Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 88
Sign: Gemini
City: PLEASANT HILL
State: Tennessee
Country: US
Signup Date: 1/11/2006
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009
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”How the USA Became the World’s Policeman.” Revised June 30, 2009. First appeared as: "How U.S. Foreign Policy Became Imperial Since the 1898 Spanish American War,"
A Dialogue by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker on Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp., and other works.
Given originally at Book Review Group, Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, June 19, 2006. E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net
Summary
We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, 2002, plus related works, because: we were concerned, like all Americans, about why 9,11-200l happened, why we are in Iraq and Afghanistan, why Muslim extremists hate us, why many believe that the U.S. and its recend past president were imperialistic.
Zimmermann traces U.S. foreign policy back to the 1898 Spanish American War. Until then U.S. energies went into continental expansion, Atlantic to the Pacific. With the frontier gone, needing to sell our surplus industrial/agricultural products abroad, we modernized our Navy, provoked and defeated a weakened Spain, acquired Spain's strategic Caribbean and Pacific bases, and planned a Panama Canal (opened in 1914)--our first steps toward becoming a world economic and military power.
In a three-month imperial thrust—late April to July 1898--we destroyed the Spanish fleet, acquired overseas naval bases in and responsibility for Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa, others. The resulting expansionist U.S. foreign policy led a willing winning coalition of democracies through WW I and II, Cold War, Gulf War. Then came 9-11-2002, the 2003 Iraq War, and serious U.S. difficulties.
The Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power were:
1-U.S. Navy Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan whose book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History…(1890), was "the most influential work on naval strategy ever written." In it he urged more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships for oceanic offense; strategic refueling and refitting stations in the Caribbean and Pacific; and quick Atlantic to Pacific passage through a central American canal.
2-Theodore Roosevelt who, as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Vice President, &U.S. President implemented Capt. Mahan's naval ideas and largely provoked the 1898 Spanish American War in which he was the hero of the Battle of San Juan Hill, Cuba.
3-Influential expansionist-minded Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, over 30 years on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who not only guided Roosevelt's career choices to the presidency but won by 2 votes the Senate's approval of the Treaty of Paris (1900) by which defeated Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
4-As U.S. ambassador in London and later U.S. Secretary of State, John Haygot Britain to back the U.S. in the Spanish American War and affirm U.S. control of Spain's Caribbean and Pacific territories.
5-Successful N.Y. lawyer Elihu Root as U.S. Secretary of War replaced Army rule of newly won territories with civil administrators good at nation building and implementing self rule.
End of Summary. Dialog Follows:
Betty: We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, plus supporting references.
Frank: Why this particular Warren Zimmermann book?
Betty: Because he shows that when the dynamism of U.S. westward expansion (i.e., our "Manifest Destiny") reached the Pacific, it was soon transformed into an overseas expansionist, aggressive, imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Having settled the Pacific coast, with nowhere else to go, overproduction of farm and factory products impelled us to find new markets and new resources abroad. The end of the frontier drove us to trade abroad, to build a stronger navy, to seek colonies and world power status.
Betty: With the frontier gone, the drive for trade and ascendancy abroad pushed us into the 1898 Spanish American War. That war led to our becoming a world power. That's the meaning of Zimmermann's book title. The Spanish American War was our First Great Triumph, a first step toward world hegemony based on an increasingly aggressive imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Zimmermann also implies, repeat implies, why an aggressive U.S. imperialism led to the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks, the 2003 Iraq war, U.S. unilateral military strikes; why Muslim extremists hate us; why we have lost world wide respect and are now in crisis.
Betty: Warren Zimmerman, born 1935, died 2004, was a Yale graduate, a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, England, and a U.S. diplomat for 33 years.
Frank: He was U.S. ambassador to various countries, including Yugoslavia. He then taught international diplomacy at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. His book, First Great Triumph, won several prizes.
Betty: Zimmermann's title, The First Great Triumph, is from a letter Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) wrote to his sister Corinne, June 15, 1898, on his way to fight in Cuba: "[This] is a great historical expedition,…I thrill to feel that I am part of it…. If we…succeed…and we shall succeed, we have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement."1
Frank: Theodore Roosevelt is the first of Zimmermann's…Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Roosevelt is presented as a rising dynamic Republican politician, enthusiastic for U.S. expansion abroad and determined to remake the U.S. from a third rate country to a world power.
Betty: Theodore Roosevelt and other expansionists helped provoke the Spanish American War, which made the U.S. for the first time a colonial power, controlling Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa. More later about Roosevelt.
Frank: The U.S. was expansionist-minded from its beginnings. Examples: The American Revolution was fought to win independence and to acquire all North American land we could get. We tried to take Canada several times but did not succeed.
Betty: George Washington referred to the U.S. as a "new empire," a "rising empire." He said in 1786: "there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires."2
Frank: Pres. Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, 1803. He then sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Pacific Northwest. Why? So Americans could settle and develop its resources.
Betty: We bought Florida from Spain (1819) under Pres. James Monroe. We also formulated the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which declared the Western Hemisphere to be a U.S. sphere of influence closed to European exploitation.
Frank: Pres. James K. Polk (1795-1849) wanted the U.S. northwest boundary with Canada set at "54-40 or Fight." But Britain was too strong to tackle. The U.S. had to settle on the 49th parallel as the Canadian boundary.
Betty: By urging the Mexican War (1846-48), Pres. James K. Polk added 1.2 million square miles to the U.S.
Frank: In 1853 Pres. Millard Fillmore (1800-74) sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) to open trade with Japan, a clear case of gunboat diplomacy.
Betty: Pres. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War and jailed subversives without trial, both unconstitutional acts. The U.S. was imperial in its discrimination against African Americans, native Americans, Chinese, and others.
Frank: By 1890, after Civil War and Reconstruction, a new generation with boundless energy built roads, canals, railroads, the telegraph, the Atlantic Cable; settled the west; created factories, industries, towns, cities.
Betty: Immigrant labor poured in. Business boomed. Fortunes were made. U.S. "Manifest Destiny," which took us to the Pacific, seemed unstoppable.
Frank: The U.S., by 1890, overproduced farm and factory products. With the U.S. frontier market reduced, with European countries walled off by protective high tariffs, U.S. farmers and manufacturers were pushed economically to find foreign markets and raw materials in less developed areas.
Betty: A major shift in the center of U.S. population was noted in the 1890 Census by Wisconsin History Professor Frederick Jackson Turner. He said in his famous 1893 paper, "The Frontier in American History": the American frontier is gone, but frontier characteristics remain--rugged individualism, restless movement, upward striving for business success, profits, and dominance.
Frank: In 1896, two years before the Spanish American War, Prof. Turner said prophetically: [The frontier] "energies of expansion will…[continue in] demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries…."3
Betty: Prof. Turner and other expansionists rightly saw that increased overseas trade required stronger naval protection. A stronger U.S. navy needed strategic overseas refueling and refitting bases. Military power to protect commercial expansion abroad then meant naval power. Enhanced world power then meant colonies. We needed colonies.
Frank: To Prof. Turner's insight that U.S. rugged individualism would lead to overseas expansion was added Charles Darwin's (1809-82) evolution theory (1859). U.S. expansionists embraced Darwinian evolution. They saw struggle for survival as natural, Anglo Saxon society as superior, the U.S. as the fittest nation destined for world leadership.
Betty: Second of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power/i<>," Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), was a U. S. naval officer and historian. Mahan's 1890 book on the importance of sea power influenced naval strategists world-wide. He was the father of the modern U.S. Navy.
Frank: Mahan, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate (1859), served on antiquated U.S. Civil War warships. He later irritated navy brass by writing articles urging U.S. Navy improvements. Superiors tried to muzzle Mahan. One called Mahan derisively "a pen and ink sailor."
Betty: Mahan's model for a great navy was the British Navy. Mahan wanted more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships. He wanted better selected, brighter, well trained, highly skilled naval personnel. Instead of small ships for coastal defense he wanted large battleships for oceanic offense.
Frank: : The U.S. Navy, Mahan wrote, must be mobile, flexible, and able to pass quickly from the Atlantic to the Pacific through a central American canal. The U.S. must also have a network of strategically located refueling and refitting stations with deep ports.
Betty: A naval officer under whom Mahan once served established at Newport, R.I., the world's first Naval War College. Mahan eagerly accepted a teaching post there in 1885. He steeped himself in historical studies and became the Naval War College's acting head and later president.
Frank: Needing a lecturer on the naval history of the War of 1812, Mahan found that Theodore Roosevelt had published in 1882, at age 24, an authoritative book on that subject. In his 1887 Naval War College lectures, Roosevelt used the word "war" 62 times. Mahan and Roosevelt bonded, reinforced each other, with Mahan as Roosevelt's strategic advisor. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and as U.S. President implemented Mahan's ideas.
Betty: Mahan's book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (1890), along with his later books, won rave reviews by Roosevelt and others. Mahan's books became required reading in navy departments worldwide.
Frank: Brief quotes about Mahan's importance: "The Influence of Sea Power…was Mahan's greatest achievement and probably the most influential work on naval strategy ever written."4 …"The Influence of Sea Power was a work of breathtaking range: a history of diplomatic and military strategy, a survey of land as well as sea combat."5 …"[Mahan's book] shaped the imperial policies of Germany and Japan…."6
Betty: Mahan's aggressive naval strategy coincided with the insatiable drive for increased U.S. trade abroad.
Frank: Said Ohio Governor William McKinley, before his presidency: "We want a foreign market for our surplus products."7
Betty: Said Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927), a year before the Spanish American War: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."8
Frank: Said expansionist Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, third of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power: "In the interests of our commerce…we should build the [Central American] canal, and for the protection of that canal…we should control [Hawaii]…, Samoa, [and] Cuba…. [Why,] the great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth…."9
Betty: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), son of two patrician Boston families, heir to a shipping fortune, was a Harvard graduate, a Harvard history professor. Roosevelt was his student.
Frank: Henry Cabot Lodge was a U.S. congressman, then as U.S. senator and long-time chairman, of the Foreign Relations Committee, he ruled the U.S. Senate with an iron hand.
Betty: Eight years older and more jingoistic than Roosevelt, Lodge guided Roosevelt's political career right up to the White House.
Frank: During William McKinley's presidency (1897-1901), Lodge, supreme political tactician; Roosevelt, diehard political expansionist; and Mahan, promoter of aggressive naval power—were determined to advance U.S. to world power status. They sparked the Spanish American War.
Betty: Seeking a pretext for war, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War: "In strict confidence…I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."10
Frank: Five years before the Spanish American War (1893), U.S. owners of Hawaiian sugar plantations, fearing the Hawaiian queen's (Queen Liliuokalani, 1838-1917) liberal reforms and expecting U.S. annexation, got the U.S. Navy to help dethrone the queen.
Betty: But newly elected anti-expansionist U.S. Pres. Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) vetoed annexation.
Frank: In Howard Kinzer's new book, 2006, title: Overthrow, he tells how Hawaii was the first territory whose regime the U.S. tried to destabilize. Why? So that we could annex Hawaii, take it over.
Betty: Hawaii, , according to Kinzer, was the first of 14 instances in 110 years when the U.S. militarily or by subversion forced regime changes to assure compliance with U.S. interests. 11
Frank: Spain in 1898 was weakened by years of guerrilla-led uprisings in Cuba under Jose Martí (1853-95) and in the Philippines under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964).
Betty: Americans, sympathetic with oppressed Cubans, were angry at Spain's brutality and resulting deaths. That anger was fanned by sensational U.S. press accounts of Spanish atrocities.
Frank: Pres. McKinley, having seen suffering as a Civil War officer, hoped to avoid war. But a riot in Havana on January 12, 1898, threatened Americans living there.
Betty: Pres. McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Cuba as a show of force.
Frank: On Feb. 15, 1898, an explosion sank the Maine in Havana Bay, killing 268 U.S. sailors.
Betty: A U.S. Navy investigation in March reported that a mine explosion outside the hull sank the Maine. The U.S. jingo press headlined, without proof, that Spanish agents deliberately sunk the Maine.
Frank: Press propaganda and public pressure pushed Pres. McKinley to ask Congress to declare war.
Betty: After the U.S. Navy blockaded Cuban ports, Spain on April 24, 1898, and the U.S. the next day declared war. END OF PART 1___________________Beginning of Part 2 ”Pax Americana: How and Why the USA Became the World’s Policeman.” Revised Aug. 3, 2006. First appeared as: "How U.S. Foreign Policy Became Imperial Since the 1898 Spanish American War," A Dialogue by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker on Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp., and other works. Given originally at Book Review Group, Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, June 19, 2006. E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net
Frank: Interjection: 78 years later, in 1976, a re-sifting of the evidence showed that the Maine explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion of coal dust—an accident.
Betty: Deliberate or accidental, the Maine explosion was a pretext. The real U.S. motives for the war were: to acquire more territory for more trade, more territory for refueling bases, to assure the U.S. greater status in the world, to protect the proposed Panama Canal, and—for the first time--to restore human rights to oppressed Cubans.
Frank: Cuba was the initial focus. The Philippine Islands was an afterthought. With the Navy Secretary away, Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt, on Mahan's advice, sent Commodore George Dewey's (1837-1917) Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong before war was declared.
Betty: Roosevelt instructed Dewey: when war is declared, rush to Manila and attack the Spanish fleet. Dewey's fleet reached Manila Bay late April 30. The next day, May 1, in a 7-hour battle Dewey destroyed the Spanish ships.
Frank: In Cuba a U.S. Navy squadron blockaded the remaining Spanish fleet. U.S. troops and volunteers, including Roosevelt's Rough Riders, reached Cuba.
Betty: Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, with spare glasses sewn into his new Brooks Brothers uniform, led the fight up San Juan Hill. On July 3, in a 4-hour sea battle the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet. A month later (Aug. 4, 1898) we took Puerto Rico.
Frank: Total U.S. casualties: 3,289 dead; of these 332 died in battle, the rest from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases. Spanish casualties: about 60,000 dead, 10% in battle, 90% from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases.12&13
Betty: After the war, in the Treaty of Paris (Dec. 10, 1898), Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the Pacific we annexed Wake Island (July 4, 1898) and Hawaii (July 7, 1898). We acquired Midway Island earlier when we bought Alaska (1867).
Frank: Opponents, uneasy about expansion abroad, argued against making the U.S. a colonial power. They opposed our taking distant lands with brown and yellow people they thought incapable of assimilation. Acquiring colonies, opponents said, went against U.S. isolationism, against the Monroe Doctrine, against U.S. principles of self-government.
Betty: By two votes Senator Henry Cabot Lodge barely won Senate approval of the Treaty of Paris, Feb. 6, 1900.
Frank: As in Iraq in 2003, the U.S. rushed into the Spanish American War without a post war plan. To counter inevitable criticism, indecision, and mistakes, we needed backing from the world's then most powerful country, Britain.
Betty: To get British backing, Pres. McKinley chose a rare diplomat, John Hay (1838-1905) as ambassador to Britain (1897-98), fourth of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power.
Frank: John Hay, after graduating from Brown University, Providence, R.I., joined his uncle's law firm. Where? In Springfield, IL., next door to lawyer-politician Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).
Betty: Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign manager John Nicolay (1832-1901) had been John Hay's classmate. Newly elected Pres. Lincoln took both Johns, John Nicolay and John Hay, to Washington, D.C., as his two secretaries.
Frank: There, John Hay, in 1861 at the tender age of 23, found himself living in the White House.
Betty: John Hay read Pres. Lincoln's mail, drafted replies, briefed Lincoln on press items, greeted visitors, weeded out job-seekers, and played with Lincoln's sons Willie and Tad.
Frank: He swapped funny stories with Lincoln and was at the assassinated Lincoln's deathbed.
Betty: John Hay's Lincoln connection, political skills, literary talent, wit, charm, and easy manner led him to high office.
Frank: Appointed foreign service officer (1865-70), John Hay served in Paris, Vienna, Madrid. He then was New York Tribune editorial writer (1870-74). He met and married Clara Stone (Feb. 4, 1874), and moved to her hometown, Cleveland, OH, where investment opportunities made John Hay a wealthy man.
Betty: Ohio political connections led to John Hay's appointment as assistant secretary of state (1879-81) under Ohio-born Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-93).
Frank: Besides writing a best selling novel, Hay wrote with John Nicolay the historically important Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 volumes (New York: Century, 1890).
Betty: Pres. McKinley, a good judge of talent, knew that John Hay as U.S. ambassador to Britain (1897-98) could help win Britain's support for the Spanish American War and the territories acquired.
Frank: John Hay smoothed past U.S.-British angers over the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and two serious Civil War differences. The first involved the British ship Trent, in which the U.S. was in the wrong. On Nov. 8, 1861, a U.S. warship captain illegally stopped the Trent and forcibly removed and imprisoned four Confederates seeking arms and aid abroad.
Betty: Britain's reaction to this illegal U.S. search and seizure was to send 5,000 troops to Canada, in case a U.S.-British war erupted.
Frank: Pres. Lincoln eased the crisis, told his cabinet: one war at a time, gentlemen. He disavowed the illegal seizure, released the Confederates (Dec. 1861), thus avoided a U.S.-British war right in the middle of the U.S. Civil War.
Betty: A second irritant was the MaineClaims controversy. Britain was in the wrong.
Frank: Without a navy, Confederate agents secretly bought, with British connivance, British made ships, and outfitted them with guns as Confederate war raiders.
Betty: These raiders (the first was named Alabamaa) cost many Union lives and much treasure. A Geneva international court made Britain pay the U.S. in 1871-72 a $15.5 million indemnity.
Frank: As U.S. ambassador in London and then as U.S. secretary of state, John Hay gained British backing for U.S. rule of Spain's territories. He also negotiated an "Open Door" policy (March 20, 1899) allowing U.S. trade in China without paying a high tariff.
Betty: Hay also ended an 1850 treaty (Clayton-Bulwer Treaty) for joint U.S.-British control of any future central American canal. Instead, Hay's new 1901 treaty (Hay-Pauncefote Treaty) gave the U.S. exclusive control of the proposed canal..
Frank: Interjection: in 1977, the U.S. Congress voted to return the Panama Canal to Panama. In the U.S. Senate debate over return, California's Senator S.I. Hayakawa said facetiously to opponents of return: "We stole [the Panama Canal] fair and square."
Betty: The Anglo-American alliance John Hay forged, which still exists, tipped the balance toward our late but crucial entrance into World Wars I and II. The alliance, which helped us win the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War, still exists in the current Iraq War. U.S. patriots say that the U.S.-British alliance helped keep the free world free.
Frank: Author Warren Zimmermann described John Hay this way: "As a Secretary of State [he] knew both the world and his own country. He presided over a period of [U.S.] expansion with modesty, civility, and a self-deprecating humor…."15
Betty: The U.S. Army initially administered Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. But Pres. McKinley wanted to replace Army rule with civilian administrators. He sought a Secretary of War who would supervise civil administrators good at nation building, good at leading colonial people toward self rule.
Frank: John Hay recommended Elihu Root (1845-1937), fifth of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Elihu Root proved ideal at nation-building and at finding legal solutions to difficult international problems.
Betty: McKinley said to Root by phone: I want you to be Secretary of War. Root replied: Mr. President, I don't know anything about war or the Army. I have no experience with government. McKinley said: You're a smart lawyer and you will be the first person in U.S. history charged with running colonies. I want a pragmatic problem solver, a lawyer like you.
Frank: Elihu Root served Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt as Secretary of War (1899-1904). He then succeeded John Hay as Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt (1905-09). He was also a one-term U.S. senator. Root was our then leading international lawyer.
Betty: Born in Clinton, New York, home of Hamilton College, Elihu Root graduated from Hamilton College (1864) and from New York University Law School (1867). In his twenties Root was a highly regarded corporation lawyer, by his thirties his law practice had made him rich, and in his forties one of most sought–after trial lawyers in the country.16
Frank: William Howard Taft (1857-1930), before he became U.S. president, was our first civil administrator to the Philippines. Here is how Elihu Root instructed William Howard Taft: "…the government… you are establishing is [not] designed for our satisfaction…but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands, and the measures [you] adopt… should…conform to their customs, their habits,…their prejudices."18
Betty: Elihu Root served U.S. interests and also helped make Cuba conditionally independent (May 20, 1902). In Puerto Rico he preserved Spanish civil law, used locally generated revenues locally, and obtained large U.S. grants for schools.
Frank: After Filipino nationalists fought the U.S. takeover bitterly for three years (with atrocities on both sides), Root and Taft began land reform.
Betty: They built roads and schools, helped the Philippines attain the highest literacy rate in Asia and install the first elected legislature in Asia.
Frank: Elihu Root founded two still active fact finding think tanks: 1-the Council on Foreign Relations and 2-the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Root inspired the Central American Court of Justice. Root's efforts led to the International Court of Justice in the Hague (1945).
Betty: Elihu Root, who served on many international committees and courts, won the Nobel Peace Prize (1912) for tirelessly establishing compulsory international arbitration.19 &20 Root died in 1937 at age 92.
Frank: Young, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt gave us a powerful navy and he stiffened a wavering Pres. McKinley. Roosevelt also won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier in 1905 for helping to end the Russo-Japanese War. Roosevelt died of heart failure in 1919 at age 61.
Betty: Alfred Thayer Mahan, the once maligned "pen and ink" sailor, was vindicated as the grand naval strategist. He was later showered with honorary degrees in England and the U.S. Mahan died in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, when air power began to supplement sea power.
Frank: John Hay, bright, witty, noted writer, political administrator, died at age 67 in 1905, having forged a lasting U.S.-British alliance. John Hay's diplomacy and Elihu Root's governance were essential to post Spanish American War stability and eventual self rule.
Betty: Henry Cabot Lodge, supreme Republican expansionist senator, died in 1924.
Frank: The U.S., as ruthless as any European power in grabbing colonies, did better as a colonial administrator. Cuba became independent in 1902 as stated, although under conditions that assured U.S. best interests. Philippine independence was delayed until 1946, after World War II. Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state (Aug. 21, 1959). Most Puerto Ricans are still divided over possible U.S. statehood. They want to remain a commonwealth because as such they pay no U.S. income tax.
Betty: The U.S. profited, but it also built roads, schools, improved health, and advanced the economies of its former colonies.21 The bee fertilized the flowers it robbed. Frank, restate Zimmermann's main themes.
Frank: To recap: After post-Civil War U.S. internal expansion reached the Pacific, that expansionist thrust shifted overseas toward wider world trade. To lead in world trade meant we had to reach for world power. To be a world power required naval power and strategic bases. Spain, weak, oppressive, with key bases, was ripe for plucking. We had the motive, drive, navy, and the crucial five Americans in key positions who made the U.S. a world power.
Betty: Two dates show U.S. transition from a third rate country to world power status. 1891, 7 years before the Spanish American War, Capt. Mahan estimated that the U.S. Navy was too weak to defeat the navy of Chile. Mid-1907, 16 years later, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, about to leave office, sent the Great White Fleet, 16 first class U.S. warships, around the world, with stops at major world ports.
Frank: This Great White Fleet arrived at Hampton Roads, Va., Feb. 24, 1909, greeted by Pres. Roosevelt, U.S. dignitaries, navy bands, and resounding cheers. In this, his last act as president, Roosevelt showed the world that the U.S. was a first class nation with a first class navy, and had arrived on the world stage.22
Betty: Zimmermann believed that U.S. imperialism lasted nearly 100 years, 1898 to the end of the Cold War, 1991. He believed that since 1991 we have been in transition to a new age, as yet unformed and undefined.
Frank: What new age? Here is the title of Johns Hopkins foreign policy Professor Michael Mandelbaum's new 2006 book: The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century.
Betty: If a world policeman is inevitable, wrote Michael Mandelbaum, then most countries prefer that policeman to be the U.S. Why? Because—so far-- U.S. world leadership has been more helpful than harmful; more to be trusted than Russia or Germany or France or most other countries.
Frank: U.S. expansionists say that, by leading a willing winning coalition of democracies, the U.S. kept the free world free in defeating imperial Germany in World War I, Hitler's Nazism in World War II, USSR Communism in the Cold War (1945-1991), and in defeating Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War.
Betty: Recent changes have made the U.S. as world policeman less benign, more aggressively fearsome. One change is skyrocketing political campaign costs. Big money given by big corporations forces U.S. presidents and Congress to favor corporate interests over humane concerns at home and abroad.
Frank: Another related change: the military-industrial complex which Pres. Eisenhower warned against 50 years ago. It now has awesome power.
Betty: Corporate lobbyists and their money contributions, which influence policy at home and abroad, favor corporate interests such as weapon sales, control over oil and other resources.
Frank: Also, the growing divide at home between U.S. rich and poor further strengthens U.S. corporate-dominated foreign policy. The rich-poor divide is accelerated by deliberate under funding by conservatives of federal socio-economic programs for the poorest Americans.
Betty: Tax breaks for the rich and reduced funding for the poor seemed to be the George W. Bush administration's main objective initially. Then came the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks. That catastrophe transformed President Bush, gave him a messianic mission.
Frank: He saw his future fame as David slaying terrorist Goliaths. With Congress, the courts, and the religious right in his pocket, his administration authorized unilateral military strikes, overrode checks and balances, invaded Iraq. Can we impose democracy in Iraq or elsewhere?
Betty: Mounting disenchantment (mid-2006) with the costly ongoing Iraq War, deaths, torture, and loss of U.S. prestige abroad have reduced the president's approval rating to the low 30s. Did Warren Zimmermann, who died in 2004, say anything specifically about Iraq?
Frank: Yes. He said, prophetically, June 14, 2002, nine months before the U.S. invaded Iraq: "…there is more…danger to us by a military invasion of Iraq than if we dealt with [Saddam Hussein] in some other way…. [An invasion of Iraq will]…generate more terrorism in the Middle East…. [E]ven if we win…[and]…install the government of our choice, we will have to run [Iraq] for a long time because of…unsettled ethnic problems there. So Iraq becomes…an American protectorate…that will…generate among young [Muslims] everywhere greater anti-Americanism and terrorism."23
Betty: We chose Warren Zimmermann's book wanting to understand why the U.S. is in crisis. We close with thoughts from two other historians. Historian Howard Zinn's response in April 2006 to the question: why were so many Americans so easily and so long misled by our current leaders? Howard Zinn's answer: we are unable to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. "We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."
Frank: Historian Zinn also explained that we teach politicized U.S. history. We teach that Pres. Polk went to war against Mexico because Mexicans shed American blood on American soil. Truth: we fought Mexico because Pres. Polk and the slave owning aristocracy wanted half of Mexico as U.S. slave states. We teach that Pres. McKinley invaded Cuba and the Philippines to free them from Spanish brutality. Truth: We invaded Cuba and the Philippines to benefit U.S. business and to gain strategic military locations.24
Betty: : How will history judge this administration? Highly regarded presidential historian Sean Wilentz reported a 2004 survey of 415 historians, 81% of whom voted our current administration a failure; and 12% voted our current president the worst U.S. president. Wilentz added that if that survey were done today, a higher proportion of historians would vote him our worst president.26
Frank: We have created a generation of Middle Eastern Muslims who fear and hate us. Betty, how do we get out of our present crisis?
Betty: Surely we must elect wise leaders, renew international coalitions, use arbitration, end the Iraq war fairly, assure freedom at home, restore good will abroad.
Frank: Pray U.S. voters do just that. Well, thank you, audience, for your attention.
References for Quotations
1. Zimmermann, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p.275.
2. Ibid., p. 6. 3. Ibid, p. 24. 4. Ibid. p. 94. 5. Ibid.
6. Uhlig, Jr., Frank. "The Great White Fleet," American Heritage, Vol. XV, No. 2 (Feb. 1964), pp. 30-43.
7. Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. N.Y.: Perennial Classics, 1999, p. 299.
8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid p.297.
11. Kinzer, Howard. Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. NY: Times, 2006.
12. Http://www.spanamwar.com/casualties.htm
13. http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm
14. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 419.
