“The spelling bee at the Baptist church Tuesday evening was quite a lively entertainment,” so says a press report from Jamestown in April 1885. “Rev. S. N. Griffith acted as umpire, Professor Clemmer conductor and Professor Culver and C. T. Hills captains. Between thirty and forty participated in the exercises. Professor Culver and Miss Flagler were the last contestants for the honors, and finally the former staggered at the word ‘millionaire,’ and the latter was declared the best speller.”
The correct spelling, in case you, like Professor Culver, are in doubt, is M-I-L-L-I-O-N-A-I-R-E. Millionaire.
Now I’ll parse that press report a little bit. Public school teachers often were accorded the title “Professor,” if they were male. Not if they were female. Miss Flagler, the best speller in the contest, likely therefore also was a teacher. For reasons still uncertain to me, nineteenth-century spelling bees commonly began with the choosing of sides, although the competition ended up matching individuals head-to-head. Finally, despite a history of American spelling contests going back to colonial times, this 1885 story is the first record of a spelling bee in North Dakota I have found.
One chronicler has declared, “The spelling bee is a paradigmatic American institution,” meaning a thing typical, maybe even defining, of the country (and fear not, I won’t ask you to spell “paradigmatic”). Another says, “The spelling bee is a curiously American spectacle in which our competitive spirit encounters the idiosyncrasies of the English language.” (And no, you don’t have to spell “idiosyncrasies,” either.)
The spelling bee tradition indeed does stretch back to colonial times; Benjamin Franklin endorsed spelling contests in schools in 1750. Such exercises became more common in the late 1700s, after the Revolution, and particularly after in 1783 Noah Webster published The American Spelling Book. The spelling contest was a sort of orthographic declaration of independence, by which spellers propagated a peculiarly American language, eschewing old-country English usage and facing forward. The American language was a tool to acculturate foreign elements and also to eradicate rustic local expression. Spellers were creators of a nation indeed.
Around 1800 spelling bees came out of the schools and into public venues. The adult public embraced them as evening entertainment—even, perhaps commonly, as opportunities for flirtation and courtship. After reading many accounts of early spelling bees on the prairies, which commonly came down to a male contestant and a female squaring off as the final contenders, I have no doubt that gender and romantic considerations came into play in contest outcomes.
In such manner they reprised a trope from Edward Eggleston’s 1871 novel, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, wherein romance triumphs over both social class and individual rivalry. That popular novel also seems to have inspired what cultural critics of the 1870s termed an “infatuation” and even an “epidemic” of spelling bees across the country. In the process of western development, the trend stilled as the country settled up and settled in, but in Dakota Territory during the late 1880s, reporters commonly still spoke of the “craze” for spelling bees.
Prairie spelling bees could be raucous, although never so much so as in Bret Harte’s 1878 story, “The Spelling Bee at Angels.” The public was intrigued by them, as I think you will be as I spell out their history.
