I’ve recently been thinking a lot about the two-hundred-fiftieth birthday of the country that I call home coming at a time when I feel so alienated from it. What does it mean when a nation sold to you as an imperfect idea, forever striving towards its own improvement and perfection suddenly begins to look more and more like the empire it is? An empire you know it has always been destined to be from its very genesis? What does it mean when the nationstate in which you reside, seeking to rewrite its history once more on an important anniversary (the most important one you’ll ever see in your lifetime, at least), decides it wants to write you and many of your fellow citizens about out of it, or to at least hide their objections to the status quo (those objections, mind you, that had always served as your evidence justifying a scrap of legitimacy in a clearly imperfect state)? What does it mean when the leader of that state, seeking to celebrate that date, presents himself all but emperor and king, demanding crassness, and thanks for the same, and then, when even that proves half-assed, demands the heads of all who note the halfness of that ass as that half-ass necessarily serves as our method of getting to that very celebration because our normal conveyances (cars, horses, etc.) were sold off to the lowest bidder?
It all seems so absurd, yet seemingly predictable all the while.
The nationstate has always been grotesque.
Strange, then, to wrestle with all this anew as one looks to the past by choice, looking at a husband and wife that surely would speak to the good of the nation’s ideals (though, surely, to its ills as well).
Those of you with a sharp-eye to the typography of this website may have noticed that this article is set in a different typeface to much of the rest of the site (at least at the time of posting and accompanied by my apologies to newsfeed and text-to-speech readers; hopefully you’ll be able to get a better experience for some of these typography articles when they happen by dropping in and visiting directly, but I hope the text stands up well enough on its own). The typeface in question is one I was inspired to make for myself, though it remains an early, incomplete version barely suitable for English-language prose in standard Usonian1 orthography of the early twenty-first century of the common era (Did you see how I carefully avoided using digits there? Yeah. I’m only just adding those as I write.)
So, yes, welcome to Longley, named for mid-nineteenth century Usonian utopian unitarian socialists Elias Longley and Margaret Vater (M. V.) Longley, his wife.2
Soon after they had married, Elias, who had recently been quite engrossed with the modern revival of phonetics as a discipline, went in together with his wife and brothers to became publishers specializing in Phonotypy, an English-language spelling reform pioneered by Sir Isaac Pitman and Alexander John Ellis. Though Phonotypy would eventually prove a fad, and the Longley Brothers eventually disband their efforts as a joint publishing concern, Elias parlayed his knowledge of Pitman’s shorthand and contacts with educators into an on-going career as a stenographic reporter and teacher of Pitman shorthand.
For Margaret, supporting Elias and the Longley Brothers publishing house took the form of learning typesetting, which, similar to Elias, led to a career as an editor and court reporter. Margaret eventually was among the first generation to master the new skill of typewriting, for which she then offered lessons alongside her husband’s lessons in stenography.
Though her choice of profession was undoubtedly directly influenced by her husband’s interest in phonetics and desire to promote Phonotypy, Margaret was no meek housewife solely supporting her husband’s endeavors. Indeed, Margaret was a notable suffragette and close friend of Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony, eventually becoming the vice-president of the People’s Party in California and helping to lead the Los Angeles County Campaign Committee for an (unsuccessful) referendum on women’s suffrage near the end of the nineteenth century.
Suffice to say, though they undoubtedly had faults to which I fail to speak of adequately here (California’s populists, for example, were known for their connections to anti-Catholic sentiment, and utopian socialist views on abolitionism were not always free of the paternalism of whiteness), it remains fascinating that I should have ended up deciding to work on a typeface based on a Scotch-face used by the Elias and M. V. Longley family’s printing concern this year.3
While the lineage of Scotch-face type dates to the Pica No. 2 of the Edinburgh type foundry of William Miller from the early nineteenth century, Longley shows subtle features characteristic of the numerous unnamed Usonian Roman types that followed the introduction of Scotch-face to the country in the mid-nineteenth century, such as its slightly leaning, but quite-pointed, “t” (as opposed to the flat-topped design of some later revivals) and, in its serifs, a distinct influence from the then-equally-novel slab serif designs.
Based on a Small Pica design of 11 points, Longley is a little heavier than Times New Roman at an equivalent size, but is quite legible and not overwrought even at slightly larger sizes, hopefully making it a decent, if perhaps slightly heavier than average option for book type, as I hope you can see here. This is quite understandable, coming as it does largely from a book printed in Phonotypy about the lives of Usonian presidents through Franklin Pierce, the fourteenth and current as of the printing of the book. Of Phonotypy, I intend to write more later, but for this article I will remain focused on the now largely complete (but still actively tuned) Longley Romanic,4 its origins, its namesakes, and the country into which it burst forth, some one hundred seventy-five years ago.
Elias and Margaret were of that generation of Usonians born into what is now called the Second Great Awakening. The burst of optimism they rode in their youth belied the volatility of their adulthood. At the time “Biographies of the Presidents of the United States,” the book upon which Longley is based, was printed, Phonotypy was still novel, and reformers belonging to the American Phonetic Society still believed in the possibilities of promoting its use. But the optimism of that time was already fading, and Longley Brothers would cease printing altogether by the end of the decade.