15. Ibid., p. 455.
16. Zimmermann, Warren. Speech, April 9, 2003, Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
17. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 123.
18. Ibid. 19 and 20. Ibid., pp. 487-488.
21. Zimmermann, Warren. "Jingoes, Goo-Goos, and the Rise of America's Empire, Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 22, No.2 (Spring 1998), pp. 42-65.
22. Uhlig, op cit.
23. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 503.
24. Zinn, Howard. http://itzie83.blogspot.com/2006/04/hegemonic-nationalism.html.
25. Wilentz, Sean. Rolling Stone (April 21, 2006): http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042006J.shtml
Used for Background
"Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies," New York Times, December 2, 1914, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0927.html
Avram, Wes., Ed. Anxious About Empire; Theological Essays on the New Global Realities. Grand Rapids, MI, 2004. (13 religious leaders criticize the morality of the "Bush Doctrine"). Braun, Theodore A. Perspectives on Cuba and Its People. N.Y.: Friendship Press, National Council of Churches, 1999.
Byrd, Robert C. Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency. N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Morris, Richard B., Ed. Encyclopedia of American History. N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1953.
END of Manuscript. Comments, corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net
Addendum: 24 of Franklin and Betty J. Parker’s book titles are listed in: http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P
For their writings in blog form, enter bfparker in google.com or in any other search engine.) USImperiaForPolicy: Part 1 of 2 Parts: http://www.toadfire.com/blog_full.jsp?blogID=1437 Part 2 of 2 Parts: http://www.toadfire.com/newBlog.do Webspawner: USImperForPolicy2of2: usforeign policy2of2 spawn e-mail. ____________________________________________________ ”Pax Americana: How and Why the USA Became the World’s Policeman.” Revised Aug. 3, 2006. First appeared as: "How U.S. Foreign Policy Became Imperial Since the 1898 Spanish American War," A Dialogue by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker on Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp., and other works. Given originally at Book Review Group, Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, June 19, 2006. E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net
Summary
We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, 2002, plus related works, because: we were concerned, like all Americans, about why 9,11-200l happened, why we are in Iraq, why Muslim extremists hate us, why many believe that the U.S. and its current president are imperialistic.
Zimmermann traces U.S. foreign policy back to the 1898 Spanish American War. Until then U.S. energies went into continental expansion, Atlantic to the Pacific. With the frontier gone, needing to sell our surplus industrial/agricultural products abroad, we modernized our Navy, provoked and defeated a weakened Spain, acquired Spain's strategic Caribbean and Pacific bases, and planned a Panama Canal (opened in 1914)--our first steps toward becoming a world economic and military power.
In a three-month imperial thrust—late April to July 1898--we destroyed the Spanish fleet, acquired overseas naval bases in and responsibility for Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa, others. The resulting expansionist U.S. foreign policy led a willing winning coalition of democracies through WW I and II, Cold War, Gulf War. Then came 9-11-2002, the 2003 Iraq War, and serious U.S. difficulties.
The Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power were:
1-U.S. Navy Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan whose book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History…(1890), was "the most influential work on naval strategy ever written." In it he urged more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships for oceanic offense; strategic refueling and refitting stations in the Caribbean and Pacific; and quick Atlantic to Pacific passage through a central American canal.
2-Theodore Roosevelt who, as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Vice President, &U.S. President implemented Capt. Mahan's naval ideas and largely provoked the 1898 Spanish American War in which he was the hero of the Battle of San Juan Hill, Cuba.
3-Influential expansionist-minded Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, over 30 years on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who not only guided Roosevelt's career choices to the presidency but won by 2 votes the Senate's approval of the Treaty of Paris (1900) by which defeated Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
4-As U.S. ambassador in London and later U.S. Secretary of State, John Haygot Britain to back the U.S. in the Spanish American War and affirm U.S. control of Spain's Caribbean and Pacific territories.
5-Successful N.Y. lawyer Elihu Root as U.S. Secretary of War replaced Army rule of newly won territories with civil administrators good at nation building and implementing self rule.
End of Summary. Dialog Follows:
Betty: We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, plus supporting references.
Frank: Why this particular Warren Zimmermann book?
Betty: Because he shows that when the dynamism of U.S. westward expansion (i.e., our "Manifest Destiny") reached the Pacific, it was soon transformed into an overseas expansionist, aggressive, imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Having settled the Pacific coast, with nowhere else to go, overproduction of farm and factory products impelled us to find new markets and new resources abroad. The end of the frontier drove us to trade abroad, to build a stronger navy, to seek colonies and world power status.
Betty: With the frontier gone, the drive for trade and ascendancy abroad pushed us into the 1898 Spanish American War. That war led to our becoming a world power. That's the meaning of Zimmermann's book title. The Spanish American War was our First Great Triumph, a first step toward world hegemony based on an increasingly aggressive imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Zimmermann also implies, repeat implies, why an aggressive U.S. imperialism led to the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks, the 2003 Iraq war, U.S. unilateral military strikes; why Muslim extremists hate us; why we have lost world wide respect and are now in crisis.
Betty: Warren Zimmerman, born 1935, died 2004, was a Yale graduate, a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, England, and a U.S. diplomat for 33 years.
Frank: He was U.S. ambassador to various countries, including Yugoslavia. He then taught international diplomacy at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. His book, First Great Triumph, won several prizes.
Betty: Zimmermann's title, The First Great Triumph, is from a letter Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) wrote to his sister Corinne, June 15, 1898, on his way to fight in Cuba: "[This] is a great historical expedition,…I thrill to feel that I am part of it…. If we…succeed…and we shall succeed, we have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement."1
Frank: Theodore Roosevelt is the first of Zimmermann's…Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Roosevelt is presented as a rising dynamic Republican politician, enthusiastic for U.S. expansion abroad and determined to remake the U.S. from a third rate country to a world power.
Betty: Theodore Roosevelt and other expansionists helped provoke the Spanish American War, which made the U.S. for the first time a colonial power, controlling Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa. More later about Roosevelt.
Frank: The U.S. was expansionist-minded from its beginnings. Examples: The American Revolution was fought to win independence and to acquire all North American land we could get. We tried to take Canada several times but did not succeed.
Betty: George Washington referred to the U.S. as a "new empire," a "rising empire." He said in 1786: "there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires."2
Frank: Pres. Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, 1803. He then sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Pacific Northwest. Why? So Americans could settle and develop its resources.
Betty: We bought Florida from Spain (1819) under Pres. James Monroe. We also formulated the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which declared the Western Hemisphere to be a U.S. sphere of influence closed to European exploitation.
Frank: Pres. James K. Polk (1795-1849) wanted the U.S. northwest boundary with Canada set at "54-40 or Fight." But Britain was too strong to tackle. The U.S. had to settle on the 49th parallel as the Canadian boundary.
Betty: By urging the Mexican War (1846-48), Pres. James K. Polk added 1.2 million square miles to the U.S.
Frank: In 1853 Pres. Millard Fillmore (1800-74) sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) to open trade with Japan, a clear case of gunboat diplomacy.
Betty: Pres. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War and jailed subversives without trial, both unconstitutional acts. The U.S. was imperial in its discrimination against African Americans, native Americans, Chinese, and others.
Frank: By 1890, after Civil War and Reconstruction, a new generation with boundless energy built roads, canals, railroads, the telegraph, the Atlantic Cable; settled the west; created factories, industries, towns, cities.
Betty: Immigrant labor poured in. Business boomed. Fortunes were made. U.S. "Manifest Destiny," which took us to the Pacific, seemed unstoppable.
Frank: The U.S., by 1890, overproduced farm and factory products. With the U.S. frontier market reduced, with European countries walled off by protective high tariffs, U.S. farmers and manufacturers were pushed economically to find foreign markets and raw materials in less developed areas.
Betty: A major shift in the center of U.S. population was noted in the 1890 Census by Wisconsin History Professor Frederick Jackson Turner. He said in his famous 1893 paper, "The Frontier in American History": the American frontier is gone, but frontier characteristics remain--rugged individualism, restless movement, upward striving for business success, profits, and dominance.
Frank: In 1896, two years before the Spanish American War, Prof. Turner said prophetically: [The frontier] "energies of expansion will…[continue in] demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries…."3
Betty: Prof. Turner and other expansionists rightly saw that increased overseas trade required stronger naval protection. A stronger U.S. navy needed strategic overseas refueling and refitting bases. Military power to protect commercial expansion abroad then meant naval power. Enhanced world power then meant colonies. We needed colonies.
Frank: To Prof. Turner's insight that U.S. rugged individualism would lead to overseas expansion was added Charles Darwin's (1809-82) evolution theory (1859). U.S. expansionists embraced Darwinian evolution. They saw struggle for survival as natural, Anglo Saxon society as superior, the U.S. as the fittest nation destined for world leadership.
Betty: Second of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power," Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), was a U. S. naval officer and historian. Mahan's 1890 book on the importance of sea power influenced naval strategists world-wide. He was the father of the modern U.S. Navy.
Frank: Mahan, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate (1859), served on antiquated U.S. Civil War warships. He later irritated navy brass by writing articles urging U.S. Navy improvements. Superiors tried to muzzle Mahan. One called Mahan derisively "a pen and ink sailor."
Betty: Mahan's model for a great navy was the British Navy. Mahan wanted more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships. He wanted better selected, brighter, well trained, highly skilled naval personnel. Instead of small ships for coastal defense he wanted large battleships for oceanic offense.
Frank: : The U.S. Navy, Mahan wrote, must be mobile, flexible, and able to pass quickly from the Atlantic to the Pacific through a central American canal. The U.S. must also have a network of strategically located refueling and refitting stations with deep ports.
Betty: A naval officer under whom Mahan once served established at Newport, R.I., the world's first Naval War College. Mahan eagerly accepted a teaching post there in 1885. He steeped himself in historical studies and became the Naval War College's acting head and later president.
Frank: Needing a lecturer on the naval history of the War of 1812, Mahan found that Theodore Roosevelt had published in 1882, at age 24, an authoritative book on that subject. In his 1887 Naval War College lectures, Roosevelt used the word "war" 62 times. Mahan and Roosevelt bonded, reinforced each other, with Mahan as Roosevelt's strategic advisor. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and as U.S. President implemented Mahan's ideas.
Betty: Mahan's book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (1890), along with his later books, won rave reviews by Roosevelt and others. Mahan's books became required reading in navy departments worldwide.
Frank: Brief quotes about Mahan's importance: "The Influence of Sea Power…was Mahan's greatest achievement and probably the most influential work on naval strategy ever written."4 …"The Influence of Sea Power was a work of breathtaking range: a history of diplomatic and military strategy, a survey of land as well as sea combat."5 …"[Mahan's book] shaped the imperial policies of Germany and Japan…."6
Betty: Mahan's aggressive naval strategy coincided with the insatiable drive for increased U.S. trade abroad.
Frank: Said Ohio Governor William McKinley, before his presidency: "We want a foreign market for our surplus products."7
Betty: Said Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927), a year before the Spanish American War: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."8
Frank: Said expansionist Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, third of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power: "In the interests of our commerce…we should build the [Central American] canal, and for the protection of that canal…we should control [Hawaii]…, Samoa, [and] Cuba…. [Why,] the great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth…."9
Betty: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), son of two patrician Boston families, heir to a shipping fortune, was a Harvard graduate, a Harvard history professor. Roosevelt was his student.
Frank: Henry Cabot Lodge was a U.S. congressman, then as U.S. senator and long-time chairman, of the Foreign Relations Committee, he ruled the U.S. Senate with an iron hand.
Betty: Eight years older and more jingoistic than Roosevelt, Lodge guided Roosevelt's political career right up to the White House.
Frank: During William McKinley's presidency (1897-1901), Lodge, supreme political tactician; Roosevelt, diehard political expansionist; and Mahan, promoter of aggressive naval power—were determined to advance U.S. to world power status. They sparked the Spanish American War.
Betty: Seeking a pretext for war, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War: "In strict confidence…I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."10
Frank: Five years before the Spanish American War (1893), U.S. owners of Hawaiian sugar plantations, fearing the Hawaiian queen's (Queen Liliuokalani, 1838-1917) liberal reforms and expecting U.S. annexation, got the U.S. Navy to help dethrone the queen.
Betty: But newly elected anti-expansionist U.S. Pres. Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) vetoed annexation.
Frank: In Howard Kinzer's new book, 2006, title: Overthrow, he tells how Hawaii was the first territory whose regime the U.S. tried to destabilize. Why? So that we could annex Hawaii, take it over.
Betty: Hawaii, , according to Kinzer, was the first of 14 instances in 110 years when the U.S. militarily or by subversion forced regime changes to assure compliance with U.S. interests. 11
Frank: Spain in 1898 was weakened by years of guerrilla-led uprisings in Cuba under Jose Martí (1853-95) and in the Philippines under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964).
Betty: Americans, sympathetic with oppressed Cubans, were angry at Spain's brutality and resulting deaths. That anger was fanned by sensational U.S. press accounts of Spanish atrocities.
Frank: Pres. McKinley, having seen suffering as a Civil War officer, hoped to avoid war. But a riot in Havana on January 12, 1898, threatened Americans living there.
Betty: Pres. McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Cuba as a show of force.
Frank: On Feb. 15, 1898, an explosion sank the Maine in Havana Bay, killing 268 U.S. sailors.
Betty: A U.S. Navy investigation in March reported that a mine explosion outside the hull sank the Maine. The U.S. jingo press headlined, without proof, that Spanish agents deliberately sunk the Maine.
Frank: Press propaganda and public pressure pushed Pres. McKinley to ask Congress to declare war.
Betty: After the U.S. Navy blockaded Cuban ports, Spain on April 24, 1898, and the U.S. the next day declared war. END OF PART 1___________________Beginning of Part 2 ”Pax Americana: How and Why the USA Became the World’s Policeman.” Revised Aug. 3, 2006. First appeared as: "How U.S. Foreign Policy Became Imperial Since the 1898 Spanish American War," A Dialogue by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker on Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp., and other works. Given originally at Book Review Group, Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, June 19, 2006. E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net
Frank: Interjection: 78 years later, in 1976, a re-sifting of the evidence showed that the Maine explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion of coal dust—an accident.
Betty: Deliberate or accidental, the Maine explosion was a pretext. The real U.S. motives for the war were: to acquire more territory for more trade, more territory for refueling bases, to assure the U.S. greater status in the world, to protect the proposed Panama Canal, and—for the first time--to restore human rights to oppressed Cubans.
Frank: Cuba was the initial focus. The Philippine Islands was an afterthought. With the Navy Secretary away, Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt, on Mahan's advice, sent Commodore George Dewey's (1837-1917) Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong before war was declared.
Betty: Roosevelt instructed Dewey: when war is declared, rush to Manila and attack the Spanish fleet. Dewey's fleet reached Manila Bay late April 30. The next day, May 1, in a 7-hour battle Dewey destroyed the Spanish ships.
Frank: In Cuba a U.S. Navy squadron blockaded the remaining Spanish fleet. U.S. troops and volunteers, including Roosevelt's Rough Riders, reached Cuba.
Betty: Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, with spare glasses sewn into his new Brooks Brothers uniform, led the fight up San Juan Hill. On July 3, in a 4-hour sea battle the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet. A month later (Aug. 4, 1898) we took Puerto Rico.
Frank: Total U.S. casualties: 3,289 dead; of these 332 died in battle, the rest from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases. Spanish casualties: about 60,000 dead, 10% in battle, 90% from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases.12&13
Betty: After the war, in the Treaty of Paris (Dec. 10, 1898), Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the Pacific we annexed Wake Island (July 4, 1898) and Hawaii (July 7, 1898). We acquired Midway Island earlier when we bought Alaska (1867).
Frank: Opponents, uneasy about expansion abroad, argued against making the U.S. a colonial power. They opposed our taking distant lands with brown and yellow people they thought incapable of assimilation. Acquiring colonies, opponents said, went against U.S. isolationism, against the Monroe Doctrine, against U.S. principles of self-government.
Betty: By two votes Senator Henry Cabot Lodge barely won Senate approval of the Treaty of Paris, Feb. 6, 1900.
Frank: As in Iraq in 2003, the U.S. rushed into the Spanish American War without a post war plan. To counter inevitable criticism, indecision, and mistakes, we needed backing from the world's then most powerful country, Britain.
Betty: To get British backing, Pres. McKinley chose a rare diplomat, John Hay (1838-1905) as ambassador to Britain (1897-98), fourth of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power.
Frank: John Hay, after graduating from Brown University, Providence, R.I., joined his uncle's law firm. Where? In Springfield, IL., next door to lawyer-politician Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).
Betty: Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign manager John Nicolay (1832-1901) had been John Hay's classmate. Newly elected Pres. Lincoln took both Johns, John Nicolay and John Hay, to Washington, D.C., as his two secretaries.
Frank: There, John Hay, in 1861 at the tender age of 23, found himself living in the White House.
Betty: John Hay read Pres. Lincoln's mail, drafted replies, briefed Lincoln on press items, greeted visitors, weeded out job-seekers, and played with Lincoln's sons Willie and Tad.
Frank: He swapped funny stories with Lincoln and was at the assassinated Lincoln's deathbed.
Betty: John Hay's Lincoln connection, political skills, literary talent, wit, charm, and easy manner led him to high office.
Frank: Appointed foreign service officer (1865-70), John Hay served in Paris, Vienna, Madrid. He then was New York Tribune editorial writer (1870-74). He met and married Clara Stone (Feb. 4, 1874), and moved to her hometown, Cleveland, OH, where investment opportunities made John Hay a wealthy man.
Betty: Ohio political connections led to John Hay's appointment as assistant secretary of state (1879-81) under Ohio-born Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-93).
Frank: Besides writing a best selling novel, Hay wrote with John Nicolay the historically important Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 volumes (New York: Century, 1890).
Betty: Pres. McKinley, a good judge of talent, knew that John Hay as U.S. ambassador to Britain (1897-98) could help win Britain's support for the Spanish American War and the territories acquired.
Frank: John Hay smoothed past U.S.-British angers over the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and two serious Civil War differences. The first involved the British ship Trent, in which the U.S. was in the wrong. On Nov. 8, 1861, a U.S. warship captain illegally stopped the Trent and forcibly removed and imprisoned four Confederates seeking arms and aid abroad.
Betty: Britain's reaction to this illegal U.S. search and seizure was to send 5,000 troops to Canada, in case a U.S.-British war erupted.
Frank: Pres. Lincoln eased the crisis, told his cabinet: one war at a time, gentlemen. He disavowed the illegal seizure, released the Confederates (Dec. 1861), thus avoided a U.S.-British war right in the middle of the U.S. Civil War.
Betty: A second irritant was the MaineClaims controversy. Britain was in the wrong.
Frank: Without a navy, Confederate agents secretly bought, with British
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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LOEB, LEO (September 21, l869-December28, 1959), Pathologist, Experimental Biologist, and Cancer Researcher, by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AS: Franklin Parker, "Loeb, Leo," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973, Volume VIII, pp. 447-448
LOEB, LEO (September 21, l869-December28, 1959), pathologist, experimental biologist, and cancer researcher; born in Mayen, near Koblenz, Germany, the son of Benedict Loeb, a prosperous businessman, and Barbara (Isay) Loeb.
His mother died when he was three; his father died of tuberculosis when he was six. His older brother, Jacques (1859-1924), took him to live with their maternal grandfather in Trier, Germany, where he attended the gymnasium, 1875-79. After age 10 he lived with a maternal aunt, wife of a professor of medieval German history, University of Berlin (their daughter later married Albert Schweitzer,1875-1965).
Despite tubercular periods in health resorts, Leo attended Askanische Gymnasium, Berlin; then gymnasiums in Durkheim and Heidelberg. He entered Heidelberg University, 1989; attended Freiberg University lectures by August Weismann (1834-1914), and spent a semester each at the universities of Berlin and Basel, Switzerland, the last studying under biochemist Gustav von Bunge (1844-1920) and physiologist Johann Friedrich Miescher (1844-1895).
Disliking German nationalism and militarism, he studied premedicine at the University of Zurich, 1890-92; did clinical work at the University of Edinburgh and at London Hospital; returned to Zurich in1895, passed the Swiss state medical examination, and completed an M.D. dissertation (1897) under pathologist Hugo Ribbert (1855-1920), writing on the results of skin transplantation on guinea pigs.
He visited his brother Jacques, University of Chicago physiologist, in 1892 and 1894 at Woods Hole, Mass. Attracted by opportunities for biological research, Leo immigrated to Chicago in 1897, briefly practiced medicine near the University of Chicago (he was physician to John Dewey's experimental laboratory school), then was adjunct professor of pathology at Rush Medical College, 1900-02, while doing experimental research in a rented room behind a drugstore. He became a naturalized citizen in 1902.
He continued his experiments for a few months at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School Pathology Department. He accepted a research fellowship during 1902-03 at McGill University under John George Adami (1862-1926). He became assistant professor of experimental pathology, University of Pennsylvania, 1904-10.
In 1910 he moved permanently to St. Louis, MO, first as director, pathological laboratory, Barnard Skin and Cancer Hospital (1910-15); then as professor of comparative pathology at Washington University School of Medicine, 1915-1924; and finally as Mallinckrodt Professor of Pathology, 1924-37.
On retiring in 1937, he continued as research professor emeritus, Oscar Johnson Institute, 1937-41, doing laboratory research until 1950, when he stopped at age 81 because of severe tuberculosis.
On January 3, 1922, at the age of 53, he married physician Georgiana Sands, a physician's daughter, in Port Chester, New York. They had no children. He died in St. Louis on December 28, 1959.
His honors included: President, Society of Cancer Research,19ll; President, American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists, 1914-15; the American College of Physicians' John Phillips Memorial Medal Award, 1935; the Phi Beta Pi Medical Fraternity Annual Lectureship in his name at Washington University,1937; an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Washington University, 1948; and dedication to him of the December 1950 issue of the American Medical Association's Archives of Pathology, containing a full bibliography of his over 400 published writings.
Dr. Peyton Rous (1879-1970) called Leo Loeb "a founder of experimental cancer research." With collaborator Miss A.E.C. Lathrop he demonstrated hereditary factors in cancerous mice and the effects of estrogen on the origin of cancerous tumors in mice. With collaborator Mayer Fleisher he found that neoplastic cells treated with colloidal copper led to resistant strains in cancerous mice. He also did research on tissue culture, transplantation, the pathology of circulation, internal secretions, venom of Heloderma, and the analysis of experimental amoebocyte tissue. His biographer, Ernest William Goodpasture (1886-1960), wrote that while Loeb did not perfect in vitro cell culture, "he conceptually paved the way."
Bibliography
Leo Loeb's major books are (with M. S. Fleisher), The Venom of Heloderma, Carnegie Publication No. 177, Washington, D.C., 1913; Edema, Baltimore, 1924; and The Biological Basis of Individuality, Springfield, Ill., 1945.
His "Autobiographical Notes," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2, No. 1 (Autumn 1958), pp. 1-23; was reprinted in "Leo Loeb, M.D.: Some Personal and Professional History and Philosophy," A Dozen Doctors: Autobiographical Sketches, edited by Dwight J. Ingle, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. 86-108.
Philip A. Shaffer, "Biographical Notes on Dr. Leo Loeb," Archives of Pathology (Chicago), 50, No. 6 (December 1950), pp. 661-675, is followed by "Bibliography of Writings of Dr. Leo Loeb From 1896 to 1949" (over 400 entries). The entire issue is dedicated to Leo Loeb.
Obituaries and biographical sketches are in:
New York Times (December 30, 1959), p. 21;
Ernest W. Goodpasture, "Leo Loeb, September 21, 1869-December 28, 1959," Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences, 35 (1961), pp. 205-219;
W. Stanley Hartroft, "Leo Loeb, 1869-1959," Archives of Pathology (Chicago), 70, No. 2 (August 1960), pp. 269-274;
George W. Corner, "Loeb, Leo," Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Six 1956-1960, edited by John A. Garraty, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980, pp. 385-387;
Franklin Parker, "Loeb, Leo," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973, Volume VIII, pp. 447-448;
Marion Hunt, "Loeb, Leo," Dictionary of American Medical Biography, edited by Martin Kaufman, et al., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984, Volume I, A-L, p. 452-453;
"Loeb, Leo," Oxford Companion to Medicine, edited by John Walton, et al., New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, Volume I, A-M, p. 678;
"Loeb, Leo," Index to Scientists of the World From Ancient to Modern Times, by Norma Olin Ireland, Boston: F.W. Faxon Co., 1962, p. 386;
"Loeb, Leo," Encyclopedia of Medical Sources, by Emerson Crosby Kelly, Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co., 1948, p. 258; L. P. Rubin,
"Leo Loeb's Role in the Development of Tissue Culture," Clio Medica 12 (1977), pp. 33-56;
Herman T. Blumenthal, "Leo Loeb, Experimental Pathologist and Humanitarian," Science 131, No. 3404 (March 25, 1960), pp. 907-908;
"Loeb, Leo," Who Was Who in America, Chicago: A.N. Marquis Co., 1960. Volume 3, p. 527;
"LOEB, Leo," The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, New York: James T. White & Co., 1962, Volumbe 44, pp. 522-523;
"The Weakness," Time, Volume 57, No. 2 (January 8, 195l), pp. 32, 34;
obituary, Time, Volume 75, No. 2 (January 11, 1960), p. 66.
END of Manuscript. Corrections, comments: bfparker@frontiernet.net
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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LOEB, LEO (September 21, l869-December28, 1959), Pathologist, Experimental Biologist, and Cancer Researcher, by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AS: Franklin Parker, "Loeb, Leo," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973, Volume VIII, pp. 447-448
LOEB, LEO (September 21, l869-December28, 1959), pathologist, experimental biologist, and cancer researcher; born in Mayen, near Koblenz, Germany, the son of Benedict Loeb, a prosperous businessman, and Barbara (Isay) Loeb.
His mother died when he was three; his father died of tuberculosis when he was six. His older brother, Jacques (1859-1924), took him to live with their maternal grandfather in Trier, Germany, where he attended the gymnasium, 1875-79. After age 10 he lived with a maternal aunt, wife of a professor of medieval German history, University of Berlin (their daughter later married Albert Schweitzer,1875-1965).
Despite tubercular periods in health resorts, Leo attended Askanische Gymnasium, Berlin; then gymnasiums in Durkheim and Heidelberg. He entered Heidelberg University, 1989; attended Freiberg University lectures by August Weismann (1834-1914), and spent a semester each at the universities of Berlin and Basel, Switzerland, the last studying under biochemist Gustav von Bunge (1844-1920) and physiologist Johann Friedrich Miescher (1844-1895).
Disliking German nationalism and militarism, he studied premedicine at the University of Zurich, 1890-92; did clinical work at the University of Edinburgh and at London Hospital; returned to Zurich in1895, passed the Swiss state medical examination, and completed an M.D. dissertation (1897) under pathologist Hugo Ribbert (1855-1920), writing on the results of skin transplantation on guinea pigs.
He visited his brother Jacques, University of Chicago physiologist, in 1892 and 1894 at Woods Hole, Mass. Attracted by opportunities for biological research, Leo immigrated to Chicago in 1897, briefly practiced medicine near the University of Chicago (he was physician to John Dewey's experimental laboratory school), then was adjunct professor of pathology at Rush Medical College, 1900-02, while doing experimental research in a rented room behind a drugstore. He became a naturalized citizen in 1902.
He continued his experiments for a few months at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School Pathology Department. He accepted a research fellowship during 1902-03 at McGill University under John George Adami (1862-1926). He became assistant professor of experimental pathology, University of Pennsylvania, 1904-10.
In 1910 he moved permanently to St. Louis, MO, first as director, pathological laboratory, Barnard Skin and Cancer Hospital (1910-15); then as professor of comparative pathology at Washington University School of Medicine, 1915-1924; and finally as Mallinckrodt Professor of Pathology, 1924-37.
