Or consider these lines from another unread classic:
[W]hatever man you meet who needs your aid, you have no reason to refuse to help him. Say, “He is a stranger”; but the Lord has given him a mark that ought to be familiar to you, by virtue of the fact that he forbids you to despise your own flesh. Say, “He is contemptible and worthless”; but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image. Say that you owe nothing for any service of his; but God, as it were, has put him in his own place in order that you may recognize toward him the many and great benefits with which God has bound you to himself. Say that he does not deserve even your least effort for his sake; but the image of God, which recommends him to you, is worthy of your giving yourself and all your possessions. Now if he has not only deserved no good at your hand, but has also provoked you by unjust acts and curses, not even this is just reason why you should cease to embrace him in love and to perform the duties of love on his behalf. You will say, “He has deserved something far different of me.” Yet what has the Lord deserved? While he bids you forgive this man for all sins he has committed against you, he would truly have them charged against himself. Assuredly there is but one way in which to achieve what is not merely difficult but utterly against human nature: to love those who hate us, to repay their evil deeds with benefits, to return blessings for reproaches. It is that we remember not to consider men’s evil intention but to look upon the image of God in them, which cancels and effaces their transgressions, and with its beauty and dignity allures us to love and embrace them.
That is from the Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), the major theological work of John Calvin, not a man known among us for generosity of spirit. But then we do not do him or the many generations immersed in his thought the courtesy of reading him. No more do we hesitate to interpret their works and ways in light of assumptions that are smug and dismissive. Any reader of the Institutes must be struck by the great elegance, the gallantry, of its moral vision, which is more beautiful for the resolution with which its theology embraces sorrow and darkness. Again, if we looked at Calvin, we might perhaps understand why he engrossed so much of our culture for so long, and we might even have grounds for a new understanding of our tradition.
I raise these issues because they are important and because they are relatively straightforward. The New England Primer was or was not the product and expression of New England civilization. John Calvin did or did not encourage acquisitiveness, this-worldliness, intolerance, contempt for humankind, stoicism, and so on. Provision for the poor, by governments and by individuals, was or was not a feature of the ethic and practice of early America. Significantly misleading things are said and assumed about figures very accessible to scrutiny, whose reputations would greatly benefit from the slightest attention, and about texts that are never consulted though they are perfectly available.
All this is by way of preparation for a discussion of certain other texts which are always described as central to the development of American culture and which are very little read and little considered — the McGuffey readers. For those who have not looked into them, it may be useful to know that, as with the New England Primer, those who studied them were not assumed to be children. The fourth, fifth, and sixth readers were meant to be used in high school or college, but lessons that appear in the fourth reader in one edition will appear in the second reader in another. The content of the readers reflects the irregularity of education and the uneven spread of literacy as well as a great scarcity of books. As with Calvin, as with the Primer, it is as if we know so much about McGuffey’s readers that we need know nothing at all about them. But in fact they are documents of remarkable interest, not least because they are an early and influential cultural product of the Middle West, a highly distinctive and crucial region which is very generally assumed to have neither culture nor history.
I am tracing a lineage here. McGuffey is the intellectual descendant of Calvin’s Institutes and the New England Primer, an active Presbyterian minister and a professor of ancient languages and moral philosophy. He has not escaped the hereditary curse. He is believed to have created or codified a common American culture, and in doing so to have instilled shirtsleeve values of honesty and hard work in generations of children. Moral, cheerful, narrow, and harmless — insofar as such traits are consistent with harmlessness — his texts supposedly expressed and propagated the world view of the American middle class. The historian Henry Steele Commager, who edited a reprint edition of the Fifth Reader of 1879, says in his introduction, “For all its preoccupation with religion, the morality of the Readers was materialistic and worldly. It taught a simple system of rewards and punishments … Nothing was left to the imagination, nothing to chance, and nothing, one is tempted to say, to conscience … It was a middle-class, conventional, and equalitarian morality … Industry, sobriety, thrift, propriety, modesty, punctuality, conformity — these were the essential virtues, and those who practiced them were sure of success. Success, too, for all the patina of morality that was brushed over it, was clearly material.” He concludes, mysteriously, “If [the Readers] did not themselves provide the stuff of culture and morality, they were one of the chief instruments for weaving this stuff into the fabric of American life.” Commager discusses only William Holmes McGuffey, never mentioning that the fifth and sixth readers were always and only edited by his brother, Alexander Hamilton McGuffey.