Chapter 7
Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio, is a tired resort town on the shores of Lake Erie. It is also the former home of Platt Rogers Spencer, a true believer in the ennobling qualities of script. Spencer was born in Dutchess County, New York, in 1800, and moved to Ohio in 1810. He was the youngest of ten children, raised by his mother after his father passed away. He was obsessed with penmanship as a child. According to a 1900 encyclopedia entry (and perhaps backed up only by legend): “Young Spencer was always passionately fond of penmanship, writing in his early years upon anything procurable—sand, snow, ice, brick, bark, the fly-leaves of his mother’s Bible, etc., and by permission of a kind old cobbler, upon the leather in his shop.” By age fifteen he was teaching writing classes, working as a clerk and studying literature, Latin, and law as well as penmanship. He taught school and did accounting, but he decided against college when, as the 1900 biography puts it, “The drinking customs, then prevalent in society, proved too strong for him.” In 1828 he married Persis Duty, “a lady of remarkable devotion and force of character.” She got him sober, and by 1832, Spencer was lecturing on temperance and claimed he was the first American of the century to take a public stand for abstinence from alcohol. He became the Ashtabula County treasurer. He was also a passionate abolitionist and proponent of universal education. With Persis, he fathered eleven children. He was also the first American to create a penmanship franchise, a business that included schools, books, pens, and instructional materials.1
Once a year, a workshop called the Spencerian Saga is held on Geneva-on-the-Lake to teach people this script. When he is not teaching the Saga, Michael Sull—Spencer’s latter-day heir and America’s current leading penman—travels around the country giving Spencerian demonstrations. Spencerian is full of curlicues and swirls. To visualize it, picture the words “Coca-Cola,” the ubiquitous brand written on bottles and cans. As the Coca-Cola logo demonstrates, it is an ornate and complicated script not terribly popular today, even among calligraphers hired to write wedding invitations and diplomas. Sull, however, believes Spencerian to be “the most beautiful script in the history of Western Civilization.”
Sull’s pupils sit at tables learning how to wield steel nibs and make the upward strokes one must make to master Spencerian. One needs the right nib, a small piece of steel, about 1 inch by 1½ with a narrow slit through the middle and a round end for clamping it onto the holder. Holders are pens without tips, pieces of wood carefully hewn to best fit in between fingers. Writing with a nib is confusing and counterintuitive to anyone used to pencils, ballpoints, or felt tip pens. The nib sticks out at an angle from the holder, so one has to hold one’s hand further away from the paper, and at a different angle, since the nib is at a 90-degree angle from the pen. The orientation compels you to sit up straighter and hold your arms wider and farther away from your body, and sitting thus one feels slightly different, more upright. Starting with Spencer, no longer was handwriting a way to display one’s status; it became a process through which one learned key values. In the second half of the nineteenth century in America, having a good Spencerian hand was an indicator that you were Christian, educated, and proper.
With his knack for public speaking and his quasi-religious zeal for penmanship, Spencer quickly became successful. In 1848 he published a set of exercises, called “copy-slips,” together with Victor M. Rice, who then became the superintendent of New York State public schools. From there, Spencer established business colleges to teach his philosophy, “Education for Real Life.” The colleges were mainly in the Midwest, and many survive today, teaching workplace skills; some are now run by the for-profit Bryant & Stratton College, with which Spencerian schools were allied from the beginning. Spencerian also became the official government script. For fifty years, Americans would be taught to copy out this one man’s invention in order to succeed in school and work.
Spencer’s way of making letters became so popular because he imbued his letters with moral and spiritual valences that elevated his system above mere practicality. He used Lake Erie as the basis, so the “true imagery of writing is culled then from the sublime and beautiful in nature.” Living during the age of American Transcendentalism—the movement led by writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—Spencer was inspired by nature. He fashioned a’s, b’s, and c’s from the shapes of rocks, branches, and lakes that he looked at every day. The inspiration for his ovals thus came from stone, the branches suggested the linking between letters, and waves lapping on the shore the downstrokes. Sunbeams were straight lines; clouds were curves. As he put it in a poem:
Evolved ’mid nature’s unpruned scenes,
On Erie’s wild and woody shore,
The rolling wave, the dancing stream,
The wild-rose haunts in days of yore.
