This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected.
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Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. Up next, the story of the man who quite literally wrote the dictionary, but not just any dictionary, the first truly American dictionary. Here to share the story of Noah Webster is Joshua Kendall, author of The Forgotten Founding Father, Noah Webster's Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture.
We'd like to thank the U.S. Library of Congress for providing this audio. Let's get into the story. He has what I call some forest gump moments. He's born in West Hartford in 1758.
He graduates from Yale in 1778. In his freshman year at Yale, he's a member of the Yale militia and he makes eye contact with George Washington. en route to Cambridge, where he's going to take over command of the Continental Army. In the summer before his senior year at Yale, he, his two brothers, and his father fight in the Battle of Saratoga. That's the one battle that we won, and Webster was very proud to have been there at the creation of America.
But those are small moments. Webster wants to be a writer. He loves Yale. He has insatiable intellectual curiosity, but the economy is tanking. There's hyperinflation.
They're printing $60 bills, $70 bills. They're all worthless.
So he comes home to his father's house, his farm in West Hartford. and says, Dad, I want to be a writer. And his father says, ha.
Son, he gives him an eight dollar bill, which is worthless. And a sudden, you're on your own now. And here's Webster's reaction. The subject of this memoir was cast upon the world At the age of 20, without property, without patrons, and in the midst of a war which had disturbed all occupations. For the next couple of days, he locks himself in his room and reads Samuel Johnson's moral essays.
And then he decides that Samuel Johnson did not The author of the great 1755 dictionary is going to be his spiritual father. Oh no.
Some of you may have seen the Facebook movie, which starts with a rejection. The fellow, Mark Zuckerberg, is rejected by his girlfriend and then spends 20 hours on computer code and comes up with Facebook. And I think Webster has the same kind of character type, it's obsessive, that he gets rejected, the economy's tanking, his father says, forget about it. And he's just determined. and out of this pain and frustration comes the dictionary.
But the reason he was so well known wasn't his dictionary. Mm-hmm. In the 1780s, he publishes a speller. That's a three-parter. It has a speller, a grammar, and a reader.
and the speller was the Harry Potter of its day. It sold 100 million copies. This man really knew how to sell books. Every American school kid for five generations learned how to read using Webster's speller. And one of those kids was Jefferson Davis.
who in 1858 is a senator from Mississippi. And on the 100th anniversary of Noah Webster's birth, he says, We have a unity of language which no other people possess, and we owe this unity above all to Noah Webster's Yankee spelling book.
Now Davis, three years later, became the President of the Confederacy, and his day job was to kill us in New England. But that's really Webster's central achievement. He gave us American English. We're the most ethnically diverse nation on the face of the earth, but from Maine to California, we all speak the same language. As I told you, it's the Harry Potter.
It's selling like crazy, and he's afraid of piracy. He's very enterprising. What he ends up doing is he becomes the father of copyright law. Remember, we have the Articles of Confederation and states of all the power.
So he goes on a book tour to every single state capital and gets copyright law passed. and he's a compiling and organizing machine. During his book tour, he did a personal house count. of the houses in every one of America's major cities. Philadelphia had 4582.
But he he he he has to deal with round numbers, so it becomes 4,600. And that data set was folded into the first census. And I argue that he had obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. that he loved rules, order, and lists.
Now that's not the same as obsessive-compulsive disorder. People with OCD have trouble functioning. They may be so anxious that they're going to set the house on fire. They have to check the burner. People with severe cases of the disease can spend hours doing that.
They're not going to write dictionaries. But people with OCPD, with a personality disorder, they function better than well as long as they find a project they can focus on. And people with OCPD are the types of people who won't go into treatment, but they'll drive other family members into treatment. And Webster had a son, William, who Got very depressed, and he never finished Yale. And he was an editor, but he never really had a career of his own.
He had six daughters and one son, and I have a sense that being Noah Webster's only son. was tough. He was very crotchety. When he turns fifty, he says that no one under forty five should be allowed to vote. doesn't make any sense as policy.
He's just kind of popping off. and he alienated during his lifetime a lot of people. And Ambrose Bierce, the satirist, captures that in his Devil's Dictionary. In 1911, Bierce takes potshots at everyone, but he can't resist taking one of Webster. And he defines hell as the eternal resting place of the late Dr.
Noah Webster, dictionary maker. He's arrogant and he always thinks he knows it all, and sometimes he really does. and in 1785 he diagnoses what's wrong with America. He thinks that the Articles of Confederation aren't working. And he writes this pamphlet.
