By Marcia Biederman, author of SCAN ARTIST: HOW EVELYN WOOD CONVINCED THE WORLD THAT SPEED-READING WORKED, to be released by Chicago Review Press on Sept. 3, 2019.
If the redacted version of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s report had been released during the Kennedy era, everyone would have read already. Or, rather, they would have claimed they had. With JFK in the White House, reportedly gulping text at breakneck speed, a simmering speed-reading craze ignored scientific skepticism and reached a rapid boil.
If Mueller’s report does nothing else, its reception marks the end of a longstanding national delusion. In organizing a marathon read-aloud of its contents last week, House Democrats recognized that each unredacted word deserves careful consideration. From the early 1960s until not very long ago, that event would have seemed hopelessly old-school. Two U.S. presidents and a number of senators, notably Democrats, claimed the ability to read at least a thousand words a minute without sacrificing comprehension. At that pace, the special counsel’s 448-page would be well digested within two hours, not 17 hours and 25 minutes – the typical time it takes to read, according to Kindle.
As ridiculous as those claims may seem today, they once triggered national anxieties. A Texas newspaper warned in 1961, “If you can’t read and understand 3,000 to 4,000 words a minute, you’re definitely ‘out’ of the New Frontier.” The low end of that range is about ten times the normal reading rate of most people, including those with higher education. However, as the news item pointed out, help was available. A so-called revolutionary reading system called Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics promised to triple the average mortal’s rates in a matter of weeks. The most adept and applied students could expect to achieve warp speeds, or so they were told.
Professing to belong to the latter group were four senators. William Proxmire of Wisconsin, Herman Talmadge of Georgia, and Stuart Symington of Missouri enrolled in an Evelyn Wood class in Washington. Graduating from the 30-hour course, the three Democrats gushed about their progress on an ABC television news show. Proxmire’s outlandish claim of reading at 20,000 words per minutes was reported by papers across the nation, and testimonials from all three Democrats ran for years in Evelyn Wood print ads, joined by that of a Republican, Senator William Bennett of Utah.
Evelyn Wood, the company founder, was a native of Bennett’s state and had already taught some of his college-aged sons. As a part-time University of Utah instructor, she’d revamped a previously unnoticed reading-improvement course, telling a newspaper reporter she could multiple reading rates tenfold. Soon, students were camping out in registration lines to secure a spot in her class, or so said Wood, an unreliable narrator.
Rapid reading courses, as they were known, were nothing new then. Universities routinely offered them, competing with a patchwork of proprietary schools. By 1957, the Wall Street Journal had already noted the burgeoning sales of related gadgets, classes, and publications. But the fragmented industry lacked a coherent message and a dominant brand until Wood came to Washington with extravagant promises. Her trademarked method dispensed with the machinery favored by competitors. Instead, she had students sweep fingers across pages, with eyes following. With practice, she promised, they’d learn to ingest ideas and not words. Comprehension would improve rather than suffer, Wood assured.
Assumptions about age, race, and gender seemed to place Wood beyond reproach. White, middle-aged, and conservatively dressed, she was billed as a schoolteacher, though she’d spent relatively little time in conventional classrooms. Having staged religious pageants at the Mormon Tabernacle, she was adept at recruiting wholesome-looking juveniles to demonstrate her system at sales sessions, academic conferences and on TV talk and game shows. That skill served her well as she parried the legitimate skepticism of her methods arising from universities, reading experts, consumers, and former colleagues. Her mild manner and the youth of her assistants made debunkers seem like bullies, and her lawyer raised the threat of a defamation suit.
Not to be outdone by senators, two dozen US representatives invited an Evelyn Wood instructor to set up shop in a House hearing room. Most were Democrats eager to emulate JFK, who’d once taken a few speed-reading classes offered by another company before dropping out to continue on his own at a reported 1,250 words per minute. After Kennedy’s death, Evelyn Wood said he’d invited her to the White House to teach his aides and joint chiefs of staff. More likely, some chose to take the course commercially. Without endorsing Wood publicly, the reader-in-chief clearly approved of her approach. In the transcript of a telephone recording recently released by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the president urged his brother Ted, newly elected to the Senate, to work harder at an Evelyn Wood class organized, under the younger Kennedy’s leadership, in the upper chamber.
By then, Wood and her partners had sold the firm, nearly bankrupted by its rapid expansion across the nation and in several other countries. As it changed hands several more times over the next decades, Wood remained a consultant, defending her method against mounting attacks from scientific investigators, who found that Wood-trained readers were merely skimming, at disastrous cost to comprehension. As enrollment hit half a million, a growing number of customers asked for refunds but found them hard to get. Providing the veneer of legitimacy, kinescopes of the ABC show featuring the senators were shown for years at Evelyn Wood sales sessions.
Even as all four of Wood’s senatorial fans stayed in office, the testimonials shrank to one. Eventually only Proxmire’s face appeared in ads, next to his assessment of his Evelyn Wood course: “I must say that this is one of the most useful education experiences I have ever had. It certainly compares favorably with the experiences I’ve had at Yale and Harvard.” A decade after he first said that, he was questioned about it by the Federal Trade Commission. He said those were his words, adding that he’d received no money for them, an explanation that appeared to satisfy the FTC.
Republicans, meanwhile, had re-entered the game. In 1970, the Nixon White House quietly contracted Evelyn Wood instructors to school its White House staffers. Among the pupils were press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler and speech writer Patrick J. Buchanan. But by then the Evelyn Wood marketing machine was sputtering, and the media barely took notice. Anti-war protests had darkened the mood on college campuses, a main source of Evelyn Wood revenue. Bright-eyed demonstrators began encountering hecklers instead of applause. At the University of Washington in Seattle, frustrated refund-seekers formed a group called Students Against Evelyn Wood.
Hope revived when Carter arrived in the White House, arranging Evelyn Wood classes for himself, some family members, and about fifteen others. According to Carter, eight weeks of instruction with an Evelyn Wood franchise owner had him reading 1,000 words per minute, just below the pace attributed to Kennedy. Presidential enthusiasm gave the business a lift, just as its fourth set of owners were preparing to sell it.
But the resuscitation wasn’t entirely successful. News outlets that had once boosted the Evelyn Wood method now derided it, soliciting quotes from skeptics long ignored or dismissed. The adulatory headlines of 1961, like, “She Can Teach You to Read 2,500 Words a Minute!” were displaced in 1982 by “Sp’d Read’ng or Skimm’ng?” While never regaining its past popularity, the brand survived its creator’s 1995 death. Evelyn Wood books and courses are still sold. The name means little to millennials, but a new crop of competitors is angling for them, marketing apps and display technologies that promise to turbocharge reading speeds.
This time, however, the speed merchants can no longer expect a boost from Washington, at least, not from Democrats. Among Trump’s opponents, slow reading, like slow food, has regained popularity. With podcasts and round-robin readings, progressives encourage the savoring of every word. As for the other side, MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah tweeted, “Every single @Senate GOP @HouseGOP member who appears on TV to defend Trump should be asked if they’ve read the full Mueller Report & for specific examples so they can’t fake it.” Evelyn Wood’s debunkers couldn’t have phrased it better.
©Marcia Biederman, 2019
