Abstract
Veggian explores Manly and Rickert’s theoretical and pedagogical influences on the legacy of literary studies after their World War I (WWI) military work and their Chaucer project. It links cryptology with literary humanism in a genealogy of mutual, interdisciplinary influences. Regional and national debates over literacy, canons, and authorship, and the opposition of Pragmatism to Social Darwinism motivated Manly and Rickert to reform the study of English, and the chapter tracks how their work in cryptology provided an unlikely yet practical methodological model for their vision of language and literature study in the twentieth century. The disappearance of philology from the English department curriculum, and the rise of rhetoric and composition, is part of this change, a shift that was initially specific to Midwestern U.S. institutions.
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Notes
- 1.
David Kahn, The Codebreakers: A History of Secret Communication (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1967); James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
- 2.
See Paul Virilio, “The Data Coup D’Etat,” in The Art of the Motor, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 23–34; Armand Mattelart, Mapping World Communication (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
- 3.
DeLanda borrows the phrase from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. See Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
- 4.
Without going into great detail, I have generally followed Edward W. Said’s critique of Michel Foucault’s work in this matter. The point is that, following Said, one returns to philology—the primary discipline in the shift in question.
- 5.
J. R. Hulbert, “John Matthews Manly 1865–1940,” Modern Philology 38, no. 1 (1940): 2. Manly was chairperson until 1933 despite the fact that he had worked for only a brief time in academia.
- 6.
John Matthews Manly, Edith Rickert, Mabel Dean, Helen McIntosh, and Margaret Josephine Rickert. The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, Vol. I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1940), vii.
- 7.
She earned her Ph.D. in 1899. Her colleague J.R. Hulbert contributed an insightful biography to The Dictionary of American Biography: Supplement Two (1958).
- 8.
“John Matthews Manly 1865–1949,” 2.
- 9.
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, revised ed. (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955), 8.
- 10.
See John Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (1980).
- 11.
See, for example, Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988).
- 12.
Shawn Rosenheim briefly discusses Hawthorne’s contribution in The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 11.
- 13.
The book even prompted Friedrich Nietzsche’s ire in Ecce Homo, although it was of a different sort than the wounded nationalism that Donnelly was subject to when he later lectured in England.
- 14.
See Kahn, The Codebreakers, 875–879.
- 15.
These included Francis Bacon and His Secret Society (1891) and Shakespeare Studies in Baconian Light (1901).
- 16.
The most concise summary of the Shakespeare-Bacon Debate can be found in William and Elizebeth Friedman’s The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (1957). The Friedmans began their careers in cryptology at the aforementioned Riverbank Laboratories.
- 17.
Rosenheim has incongruously described the Baconian project in the following terms: “Ciphered readings of Shakespeare aim to disrupt the authority of canons, the construction of authors, and the relation between authors and the works they produce—in part by mimicking the protocol of the literary history they resist” (10). Rosenheim’s account disguises the awkward political affiliations of the Baconian movement in contemporary literary jargon. The Baconians desired the prestige of literary-scientific protocol, but only to conservative, often racist ends.
- 18.
Hofstadter’s account of Dewey’s career is canonical. See Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 135–141.
- 19.
For example, an essay on Henry James by James’s friend Robert Herrick was later included in an anthology dedicated to Manly.
- 20.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Madness in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988), 21.
- 21.
The modern U.S. institutional intelligence apparatus was founded primarily as a result of the Friedmans’ work.
- 22.
Elizebeth later achieved prominence as a cryptanalyst while working for the U.S. Coast Guard against rum-runners during Prohibition. Both worked as consultants to various government agencies over the following decades, and William was eventually instrumental breaking the Japanese military codes during World War II (WWII) and in founding the National Security Agency after WWII.
- 23.
Chauncey Tinker was a prominent Yale scholar of Old and Middle English, and his late essays on modern literature discuss many writers who were important to his young protégé, Stephen Vincent Benet (in particular William Morris). There are several biographical discussions of Benet’s work for MI-8. See, for example, his brother William Rose Benet’s essay, “My Brother Steve” (viii) and Charles Fenton’s biography Stephen Vincent Benet (73–75). See also David Kahn’s The Reader of Gentleman’s Mail (30). William Rose Benet, “My Brother Steve,” in Twenty-Five Short Stories by Stephen Vincent Benet (Garden City, NY: Sun Dial Press, 1943), vi-xiii; David Kahn, The Reader of Gentleman’s Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).
- 24.