On retiring in 1937, he continued as research professor emeritus, Oscar Johnson Institute, 1937-41, doing laboratory research until 1950, when he stopped at age 81 because of severe tuberculosis.
On January 3, 1922, at the age of 53, he married physician Georgiana Sands, a physician's daughter, in Port Chester, New York. They had no children. He died in St. Louis on December 28, 1959.
His honors included: President, Society of Cancer Research,19ll; President, American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriologists, 1914-15; the American College of Physicians' John Phillips Memorial Medal Award, 1935; the Phi Beta Pi Medical Fraternity Annual Lectureship in his name at Washington University,1937; an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Washington University, 1948; and dedication to him of the December 1950 issue of the American Medical Association's Archives of Pathology, containing a full bibliography of his over 400 published writings.
Dr. Peyton Rous (1879-1970) called Leo Loeb "a founder of experimental cancer research." With collaborator Miss A.E.C. Lathrop he demonstrated hereditary factors in cancerous mice and the effects of estrogen on the origin of cancerous tumors in mice. With collaborator Mayer Fleisher he found that neoplastic cells treated with colloidal copper led to resistant strains in cancerous mice. He also did research on tissue culture, transplantation, the pathology of circulation, internal secretions, venom of Heloderma, and the analysis of experimental amoebocyte tissue. His biographer, Ernest William Goodpasture (1886-1960), wrote that while Loeb did not perfect in vitro cell culture, "he conceptually paved the way."
Bibliography
Leo Loeb's major books are (with M. S. Fleisher), The Venom of Heloderma, Carnegie Publication No. 177, Washington, D.C., 1913; Edema, Baltimore, 1924; and The Biological Basis of Individuality, Springfield, Ill., 1945.
His "Autobiographical Notes," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 2, No. 1 (Autumn 1958), pp. 1-23; was reprinted in "Leo Loeb, M.D.: Some Personal and Professional History and Philosophy," A Dozen Doctors: Autobiographical Sketches, edited by Dwight J. Ingle, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. 86-108.
Philip A. Shaffer, "Biographical Notes on Dr. Leo Loeb," Archives of Pathology (Chicago), 50, No. 6 (December 1950), pp. 661-675, is followed by "Bibliography of Writings of Dr. Leo Loeb From 1896 to 1949" (over 400 entries). The entire issue is dedicated to Leo Loeb.
Obituaries and biographical sketches are in:
New York Times (December 30, 1959), p. 21;
Ernest W. Goodpasture, "Leo Loeb, September 21, 1869-December 28, 1959," Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences, 35 (1961), pp. 205-219;
W. Stanley Hartroft, "Leo Loeb, 1869-1959," Archives of Pathology (Chicago), 70, No. 2 (August 1960), pp. 269-274;
George W. Corner, "Loeb, Leo," Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Six 1956-1960, edited by John A. Garraty, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980, pp. 385-387;
Franklin Parker, "Loeb, Leo," Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973, Volume VIII, pp. 447-448;
Marion Hunt, "Loeb, Leo," Dictionary of American Medical Biography, edited by Martin Kaufman, et al., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984, Volume I, A-L, p. 452-453;
"Loeb, Leo," Oxford Companion to Medicine, edited by John Walton, et al., New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, Volume I, A-M, p. 678;
"Loeb, Leo," Index to Scientists of the World From Ancient to Modern Times, by Norma Olin Ireland, Boston: F.W. Faxon Co., 1962, p. 386;
"Loeb, Leo," Encyclopedia of Medical Sources, by Emerson Crosby Kelly, Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co., 1948, p. 258; L. P. Rubin,
"Leo Loeb's Role in the Development of Tissue Culture," Clio Medica 12 (1977), pp. 33-56;
Herman T. Blumenthal, "Leo Loeb, Experimental Pathologist and Humanitarian," Science 131, No. 3404 (March 25, 1960), pp. 907-908;
"Loeb, Leo," Who Was Who in America, Chicago: A.N. Marquis Co., 1960. Volume 3, p. 527;
"LOEB, Leo," The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, New York: James T. White & Co., 1962, Volumbe 44, pp. 522-523;
"The Weakness," Time, Volume 57, No. 2 (January 8, 195l), pp. 32, 34;
obituary, Time, Volume 75, No. 2 (January 11, 1960), p. 66.
END of Manuscript. Corrections, comments: bfparker@frontiernet.net
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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Arthurdale, West Virginia, 1933: Historic First FDR New Deal Homestead Community
By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
Some 73 years ago, Arthurdale, in northern West Virginia, was a storm center of New Deal controversy. The first, most controversial, New Deal subsistence homestead project was sited there in 1933.
Arthurdale housed displaced and jobless coal mining families.
What began as a grand scheme to ease Great Depression suffering by providing homes, gardens, a community school, and jobs for those in want, became a much criticized, costly project which Congress forced the federal government to sell.
Yet Arthurdale has also been praised as a noble New Deal experiment to uplift dispossessed West Virginia coal miners, among the most wretched of Depression-era Americans.
Lorena A. Hickok "Discovers" Scott's Run, WV
The Arthurdale story began with Associated Press reporter Lorena A. Hickok (1893-1968), who covered Eleanor Roosevelt during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (FDR) first run for the presidency. They became friends and confidantes.
Mrs. Roosevelt urged Hickok to work as relief needs investigator for Harry L. Hopkins (1890-1946), Federal Emergency Relief Administration head and later Works Progress Administration head. Hickok reported to him on economic conditions and relief needs in 32 states during 1933-36. She sent the same information in letters to Mrs. Roosevelt. FDR saw both her reports to Hopkins and letters to Mrs. Roosevelt.
Hickok first sought advice from the Philadelphia-based Quaker relief agency, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Executive Secretary Clarence E. Pickett (1884-1964) told her, "If you want to see just how bad things are, go down to the southwestern part of the state and into West Virginia." Of conditions among jobless mining families in northern West Virginia, she wrote :
"Scott's Run, a coal-mining community, not far from Morgantown, was the worst place I'd ever seen. In a gutter, along the main street through the town, there was stagnant, filthy water, which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing, and everything else imaginable. On either side of the street were ramshackle houses, black with coal dust, which most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs. And in those houses every night children went to sleep hungry, on piles of bug-infested rags, spread out on the floor. There were rats in those houses."1
Appalachian Coal Miners and the Great Depression
Scott's Run, the name of a creek that empties into the Monongahela River, is also the name of coal mining communities along its banks. It had been an active mining area near Morgantown, WV, site of West Virginia University (WVU).
The late nineteenth century coal boom, heightened by World War I energy needs, lured marginal small farmers to work for wages in Appalachian coal mines. Large and many smaller mines flourished in boom times, owned mainly by profit-hungry companies based outside the coal mining areas. Before unions demanded better conditions, miners were housed in low-cost company-owned shacks, paid in scrip redeemable only in a company store, and were controlled and constrained in company-owned and policed towns.
The 1920s saw coal mine overexpansion, competition, strikes, and labor-union conflicts. Scott's Run was sometimes called Bloody Run because of its labor union violence. West Virginia coal mining cutbacks and closings became acute by 1928. The 1929 Wall Street crash and Great Depression meant even harder times for miners. Mines closed, lights were turned off, and water pumps shut down. Some families were allowed to live in shacks lest empty ones be torn down for firewood.
By 1930, with little mining and much hunger at Scott's Run, a White House Conference on Child Welfare publicized the plight of undernourished Appalachian miners' children. Federal money left from post-World War I aid to Belgian and French children was given to the AFSC in 1931 to help feed needy miners' children in the West Virginia-Pennsylvania Monongahela River Valley. AFSC relief work in the area was centered at Scott's Run because of its poverty and because of earlier relief efforts of Morgantown social agencies and of the WVU Extension Service.
Mrs. Roosevelt knew of Scott's Run, having bought some furniture made there as part of the relief effort. She was subsidizing a furniture-making cottage industry for poorer people at Val-kill near the Roosevelt home at Hyde Park. She also knew of the AFSC relief work at Scott's Run.
Hickok's description of miners' plight led Mrs. Roosevelt to visit Scott's Run in August 1933. FDR's election, the Depression, passage of subsistence homestead legislation (June 16, 1933), and Mrs. Roosevelt's personal concern over Scott's Run miners' plight led to the founding of the first New Deal subsistence homestead project at Arthurdale, near Reedsville, in Preston County, W. Va.
With homesteaders selected mostly from displaced Scott's Run coal miners and Mrs. Roosevelt's publicized frequent visits there, Arthurdale became a conspicuous example of FDR's more controversial experiments to counter the Great Depression.
Subsistence Homestead Projects, 1933-1948
The subsistence homestead idea came from the 1920s back-to-the-land movement, which FDR favored. He had tried to resettle jobless families in rural communities during his New York governorship. As president, FDR first urged congressional friends to enact a bill to allot $25 million to put 25,000 needy families on farms at an average cost of $1,000 per family. When such a bill was formulated, the White House suggested that it be attached as Section 208 of Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA).
Thus was passed with little debate in 1933 a controversial subsistence housing experiment which Congress later forced the government to sell. The Subsistence Homestead Division was placed under Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes (1874-1952), who named as its administrator Milburn L. Wilson (1885-1969), an Agricultural Adjustment Act administrator and a back-to-the-land enthusiast. AFSC relief director Clarence E. Pickett became Wilson's assistant.
Mrs. Roosevelt Goes to Scott's Run, August 18-19, 1933
Genuinely concerned after hearing Lorena Hickok's description of dreadful Scott's Run conditions, Mrs. Roosevelt, at FDR's request and at the AFSC's invitation, visited Scott's Run on August 18-19, 1933.2 With her were Lorena Hickok and Clarence Pickett. Unrecognized, she talked to miners, their wives, and children.
To the end of her life she recalled how Scott's Run's plight had affected her. Conditions were so bad and the people so dispirited, she told FDR, that she feared a fascist-type revolution there.
FDR urged his adviser, Louis M. Howe (1871-1936), to start quickly the first subsistence homestead community near Scott's Run. Howe was a newspaperman who had masterminded FDR's political career. Ill and knowing he was near death, Howe pushed Wilson, Pickett, and others to start the northern West Virginia subsistence homestead project. A WVU agricultural experts' committee recommended federal purchase of the Richard M. Arthur farm, part of a l,200-acre estate l5 miles southwest of Morgantown, about to revert to the state for unpaid taxes, and being used as a WVU experimental farm.
With the Arthur farm purchased, Interior Secretary Ickes on October 12, 1933, approved the Arthurdale Resettlement Community Plan for 200 five-acre plots, a community school, and a cooperative store.
New Deal and local officials wanted to show that they could move quickly to cut red tape to ease human misery. They also wanted to avoid undue attention and bad publicity. Rightly or wrongly, because residents of the area insisted on it, only native-born Americans were selected as homesteaders. African Americans and the foreign-born were excluded. It was thought that to raise local ire would bring undue publicity and ruin the project.
By January 1934 several New Deal agencies were paying a thousand workers on relief $3 per day to build the first houses and roads and to landscape. Problems caused by undue haste and unwise selection of homesteaders were compounded by cost overruns on homes and failure to find industrial jobs for the homesteaders.
Trouble in Paradise
Arthurdale faced frequent disagreements, mismanagement, and lack of communication between New Deal and local officials. Louis Howe is said to have told Harold Ickes: you buy the land; I'll buy the houses. Despite Mrs. Roosevelt's caution, but pressed by a desire to house the homesteaders before Christmas 1933, Howe ordered by phone 50 prefabricated Cape Code cottages from Boston.
Designed for summer use and unsuitable for northern West Virginia winters, they were also smaller than the foundations prepared for them. Mrs. Roosevelt asked New York architect Eric Gugler to recut, rebuild, and winterize the cottages to fit the foundations and the weather. Costs, of course, skyrocketed.
Arthurdale suffered from too many uncoordinated committees trying to get too many things done too quickly. There was also interference, though well intentioned, from Howe and Mrs. Roosevelt. There were contradictory orders, delays, waste, and cost overruns. Interior Secretary Ickes, a frugal administrator, wrote in his diary, "We have been spending money down there like drunken sailors."3
Despite delays and some incomplete and unoccupied homes, Arthurdale opened officially June 7, 1934.
Finding Industry for Arthurdale
A small industry could not be found to supplement homesteaders' inadequate gardening and handicrafts incomes. In October 1934, the Public Works Administration allocated $525,000 to the U.S. Post Office Department for a factory at Arthurdale to manufacture post office furniture and mail boxes. Congressmen and others from furniture-producing states attacked the appropriation as a step toward socialism that would destroy capitalism. Indiana Representative Louis Ludlow, pressured from the Keyless Lock Company in his district (it made post office boxes and equipment), blocked the U.S. Post Office appropriation on January 26, 1935.
On presidential adviser Bernard Baruch's suggestion, a General Electric Company subsidiary built a vacuum cleaner assembly plant in Arthurdale in the fall of 1935. Its opening was aborted when the U.S. Comptroller General ruled that federal funds could not be used for a private business. Some homesteaders early in 1936, with money borrowed from the government, purchased the plant, but it closed after a year because of financial loss.
Other industries that failed included a men's shirt factory in 1937, a poultry farm, a grist mill, and a New York firm making cabinets for radios. World War II defense needs did open coal mines again and many homesteaders returned to work in the mines. By the time an industrial firm was producing war materials at Arthurdale, the government was divesting itself of all of its homestead projects.
Other Arthurdale Critics
Attacks on Arthurdale mounted. Critics derisively called it "Mrs. Roosevelt's project." One such attack from journalist Wesley Stout in the widely read Saturday Evening Post (August 4, 1934) focused on waste at Arthurdale.4 Critic William A. Wirt, Gary, Indiana, school superintendent, alleged a New Deal conspiracy to subvert the economy of Morgantown, WV. He charged that resettled miners would no longer be paying rent and taxes in Morgantown. Mrs. Roosevelt pointed out that few if any of the jobless miners had paid rent or taxes for years.
Arthurdale Community School
From the first Mrs. Roosevelt saw the school as a center of Arthurdale activities. The community school she envisioned was one which John Dewey and other progressive education leaders advocated: a child centered, community centered school, emphasizing children's interest and their learning, not by drill in a set curriculum, but by active involvement in community affairs.
This progressive concept went back to Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) and was practiced from the mid-nineteenth century by Swiss educator Heinrich Pestalozzi and others in Europe and the U.S.
During the Depression, there was also a "social reconstructionist" element in the community school concept. Teachers College, Columbia University educator George S. Counts (1889-1974) wrote Dare the School Build a New Social Order? in 1932. His colleague, Harold O. Rugg (1886-1960), had developed and teachers were using social studies textbooks that stressed American society's faults as well as successes. Reconstructionists believed that students and teachers should discuss current problems, take sides on issues, and that the school should be an active agent to reform (i.e., improve) society.
In this context Mrs. Roosevelt in January 1934 formed a National Advisory Committee for Arthurdale made up of leading prestigious progressive educators: Dean William Russell of Teachers College, Columbia University; Columbia University philosopher John Dewey; Clarence Pickett; E. E. Agger of the Resettlement Administration; Fred J. Kelly of the U.S. Office of Education; Lucy Sprague Mitchell of New York's Bank Street School; and W. Carson Ryan, Progressive Education Association president.
Because Preston County, WV, was poor, it was decided to build the Arthurdale school at federal expense and to divide staff and operating costs with county and state education agencies. Thinking that operating costs for the kind of community school she envisioned would be too costly for the state and county, Mrs. Roosevelt determined to donate to the school her earnings from radio talks and newspaper articles and to solicit private funds.
It was Clarence Pickett who brought Elsie Ripley Clapp 1879-1965) to Mrs. Roosevelt's attention as particularly suitable to be director of the Arthurdale school.
Arthurdale School Director Elsie Ripley Clapp (1934-36)
Elsie Ripley Clapp, born in Brooklyn, NY, on November 16, 1879, had attended Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, 1899-1903; received the B.A. degree in English from Barnard College, New York, in 1908; and the M.A. degree in Philosophy from Columbia University in 1909. She had assisted John Dewey in his Philosophy of Education classes at Teachers College, Columbia University, 1909-13, and again during 1923-29. She had taught in the following private schools: Ashley Hall, Charleston, SC, 1913-14; Brooklyn Heights Seminary, NY, 1914-21; Milton Academy, Milton, MA, 1921-22; City and Country School, New York, NY, 1922-24; and Rosemary Junior School, Greenwich, CT, 1924-25.
As Principal of Rogers Clark Ballard Memorial School, Jefferson County, near Louisville, KY, 1929-34, she developed a community school atmosphere, described later in her two books and several articles. By the early 1930s she was a leader in the Progressive Education Association (1917-55) and headed its Community School Division, which advised government agencies on education.
Mrs. Roosevelt interviewed Elsie Ripley Clapp in February 1934. They agreed on the community school approach. Clapp was appointed that summer as Arthurdale School director. She visited Scott's Run and the Arthur farm, met the parents and children selected to move there, viewed possible school sites, and got the architect to adapt his school building plans to facilitate student group work and community school activities. Clapp brought six experienced progressive teachers with her from the Ballard School and helped select the three local teachers who were paid by the Preston County Public Schools.
Buildings were not yet completed when the Arthurdale school opened in September 1934 with 246 students. Classes were temporarily held in the Arthurdale farm's main building. When finished, the school complex included a school center, a nursery school, elementary school, high school, and a community recreation center.
Community School Activities
Arthurdale, then a rural beehive of construction, was a natural place to involve school children in community activities. First graders were taken to see buckwheat threshed and potatoes disked. When some cows were acquired, children studied butter and cheese making. A surviving log cabin from colonial times was restored and taken over by fourth graders for a study of pioneer life. Children painted, sang folk songs, and wrote and produced plays. There were square dances, sports, and an annual summer music festival. Classes were organized around small interest groups rather than by formal grades. The nursery school, a source of community pride, served as the community child care center.
Most parents were impressed with the school, although some felt that the 3 Rs were being neglected. Some complained because the high school was not accredited in 1936. Elsie Clapp made light of the complaint, saying that none of the 3 high school graduates that spring planned to go to college.
Private aid was needed to supplement federal, state, and county funds. Mrs. Roosevelt gave the AFSC her radio talk and newspaper earnings to pay Clapp's salary ($6,000 a year, criticized as too high for the times), buy library books and equipment, and pay other costs. Bernard Baruch, who shared her enthusiasm for the school, contributed, mostly to the nursery school which was not eligible for state funds: $33,518 in 1934-35, $23,775 in 1935-36, $l0,272 in 1936-37, and $5,000 a year for the next few years.
Elsie Clapp's Departure
When other private funds could not be found, Clarence Pickett told the school advisory committee in early 1936 that the time had come to transfer school control and finance to West Virginia supervision and Preston County administration. Mrs. Roosevelt reluctantly relayed the decision to disappointed homesteaders, who wanted Clapp and her staff to remain, possibly paid by Preston County.
But Clapp discouraged plans to keep her on. She and the six teachers from the Ballard School left after school ended in 1936. She became editor of Progressive Education, journal of the Progressive Education Association, October 1937 through May 1939. She wrote several articles and two books, Community Schools in Action, 1939, and The Use of Resources in Education, 1952, extolling her community school experiments at the Ballard School in Kentucky and the Arthurdale School in West Virginia.
She lived in retirement in Exeter, NH, where she died July 28, 1965, some three decades after her work at the Arthurdale school.
Was the Arthurdale School Successful?
As a progressive community school under Elsie Clapp as director, Arthurdale enjoyed esteem and praise. The school fostered a spirit of community cooperation. Better student social adjustment and a higher standard of community health were achieved. Rexford Tugwell, federal administrator of the Homestead Projects, in praising the original Arthurdale school, said, "Morale at Arthurdale and conditions there were 90 percent better than in other homesteads, entirely due to the school."5
Critics said that in its zeal for community service, the school neglected the realities of the complex industrial world around it. Some criticized its lack of long-range planning. In a 1941 survey of its first 49 graduates, all but one said they had enjoyed the high school, valuing its smallness and friendly informality, but several faulted its limited course offerings. The school's promoters--Mrs. Roosevelt, Baruch, Tugwell, and Pickett--were convinced that the school was the most successful part of the Arthurdale experiment.
After June 1936, Preston County, WV, took over the school and appointed a principal. Its original progressive education and community influences dwindled. Traditional teaching and administration followed. The high school was organized along subject department lines. With the approach of World War II, it became just another rural school.
Eden Liquidated: Arthurdale on Its Own
By 1938 national sentiment for socioeconomic reform had waned. New Deal critics in Congress in 1939 cut funds for the subsistence homestead projects. Congress in 1942 directed the federal government to sell all interests in the homestead communities. Homes, land, and properties were sold to homesteaders and others. With wartime employment high and new building scarce, the homes sold readily by 1948. Arthurdale cost the government an estimated $2 million from 1933 to final liquidation in 1948.
Epilogue
Arthurdale remains a pleasant community in northern West Virginia. Its fiftieth anniversary celebration was held on July 14, 1984, with meals and speeches. Of the original homesteaders, 27 persons were still living there, 42 couples had lived there until one or both spouses died, and 76 children or grandchildren were heads of families living in Arthurdale, some in the homes of their forebears.6 Arthurdale, a controversial New Deal experiment, is but a footnote to history, a dream that was.
Footnotes
1. Hickok, Lorena A. Reluctant First Lady. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962, pp. 136-137.
2. Haid, Stephen Edward (Ph.D. dissertation). "Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning, 1933-1947." West Virginia University, 1975, p. 66.
3. Ickes, Harold L. The Secret Diaries of Harold L. Ickes; Vol. I: The First Thousand Days, 1933-1936. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1953, pp. 152, 207, 218.
4. Stout, Wesley. "The New Homesteaders," Saturday Evening Post, CCVII (August 4, 1934), pp. 5-7, 61-65.
5. Haid, op cit., p. 295.
6. Eble, Jettie and Charles. The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Homesteading of Arthurdale, W. Va. Arthurdale, WV: Privately Printed, 1984, pp. 9, 14.
References
Elsie Ripley Clapp's two books on community schools during the Depression years were Community Schools in Action, New York: Viking Press, 1939; and The Use of Resources in Education, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952.
Her journal articles include "Plays in a Kentucky County School," Progressive Education, VIII, No. 1 (January 1931), pp. 34-39; "A Rural Community School in Kentucky," Progressive Education, X, No. 3 (March 1933), pp. 123-128; "The Teacher in Social Education," Progressive Education, X, No. 5 (May 1933), pp. 283-287; and [Editorial] "Schools Socially Functioning," Progressive Education, XV, No. 2 (February 1938), pp. 89-90.
The Arthurdale School is described in: College of Education, West Virginia University, Report of the Survey of Arthurdale School, Morgantown, WV: College of Education, West Virginia University, May 6, 1940; Thomas H. Coode and Dennis E. Fabbri, "The New Deal's Arthurdale Project in West Virginia," West Virginia History, XXXVI, No. 4 (July l975), pp. 291-308; Holly Cowan, "Arthurdale," Columbia University Faculty of Political Science thesis, 1968?; Kathleen Irwin, "Schools at the Center of Society's Values and Vision," paper read at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting, Chicago, April 2, 1985, ERIC ED 254 961 [abstracted in Resources in Education, XX, No. 8 (August 1985), p. 57]; Richard S. Little and Margaret Little, Arthurdale--Its History, Its Lessons for Today, Morgantown, WV: 1940; Franklin Parker, "The Progressive Educator: Elsie Ripley Clapp," The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Homesteading of Arthurdale, W. Va., coedited by Jettie and Charles Eble, Arthurdale, WV: Privately Printed, 1984, pp. 11-12; Carleton E. Preston and Vester M. Mulholland, "Experiments in Community Education," in Secondary Education in the South, edited by W. Carson Ryan et al., Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946, pp. 199-205; Bob Robinson, "Great Social Experiment in Arthurdale Inconclusive," Dominion-Post (Morgantown, WV), June 7, 1981, p. 2-A; and Steward Wagner, "School Buildings, Arthurdale, West Virginia," Progressive Education, XV, No. 4 (April 1938), pp. 304-316.
Books by Eleanor Roosevelt describing Arthurdale include This I Remember, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949, pp. 126-133; and My Day, Edited by Rochelle Chadakoff, New York: Pharos Books, 1989, pp. 36-37, 86, 170-171, 245, 380.
Works mentioning Eleanor Roosevelt's involvement in Arthurdale include Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-Fulfillment, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987, pp. 62-64, 74, 104, 127; Bruce G. Beezer, "Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Education," West Virginia History, Vol. XXVI, No. 1 (October 1974), pp. 17-36; Tamara K. Hareven, "Arthurdale: A Venture in Utopia," Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975, pp. 91-111, 290-292; Lorena A. Hickok, Reluctant First Lady, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962, pp. 136-137; Joseph P. Lash, "Mrs. Roosevelt's 'Baby'--Arthurdale," Eleanor and Franklin, New York: W.W. Norton, 1971, pp. 393-417, 737-738; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend's Memoir, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964, pp. 110-111; Lois Scharf, Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of American Liberalism, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987, pp. 100-103; Graham White and John Maze, Harold Ickes of the New Deal: His Private Life and Public Career, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 128-132; J. William T. Youngs, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life, Boston: Little, Brown, 1985, pp. 164-169, 177.
Elsie Clapp's earliest work on the community school, done at the Junior School of Rosemary Hall, Greenwich, CT, 1924-25, is briefly mentioned in Harold Rugg and Ann Shumaker, The Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New Education, Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Co., 1927, p. 51. Her later community schools in Kentucky and West Virginia are mentioned in Harold Rugg, Foundations for American Education, Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Co., 1947, pp. 572-573; and Harold Rugg and B. Marian Brooks, The Teacher in School and Society: An Introduction to Education, Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Co., 1950, pp. 259-260.
Doctoral dissertations on Elsie Ripley Clapp's community school in Arthurdale, WV, include: Robert A. Naslund (Ph.D. dissertation), "The Origin and Development of the Community School Concept," Stanford University, 1951; more fully in Stephen Edward Haid (Ph.D. dissertation), "Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning, 1933-1947," West Virginia University, 1975; and Martin L. Berman (Ph.D. dissertation), "Arthurdale, Nambe, and the Developing Community School Model: A Comparative Study," University of New Mexico, May 1979.
There is a biographical sketch in the "Elsie Ripley Clapp Papers 1910-1943" Mss. Collection 21, The Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901.
Elsie Ripley Clapp obituaries appeared in The Exeter News-Letter (Exeter, NH), August 12, 1965, and in The New York Times, July 31, 1965, p. 21.
About the Authors
1. For biographical account: "Betty & Franklin Parker Looking Back Since 1946,"
access: http://bfparker.blogster.com/betty_franklin_parker_looking.html
or:
http://ourstory.com/story.html?v=10919
or: http://www.progressiveu.org/182455-betty-franklin-parker-looking-back-since-1946-57-years-of-a-good-idea-thanksgiving-2007-bfparker-frontiernet-net
or:
http://bootlog.com/index.php?cat=travelogs&aut=bfparker
2. For a list of 153 of authors' publications go to: http://www.worldcat.org
type in: Franklin Parker, 1921- and you should get the following URL:
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Parker%2C+Franklin%2C+1921-%2C&=Search&qt=results_page
3. To access free E-Book full contents of Franklin Parker, George Peabody, A Biography. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995 rev. edn., go to:
http://books.google.com/books?id=OPIbk-ZPnF4C&dq=franklin+parker&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=qxV3RqTk1k&sig=sXAmDL_CyCYd-Sl0n_IRl7g1S1I#PPP1,M1
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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Ezekiel Cheever (1614-1708), New England Colonial Teacher
by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
[63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270, Ph. (931) 277-3268]
Ezekiel Cheever was the most famous colonial New England Latin grammar teacher of his time. He came from middle class Puritan roots in England, where he received a classical education before emigrating to Boston. His remarkably long teaching career of 70 years in four New England towns and the esteem shown by his famous pupils at his death tell much about how the New England colonial mind shaped American education and thought.
