The University of Tennessee's John C. Hodges created the best-selling textbook of all time.
By
Brooks Clark and Cari Wade Gervin (originally published in
MetroPulse June 16, 2011)
FOLLOWING THE RULES: English teachers
could save time by simply noting the Harbrace rule number in the column beside
an error, like "10a" marked here. This example is from a 10th-grade
paper of Brooks Clark circa 1972, entitled “An Autobiographical Sketch.” The
teacher was Ferdinand Ruge, who taught at St. Albans School in Washington,
D.C., for decades.
------------------------------------
It’s a story about a teacher. It’s a story about
the explosion of college education. But, first and foremost, it’s a story about
commas.
This year is the 70th birthday of the Harbrace
Handbook of English. It’s an anniversary that will go unnoticed by
most—even students who do pay attention to their textbooks aren’t likely to
think about them once they leave school. But it’s an anniversary with a lot of
significance for the University of Tennessee: Harbrace is
the best-selling college textbook of all time, and it’s the creation of former
UT English professor John C. Hodges.
Yes, that John C. Hodges—the one the campus library
is named after. Ask a student studying inside the library who Hodges was or
what he did, it’s even odds at best that he or she will know, but Hodges might
have liked it that way. “He didn’t want the spotlight or need it,” says his
brother-in-law, John Smartt.
In his will, Hodges assigned three-fourths of
future royalties from sales of the textbook to a fund that helped pay for UT’s
new library in the late 1960s. “It’s the little handbook that built the
library,” says Penn State English Professor Cheryl Glenn, who has channeled
Hodges’ spirit as coauthor of the past three editions.
More significantly on a national scale, it
constructed a model of the English language in the minds of generations of
American students. That first Harbrace, back in 1941, was a small,
maroon textbook, slightly bigger than a mass-market paperback. Since then,
there have been 16 more editions; Glenn and her coauthor Loretta Gray are
already working on the next one. And according to its publisher, Harbrace
really is the top-selling textbook ever, with only McGraw-Hill’s Principles
of Economics anywhere close. (Book sales are proprietary
information for publishers; most authors don’t even know their own sales
figures, so there is no way to verify this claim.)
Hodges knew his book was a success: When he died in
1967, the textbook was in its sixth edition and had been renamed Hodges’ Harbrace
College Handbook. But even he might be surprised to know of its
continuing popularity.
So how did this happen? How did an in-house manual
from UT’s English Department in the 1920s become the definitive college
composition textbook?
The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with
pedagogy—and a lot to do with World War II. It also turns out that the history
of Harbrace is, in a nutshell, the history of 20th century English education in
the United States.
‘All Matters Needed by Freshmen’
John Cunyus Hodges was born March 15, 1892, in tiny
Cotton Valley in northwestern Louisiana, between Shreveport and the Arkansas
state line. It was a rural but comfortable childhood.
“His family down in Louisiana was rich,” says
Smartt. “He knew he wanted to teach, and they resolved to take care of John.”
At the age of 19, Hodges graduated with a B.A. from
Meridian College in Mississippi, and he got his master’s from Tulane a year
later. After teaching at Northwestern University in Chicago for three years,
Hodges went east to Harvard, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1918.
He taught briefly at Ohio Wesleyan, just north of
Columbus, before joining the UT English Department in 1921. Here, Hodges took
over “a moribund program of Freshman English,” according to Kenneth Curry’s
history of the department, English at Tennessee.
Within a year, Hodges developed the beginnings of a
systematic approach to teaching freshman English. Curry writes that Hodges had
students keep their papers and revisions in folders, which they would discuss
in regular conferences with their instructors. The folders were then archived
by the department. “Over time, Hodges analyzed and tabulated the contents of
these folders,” Curry explains.
With so many stacks of papers and so many sets of
corrections, Hodges was able to systematically determine which errors his
students were most likely to make. Starting in 1922, Hodges published his own
“Manual of Instruction for Freshman English,” which he expanded each year. By
1937, the manual was 29 pages long and included a map of the library and
instructions on how to write papers.
Hodges’ manual referred students to the 100 rules
of the Century Handbook of Writing by Garland Greever and Easley S.
Jones, which was a popular composition handbook at the time, along with the
283-rule Guide to Composition by James Finch Royster and Stith Thompson. Curry
writes: “Hodges concluded that most of these handbooks included much material
that was ignored or irrelevant to the teaching of composition.”
Says Bain Stewart, who joined the faculty in 1940,
“I think he felt, as many of us felt, that these handbooks were so enormously
complicated, and it was impossible to know the difference between Rule No. 279,
Rule No. 280 and Rule No. 281.”
