Global Perspectives on
Language Standards in Composition Classrooms
Notes from a presentation at
Spring Teaching Conference
The Writing Program, Syracuse University
Rebecca Moore Howard
27 February 2004
The historical moment which saw the emergence of "English" as an academic discipline also produced the nineteenth-century colonial form of imperialism. . . . It can be argued that the study of English and the growth of Empire proceeded from a single ideological climate and that the development of the one is intrinsically bound up with the development of the other, both at the level of simple utility (as propaganda for instance) and at the unconscious level, where it leads to the naturalizing of constructed values (e.g. civilization, humanity, etc.) which, conversely, established "savagery," "native," "primitive," as their antitheses and as the object of a reforming zeal. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin 3)
In England, efforts to establish "mass education and a standardized language" occurred at the same time as "the coming of industrialization and colonialism" (Pennycook 118). In the U.S., efforts to establish instruction in the standard code occurred, not coincidentally, at the same time as mass education, unprecedented class and race conflict, and imperialism.
The U.S. endured five depressions between 1873 and 1915. Following the first of these depressions, written entrance exams were established at Harvard in 1874. More than half the applicants to Harvard failed the exam, leading to public outcry about illiteracy and to the "temporary" institution of a remedial writing course (proposed by A.S. Hill) that "within fifteen years [became] standard at almost every college in America" (Connors 11).
The year 1877 brought a cataclysmic railroad strike, one that, says Painter,
began to change American life and thought. . . . [T]he strike awakened everyone to the existence of an intense, formless anger among poor and working people that was too shocking to be consonant with the older ideal of an American society spared class conflict. . . . [T]he strike gave notice that American society, long accustomed to seeing itself as exempt from the class struggles that rent Europe, no longer enjoyed this exemption. (24)
In 1878, Adams Sherman Hill's Principles of Rhetoric "blamed democratic practices for the 'ubiquity of bad English'" (Connors 62).
Composition became a required college course at Harvard in 1885. Colleges across the nation were quick to follow suit.
Four of the seven convicted of the 1886 Haymarket bombing at a labor rally in Chicago were executed. In that same year, John Genung published his Practical Elements of Rhetoric. "Genung identified the individual writer as an independent craftsman who perfected his craft through strength of character" (Brody 143). His metaphors, Miriam Brody adds, were not so much those of craft and work as they were of combat.
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was first deployed to jail labor agitators rather than to break up corporate trusts. Barrett Wendell published his English Composition in 1891; W.E.B. Du Bois was his student at Harvard. Ingrained in Wendell's pedagogy was an obsession with correctness. Like Genung's, Wendell's textbook was "atomistic in perspective, dividing and subdividing the subject into many discrete classes, levels, figures, skills, behaviors, and rules" (Connors 83). Written composition, Wendell believed, could be studied in a highly scientific, methodical, controlled way.
The current-traditionalism that Wendell participated in pioneering amounts to "a theory of graphic display" or an ideal to be applied in all situations, one that insists on students' unerring replication of "institutionally sanctioned forms" (Sharon Crowley 94-97). "Current-traditional rhetoric," James Berlin adds, "is the triumph of the scientific and technical world view" (Writing 62). Berlin recurs to this argument twelve years later, in his Rhetorics, Poetics, Cultures, when he describes current-traditional rhetoric as "text production for the new scientific meritocracy" (28). The idea is an important one, because it emphasizes an ideal of control, one on which character and merit will be based. Current-traditionalism excludes pathos, emotion, and is instead dedicated to argument advanced exclusively through the logic and method of logos. "[E]xcessive language . . . damaged meaning not only by overloading meaning with imagery but, as Channing suggested and A.S. Hill echoed, by threatening thought" (Brody 115). John Genung and Wendell "took up Channing's call for purposeful, self-confident, original, and productive writing. . . ." (116). Wendell offered sensible but heuristically useless principles of arrangement: "[1] Every composition should group itself about one central idea; [2] The chief part of every composition should be so placed as readily to catch the eye; [3] Finally, the relation of each part of a composition to its neighbors should be unmistakable" (Berlin, Writing 70).
Derived from Alexander Bain, Wendell's description of an organic relationship between the parts of composition represented the writer in a relative state of freedom or submission to the text, as if in a form of heroic combat with the creative enterprise of writing. From the fixedness of the word, bound by word order to meaning rather than the freedom of an inflected lexicon, the writer ascended to the freedom of the paragraph and the ability to move sentences around within it. (Brody 150)
In the year following the publication of Wendell's influential textbook, the 1892 miners' strike in Homestead, Pennsylvania, escalated to a "bloody struggle [that] ended in military occupation" (Painter 110).
The Homestead strike occurred on the cusp of a period described by David Nugent: "[D]uring the three years of 1893 to 1895 class conflict became so severe that the U.S. secretary of state referred to 'symptoms of revolution' throughout the land" (8).
