McGuffey Readers

Created by Ohio University’s Fourth President

William Holmes McGuffey was president of Ohio University from 1839 to 1843 and created the first four volumes of The Eclectic Readers, commonly known as the McGuffey Readers. (The last two of the six volumes were created by William’s brother, Alexander Hamilton McGuffey, in 1844 and 1857.) These were the nation’s first primers, used in classrooms across America to teach reading, and much more. 

Between 1836 and 1960, approximately 120 million copies were sold, matched only by sales of the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary. For more than a century, then, the Readers played a central role in shaping American identity and values, inspiring such prominent figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and the Wright Brothers.

Humanistic Values

McGuffey began his career as an educator in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, going on to teach ancient languages at Miami University for 10 years (1826-36). At this time, education largely occurred in the home on the Ohio frontier, but there was a growing movement to support public education. Seeing a market for textbooks, the small Cincinnati publishing firm Truman and Smith commissioned McGuffey to produce the Eclectic Readers, and the first four volumes were published 1836-1837. The Readers were originally colored by William Holmes McGuffey’s Presbyterian Calvinist beliefs; they included scriptural selections and guiding questions meant to inculcate moral values of industry, thrift, temperance, and kindness. They were significantly revised in 1879 and made more secular in tone. Although McGuffey had no hand in the revision, his name had become so closely wed to the primers that it still graced the cover.

Lasting Influence

The Readers played an important role in promoting literacy and shaping literary taste in America. In 1936, Harvey Minnich praised McGuffey’s great service to “millions of American Readers” in introducing them not just to “a dependable moral and ethical code” but also “to the world’s best literature” (William Holmes McGuffey and His Readers, vii). The Readers featured eclectic stories, poems, essays, and speeches from a variety of sources, which every school child learned to recognize. In an attempt to revive the lost art of oratory, the Readers encouraged students to memorize and recite passages, such as Hamlet’s famous “To be, or not to be” speech. In this way, the Readers were instrumental in popularizing Shakespeare, as well as home-grown American writers like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, forging a shared culture as well as shared values.

The Readers’ influence could be felt well into the 20th century. Industrialist Henry Ford was such a fan that in the 1930s, he republished all six volumes and had them distributed across America, and even had the log cabin where McGuffey was born transported to his museum of Americana in Dearborn, Michigan. American composer Burrill Phillip found inspiration in the primers for his first important orchestral work titled Selections from McGufffey’s Readers. He confessed in his diary in 1933, “I don’t think anybody had written such ‘American-sounding’ music before. On the first night, the students said it was corny. And it was. But I didn’t care, because it was a huge success.” At Ohio University, there was even a musical revue that paid tribute to McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, written in 1928 by Irma Voigt, the university’s first Dean of Women, and her longtime companion Edith Wray, English Department Chair.  (Follow the link to see the revue.)

Modern Critiques

In the 20th and 21st centuries, evangelical homeschooling parents have used the McGuffey Readers to recapture 19th- century values and to reposition Christian morality at the center of education. Others have criticized the Readers for perpetuating the racial and gender biases of their day by “not addressing the injustices of slavery, referring to Native Americans as ‘savages,’ having anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic overtones, and reinforcing the traditional role of women as homemakers” (“William Homes McGuffey and His Popular Readers,” blog, The Henry Ford Organization, Jan. 12, 2022).  

History professor Johann Neem argues that in aiming to draw religious lessons without espousing a sectarian viewpoint, McGuffey was actually aiming for a middle ground: He wanted “to offer something that reflected the nation’s culture and values without inciting division” (Neem, “The Strange Afterlife of William McGuffey and His Readers,” The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2018, 118). 

McGuffey Hall is named to commemorate Ohio University’s fourth president, whose biggest legacy is editing these influential Readers.