Called Sketches of American Policy. And he takes the pamphlet to George Washington and this Yale whipper snapper, this 25-year-old kid. is going to tell Washington what to do to fix the country. I get this from Washington's diary. Washington was a farmer and always kept close track of the weather.
So the morning of Friday, may twentieth, seventeen eighty five, was bright and sunny, though there was a slight chill in the air. In the early afternoon, just as the mercury hit sixty eight degrees, the brisk southerly wind began to calm down. But not so Noah Webster Jr. He kept beating his horse with a cane as he traped across the rocky roads just south of Alexandria. A young man in a hurry, the gangly six-footer with the flaming red hair, square jaw, and gray eyes, was dashing off to keep an important appointment.
He's headed to Mount Vernon to tell Washington what to do. Webster came from Connecticut and he found that Connecticut was very reasonable. And in this sketches of American policy, this pamphlet that he takes to Washington, What he wants to do is bring the reasonableness of Connecticut to the country as a whole. And he says in Connecticut, Thus the whole point of the state is brought to a single point, united in a single person. And that's his argument for the presidency.
He argues for the president, and you'll see that James Madison takes this. notion over when he gets to thinking about the Constitution. Sipping a glass of Madeira, Webster got a chance to explain the crucial fourth and final sketch of that pamphlet. The Articles of Confederation, passed in haste by the Second Continental Congress, had, according to Webster, failed to unite the thirteen colonies sufficiently. Summarizing his main concern, and he's a brilliant wordsmith, and he puts it beautifully, he told Washington that since each state retained the power to defeat the will of the other states, Quote.
Our Union is but a name and our Confederation a Cobweb. A stronger federal government, Webster emphasized, could improve the advantages of the American states as provincial interests would become inseparable from national interest. Remember that I told you that he sort of nationalizes our language, and here I'm arguing that he also nationalizes our politics.
Now at this point in the dinner, I think Washington is a little bit nervous. because he's not a college guy and he's very impressed by Webster. And he thinks he's onto something, but he's a little bit out of his depth. He wasn't a policy guy. He didn't do details.
And Webster is a Yaley, James Madison is a Princeton guy, John Adams is a Harvard guy.
So here's what Washington does, and he always seems to know what to do. He nods his assent and then promises Webster that he would ask his friend, the Virginia legislator, to read the entire work as soon as possible. And Madison reads it and works those ideas into the Constitution. When we come back, more of this story, the story of Noah Webster, the man who wrote. The dictionary here on Our American Stories.
Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs.
Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at let's get real about skincancer.com. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint.
It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. You've watched racing.
Now get behind the wheel. At Kaizen Autosport Racing School at VIR, professional race drivers teach you how to drive faster, safer, and with more confidence on one of America's legendary racetracks. Never driven on track? We'll get you started. Already experienced, we'll take you to the next level.
Ready to race? Earn your competition license and learn real wheel-to-wheel racecraft. Stop watching, start driving. Go to racevir.com. That's racevir.com.
Professional wrestling fans, the action continues every week. Watch CNA Thursday Night Impact every week on AMC. It is like electronic. Christina blowing through your veins. Don't miss the adrenaline, the drummer, and the total non-stop action.
No one can ever be as good as Don't miss the action of TNA Thursday Night Impact every week on AM SIG. For show types and more information, visit TNAWrestling.com. You're grinding, putting tracks on Spotify, making TikToks, and watching fractions of a cent roll in. Exposure doesn't pay rent. It's time for real stakes.
Welcome to The Beam, the new music competition app. Real fans vote. Brands buy your music before it breaks. You win money and exposure. No more chasing algorithms.
Just compete and get paid. Download TheBeam at thebeam.com or on the App Store. Submit your track. Earn what your music deserves on The Beam, the only chart that writes checks. And we continue with our American stories and Josh Kendall, author of The Forgotten Founding Father.
sharing the story of Noah Webster, the man who gave the world American English. When we last left off, a 20-something-year-old Noah Webster had inserted himself into the creation of our Constitution after coming to believe that the Articles of Confederation were deeply flawed. In doing so, he became one of George Washington's top guys. Let's return to the story here again is Joshua Kendall. Shortly after Washington's death in 1799, Webster petitioned for access to the family papers so that he'd become America's first presidential biographer, but that assignment went to Marshall.