Sometime in the late 1930s, a Harcourt Brace
textbook traveling salesman named Sidney Stanley visited UT. He met Hodges, and
after he heard about his system of correcting papers, he passed on the lead to
the Harcourt Brace editorial department. Intrigued, the publishing company
offered Hodges a contract. What he called his handbook of “all matters needed
by freshmen” was published in 1941. (“Harbrace” is a conflation of Harcourt
Brace.)
“The rest is history,” says Michael Rosenberg, a
publisher at Wadsworth/Centage Learning (which currently owns the rights to the
now-defunct Harcourt Brace’s college textbooks). “The company was hoping to
make only a small dent in the freshman handbook market with the unknown author
from Tennessee.
“However, the clever organizational plan, the
compact, trim size, and the book’s ability to explain difficult issues of
language cogently and concisely created a demand that catapulted the handbook
to best-seller status quickly.”
Hodges had two stated objectives when he composed
his textbook. The first read, “To make correction of written work as clear and
easy as possible for the student.” The second was, “To make marking of student
papers as easy as possible for the instructor.” But it is most likely the
latter point—making teachers’ lives easier—that has been the secret to its
continuing success.
The first edition of Harbrace was
divided into 34 major sections (the current edition has 36). Each section
included lowercase-lettered subject areas and numbered subdivisions and
subscripts. Hodges’ numbering of each rule enabled teachers coming upon a
sentence like, “While riding a bus, the tornado ripped through town,” to simply
write in the margin “25f(4),” sending students to the rule, “Avoid dangling
elliptical phrases or clauses” and its explanation.
“It’s the granddaddy of all successful college
handbooks,” says Glenn. “It’s the handbook that everybody copies. Before Harbrace,
there were other books. But they were a mess, a random accumulation of rules.
Hodges made a taxonomy that is a template for every other textbook.”
Class and the Classroom
Hodges’ text is often found on the same shelves
with its younger counterpart, William Strunk and E.B. White’s The
Elements of Style, which celebrated its 50th birthday two years
ago.
Strunk and White’s “little book” is shorter, with
fewer rules (22) and more of an emphasis on an overarching philosophy of
elegant expression. The book has Ivy League roots—Professor Strunk taught E.B.
White at Cornell—and its genesis was a 1957 article in the New
Yorker, in which White reminisced about Strunk. Is it any wonder The
Elements of Style has long been the darling of the East Coast
elite?
Harbrace, on the other hand, is somewhat the antithesis of
Strunk and White. It is not about brevity, and it is not about art. It is a
textbook, not a usage manual. It does not assume that the student has a
sophisticated grasp of English, or even a fundamental mastery of the sentence.
Legend has it that Harbrace was
geared to hardscrabble rural students from the start, that the textbook’s
unique 5 inch by 7 inch size supposedly came from Hodges’ insistence that it be
small enough to slide into the front-center pocket of a pair of overalls. But
Hodges was no man of the people. He, too, had an Ivy League education, albeit
not an undergraduate one.
Just over 30 years before Hodges began classes at
Harvard, the university had introduced the prototype of the freshman
composition class: “English A.” According to an essay and critical history of Harbrace
by Debra Hawhee, the course “grew out of a particular historical moment in
response to the perceived ineptitude or failure of Harvard applicants to adhere
to ‘standards of correctness.’ The ‘need’ for such a course can largely be
attributed to the veritable flood of bourgeois students to American colleges
during this period.”
But by the 1920s, it wasn’t just the bourgeoisie
whose prosody wasn’t up to snuff. Tennessee in particular at that time, as both
a state university and a land-grant institution, had a student body full of
first-generation college students fresh off the farm. It was those students
whose 20,000 papers were archived and studied by Hodges, and it was those
students whose errors became the basis of Harbrace. Hawhee writes: “Hodges
universalized the particulars: by examining the ‘bodies’ of Tennessee students’
writing, he grafted their most common ‘flaws’ onto the national student body.”
Hawhee says this sampling led to “an obvious
Appalachian slant” in the first few editions. Students are told to avoid using
dialects, “illiterate constructions,” or vulgarisms; section 19g in the first
edition instructs students to “avoid faulty diction” by not using phrases like
“can’t hardly,” “drownded,” “you all,” and “where is she at?”
But it is not just “country” phrasing that comes
under the gun—“phone” and “photo” should be “telephone” and “photograph;”
“lovely” is criticized for being both vague and colloquial; and “female” is “no
longer used as a synonym for woman.”
Hawhee is clearly critical of Hodges’ elitist
judgment. She writes, “All of these proscribed usages are indigenous to the
South, or mountain dialect … The Tennessee students, many of who were probably
first-generation college students, were taken as those who needed—in the worst
way—a simple book to help ‘fix’ their language practices.”
