Lewis Masquerier

• Lewis Masquerier
• Born: March 14, 1802
• Died: 1888

Pioneer in phonetic spelling and agrarian reformer, was born in Paris, Kentucky, the grandson of French Huguenots. His father, also named Lewis Masquerier, was educated in England and lived in Java, Haiti, and Santo Domingo before settling about 1800 in Kentucky, where he married Sarah Hicklin. The younger Lewis Masquerier received a meager frontier education and worked on his parents’ farm. As a boy he developed a distaste for Old Testament stories, which shocked his sensibilities. After his father died, his mother remarried and moved to the Boonslick settlement on the Missouri River. Masquerier returned to his birthplace and worked there in a printing shop.

Hoping to become an orator, Masquerier studied law. He was licensed and began practice in Quincy, Illinois, but discovered that he was too shy to succeed as a trial lawyer and that he was bored by office work. His studies had produced in him, by his own account, a “thirst for promiscuous learning” that he indulged while making a living in land speculation.

One of Masquerier’s major interests was phonetic spelling. He developed a new alphabet of eleven vowels and twenty-two consonants in 1830 and published a pamphlet on the subject in 1834. A typical sentence using his alphabet reads: “But yu dear children will not hav suts on thou to unlern.” Masquerier traveled to New York City to popularize his phonetic spelling system, printing specimens of a small dictionary together with a treatise on scientific orthography. In 1867 he published The Phonotypic Spelling and Reading Manual. A pioneer in this field, Masquerier anticipated by more than twenty years the work done by Alexander J. Ellis and others. About 1840 Masquerier married Anna Taber of Bradford, Vermont.

While living in New York Masquerier became interested in various schemes for social reform. At first he espoused the communistic ideas of Robert Owen but he was later converted to the individualistic views of George Henry Evans, a land reformer and the editor of the first labor newspaper in the United States. Evans’s agrarian theories were derived from the writings of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, who had advocated the view that the right to life is the source of all other rights. This included the corollary that everyone is free to use natural resources and that people therefore had the right to overthrow the system of large landholdings that kept tenant farmers poor. Evans also argued for the abolition of debt laws, against chattel and wage slavery, and for equal rights for women. “The great object of his life,” Masquerier wrote, “was to secure homes for all by abolishing the monopoly on them. As editor . . . he triumphantly vindicated the right of every human being to a share of the soil, as essential to the welfare and permanence of a landed democracy.” Masquerier embraced Evans’s thesis that everyone has an equal, inalienable right as an individual to a homestead. “Property must be owned separately by individuals,” he asserted, “and not in communized bodies.” Masquerier stood for Evans’s theories as a member of the National Reform Union, but the group was never truly national and did not attract an important following.

Much of the impetus for Evans’s theories and Masquerier’s advocacy of them stemmed from economic and social conditions before the Civil War. A surplus of laborers in the eastern coastal cities forced workers to compete with one another for decreasing wages. Holders of large properties rented land for farming and other development at high rates, sometimes practicing feudal absolutism. Prices for land, machinery, and goods rose as wages steadied or fell. Recurring economic panics hindered laborers’ efforts to become independent.

Programs for improving the lot of the white laboring classes and the growth of abolitionism were both products of these economic and social crises and provided the context for Evans’s and Masquerier’s work. Their theories were formed in opposition to the collectivist visions of utopian Socialists like Robert Owen and Albert Brisbane, Charles Fourier’s advocate in America, whose proposals were tainted by their European origin as well as by their reliance on coercion to achieve social harmony. To preserve each individual’s right to associate voluntarily, utopian agrarians like Evans, Masquerier, and the single-tax advocate Henry George offered individualistic solutions. Their principles aligned them with the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who also opposed associationism, though from different perspectives.

Masquerier pushed Evans’s ideas of individualism even further, to the point of anarchism. In lectures delivered in New York and Boston, and in pamphlets, he developed a program for an agrarian utopia. The entire surface of the earth was to be divided into townships, each six miles square. The townships were to be subdivided into homesteads of forty acres, and further subdivisions, of a minimum of ten acres, were to be permitted. In this way landlordism, rent gouging, and wage slavery were to be overridden. In the geographic center of each township a village would be established as headquarters for the township’s self-governing participatory democracy. Masquerier would have abolished not only organized government but organized religion, which he viewed as another means for enslaving humanity.

Though Masquerier’s extensions of Evans’s theories were never realized, he lived to see adoption of one principle of agrarianism: the passage in 1862 of the Homestead Act, which distributed western lands in the public domain on terms similar to those he had set forth. Masquerier died at the age of eighty-six.

Lewis Masquerier’s career as a reformer illustrates the possibility that intellectual rather than religious enthusiasm could be a source of the reform impulse. Masquerier was attracted to schemes for rationally ordering human affairs, from spelling words to the settlement and socialization of huge new territories. Masquerier’s rationalism is also an American tradition, and his advocacy of an individualist rather than a communal basis for reform is an American vision, too.

It may be that Masquerier’s atheism, rationalism, and individualism hindered wide dissemination of his views. The cohesion of the communistic associations at Oneida or Amana was not Masquerier’s aim at all; his principles led elsewhere—to self-reliance and independence. Though Masquerier’s views had much in common with the socialist visions of human in-terdependency, he distrusted the rationality of an individual in a crowd, or a church, or a frenzy. His career—however limited his influence—carried on an American tradition of secular humanism.

Masquerier published pamphlets, manuals, and a spelling dictionary; the major orthographic source is The Phonotypic Spelling and Reading Manual (1867). His writings, comprised of newspaper articles, pamphlets, and poems on phonetics, land reform, and theology, were collected in Sociology: or the Reconstruction of Society, Government, and Property (1877). An Appendix to Sociology was published in 1884. Both works contain autobiographical summaries. See also J. R. Common set al., eds.,A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, vol. 7 (1910), and the Dictionary of American Biography (1933).