Made In America (23 page)

Even more improbable in their way are state nicknames. Considering how widely used these nicknames are, it is surprising that their origins are often nowadays a mystery. No one knows for sure why Iowans are called Hawkeyes, why North Carolinians are Tarheels, why Kansans are Jayhawkers (there is no such bird) or why Indianans are Hoosiers. We know that Delaware has been called the Blue Hen State since at least 1840, but we don’t know why. Various, sometimes ingenious explanations have been adduced – someone, for instance, traced
hoosier
to a Cumberland dialect word,
hooser
– but the evidence in each case is at best inconclusive and often merely fanciful.
²⁷

Most states have a discarded nickname somewhere in their past. Arkansas has been called the Hot Water State and the Toothpick State, Georgia the Buzzard State, Goober State and Cracker State. (The cracker in Georgia cracker has nothing to do with crisp baked wafers. It comes from the practice of cracking corn to make cornmeal.) Missouri was once widely known as the Puke State, Illinois as the Sucker State and Montana as the Stub-Toe State though again in each case no one seems to know why. We do know, however, the derivation of Missouri’s current slogan, the Show Me State. The expression was coined as an insult by outsiders and was meant to suggest that Missourians were so stupid that they had to be shown how to do everything. The state’s
inhabitants, however, contrarily took it as a compliment, persuading themselves that it implied a certain shrewd caution on their part.

As you might expect, state legislatures from time to time come up with more flattering nicknames for themselves, even at the risk of seeming a shade overambitious. New Jersey for a time called itself the Switzerland of America while Arkansas opted for the Wonder State. New Mexico appears to have suffered from the most severe outbreak of narcissism, calling itself at various times the Land of Heart’s Desire, the Land of Opportunity, the Land of the Delight Makers and the Land of Enchantment.

For the honour of nickname least likely to make you pack up your bags and head on out, there has been no shortage of contenders. Among the perennial front runners in this category we find the Tree Planters State (Indiana), the Wheat State (Kansas), the Blizzard State (South Dakota), the Hog and Hominy State (Tennessee), the Iodine State (South Carolina), the Mosquito State (New Jersey) and the apt if resplendently self-evident Land of the Dakotas (North Dakota).

And so, more briefly, to personal names. One of the more striking features of life in the early colonial period is how casual people were with the spellings of their names. Shakespeare, as is commonly noted, never spelled his name the same way twice in any of his surviving six signatures, even employing two spellings on a single document. His contemporaries were even more approximate in their renderings, leaving us with eighty-three different spellings of his name. Curiously, the one spelling Shakespeare himself didn’t appear to use was
Shakespeare.
Sir Walter Raleigh likewise
changed the spelling of his surname as one might change a shirt, sometimes styling himself
Rawleyghe,
sometimes
Rawley,
sometimes
Ralegh.
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His friends and associates were even less specific, addressing him as
Ralo, Ralle, Raulie, Rawlegh, Rawlighe, Rawlye
and some sixty-five other seemingly whimsical variants. Again, the one spelling he never apparently used is the one most commonly applied to him today:
Raleigh.
²⁸

Abraham Lincoln’s ancestors are recorded in early church and property rolls in such forms as
Lyncoln, Linccolne
and
Linkhorn,
Jefferson’s as
Giffersonne
and
Jeffreson,
and Andrew Jackson’s as
Jaxon, Jackeson, Jakeson
and
Jakson.
John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts (or
Masathusets
as it appeared on the first colonial-minted coins, place names being equally subject to orthographic variability), sometimes styled himself
Wyntropp,
which is in fact how he pronounced the name,
²⁹
and the records of early colonial towns are so full of multiple spellings for the same name –
Mayo/Mayhew, Smith/Smythe, Moore/Muir
and so on – as to suggest that few in that busy age saw any special merit or purpose in consistency of spelling or even pronunciation.