What Hawhee neglects to note is that many of these
students wanted to improve their speech and grammar. Perhaps at no other time
in history did the American Dream seem more obtainable, provided you fit the
part. You could trade your overalls for a suit and your work boots for loafers
and your tractor for a Studebaker, but if you told a colleague, “I can’t hardly
wait for your cocktail party on Friday,” the jig was up.
It’s no coincidence that the period of Hodges’ and Harbrace’s
ascendancy was the era of Gatsby through to the era of The Man in the Grey
Flannel Suit. Because without the right words, and knowing how to use them, it
was impossible to reinvent yourself, like Mad Men’s Don Draper.
Hodges may have been a snob, but that snobbery was
a product of his era. One also wonders how much of Hodges there may be in the
text—whether he was not writing down to his students but instead writing to a
slightly less educated version of his younger self. No matter how much money
his family had, no matter how much education he had, it must have been
challenging for the 24-year-old Hodges to enter Harvard in 1916, a man
determined to lose his rural Louisiana roots, to become an Ivy League scholar
and a gentleman, to show he wasn’t just another one of those bourgeois
students. It’s possible Hodges’ dedication to improving students’ grammar was
his way of giving back to his hometown, such as it was.
Grammar Wars
The first edition of Harbrace came
out at the beginning of World War II. At the end of that war, with the
introduction of the GI Bill, colleges and universities were suddenly filled
with students who never before had the means to pursue a higher education.
Such a dramatic increase in the number of students
also meant a dramatic increase in the number of instructors. Is it any wonder
that the textbook that was the easiest to use for both parties quickly became
the most popular?
A second edition of Harbrace
appeared in 1946. A third followed five years later, and a fourth edition five
years after that. Coauthors and collaborators worked on the textbook, but the
format had stayed exactly the same. One of the biggest changes came in the 1962
fifth edition, when Hodges’ name was added to the title, just as he retired
from teaching in the English Department.
Several years later, in Hodges’ obituary, a student
described him as follows: “He was a kind man who never raised his voice in
anger. Yet he was exact and demanding of his students, a rigid disciplinarian
who urged his students on to a needle-sharp understanding of literature.” It
was exactly this sort of teaching style that fell out of favor in the 1960s.
By the time Hodges was working on revisions for the
sixth edition, Harbrace faced competition from
handbooks from publishers like Prentice-Hall, Scott Foresman, and Macmillan. At
the same time, Hawhee writes, “surveys of instructors reported a decrease in
satisfaction with the fifth edition for its ‘stiff,’ conservative approach, its
lack of ‘liveliness’ . . . and ‘fuddy-duddy’ sentence diagrams.”
Unwittingly, Harbrace had become the textbook flash
point in the grammar wars of the 1960s.
Studies in theoretical linguistics and new ways of
thinking about grammar in the 1950s—especially works by C. C. Fries and Noam Chomsky—began
to trickle down to the English-teaching establishment. Other concerns about
equating correct grammar with correct usage had been bubbling up for years,
according to an essay on the history of grammar in U.S. schools by Martha Kolln
and Craig Hancock.
In 1963, at the annual conference of the National
Council of Teachers of English, the council issued a statement that was the
discipline’s equivalent of the atomic bomb. It reads, in part: “In view of the
widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and
teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: The
teaching of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces
some instruction and practice in actual composition, even a harmful effect on
the improvement of writing.”
As the 1960s wore on, scholars such as Peter Elbow
promoted a student-centered classroom, suggesting activities like journaling
and peer review to improve writing skills. Elbow writes, “[T]he process of
learning grammar interferes with writing: It heightens your preoccupation with
mistakes as you write out each word and phrase, and makes it almost impossible
to achieve that undistracted attention to your thoughts and experiences as you
write … For most people, nothing helps their writing so much as learning to
ignore grammar.”
It was against this background that Harcourt Brace
pushed Hodges for major revisions. Hodges pushed back, sending a letter in
November of 1966 to then-editor William Jovanovich: “No successful handbook has
gone through six editions—not even four—with so little basic change or
reorganization as ours. The fundamental sameness of all editions, not the minor
changes to which we have been limited, explains the success of the book.”
In the end, the section on diagramming sentences
was expelled from the 1967 sixth edition, never to return, but the rest of the
textbook remained quite the same.
In July of 1967, Hodges died at age 75 after a
heart attack. At his funeral, UT President Andy Holt said, “I have never known
anyone more dedicated to the advancement of mankind and more effective as a
teacher than Dr. John C. Hodges.”
Legacy Edition
The explicit teaching of grammar continued to fall
out of favor in U.S. secondary schools in the ensuing decades, even as the
number of students attending college continued to rise. The result? College
composition is now a bigger business than ever.
At UT alone there are 135 sections of English 101
and 102, which are required classes for all freshmen. The required textbook, of
course, is the 17th edition of the Hodges' Harbrace Handbook.