Neil Grauer, Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 15. Thurber completed his cipher training and was eventually sent to Paris to work as a code clerk during the Armistice. Thurber does not mention his cryptological work in his letters until after the war, when he was stationed in Paris. Burton Bernstein’s biography of Thurber offers an amusing account of Thurber’s work in Paris, and includes references to specific codes and political figures, including Woodrow Wilson’s famous confidante, Colonel House. See Thurber 78–81.
- 25.
Post-WWI U.S. intelligence agencies were modeled, as were those of every other military power, after the successful French Bureau du Chiffre of the nineteenth century. I discussed these institutions in greater detail in my doctoral dissertation, Mercury of the Waves: Cryptology and U.S. Literature (University of Pittsburgh, 2005). Historian David Kahn and journalist James Bamford are among the most notable contemporary authorities on the subject, while Manuel De Landa’s War in the Age of Intelligence Machines is indispensable.
- 26.
Some remained divided between the two careers. Charles Mendelsohn, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania and City College in New York, continued to work with Yardley during the 1920s.
- 27.
That correspondence between the Friedmans and Manly lasted until the latter’s death in 1940.
- 28.
This conjunction would benefit the United States security agencies greatly during WWII when it deployed the Navajo code-talkers.
- 29.
John Matthews Manly, “The President’s Address: New Bottles,” PMLA 35 (1920): lxix.
- 30.
Yardley’s 1931 book, The American Black Chamber, was so scandalous that it prompted the revision of the U.S. national security laws.
- 31.
It was perhaps I.A. Richards, however, who proved the catalyst (rather than the showman) that Manly had hoped would arrive.
- 32.
One such letter may be found in Box 2, Folder 8 of the John Matthews Manly papers in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
- 33.
J.R. Hulbert, “John Matthews Manly,” in The Dictionary of American Biography: Supplement One and Two, Vol. XI, ed. Robert Livingstone Schuyler and Edward T. James (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1958), 427.
- 34.
J.R. Hulbert, “Martha Edith Rickert,” in The Dictionary of American Biography: Supplement One and Two, Vol. XI, ed. Robert Livingstone Schuyler and Edward T. James (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1958), 557, 558.
- 35.
Edith Rickert, New Methods for the Study of Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1927), v.
- 36.
Ibid., vi.
- 37.
Ibid., ix.
- 38.
Manly often praised Richards’ work. Among his papers at the University of Chicago there is the unpublished manuscript of a speech titled “The Teaching of Literatures” in which Manly clearly designates the “aesthetic” approach of Richards as the most likely future path of literary studies.
- 39.
Rickert, New Methods, 1. Erika Lindemann has described the history of rhetoric as contemporaneous with the moment to which Rickert refers: “courses in the reading and analysis of English literature were not to become part of the curriculum until the second half of the nineteenth century” (52). Erika Lindermann, A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 40.
Both Manly and Rickert often echoed Darwinian terms in these later works. In “New Bottles,” Manly juxtaposed “evolution” with the masons who designed the figurative edifice; in a similar vein, Rickert characterized philology as the study of the historical “environment” of literature.
- 41.
William Friedman and the New Critic W.K. Wimsatt would later correspond on the subject of cryptology during the late 1930s and 1940s, citing one another in their works on the subject.
- 42.
Contemporary literary historian Gerald Graff argues that one has to understand that while it was the scientific model of research that justified philological studies of literature to other professionals inside the university, it was the civic and humanist claims of literature that justified those studies to outsiders (5). Gerald Graff, “Introduction,” in The Origins of Literary Studies in America: A Documentary Anthology, ed. Gerald Graff (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1–14.
- 43.
Daniel Aaron, “Literary Scenes and Movements,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 735.
- 44.
The John Matthews Manly Papers located at the University of Chicago Library, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. I thank the Center, and in particular Daniel Meyer and Julia Gardner, for their particularly generous assistance in the research for this essay. I cite and refer to sections of the John Matthews Manly Papers with the Center’s written consent.
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The John Matthews Manly Papers located at the University of Chicago Library, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. I thank the Center, and in particular Daniel Meyer and Julia Gardner, for their particularly generous assistance in the research for this essay. I cite and refer to sections of the John Matthews Manly Papers with the Center’s written consent.
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Veggian, H. (2022). From Philology to Formalism: Edith Rickert, John Matthews Manly, and the Literary/Reformist Beginnings of U.S. Cryptology. In: Ellison, K., Kim, S.M. (eds) Collaborative Humanities Research and Pedagogy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05592-8_5
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