Receive the summer sky

Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current; 

Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air; 

Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you! 

from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

by Walt Whitman 

Long Island Sound on the way from New London to Orient Point

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"My world is not your world, O Census-taker"

In 1922, the poet James Rorty published “What Michael Said to the Census-Taker.”  The poem is not well-known; just 150 pretty copies were printed by a San Francisco antiquarian named Edwin Grabhorn. 

Rorty, who was also an author, editor, and journalist, would become best known for co-founding The New Masses, a leftist magazine associated with the Communist Party of the United States of America.  He also decried Senator Joseph McCarthy and published McCarthy and the Communists, which is thought to have helped diminish the senator’s influence, and other works of social criticism.  

The son of Irish immigrants, born in 1890 in the industrial city of Middletown, N.Y., Rorty graduated from Tufts University. He drove an ambulance during World War I and received the Distinguished Service Cross.  Upon his return to the U.S., Rorty worked in advertising before cynicism set in and he turned to writing full-time.     

“What Michael Said to the Census-Taker” embodies themes to which Rorty returned throughout his life: pacifism, defiance, justice, and hypocrisy.  It’s an interesting poem and well worth reading, which is why I’m posting it here.

"yapping on the roadside of the world"

"Homer sang to me"

"I saw the torches sway and go out."

"When the moon rose over Calvary, I was there."

"A red glow flushed the cheek of the saint in

the stained-glass window"

"I'm Bolshevik!"

"And the jail's open door flapping, 

flapping in the wind."

"If you want to know who I am, I shall tell you"

Double left-click on images to enlarge them.

*The poem is in the public domain.

**The philosopher Richard M. Rorty was the son of James Rorty.    

The Schoolman

Ballroom at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in Des Moines, Iowa, site of the
1921 convention of the National Education Association 

Summer is always hot as hell in the Plains States and that’s inscribed in his soul, for he was a boy in rural Kansas and a young man in Nebraska. 

Now it’s July 1921 and Fred Hunter is ready to handle the heat of Iowa.  He’s on top of the world as he pulls open a bronze door to enter the lobby of the Hotel Fort Des Moines.  He’s ready for anything. 

Fred is president of the National Education Association, the nation’s most prestigious organization of school teachers and administrators.  The 64-year old group’s annual convention is about to begin.

Fred Hunter was a rising star in the
field of public school education.

In and out of the hotel’s ballrooms and lounges, Fred will preside over five days of discussions, debates, and reports.  Four thousand participants are expected.  Most will arrive in time for “Educational Sunday,” as described in the official program: Homer C. Stuntz, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal church of Omaha, will speak about “Educating the Other Half of the World.”

The next morning, in between greetings from college presidents and state officials, the group gathered for an Americanization pageant performed by children in the Des Moines Public Schools.  Since the late nineteenth century, the children of immigrants had been the focus of Americanization programs in the nation’s public schools.

Immigration slowed during the Great War but after the Armistice it surged again.  Consequently, Senators Albert Johnson and David Reed were busy drafting the nation’s harshest immigration law to date.  The Immigration Act of 1924 would encompass the Asian Exclusion Act and, using drastically revised quotas, slam the door on Italians, Jews, and Slavs.   

Back at the convention, female teachers and male administrators discussed salaries, tenure, visual and music education, daylight in the classroom, rural school consolidation, the creation of the junior high school, and educating the Negro.

Excerpt from the NEA's 1921 Report on the Negro in Rural
Education and Country Life.  Utter indifference among those
who could have made a difference.

The leading topic was student health and hygiene, including the trachoma epidemic* and proposals for sex education.  Nearly 20 sessions were devoted to health issues.

Some of the charts concerning student health which
appeared in the 1921 NEA convention program 

But the real buzz at the convention concerned something else entirely:  the application of business practices to schooling.  Educational administrators had fallen under the spell of efficiency.

Styling themselves as executives, the schoolmen – as they now liked to call themselves – sought better ways to monitor truancy and supplies, keep costs down, and standardize teaching practices.  They wanted more student testing.  They wanted to account for every red rubber playground ball. 

And so school administrators shifted their emphasis from education to efficiency.  As school districts grew larger, the schoolmen called in experts and ordered surveys.  Not until the thirties did the trend start to wind down, although arguably it never went away entirely.

Fred was an adherent of the education efficiency movement, but he didn’t stay a schoolman.  He had set his sights on higher education soon after kicking off his career in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he served as superintendent of schools between 1912 and 1917.