And Webster would have been terrible because he would have just idealized Washington and just would have been dripping. He didn't really have a sense of other people and their struggles. But only when he failed to land this plum assignment did the freelance writer begin work in what eventually become his most illustrious monument to our national identity. He marries Rich. In 1787, he's at the Constitutional Convention.
He's there as a journalist, and there he meets his future wife, Rebecca Greenleaf. The 13th of 16 children in the Greenleaf family. Her father, William Greenleaf, was the mayor of Boston, who read the Declaration of Independence from the steps of the old statehouse. And one of the brothers was one of the speculators intimately involved with the building of Washington, D.C. It turns out that he was the Bernie Madoff of his day.
but he finances Webster and helps Webster get married and Webster decides to retire. because Webster can't wait to write the dictionary. Our language was really up for grabs, and English was the language of the oppressor. If you think about it, we had gotten rid of the king, so why do we want to speak the king's English? And there was a serious movement to make German, which was then like Spanish today, language number two, spoken by about 10% of the population.
It was a serious movement to make German the national language. There's a famous story about some guy in Boston who said maybe we should do what the Israelis did and make ancient Hebrew the national language. Webster's idea was American English. He wanted to get rid of silent E's, you know, changing theater from the French to the ER, getting rid of the U in color. And he wanted American English because he wanted us to be proud of our country.
Samuel Johnson. the author of the great seventeen fifty five dictionary, Wrote it for the money. Johnson once said, No one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. And Johnson actually hated Americans. He once said, I'm willing to love all mankind and accept an American.
He thought we were hypocrites, we had slavery, but we were yelping for freedom.
Now, what's that all about? Johnson does it because the king is offering him a contract. Webster does it because he's a compiling machine and loves Americans. Webster quoting Johnson says the chief glory of a nation is its authors. And in the 1828 dictionary, he's going to put American authors on the world stage.
We don't have a Shakespeare, we don't have a John Milton. But we have great constitutional theorists like Madison and Jay, and he's going to show the world that America has its own writers. And he's a brilliant definer. James Murray, the first editor of the OED Oxford English Dictionary, calls him a born definer of words. And he's going to define America and exactly what it meant in 1828.
And his masterpiece was twice the heft of Samuel Johnson's seventeen fifty-five dictionary. and Webster said in 1828 that his dictionary Published at a time when America had 13 million people, it would furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue to the 300 million people who are destined to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction. Of course, that's exactly the population according to the 2010 census. But it almost didn't happen.
So he retires to New Haven. He's making money from his speller and he moves into the fanciest house in town and that's Arnold as in Benedict Arnold. And he gets a good deal because there's shame associated with the house.
So he gets it for $2,000. I looked at the deed and it's got all the modern accoutrements, including the second outhouse. It's got fancy columns. And from there, it's as if he went to Staples, got a notebook, and says, Today I'm going to start on the dictionary. And he dates it November 3rd, 1807.
And then he spends the next 22 years Writing the dictionary. Writing a dictionary by oneself, as Webster repeatedly learned, always takes longer than expected. He does A and B. And then in 1808, He has a religious conversion. and he begins to believe that all languages are related to the language of Noah, his biblical namesake.
And he comes up with an etymology, synopsis of 20 languages. and his etymology is pure speculation. He spends 10 years on it. In many cases, his arrogance put him on the map. This is the one case where his arrogance got him into trouble.
If he hadn't been so determined, he wouldn't have been able to finish the dictionary. But he spends 10 years in this etymology. His publisher won't go near it.
Some of his funny ideas about etymology make it into the 1828 dictionary. He had one assistant on the dictionary who was a Yale medical student. Who was up on his etymology? He was up on the Germans who are making the major inroads. And he's so angry with Webster, he writes to a friend, multa absurda removi, many absurd things I have removed.
So he's trying to take out the speculative parts, and Webster fires him.
So Webster does it by himself. And Webster was most proud of that.
So that's the one flaw in his otherwise exemplary ervre. He gets back to the dictionary in 1817, and in his correspondence he'll say he's up to C. 1821, he's up to H. And now a little bit about his method. He leans on Samuel Johnson.
Webster took about one-third of his definitions from Johnson. He adds a lot of scientific terms, from like physics, chemistry, and biology. Johnson's dictionary was very literary. And Johnson is always quoting Shakespeare. And Webster puts little black marks next to Shakespeare.
He rarely quotes Shakespeare, and one of the reasons is that At Yale in the 1770s in Congregational New Haven, Drama was considered two steps away from sex. Yale students were penalized. for attending a play and penalized twice as much. for putting on a play. And Webster hates Shakespeare.
