Wolfe portrays this conflict between Chomsky and Everett as an continuation of the debate between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (the "co-discoverer" of the idea of natural selection) over the question of whether Darwinian evolution could explain how human language came into existence (Chomsky, like Darwin, believes it can, while Everett, like Wallace, denies this, arguing instead that language is a human creation). However, after reading Sampson's book, I came to realize that the clash between Chomsky's and Everett's views of language can also be placed in another historical context, namely the history of linguistics as a scholarly field in the United States. As Sampson points out, from the late 19th century until the 1950s, American linguistics was dominated by a group of scholars known as the Descriptivists, perhaps the most famous of whom were Franz Boaz (1858-1942) and Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949). The Descriptivists believed in unlimited diversity among human languages; in other words, they rejected the idea that human languages exhibit any universal characteristics. It was Chomsky, starting in the 1950s, who moved American linguistics in an opposite direction, by advocating the theory of Universal Grammar. By rejecting Chomsky's Universal Grammar and arguing that languages reflect the culture in which they are used, Everett has, in effect, revived Descriptivism's notion of linguistic relativity. However, this connection between Everett and the Descriptivists is more than historical; it is also personal in a sense. In his book Sampson points out that Descriptivism has been the guiding philosophy of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), a Christian organization dedicated to training missionaries to translate the Bible into languages for which there is currently there is no translation. Everett--it turns out--received his linguistic training from SIL. Given this background, perhaps it is not totally surprising that Everett (despite being a Chomskyan in earlier in his academic career) should end up rejecting Chomsky's view of language.
In short, the conflict between Chomsky and Everett that Wolfe so colorfully describes in The Kingdom of Speech can be understood as having a more complex historical context than perhaps Wolfe himself realizes. At least, that is what I would argue.
Image of Franz Boaz from Wikimedia Commons