During those years, as popular culture stormed across the country, Fred voiced deep concerns.  He worried about the movies, dance halls, and penny arcades where wide-eyed youngsters learned about divorce, adultery, suicide, drinking, and robbery.  Teenagers were dancing the Tango and the Maxixe.  Church socials had been swapped out for bowling parties.    

Fred called for “a constructive program to control the amusement instinct” – build more playgrounds and sponsor activities at local schools.  Insist on vocational guidance for each student.  Establish an “efficiency list” comprised of reliable girls and boys who are available to perform tasks for local merchants.

But he probably didn’t want to keep wrestling with social deviance and the health crisis in the public schools.  As president of the University of Denver and chancellor of the Oregon Higher Education System – he would hold both positions – he could largely detach himself from those problems.

So here’s to Fred, president of the National Education Association, slamming down the gavel on July 3, 1921.  He welcomes everyone to the glittering new ventilated hotel and jovially shakes hands with his fellow schoolmen. 

Despite the sobriquet “Roaring Twenties,” the decade was disastrous for immigrants, minorities, and poor people (although very good for business). 

The schools were besieged by single-issue influencers ranging from the American Legion to Nativists to the Women's Christian Temperance Union.  The teaching of history became a battleground. The juvenile justice system meted out thousands of sentences.  For many public school students, it was the worst of times.

Dr. Frederick Maurice Hunter
1939

*Trachoma is a contagious disease of the eye that can lead to blindness.  Many thought it was brought to the U.S. by immigrants, but it also proliferated among white Appalachians and Native Americans.  

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Three views from the 52nd floor

  

Edith + Edith Again

The H. W. Wilson Company produced The Debaters
Handbook Series between 1910 and about 1950.

In 1907, a Minneapolis publishing executive named Halsey W. Wilson was looking for writers and researchers to work for his growing company.  Spurred by his wife, Justina, he asked a University of Minnesota professor to recommend several alumnae.  A young woman named Edith Phelps left her teaching job and came on board right away. 

In short order, Edith would become a supervisor and editor at the H. W. Wilson Company.  She wrote dozens of guides to such topics as the income tax, immigration, and the League of Nations.  

These became known as “debaters’ handbooks,” and were used by high school and college teams who sparred competitively about the social policies and laws of the rising century. 

But really, the handbooks had a larger significance.  They were particularly useful to people who lived in rural areas, with their reach extending well beyond debaters to men’s and women’s clubs, voting leagues, and adult education programs.  

In fact, making this literature widely available tied into the Progressive ideal of educating as many Americans as possible. 

Halsey W. Wilson
(1868-1954)

In 1913, when Halsey Wilson decided to move his company to New York City, Edith Phelps went with him.  For the next 40 years, she worked in the vanguard of what became known as information sciences.  In 1922, she became an officer of the company. 

Back to the other Edith.

Within several years of Edith Penney’s arrival in New York, she made her mark on one of the most innovative projects in the history of American education: The Eight-Year Study.  This experiment posed a challenge to the time-honored methods of evaluating college applicants long used by admissions officials. 

The study explored whether students’ performance in the college preparatory curriculum was the best indicator of college readiness and future success.  What would happen if students were to pursue an alternative high school curriculum in the humanities and social sciences?

That question lay at the heart of The Eight-Year Study, launched in 1930 by the Progressive Education Association.  That year, high school teachers and administrators started to collaborate with researchers and college professors to revise the traditional curriculum. 

Between 1933 and 1940, 29 public and private high schools and 200 colleges and universities participated in the experiment.

Along came more classes in the manual and fine arts, a shift from survey-style courses to electives that focused on a few texts or a historical era, and the elimination of material that students had regurgitated since elementary school.  There was a concerted effort to embrace unconventional opinions and interpretations.   

The outcomes were positive.  When it came to college the Eight-Year Study students turned out to be as successful as students who followed an established curriculum.  They also developed a wider range of interests outside the classroom.    

As a high school principal and member of two committees that directed the study, Edith Penney became committed to educational reforms that would have been unheard of during her Minnesota childhood.  

Radical as the work seemed during the 1930s, several of the ideas that emerged from The Eight-Year Study have endured.

 The Eight-Year Study was published
in 1942 in five volumes.

Professional development for teachers, testing methods that would provide more accurate and meaningful measures of students’ knowledge, and greater variety and student choice of courses were among the changes.  

High schools also began to push back against onerous college entrance requirements. 

Unfortunately, the results of The Eight-Year Study received little attention when they were published in 1942.  Some critics thought they were inconclusive while others feared change.  Regardless, by the time the war ended, school administrators were not in the mood to innovate.  Every so often, however, the study draws renewed attention.

