This, from The Story of Ain’t, p. 170, sums up the attitude of the Prescriptivists:
“But this was several years before history’s most notorious dictionary was published. Gove was still an innocent, not yet excoriated in the press as a saboteur of the English language and the dangerous proponent of the philosophy that “anything goes.” In less than a decade, to quite a throng of newspapermen, schoolteachers, parents, intellectuals, mystery readers, and priests, Gove would become known as one of the most dangerous men on earth, a great relativist who was trying to sweep away all the rules of grammar and usage and doom the English-speaking West to a twentieth-century Tower of Babel.”