Ezekiel Cheever was born in London, January 25, 1614, the son of William Cheaver (as he spelled his name), who made his living in the cloth trade. Family circumstances were good enough so that Ezekiel received a classical secondary education that prepared him for Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. One account says he attended a secondary school attached to Christ's Hospital in 1624. By another account, about which there is some doubt, he attended the well known St. Paul's School in London.
If he attended the school near Christ's Hospital, located at Newgate Street, London, it was originally the priory (or residence) of the Grey Friars. On that location a school was founded in 1553 by King Edward VI to support poor orphans. The school was commonly called the Blue Coat School after the blue uniform pupils wore. When fully enrolled, the school annually boarded and taught from 1,000 to 1,200 boys and a few girls who entered at ages 8 to 10 and left at ages 15 or 16. Each year five or six of the best pupils were sent to enroll in colleges at Oxford or Cambridge universities.
If Cheever attended St. Paul's School, he was in good company. England's famous poet John Milton, six years older than Cheever, also attended St. Paul's. St. Paul's was an endowed grammar school founded in 1509 (or 1512 by one source) by John Colet, famous humanist scholar, who founded it originally for the free education of poor children.
The colleges making up Cambridge University attracted such future leaders as Oliver Cromwell, who headed the Puritan Revolution in England. Other Cambridge-educated Puritans who left England for the New World and became leaders in America included William Brewster, John Winthrop, and John Cotton. John Milton entered Christ's College, Cambridge University, in 1625. Ezekiel Cheever entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, eight years later in 1633.
Emmanuel College was founded as a Puritan institution in 1584 and was the model for Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. John Harvard, a Puritan and Emmanuel College graduate (1635), left for New England where he worked as an assistant pastor. His important gift of half of his estate and his library of 320 books led to the founding in 1636 of Harvard College at Cambridge, near Boston, Massachusetts, named in his honor.
Ezekiel Cheever arrived in Boston in June 1637. He came to the New World, like many before and since, for religious freedom and economic opportunity. He was 23 years old and single. Boston was then only seven years old. Two years before his arrival in Boston there was founded in that town, on April 23, 1635, the New World's first college-preparatory secondary school, the Boston Latin Grammar School (still active as the Boston Latin School), where Cheever taught for the last 37 of his 70 years as a teacher.
Cheever's first stay in Boston lasted only one year. He left in 1638 for the New Haven Colony, later named Connecticut, perhaps because, like Roger Williams before him, he disliked the rigid Puritan state-church atmosphere in the Boston area. In New Haven, where he was among the earliest founding settlers, Cheever began the first of his 70 years as a teacher. He taught Latin, first in his own home and later in a school house built for him. He married Mary (last name not known) and with the New Haven leaders signed the "Plantation Covenant" in Newman's barn, June 4, 1639, a compact which formed New Haven's religious and civic government. He received £20 for his teaching in 1641. This amount was raised to £30 in August 1644.
Although of very modest means when he went to New Haven (Cheever's estate was then listed as worth £20), the esteem in which he was held as a teacher can be seen in the fact that in 1643 his name was listed sixth among the planters of New Haven . This respect can also be seen from his being chosen one of the twelve deacons in the New Haven church, from his being deputized to represent his district in the general court in 1646, and from his being occasionally asked to preach at New Haven's First Church. He was respected as a teacher for his scholarly knowledge of Latin and Greek and also for his firm discipline, considered essential in colonial education. One of his pupils in New Haven who later became a well known minister and poet was Michael Wigglesworth.
But Cheever was also known as a man of strong independent mind, as shown in an incident of censure in New Haven in 1649. Some elders of the New Haven community were criticized for "partiality and usurpation"; that is, for having done some act or deed the community frowned upon. Many wanted the accused tried and disciplined. When the case was presented before church leaders, the accused individuals were cleared. Cheever, observing the proceedings, expressed strong disagreement with the verdict. Because of his independent stand, he was criticized by the church elders and censured for his "uncomely gestures and carriage before the church." His own defense sounds better than the charges made against him. His arguments made some of the church leaders doubt that they had made the right decision. In ringing words he said to the church elders, "I had rather suffer anything from men than make shipwreck of a good conscience, or go against my present light."
His wife Mary died the year of this trial, 1649, leaving him with five children. One child, named Ezekiel after him, had died in infancy. In 1650 he left New Haven after 12 years as its schoolteacher. It was probably while in New Haven that he wrote a Latin grammar textbook whose shortened title was Accidence. It was a highly popular textbook in colonial Latin grammar schools and was used long after his death in 1708. The eighteenth edition was published in 1785 and the twentieth edition was published in 1838.
While Cheever taught in New Haven, the Massachusetts General Court passed two important school laws. The Massachusetts School Law of 1642 required parents and masters to teach their children to read and write, on penalty of paying a fine. This law reflected the Calvinists' desire for universal elementary education for moral and religious purposes. To understand the Bible, children had to learn to read. This law was based on the English Poor Law of 1601, which laid down England's policy for the welfare of lower class children. This English law required pauper and orphan children to be apprenticed to a trade and stipulated that their masters see to their moral and religious welfare.
Two years later the Massachusetts School Law of 1647 went further. It required every town of 50 homes or more to employ an elementary school teacher, and every town of 100 or more homes to have a Latin grammar school. This 1647 law has been popularly called the Old Deluder Satan Law, after its quaint wording which said that since the Old Deluder Satan tried to keep men and women from reading the Bible, the best way to fight the devil was to promote schools and learning.
Even though these two school laws were not strictly enforced, they marked the first time an English-speaking legislature anywhere in the world had declared in favor of universal elementary and secondary education. The year Cheever left New Haven, 1650, Connecticut passed a school law which incorporated the main features of the Massachusetts school laws of 1642 and 1647.
In December 1650 Cheever went to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he taught for 11 years. His school, endowed with grants of land and bequests, was called a free school but still required fees from pupils' parents. There Cheever taught Latin and Greek to prepare boys for college. His teaching fame spread and helped make Ipswich more widely known. In 1652 he married his second wife, Ellen Lathrop, who had come from England two years earlier to live with her brother. The Cheevers had four children in Ipswich. In 1653 a philanthropic citizen gave the town a better school building and provided a house for Cheever with a few acres of land.
In November 1661 Cheever went to Charlestown, Massachusetts, as its teacher at a salary of £30 a year. He was not always paid, however, and in November 1666 he petitioned the selectmen of the town for his salary, mentioning that "the constables were much behind with him" (meaning that he might be jailed for his debts). He asked that the school building be repaired. He also complained that the agreement under which he was hired to teach was that he would be the only teacher in town. .But, now, a Mr. Mansfield was taking pupils away from him. In 1669 he petitioned for land on which to build his hme. The selectmen voted him the land, but Cheever left the next year after nine years of teaching in Charlestown.
On January 6, 1670, when Cheever was 56 years old and had taught for more than 30 years, he became schoolmaster of the Boston Latin Grammar School, where he remained for 38 years until his death in 1708. The still-existing Boston Latin School (as it is now called) was founded February 13, 1635, a year before the founding of Harvard College (1636). This Boston Latin School, the oldest and best known grammar school in New England, is believed to have been founded through the influence of John Cotton and based on the school John Cotton knew called the High School in Boston, Lincolnshire, England, founded in 1554. John Cotton came to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1633, and helped found the Boston Latin School two years later (1635), one year before the founding of Harvard College. John Cotton's will provided that half of his estate go the "Free School of Boston." Philemon Pormort was the Boston Latin School's first master. It was early supported by the town of Boston.
Five signers of the Declaration of Independence and four presidents of Harvard College attended the Boston Latin School. Its many famous pupils read like a who's who of New England and included Benjamin Franklin, Cotton Mather, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Edward Everett, Robert C. Winthrop, Charles Francis Adams, Charles Sumner, William M. Evarts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, John Lothrop Motley, Francis Parkman, Henry Ward Beecher, Charles W. Eliot, Edward Everett Hale, and others. More recent Boston Latin School graduates include philosophers George Santayana and Bernard Berenson, journalist Theodore H. White, and education-writer Jonathan Kozol.
Cheever's last 37 years of teaching at Boston Latin School established his reputation as the most famous teacher in the colonies. His salary was £60 a year, then a very good salary. Elijah Corlet, a schoolmaster of the Latin grammar school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and almost as well-known a teacher as Cheever, earned only £20 a year. The school room in which Cheever taught was large and received little light from its high, small windows. Smoke from the large fireplace at one end of the room often drifted over the heads of the pupils and blackened the ceiling. Copying or listening, the pupils sat on long fixed benches with fixed desks in front of them. Cheever wore a black skullcap on his gray head and his white beard was long and pointed. The boys always knew when he was angry because he would start stroking his beard to the point faster and faster. The rod of birch twigs hung nearby. Cheever's school was open mornings from 7 to 11 in summer and from 8 to 11 in winter and in the afternoons from 1 to 5. Boys learned their Latin from his Accidence and read the New Testament in Greek.
Cheever, who had seen many generations of boys come and go, knew that those who learned their Latin and Greek would go on to one of the colonial colleges and become mainly ministers or physicians. During Cheever's lifetime three colonial colleges were founded by the established churches in three colonies. Harvard College was founded in 1636 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the Puritans and named after John Harvard because of his early gift. William and Mary College was founded in 1693 in Williamsburg, Virginia, 1693, by the Anglicans. Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, was founded in 1701 by the Puritans.
American colleges did not cluster at great learning centers as in England's Oxford and Cambridge universities but were small and scattered. This diffusion of colleges was aided by the Great Awakening, whose resulting revivals and evangelism led to splits in the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches, splits that aided the spread of American higher education.
The fourth colonial college, Princeton College, founded in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, was founded by "New Side" Presbyterians. The fifth colonial college, Brown College, was founded in 1764 by Revivalist Baptists in Providence, Rhode Island. The sixth colonial college, Rutgers College, originally called Queen's College, was founded in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1766 by Theodore J. Frelinghuysen and his followers of the Dutch Reformed Church. The seventh colonial college, Dartmouth College, 1769, in Hanover, New Hampshire, grew out of an Indian missionary school organized with visiting English Anglican evangelist George Whitfield's help by Eleazar Wheelock, Congregational pastor. The eighth colonial college, King's College, later Columbia University, was founded by Anglicans in New York in 1754. The ninth college founded before the Revolution was the secular College of Philadelphia, later the University of Pennsylvania, based on the first academy in America, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1755.
Cheever knew that those pupils who did not do well in their classical languages would become farmers, shopkeepers, merchants, or go to sea on sailing ships. For those trades they needed a little more arithmetic. Little history, geography, or literature were taught. The curriculum of the Latin grammar schools aimed at college entrance; and the entrance requirements at Harvard College were to read Tully or another classical Latin author in the original, write and speak Latin verse and prose, and be able to decline Greek nouns and verbs.
When his pupils grew in number, Cheever hired and paid his own assistant. In March 1699, when Cheever was 85, the selectmen voted to pay his assistant, Ezekiel Lewis, £40 a year, raising this to £45 in 1701. Cheever's second wife died in 1706. He lived his last two years with his youngest daughter Susannah and her husband. Of his children Cheever was particularly proud of his son Samuel, a minister, who was well known and much respected.
Cheever's last illness came in August of 1708, in his seventieth year of teaching. On August 12, after going out to hear his old pupil, Cotton Mather, preach, he became ill. On August 13 his friend, Judge Sewall, another successful former pupil, who had arranged for an old age pension for Cheever, went to see him. Cheever, in bed, blessed the judge. On August 19 Sewall called again and Cheever took him by the hand several times. On August 20 Sewall called to find Cheever much weaker. In a very low voice Cheever called for his daughter and asked those in the room if they were ready for his end. He died early in the morning of August 21, 1708. He was 94 years old.
Cheever's funeral was attended by many people of all stations of life, including the governor, councilors, ministers, and justices, most of whom had been his pupils. Cotton Mather preached a long funeral sermon for his old schoolmaster. He recalled Cheever's long and distinguished teaching career: 23 years in New Haven, 11 years in Ipswich, nine years in Charlestown, and 37 years at Boston Latin School. Cotton Mather told how he and his classmates were taught by Cheever an oration by the Roman orator Tully praising his (Tully's) schoolmaster; and how Cheever taught them Corderius's Colloquies and the fact that Corderius had himself taught the great John Calvin. Mather praised Cheever's scholarship, dedication as a teacher, and piety; and ended with "He Dyed, a Candidate for the First Resurrection."
Cheever left behind an estate of £837, 19 shillings, and 6 pence. He also left behind him a legend of 74 years of teaching. His thousands of pupils remembered him as the most famous teacher in colonial New England.
The Latin grammar school was inherited from Europe via England as the first type of secondary school in colonial America, from 1635. It was succeeded by the more practical academy, introduced by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, 1751. The academy was succeeded by the high school after 1821 and especially after the 1872 Kalamazoo, Michigan, decision legalizing use of tax funds for public high schools.
END
References
Barnard, Henry. "Ezekiel Cheever," American Journal of Education, I (1855), pp. 267, 297-310; XXVII? (1877), pp. 67, 73, 395; XXXIII? (1878), pp. 134, 286.
Barnard, John. [his autobiography-describes Latin School in Cheever's time] Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Series, Vol. V.
"The Old Deluder Satan Act [original wording]," in Beckner, Weldon, and Wayne Dumas, eds. American Education: Foundations and Superstructures. ?place: International Textbooks, 1970.
Butterfield, Fox. "Boston Latin Marks 350th Anniversary as Oldest Public School in the U.S." New York Times (April 24, 1985), p. 11.
Connecticul Historical Society Collections, I (1860), pp. 22-51.
Gould, Elizabeth Porter. Ezekiel Cheever, Schoolmaster. Boston: Palmer Co., 1904.
Mather, Cotton. "Cotton Mather's Tribute to Ezekiel Cheever," Old South Leaflets, No. 177. Boston: Directors of the Old South Work, Old South Meeting House, year ?, pp. 21-36; reprinted from Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (October 1889).
Parker, Franklin. "Ezekiel Cheever: New England Colonial Teacher," Peabody Journal of Education, XXXVII, No. 6 (May, 1960), pp. 355-360.
Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Ezekiel Cheever (1614-1708), New England Colonial Teacher." CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XX, No. 2 (June 1996), Fiche 8 E11. Abstract in Resources in Education, XXXI, No. 8 (Aug. 1996), p. 151-152 (ERIC ED 393 774).
Woody, Thomas. "Ezekiel Cheever," Dictionary of American Biography, IV. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, ?19??, pp. 47-48.
Also check for biblio info:
Jenks, Henry F. title not known [excellent history of the Boston Latin School]
Hassam, John T. Ezekiel Cheever and Some of His Descendants
END OF MANUSCRIPT. Send errors and comment to: bfparker@frontiernet.net.
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
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"Karen Armstrong (1944-) as Master Teacher: A Dialogue on the British Ex-Nun, Author, and Historian of Religion," by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker (bfparker@frontiernet.net), 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270
Betty J. Parker: Frank, explain our interest in Karen Armstrong. Why have so many readers, wanting to understanding why Muslim extremists hate us, turned to her books on religion? Why have so many study groups spent months analyzing her 1993 book, A History of God? What circumstances made her, for a time at least, as writer and lecturer, also a master teacher?
Franklin Parker: Her interviews on CNN, C-Span's Booknotes, and elsewhere have impressed many. She is a English-born former nun who is a notable historian of religion. Her books and speeches help us understand religious conflicts. Betty, what else explains Karen Armstrong's appeal?
BJP: Her historical perspective helps us understand, for example, , why they attack us. Yet, she cautions us to separate Islam's fundamentalist minority from its peaceful majority. Readers find her explanations provocative and plausible. Frank, describe her life.
FP: Her two autobiographical books, Through the Narrow Gate, 1981, and Beginning the World, 1983, tell of her birth on Nov. 14, 1944, near Birmingham, England. Her father, John O. S. Armstrong, from Ireland, married Eileen Hastings (nee McHale) Armstrong, a born English Catholic. Since Catholics are a minority in Anglican England, understandably, her middle class family lived in an enclave of fellow Catholics. The father was a scrap metal dealer. Karen grew up small, chubby, introverted, and serious, unlike her prettier extroverted younger sister, Lindsey, who later became an actress and radio performer and lived in California.
BJP: Karen attended the Convent of the Holy Child Jesus School in Birmingham. She early determined to enter that same teaching order of nuns. Her motivation? When she was 12 her sister Lindsey, then nine, almost died of diphtheria. Karen prayed that if Lindsey lived she would think of becoming a nun. Lindsey recovered. Karen pushed that promise to the back of her mind. Later, a lay Catholic teacher of physics in Karen's school, Miss Jackson, became a nun. Karen gazed at Miss Jackson's picture in nun's habit on the school bulletin board. She thought she saw in Miss Jackson's eyes the joy and serenity she hoped to achieve herself.
FP: Also, Karen's Granny, her mother's mother, as a girl wanted to become a nun but was stopped by her parents. Disappointed, Granny was unhappy all of her life. Karen always thought her Granny should have been given a chance to become a nun.
BJP: In her mid-teens, Karen thought her girl friends too worldly, too trendy, too "boy crazy." Self-conscious about her dumpy body and less than attractive appearance, she increasingly turned inward, away from the material world, toward books and literature. Growing up Catholic she was comforted by ritual, saints, holy days, and holy visions. Her father, proud of her school success, hoped she would be the first in the family to attend a woman's college at Oxford University.
FP: Karen spoke to the mother superior of her convent school about becoming a nun. The mother superior advised her to wait and see if she felt the same after finishing high school. When Karen was 15 her father asked: "What do you want to do?" She answered: "I want to be a nun."
BJP: Her parents tried to dissuade her. They listed the pleasures she would give up, the vows she would be compelled to follow. The mother superior told her parents that Karen was young, bright, was seemingly sincere in wanting to be a nun; that experienced superiors would observe, test, and monitor her training; that there were set times when she could leave if she proved not to have the calling. On Sept. 14, 1962, at 17, with her parents' wary approval, Karen entered the training convent in Tripton, near London. With mystic resolve to find and serve God, she faced a life of poverty, chastity, obedience.
FP: Her teaching order was founded in the 1840s under the strict rules of 16th century Spanish soldier Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Jesuits. Wearing a novice's confining habit; given a new name, Martha, symbol of a new life, she slept on a hard narrow bed in a dorm-like room with nine other entrants; rose at dawn; washed with carbolic soap; and had to eat everything on her plate. To leave a scrap invited censure, even macaroni and cheese which always made her sick. Her chores were ones she had either never done before or had done poorly before. Postulants prayed five hours daily and performed tasks under the rule of silence. In the one hour of talk allowed each evening, personal and trivial chatter was discouraged.
BJP: Close friendships were also discouraged, as were touching, embracing, or unduly befriending others inside or outside the community. The intent was to reduce human closeness to a minimum, the better to find and serve God. Publicly she controlled her inner despair and hurts. Her sobs at night were less over hard work than over loneliness, giving up family and friends, humbling herself, trying to eliminate ego, in order to be a perfect nun.
FP: She was awkward, inept, nervous. She found food repulsive, lost weight from anorexia, was ill. Yet she had to clean, sweep, sew, cook, and pray. Most frightening were her unaccountable fainting spells. These brought unwanted attention and shame. In the first one, 1963, during morning meditation, she saw bright flashing lights, smelt a horrible odor, broke out in a cold sweat, fell on the floor stiff and unconscious. She awoke shaking, kicking, crying, surrounded by concerned novices and nuns. These spells occurred sporadically.
BJP: Her superiors attributed her fainting spells to hysteria and nervousness They thought her spells were an unconscious bid for sympathy. She was assigned penance intended to strengthen her religious vows. Penance included prayers said standing for an hour or so with arms extended in the form of a cross. She performed self flagellation in a secluded room, striking her back over each shoulder with a corded rope. Another penance was to kiss the feet of her sisters, 70 of them, in the dining hall while they ate.
FP: Her superiors did send her to a physician who, unable to find a physical cause for her problems, accepted her superiors' belief that she was a nervous young nun. Despite difficulties she finished her training, took the veil, and prepared to become a teaching nun. Her superiors, seeing promise in her academic abilities, decided she should prepare to teach English literature in their parochial high schools. They sent her to St. Anne's College, Oxford University, where she was studious, timid, hesitant, but gradually spoke up in small discussion groups. She impressed her tutors with her good mind. She read widely in Oxford's Bodleian Library, wrote weekly papers, and absorbed great literature and history.
BJP: Inwardly, she questioned blind obedience to Catholic dogmas. Her anorexia continued. Her fainting spells recurred. Physically ill, distraught, not able to find God, she sensed that continuing as a nun would kill her or drive her mad. On January 6, 1969, the Feast of Epiphany, the day of miraculous insights, when nuns symbolically renew their vows, she explained her doubts to her superiors. She asked to leave the cloister to seek God in the world.
FP: A sympathetic mother superior who had known her since school days, contacted the Mother Provincial, who spoke to Karen and approved her leaving the order. Karen wrote the bishop, asked to be released from her vows, asked that his dispensation be forwarded to the Sacred Congregation for Religious in Rome. On January 27, 1969, the official papers arrived from Rome. Having entered at 17, now at 24, after seven years, no longer a nun, she was depressed and uncertain.
BJP: A small scholarship enabled her to continue her studies at Oxford. She strove to overcome depression, to adjust to the strange outside world, to get used to miniskirts, raucous music, gyrating dancing. In her second autobiographical book, Beginning the World, she wrote of being lost, of being "in the world, but not of it."
FP: While she grieved at leaving the convent, her college tutor nominated her for a competitive academic prize. She spent six hours in competition with others writing papers about the novel, tragedy, and verse. When the University Registry letter came, she stared at it, not believing that she had won the Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize for Literature. This prize gave her new assurance.
BJP: Another bright spot at Oxford was the Stanley family. Both Judith and Edwin Stanley taught at Oxford and needed a live–in student to help care for their 10 year old autistic son Simon, a highly strung epileptic. Needing the job, Karen successfully coped with Simon's erratic behavior, was warmed by this kind family. But her sense of failure and her occasional fainting spells continued.
FP: Karen remained at Oxford, 1969-73, four years, receiving the B.A. degree in literature. She then taught English Literature at the University of London's Bedford College, 1973-76, three years. She had a failed love affair with an equally troubled Oxford student, was treated by a psychiatrist, had a nervous breakdown, and was suicidal.
BJP: The climax came at age 38 while she taught English at a girls' high school in Dulwich, England, 1976-82, six years. At the end of a play she had directed, while thanking the student actors and guests, she experienced flashing lights, perspiration, light-headedness. She fainted. In the emergency room of the local hospital, examined by a neurologist, Dr. Wolfe, she described her previous attacks going back to 1963 when she was 18. He gave her an EEG test to measure her brain waves. He diagnosed her condition as sporadic brain wave irregularity leading to temporal lobe epilepsy, probably from a birth defect. He assured her that the epilepsy was controllable by drugs. He said she should have had an EEG test much, much earlier.
FP: The weight of anxiety about her sanity was lifted. She knew from young Simon Stanley's case that epilepsy is treatable. The right medication was soon found. She has not had an epileptic seizure since. But the head of the Dulwich girls school, worried that epilepsy would frighten parents, replaced her. Her job lost, barred from teaching because of prejudice against epilepsy, she was at another low point, another crossroads.
BJP: To make sense of her shattered life she wrote her first autobiographical book, Through the Narrow Gate. The title came from the New Testament, Matthew 7:12: "Enter by the narrow gate, since the gate that leads to perdition is wide, and the road spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it."
FP: Her editor asked that she revise her first bitter draft to include good things that had kept her a nun for seven years. Her final version speaks of the beauty of the liturgy, the belief that every moment of life has eternal significance, her optimism that she would find God, appreciation for the fellow nuns who broke the rules to befriend and comfort her. Her nun's training came at the wrong time. Second Vatican Council reforms (1962-64) were being debated but not yet implemented. Had she entered a few years later, her training would have been lighter and brighter. All would have been different.
BJP: Glowing reviews of her Through the Narrow Gate, a best seller, brought her to the attention of a specialized London college and led her to another teaching job, this time about religion. In 1982 she was asked to teach about Christianity at London's Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism and the Training of Rabbis and Teachers. The door of opportunity had opened to her next career as a historian of religion.
FP: The program manager at England's then new TV Channel 4 asked her to write scripts for a six part TV series about the life and work of St. Paul. She worked for some years with an Israeli film crew in Jerusalem. She interviewed Jews, Christians, and Muslims. A successful TV series resulted, along with a book on St. Paul titled The First Christian, 1984, and two other books of interviews she had with Israeli Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Thus, in her late thirties and early forties, she found herself and her life's work. Each succeeding book made her a better known researcher and writer on the histories and conflicts of the major religions.
BJP: Frank, what if Vatican reforms had been in effect when she entered? What if her training as a nun had been more humane and she had remained a nun? What if her superiors had not sent her to Oxford to study? Any other "ifs"?
FP: What if neurologist Dr. Wolfe had not diagnosed her epilepsy? What if medication had not controlled it? What if she had not come to the favorable attention of Leo Baeck College officials, and to England's Channel 4 TV officials—what would have happened?
BJP: We would not have Karen Armstrong, author of some international best sellers on religion and religious conflicts. Here are some of her major books and their themes: 1981, Through the Narrow Gate; and 1983, Beginning the World, her two autobiographical books already mentioned. 1984, The First Christian, about St. Paul; and Varieties of Religious Experiences; 1985, Tongues of Fire; the last two books based on her interviews in and around Jerusalem.
FP: 1986, The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity's Creation of the Sexual War in the West. Armstrong showed how the medieval witch craze, sex-denying Victorian England, and today's Christianity have all perpetuated mistrust of the human body and fear of women. She criticized theologians, scholars, and others who have made women, including herself, victims of Christian dogma about the inferiority of women.
BJP: 1988, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World. Armstrong wrote that in waging wars against each other the three major religions have wasted lives and treasure; that false images, ridiculous perceptions, and absurd demons have haunted them. These three religions, she wrote, must learn to look at the world from one another's viewpoints.
FP: 1992, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet. Armstrong's respectful, reverential life of Muhammad tried to correct the West's misconceptions about Islam and its founder. Many Westerners believe wrongly that Islam is a violent religion. It was not violent in origin. About 610 A.D., Muhammad, a merchant from Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia, saw that his squabbling tribesmen needed a holy book, as the Jews and Christians had the Bible. He gave them the Koran, as revealed to him, stressing that Arabs were descended, like Jews and Christians, from Abraham; that Allah, which means God, is the same one God of the Jews and Christians. The Koran, Armstrong stressed, urged prayer, good works, justice, and charity.
BJP: 1993, The End of Silence: Women and Priesthood, is Armstrong's defense of women as being as capable as men. It is a plea for all religions to allow women to serve as priests and ministers. Also in 1993, her A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is her best known international best seller. It traces the changing concepts of God: from pagan times, to the Hebrew prophets, to the Greeks and Romans, to early Christians, to Islam, to the 16th century Enlightenment thinkers, to the l9th century Death of God philosophers, to our time. This tour de force is not an easy book. But its rich detail and historical coverage make it worth the try.
FP: 1996, Jerusalem, One City, Three Faiths, traced the frictional relations of Christians, Jews and Muslims in the holy city over the last 5,000 years. She is not optimistic that the knotty Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be easily or quickly solved. An Israeli critic, writing in the Jerusalem Post, accused Armstrong of being a pro-Muslim apologist who disparaged Jews and Christians.
