T.R. vs. The Dictionary
By Bill Kauffman

From boyhood, Theodore Roosevelt had been a notoriously bad speller; so as President he simply rewrote the rules of orthography—until a swarm of spelling bees stung him back to his senses.

The Spelling Reform Association had been founded in 1886 by Melvil Dewey, a dozen years after he had immortalized himself in the nation’s libraries by siring the decimal cataloging system. America’s spelling reformers wanted to simplify and rationalize our lexicon, for reasons ranging from the anti-colonialist (why shackle ourselves with sense-defying British spellings?) to the ridiculously practical: Lopping off superfluous letters would shorten books and save ink and paper, claimed the champions of  “simplified spelling.” Moreover, American schoolchildren could shave a full two years off their studies if liberated from spelling drills.

Defenders of traditional spelling occupied the high ground of poetry and custom, while the reformers trotted out efficiency, that god of turn-of-the-century progressivism. The ensuing debate wended its way down colorful byways. The simplified spellers brandished a finding of an underemployed worker at the U.S. Pension Office, who had counted 1,690 different spellings of the word “diarrhea” in pension applications. To this, the mossback Librarian of Congress Ainsworth R. Spofford replied, “Is there any phonetic system which could bring about a uniform spelling of that word?”

The game was really afoot when the spelling reformers found a sugar daddy in the person of Andrew Carnegie. The philanthropic steel titan counseled a name change for the organization (“reform” scares people, he insisted), and so the Spelling Reform Association became the Simplified Spelling Board. It was studded with such eminences as Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, David Starr Jordan of Stanford, Mark Twain, and William James.

In March 1906, the SSB released a list of 300 words crying out for orthographic reform. Some of the recommendations had already slipped into accepted usage: “honor” without the u, “center” instead of “centre,” “axe” with the e chopped off. But others looked bizarre: The SSB suggested replacing the “ed” in such words as “kissed” and “missed” with a t. “Purr” would lose an r, and such words as “dullness” and “fullness” would be stripped of an l. “Through” would become “thru,” and “thoroughly” would shrink to “thoroly.” It all seemed so...mechanical. Rather like a metric system for words.

Literary critic Brander Matthews, chairman of the Simplified Spelling Board, called this “simplification by omission.” And he had a friend in the White House. So in August 1906, with characteristic impulsiveness, President Roosevelt directed the Government Printing Office to adopt simplified spelling in all publications of the executive department. His order was not “far-reaching or sudden or violent,” averred Roosevelt, but only a modest effort “to make our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic.”

It may have been the worst miscalculation of T.R.’s career.

The press heaped ridicule upon the Rough Rider, who had a self-deprecating sense of humor but did not much like to be deprecated by others. The Baltimore Sun  asked how the President’s surname would be rendered in the new spelling: “Rusevelt” or “Butt-in-sky”? In best conspiracy-sniffing fashion, the Rochester Post-Express declared, “It is a scheme financed by Carnegie, backed by certain large publishing interests, and designed to carry out an immense project for jobbery in reprinting dictionaries and school books.” Abroad, observers wondered just what had happened to the unruly and libertarian Americans. “Here is the language of 80 million people suddenly altered by a mere administrative ukase,” marveled an English paper.  “Could any other ruler on earth do this thing?”

In the end, the Supreme Court refused to follow the President, as did the House of Representatives, which voted 142-24 to overturn T.R.’s order. The President withdrew his spelling edict and admitted defeat in this “undignified contest.” In a letter to Brander Matthews he attempted to shift the blame, asserting that “the one word as to which I thought the new spelling was wrong—thru—was more responsible than anything else for our discomfiture.”

Unbowed, Roosevelt vowed to use simplified spelling in his own correspondence, and he did so fitfully. Discussing his Presidential legacy, he wrote to a friend, “I have succeeded in getting thru some things that I very much wisht, altho not always in the form I most desired.”

Roosevelt’s crusade was carried on for some years by the Chicago Tribune, bastion of Midwestern Anglophobia, which between 1934 and 1975 used such spellings as “autograf,” “ameba,” “burocrat,” and “rime,” until finally its editors decided that enuf was enough.