In 1898 the Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, killing a crew of 266, and the U.S. went to war against Spain. The first battle was Commodore Perry's victory in the Philippines. According to Painter, the Philippines presented the U.S. with a shipping stepping-stone to China, which was regarded as a necessary market for U.S. overproduction. Nugent adds that philanthropy as well as militarism contributed to U.S. imperialist efforts in the Asian arena: Because U.S. manufacturers needed the market in China, turn-of-the-century philanthropic efforts were focused there. The economic prospects were threatened by Chinese nationalism, which was mobilized in the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, to which United States intervention brought an end. "And Protestant clergymen," Painter says," one of the most expansionist-minded segments of the American population, imagined the millions of Chinese as potential converts" (Painter 147). And she offers this analysis:
[T]he Spanish-American and European wars produced . . . intolerance: the pressure for conformity of race. Racism has been an American ideology since the institutionalization of slavery in the late seventeenth century, and its manifestation at the turn of the century was not new. But the Spanish-American War witnessed a frenzied pursuit of imperialism, white supremacy, and Anglo-Saxonism that redefined American society and characterized it by race. (Painter 389)
The belated entry of the U.S. to the global imperialism of 1870-1900 prompted a sense of Anglo-American fellow-feelingÑand concomitant white supremacy (149-150). Painter explains,
As often as not appeals to destiny meant race destiny. . . . Expansion rose above politics and laws because within the unity that was human history, Americans were playing a preordained role. Imperialism was elemental, racial, predestined, for God had prepared the English-speaking people, master organizers, for governing what [Senator Albert J.] Beveridge called "savage and senile people." Americans must accept colonies and begin the regeneration of the world or see the world relapse into barbarism. (151)
Only Anglo-Saxons, said Senator Benjamin Tillman, were "capable of self-government." Hence it was their responsibility to govern and civilize the races that were not yet so developed. "This chain of logic reached an unavoidable conclusion: the United States must rule the Philippines out of duty. This was not mere imperialism; it was mission" (152).
Significantly, Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden," which articulated the logic of empire, appeared in the U.S. in the muckraking McClure's magazine in February 1899. The shared sense of imperialist mission had grave implications for domestic issues:
One result of the rhetoric of empire and the white man's burden was a vastly increased emphasis on race nationally. Of course, race had been a potent political factor before 1898, especially in the South, but the proclamations and debates on war and annexation invariably stressed race by translating a wide variety of political questions into racial terms. American expansion was not interpreted simply as the spread of the American polity, with its ethnically diverse population. It was emphatically and explicitly the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon. Non-Anglo-Saxon whites were forgotten, and nonwhites everywhere were lumped together as "inferior races" (Painter 168)
The result was a drastic reduction of civil rights in the U.S. In both North and South, the belief that too many people were voting took hold, and by 1910, "registration and secret ballots had disfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters, black and white, inside and outside the South" (Painter 229).
During the same period that the U.S. was engaging in imperialist expansion and domestic disfranchisement, composition and rhetoric was becoming a field. Robert Connors identifies the period 1885 to 1910Ña period that encompasses the Spanish-American War and the Boxer RebellionÑas the period of "consolidation composition-rhetoric," when the field was coalescing around Wendell's rhetoric, adopting current-traditional tenets of order and control that would dominate composition studies into the 1960s and endure to the present day (Connors 11-12).
The years 1885-1910 not only saw the rise of composition but also the violent exercise of white supremacy. Post-Civil War democratic gains were rolled back, state by state, as African Americans were deprived not only of the right to vote but of their very lives. "Between 1885 and 1900, 2,500 lynchings, mostly of blacks, occurred in the United States, mainly in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana" (Painter 164). The lynchings continued unabated through the Spanish-American War and increased during the Philippine-American war. There were 100 lynchings of African Americans recorded in 1901. "Before the twentieth century had advanced very far, all the sizable nonwhite populations under American control enjoyed only limited civil rights, whether as noncitizen Native Americans or Chinese, subjects in the islands, or disfranchised black citizens in the South" (167). Following a 1906 performance in Atlanta of Thomas Dixon's stage version of The Clansman, an episode of mob violence driven by white supremacy left one white man and twenty-five African Americans dead.
The first college writers' handbook was published the next year, in 1907 (Woolley). The net effect of the handbook phenomenon in composition pedagogy would quickly become one of "lock[ing] the teacher into a secondary role, a caretaker and enforcer of the 'father's' rules" (Hawhee 513-14). Although Woolley's was the first handbook for U.S. college composition courses, it had a fifteenth-century predecessor that Alastair Pennycook identifies: When Nebrija offered his Gramatica Castellana in 1492 (fifteen days after Columbus began his voyage), it was, in his words, to provide "state control over the shape of people's everyday subsistence" through a prescribed grammar (111). Pennycook specifies Nebrija's aims: "He argues that this first attempt to describe Spanish dialects as a uniform, standardized entity would be a crucial tool both in creating a notion of homogeneity within the nation and as a tool of linguistic colonization beyond the shores of Spain" (118).
Nebrija's concerns with homogeneity and unity are echoed in the early twentieth-century United States, where the issue of immigrants stirred just as much passion as did race relations. The number of immigrants was vast:
In 1912 much of the industrial working class outside the South (as opposed to farmers, clerks, and professionals) consisted of immigrants or the children of immigrants. Between 1901 and 1910 an immense wave of 6,300,000 immigrants arrived in the United States, many from southern and eastern Europe and the Middle East. By 1910 one-third of the American people had either been born outside the United States or had at least one foreign parent. (Painter 263).
And the threats posed by immigrants were also perceived to be vast. "Along with their enormous labor power, immigrants brought unfamiliar languages and customs, and their working-class status and cultural distinctiveness fueled the middle-class nativism that had been growing since the late nineteenth century" (263-264). That nativism was expressed in open, active hostility to working-class immigrants.
During 1915 preparedness advocates had all too often combined their demands for military spending with attacks on immigrants and appeals for 100-percent-Americanism, initially perhaps because Irish-Americans and German-Americans endorsed neutrality. But bigotry had no roots in reason and acquired its own momentum. As though it were impossible to augment the armed services without indulging in nativism, President Wilson adopted the rhetoric of 100-percent-Americanism as he moved away from peace and toward preparedness. (Painter 309-310)
This open, active hostility to immigrants followed close on the heels of changes in college curricula that, in Bruce Horner and John Trimbur's analysis, contributed to a culture of monolingualism in the U.S. No longer did all college students learn to translate between English and the classical languages. The modern language instruction that replaced classics was conducted in separate, autonomous departments. Writing, the highest form of language use, was taught only in English.[1]
Describing the same period in the British Empire, Alastair Pennycook observes, "The spread of English under colonialism occasioned a massive increase in studies of the language," with the objective of "controlling and disciplining . . . the language" (108-109). The study of linguistics in the U.S. followed a similar trajectory, accompanied on this continent by the teaching of college composition, an endeavor charged with the same prescriptivism and control that Pennycook attributes to colonialist linguistics:
With the spread of English across the empire, the issue of the standardization of English became not merely one of cultural politics within Great Britain but increasingly one of imperial cultural politics. The putting into discourse of a view of a global standard English was to become a key tenet of the discourse of EIL. The significance of a process of standardization should not be overlooked for it is connected both to the construction of social difference (by privileging one form of language over others and giving people differential access to that privileged form) and to the denial of forms of social difference (by regulating the forms of expression available in the language). (110)
I am not arguing that the expansion of U.S. capital into the global arena and its consolidation caused SWE or the teaching of college composition. Rather, I am describing the conditions in which required first-year composition arose, and some of the ways in which its concerns with language standards are illuminated by those conditions. The method of my argument corresponds to that of Judith Butler in a recent article exploring relationships between global terrorism and imperialism:
When President Arroyo of the Philippines on October 29, 2001, remarks that "the best breeding ground [for terrorism] is poverty," or Arundhati Roy claims that bin Laden has been "sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid waste by America's foreign policy," something less than a strictly causal explanation is being offered. . . . This is not God creating Eve from the rib of Adam, life generating life, but death generating death, and through a means that is figural, not precisely causal. Indeed, both of them make use of figuresÑgrounds and bonesÑto bespeak a kind of generation that precedes and exceeds a strictly causal frame. Both of them are pointing to conditions, not causes. A condition of terrorism can be necessary or sufficient. If it is necessary, it is a state of affairs without which terrorism cannot take hold, one that terrorism absolutely requires. If it is sufficient, its presence is enough for terrorism to take place. Conditions do not "act" in the way that individual agents do, but no agent acts without them. (183)
In the period I am describing, U.S. society had a growing need for the demonstration of the racial and class superiority that justified imperialism. LanguageÑspecifically, "mastery" of the privileged codeÑprovided one such demonstration. Hence the global expansion of U.S. capital provided a fertile condition for the rise of SWE hegemony and its dominance in the newly-created college composition classrooms, just as the global consolidation of U.S. capital today provides conditions for renewed language standards in domestic composition classrooms; the state-by-state advance of English Only legislation (paralleling, in a startling way, the state-by-state successes in disfranchisement a century ago); and the celebrated advance of English as a global lingua franca.
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[1] Moreover, Horner and Trimbur find evidence of a contemporary link between composition instruction and anti-immigrant sentiment: the rhetoric of contemporary anti-immigration agitation parallels the language in which open admissions and instruction in basic writing is rejected. "Basic writers have commonly been described as immigrants and foreigners to the academy, those whose right to be there is suspect and whose presence is often seen as a threat to the culture, economy, and physical environment of the academy" (609).