The Spelling Bee: What Makes It an American Institution?

The "spelling bee," a contest based on spelling words correctly, is a peculiarly American institution that dates back to the 1700s, if not before. Over the past twenty years or so, this competition has drawn much attention in the news, in literature, and in film. Moreover, the yearly national spelling bee championship is a televised event. What has not been attended to is what makes this event so peculiarly American. The argument presented in this paper is that language in a Calvinist America became the site where a certain arbitrariness in how words were spelled was seen as analogous to an essential arbitrariness in Calvinist thought, and culture. Spelling correctly a word such as "though," for example, was an act of overcoming what could be perceived as the arbitrariness in the relationship between the letters of "u," "g," and "h." The written language, which is often seen as representing a certain moral dimension (watch your "Ps" and "Qs"), in the spelling bee, became that site of possible triumph over that fundamental, Calvinist dimension in American culture of the sense of the arbitrary, a concept at the heart of the doctrine of predestination.