s ‘uncertainty’ might indeed be resolved; while other variants might therefore exist in ‘general custom’, the choice of headword will, of necessity, prioritize and select. It sets out, in effect, a preferred spelling, authorized by the lexicographer and made part of the dictionary’s intended role as reference book.

As eighteenth-century lexicography confirms, different dictionary-makers can, of course, draw on different patterns of ‘preference’ in this respect. If Johnson’s headwords institute forms such as publick, classick, logick, and musick as part of the reference model he provides, Benjamin Martin’s Linguæ Britannicæ Reformata, published in 1749, conversely discards what he termed the ‘redundant final k’. This reflected the ‘old Way’ of spelling, Martin argued, rather than that used by ‘later Writers’. ‘Preference’ in his Dictionary is given to headwords such as music and logic. ‘K is a very useless and superfluous letter . . . and should not be wrote at the end of words exceeding one syllable’, Buchanan’s Linguæ Britannicæ vera Pronunciatio (1757) likewise averred. Typical of the first half of the eighteenth century, Johnson’s preferred –ick would, at least in public printed texts, largely have disappeared by its end. His cautions on ‘reason’, ‘custom’, and ‘obedience’ prove, in this instance, well justified.
[endnotes not included]

Whether Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words passes or fails the page 99 test is a moot point. The page itself focusses on spelling, setting the stage for a wider exploration of Johnson’s engagement with written language in his Dictionary of the English Language of 1755. Johnson had been expected – as his patron Lord Chesterfield had declared – to institute a reform of language, settling, stabilising, and regulating the variations which English all too often revealed. ‘One great end of this undertaking is to fix the English language’, Johnson agreed in the Plan of a Dictionary deferentially addressed to Chesterfield in 1747. Spelling was a vexed topic for contemporary writers; ‘auricular spelling’ (spelling by what a word sounded like) was, Chesterfield stressed, a particular fault of women, which rendered their missives illegible and incomprehensible. If dictionaries must, of necessity, provide a reference model of spelling, Johnson was expected to prescribe a newly corrected norm of use. That Johnson fixed English spelling still remains a prime element in popular conviction about what Johnson achieved.

And yet … Page 99 opens by considering Johnson’s evident scepticism about spelling reform. Writers in this tradition, he observes, evidently ‘take pleasure in departing from custom’ or the patterns of language in actual use. Spelling reformers, as Johnson adds with conspicuous irony, presumably ‘dread the fascination of lavish praise’. Comments of this kind do not suggest that Johnson was keen to meet the same fate. The rather different realities of what Johnson as dictionary-maker does in terms of spelling – especially in terms of his nuanced engagement with variation and change, are documented, however, on subsequent pages. Page 99 sets up the theme, of norms and dissent, but we need to read on – just as we do in order to explore the other dynamics which intervene in the fixed state of language to which Johnson was initially bound.

Chesterfield’s vision of English as a dictatorship of words, with Johnson in control, is rejected. Instead, images of suffrage, and democracy, can, as here, come to the fore. ‘I have left, in the examples, to every authour his own practice unmolested, that the reader may balance suffrages, and judge between us’, Johnson writes of the practice, and principles, which inform the Dictionary in this context. Johnson’s journey into words, as in the overarching theme of the book, does not always lead him – or us -- where we might expect.

Learn more about Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue