A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States

A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States by Jill Lepore (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002. 241 pp., cloth $25.00) John Vickrey Van Cleve IN 1848 Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraphy code, married a deaf woman, Sarah Elizabeth Griswold, his second cousin. A former student of the New York School for the Deaf, Griswold was twenty-six. Morse was fifty-seven. Griswold's "beauty," "artlessness," and "amiable deportment" impressed Morse, but her deafness attracted him as well, according to historian Jill Lepore. She quotes a letter from Morse to his brother, saying that Griswold's "misfortune of not hearing, and her defective speech ... excited the more my love & pity for her" (157). That was not all. Morse believed that the young woman's deafness would make her dependent on him, ensuring that he could be "doubly & trebly sure" of "her sincere devoted affection" (ibid.). Did similar attitudes lead other famous hearing men, such as Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell, to marry deaf women? Lepore does not say in A Is for American, but her book is a good read for students of sign languages and deaf communities. Lepore's central focus is the relationship between languages and nationalism, a natural subject for linguistics and deaf studies. Several years ago I gave a speculative talk at a conference in Helsinki, arguing that late-nineteenth-century opposition to sign languages could be understood most usefully within the context of growing nationalism, particularly in European countries. National elites were stamping out local languages or dialects of the "national" language, and they saw sign language as just another impediment to a single-language policy. France and Italy are obvious examples, but even the United States was not immune to this thinking. Nativist and sign language opponent Alexander Graham Bell, who knew his sign language history, told state legislatures and other governing bodies that the sign language that deaf Americans used was a French import and therefore unsuitable for American schoolchildren to learn, regardless of whether they were deaf or hearing. As Lepore says near the conclusion of her book, language is "politics by other means" (192). Narrative portraits of influential Americans who "explored the idea that letters and other characters-alphabets, syllabaries, signs, and codes-hold nations together" form the core of Lepore's study (II). Along the way, these portraits illuminate several interesting themes, particularly the important one that sign languages have been repressed in the name of political goals, that is, that supposedly larger national objectives have overridden the immediate needs of deaf children in educational programs. This topic is directly confronted in Lepore's discussion of Gallaudet and Bell and indirectly in other ways. None of the sketched individuals was deaf himself (all of her subjects are men), but several are familiar to scholars of nineteenth-century American deaf history. Three of these men married deaf women, and two, Gallaudet and Bell, were active in deaf issues for most of their professional careers. Lepore's sketches illuminate the intersection of broad general themes in American history with the seemingly more parochial concerns of scholars of sign languages and deaf studies, and they do so with references to important studies of American deaf history, such as Christopher Krentz's recent A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816-1864,1 and with citations drawn from key archival collections, such as the Bell family papers. In short, Lepore approaches the issues raised by deaf studies with a seriousness few mainstream historians have accepted, which points out another valuable characteristic of her text. Lepore contextualizes sign language and deaf people within the broad currents of the political culture of nineteenth-century America. In so doing, she demonstrates that one pursues deaf history and the historical understanding of sign languages most fruitfully in a wide social context. …