Influence
The manufacturer Henry Ford cited McGuffey's Readers as one of his most important childhood influences. He was an avid fan of McGuffey's Readers first editions, and claimed as an adult to be able to quote from McGuffey's by memory at great length. Ford republished all six Readers from the 1857 edition, and distributed complete sets of them, at his own expense, to schools across the United States. In 1934, Ford had the log cabin where McGuffey was born moved to Greenfield Village, Ford's museum of Americana at Dearborn, Michigan. In 1936, Ford was an associate editor (along with Hamlin Garland, John W. Studebaker and William F. Wiley) of a collection of excerpts from McGuffey Readers. This 482-page compendium was dedicated to Ford, "lifelong devotee of his boyhood Alma Mater, the McGuffey Readers".
In Henry Ford and the Jews (2002), Neil Baldwin asserts that Henry Ford's self-avowed anti-Semitism originated with his study of McGuffey's as a schoolboy. Baldwin cites numerous anti-Semitic references in the readers to Shylock and to Jews' attacking Jesus and Paul. He also notes the cultural climate to which Ford was exposed as a child had increased anti-Semitism in reaction to greatly increased immigration from eastern Europe.
American composer Burrill Phillips composed a work entitled Selections from McGuffey's Reader, for orchestra, based on poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. It was completed in 1933.
Read more about this topic: McGuffey Readers
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has “never had a chance, poor devil,” you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.”
—Margot Asquith (1864–1945)
“Under the influence of fear, which always leads men to take a pessimistic view of things, they magnified their enemies’ resources, and minimized their own.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)