BJP: 2000, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is a history of religious fundamentalism since 1492. It appeared before the horror of September 11, 2001 and was snapped up by readers as a plausible explanation. Religious fundamentalists, Armstrong explained, are militant splinter groups who break away from major religions when they (splinter groups) see the parent religion turn unalterably from original principles. Fundamentalists are true believers who when they see themselves marginalized, pushed aside, and about to be eliminated lash out at change, progress, modernity. Determined not to be wiped out, they organize, plot how to survive, and the more radical misguided few use violence to destroy those who, they believe, have wronged or betrayed them.
FP: 2000, Islam, A Short History, is another attempt to show Islam in its best light. She shows how Muhammad the Prophet gave Muslims the Koran; how in it he stressed peace, good works, and charity. She again countered as incorrect the West's misconception of Islam as warlike. Followers of Islam, she explained again, are urged to create a just and charitable community.
BJP: Karen Armstrong has written much and lectured widely. There is repetition. One can get lost. Can you pin down her core beliefs about religions and their conflicts. What are her passions?
FP: She has four passions: 1-She is passionate about wanting to correct stereotypes and misconceptions we Westerners have about Islam. 2-She passionately wants us to know what fundamentalism is, how the term is used, why it has arisen recently; why we've been shocked by its violent eruption among Islamic extremists. 3-She passionately wants readers to understand that concepts of God have changed over thousands of years; that how we think about God has changed as human problems have changed. 4-She passionately believes that the test of a good religion is its compassion, how it treats its have-nots, its sick and its poor. And now, for another perspective, we condense the content of two TV interviews with Karen Armstrong seen and heard by millions of viewers.
BJP: Here is the gist of the Brian Lamb-Karen Armstrong interview on C-Span, Booknotes, Sept. 22, 2000. Lamb asked her: when were you first interested in writing about God? Armstrong answered, repeating facts already mentioned: I never intended to be a writer. After I left the convent I thought I had finished with God. I was tired of religion. I fell into writing about religion by accident. I lost my teaching job because I'm an epileptic. I wrote my first autobiography, Through the Narrow Gate, 1981, to make sense out of my life. The program manager of a new British TV station who read it asked me to write the scenario for and help film a documentary series on St. Paul's life. I needed the work, lived in Jerusalem with an Israeli film crew, and was at first skeptical about the authenticity of the St. Paul story. But in Jerusalem, seeing the three faiths living side by side, interviewing Jews, Christians and Muslims, seeing how each adhered to his or her faith, [quote] "I came back to a sense of the divine." [end quote].
FP: Lamb asked her: What is your religion now? Armstrong answered: I say jokingly that I am a freelance monotheist. I draw strength from all three religions and am open to wisdom from any other faith. I see my former Catholicism as part of a great human search for meaning in a flawed and tragic world. I search after God, after the divine, after the ultimate about which there is no end. Lamb asked her: What has been the biggest problem in your life?
BJP: Armstrong answered: Adjusting. As Catholics in England my family were a minority. We lived in a tight subculture, a ghetto, like the Jews. In the convent I was cut off from the world. After seven years, I went back to a totally transformed world. Everyone was protesting the war in Vietnam about which I knew nothing. I gave up on religion after leaving the convent. After working on religious documentary films in Jerusalem, I adjusted to researching and writing the history of religions. Adjusting has been my hardest but necessary problem.
FP: Lamb said: You wrote your first autobiography, went to Jerusalem to write about St. Paul, and have written ten or so other books. Are they all still in print? Armstrong answered: My second autobiographical book, Beginning the World, is out of print. The publisher wants to reprint it but I resist. I was then in grief, was suicidal, was utterly miserable. I still need to come to terms with that horrible time in my life. Lamb asked: Which of your books has sold the most and how many? Armstrong answered: A History of God, no idea how many, but there are over half a million copies in over 30 languages.
BJP: Lamb said: There are some six billion people on earth: two billion are Christians, of which just over a billion are Roman Catholic, 1.2 billion are Muslims, and only 15 million are Jews. Why have so few Jews written so much and had so much written about them? Armstrong answered: Jews have had a tragic history. Their very existence has been threatened in the last thousand years since the Crusades. So they continually ask themselves and write about: Who am I? Why am I here? Is there a God? Why be Jewish when it brings so much suffering and pain?
FP: Lamb asked: Why have the Jews been so persecuted? Armstrong answered: Anti-Semitism is a terrible European disease. Consider how it arose: the Roman Empire fell; barbarians overran Europe; Europe fell into the Dark Ages; European civilization came to a virtual halt. Europe struggled for a comeback on the world stage, with the Crusades as its first cooperative act. Europeans felt inferior, an out group, afraid, and truculent. So they projected this fear into hating others. They hated the Muslims because Muslims had the Holy Land; hated Greek Orthodox Christians because they escaped the Dark Ages, hated Jews because Jews, wanderers without a homeland, had learned how to survive, some even to prosper.
BJP: Lamb asked: How did the lies about the Jews originate? Armstrong answered: Jews were easy scapegoats To remember their past, their reason for being, they clung to ritual, holidays, customs. It was easy to single out Jews by dress and manner and tar them with bizarre myths, such as Jews kill little children at Passover and use their blood to make unleavened bread to remind them of their escape from Egypt. This ridiculous myth showed the disturbed European mind. This prejudice persisted against all common sense. Hitler used it and other lies to fuel his Nazi Holocaust.
FP: Lamb asked: Why did you write your book titled Islam? What does the word "Islam" mean? Armstrong answered: Islam means to "surrender" to Allah (Arabic name for God), to give up posturing, to stop calling attention to one's self, to surrender ego. Muhammad (c.570-632), the Prophet, asked fellow Muslims to prostrate themselves to Allah, the same one God of the Jews and Christians. Now, Christians often presented God in human terms like themselves and ascribed to God some of their own prejudices. Christian Crusaders went into battle crying, "God wills it," as they murdered Muslims and Jews. Muslims, wary of this behavior, speak of Allah, God, ultimate reality, as a state of purity. Islam's basic values are peace and good works. Because a few Islamic extremists are violent, we in the West, see all Islam as violent. This is not so, said Armstrong.
BJP: Lamb asked: What about Buddha, about whom you are now writing a book? Armstrong said: Buddha stressed self abnegation, continuous effort to lose one's ego, to empty one's self. That's why all we know about him can be put in a thimble. Few can achieve total abnegation. But in so striving, one sees things ever clearer. Lamb asked: Well, Karen, now back to Islam and Muhammad the Prophet. Who was he?
FP: Armstrong answered: Muhammad was a concerned merchant of Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia. Around 610 A.D., Arabia was a desert without crops or resources. Tribes fought within and among themselves for survival. Muhammad knew that Jews and Christians looked down on Arabs as barbaric pagans who had no prophets, no Bible. Claiming revelations from on high, Muhammad dictated in beautiful poetry insights that formed the Koran. That book stressed that Allah required Muslims to humble themselves by prayer, to live righteously, and to dispense justice and charity. [End of Lamb-Armstrong interview].
BJP: Here is the gist of the Bill Moyers-Karen Armstrong interview on his PBS TV program NOW. Moyers asked Armstrong: if you were God, would you do away with religion? Armstrong replied: The test of a good religion is its degree of compassion. When religion concentrates instead on ego or on belligerence, God must weep. Moyers asked: Why have there been so many atrocities in the history of religion?
FP: Armstrong replied: Some extremists are angry enough to kill. Examples: the 9-11 Islamic fanatics, the European Crusaders, the orthodox Jew who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. When fanatics commit atrocities in the name of God, or for the glory of God, that's bad religion. When you ask fanatics, "what about compassion?" They answer, "what's the point of having religion if we can't use it to hurt people who are hurting you?"
BJP: Moyers asked: Why do fanatics have this attitude? Armstrong replied: Fear. It comes from cold fear. Fundamentalists are true believers. Convinced that their basic beliefs are being crushed out of existence, they strike back. Such violence was associated with religion from the beginning. The Hebrew Prophets and later religions, seeing every single human as sacred, transcended this barbarism.
FP: Moyers asked: How do you value the sacredness of others? Where does compassion come from? Armstrong replied: Compassion comes when you put yourself in another person's position, when you make a friend of a stranger. Genesis tells how Abraham sat outside his tent in the hot afternoon and watched three strangers approach. Most of us would not bring strangers who might be dangerous into our home. Abraham welcomed them into his home. Abraham asked his wife to prepare an elaborate meal for them.
BJP: Armstrong continuing: It turned out that one of the strangers was Abraham's God. Abraham's act of compassion led to a divine encounter. In Hebrew the word for holy, Kadosh, also means separate or other. Sometimes the otherness of a stranger, one not of our ethnic or ideological or religious group, instead of repelling us, can bring us out of our selfishness and give us insight into the otherness which is God. [End of Moyers-Armstrong interview].
FP: Betty, despite Karen Armstrong's trials and tribulations, she has achieved success. Born in 1944 she is now in 2003 age 59. What does she say about her lifestyle as a professional single woman?
BJP: She answered that in her article, "The Loneliness of the Intellectual Woman," New Statesman, Vol. 129, Issue 4489 June 5, 2000), pp. 23-24. She begins (I paraphrase): I sometimes smile wryly when I hear myself described as an 'ex-nun'. True, I no longer observe poverty, chastity and obedience, vows I kept for seven years as a nun. I am no longer poor and am certainly not obedient. But I have never married, continue to live alone, pass my days in silence as I did in the cloister, and spend my life writing, thinking, and talking about God and spirituality.
FP: Armstrong continued: Being solitary holds no terrors for me. A writer must spend long hours alone. Somebody once called me a 'gregarious loner.' I enjoy company, but I feel lost if I do not spend time by myself each day. I love my work. I can't wait to get to my desk. I can't wait to get to the library.
BJP: She continued on marriage: I have always assumed that, one day, I would find somebody to love and would get married like everybody else. But I have been unsuccessful with men. Yet I also realize that, had I had a normal family life and responsibilities, I would not have written as much. Perhaps to succeed as a writer, it has been necessary for me to fail as a woman. She continued: I have to live a good deal of the time inside my own head. It takes an immense effort to drag a book from sources into my mind and then from my mind onto paper. It demands concentration. For months, I retreat from the outside world. The real drama is enacted in my head.
FP: She continued: Now, in a man, this concentration is regarded as noble and inspiring. But in a woman it is often condemned as selfish. Why? Men think women must be primarily caregivers and serve the family. I am taken to task for appearing unfriendly, impenetrable, and inaccessible when producing a new book. Others scold me for remaining single. But I [she must have smiled] have had no choice in the matter. Betty, as we end, what do you think is Karen Armstrong's value to us, to the reading public, to scholarship?
BJP: She is a phenomenon, a valuable contributor to our understanding of religious conflicts. We admire her gumption in rising above adversity. We admire her ability to write and to lecture widely. She has given us fuller understanding of problems on religious differences. Frank, what is Karen Armstrong writing now?
FP: Two books to be published next year in 2004: one is another autobiographical book; the other is on the Axial Age, from 600 BCE to 200 BCE, which saw an explosion of religious ideas from Confucius, Tao, Buddha, the Jewish prophets, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. She continues to probe and to share that mysterious mystical unknowable intelligence called God.
BJP: Where does she find that mysterious mystical unknowable intelligence called God?
FP: She says she finds God where ordinary people are concerned about others. Where the lowly are lifted, the sick healed, justice reigns, peace is made universal. Where transformed people work together to make future generations healthier and happier. Where the test of a good religion, a good faith, is its capacity for compassion. Compassion leads a person, family, society or country to correct wrongs and do justly. For her, so far, where there is compassion, there is God.
BJP: Let's stop on that note. END. Corrections, additions, questions: bfparker@frontiernet.net
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Monday, June 29, 2009
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1 of 2 Parts: Paul K. Conkin, Peabody College: From a Frontier Academy to the Frontiers of Teaching and Learning (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), ISBN 0-8265-1425-1, Reviewed with commentary by Franklin Parker, bfparker.
See end of concluding Part 2 of 2 Parts about reviewer Franklin Parker).
Peabody College of Vanderbilt University
Paul K. Conkin, Vanderbilt University's distinguished history professor emeritus, has long gazed over the Twenty-First Avenue South, Nashville, Tennessee, divide between the campuses of Vanderbilt University and George Peabody College for Teachers. Conkin's new book, Peabody College: From a Frontier Academy to the Frontiers of Teaching and Learning, 2002, is an important multifaceted history covering 217 years of six consecutive charter-connected educational institutions in Nashville culminating in the present Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.
Multifaceted History
The book is about schooling in frontier Nashville before Tennessee became a state (1796) and before and after it became the "Athens of the South."
It is about new beginnings, examining why each of the six predecessor Peabody educational institutions was founded, how each begat its offspring, who their leading officials and teachers were, what they did right, wrong, neglected to do, and the consequences.
It is about the relationship between Peabody College's predecessors and neighboring Vanderbilt University and the merger that occurred on July 1, 1979.
It is about the philanthropic intent of George Peabody, Massachusetts-born merchant in the South who became a London-based banker and philanthropist.
It is about his Peabody Education Fund (1867-1914); and how Peabody College became the legatee of that fund.
It is about how Peabody College as the South's pioneer model private teacher education institution embraced George Peabody's idealistic motto: "Education: A Debt Due from Present to Future Generations."
It is also about Peabody College of Vanderbilt University's continuing pursuit of George Peabody's dream—to uplift the South and advance the nation through professionally prepared teachers serving ever-better public schools.
These are the large tasks Conkin has undertaken.
Origins
In 1779 Virginia-born and North Carolina-reared James Robertson (1742-1814) explored the western part of North Carolina, now Tennessee. The next year (1780) he led mainly Scotch-Irish families to the frontier settlement of Nashborough, later renamed Nashville.
Frequent Indian raids caused settler to build makeshift forts (some 50 settlers annually were killed by Indians). From the North Carolina legislature of which he was a member James Robertson secured both a land grant and a charter for a Davidson Academy (newly named Davidson County included Nashville). He found and persuaded Presbyterian minister Thomas Craighead (c.1750-1825) to be both church pastor and academy principal.
Thomas Craighead was a graduate of the College of New Jersey (which became Princeton University, 1896). It was founded by "New Light" Presbyterians to train ministers. Its President John Witherspoon (1723-94), a signer of the Declaration of Independence, inspired many of his graduates with missionary zeal to preach and teach on the frontier.
Thus, Davidson Academy and its successors (Cumberland College and the University of Nashville) were molded by Scotch-Irish Presbyterian culture, rooted in Scottish reformer John Knox's (c.1514-72) enthusiasm for universal literacy so that all could read and understand the Bible.
Overview, 1785-1875
Peabody's six predecessor schools were: Davidson Academy (during 1785-1806), under Principal Thomas Craighead who also headed for three years to 1809 its rechartered successor, Cumberland College (1806-26).
Noted educator James Priestley (1760-1821) succeeded Craighead as president of Cumberland College from October 24, 1809, to February 4, 1821. Priestley was succeeded as president by a nationally prestigious scholar, President Philip Lindsley (1786-1850), at whose suggestion Cumberland College was rechartered as the University of Nashville from November 27, 1826, to 1875.
Why the University of Nashville?
There was some confusion between Cumberland College, Nashville, and a Cumberland College in Kentucky. Adoption of the name change to the University of Nashville was hastened by the availability of a federal land grant to institutions of higher education. There was also pride in Nashville's growing importance. President Lindsley envisioned a University of Nashville as an umbrella embracing professional schools and academic departments.
Overview, Since 1875
The University of Nashville's (1826-1875) charter was amended in 1875 so that its Literary Department was rechartered as State Normal School (1875-89), renamed officially Peabody Normal College (1889-1911), although informally called Peabody Normal College from the first because of its Peabody Education Fund origin and financial support). Peabody Normal College was rechartered as George Peabody College for Teachers (1914-79), which became Peabody College of Vanderbilt University on July 1, 1979.
Vision of an Athens of the South
Conkin wrote that by scholarly eminence and vision alone Lindsley deserved a chapter by himself, that "Philip Lindsley's University of Nashville first justified the reputation of Nashville as a center of higher education in the South…. It was his Princeton of the West." In 1835 Philip Lindsley first called Nashville the "Athens of the West." (Conkin, p. 47).
University of Nashville (1826-75)
Philip Lindsley was succeeded as president of the University of Nashville in 1850 by his physician son, Dr. John Berrien Lindsley (1822-97), chancellor during 1850-72, succeeded in turn by Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith (1824-93) as chancellor during 1872-75.
University of Nashville's Medical School
Financially pressed and occupied by Union troops during most of the Civil War, the University of Nashville hosted a cluster of schools and departments, some short-lived. The most successful was its medical school from 1850 to 1895, which graduated a total of 1,699 physicians and was the second largest U.S. medical school during the Civil War.
Other Schools and Departments
The University of Nashville also had a law department (1854-72); a school of agriculture and mechanic arts (1872-75); a school of civil engineering (1872-75); a military institute (about 1854-59); and a preparatory school, Montgomery Bell Academy, partly endowed by wealthy Nashville iron manufacturer Montgomery Bell (1769-1855), still functioning under the University of Nashville charter.
Nearly Defunct Literary Department
The University of Nashville's Literary Department, comparable to a college of arts and sciences, did not fare well in enrollment, finances, or faculty. From this nearly defunct Literary Department in 1875 the Peabody Education Fund trustees created and financed a State Normal School, later renamed Peabody Normal College, from which emerged George Peabody College for Teachers and finally Peabody College of Vanderbilt University (July 1, 1979).
Conkin tells this story by describing George Peabody's fund to aid public education in the desolate former Confederate states.
George Peabody (1795-1869)
A short account of Peabody's career and philanthropic motives helps explain his motto, "Education: a debt due from present to future generations." This motto accompanied his July 16, 1852, letter and check founding his first library and lecture hall in his hometown (then South Danvers, renamed Peabody, Massachusetts, 1868). That motto also helps explain the teacher education idealism of Peabody College, offspring of the Peabody Education Fund (1867-1914), whose purpose was to stimulate public schools for all as a way to help reunite and strengthen the nation.
Merchant in the South
Born poor in Massachusetts 19 miles from Boston, Peabody had four years of schooling and was apprenticed in a general store for four years. In 1811 his father died in debt with the family forced out of their mortgaged home to live with relatives. Two weeks later a great fire in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where young Peabody worked in his older brother's store, ruined all business prospects. These catastrophes led the17-year-old to migrate to Georgetown, D.C., where he opened a dry goods store (1812).
Peabody served in the War of 1812. Older fellow soldier and Maryland merchant Elisha Riggs, Sr. (his son founded Riggs Bank, Washington, D.C.) took Peabody at age 19 as junior partner. Their Baltimore-based firm successfully imported dry goods for resale to U.S. wholesalers. Besides traveling widely in the South as a merchant, George Peabody also made five European buying trips during 1827-37.
American Banker in London
On his fifth trip to London, February 1837, he was also an agent to sell abroad Maryland's $8 million in bonds to finance the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The Panic of 1837 soon forced Maryland and eight other U.S. states to stop paying interest on their bonds. Foreign investors holding these bonds, many of them pensioners and widows, were incensed.
Peabody helped ease foreign investors anxiety by publicly urging officials in Maryland and other defaulting states to resume interest payments retroactively. When resumption occurred and it became known that rather than burden the Maryland treasury Peabody had declined his $60,000 commission, he won public thanks from Maryland's legislature and governor and respect in London banking circles.
To show his confidence that the defaulting states would eventually pay interest on their bonds, he privately bought many of them when their value was low. When interest payments were resumed he reaped a profit, the basis of his fortune and the source of his later philanthropy.
George Peabody & Co., London
Remaining in London from 1837 onward he founded George Peabody & Co. (1838-64), a London-based banking firm, which sold state bonds to finance U.S. canals, roads, and railroads. He bought, sold, and shipped iron and steel rails for U.S. railroads. He helped sell the bonds that financed the Mexican War loan. He was a director of the Atlantic Cable Co.
Root of the Banking Firm of J.P. Morgan
Ill and overworked, he took as partner in 1854 Boston merchant Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90), whose son, John Pierpont Morgan, Sr. (1837-1913), began as New York City agent for George Peabody & Co. On retirement, 1864, unmarried, without a son to carry on, George Peabody withdrew his name. The London firm continued as J.S. Morgan & Co., Morgan Grenfell & Co., and still continues as Deutsche Morgan Grenfell. George Peabody was the founding root of the banking house of J.P. Morgan.
"Deprived as I was"
In his mid-teens when his father died in debt in 1811, Peabody supported his mother and siblings forced out of their mortgaged home to live with relatives. Peabody restored them to the family home(1816) and paid for five of his younger relatives to attend Bradford Academy, Bradford, Massachusetts. When his17-year-old nephew asked his financial help to attend Yale College, Peabody replied from London (May 18, 1831):
"Deprived, as I was, of the opportunity of obtaining anything more than the most common education, I am well qualified to estimate its value by the disadvantages I labour under in the society [in] which my business and situation in life frequently throws me, and willingly would I now give twenty times the expense attending a good education could I now possess it, but it is now too late for me to learn and I can only do to those who come under my care, as I could have wished circumstances had permitted others to have done by me."
Peabody as Philanthropist
Peabody early told intimates privately and in 1850 said publicly that he would endow helpful institutions in every town and city where he had lived and worked. His gifts included seven Peabody libraries in the U.S.; Peabody museums at Harvard (anthropology), Yale (paleontology), and in Salem, Massachusetts (maritime history); professorships at an academy and several colleges; publication funds to two historical societies; aid to Civil War veterans, their wives and orphan children; and aid for a charitable hospital in the Vatican, Italy.
Housing (London) and Education (Defeated Southern States)
His two largest gifts were: $2.4 million for housing London's working poor (begun 1862), where 34,500 low income Londoners (white, black, others) still live in 17,183 affordable apartments; and a $2 million Peabody Education Fund to aid public education in the eleven embittered, impoverished, Civil War-torn former Confederate states. In May 1866 Peabody went for advice to Robert Charles Winthrop (1809-94), who helped choose the original trustees and also presided over the board of trustees.
Robert Charles Winthrop
Winthrop was descended from Massachusetts Bay Colony's early governor, John Winthrop (1588-1649). He was a Harvard graduate (1828), trained in Daniel Webster's law office, was admitted to the bar (1831), a Whig member of the Massachusetts legislature, Speaker of the Massachusetts State House, elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (1842-50 and its speaker, 1847-50), and was appointed to fill Daniel Webster's U.S. Senate seat (1850). A respected national figure no longer seeking public office, Winthrop in the last 27 years of his life (during 1867-94) directed the Peabody Education Fund trustees.
A Plan and an Administrator
Winthrop pondered how to use the relatively small income from a $2 million fund to stimulate public schools for white and black children in twelve poverty-ridden, Civil War-ravaged states (West Virginia was added because of its poverty); how to convince defeated, resentful southern parents, taxpayers, and political leaders that permanent tax supported public schools could help renew their economy and uplift their lives; how to attract and train better teachers; and how to spread public elementary and secondary schools to strengthen a new South.
Barnas Sears
Winthrop found a feasible plan and its able administrator in long-time friend Barnas Sears (1802-90), then president of Brown University in Rhode Island. Barnas Sears was born in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, was a Brown University graduate (1825), studied at Newton Theological Seminary (Massachusetts), was ordained a Baptist minister, was a Colgate University (New York) professor (1831-33), studied in German universities, was Newton Theological Seminary professor and later its president. He succeeded Horace Mann (1796-1859) as Massachusetts Board of Education secretary (during 1848-55) and was Brown University president (1855-67).
Winthrop and Sears, March 13, 1867
Winthrop met Sears by chance at the old Wednesday Evening Club in Boston, March 13, 1867; asked Sears how the Peabody Education Fund might carry out its mission; and was impressed by Sears's remarks.
Sears's March 14, 1867 Letter
Winthrop shared with the trustees Sears's letter of March 14, 1867, from Providence, Rhode Island, detailing how the Fund might operate. Backed by the trustees Winthrop persuaded Sears to accept the post as the Peabody Education Fund's first administrator during 1867-80, the crucial first 13 years.
Sears's Plan
Sears's plan was to strengthen through grants existing public schools in larger towns to serve as models for smaller communities; to establish new public schools where needed; to require that Peabody Education Fund-aided schools become permanent tax-supported public schools under state control; to require that aided schools meet nine or ten months a year; to have at least one teacher per 50 pupils; and to require local citizens to match Peabody Education Fund contributions, if possible, by two or three times the amount of Peabody Education Fund aid.
Matching Funds and Permanent Legislation
Sears set a rising scale of financial aid as enrollments rose: $300 a year for a school enrolling up to 100 pupils, $450 for 100 to 150 pupils, $600 for 150 to 200 pupils, $800 for 200 to 250 pupils, and $1,000 for 300 or more pupils. It was pure pump priming, using small grants for their matching and levering effect and requiring legislative approval and permanent state support.
Sears's First Aim
Sears and his family moved to Staunton, Virginia. He wrote, spoke, and traveled widely during his 13 years as fund administrator (1867-80). He used the fund's limited resources to accomplish his first .. to help establish tax supported elementary and secondary public schools and create a model teacher training college for the South in Nashville (Peabody Normal College during 1875-1911).
Sears's Other Two Aims
Sears's second aim, to establish both short term teachers' institutes (a week or less training for practicing teachers) and long term professional teacher training normal schools, was largely accomplished by the fund's second administrator J.L.M. Curry during 1881-1903.
Sears's third aim, rural public schools, was largely accomplished by the fund's third administrator Wycliffe Rose (1862-1931) during 1907-14.
State Normal School in Nashville
Sears saw Nashville, Tennessee, as a cultural center and the ideal place for a normal school as a model for the South. Proposals in the Tennessee legislature to establish a state teacher training normal school had failed in 1857 and 1865. In June-July 1867, Sears offered Peabody Education Fund stipends of $1,000 or more annually if Tennessee would establish one or more normal schools.
Legislative bills for a state normal school failed in 1868, 1871, and 1873, even though the Peabody Education Fund offered (in 1873) $6,000 annually to match annual state funding.
University of Nashville Land and Buildings
Disappointed at not getting Tennessee legislative cooperation for a state normal school and not wanting to lose Nashville as his preferred site, Sears in 1874 asked the University of Nashville trustees to give land and buildings for a normal school in place of their moribund Literary Department. He promised to support the normal school with $6,000 annually from the Peabody Education Fund.
Helped by Tennessee Governor James Davis Porter
In 1875, with the help of the then new Tennessee Governor James Davis Porter (1828-1912), Sears got the University of Nashville trustees to convert its nearly defunct Literary Department into a normal school. The legislature, encouraged by Governor Porter, amended the University of Nashville's charter to legalize the normal school. Sears and the Peabody Education Fund trustees subsidized the normal school, expecting imminent and continuing state support.
State Normal School: 1875-1889
Glad not to spend state funds, the Tennessee legislature amended the University of Nashville's charter to allow it to establish a normal school, financed by Peabody Education Fund's $6,000 annual contribution (Sears expected sustaining state aid). The new State Normal School on the University of Nashville campus opened December 1, 1875, with 13 students and ended the first year with 60 students.
Peabody Scholarships Provided a Southern Regional Influence
State Normal School (1875-89) was officially renamed Peabody Normal College (1889-1911), although it was always locally called Peabody Normal College. Attendance was cost-free to selected students with promise as future teachers. During 1877-1904, 3,645 of the most promising applicants from the South received Peabody Education Fund scholarships of $200 annually during 1877-91 and $100 annually plus railroad fare during 1891-1904.
The importance of the Peabody scholarships was that they reached beyond Tennessee to the entire South. Alfred Leland Crabb (1883-1979, of George Peabody College for Teachers) later noted that these 3,645 Peabody scholarship teachers in their time formed an important core of educational leaders for the South.
Threat of a Move to Georgia
Unable or unwilling to offer state aid, the Tennessee legislature defeated appropriation bills for the State Normal School in 1877 and 1879, leaving funding solely to the Peabody Education Fund until 1881. Disappointed, Sears and the fund trustees considered moving State Normal School from Nashville to Georgia, whose legislature agreed on state support if the fund continued its $6,000 annual contribution. But Georgia's Constitution required that any such school be state controlled as part of the University of Georgia at Athens. This requirement irked Sears and the fund trustees, who wanted state aid but opposed state control.
Tennessee State Aid
Threat of a move from Tennessee prompted Nashville citizens to guarantee $6,000 by April 1880 to keep the Normal School in Nashville. Stung into action, the Tennessee legislature gave the Normal School $10,000 annually (1881-83), raised to $13,300 annually (1883-95), and raised again to $23,000 annually (1895-1905). Peabody Normal College got $555,730 from the Peabody Education Fund (1875-1909) and $429,000 from the Tennessee legislature (1881-1905).
Peabody Normal College's Three Presidents: 1875-1909
The three presidents of State Normal School (1875-89) and Peabody Normal College (1889-1911) were, first, President Eben Sperry Stearns (1819-87) during 1875-87. Born in Massachusetts and Harvard University educated, Stearns, under Massachusetts Board of Education Secretary Barnas Sears, was the second president of Newton Normal School, Massachusetts (the first U.S. normal school).
The second president was William Harold Payne (1836-1907) during 1888-1901. He had held the first professorship of education in the U.S. at the University of Michigan during 1879-88.
The third president was James Davis Porter during 1901-09, a Tennessean, a University of Nashville graduate (1846), a lawyer, Tennessee House member, Confederate officer, and Tennessee governor (1874-78).
Normal Colleges Became State Colleges of Education
The Peabody Normal College years (1875-1911) coincided with the rise of state normal schools as the chief agency to prepare elementary and secondary school teachers. After 1910, state normal schools were increasingly replaced by state colleges of education, a changeover which coincided with the Peabody Education Fund's dissolution in 1914.
Transition to George Peabody College for Teachers
George Peabody's founding letter (February 7, 1867) allowed the Peabody Education Fund trustees to end the trust after 30 years and to distribute its principal. On January 29, 1903, the fund trustees resolved to give most of the fund's principal to found George Peabody College for Teachers (influential trustees then included Theodore Roosevelt and John Pierpont Morgan, Sr.).
On January 24, 1905, the fund trustees committed $1 million (later raised to $1.5 million) to transform the Peabody Normal College into George Peabody College for Teachers, contingent on matching funds from Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee, and other donors; and on relocating from south Nashville to Twenty-First Avenue near Vanderbilt University for added academic strength.
Transition Problems
A problem arose when Georgia State Commissioner of Education G.R. Glenn, Peabody Education Fund acting administrator in 1903, argued in his annual report that because public education in the South lagged behind national levels, the fund's principal should be used in a campaign to raise local public school taxes. But fear of losing Peabody Education Fund assets led Peabody Normal College alumni to secure petitions supporting the creation of George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville as successor to Peabody Normal College.
After a year-long deadlock on the issue, the Peabody Education Fund trustees confirmed that George Peabody College for Teachers would indeed succeed Peabody Normal College, with a new campus near Vanderbilt University.
Objection to Move From South Nashville
South Nashville property owners objected to moving Peabody Normal College from their area and began court action. President James D. Porter also preferred south Nashville but the Peabody Education Fund trustees' endowment power determined the Vanderbilt University location. President J.D. Porter acquiesced, was compensated by a pension from the Carnegie Pension Fund, and helped secure the legislation that permitted transfer of assets from the University of Nashville's Peabody Normal School to George Peabody College for Teachers.
By June 1909 President Porter also helped secure funds required to match the Peabody Education Fund's $1.5 million endowment: $250,000 from the Tennessee legislature, $200,000 from the City of Nashville, and $100,000 from Davidson County. President Porter resigned on August 4, 1909, and George Peabody College for Teachers was incorporated on October 5, 1909.
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University was chartered August 6, 1872, as Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In February 1873 its founder, Methodist Bishop Holland N. McTyeire (1824-89), needing building funds, visited Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) in New York City. Their wives were cousins and had been intimate girlhood friends in Mobile, Alabama (this was Cornelius Vanderbilt's second wife, his first wife having died).
Cornelius Vanderbilt's Gifts
Bishop McTyeire told Cornelius Vanderbilt of higher education needs in the South and particularly of Central University building needs in Nashville. Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose wealth came from ferry boats, steamship lines, and railroads (New York Central, 1867), gave Central University in Nashville $500,000 on March 12, 1873, later doubled to $1 million, leading to the renaming of Central University to Vanderbilt University on June 6, 1873.
Vanderbilt-Peabody Connection
Vanderbilt University's second Chancellor James Hampton Kirkland (1859-1939) wanted to make Nashville a great university center. He also knew that George Peabody College for Teachers' endowment was initially greater than Vanderbilt's endowment. Wanting a Vanderbilt-Peabody College connection similar to the successful Teachers College of Columbia University, Kirkland deeded Vanderbilt land to George Peabody College for Teachers, about which some contention later resulted.
Daniel Coit Gilman
Kirkland's hoped-for ally in making a Vanderbilt-Peabody connection was Johns Hopkins University President Daniel Coit Gilman (1831-1908), the South's most respected higher education leader and also an influential Peabody Education Fund trustee. Kirkland urged in 1900 and 1901 that Gilman, about to retire as Johns Hopkins president, become Peabody Normal College president and help form a Vanderbilt-Peabody connection.
While retaining his long friendship with Kirkland, Gilman adroitly sidestepped involvement, declining to give a major address in Nashville in 1900 and also declining to head Peabody Normal College in its last years.
First Peabody College President Bruce Ryburn Payne
First President Bruce Ryburn Payne (1874-1937) during 1911-37 cooperated academically with Vanderbilt but adamantly kept Peabody independent as the South's leading teacher training institution.
North Carolinian Bruce R. Payne was a graduate of Trinity College (later renamed Duke University), was principal of Morganton (North Carolina.) Academy, did graduate study at Trinity College and at Teachers College of Columbia University (M.A., 1903; Ph.D., 1904), was professor of philosophy and education, College of William and Mary, Virginia (1904-05); and was University of Virginia professor of secondary education and psychology and summer school organizer.
Architecture Inspired By Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia
Payne assembled a first-rate faculty, modeled the new Peabody campus on Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia architectural plan (a quadrangle of columned buildings dominated by a Social-Religious Building with a commanding rotunda), and raised an additional $1 million for the new campus.
President Payne's Fund Raising
An example of Payne's fund raising: banker and Peabody Education Fund trustee J.P. Morgan, Sr., had promised $250,000 toward George Peabody College for Teachers buildings when needed but died. Payne went to New York City to request the funds of Morgan's son-in-law, Herbert Livingston Satterlee (1863-1947). Satterlee hesitated because Morgan had not left written evidence of his promised aid. Payne felt he had failed in this fund raising until Satterlee, checking with Morgan's son (J.P. Morgan, Jr.), released the promised amount.
Peabody Education Fund Assets Distributed, 1914
The Peabody Education Fund trustees dissolved in 1914 and distributed their total assets ($2,324,000) as follows: $1.5 million to endow George Peabody College for Teachers; $474,000 to education departments of 14 southern universities ($40,000 each to the universities of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana [State]); $6,000 each to Johns Hopkins University and to the universities of South Carolina, Missouri, and Texas; $90,000 to Winthrop Normal College, South Carolina (now Winthrop College), founded by Peabody Education Fund trustee President Robert Charles Winthrop.
Recipient state universities of Georgia, Mississippi, Florida at Gainesville, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and others named their college of education buildings after George Peabody. George Peabody-named elementary and secondary schools exist in the southern states his fund benefited; along with a Peabody Avenue and a Peabody Hotel, both in Memphis, Tennessee; and Peabody Hotels in Orlando, Florida, and elsewhere.
Peabody's Payne and Vanderbilt's Kirkland
Payne, like Kirkland, was a strong administrator with a vibrant personality. Their relations were polite but strained by Payne's determination to keep Peabody College independent yet cooperative in cross-listing courses and programs. Kirkland was elitist and an educational conservative while Payne, concerned for mass education, was egalitarian in the spirit of the democratic educational philosophy of his Columbia University mentor, John Dewey (1859-1952).
A Unique Mini-University
Payne and his successors, rightly or wrongly, made and tried to keep Peabody a unique mini-university. Besides the professional preparation of teachers, it graduated students in liberal arts, science, music, physical education, art, and library science; and had a demonstration elementary school for teachers-in-training, Knapp farm for rural studies, and a school survey research unit used widely in the South. Unresolved fiscal problems in the late 1960s and early 1970s created the possibility of some kind of merger in the late 1970s.
Mutual Suspicions
With more women than men students during the 1920s-50s, Peabodians felt discrimination and a snobbish belittling of their professional education courses by Vanderbilt liberal arts professors (some of whom gladly taught for extra pay in Peabody College's large summer school).
The Peabody community sensed that Vanderbilt wanted to separate its graduate courses from them and that Vanderbilt deans and faculty disdained Peabody's teacher education mission and belittled its academic standards.
Cautious Cooperation
Vanderbilt's short-lived Education Department (1930-34) caused apprehension at Peabody. It was headed by Joseph Kinmount Hart (1876-1949), a progressive educator from the universities of Chicago and Wisconsin who had written A Social Interpretation of Education, 1929, and other textbooks. Hart's liberalism caused student disturbances. He ended his Vanderbilt career with bitterness and vague threats of a lawsuit.
More fruitful was the Joint Universities Library (JUL), dedicated December 5-6, 1941, outgrowth of a 1935 study of library needs of adjoining campuses of Vanderbilt, Peabody, and Scarritt College for Christian Workers (Methodist college founded in 1892, later an adult education conference center). JUL was renamed in 1984 the Jean and Alexander Heard Library.
The following overview of the Peabody presidents since Bruce R. Payne, with Conkin's assessment of each, helps explain conditions that led to the 1979 Vanderbilt merger.
Presidents of George Peabody College for Teachers
Peabody's first President Bruce R. Payne (1911-died in office, April 21, 1937) was succeeded by the following:
S. C. Garrison
Sidney Clarence Garrison (1887-1944), Peabody's second president during 1937-44, eight years; was a North Carolinian, a graduate of Wake Forest College, a high school principal and county superintendent. He was an M.A. degree graduate of Peabody College, 1916; served as a World War I captain; earned the Ph.D. degree from Peabody, 1919; taught educational psychology at Peabody where he was also a dean. "Garrison was not Payne," wrote Conkin; "he was an interim president." (Conkin, pp. 252-253).
Henry H. Hill
President Henry Harrington Hill (1894-1987) was third president during Peabody's boom years, 1945-60 (16 years) and interim president, 1962-63 (total of 18 years). Also a North Carolinian, Hill received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Virginia and the Ph.D. degree from Columbia University. He was a teacher, principal, and school superintendent in Arkansas; an education professor and dean at the University of Kentucky; was school superintendent in Lexington, Kentucky; St. Louis, Missouri; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Hill was cautious, moderate, and an expert at building consensus (Conkin, p. 265). In 1951, using a foundation grant, Hill hired four high profile division chairs: 1-Harold R. W. Benjamin (1893-1969) to head Foundations of Education; 2-Willard E. Goslin (1899-1969) to head Education Administration; 3-William Van Til (1911-) to head Teaching and Curriculum; and 4-Nicholas Hobbs (1915-83) to head Guidance and Development (Hobbs later led in securing for Peabody its prestigious and well funded John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development. Hobbs was later also a Vanderbilt provost).
Felix C. Robb
Felix Compton Robb (1914-97), fourth president during 1961-66, was an Alabamian, had a Vanderbilt M.A. degree, took education courses at Peabody where he became President Hill's assistant and heir apparent, and received a Ph.D. degree from Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Conkin characterized Robb as charismatic and idealistic but, when cracks appeared in Peabody's finances, "not a forceful or decisive leader" (Conkin, p. 296).
John Claunch
John M. Claunch (1906-90), fifth president from August 1, 1967, through 1973, six years, was from Louisiana, a graduate of Austin State Teachers College, Texas (B.A., 1928); and the University of Texas (M.A., 1937; Ph.D., 1956). His main administrative experience was as director of Dallas College, an adult education mainly evening college, established by Southern Methodist University. Stronger candidates had warily declined the Peabody presidency. Conkin called Claunch's appointment a "disastrous decision," adding that he was "rigid, insecure,…authoritarian" (Conkin, pp. 311-312).
Claunch chafed at endless studies and reports to keep Peabody College afloat, clashed with Nicholas Hobbs over the Kennedy Center, opposed faculty independence, and was critical of student protests against military action in Vietnam
John Dunworth
John Dunworth (1924-) was Peabody's sixth and last president during 1974-79, five years, when the trauma of merger was played out. Born in Los Angeles, Dunworth was an Ed.D. graduate of the University of Southern California, had been a successful dean of Ball State University's Teachers College, Indiana. Conkin characterized him as "Charming, vain, an expert at self promotion…[he] worked well with faculty" and "in other times, other circumstances, might have been a popular president" (Conkin, p. 330).
Reviewers' Experience at Peabody, 1951-56
[I here insert our experiences during 1951-56 as graduate students at George Peabody College for Teachers for any light it may shed on the Peabody College of that time].
Betty Parker and I were newly married (1950); recent graduates of Berea College near Lexington, Kentucky (a tuition-free work-study college); on our first teaching jobs at what is now Ferrum College near Roanoke, Virginia. To upgrade our teaching skills we took Peabody College courses the summer of 1951.
Peabody had a fine regional reputation in our school-oriented circles. Betty's aunt and other relatives had attended there. We returned to Peabody the summer of 1952 and remained as graduate students through August 1956, four years and two summers, holding part time jobs at Peabody and at Belmont College (now University), which the Baptists had acquired from Ward Belmont School.
Professor Clifton Landon Hall (1898-1987)
I looked for an unexplored aspect of Tennessee higher education as a dissertation topic to pursue under Canadian-born Clifton L. Hall, a respected Peabody professor in history and philosophy of education. Eager to be accepted as Hall's doctoral candidate, I enrolled in Hall's courses for several years. Not until I took Hall's seminars with weekly papers did I feel I had won Hall's confidence. Hall was a graduate of Bishop University (Quebec) and McGill University (Montreal) with a Ph.D. degree under University of North Carolina's (Chapel Hill) history of education Professor Edgar W. Knight.
Dean of Instruction Felix Robb
After I passed the doctoral preliminary examinations, Dean of Instruction Felix Robb had to formalize my doctoral committee and topic. When I met with Dean Robb in late 1953 Robb spoke at length about his own experience at Harvard Graduate School of Education. In a Harvard seminar under historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965), Schlesinger, knowing that Robb was a rising administrator at Peabody, mentioned George Peabody’s little known role as a founder of U.S. educational philanthropy. Schlesinger said that someone needed to explore and document that thesis.
END of 1of2Parts. Go to Part2of2 Parts. bfparker@frontiernet.
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Monday, June 29, 2009
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Concluding Part 2 of 2 Parts: George Peabody, "Education: A Debt Due from Present to Future Generations" (June 16, 1852); A Review with Commentary of Paul K. Conkin, Peabody College: From a Frontier Academy to the Frontiers of Teaching and Learning (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), ISBN 0-8265-1425-1.
By Franklin Parker (see end of article About the Reviewer).
Peabody's Acting Dean Hardy C. Wilcoxon
Acting Dean Hardy C. Wilcoxon during 1979-80 knew that Peabody College of Vanderbilt University had to "sharpen its focus as a professional school." Like all Vanderbilt schools, Peabody College had to pay its own way from tuition, research grants, and fundraising. It also had to pay its share of total plant operating costs, personnel costs, and other services.
H.C. Wilcoxon attended the University of Arkansas (B.A., 1947, and M.A., 1948) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1951), was psychology professor, University of Arkansas (to 1966), a George Peabody College for Teachers faculty member from 1966, and acting dean at the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University merger, 1979-80.
Dean Willis D. Hawley
Wilcoxon's successor was Dean Willis David Hawley (b.1938) from October 15, 1980 to l989. He came to Vanderbilt in August 1980 to teach political science and to direct the Center for Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt's interdisciplinary Institute for Public Policy. Born in San Francisco, he earned the B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught political science at Yale University (1969-72) and co-directed Yale's training of secondary school teachers. He taught political science at Duke University (1972-80) and directed its Center for Education Policy. He was on leave from Duke (1977-78) to help plan the cabinet-level U.S. Department of Education under U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Educational Technology Breakthrough
Under Dean Hawley and amid a national surge of public education reform (inspired by A Nation at Risk, 1983, and other national reports critical of public education), Peabody had by 1983-84 upgraded its undergraduate and graduate programs, added new faculty, become proficient in using computers and telecommunications to enhance teaching and learning, and moved Peabody into national leadership in applying the new educational technology to improve public school teaching and learning. Peabody's scattered educational technology components were placed in a Learning Technology Center to assure better research and to secure grants to improve learning and public school teaching.
"America's School of Education"
Hawley stated in 1986: "Peabody, more than any other school of education and human development, [is] national in scope and influence." He cited Peabody as "America's School of Education" because "we are arguably better than anyone else at linking knowledge to practice." After a 1987 self-study on Peabody's mission, Hawley wrote that "Peabody's central mission is to enhance the social and cognitive development of children and youth," focusing on the handicapped, and to transfer that knowledge into action through policy analysis, product development, and the design of practical models.
Peabody Library School Closed
A self-study in 1987 led Peabody to close its 60-year-old Library School. Reasons given for its closing were: it had been understaffed, student enrollment had not grown, school librarians had become computer-based learning facilitators, and American Library Association standards would require adding faculty. A two-day celebration in May 1987 honored Peabody's Library School leaders and alumni.
Ten Years after Merger
Dean Hawley left the deanship after nine years (1980-89), remaining at Peabody. He became University of Maryland's education dean on July 1, 1993. Reflecting on Peabody's ten years as Vanderbilt's ninth school, he said: To make it the best U.S. school of education and human development, Peabody had improved two-thirds of its programs, collaborated with Fisk University on increasing minority teachers, added new faculty, and increased its capacity to serve and influence educational policy makers and practitioners.
Peabody had established the Center for Advanced Study of Educational Leadership, the Corporate Learning Center, the Learning Technology Center, and strengthened and broadened the mission of the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Education and Human Development. It had increased student aid and increased external research and development funding at an annual rate of 20 percent. In educational technology research and learning, he said, "we can claim to be the best in the country."
In 1989 Hawley listed the following among Peabody College of Vanderbilt University's achievements:
The U.S. Department of Education had awarded Peabody College and Harvard University a joint 5-year $2.5 million grant to study effective leadership in kindergarten through grade 12 school systems. The grant funded a National Center for Educational Leadership, housed at both Peabody and at Harvard, to study the leadership styles of school principals and school superintendents.
Apple Computer had donated computers, with equipment and software matched by Peabody, to improve math, science, and language arts teaching in a Nashville middle school. Besides better middle school learning, multimedia presentations showed prospective teachers how to apply educational technology in the classroom. Peabody was one of a six-member Southeast research university consortium testing and evaluating new educational technology programs in teaching and learning.
Peabody College received a four-year $80,000 grant for 20 educators to develop and evaluate computer-based instruction to improve learning by children with disabilities. The 20 teachers so trained, in turn, were resource educators for other teacher education institutions, thus stimulating ongoing programs. Said a Peabody special education professor directing the research: "We're on the forefront of computer-based instruction and one of the leading institutions on technology as applied to teaching children with disabilities."
For three consecutive years, Peabody College was named as having the "top choice" program to prepare guidance counselors. The judges (6l8 high school guidance counselors) most often named Peabody College of Vanderbilt University as having the best program for undergraduates from among 650 quality four-year colleges, public and independent, listed in Rugg's Recommendations on the Colleges for 1990, 1991, and 1992.
Peabody College's Dean J.W. Pellegrino
After a two-and-a-half year search, James William Pellegrino (1947-) was chosen as the second dean of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, 1992-98. He had been acting dean at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before joining Vanderbilt as holder of the Frank W. Mayborn Chair of Cognitive Studies. "I inherited a financially stable and intellectually robust institution," he said in the fall of 1992 (enrollment was over 1,500 [870 undergraduate, some 630 graduate students]). His goals were to so undergird Peabody 's instructional programs with innovative technology that they would be "uniquely superior" and set a standard for other universities.
Dean Pellegrino said Peabody was developing a college-wide blueprint to improve learning in U.S. schools. That blueprint included continued collaboration with school leaders and teachers in Nashville and elsewhere, focusing on Peabody-developed innovative educational technology. Besides continued collaboration after September 1992 with Nashville schools, Peabody also joined the U.S. Education Department-sponsored alliance to promote the six (later raised to eight) national education goals.
Social-Religious Building Remodeled
During 1993-96 Peabody's historic Social-Religious Building was renovated and expanded by 50,000 feet at a cost of $15 million to make it Peabody's center for educational technology research and development. Its aim was to use creatively computers, interactive video and audio, fiber optics, and satellite systems to improve learning and enhance teaching.
The Social-Religious Building retained the main auditorium and housed Peabody's central administrative offices, the Department of Teaching and Learning, and the Learning Technology Center. It had built-in capabilities for multimedia presentations, productions, and conferences, and also a visitors center.
Dean Camilla Persson Benbow
Peabody College's second Dean James William Pellegrino, who remained as research professor, was succeeded by third Dean Camilla Persson Benbow (b.1956) from August 1998. She was former interim dean of Iowa State University College of Education and an authority on academically talented children.
Under Dean Benbow, on April 30, 2000, the Social-Religious Building was renamed the Faye and Joe Wyatt Center for Education, to honor the retiring Vanderbilt University chancellor and his wife, under whom the 1993-96 building renovation occurred.
Since 1979, under deans Hawley, Pellegrino, and Benbow, Peabody College of Vanderbilt University has advanced its small but excellent teacher education and other programs, especially its educational technology; has been financially stable; has refurbished its physical plant; and has enhanced its national reputation.
Conkin's Conclusions
Conkin wrote positively about the Vanderbilt-Peabody union. He ended his book with the statement that "Peabody…has enhanced the reputation of its host [Vanderbilt]." Conkin sees a realization of "Philip Lindsley's 1828 dream of a great university in Nashville, with one of its colleges dedicated to the training of teachers." Conkin lauds as reality "Chancellor Kirkland's dream at the beginning of the last century of a great university center in Nashville" (Conkin, p. 409).
Final Thoughts
Conkin wrote a fair and balanced history of Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. He read massive documentation, offered much detail yet also presented the big picture. He was blunt and made judgments based on facts. This book is a fit companion to and will stand the test of time alongside Conkin, et al. Gone With the Ivy: A Biography of Vanderbilt University (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985).
Touching Dedication
I was touched, as all Peabodians will be, at Conkin's dedication:
I dedicate this book to the corps of Peabody-trained teachers. From the first thirteen young women who enrolled in a new State Normal College in December 1875 to the present, thousands of women and men, teachers or prospective teachers, have come to Peabody to gain needed skills in their chosen calling. They have eschewed wealth or the lofty status that too often attaches to high incomes. They have left Peabody, not only well prepared to teach or to assume leadership positions in education, but with a heightened idealism and a stronger commitment to a life of service. More than anyone else, they embody the Peabody ideal.
Last Word
Faced with greater financial challenges and class and race divisions than its northern and western counterparts, Peabody College and its predecessors rose phoenix-like again and again to produce educational leaders for the South, the nation, and the world. Strengthened since 1979 as part of Vanderbilt University, and annually in the 1990s through 2002 voted among the best U.S. graduate schools of education, Peabody College of Vanderbilt University proudly carries into the twenty-first century George Peabody's 1852 motto, "Education, a debt due from present to future generations."
[About the reviewer: Franklin Parker's article, "George Peabody (1795-1869)," appeared in Notable American Philanthropists: Biographies of Giving and Volunteering, pp. 242-246, ed. By Robert T. Grimm, Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002). His other George Peabody articles, co-authored with Betty J. Parker, published in the ERIC system (Educational Resources Information Center) include ERIC ED numbers 369720, 378070, 379179, 388571, 392653, 392664, 397179, 398126, 413254, 422243, 436444, 444917, and 445998.
The Parkers do research and writing in their retirement home, 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270. E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net]
End of Review
Please send comments and corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net
About the Parkers: 24 of their book titles are listed in:
http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P
For writings by the Parkers in blogs, enter bfparker in google.com or in any other search engine.
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Sunday, June 28, 2009
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Concluding 2 of 2 Parts: Myles Horton (1905-90) of Highlander Adult Education Center, Tennessee; Educator and Social Activist: With Addendum.
The Long Haul: An Autobiography of Myles Horton
The Long Haul won the 1990 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, endowed by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., from earnings from his biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times: The Unpublished Recollections of the Kennedy Years (New York: Bantam, 1989). The presenter at the award ceremony said that it is made to those authors who "most faithfully and forcefully reflect Robert Kennedy's purpose--his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and evenhanded justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity."
The endorsement on the book jacket by Studs Terkel (author of Working and a Chicago radio interviewer) reads: "Were I to choose America's most influential and inspiring educator, it would be Myles Horton of Highlander."
Bill Moyers, Public Broadcasting System broadcaster, wrote in the preface about Horton (he interviewed Myles Horton, on Bill Moyers' Journal, "Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly, June 5 and 11, 1981, on WGBH, Boston): "He's been beaten up, locked up, put upon and railed against by racists, toughs, demagogues, and governors. But for more than 50 years now, he has gone on with his special kind of teaching--helping people to discover within themselves the courage and ability to confront reality and changes."
These endorsements show Myles Horton's impact on key liberals aware of his unique place in the history of recent U.S. social reform. Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl made this autobiography possible. They recorded Myles Horton's recollections, first, because they admired his contributions as a radical southern adult education reformer; and, second, because he had always avoided lengthy serious writing about himself and his work, preferring to "talk out" his articles and books to interviewers.
Herbert Kohl wrote the sensitively appealing 36 Children (New York: New American Library, 1967) about the black children he taught in a Harlem ghetto school. His other books reflect his career as a progressive teacher, an Open Classroom advocate, and an alternative school leader. He first learned of Myles Horton in 1977, when fellow educator Joe Nathan sent him a review he had written of Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, l975) by Frank Adams and Myles Horton.
Fascinated with the Myles Horton story, Kohl was then helping to plan a Chicago meeting of the Alternative Schools Network. He planned to invite Brazilian educator Paulo Freire to the Chicago meeting and hoped to use Freire's presence to lure Horton there, too. He would then have brought together two of the world's best known radical adult educators. The ruse worked. Myles Horton's remarks at the meeting further impressed Kohl, who described Horton then as "an older man..., rather tall with gray hair, glasses, and a thoroughly engaging if a bit wicked smile."
Kohl accepted an invitation to visit Highlander, urging his wife to go with him, because he expected (as he wrote in "How This Book Came About," [p. xiv]) that "our visit to Myles would have a major impact on our lives." Judith Kohl continued the background narrative, describing the fall 1977 meeting at Highlander, which was then conducting a seminar with former coal miners suffering from black lung disease. Then followed several other meetings in the Kohl home in San Francisco, in London in 1985, and on a trip to exchange views with coal miners in Wales.
Originally intending to write a book on Horton, the Kohls, after tape recording his anecdotal remembrances, asking probing questions, and making judicious queries, found that they already had recorded his autobiography and his educational and philosophical ideas. The Long Haul thus became Myles Horton's book (with sales proceeds going to Highlander) as he patiently went over and carefully corrected the many drafts.
Besides Horton's recollections, the Kohls used Adams and Horton's Unearthing Seeds of Fire, Aimee I. Horton's University of Chicago Ph.D. dissertation, and John M. Glen's Highlander: No Ordinary School 1932-1962 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), and other published works.
They also verified Horton's recollections by checking records in the archives at Highlander, New Market, TN; and in the Highlander Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison.
The autobiography is organized chronologically with many photos which show the training of textile worker union leaders and coal miner union leaders in the 1930s and '40s, and blacks and whites discussing problems and tactics at Highlander during the racially tense 1950s and '60s. Highlander seminars enrolled such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernethy, and Andrew Young; involved folk singers Pete Seeger and the Guy Carawans; and had such liberal supporters as Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, and others.
The Long Haul is a readable account of turbulent times, offering a rich picture of the rural South during and after the Great Depression, when textile workers, coal miners, and blacks struggled for justice. Above all, it is the story of Myles Horton, a dreamer turned adult educator who, working in the South with the poor and the powerless, helped them use their own experiences and insights to develop strengths and tactics with which to change things for the better.
We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change
The last book is an exchange between Myles Horton and Paolo Freire about circumstances of their time and life experiences which made them radical adult educators. Paolo Freire is the better known international adult education theorist and leader, famous for his work in his native Brazil, in Chile, at UNESCO; and for his provocative books, including Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970. Horton, described in the foregoing article and admired by American professional adult educators and social activists, is becoming better known to a wider U.S. audience because of recent books about him.
Freire, born into a middle class family in Recife, port city of northeastern Brazil, experienced near poverty during the 1930s Depression. Despite straitened family circumstances and academic setbacks, he taught Portuguese in a secondary school and attended the University of Recife, where he earned a law degree. He preferred not to practice law but to work as a welfare officer. He later became Director, Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service, State of Pernumbuco, where he worked with the urban poor, 1946-52. From 1954 he taught history and philosophy of education at the University of Recife, where he earned a doctor's degree in 1959.
In 1960 almost half (15.5 million) of Brazil's 34.5 million people were illiterate and could not vote. Accompanying a Roman Catholic social liberation movement in Brazil and after the 1961 election of populist President J. Goulart, basic literacy education flourished. Freire, as Director of the University of Recife's Cultural Extension Service and as head of the National Literacy Program of Brazil's Ministry of Education and Culture, achieved renown for his radical "conscientization" approach to adult literacy. Freire's "conscientization" theory held that education is seldom neutral, that to be literate implies responsibility to participate in the political process, and that to participate politically implies responsibility to help revise Brazil's laws to improve conditions for the poor. When, however, the Goulart government fell to conservatives in April 1964, adult literacy and other popular movements were suppressed. Freire was jailed for 70 days, during which he began writing his first major educational work, Education as the Practice of Freedom. Expelled from Brazil, he worked in adult education in Chile, 1964-69; promoted world literacy for UNESCO in Geneva, 1969-70; and was invited to lecture at Harvard University's Center for Studies in Education during the years of racial unrest in the U.S.
Horton and Freire had known of each other and admired each other from a distance for 20 years. They first met in 1973 at a Chicago adult education conference, met again at conferences in New York, California, and in Nicaragua. But a busy agenda always kept them from spending much time together.
It was at a meeting in Los Angeles in July 1987 that Freire first suggested to Horton that they "speak a book" together. Horton was then in Los Angeles visiting his daughter and recovering from colon cancer. Freire was in Los Angeles speaking at a symposium in honor of his recently deceased wife of 42 years, Elza Freire. Horton anticipated the pleasure of the project. He knew that they both previously had gotten their ideas into print by talking out their experiences in tape recorded interviews.
Mutual friends arranged for them to converse at the University of Tennessee, a meeting which was then continued in early December 1987 at Highlander, New Market, TN. In a relaxed atmosphere they reminisced about their backgrounds and experiences. It was like a dance between old companions, accustomed to each other's leads and responses. We Make the Road by Walking (Freire adapted the title from Spanish poet Antonio Machada's phrase, "You make the way as you go") retains the pair's spontaneity, cognitive leaps, and occasional discontinuities. The three editors, acting as listening friends (referred to in the book as the Third Party), kept the dialogue flowing by prodding the discussants when needed with a question to jolt them back to the main issue. Editors Brenda Bell and John Peters are connected with adult education at the University of Tennessee. Editor John Gaventa is currently Director of the Highlander Research and Education Center.
The Introduction to We Make the Road by Walking briefly portrays and compares Horton and Freire's lives. Each was born into a family slightly more educated and better off than their neighbors. Each lived in the poorest, most exploited parts of their respective countries. Through friends or contacts, both sets of parents sent their sons to nearby towns for high school (Horton and Freire had a good laugh when Horton recalled that he went through the first nine school grades in a Tennessee town named Brazil).
Both were independent in their early learning. Unlike their peers, both attended higher education. Both were drawn to social aspects of Christianity, Horton at Union Theological Seminary and influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr's social gospel; Freire influenced by Roman Catholic liberal social action in Recife.
Both were greatly influenced by their first wives: Zilphia Horton, who helped with her musical and other talents; Elza Freire, who helped Paulo to listen to rather than to talk down to illiterates. Each first wife preceded her husband in death. Both men remarried women who also aided their work.
Each man found fulfillment as a radical adult educator. Horton's success was in training textile and coal mine union leaders and in linking the Citizenship Schools with the civil rights movement. Freire's challenge was in organizing adult literacy along "conscientization" lines during Roman Catholic reforms in Brazil and the Goulart government's liberalism (1961-64). Both men saw the adult education of have-nots as an opportunity to promote socio-economic-political empowerment. Both became revolutionary change agents.
Each said he learned to read and write at home, before starting to school, with parents' help and encouragement. Horton read every book he could borrow or cajole, getting into trouble with teachers for unassigned reading. Freire had difficulties because of his rigidly formal elementary schools and because Recife had no free public high schools.
After an arduous search, his mother (his father died in 1934 when Paulo was 13) contacted the Osvaldo Cruz School, a prestigious Recife private secondary school, whose director Alvizio Araujo, accepted Paulo. (The director's daughter, Ana Maria, became Freire's second wife in 1988. She is an historian and author of a 1989 history of illiteracy in Brazil.)
Myles, a leader in the youth group of his Cumberland Presbyterian Church, also saw the seamier sides of life working as a store clerk after high school hours. He observed leading citizens who cheated on their bills and some who quietly paid bills for black children suspected of being their offsprings.
Horton found his life work when, in Ozone, TN, he learned that adults, once they shared their problems, knew what must be done to resolve them, but needed advice on the best way to achieve the resolution.
For Freire, who wanted to be and did become a teacher, it was his first wife, Elza, who helped him see that you do not lecture have-not adult illiterates, but you ask them about their concerns and what they think ought to be done to set things right.
Horton's greatest challenge was to find how best to conduct the black South Carolina islanders' Citizenship Schools and how to link them with the civil rights movement.
Freire's greatest opportunity came in the context of Brazil's early 1960s reform when he taught new literates to use their reading, writing, and thinking skills for political involvement and social change. Freire said that he pursued this "conscientization" of new literates outside of formal schools. To get away from the school atmosphere, he called his discussion group a "Circle of Culture," his teachers "coordinators," and his students "participants."
Many other insights are explored in these wide-ranging Horton-Freire dialogues. The best thought are grouped under the headings of Ideas, Education and Social Change, and finally Reflections. Is it possible for education to be neutral? they asked, and answered a qualified no.
Both were wary of charismatic leaders, Horton particularly believing that such leaders created unthinking followers. This thought led them to discuss differences between educating and organizing, and so they went on, exploring many interconnected issues.
We Make the Road by Walking is compelling reading, a great dialogue on education and social criticism, showing how two great educator-activists went about changing injustice in the world around them. Liberals will relish it, conservatives will be put off by it, and most readers will be charmed by the two democratic radicals.
They last met at Highlander in early January 1990 to check the manuscript. The last short epilogue is worth repeating:
Myles: Well, you feel contented that we've done all we can do?
Paulo: Oh yes. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I think that it will be a beautiful book.
Myles: Yes. I don't see any reason for having any more discussions.
Paulo: It is more or less structured.
Myles: Let's have a drink.
Paulo: Yes.
Horton was then gravely ill from the effects of a late 1989 brain tumor operation. He rallied, however, to express pleasure with their meetings and with the manuscript. Three days after Freire left, Horton slipped into a coma. He died on January 19, 1990.
Conclusion
Because of their impact on adult education, the southern labor movement, and the civil rights movement, historians and others will most likely write about Myles Horton and Highlander again. He and Highlander are certain to appear in later works. The four books here reviewed at least give readers the measure of an unusual man and the school he founded, an iconoclastic adult educator (two adult educators, if you include Paulo Freire).
This southern teacher, who loved his country, region, and people, found through his private adult education center (Highlander) that he could reach and influence leaders in the struggle to advance human dignity. Because he labored to fashion a better and fairer society, he is worth knowing.
Addendum: For "Franklin Parker Collection 1941-2001" on Myles Horton (1905-90), of Highlander Adult Education Center. TN, see also:
http://www.etsu.edu/cass/archives/Collections/afindaid/a598.html
About Authors
The Parkers, graduates of Berea College near Lexington, Ky., were married in 1950 and graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana, 1950 and from what is now Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 1956.
Franklin met Myles Horton at annual Spring Conference education meetings while teaching at the Universities of Texas, Austin, 1957-64; Oklahoma, Norman, 1964-68; West Virginia University, Morgantown, 1968-86; Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, 1986-89; and Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, 1989-94.
The Parkers also accompanied a Myles Horton-led group to China in August 1978.
Betty Parker, a researcher and writer, wrote and co-edited with Franklin Parker education books and articles; and did extensive research resulting in George Peabody, A Biography, Vanderbilt University, 1971, revised 1995.
The Parkers live at Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN (but their U.S. mail address is 63 Heritage Loop (Uplands), Crossville, TN 38571. E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net
END OF PART 2 of 2 Parts. For Part 1 of 2 Parts, access:
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Saturday, June 27, 2009
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Myles Horton (1905-90) of Highlander Adult Education Center, Tennessee; Educator and Social Activist: With Addendum.
By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker (see end About Authors)
Introduction
Tennessean Myles Horton is worth knowing about because he was a significant leader of social change in the modern South. His Highlander folk school in East Tennessee helped unionize southern textile workers and coal miners in the 1930s and '40s and helped advance civil rights in the 1950s and '60s.
Early black leaders--Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, and others--attended Highlander interracial workshops before the Montgomery, AL, bus boycott; before lunch counter sit-ins; before the student freedom riders; and before school integration. "We Shall Overcome," the civil rights song heard around the world, was first popularized at Highlander.
Horton of Highlander initiated South Carolina black Sea Islanders' Citizenship Schools which spread throughout the South, helped some 100,000 blacks become literate, qualified them to register to vote, and thus helped advance the 1960s civil rights movement.
Critics falsely labeled Myles Horton a rabble rousing "red," a "communist," a threat to American institutions and traditional values. Huge billboard photos in the South in 1965 were captioned, "Martin Luther King at a Communist Training School" [Highlander].
Horton is important because he challenged entrenched power and privilege (as did India's Gandhi); helped workers form labor unions and cooperatives (as did labor organizer Saul Alinsky, 1909-72); helped empower dispossessed people (as did Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire, 1921-); and helped people realize and achieve their legal rights (as did consumer advocate Ralph Nader, 1934-).
What in Horton's background and upbringing might have foretold what he was to become? He was born in Savannah, TN, July 9, 1905, the eldest of four children. His parents, Perry and Elsie Falls Horton, were native Tennesseans, Scotch Irish, and poor, although a paternal forebear had received the first land grant (c.1772) in northeast Tennessee.
His parents passed on to Myles their Cumberland Presbyterian Church's Calvinistic values, independent spirit, belief in helping others less fortunate regardless of race, and a respect for education (both parents, with grade school education, had been schoolteachers).
The Hortons moved from Savannah to Humboldt (near Memphis) where Myles went to high school and worked during summers. He expressed his skepticism about religion to his mother. She advised him to, "just love people." Eclectic in his reading, he majored in English literature at Cumberland University, Lebanon, TN, 1924-28, refused to take the traditional hazing and organized other students to resist hazing.
Working in a Humboldt box factory in the summer of 1925, he shocked fellow workers by supporting John T. Scopes, on trial in Dayton, TN, for teaching evolution. As president of his campus YMCA, in his junior year, 1927, he attended a southern YMCA conference on Nashville's Vanderbilt University campus.
In this, his first contact with foreign and black students, he resented not being able to take a Chinese girl to a restaurant or enter a public library with a black acquaintance.
He was upset when he heard a Labor Day speech on campus by Cumberland University trustee John Emmett Edgerton, a woolen manufacturer and president of the Southern States Industrial Council, lecturing students against labor unions. Northern agitators, Edgerton said, were starting labor unions that would destroy industry and jobs in the South. On impulse, Horton went to the Edgerton's textile mill in Lebanon, TN, was dismayed at the unfair practices he saw, and urged the workers to organize. University officials threatened to expel him if he visited the mill again.
Ozone, TN, Summer 1927
In summer vacations from Cumberland University, Horton organized vacation Bible schools for the Presbyterian Church. In the summer of 1927 he let his assistants teach the young people at a small Ozone, East Tennessee, church while he invited their parents to discuss their problems. They asked questions about farming problems, how to get a textile mill job, how to test wells for typhoid, and other concerns. Myles said he did not know but would get the answers from experts: a county agent, a health officer, and others.
The 22-year-old realized for the first time that he could lead a discussion without knowing all the answers. He got the adults to talk about their own experiences and found that they already had many answers to their problems. Ozone people liked these discussions, attendance increased, and a woman about to retire who liked what he was doing said that she would turn over her home to him for such programs. Horton, grateful, said he would think about it and would return when he had something to offer. "O" for Ozone in his later notes stood for the kind of school he wanted to start. The Ozone experience, he later said, was the genesis of Highlander.
Union Theological Seminary, 1929-30
Crisscrossing the state as Tennessee YMCA organizer, Myles found a sympathetic listener in Crossville, TN, Congregational minister Abram Nightingale, with whom he sometimes boarded. Nightingale encouraged Myles's intent to establish a school but told Myles that he needed more learning, more experiences, more contact with ideas and thinkers away from the South.
Nightingale encouraged Myles to attend Union Theological Seminary, New York City, and shared with Myles a book by Union Seminary Ethics Professor Harry F. Ward (1873-1966), On Economic Morality and the Ethic of Jesus. Ward believed that extremes of wealth and poverty were the Achilles' heel of U.S. free enterprise and that the profit motive hindered Christian brotherhood and equality.
During the early Great Depression years of stock market crash, failed businesses, and jobless bread lines, Myles, at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, met the leading U.S. social-activist educators. He sought a philosophy to guide the kind of school he envisioned. He took theology courses, read widely at Columbia University Library near the seminary, worked in a Hell's Kitchen ghetto boys' club, visited Greenwich House and Henry Street Settlement House, and helped organize an International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union strike.
He went to observe a Marion, NC, textile strike; visited Brookwood Labor College, Katonah, NY, which trained labor union leaders (modeled after worker education-oriented Ruskin College, Oxford, England); interviewed old timers at the utopian Oneida Colony, upstate NY, and the cooperative communities at Rugby and Ruskin, both in TN, and at New Harmony, IN. He noted sadly how with time the spirit of these once vibrant socialist communities had all but disappeared.
He determined that the school he envisioned would be loosely structured and adaptable to involve, serve, and help poor people in labor and racial strife, help them find ways to gain dignity, freedom, and justice.
Unconcerned with credits, grades, or a divinity degree, he read the writings of the British Fabian socialists and the writings of U.S. educators John Dewey, George S. Counts, and others. Observing a New York City May Day parade while unwittingly wearing a red sweater, he was rudely brought to reality when a mounted policeman clouted him for being a "god-damn Red."
He was most influenced by Union Theological Seminary's liberal theology Professor Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), a passionate advocate of the social gospel. Niebuhr had come to Union the previous year, 1928, from a small Detroit church. His Christian ethics seminar, which Horton attended, was the basis of his 1932 book, Moral Man and Immoral Society. Niebuhr questioned the generally accepted notion of inevitable progress, saw that the poor were oppressed and exploited by the economic and political system. He headed the Fellowship of Socialist Christians, which wanted progressive churches to join with labor unions to achieve fundamental reform. He co-founded with socialist Norman Thomas a journal, The World Tomorrow, dedicated to "a social order based on the religion of Jesus."
Niebuhr saw the reformer's problem as how to achieve equality and justice peacefully; that is, how to pit the power of the oppressed against the power of oppressors nonviolently. Niebuhr's ideas coincided with Horton's aims for his anticipated southern adult education school: to help downtrodden people find ways to solve their own problems peacefully. Niebuhr was sympathetic and encouraged Horton.
University of Chicago, 1930-31
Interested now more in sociology than in theology, Horton went to the University of Chicago. There, he was impressed by sociology Professor Robert E. Park's (1864-1944) theory that individuals unite when they see common goals they can attain by working together. Through Park, Horton saw that because conflict is inevitable, the thing to do is to use conflict creatively to move people away from the inequities of the status quo and toward fairer economic, political, social, and moral positions.
Horton was also influenced by Lester F. Ward's (1841-1913) Dynamic Sociology, which argued that education requires action and that social progress is possible only through dynamic action. He talked with and was encouraged by Jane Addams and her colleagues at Hull House, famed adult education center for immigrants in Chicago.
In the spring of 1931 in Chicago he met two immigrant Danish Lutheran ministers who, when they heard him describe his school ideas, said that his ideas reminded them of the Danish folk school and urged him to visit Denmark.
Reading about Danish folk school history and accomplishments, Horton compiled a pertinent bibliography for the University of Chicago library. He also read The Southern Highlander in His Homeland by John Charles Campbell (1867-1919), written with Mrs. Campbell who, in 1925, had established the John C. Campbell Folk School near Brasstown, NC, along Danish folk high school lines. Determined to visit Denmark, Horton earned enough money for travel there by working in New York City as researcher for a professor he had met at the University of Chicago.
Denmark Folk Schools, 1931-32
Visiting Danish folk high schools, Horton appreciated 19th century founder Bishop N.S.F. Grundtvig's (1783-1872) "Living Word" sermons and admired disciple Kristen Kold's folk schools. These folk schools had awakened oppressed peasants' patriotism and civic responsibility, helped restore Denmark's economic prosperity, and led to cooperatives and a broader based democracy. Horton liked the newer folk high schools for industrial workers. He admired their informality, close student-teacher interaction, highly motivated learning, and clear objectives.
Christmas night, 1931, Copenhagen
Unable to sleep on Christmas night, 1931, Horton wrote down his thoughts about his future school: it must be located in the South; have white and black students and teachers working together; give no credits or exams; should collect information on the south's most pressing problems, propose solutions, and have students try out those solutions in conflict situations in their home communities. It was to be an adult education school to train leaders who in turn would transform their communities and organizations.
Highlander at Monteagle, November 1, 1932
Horton returned to New York in May 1932 and outlined his school plan to Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr wrote a finance appeal letter to raise funds for Horton's school in the South intended to train "an educated radical labor leadership." At Niebuhr's instigation, Horton got his school's first $100 contribution from International YMCA Secretary Sherwood Eddy (1871-1963) and secured two Niebuhr graduate students as teachers: one who stayed less than a year, and James A. Dombroski (1897?-1983), son of a Tampa, FL, jeweler, who stayed nearly a decade.
Searching for a school site, Horton contacted Will W. Alexander (1884-1956?) of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. Alexander mentioned Don West (1906-92) who also wanted to establish a southern Appalachian folk school. West, a rural north Georgian and Lincoln University (Harrogate, TN) graduate, was, like Horton, a former campus YMCA president, Bible school organizer in mountain communities, and a Danish folk high school enthusiast.
Horton learned that West, a Vanderbilt University Divinity School graduate and a Congregational church pastor near Crossville, TN, was attending the YMCA's Blue Ridge Assembly, Black Mountain, NC. Horton hitchhiked to North Carolina, met and shared common interests with West and, by one account, learned through the Rev. Abram Nightingale that retired college president Lilian Johnson (1864-1968) had offered her Monteagle, TN, farm to be used for community uplift.
Lilian Johnson, daughter of a wealthy banking and mercantile family, had a Cornell University doctorate in history, had been president of Western State College, Oxford, Ohio; was a leading southern suffragist, and a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She had gone to Italy to study cooperatives and returned to spread the idea in the South, working from her house and farm in Summerfield, near Monteagle, Grundy County, TN.
Horton and West, with meager financial backing and a small staff, got Lilian Johnson to lease her property for a year and, subject to her satisfaction, perhaps longer. Highlander Folk School, as it was named, opened November 1, 1932. Only eight students enrolled in its first residence term, November 1932-April 1933, a small beginning. But with the Wilder, TN coal mine strike, 1932-33, 100 miles north of Monteagle, Horton and Highlander became involved for the first time in mineworker union conflict.
Wilder, TN, Mine Strike, 1932-33
The Wilder strike began in the summer of 1932. Mine owners refused to renew a United Mine Workers (UMW) contract unless union members took a 20 percent wage cut. Long critical of mine conditions and company store prices (miners were paid in scrip redeemable only in company stores), union miners struck, closing the mines to mid-October 1932, when nonunion scabs and some union members resumed work under armed guards.
Violence flared. The state governor sent in some 200 national guardsmen, whose inexperience, drinking, and favoritism to scabs and mine owners hardly kept the peace.
Myles Horton went to Wilder in November 1932, took notes on the strike, and ate a meager Thanksgiving dinner with UMW local president Barney Graham. Waiting for a bus the next morning, he was arrested, jailed, and charged--as he later humorously recalled--with "coming here and getting information and going back and teaching it." He was released the following day.
To Horton the strike was a conflict situation from which he, Highlander students, and the miners could learn. He and Highlander students helped solicit and distribute emergency food and clothing. Some strikers thought him a "Red." Others appreciated his and Highlander's help and good intentions. Violence continued.
Horton heard of and told state officials of a plot to kill local union president Barney Graham. Horton's warning was ignored. Graham was shot to death April 30, 1933. Their leader dead, the strikers returned to work without a contract and under near starvation conditions.
Said Horton, "If I hadn't already been a radical, [Graham's murder] would have made me a radical right then." The strike helped shape Highlander's labor education program, which thereafter examined the various roles played in labor conflict by newspapers, churches, the power structure, and other community forces.
Wilder also confirmed for Horton what he already knew: the power structure's determination in the 1930s and '40s (omitting the war years) to cripple labor unions. He later experienced in the 1950s and '60s the power structure mobilization to stem the tide of racial integration in schools and public places.
Zilphia Mae Johnson (Mrs. Myles Horton), 1935
The first Mrs. Myles Horton was Zilphia Mae Johnson (d. 1956) from Paris, Arkansas. She was the privileged daughter of an Arkansas coal mine operator and College of the Ozarks graduate, a talented, classically trained musician. Influenced by radical Presbyterian minister Claude Williams, she wanted to use her musical and dramatic talents to advance working people in labor unions. In this, she clashed with and parted from her conservative father.
A friend got her to attend a 2-month Highlander winter session to learn about the labor movement. She and Myles fell in love and were married on March 6, 1935. She then studied about workers' theater at the New Theatre School, New York City. At Highlander, she taught drama, playwriting, public speaking, wrote and directed plays based on labor strikes, and led square dancing and singing.
Zilphia Horton had a gift for using music, drama, and dance to advance labor union concerns and civil rights. She united people, mellowed differences, and lifted spirits. By collecting songs and encouraging Highlander students to collect and sing them, she involved communities around Highlander, helped heal wounds, lessened suspicions, and fostered cultural pride. Through Zilphia, Highlander's cultural programs gained national and even international renown when the British Broadcasting Corporation presented a cultural program from Highlander in March 1937.
Zilphia Horton also helped make "We Shall Overcome" a national and international favorite among the oppressed. Originally an Afro-American folk song, "We Will Overcome" became a Baptist hymn and was sung by union members to raise picket line morale at a Charleston, SC, Congress of Industrial Organizations' Food and Tobacco Workers strike. Two women members from that union sang it at Highlander in 1946.
Zilphia recognized the hymn's emotional appeal, slowed the tempo, added verses, and sang it at meetings. Pete Seeger (1919-) learned it from Zilphia in 1947, altered its title to "We Shall Overcome," added verses, and sang it at 1950s folk song concerts around the country. Folk singer Guy Carawan (1927-), who with his wife Candie worked at Highlander, further refined it and added the verse, "We Shall Not be Moved," during a police raid on Highlander, the night of July 31, 1959. It was sung at Highlander workshops, at civil rights gatherings from the 1960s, and became the freedom song heard round the world.
Zilphia and Myles Horton were married 21 years, had a son and daughter, when she tragically died. Reaching for a glass she thought held water, she drank some carbon tetrachloride, realized her error, induced vomiting, and phoned her physician, who assured her that she had remedied the accident. But the poison aggravated a kidney condition discovered at Vanderbilt Hospital, Nashville, where she died of uremic poisoning, April 11, 1956.
Citizenship Schools for Voter Registration, 1957-61
Two South Carolina black leaders, later to become more prominent, attended Highlander's August 1954 workshop titled "World Problems, the United Nations, and You," comparing discrimination in the South with discrimination in other countries. Esau Jenkins (died 1972), a businessman and community leader from Johns Island, SC, accompanying Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987), a Charleston, SC, teacher, was more interested in adult black literacy than in the United Nations.
Esau Jenkins wanted his neighbors to learn to read and write and so qualify to vote. Highlander's staff hesitated to fully back Esau Jenkins because it was then busy training black leaders for the public school desegregation movement. It took Jenkins and Clark some time to convince Horton that Johns Island blacks needed Highlander's help in getting adult literacy classes started. These literacy classes did began on Johns Island, spread to other Sea Islands, and then throughout the South.
It became Highlander's most successful training program and significantly increased black voter registration, black political awareness and involvement, and helped elect black mayors, sheriffs, and other officials in the l970s and '80s.
Johns Island, six miles south of Charleston, SC, with a 1954 population of 4,000, is the largest of the Sea Island chain along the South Carolina and Georgia coast. Inhabitants, 67 percent black (other islands had higher black proportions), lived just above the subsistence level. Some owned farms and small businesses. Most worked on large truck farms or in Charleston as servants or as factory and shipyard hands. Gullah was their home language, an African dialect mixed with English.
Until the Works Progress Administration built bridges in the 1930s, inhabitants went by boat to Charleston. Jenkins, a Johns Island leader, had supplemented his fourth grade education with night classes. Converting his small cotton farm to truck farming, he learned enough Greek to help him sell produce to Charleston's Greek vegetable merchants.
Jenkins was PTA president, church school superintendent, assistant pastor in his church, and also ran a small bus line to the mainland. During the 45-minute drive, he distributed, explained, and discussed the South Carolina state constitution and voting laws, thus encouraging passengers to learn to read and write to pass voter registration literacy tests.
Black islanders were suspicious of and white authorities were also hostile to outside do-gooders. To overcome this dilemma, Myles Horton decided to train potential black island leaders at Highlander and send them back to conduct Citizenship Schools. The schools were thus all-black, local, and largely self-taught. Septima Clark sent field reports of progress and problems to Highlander, whose white staff were seldom seen and thus avoided any hostile local newspaper publicity for the first three years.
Horton deliberately chose Bernice Robinson, a black beautician, as the first Citizenship School teacher, who began teaching on January 7, 1957. She was Septima Clark's niece.
A black beautician with black customers was not dependent on and hence not intimidated by the white power structure. Her parlor was a community center and she was a natural community leader. Bernice Robinson (1917-), born in Charleston, earned her high school diploma through night school in New York City, where she went to better herself. Returning to Charleston in 1947 to help her ailing parents, she actively advanced race relations through the YWCA and the NAACP. She could find work only as a self-employed beautician and dressmaker.
Esau Jenkins formed a Progressive Club in order to purchase a building (with a loan from a Highlander grant), sold gasoline outside and groceries inside while citizenship classes were held in the back. Bernice Robinson treated the adult illiterates as adults, avoiding the use of elementary school teaching materials and child-size school furniture. She taught islanders such practical things as how to write their own names, read and understand a newspaper, fill out mail order and money order forms, and do some arithmetic.
The class met two hours a night, two nights a week, for some three months. She had seen a large United Nations Declaration of Human Rights poster at Highlander, obtained a copy, and posted it for all in the class to learn to read and understand by the end of the course. The Citizenship Schools succeeded beyond expectations.
Citizenship School teaching materials were collected into booklets, distributed in South Carolina, and later revised to fit voter registration requirements in Tennessee and Georgia. Guy Carawan, in Highlander "singing schools," improvised lyrics for spirituals and folk songs that urged people to learn to read, write, register, and vote.
Citizenship Schools spread to Huntsville, AL, and Savannah, GA, 1960-61, straining resources at Highlander, then in debt and about to be closed by hostile Tennessee authorities. In August 1961, Highlander handed over its Citizenship School programs to the Martin Luther King-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Septima Clark, who continued working with Citizenship Schools under SCLC, estimated that between 1954-70 they helped some 100,000 blacks learn to read and write.
Highlander Attacked, 1953-61
As Highlander's civil rights activities increased, so too did segregationists' attacks. Fear of communist internal subversion pervaded the U.S. in the 1950s, aggravated by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's communists-in-government alarmist charges.
Worried by the liberal tide, segregationists mobilized state authority and police to try to roll back the cumulative effects of the May 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown v Board of Education desegregation decision; the 1955 Montgomery, AL, bus boycott; the 1957-58 Little Rock, AR, school desegregation crisis; the 1961 black college student lunch counter sit-ins (begun February 1, 1961, Greensboro, NC); and the 1961 white and black freedom bus riders challenging southern segregated public facilities (begun May 4, 1961).
Attacks on Highlander were based on false communist conspiracy charges, going back to the 1930s. Paul Crouch, a known paid informer for red-baiting groups, told a Chattanooga reporter that while he was Tennessee Communist Party head, 1939-41, Highlander had 25 Communist Party members. Crouch had been court martialed in the U.S. Army, served 2 years in the federal prison at Alcatraz.
In the 1954 U.S. Democratic Senatorial campaign, Pat Sutton, running against Senator Estes Kefauver (1903-63), cited Paul Crouch's testimony that Highlander's Dombroski and Horton were communists. Sutton lost two-to-one to Kefauver, a friend of Horton's, who avoided mentioning Highlander.
In the spring of 1954, Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland (1904-86), white supremacist planter and Joseph McCarthy imitator, headed the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, investigating "subversive" southern liberal organizations, including Highlander.
Sen. Eastland believed that a well publicized investigation of Highlander would help his 1954 Senate reelection. He was also convinced that communists promoted racial equality in order to disrupt and take over the United States government.
Eastland tied Highlander to a conspiracy web that included Virginia Durr (Highlander trustee), sister-in-law of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and wife of Clifford Judkins Durr (1899-1975), New Deal official, Progressive Party Senate candidate in 1948, and an anti-poll tax activist. The March 1954 hearings, dealing with alleged communist activities of Highlander's Dombroski, Mrs. Durr, Horton, and others, ended in raucous disorder with Horton physically dragged from the committee room.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revoked Highlander's tax exempt status three times between 1957-71. Its tax exempt status was restored on appeal each time. Horton believed this harassment was aimed at stopping Highlander's school integration efforts.
In 1954 the Georgia legislature created a Commission on Education whose aim was to counter school desegregation efforts. The Commission used undercover agents to probe Koinonia Farm, located in Americus, GA, which had jointly sponsored with Highlander integrated children's camps in Tennessee in 1956-57.
On Labor Day weekend, 1957, as Highlander was celebrating its 25th anniversary, Georgia Commission agents photographed Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Myles Horton, and a publicly acknowledged black communist (who, he later admitted, had conspired with the agents to be in the photo).
In October 1957 the Georgia Commission published a 4-page paper titled "Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tennessee," with photos of Highlander's interracial meetings. The Georgia Commission distributed 250,000 copies of this 4-page paper, and White Citizens' Councils and the Ku Klux Klan distributed over a million copies by 1959.
Southern newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, published articles on Highlander, labeling it at worst communist and at best pro-Communist. The photo of Martin Luther King at Highlander was displayed by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, printed as a postcard for easy mailing by the John Birch Society, and appeared blown up in 1965 on billboards across the South titled, "Martin Luther King at Communist Training School." When Highlander's fire insurance was canceled in 1957-58, Horton suspected that segregationists were using economic pressure against the school.
Several southern state legislatures formed committees during 1957-59 to investigate causes of racial unrest. An Arkansas committee headed by the Arkansas' Attorney General tied Highlander to the Little Rock public school integration disturbances. The Arkansas Attorney General offered to supply evidence to the Tennessee legislature to help them close Highlander.
On January 26, 1959, the Tennessee legislature appointed a committee to investigate Highlander, using evidence collected by the Georgia Commission on Education. The charge was that Highlander was integrated, promoted integration, was subversive, promoted communism, allowed free love between the races; that it was not a school approved by state authorities, had no qualified faculty, and awarded no diplomas.
Horton was also charged with operating Highlander for personal profit, because the trustees had given him his house and 76 acres. The last charge--that Highlander sold spirits without a license--followed a July 31, 1959, police raid on Highlander which found beer and some whisky.
Horton replied to each charge.
Yes, Highlander was always integrated, as was implied in its charter.
No, Highlander was not subversive but allowed all points of view to be discussed. Communism was disapproved of because it was authoritarian and against Highlander's spirit of open inquiry.
No, Highlander did not condone free love, but in square dancing and folk dancing hands were held and bodies sometimes touched.
No, Highlander on principle did not issue diplomas and taught by discussing problems and issues, as did many adult education institutions.
Yes, Highlander did give Horton his house and 76 acres in lieu of over 20 years without salary for himself and Zilphia Horton.
Yes, beer was kept at Highlander because nearby cafes would not serve racially mixed groups and a money kitty was kept to replenish drinks.
Tennessee authorities found Highlander guilty of selling beer without a license and guilty of questionable financial practices (citing the gift of Horton's house and land). Other charges were dropped.
The trial sapped Horton's and other Highlander staff's time and energy, yet their programs continued. Appeals delayed the closing of Highlander at Monteagle until August 1961. By then Horton and legal advisers had obtained a new charter which met Tennessee regulations. A renamed Highlander Research and Education Center began in Knoxville, 1961-71, and still continues (in 2004) at New Market, near Knoxville.
Highlander in Knoxville, 1961-71, was frequently harassed. The City Council, dominated by wealthy grocer Cas Walker, passed an ordinance that all educational institutions be approved by the Council. Police came with warrants, which Highlander staff ignored, knowing that such legislation was not retroactive and hence not binding.
But the Ku Klux Klan marched in front of the school; there were phone threats and crank calls. Once, in a Maryville, TN, restaurant, Horton and a Highlander lawyer were badly beaten while their horrified wives watched. Horton kept on with his work. The lawyer had to close his office and move to another state.
Last Years
Horton retired as educational director in 1971; still lived and was a consultant at Highlander; and traveled to talk about the Highlander idea to adult educators in China, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, and Nicaragua. He was frequently interviewed, most notably on Bill Moyers' Journal, "Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly," Public Broadcasting System, WGBH, Boston, June 5 and 11, 1981.
Still, Horton remained obscure to the general public, a minor figure except to those who knew and valued him as a fighter over The Long Haul. Horton chose this title for his 1990 autobiography because, he wrote, as a young man he sought and found at Highlander an all-encompassing high moral task that could not be completed in one lifetime. He wrote that he had learned to sublimate his simmering anger at injustice by fighting a lifelong battle for justice.
After completing his autobiographical The Long Haul, Horton died at Highlander on January 19, 1990.
Success or Failure?
Horton had many failures. When requested to do so, he started a Highlander in New Mexico, which failed, and a Highlander in Chicago, which also failed. He later came to see that the Highlander idea fitted third world conditions and succeeded in Appalachia only because Appalachia has third world characteristics of being exploited and largely owned by outside business interests.
Horton did anticipate two major social movements in which Highlander had some success and made a definite contribution: unionized labor in the 1930s-40s (Highlander trained early southern CIO leaders); and civil rights in the l950s-60s. Highlander helped train most major and many minor black leaders of the 1950s-80s. Highlander's Citizenship Schools helped enfranchise many black people.
Public schools historically teach what is and so perpetuate the status quo. They follow and seldom lead in reshaping the political, economic, and social class system. At Highlander, which was private, small, and committed to clear social uplift goals--Horton taught adult leaders what ought to be and tactics on how to achieve equality.
In challenging injustice and trying to reshape social-economic-political forces, Horton was a Social Reconstructionist like George S. Counts, who wrote Dare the School Build a New Social Order?; Harold Rugg, who early wrote social studies textbooks; and Theodore Brameld, defender of a reconstructed education for a reconstructed world. Horton, who knew and admired both Counts and Brameld, was a revolutionary adult education reformer who found his niche in helping empower oppressed people to fight for justice and a fairer share of the American promise.
Horton knew that he had not ushered in the second American revolution, had not brought full justice and dignity to those denied them, but had cared enough and dared enough to fight for a better world.
Myles Horton Chronology
1905, July 5 Myles Falls Horton born, Savannah, TN, to Elsie Falls and Perry Horton.
1920-24 While in high school, he worked as a store clerk, at a sawmill, and in a box factory.
1924-28 Attended Cumberland University (Cumberland Presbyterian Church), Lebanon, TN.
1927, Summer Organized Bible schools for the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. Was already skeptical of organized religion. At Ozone, TN, first experience at letting people discuss their problems and find their own solutions.
1928-29 YMCA organizer at Tennessee schools and colleges.
1929-30 Studied at Union Theological Seminary, NY. Won friendship of theologian and social gospel activist Reinhold Niebuhr.
1930-31 Studied at the University of Chicago. Influenced by sociologist Robert Park, Jane Addams of Hull House, and 2 Danish-born clergymen who told him of Danish folk high schools.
1931-32 Studied folk high schools in Denmark.
1932, Fall Returned to TN. He and Don West founded Highlander Folk School, Grundy County, near Monteagle, TN, leasing a house and land from Dr. Lilian Johnson, retired educator and philanthropist. Funds came in response to an appeal letter sent by Niebuhr and endorsed by George S. Counts, Sherwood Eddy, Norman Thomas, and others.
1932-33 Horton and Highlander students aided United Mine Workers (UMW) local union strikers, Wilder, TN.
1933, April 1 Don West left to help organize miners in Kentucky and textile workers in North Carolina.
1933, June Highlander convened its "First Annual Socialist Summer School." (15 attended).
1933, December Helped form the Cumberland Mountain Cooperative to buy basic foods. Also had a sewing cooperative (made quilts) and a nursery school cooperative for area children.
1934 Resident students involved in strike at Harriman, TN.
1935 Dr. Lilian Johnson deeded her house and land to Highlander. Horton married Zilphia Johnson, a musician and social activist (no relation to Dr. Lilian Johnson).
1935 Summer Labor Chautauqua held at Highlander.
1935 December Began Grundy County, TN, program to unionize and educate underpaid WPA relief workers (taught them such skills as letter writing, petitioning, and contacting Congressmen).
1936 Picket line classes for striking textile workers, Knoxville.
1937-47 Most of Highlander staff time devoted to training members for leadership in CIO-affiliated unions.
1939 Grundy County WPA relief workers "stay-in strike" started Feb. 10, 1939. Entire families occupied WPA offices.
1938-40 Extensive residential courses to develop labor union leadership.
1940-44 Continued large-scale extension programs to train CIO and other union officers, leaders, and members.
1944 First interracial union-related resident course at Highlander (blacks had been welcome at Highlander from its beginning; white unionists were traditionally racist).
1945-47 CIO union work continued. The increasingly bureaucratic CIO formed its own Research and Education Department.
1948-49 Increasing Highlander-CIO tension because of Cold War anticommunist pressures (Highlander, determined to be open to all, refused to be officially anticommunist). Their creative relationship ended, but the CIO held summer schools at Highlander, 1950-52.
1940s Horton and others actively organized Farmers' Unions in the South.
1951 National Farmers' Union withdrew from the South.
1954 Before Mississippi Sen. Eastland's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Horton answered questions about his own political affiliations but refused to answer questions about other Highlander staff members.
1953-56 Highlander workshops trained black and white desegregation leaders.
1956 Zilphia Horton (Mrs. Horton), Highlander singing and dance leader, died.
1957 Highlander 25th anniversary celebration attended by Eleanor Roosevelt, a Highlander financial supporter.
1957-61 Citizenship School Program for literacy/voter registration, Sea Islands, SC, black people.
1960-61 Workshops on race relations for southern college students.
1961, Fall Highlander transferred the Citizenship School Program to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Tennessee authorities closed down Highlander Folk School, Monteagle. Its buildings were burned by arsonists. State of TN granted a new charter to Highlander Research and Education Center, Knoxville (where it remained for 10 years, 1961-71).
1962 Workshops, seminars, and evening classes conducted mainly for Knoxville residents.
1963-68 Highlander's emphasis shifted with the growing popularity of Black Power to civil rights-related projects in the deep South.
1968 Highlander staff participated in the Poor People's Campaign and Resurrection City, Washington, DC.
1969 Horton organized Highlander West in New Mexico, but the project soon closed.
1969-70 Highlander project in Chicago to serve Appalachian and Puerto Rican youth eventually failed.
1971 Highlander moved to New Market, TN, near Knoxville, and increasingly concentrated on southern Appalachian problem. Horton retired as education director but remained active and lived at Highlander.
1970s, late Horton led several trips to China.
1980s Horton believed Highlander imitators not successful in the U.S. except in Appalachia because Appalachia has third world colonial characteristics (owned and exploited by outside corporations). He visited Highlander-type institutions in the Philippines, India, Malaysia, and among aborigines in New Zealand and Australia. Visited Nicaragua after Daniel Ortega became President (believing socialism could succeed there).
1990, Jan. 19 Horton died at Highlander, age 85.
1992, Sept. 29 Don West , cofounder with Horton of Highlander, died (born 1906).
Bibliography
Dissertations
Dressler, Dennis Wayne (Ph.D.). "In the Service of Adults: A. A. Liveright, An American Adult Educator," North Texas State University, 1987.
Franson, Jerome D. (Ph.D.). "Citizenship Education in the South Carolina Sea Islands, 1954-1966," George Peabody College for Teachers, 1977.
Glen, John Mathew (Ph.D.). "On the Cutting Edge: A History of the Highlander Folk School, 1932-1962," Vanderbilt University, 1985. (See his book below.)
Horton, Aimee Isgrig. (Ph.D.). [Myles Horton's second wife] "The Highlander Folk School: A History of the Development of Its Major Programs Related to Social Movements in the South, 1932-1961," University of Chicago, 1971. (See her book below.)
Oldendorf, Sandra Brenneman (Ed.D.). "Highlander Folk School and the South Carolina Sea Island Citizenship Schools: Implications for the Social Studies," University of Kentucky, 1987.
Petty, Anne W. (Ph.D.). "Dramatic Activities and Workers' Education at Highlander Folk School, 1932-1942," Bowling Green State University, 1979.
Books
Adams, Frank T. James A. Dombroski: An American Heretic, 1897-1983. New Market, TN: Highland Research and Education Center, 1992.
Adams, Frank T., and Myles Horton. Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1975.
Alinsky, Saul D. Reveille for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.
Bledsoe, Thomas. Or We'll All Hang Separately: The Highlander Idea. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.
Brameld, Theodore, ed. Workers' Education in the United States. Fifth Yearbook of the John Dewey Society. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941.
Carawan, Guy, and Candie Carawan. Voices from the Mountains. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
Clark, Septima Poinsette, and Le Getta Blyth. Echo in my Soul. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1962.
Draves, Bill. The Free University: A Model for Lifelong Learning. Chicago: Association Press, 1980.
Durr, Virginia Foster. Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr. Edited by Hollinger F. Barnard. University: University of Alabama Press, 1985.
Glen, John M. Highlander: No Ordinary School 1932-1962. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. (See his dissertation above.)
Horton, Aimee Isgrig [Myles Horton's second wife]. The Highlander Folk School: A History of Its Major Programs, 1932-1961. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1989. (See her dissertation above.)
Horton, Myles. The Long Haul: An Autobiography of Myles Horton. Edited by Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl. New York: Doubleday, 1990. [Horton, Myles. "Still Fired Up." [Excerpts from The Long Haul] in Mother Jones, 15, 2 (February/March 1990), p. 11.]
Horton, Myles, and Paulo Freire. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Edited by Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.
Jarvis, Peter. Adult Learning in the Social Context. London: Croom Helm, 1987.
Kennedy, William Bean. Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1986.
Klibaner, Irwin. Conscience of a Troubled South: The Southern Conference Educational Fund, 1946-1966. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Co., 1989.
Morris, Aldon D. Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984.
Seeger, Pete, and Bob Reiser. Everybody Says Freedom: A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Songs and Pictures. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989, pp. 2, 3-7, 8, 25, 34-35, 37-39, 119, 174, 235.
Tjerandsen, Carl. Education for Citizenship: A Foundation's Experience. Santa Cruz, CA: Emil Schwarzhaupt Foundation, 1980. (Excerpt in Convergence, 15, 6 [1983], pp. 10-22.)
Wigginton, Eliot, ed. and Introduction. Refuse to Stand Silently By: An Oral History of Grass Roots Social Activism in America, 1921-64. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1964. New York: Penguin Books, 1988, pp. 64-66.
Chapters in Books
Cotten, Dorothy, and Myles Horton. "Citizenship Schools," Roots of Open Education in America: Reminiscences and Reflections. Edited by Ruth Dropkin and Arthur Tobier. New York: City College Workshop Center for Open Education, 1976, pp. 101-117.
Horton, Myles. "Decision-Making Processes," Educational Reconstruction: Promise and Challenge. Edited by Nobuo Shimahara. Columbus, OH: Merrill Publishing Co., 1973, pp. 323-341.
Horton, Myles. "Influences on Highlander Research and Education Center, New Market, TN, USA," Grundtvig's Ideas in North America--Influences and Parallels. Copenhagen: Danish Institute, 1983.
Horton, Myles, and Claudia Lewis. "Highlander," Roots of Open Education in America: Reminiscences and Reflections. Edited by Ruth Dropkin and Arthur Tobier. New York: City College Workshop Center for Open Education, 1976, pp. 73-90.
Peters, John M., and Brenda Bell. "Horton of Highlander," Twentieth Century Thinkers in Adult Education. Edited by Peter Jarvis. London: Croom Helm, 1987, pp. 243-264.
Articles and Biographical Entries
Adams, Frank, "In the Company of a Listener," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 31-34. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.")
Austin, Aleine, "Zilphia," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 48-52. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.").
Bari, Judi, and Judith Kohl, "Environmental Justice: Highlander After Myles," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 71-77. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.").
Braden, Anne, "Doing the Impossible," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 26-30. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.")
Brown, Cynthia Stokes, "Giving Aunt Donnie Her Due," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 19-25. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.")
Carawan, Guy and Candie, "I'm Gonna Let It Shine: Singing at Highlander," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 44-47. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.")
Clark, Mike, and Colin Greer, "A Culture of Politics," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 53-57. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.").
Conti, Gary J. "Rebels with a Cause: Myles Horton and Paulo Freire." Community College Review, 5, 1 (1977), pp. 36-43.
Conti, Gary J., and Robert A. Fellenz. "Myles Horton: Ideas That Have Withstood the Test of Time." Adult Literacy and Basic Education, 10, 1 (November 1, 1986), pp. 1-18.
Gaventa, John, " Carrying On...," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 68-70. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.").
Hilliard, Asa, "Postscript: Waking the Students Up," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 78-79. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.").
"Johnson, Lilian Wycoff." Who Was Who in America, Vol. IV 1961-1968. Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1968, p. 498.
Kazemek, Francis E. "Adult Literacy Education: an Ethical Endeavor." Adult Literacy and Basic Education, 8, 2 (1982), pp. 61-72.
Kennedy, William Bean. "Highlander Praxis: Learning with Myles Horton." Teachers College Record, 83, 1 (Fall 1981), pp. 105-119.
Kohl, Herbert. "A Tradition of Radical Education: Highlander in Context," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 36-43. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.")
Lester, Julius, "Laughing All the Way," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 8-12. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.")
MacLean, Kenneth Torquil. "Origins of the Southern Civil Rights Movement: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School." Phi Delta Kappan, 47, 9 (May 1966), pp. 487-497.
Matsuyama, Midori, ed. "Reverberations in Kyoto: A Reconstructionist Dialogue by Myles Horton, Theodore Brameld, and Shigeharu Matsuura." Cutting Edge: Journal of the Society for Educational Reconstruction, 10, 3 (Spring 1979), 27-34.
Morris, Aldon. "Introduction: Education for Liberation," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 1-6. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.")
Oldendorf, Sandra Brenneman. "Vocabularies, Knowledge and Social Action in Citizenship Education: The Highlander Example." Theory and Research in Social Education, 17, 2 (Spring 1989), pp. 107-120.
Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Myles Horton (1905-90) and Paulo Freire (1921-), Two Radical Adult Educators: Commentary on Selected Best Books," CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XVI, No. 1 (March 1992), Fiche 11 C02.
Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "Myles Horton (1905-90) of Highlander: Adult Educator and Southern Activist." Proceedings of the Forty-Second Annual Meeting, Southwestern Philosophy of Education Society, Volume XLII. Edited by Wayne Willis. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, 1992, pp. 27-43; same in Option: Journal of the Folk Education Association of America, XVII, No. 2 (Fall 1993), pp. 15-29; same in Skole: The Journal of Alternative Education, Vol. XI, Nos. 1-2 (1994), pp. ?-?; abstract in Resources in Education, XXVII, No. 2 (February 1992), p. 21 Educational Resources in Collections (ERIC ED 336 615); also reprinted in ERIC ED 399 093); and in CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XVI, No. 1 (March 1992), Fiche 11 A02.
Parker, Franklin and Betty J. "State Had Influence on MLK [Myles Horton]: Lion and the Lamb," Crossville (Tenn.) Chronicle, January 11, 1995, p. 4A
Phenix, Lucy Massie, "Myles' Legacy," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 13-18. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.")
Saunders, Bill, "Local Organizing: South Carolina," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 58-61. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.").
Sterne, Emma Gelders. "Myles Horton." They Took Their Stand. New York: Crowell-Collier Press, 1968, pp. 144-154.
Sullivan, Pat. "Horton, Myles." Biographical Dictionary of the American Left. Edited by Bernard K. Johnpoll and Harvey Klehr. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 215-216.
Surratt, Marshall. "Myles Horton: Activism and Gospel: Highlander Center and the Tradition of the Social Gospel." Christianity and Crisis, 50, 18 (December 17, 1990), pp. 398-402.
Waller, Maxine, "Local Organizing: Ivanhoe, Virginia," Social Policy, 21, 3 (Winter 1991), pp. 62-67. (Theme issue: "Building Movements, Educating Citizens: Myles Horton and the Highlander Folk School.").
Wilson, Charles Reagan, and William Ferris, eds. "Highlander." Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 1417-1418.
Wingfield, Marshall. "Lilian Wycoff Johnson." Literary Memphis: A Survey of Its Writers and Writings. Memphis, TN: West Tennessee Historical Society , 1942, pp. 39-40.
Television Interview
Bill Moyers' Journal, "Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly," Interview with Myles Horton. Public Broadcasting System, WGBH, Boston, June 5 and 11, 1981.
Unpublished Papers
Fellenz, Robert A., and Gary J. Conti. "Social Environment and Adult Learning." Paper read at Institute sponsored by the Center for Adult Learning Research, Big Sky, MT, July 31, 1989.
Franson, Jerome. "A Decade of Attacks on the Highlander Folk School: 1951-1961." Prepared for History 397 Class, George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, TN, December 22, 1971.
Obituaries
Narvaez, Alfonse A. "Myles Horton, 84, Head of School in South That Defied Racial Bias," New York Times (January 20, 1990), p. 12.
Saxon, Wolfgang. "Don West, 86, Dies; Champion of Poor, Workers and Blacks," New York Times (October 2, 1992), p. A15.
Seeger, Pete. "Passages: Myles Horton, 1907-1990," Utne Reader, No. 40 (July/August 1990), p. 28.
Highlander Collections
Highlander Collection; Books, Tapes, Videos, & T-Shirts. New Market, TN 37820: Highlander Research Center, 1959 Highlander Way, 1992. Four page brochure with order form.
Addendum:
Commentary on Selected Best Books by and about Myles Horton (1905-90
and Paulo Freire (1921-), Two Radical Adult Educators:
Adams, Frank T. James A. Dombroski: An American Heretic, 1897-1983. New Market, TN: Highland Research and Education Center, 1992.
Author was director of Highlander during its transition in the late 1960s from Knoxville to its present location. Dombroski , who played a key role in Highlander's early years along with Myles Horton and Don West, was a leading activist in unionizing coal miner and textile workers.
Glen, John M. Highlander: No Ordinary School 1932-1962. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. 309 pages. Hardcover. ISBN 0-8131-17617-1.
Horton, Aimee Isgrig. The Highlander Folk School: A History of Its Major Programs, 1932-1961. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1989. 356 pages. $70 Hardcover. ISBN 0-926019-13-9.
Horton, Myles, with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl. The Long Haul: An Autobiography of Myles Horton. New York: Anchor/Doubleday,1990. 231 pages. $10.95 Paperback. $21.95 Hardcover. ISBN 0-385-26313-9. [Horton, Myles. "Still Fired Up." [Excerpts from The Long Haul] in Mother Jones, 15 (February/March 1990), p. 11.]
Horton, Myles, and Paulo Freire. We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change. Edited by Brenda Bell, et al. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990. 256 pages. $24.95 Hardcover. ISBN 0-87722-771-3.
This review of recent books by and about radical adult educators Myles Horton and Paulo Freire was prompted by Horton's death on January 19, 1990; by the publication of The Long Haul: An Autobiography of Myles Horton, 1990; and by meetings between Horton and Freire during 1987-90 resulting in their book, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change.
The Highlander Folk School: A History of Its Major Programs, 1932-1961.
Wisconsin-born Aimee Isgrig was executive director of the Illinois Commission on Human Relations. She was Myles Horton's second wife, married at Highlander in April 196l. They immediately set out on a fundraising tour to cover Highlander's debts ($7,500), incurred from legal costs in court battles to prevent the school's closing. Her 1989 book, The Highlander Folk School: A History of Its Major Programs, 1932-1961, is based on her 1971 University of Chicago doctoral dissertation of the same title. It relies on original sources and is a carefully documented history of Highlander's programs during its first 30 years. The book is well-crafted, balanced, and carefully objective about Myles Horton's life and career as an adult educator. It does, however, stress, as intended, the positive results of Highlander programs.
John M. Glen's Highlander: No Ordinary School 1932-1962
By far the best all-round study of Myles Horton's career and Highlander programs is John M. Glen's Highlander: No Ordinary School, 1932-1962. He spent 10 years exploring Horton and Highlander. The result first appeared in an exhaustively researched doctoral dissertation completed in 1985 at Vanderbilt University's Department of History, titled "On the Cutting Edge: A History of the Highlander Folk School, 1931-1962." The dissertation is the basis of his 1988 book. His 60 printed pages of Notes indicate the author's scrupulous attention to sources. His l3-printed-page Bibliographical Essay lists manuscript sources, oral interviews, contemporary sources, and secondary sources. The Bibliographical Essay is especially good in listing best sources that place Myles Horton's accomplishments at Highlander in the context of the socioeconomic, political, labor, race relations, and industrial setting of the period. The book is thorough, objective, and well written.
End of Manuscript. See Part 2 of 2 Parts: Myles Horton..bfparker@frontiernet.net <
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