The Idealists

by Justin Peters

  The Statute of Anne, as the law was called, was the first modern copyright statute and subsequently became the model for future copyright legislation passed in the United Kingdom and the United States. Named after the reigning British monarch, the statute rejected the notion that perpetual copyright was a natural law akin to those of gravity, attraction, or optics. Instead, it established a fixed copyright term of fourteen years from the date of a new book’s initial publication, renewable once. Moreover, the act decreed that the copyright belonged to the author, as opposed to the publisher or printer. In so doing, the Statute of Anne indicated that copyright existed not as a censorship tool, but as an incentive to produce—an act of public policy, not an assertion of moral rights. Authors weren’t the only parties empowered: the law was deemed “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning,” meant to increase the production of “useful Books” from which the entire kingdom might benefit. Copyright had been reframed.

  Though the law was disliked and disputed by many, it lasted, more or less, for over a century. For the British author, the Statute of Anne did far more good than harm. But the Statute of Anne had no direct effect on the American author, at least not at first. The law did not apply in the colonies, and besides, at the time of its passage there weren’t any American authors to speak of. The printing trade there was nascent; there was scant indigenous literary culture. As of 1775, the thirteen colonies had a mere thirty-seven newspapers, most of them based in major cities.6 The most common books were Bibles and other religious texts. Despite its occasional aphorists, theologians, and pamphleteers, colonial America was an inarticulate place, and its residents were not expected to have their own ideas.7

  They had them anyway, and after the colonies won their independence in the Revolutionary War, Americans began to compile these stray ideas into a coherent national thesis statement. Fundamental was the notion of free expression: that citizens of the republic were allowed to say what they wanted, whether or not they had anything to say. Eventually, lawmakers came to see the merit in encouraging the expression of original and articulate American ideas, as opposed to reheated British ones. This intellectual nationalism came to constitute the most compelling argument for an omnibus copyright law. That argument was taken up most vigorously by a loud and brilliant young man named Noah Webster.

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  WEBSTER was born in 1758, at once ten years too late and 220 years too soon. He would have made an outstanding Framer, if only he’d been old enough, what with his patriotic zeal, his rhetorical gifts, and his lifelong interest in telling his fellow citizens what was best for them. He would probably have thrived on the Internet, too, with its taste for disputatious pedantry, and its core constituency of strident, insecure nerds. But Webster missed his moment, and though he eventually found a niche, he nevertheless spent much of his life chasing the acclaim that could well have been his but for bad timing.

  The fourth child of a resoundingly normal Connecticut farmer, Webster matriculated at Yale in 1774, at age sixteen, and did not fight in the Revolutionary War. (Later in life he would rather pathetically offer an anecdote about how, as a volunteer militiaman in 1777, he had “shouldered the best musket he could find” and “marched up the Hudson” to help fight the Battle of Saratoga. Left unsaid was that the battle had already ended by the time he arrived.)8 At Yale, he studied classics and divinity, ate “cabbage, turnip and dandelion greens with plenty of cider passed round in pewter cans,”9 and delivered one of the class orations upon graduation in 1778, on the theme of natural philosophy and the merits of empirical inquiry. Webster “was committed to bringing order to the world through his intellectual labors,” wrote the biographer Joshua Kendall, “though he hadn’t yet figured out exactly what those labors might be.”10

  He returned home to a destitute father and a cloudy future. The war had sapped the elder Webster’s savings, leaving him unable to support his son’s continued education. His father handed him a devalued wartime banknote and, effectively, told his son that he must now become a man. “Take this,” Noah Sr. said, “you must now seek your living; I can do no more for you.”11

  Webster sulked briefly, and then, like countless thwarted philosophers before and since, decided that, for lack of better options, he would become a teacher.12 So he opened a succession of schools, first in Connecticut, then in New York, where he taught wealthy children how to read, write, and—occasionally—sing. The standard spelling text at the time was an arid volume called A New Guide to the English Tongue, written by an English schoolmaster named Thomas Dilworth. Webster soon came to despise both the book and, rather unfairly, its deceased author.

  For one thing, Webster thought it unpatriotic to teach young Americans to read and write using a textbook that glorified the nation’s former colonial overlords. “[Dilworth] has twelve or fifteen pages devoted to names of English, Scotch and Irish towns and boroughs. Whatever purpose these may have served in Great-Britain, they certainly are useless in America,” Webster sniped.13 “And yet ten thousands of these books are annually reprinted and find rapid sale, when one half of the work is totally useless and the other half defective and erroneous.” So Webster decided to write his own book of grammatical instruction, one that was neither useless nor defective, one that was deliberately tuned for American ears.

  Webster believed that proper pronunciation could help save the United States—the formation of which, in the early 1780s, still struck some people as a reckless mistake. The Revolutionary War had been won, the British subdued, leaving behind a loose alliance of self-governing states united by geographical proximity, the memory of battlefield camaraderie, and a common language, sort of. Though English was the new nation’s mother tongue, its various regional dialects threatened to perpetuate the sorts of class divisions to which the republic was ostensibly opposed. While “all men are created equal” is nice in theory, tacit class divisions would always exist in America as long as educated men spoke the King’s English and drawling yokels persisted in saying sparrowgrass for asparagus, ax for ask, chimbley for chimney. A nation divided over the proper pronunciation of asparagus could not stand.