“Oh, yeah, we still use it,” says Kirsten Benson,
interim director of UT’s First Year Writing Program. “I love it. … I view Harbrace
as a kind of security. For anybody who wants to find out the answer, you can
look it up.”
Although recent trends in pedagogical theory posit
the return of grammar to the classroom—especially after the SAT and ACT added
“writing” sections to their tests in 2005—Harbrace remains the core component of
any sort of grammar or usage instruction for thousands of students every year.
“We complain that our college students haven’t
already learned grammar, but the responsibility lies with us,” says Glenn.
“When language users feel confident in their language ‘use,’ they can
concentrate on larger issues of style, grace and argument.”
T
he fundamental appeal of Hodges’ Harbrace,
then, is distinctly tied to its own fundamentals. It may be staid, it may be
restrictive, and it may be elitist, but there remains a need in this society
for grammar instruction. How else to explain the success of Lynne Truss’ 2003
best-seller Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,
or why the website Grammar Girl’s podcast consistently ranks in the Top 40 on
iTunes?
Still, the true legacy of John C. Hodges may just
be the education he provided for so many—those who studied his textbook, those
who used the library he helped build, and those he taught. David Burns of
Knoxville had Hodges for freshman English in 1950 and still has his inscribed
copy of the 1946 edition.
“He was an imposing presence,” Burns recalls. “He
wore tweed jackets most of the time, as you’d expect, and he was a grammarian
through and through. I think of him when I read even magazines that have good
writers and see one grammatical error after another.”
Adds Burns, “He was simply one of the finest
gentlemen I ever knew.”
SIDEBARS:
The Bawdy Bard
Although today he’s best known for his textbook, in
his own time John C. Hodges was a leading authority on the 17th-century English
playwright William Congreve. The Restoration writer hit big from 1695 to 1700
with five high-brow sexual comedies of manners, which included memorable lines
like, “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman
scorned,” “Never go to bed angry, stay up and fight,” “Music has charms to
sooth a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak,” and “Say what
you will, ’tis better to be left than never to have been loved.” When a wave of
conservative mores swept England, Congreve’s bawdy style fell out of fashion,
and the playwright turned to politics. Over the years Hodges amassed one of the
largest collections of Congreve’s plays in the world, which are now housed in
the UT Special Collections Library. (B.C.)
The Scandalous Miss Hazen
In 1951, the straight-laced Hodges created a minor
scandal when he hired Miss Evelyn Hazen as his administrative assistant. The
last family occupant of the antebellum Mabry-Hazen House, Miss Evelyn had made
national headlines years before when she sued a former lover in a breach of
promise suit (a tale recently recounted by Jane Van Ryan in The
Seduction of Evelyn Hazen).
Hazen was most certainly an irascible snob right
out of Tennessee Williams. She carried a gun on campus and monitored office
supplies like Scrooge. But while the idea of a tweedy Mr. Chips being
romantically entangled with a brazen hussy was irresistible to local gossips,
there was never any evidence of hanky-panky to go along with the
tongue-wagging.
After Hodges’ death in 1967, Hazen continued to
work at the university for many years. When the English department moved into
its new offices at McClung Hall, professor Bain Stewart asked how she liked the
new digs. “Cheap and pretentious, like most of the faculty,” she sneered. (B.C.)
The Power of the Proper Word
For all its power as a grammar textbook, reading
the first edition of the Harbrace Handbook of English makes it
clear that John C. Hodges was a man who cared about style and language too.
Take, for example, this excerpt from Chapter 20, “Exactness”:
20 e (4) Select words with due regard to their
connotation (power of suggestion).
Words are feelings, emotions, sensations, ideas.
Some words, beside their literal meaning, have the power to suggest varied
associations. They are surrounded, as it were, by an aura of feelings. They
stir up unexplainable emotions, pleasant and unpleasant, and connect the
present situation with something remote in consciousness. They seem to be an
intrinsic part of ourselves, and are tied up with all our experiences. For
instance, the word hearth, which literally means the floor of a fireplace,
suggests in addition the fireside, warmth, safety, good cheer, a family and
friends, and the home itself. Stove, on the other hand, is much poorer in
suggestive power.
BARREN He sat musing by the stove.
RICHER He sat musing by the hearth.
BARREN Regas sells hot steaks.
RICHER Regas sells sizzling steaks.
BARREN The baby likes to play.
RICHER The baby is as playful as a kitten.
BARREN The man at the door is an unemployed person.
RICHER The man at the door is a tramp.
Today's Knoxville News Sentinel reports that a Knox County Commission auditor sent emails to a county commissioner that included the sentence, "And your family are weirdos that go to a wierd (sic) church!" 
