The Great American Spelling Bee with Gabe Henry

The first national spelling bee in the United States was held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1908, and its champion was a 13-year-old Black girl named Marie Bolden. The New Orleans team threatened to boycott the competition when they learned they would have to compete against her. The organizers refused to remove her, and Bolden went on to win, spelling every word correctly. This moment, as Gabe Henry explains to host Sarah Marshall on You're Wrong About, sits at the intersection of several American stories: the history of spelling bees as a democratic institution, the failed movement to simplify English spelling, and the way a supposedly level playing field can become a site of genuine triumph.

Spelling Bees as Entertainment and Education

Spelling competitions in America began in the 1700s as classroom exercises called "spelling schools," used by New England teachers to make literacy fun and competitive. The stakes were real: in one colonial classroom, the losing side had to sweep the room and build the fires the next morning. These contests became possible only after the arrival of standardized dictionaries, beginning with Samuel Johnson's in 1755, which created a single "right" way to spell a word. Before that, spelling was flexible—Shakespeare spelled his own name differently in every surviving signature.