Edith May Penney retired in 1948 and died at the age of 96 in 1974.

Edith May Phelps retired in 1948 and died at the age of 98 in 1980.

  

Continued from post June 5, 2019.

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The Little House at Melrose

Wedged between two buildings at the Melrose station
along the Metro North line to North White Plains

I have traveled along this train route thousands of times and never noticed this little pink house.  It reminded me, of course, of the book called The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, published in 1942.  

The Little House is a beloved children's classic.  The story goes that the house was built around 1900 far out in the countryside.  Over the years, however, the city encroached with roads, shops, and skyscrapers. 

By 1940, the house was stuck between two tall buildings and coated with soot.  One day, the great-great-granddaughter of the original owner of the house spotted it and decided to move it back where it came from. 

The house was loaded onto a flatbed and driven far from the city.  It ended up perched happily on a hill in the country.

Now, once more it was surrounded by grass and trees, with no noise except for the birds singing.  Once again, the little house could see the stars shining at night.

Who knows the story of the little house at the Melrose station?

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Edith + Edith

Edith May Penney, passport photo, 1930s

Once there were two women named Edith May, and coincidentally both of their surnames started with a “P.”     

On top of such fortuity, both women were born in Minnesota and graduated from the University of Minnesota.  Each launched her career there; each in the field of education.  Both moved to New York and never returned to their native state.  But they did not know each other. 

For a long time I have juxtaposed them in my mind.  It’s not just the coincidences listed above, but also the allure of their American lives.  Neither married.  Both descended from English settlers.  Both were very serious people.  One of the women lived to the age of 98; the other, 96.            

These two could have been Victorians, but they cast off the demon.

Edith Penney was born in 1878, the daughter of Frederick Constant Penney and his wife, May.  The descendants of New England farmers, Frederick and May were swept into the great westward movement during the early 1870s when the Civil War was a fresh memory.  In a wagon they traveled to Minneapolis, whose population would soar from 13,000 in 1870 to 165,000 in 1890.

 

Soon after they arrived, Frederick zoomed into real estate.  He purchased land that would eventually be incorporated into the new city, and improved it by grading and paving the streets.  He made a lot of money, and then became a builder.

Although Frederick lived to the age of 108, he never again saw Canaan, Maine, nor his father, Uriah, and brothers and sisters Sylvanus, Almira, Arvesta, Isaac and Silas.   

However, Frederick and May would return east in 1925 when Edith, now an English teacher, was hired as high school principal in a village just outside New York City.  The family bought property in the town next door – far more affordable – and Frederick built a stone house that still stands, its back to the woods and a meandering creek. 

Edith Phelps was also an educator, but in a different way from Edith Penney.  

Born in 1881 in Beaver Falls, Minnesota, she too was the daughter of an East Coast transplant.  Her father, Charles Levi Phelps, had been a little boy when he and his family departed from New York before the Civil War.  Charles would meet and marry Alice, a Wisconsin native.  He worked in a sheet metal plant, as a grocer, and as a foreman in a flour mill.  The family moved around the city as his income dictated. 

Edith and Aura Phelps, center and right;
University of Minnesota yearbook (1907)

When the University of Minnesota beckoned to Edith and her younger sister, Aura Idella, the parents encouraged them to go.  Upon graduation in 1907, Edith and Aura became teachers.  Then an unusual opportunity came along.

University of Minnesota (1911)

For nearly 10 years, a Minneapolis entrepreneur named Halsey W. Wilson had capitalized on rising literacy among Americans.  He, too, was a graduate of the University of Minnesota, and owned a bookstore near campus.  As the twentieth century loomed on the horizon, Wilson noticed a trend.  His customers increasingly asked for specific articles, or for all articles on one particular topic.  He started reprinting these articles as a side business. 

H.W. Wilson Company Bookstore, circa 1900

But how did the readers learn about the articles they sought?

Only by word of mouth, Wilson realized.  There was no place to go look things up, no compendium that listed recently published material.  So he started to produce digests of articles and books, a book review index, informational handbooks, bibliographies, and, perhaps most famously, the weighty The Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, each volume of which required a crane to be lifted from a library shelf.*

These reference guides may sound dull as dishwater.  But they were extremely important to enthusiastic readers.  Schools, libraries, scholars and students – no one could get information fast enough. 

Now Wilson needed intelligent, motivated employees to make it happen at lightning speed. 

See post on June 26, 2019, for part 2.
*The H. W. Wilson Company is still in the information business, although today its products are largely digital.

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