Nostalgia: Why Did McGuffeyites Remember?

Nostalgia can be explained by both the substance of the past that is chosen as well as the individuals and the era that choose to revive the past. A memory is likely to become nostalgic if it is a memory of one's personally experienced past that is viewed in a positive light and perceived to contrast with regrettable present circumstances. Thus, nostalgia is the subjective view of the past as a pleasant departure from the present.

Nostalgia is particularly reassuring during times of perceived discontinuity and decline. According to historian David Lowenthal, nostalgia is the "search for a simple and stable past as a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present." (1) From the 1920s to the 1950s, nostalgia lent a sense of stability to a tumultuous period. The anxieties of urbanization, technological change, the Great Depression, World War II, the atomic bomb, and the rise of the Cold War compelled people to remember, or imagine, a more agreeable past. The successes of Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, Colonial Williamsburg, and Disneyland during this period are emblematic of a popular desire to connect with a shared, harmonious era. Childhood memories of the McGuffey Readers were a common link to a "simpler" past that seemed to resolve the anxieties of the present.

Several commentators noted the centrality of nostalgia to the McGuffey movement:

• According to journalist Hugh Fullerton, the society "renewed their school days by meeting and reading and reciting the old lessons." (3)
  
• In her biography of McGuffey, Alice McGuffey Ruggles wrote, "About the turn of the century, when the Readers were going out of use, a remarkable revival of historical interest in them began to spring up all over the country. Men and women who had been children in the 1850's, '60s, and 70's had reached the sentimental age. Their schooldays assumed a halcyon glow, and they began to unearth from attics and the top shelves of bookcases certain old dog-eared school Readers." (4)
  
• Ruggles explained the nostalgia the Readers inspired. "Difficult to analyze, for those who were not brought up on the 'McGuffeys,' is the mysterious hold the books have upon those who were. They did something to one... their devotees today are the men and women who were brought up in the prosperous decades between 1890 and 1910, and often in bookish homes. Let their eyes light upon a reprint of a McGuffey illustration, and their faces will relax into a happy smile. Put one of the old books into their hands, and their fingers will close affectionately over it. Turning the leaves, some spring loosens in the frozen heart's core and a thousand memories, painful and sweet, rush into the mind. Faces of teachers, of boys and girls, long forgotten, rising out of the misty past, again to be loved, feared, and hated. Tramps through snow and rain and heat with a satchel of books and a tin lunchbox... who can ever forget them? The first thrill comes back now as they are read over again after all these years. They are a part of the very stuff of one's mind forever." (5)
  
• Historian Walter Havinghurst also wrote about the Societies. "A National Federation of McGuffey Societies met annually on the Miami campus, a congress of piety and remembrance. They recalled the lessons of long ago... They told and retold how young William Holmes McGuffey walked six miles to recite Latin to his tutor, how he memorized poems, orations and whole books of the Bible. They wrote odes to the great educator 'whose classroom was a nation' and sang hymns to his memory. On the centennial of the first publication of the Readers they dedicated a memorial statue in the west courtyard of McGuffey Hall. In the warm slow summer under the Oxford trees they relived wintry days in the red schoolhouse where the jolly old pedagogue 'tall and slender and sallow an dry' opened to them the safe, sure, pious guidance of the eclectic Readers. The doubt and confusion of the 1930's increased their wistfulness for the simpler past." (6)

The other pages in this section explain how McGuffeyites' fond personal memories of the Readers, juxtaposed with perceived crises of the present, caused individuals to gather together to share their memories.

(1) Lowenthal, 21.
(2) "Eclectic Reader."
(3) Fullerton, "Two Jolly Old Pedagogues," 99.
(4) Ruggles, 122.
(5) Ibid., 102.
(6) Havinghurst, 67-68.