As early colonists employed odd spellings, so too they often brought unexpected pronunciations with them. This was particularly the case in Virginia where the leading families had a special fondness for pronouncing their family names in improbable ways, so that
Sclater
became ‘Slaughter’,
Munford
became ‘Mumfud’,
Randolph
was ‘Randall’,
Wyatt
was ‘Wait’,
Devereaux
was ‘Deverecks’,
Callowhill
was ‘Carroll’,
Higginson
was ‘Hickerson’,
Norsworthy
was ‘Nazary’, and
Taliaferro
became a somewhat less than self-evident ‘Tolliver’. Still more unlikely were the Crenshaws, who were said to pronounce the name ‘Granger’, and a branch of the
Enroughty clan, which altered the pronunciation to ‘Darby’, evidently as a way of distinguishing themselves from those members who said ‘Enruffty’. Almost always these aberrant pronunciations arose not in the New World but were brought from England, and presumably treasured as rather eccentric heirlooms. In contrast to Britain, where bewildering pronunciations are affectionately preserved, in most cases in America the pronunciations gradually fell into line with their spellings, as when the forebears of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin, stopped rhyming the name with ‘south’ and instead made it rhyme with ‘truth’.

The practice was less common in the north but not unknown. Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, the fourteenth President, pronounced his name ‘Purse’ throughout his life, but even such modest phonetic unorthodoxy was rare. New Englanders saved their creative impulses for their forenames, finding a certain comfort in endowing their children with names that denoted virtuous qualities. Among the
Mayflower
passengers we find Love and Wrastle Brewster, Resolved White, Humility Cooper, Desire Minter and Remember Allerton. Such names, as far as we can tell, appear only among the
Mayflower
children, suggesting that in 1620 the practice was quite new. We can not be entirely sure because the records are patchy. William Bradford compiled a ‘compleat’ list of
Mayflower
passengers in which he recorded the names of all of the men and most of the children and menservants, but only a few of the women, as if they were somewhat incidental to the enterprise. We therefore know, for instance, the name of Christopher Martin’s two men-servants, but have no idea what his wife was called. As wives gave up their surnames upon marriage, so it would appear that they relinquished their forenames except among their familiars, being known in the wider world – or at least to William Bradford – simply as ‘Mistress Martin’ or ‘Mistress Jones’.

At first descriptive names were confined to a single virtue: Faith, Hope, Love, Charity, Increase, Continent and the like, but within a generation Puritan parents were giving their children names that positively rang with righteousness: Flie-Fornication, Misericordia-Adulterina, Job-Raked-Out-of-the-Ashes, Small-Hope, Praise-God, Fear-Not, The-Lord-Is-Near. Names began to sound rather like cheerleaders’ chants, so that among the early Pilgrims we find Fight-the-Good-Fight-of-Faith Wilson, Be-Courteous Cole, KillSin Pemble, and the memorably euphonious Safely-on-High Snat. Occasionally the desire for biblical fidelity resulted in names of daunting sonorosity: Mahershalalhasbaz, Zaphenathpaneah, Zerubbabel and Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. And sometimes parents simply closed their eyes and stabbed blindly at the Bible, placing their faith in Providence to direct them to an apposite word, which accounts for the occasional occurrence of such relative inanities as Maybe Barnes and Notwithstanding Griswold.
³⁰

Although these memorable appellations naturally attract our attention, they were not in fact all that numerous. Careful tabulation has shown that no more than 4 per cent of Puritan children were given unconventional names. Most infants were in fact endowed with names that were unimaginative to the point of timidity. Just three names – Sarah, Elizabeth and Mary – accounted for more than half of all the females christened in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s.
³¹
Where parents applied more adventurous names, generally it was not to venerate the Bible, but to honour some progenitor – as with the celebrated clergyman and author Cotton Mather, who was named not for that useful fibre, but for his mother Maria Cotton (who was, entirely incidentally, the stepsister of her husband, Increase Mather, and thus was not only Cotton’s mother but simultaneously his aunt).
³²

By the turn of the eighteenth century, striking forenames had fallen out of use almost entirely. At the same time, there
arose a tendency to encourage a measure of uniformity with surnames. In Britain family names often came, indeed still come, with a variety of acceptable spellings:
Lea/Leigh/Lee, More/Mohr/Moore, Coke/Cook, Cooper/Cowper, Smith/Smythe
(and even in my acquaintance
Shmith).
Early on in America names tended to standardize around a single simplified spelling, so that
Browne
generally became
Brown, Hull
became
Hall, Newsholme
became
Newsom
and so on.
³³

From the earliest days, immigrants from non-English-speaking countries likewise adapted their names to ease their way into American society. Paul Revere’s father, a French Huguenot refugee, arrived in America as Apollos Rivoire.
³⁴
James Bowdoin, the Massachusetts revolutionary leader and founder of Bowdoin College, was the son of a Pierre Baudoin. George Custer, of Last Stand fame, emerged from a long line of Kösters. The Rockefellers began as Roggenfelders, the Westinghouses as Wistinghausens. Billy Sunday, the baseball player and evangelist, came from a family of Sonntags. Buffalo Bill Cody’s family name was adapted from Kothe. President Hoover’s forebears were Hubers.
³⁵
Wendell Willkie’s father was named Willcke.