And so it was for the nation as well; Franklin Pierce, the final and current president of the book, had already brought about a ripening of the rotten fruit of the peculiar Usonian institution of slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act he had signed turned two years old the year “Biographies” was printed, the Fugitive Slave Act was then actively being enforced on his orders, members of his administration had been agitating for the acquisition of Cuba as a slave state to offset the admission of California as a free state, and, five years later, civil war would follow. Franklin Pierce’s biography in the book is understandably foreshortened, noting only that “whether Mr. Pierce and his supporters shall accomplish [the acquisition of Cuba,] the desire of their hearts, and what other acts he may favor or frustrate, will be subjects for future record.”
The book does not mention his opposition to Lincoln’s prosecution of the War Between the States. It also fails to mention the time he angered citizens of his hometown of Concord, New Hampshire when he declined to raise a flag as a public mourning gesture following the assassination of President Lincoln, claiming that his service to the country as General during the Mexican War and later as president did not require him to make any further demonstration of “devotion to the Stars and Stripes.” Those moments still lay in the future.
It was just the eightieth year of the Independence of the United States of America when the book came out, after all.
It is near the end of the two-hundred-fiftieth as I write this.
The nationstate has always been grotesque.
Twenty years ago, a second civil war was talked of by those with ears to hear, three years before a Tea Party promised to take the country back. Twenty years before the Longley Brothers’ book was published, Andrew Jackson was merely grousing about a Corrupt Bargain—his actual presidency still lay three years in the future.
The first Juneteenth, the day on which I am writing the first draft of this post, would be celebrated only ten years after the book’s publication, this coming soon after the end of a war in which Elias had put his stenographic skills to work in an attempt to report on those who would see it won for the Union and on those who demanded the abolition of slavery as its fruits. Elias would even be sent to Fort Sumter to record the return and raising of the Stars and Stripes there once more.
A strange time to be looking back on, to be sure.
Elias and Margaret Longley lived their lives contributing to the construction of a flawed United States of America that nevertheless improved itself, a kind of nation I find more relatable, more human, more... Usonian, in all the best senses of the word. Would the history the nation rewrites for itself on the eve of the close of its two-hundred-fiftieth year speak of the Longleys well for having tried to help rid that nation of some of its flaws? For trying to build that “more perfect union”? Or would it denounce them for populism? For supporting women’s suffrage? For siding with “Northern Aggression”?
Regardless, the Longleys still have their memorial signs in Ohio and California. Others of their era never got them to begin with.
What is the history that modern Usonians should remember the nation by? Will we have our signs to remember us by? Or will we be denied them?
Will the history that we write together be one in which me and those I care about have a place in that ongoing fight to make the country better than it is? Or will it be one from which I am cut out like a photograph with jagged edges, a silhouette of absence where a face once looked back?
I use the term “Usonian” here and elsewhere to stand in for uses of the term “American” when it is applied exclusively to citizens of the United States of America or to describe things that relate to it. My choice of term here is admittedly partly for its etic “shock” value, but the term has a history that takes it through the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright to some of the European intelligentsia who immigrated to become citizens of the United States of America at the turn of the twentieth century. Wright and others preferred the term as a way to unambiguously refer to the middle-class, democratic cultural character of the United States or America without explicitly invoking its constitutional structure or implying any kind of hegemony over both North and South America, a sense which I hope to impart as well through my use of the word as well. While I only speak briefly about the word for now, I hope to write an origin story diving into the early history of the word “Usonian” in more detail at a later date.
Much of what I share of the lives of Elias Longley and Margaret Vater (M. V.) Longley stems from the work of Dave Seaney and Wendy Erisman, to whom this article owes a significant debt.
Who cut this type is unknown. Cincinnati was home to several type foundries at the time, and a publication of the American Phonetic Society notes that “a half dozen friends of the Reform in Cincinnati” had had a Phonotypic typeface cut about a decade prior to the printing of the book on which Longley is based, “Biographies of the Presidents of the United States.” The work then goes on to mention that, perhaps little more than a year later after Elias had proven the viability of being a phonetic printer, “Longley and Brother” (as the Longley Brothers publishing concern was first constituted) “sent to England for a variety of types.” As the Phonotypic alphabet used by the above publication differs from that eventually used in “Biographies,” it is likely that Longley is based on a new type cut between the printing of the “Phonetic Almanac” linked above and the publication of “Biographies.” Whether this type was also imported from England or was cut by a local type foundry, however, is not known.
“Romanic,” as contrasted with “Phonotypic,” was a word used by proponents of Phonotypy to refer to the twenty-six letter alphabet used for more traditional English “common spelling.” Longley Romanic deliberately eschews certain more Phonotypic letterforms that will eventually be employed in the unqualified variant of Longley (still to be finalized) so as to provide a font more useful for non-Phonotypic applications by default.