  The idea that a country’s grammar is central to its collective identity is more than just an English teacher’s aspirational delusion. The words and constructs we use to define and articulate the world around us affect the way we understand it. Webster wrote of “the influence of a national language on national opinions,” and his ambition to “detach this country as much as possible from its dependence on the parent country.”14 How could the United States ever be truly independent if its linguistic customs were wholly indistinguishable from those of its former masters?

  “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms, & it is not impossible, but a person of my youth may have some influence in exciting a spirit of literary industry,” Webster wrote in 1783.15 Webster had not been one of the heroes of the American Revolution. But he was determined to win glory in the nation’s battle for cultural independence.

  Webster published his spelling textbook in 1783. The official title was A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, but since that name was both long and terrible, most people just called it the “blue-backed speller,” after the color of its cover.16 The book emphasized instruction on the syllabic level. It was filled with stories and sentences designed to appeal to the curious American child. The Institute, he believed, would help demolish the possibility that an American might be judged on the way he spoke rather than on what he said. With luck, it might also make Webster rich and famous. For all those things to happen, the book had to be ubiquitous. And for that to happen, Webster needed to do two things: secure endorsements from the country’s most prominent men and put the book under copyright.

  Thus the story of copyright in America begins, more or less, with Noah Webster, the self-promoting, painfully insecure lexicographer who was determined to profit from his peculiar greatness. Webster was a lobbyist and a pros
elytizer, a prig, a pedant, a prodigy. “His mind was not subtle or graceful; he had not the faculty of creating, nor, so far as I can discover, of appreciating literature,” wrote his first biographer, Horace Scudder.17 For most of Webster’s life, according to the cultural historian Tim Cassedy, “the overwhelming majority of what he wrote was met with jeers and boos in newspapers and magazines throughout the United States.”18 Webster’s passions often made him a pariah, and, while it would be incorrect to say that he did not care about being vilified—as one of the most insecure great men of his era, he did, very much—he didn’t let the public resistance prevent him from pursuing his goals.

  While the concept of copyright was not novel when Webster first took it up, and while he was certainly not its only American advocate, he is nevertheless an important figure, not just for all that he did in the service of literary property, but for how he did it, and for who he was. If the story of copyright in America begins with Noah Webster, then the following chapters have often belonged to people like Noah Webster: earnest, linear young men and women who resolved to harangue a largely indifferent populace into caring about intellectual property and its sociopolitical implications. Their arguments were occasionally self-serving, and almost always framed in moral and patriotic terms: strong copyright laws, they maintained, were good for authors, for publishers, and for the welfare of Christian America. “Information is fatal to despotism,” Noah Webster wrote in 1788, and a literate, informed public was an unchained public.19 Webster was among the first in a line of Americans who came to believe that good information, widely disseminated, would make the nation stronger and more free. And as much as anyone else, Webster can also take credit for teaching Americans that the most valuable material ought to be locked away.

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  ALTHOUGH Noah Webster weathered a lot of criticism in his time, even his fiercest foes would have acknowledged his diligence and ambition. By the time he was only twenty-seven years old, Webster had already written and published a series of grammar textbooks and a collection of political essays—an impressive feat in a time when “author” was about as sensible a career ambition as “astronaut.”

  While it would be inaccurate to say that Americans in the immediate postwar period had no interest in books—to the contrary, the Revolution made new readers out of common people who had never before had any immediate incentive to participate in civic life—the young nation was not situated to cultivate its own writers. The publishing historian William Charvat has written that, even as late as 1820, there were no full-time literary authors in America. The shortage is at least partially attributable to the republic’s rickety copyright and printing infrastructure.20

  At the time that Webster published his speller, American authors generally assumed the financial risks for their works, as publishers “lived on such a narrow margin that not many had a life of more than a few years,” wrote Charvat.21 Impoverished authors could solicit prepublication pledges from wealthy “subscribers” who agreed to prepay for copies of the forthcoming work—an early version of today’s online crowdfunding platforms, and one just as tiresome as its modern-day incarnation. But early America had few wealthy and willing subscribers; as Webster’s friend Oliver Wolcott Jr. put it years later, “It is in vain to reason with the greatest part of mankind, if they have to pay Ten Dollars, in consequence of being convinced.”22 So, for many aspiring authors, self-financing remained the best option, even though it was objectively a bad one. The scholar James N. Green described how post-Revolutionary American writers who underwrote their own works “had hopes of making a profit and perhaps even a living from their books, but most were disappointed, and some—like David Ramsay, who financed the printing and binding of his two histories of the American Revolution—lost heavily on their investments.”23

  The structural inefficiencies of the book business in early America further impeded authorial success. Printing was a shambolic trade, and writers could not always ensure the fidelity of the final product to their original manuscripts or prevent printers from issuing unauthorized editions of the same. In a 1783 letter to the president of the Continental Congress, the poet Joel Barlow noted that his American compeer John Trumbull was unlucky enough to see his epic poem McFingal “reprinted in an incorrect, cheap edition” and thus “suffers in his reputation by having his work appear under the disadvantages of typographical errors, a bad paper, a mean letter & an uncooth [sic] page, all which were necessary to the printer in order to catch the Vulgar by a low price.”24 Robust copyright laws, Barlow believed, would be the American author’s best weapon against the Vulgar.

