history – Words Are Meant to Sway

Maria Sanford, who was teaching in Parkersville at the time, gave this address at the August 4, 1868, meeting of the Pennsylvania Teachers’ Association.¹ She got the opportunity to give this, her first major public address, when asked to substitute for another teacher.²

Sanford’s main argument is that the human desire for greatness is a God-given incentive to continue to work. The nature of much work is that its significance isn’t immediately apparent, either because a person cannot see how their small part contributes to a greater effort, or because the effect accumulates incrementally over time. This is true of teaching, but it is important to persevere because education is crucial to the maintenance of republican government.

The Greatness of Our Work

The desire to do or be something great is as universal in the human mind as fear or love or hatred.

“The dreams we’ve had of deathless name”³ may be locked in memory’s most secret cloister, and, like the graves of loved ones, visited only with regretful tears, but they are sacred treasures never lost, save in the shipwreck of all faith and honor, and powerful unto death to fire the soul to high resolves, and nerve the arm to manly effort. These hopes and aspirations are not vain fancies of egotism and folly, but given by the kind Father as incentives to earnestness and enthusiasm in our daily toil; are not false guides but waymarks of a real glory, which even in this world awaits those who neither faint nor falter at the difficulties of the path.

Significant Existing Biographies

Whitney, Helen Ardell. Maria Sanford. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1922.

Whitney was a Sanford colleague, and, although she used primary sources from Sanford's papers (and the papers themselves often show the mark of Whitney's blue pencil), the account lacks citations and uncritically presents Sanford's life as she saw herself and as she publicly presented herself. Whitney's is the only book-length biography and is the basis for many of the shorter biographies that would follow.

Shapiro, Maude Shirley. "A Rhetorical Critical Analysis of Lecturing of Maria Louise Sanford." PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1959.

Shapiro's PhD dissertation begins with a two-chapter biography of Sanford that primarily draws from Whitney, supplemented by details from newspaper clippings in Sanford's papers. Shapiro uses primary source material from Sanford's papers, but does so primarily in order to fill in factual details that Whitney omitted. She also provides historical context from a handful of works by popular liberal-consensus and progressive historians. Shapiro's principal goal is to analyze the rhetoric of Sanford's public addresses, and the critical shortcomings in the biographical chapters are understandable in that context; the public persona that Whitney presents is what Sanford's audiences would have known and is most important when evaluating Sanford's ethos as a rhetor. Shapiro's analysis focuses on the addresses as rhetorical acts, examining what effect they had on her audiences.

Schofield, Geraldine Bryan, and Susan Margot Smith. "Maria Louise Sanford: Minnesota’s Heroine." In Women of Minnesota: Selected Biographical Essays, 77-93. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998.

First published in 1977 as part of a collection of chapter-length biographies of Minnesota women, Schofield and Smith are the first biographers to make extensive critical use of the primary source materials in Sanford's papers. They frankly address the "disharmonies" in Sanford's life along with the accomplishments that made her beloved. Although Schoefield and Smith's effort is overall laudable, they occasionally remain overly accepting of some specific aspects of Whitney's narrative (for example, regarding Sanford's impact on intercollegiate debate) that they could not reasonably have been expected to question.

Clifford, Geraldine Jonçich. "‘Best Loved’...and Besieged: Maria Louise Sanford, 1836-1920." In Lone Voyagers: Academic Women in Coeducational Universities, 1870-1937, edited by Geraldine Jonçich Clifford, 49-83. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1989.

My Relevant Publications

Feller, Phillip. "A Vast Field of Political Controversies: Gilded Age Political Rhetoric and the Construction of a Public Speaking Self-Identity." Review of Communication 15, no. 4 (October 2, 2015): 275-97. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2015.1106007.

Analysis of how speech education at the University of Minnesota changed during Sanford's tenure and during the six years following her retirement. In focusing on speech as a field of study that would declare itself as an independent academic discipline, I'm critical of how Sanford handled her department.

Feller, Phillip. "A Vast Field of Political Controversies: Gilded Age Political Rhetoric and the Construction of a Public Speaking Self-Identity." In Microhistories of Communication Studies: Mapping the Future of Communication through Local Narratives, edited by Pat J. Gehrke, 5-27. London ; New York: Routledge, 2017.

Reprint of my Review of Communication article as the lead chapter in a collection of microhistories.