Often the transition was relatively straightforward. Langestraet easily became Longstreet, as Wannemacher turned naturally into Wanamaker, Schumacher into Shoemaker, Jung into Young, Schmidt and Müller into Smith and Miller, Blumental into Bloomingdale, Braun into Brown, Griin into Green, Blum into Bloom, Fjeld into Field, Oehms into Ames, Koch into Cook, Nieuwhuis into Newhouse, Pfoersching into Pershing, Jansson, Jonsson and Johansson into Johnson, Olesen and Olsson into Olsen. Occasionally slightly more ingenuity was required, as when Bon Coeur was turned into Bunker and Wittenachts became Whitenecks. When folk etymology wouldn’t do, direct translation was often the most convenient solution, which is how the French
Feuillevert
evolved into the
Greenleaf
in John Greenleaf
Whittier. The result is that American surnames often have an Anglo-Saxon homogeneity that belies their origins. Miller and Johnson, for instance, are far more common family names in America than in Britain, and almost entirely because of adoption by Germans and Scandinavians with similar, but other, names.

As America moved into the second half of the nineteenth century, immigration increasingly moved away from the comfortably adaptable Germanic heartland of Europe and to the southern and eastern fringes. People began arriving on American shores bearing names far less accommodating to English sensibilities and phonetics. Polish names like Krzyanowski, Szybczyńeski, Mikolajezyk and Gwzcarczyszyn
³⁶
clearly represented a greater linguistic challenge than Braun or Olesen. Even the shortest of eastern European names – notably such Czech manifestations as Krč, Chrt, Hnát and Srch – often seemed to defy easy assimilation. There was the problem, too, that some groups like the Hungarians put their last names first and others, notably Armenians, didn’t normally go in for last names at all. Sometimes a foreign name could be translated into an English equivalent, so that many Poles named Kowalczyk and Czechs named Kovář became Smiths. Sometimes a more manageable middle name was pressed into service, as when Josef Konrad Korzienowski became the writer Joseph Conrad. Long names were generally truncated, so that Greeks with names like Pappadimitracoupoulos became, almost inevitably, Pappas, and Poles named Mikolajezyk became Mikos (and often further refined to some less visibly ethnic form like Michaels).

Sometimes the old name was abandoned altogether to be replaced with a shiny new name with a good American ring to it, as when the Italian boxer Andrea Chiariglione became the American boxer Jim Flynn. Not infrequently, some members of a family would adapt the family name while
others would stay faithful to their cultural heritage. Thus the novelist Theodore Dreiser and the song writer Paul Dresser (’On the Banks of the Wabash’) were brothers.
³⁷

For Jewish immigrants the question of an American identity had an additional dimension. For those who wished to function in the wider world – for instance in show business – a visibly Jewish name could be a handicap, so Israel Baline became Irving Berlin, Mendel Berlinger turned into Milton Berle and Nathan Birnbaum took to the stage as George Burns. This was hardly a new problem for Jews. Mencken quotes a tale from Samuel Pepys’s diary about a Dr Levy who had petitioned a court to let him change his name to Sullivan and then a month later sought permission to change it again to Kilpatrick. ‘On request for ye reason, he telleth ye court that ye patients continually ask of him, “What was your name
before?”
If granted ye change, he shall then tell them “Sullivan”.‘
³⁸
Often, Jews had no particular attachment to their surnames. Those from Austria and parts of Germany had been compelled to adopt German surnames only sixty or seventy years before. Often the names imposed on them had been unattractive to begin with, as with Geldwässer (’gold water’), a venerable euphemism for urine, Wanzenknicker (’louse picker’) and Eselkopf (’ass’s head’), and they were only too glad to shed them.