He says his language is full of errors. And what he ends up doing in Shakespeare is he blames Shakespeare for the dirty words in the English language.
So there's a word like whore son, son of a whore. And Webster will just put, he won't even quote Shakespeare. There are a few Shakespeare quotations, but not many.
So next to Horse on, he'll just write S-H-A-K, Shack.
So it's like that's Shakespeare, that's what he gave us, yeah. Horse on the Now a dictionary In the days of the one-man band, it was part autobiography. Webster has a love affair, it doesn't go over well, and he's going to express his feelings in the dictionary. Remember, he's a born-again Christian.
So here is how he defines marriage. Toward the end of that definition, marriage was instituted by God himself for the purpose of preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes.
Now there's an age-old debate in lexicography about whether lexicographers should describe language or prescribe language. Webster here is prescribing how to live. In terms of language, he was a descriptivist. He was going to describe the language that people actually use. And that's part of his legacy.
And the Merriam-Webster Company has taken that position and their big fat dictionary 1961, they decided to put the word ain't in the dictionary. The New Yorker immediately came out with a cartoon saying the editor ain't in. Uh they and there was a big fur. It lasted for ten years. But Webster's position is now accepted in almost all dictionaries, especially now where language is getting more and more slippery and people are making up all kinds of stuff on the internet.
That's the way our language is evolving. And Webster. wants to chart the American language that people actually use, although in his dictionary he was telling people how to live. No one's interested. And that's part of the persistence if you didn't have this.
Persistence, he would have given up. And he has this idea in about 1825. He's always changing his ideas and it's ironic because he's the guy who gives us a national language. He figures, well, I'm going to go for a double market. I'm going to try to sell my book in England and America and come up with a new language called Universal English.
And while he's in England, he tries to set up a conference between Oxford, Cambridge, and him. to decide what Universal English is going to be. And Oxford and Cambridge aren't buying and the plan fizzles out. He goes back to New Haven, publishes the first dictionary. It comes out in 1825.
2,500 copies are published. It's not a big seller, but the abridged dictionary sells like crazy. That makes him some money. But his heart is with the unabridged, and to the horror of his family, He mortgages his second house at the age of 80. to keep going.
And that comes out in 1841, and he's still working on definitions when he dies in 1843 at the age of 84. And some of the words he's doing are aerodynamics, agronomy, and puritanically. At Harvard Houghton Library they have Emily Dickinson's copy of the 1844 dictionary. And Emily Dickinson refers to it as her sole companion. And that tells you as much about Emily Dickinson herself, she was kind of quirky, as about how beloved the dictionary was.
Most American writers, the Melvilles, the great 19th century writers, Paul used it, and at the time of his death, historians said that he was in America's Trinity of Fame with Washington and Columbus. We'd like to thank the U.S. Library of Congress for providing this audio and what a story he told. What he wanted to do was create American English because, well, he loved America and he was a compiling maniac. He was giving America its voice and American authors.
Their voices. The story of Noah Webster here. on our American stories. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S.
and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at Let's Get RealaboutskinCancer.com. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans.
It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues.
Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. You've watched racing.
Now get behind the wheel. At Kaizen Autosport Racing School in VIR, professional race drivers teach you how to drive faster, safer, and with more confidence on one of America's legendary racetracks. Never driven on track? We'll get you started. Already experienced, we'll take you to the next level.
Ready to race? Earn your competition license and learn real wheel-to-wheel racecraft. Stop watching, start driving. Go to racevir.com. That's racevir.com.
Professional wrestling fans, the action continues every week. Watch CNA Thursday Night Impact every week on AMC. It is like electricity blowing through your veins. Don't miss the adrenaline, the drama, and the total non-stop action. No one can ever be as fun as me.
Yeah. Don't miss the action of TNA Thursday Night Impact every week on AM Sing. For show types and more information, visit TNAWrestling.com. You're grinding, putting tracks on Spotify, making TikToks, and watching fractions of a cent roll in. Exposure doesn't pay rent.
It's time for real stakes. Welcome to The Beam, the new music competition app. Real fans vote. Brands buy your music before it breaks. You win money and exposure.
No more chasing algorithms. Just compete and get paid. Download the Beam at theBeam.com or on the App Store. Submit your track. Earn what your music deserves on The Beam, the only chart that writes checks.
Mm-hmm.
