Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [275]
IN ONE OF THE few light moments of a grim summer, the President responded to a request from Attorney General Moody as to the correct orthography of Justice Department press releases. “I can only advise you to follow the example of the younger Mr. Weller just prior to the moment when he was in such unseemly fashion advised by the elder Mr. Weller how to spell his own name—and this to the great scandal of the court.”
“Simplified Spelling” was now, by presidential edict, compulsory usage in all Administration documents. Roosevelt had become a convert of a philological reform movement emanating from Columbia University. An impressive phalanx of academics with letters trailing after their names sought to remove as many letters as possible from words that only a typesetter could love. They cited the carefree irregularities of spelling in past centuries (pointing out that the Swan of Avon himself never seemed to know how to spell Shakespeare), and asked why contemporary stylists had become so obsessed with standardization. The answer was, of course, that unpronounced letters caused confusion—hence, incredibly, 1,690 variants of the noun diarrhea, a word of common significance if there ever was one. Spelling, free of ambiguities, they argued would do away with the need of standardization, and schoolchildren and civil servants could take exams without fear.
In its Circular number 6 for the summer of 1906, Columbia’s Simplified Spelling Board, flush with a gift of ten thousand dollars from Andrew Carnegie, declined to propose “any change in the spelling of proper names, especially of surnames,” thus ensuring that their donor would not feel obliged to sign any future checks Andru Karnegi. The President, similarly content not to become Rozevelt, embraced the Board’s recommendations with the enthusiasm of a man of letters who had long since objected to the practice of putting a u in honor.
It seemed to him that Circular number 6 and its predecessors justified the adoption of some “very moderate and common-sense” spelling reforms, which would keep the government in step with “the ablest and most practical educators of our time”—men such as Thomas R. Lounsbury, Professor of English at Yale University. In a letter to the Public Printer of the United States, Roosevelt ordered simplified spelling of some three hundred frequently used words. Such changes, he argued, were “but a very slight extension of the unconscious movement which has made agricultural implement makers and farmers write plow instead of plough … just as all people who speak English now write bat, set, dim, sum, and fish, instead of the Elizabethan batte, sette, dimme, summe, and fysshe.”
There could be little protest against these examples—certainly not by menu writers in Chinatown, where dim sum was already approved usage. But Roosevelt’s appended list of new spellings caused a sensation in bureaucratic Washington:
addresst blusht comprize deprest egis fagot gazel kist partizan phenix pur ript snapt thru vext winkt
Soon, the nation’s newspapers were vying with one another to coin new, sarcastic simplifications, until Harper’s Weekly complained, “THIS IS TU MUTCH.” Members of Congress and the Supreme Court announced their absolute unwillingness to go along. Roosevelt seemed to sense defeat, even as he insisted that he would continue to use the new styles himself. He told the Public Printer that none of his changes should be considered permanent. “If they do not ultimately meet with popular approval they will be dropt, and that is all there is about it.”
ON 29 SEPTEMBER, President Estrada Palma and his entire Cabinet resigned, leaving Taft with no alternative under the Platt Amendment but to issue a declaration of intervention by the United States. He established himself as the temporary executive of a “Cuban” administration, “conforming as far as may be to the Constitution of Cuba,” and operating under the Cuban flag. Roosevelt had insisted