The opal, quartz and ammonite,
Gleaming beneath the wavelet’s flow,
Each gave its lesson—how to write—
In the loved years of long ago.
Spencer felt that, upon sitting down to write, one should contemplate nature, and the act of writing was noble, genteel work: “It takes Penmanship quite out of the circle of arts merely mechanical” and gives it “dignity as an intellectual pursuit.”2 By elevating penmanship into a moral duty, he also sought to make the teaching of penmanship into a more prestigious, lofty, and intellectual vocation. It was not just about learning one’s letters, he told Americans. It was about being a better person.
Spencer also argued that good penmanship could be an engine of social mobility: it “refines our tastes, assists in cultivating our judgment, and thereby makes us better men,” said one of Spencer’s followers, among the many who used handwriting to rise from penury to the respected position of writing master. Another stated, in a patronizing tone many used, that lessons brought to “cultivated masses … a love for beautiful forms and such a facility in producing them as to really elevate and ennoble their thoughts and lives.”3
Facsimile editions of the 1874 system, reissued by disciples of Spencer in 1985, come in a manila envelope with five copy books to use for the “Theory of Spencerian Penmanship in Nine Easy Lessons.” “In every properly conducted school,” the instructions begin, “the writing exercise is commenced and closed in an orderly manner: 1. Position at Desk. 2. Arrange Books. 3. Find Copy and Adjust Arms. 4. Open Inkstand. 5. Take Pens … At this point the teacher should pay particular attention to giving instruction in pen holding. When ready to write, give the order to TAKE INK.” The following page contains detailed instructions on how to sit: “Those who do not wish to become hollow-chested or round-shouldered, should learn to sit easily upright, and keep the shoulders square.” Several pages on posture follow before another lesson on how to hold the pen: “Take the pen between the first and second fingers and the thumb, observing, 1st, that it crosses the second finger on the corner of the nail; 2nd, that it crosses the fore finger forward of the knuckle; 3rd, that the end of the thumb touches the holder opposite the lower joint of the fore finger; 4th, that the top of the holder points towards the right shoulder; 5th, that the wrist is above the paper, and the hand resting lightly on the nails of the third and fourth fingers; 6th, that the point of the pen comes squarely to the paper.” Spencer believed in “whole arm movement.” Pupils were trained to use their shoulders and elbows in their letter making.
The rest of the principles provide detailed instruction on how to make each line, stroke, and loop for every letter. There are a total of 196 instructions, posed in question-and-answer form, one of which reads:
Will you explain the construction of small i? Begin on base line and ascend with the right curve, on connective slant, one space; here unite angularly and descend with a straight line on main slant to base; turn as short as possible without stopping the pen, and ascend with a right curve on connective slant, one space. Finishing with a light dot, one space above the straight line on main slant. Note: Directions are best remembered when immediately put in practice. The pupil should trace a model letter a number of times, repeating and following descriptions until the construction is familiar. During such drill the correct position ought to be observed. The exercise may be profitably varied, and easier movements secured by tracing and counting the strokes. Thus, in the small i: 1, 2, 1, dot.
In a turn that recalls the monks in the scriptorium, students were advised to practice their drills six to twelve hours a day, repeating and following descriptions until the construction was familiar. The spiritual values of Spencerian are lost in detailed systemization. Instead of inspiration from nature and Christianity, we get militaristic drilling and are told that, by following these orders, “entire classes may soon be trained to work in concert, all the pupils beginning to write at the same moment, and executing the same letter, and portion of a letter simultaneously.” 4
Despite the grueling, unromantic reality of learning Spencerian, it only became more popular as the years went on. Spencer died in 1864; his last request was for his pen, which he died holding.5 His message—that by disciplining your hand you could also discipline your mind—kept being impressed upon schoolchildren as more public high schools and business colleges opened.