  Barlow’s letter inspired the Continental Congress to issue a resolution, in May of 1783, encouraging the various states to draft and pass their own copyright laws. (In this pre-constitutional era, the United States was organized under the Articles of Confederation, which limited federal powers and asserted state sovereignty.) But most states were none too quick to respond. If the rise of statutory copyright in England had been contentious because it imposed a finite term of control on works that had once enjoyed perpetual protection, it was controversial in America because it asserted ownership rights where none had existed before.

  The copyright scholar William Patry has suggested that framing intellectual property as a “right” allows owners to “launder self-interest as enlightened conduct” and turn policy discussions into moral crusades.25 It would be more fair and equitable, in Patry’s opinion, to characterize copyright as a set of mutable social relationships between creators, the public, and the state, and to legislate and mediate with all parties’ interests equally in mind. The public benefit in cheap books, for example, should not always and automatically be subordinated to the private benefit in dear ones.

  In England, statutory copyright had come about after intense lobbying by printers. The movement for copyright in America was led by authors. Absent from both parties’ self-interested arguments was a clear explanation of how these laws would affect readers. While there exists no comprehensive statistical documentation of literacy rates in eighteenth-century America, anecdotal evidence suggests that the nation contained plenty of readers. As Julie Kay Hedgepeth Williams wrote in her doctoral dissertation on the printed word in early America, “Colonial Americans craved and used the printed word. They depended on it, bargained for it, swapped and loaned and made gift of it. They admired it, revered it, and were in awe of its power.”26 And they might well have looked askance at laws that would perforce affect its circulation.

  To obtain nationwide copyright laws, Webster and his comrades had to frame copyright as a truly American concept, a means of creating and stabilizing a literary middle class by allowing writers to control and profit from the sale of their works. To ensure that his books would be copyrighted, Webster decided to take responsibility for his own destiny and lobby almost every single legislature on his own behalf.

  * * *

  WEBSTER’S first forays into lobbying were comically inept. In the fall of 1782, before he had even published his speller, Webster visited New Jersey and Pennsylvania in hopes of “obtaining a law for securing to authors the copy-right of their publications.”27 Unfortunately, both state legislatures were out of session. He next stopped in Connecticut, where he petitioned “for a law to secure to me the copy-right of my proposed book.”28 While the Connecticut state legislature was actually in session—a small victory—it was too busy to entertain Webster’s proposal. In January 1783, the undaunted schoolmaster again attempted to petition the Connecticut state legislature for copyright in his own work. The state did him one better and passed the first general copyright law in the nation.29

  Webster eventually decided to expand his lobbying efforts, and in 1785 he embarked on an extended lecture tour during which he made the case for copyright—and for himself—to legislators and civic leaders in most of the Southern states. His strategy was simple. He would enter a city armed with letters of introduction to its most prominent citizens. If, as somet
imes happened, he entered a town wholly unrecommended, he would find other ways of announcing his presence. At many of his stops, Webster found time to deliver a series of dull lectures on the English language; although Webster knew that these presentations “were not very interesting to a popular audience”—an understatement—the sort of people who did attend were apt to act as allies down the line.30 “Obtain permission to read Lectures in the State House by vote of the House of Delegates,” Webster wrote in his diary on January 5, 1786. “Begin to read—to about 30 respectable people.”31

  The contemporaneous term tuft-hunter comes to mind when considering Noah Webster’s early years, and his gift for courting “respectable people” in the service of his own weird ambition. His diary from this era is filled with brief descriptions of governors met, professors visited, generals imposed upon, all in pursuit of references, testimonials, and associative glory. Though it appears that Webster was usually received with great courtesy, one wonders what his putative patrons actually thought of the overbearing young man who was so eager to share his theories and opinions on the national character and the English language, and how each influenced the other.

  For Noah Webster did not come by charm naturally. His overweening self-regard led critics to dub him a “conceited coxcomb,” an “inflated fop.” A girl with whom the young Webster was friendly once compared his literary talents disfavorably to that of her horse. (“In conversation he is even duller than in writing, if that is possible,” she added.)32 He styled himself “Noah Webster, jun. Esq.” and more than lived up to that title’s implied pomposity. Even his friends acknowledged that Webster’s unabashed egotism served to “prevent his hearers [from] receiving the satisfaction which might otherwise have been derived from many ingenious observations.”33 Like a truffle dipped in ipecac, a gift wrapped with poison ivy, Webster’s good ideas were often ruined by their repellent packaging.