A. N. Palmer took up Spencer’s torch and shaped handwriting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Like Spencer, Palmer was a charismatic true believer. Palmer was born in 1860 and grew up in New York and New Hampshire, where he enrolled in a business college and mastered many scripts from the well-known penman George Gaskell. Palmer then traveled west, teaching penmanship in business colleges, until he took a job with the Iowa Railroad Company and discovered the vast number of documents clerks had to write each day; the workload was too intensive for those Spencerian flourishes and shading. He decided to create a script more suitable for the increased bureaucracy needed by an industrializing country. He also believed his script would improve character, and he demanded that his script be taught by rigid, rote instruction. Palmer’s script was adopted by most American schools after they abandoned Spencerian. By the 1920s most Americans had been “Palmerized” and used the Palmer Method.6
Palmer disliked Spencerian. He decried it as feminine, fusty, and inefficient for the industrial, energetic America after the Civil War. Spencerian required too much taking up and putting down the pen, and too much shading. The Palmer Method was meant to be an efficient, simple style for the industrial age. It was useful, practical, and business-friendly: Gone were embellishments and flourishes. In 1910 a penmanship supervisor for the Cincinnati schools switched to the Palmer Method because Spencerian was “pretty” but he wanted “real, live, usable, legible, and salable” penmanship.7
If Spencer epitomized the Christian moralism of the first half of the nineteenth century, Palmer symbolized the postbellum religion of capitalism. If Spencer thought you could find letter forms by contemplating nature—and that by writing this way you could become more righteous—Palmer believed that muscularity was the key: “If the movement is right, and its application right, the letter will take care of itself.” A student needed to perform “sweeping motions of the arm from the shoulder powered by a ‘driving force’ that was both positive and assertive.”8 Students would learn how to do this by rote repetition: “The letters should be analyzed and studied until the pupil can shut his eyes and see a perfectly formed letter on his eye-lids.”9
It took weeks, sometimes months, just to get the arm movement right, so students did drills to keep their arms in perpetual motion in order to attain the proper muscle memory. The exercises were “what the gymnasium exercises are to the athlete.”10 One set of instructions used the phrase “writing machine” to refer to the human body, and students practiced arm movements alone for three to six weeks before picking up a pen:
Do not think of writing or pen holding at this point, but give all your attention to position, muscular relaxation, and the running of the writing machine, until good position and easy movement have become natural.11
Palmer even suggested students cut off “the right undersleeve at the elbow” to allow for “unrestricted actions.”12
As if mimicking the newly established assembly lines adopted at factories during this period of industrialization, the Palmer Method breaks down letters into small constituent parts:
See how many compact ovals you can make with one dip of ink, and try to develop a motion so light and elastic that you will soon be able to make from five hundred to a thousand, and one thousand or more on a line eight inches long … Indeed, one boy of twelve made three thousand [ovals] within the limits of a page eight inches across, maintaining a uniform speed of two hundred to a minut… .13
Like Spencerian, the Palmer Method was advertised as a way to uplift people. But instead of the spiritual religiosity of Spencer, Palmer was more vocational and reform-minded. His script had an “ethical value”: “Penmanship training ranks among the most valuable aids in reforming ‘bad’ children” and is “the initial step in the reform of many a delinquent,” he maintained.14 By learning how to use their arms, “pupils learn … that proper conventions must be observed in order to preserve social order and relations.” It was said to make immigrants more “American” through its “powerful hygienic effect.” Left-handed pupils were forced to use their right hands, for lefties were considered devious.15
By 1912, Palmer was a household name, and a million copies of his writing manuals had sold. As the bureaucracy of industrial America piled up, so, too, did the routinized work of clerks, who became “pen pushers” and “quill drivers.” Increasingly, women filled these positions. In 1870, business colleges—some founded by Spencer—were mostly attended by men. By 1900 they were predominately female. The popular image of a secretary, assumed to be a man before the turn of the century, became a woman. By 1930, 92 percent of stenographers were women.16
The Palmer Method began to lose its predominance in America in the 1930s when mastering this “masculine” script was no longer the way for men to enter middle-class professions and other scripts arose claiming to improve upon it, including Zaner-Bloser, a script similar to Palmer. Zaner-Bloser, which emphasized education and pedagogy more and ornamentalism less, became—and remains—a dominant force not only in elementary education but also in the curriculum materials and handwriting supplies market. The Palmer Method would still be taught by individual teachers throughout the twentieth century, though, and there remain many Americans who were taught the Palmer Method in school, since many elementary school teachers had been trained in it and continued to teach it even after it lost its preeminence.
Students who learned to write in America, from its earliest days through the first half of the twentieth century, were learning a lot more than just their letters. They were learning Christian and national values. With Palmer, efficiency was a key goal. But with the invention of the first machine for individuals to print their writing—the typewriter—even the fastest Palmer writer could not keep up.