The Education of Willard W. Beatty

End of the Trail by James Earle Fraser;
monumental plaster cast sculpture was commissioned for the 1915
Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco

In February 1936 while an extreme cold wave swept the nation, Willard W. Beatty boarded a train to go from New York City to Washington, D.C.

The energetic progressive educator had just been appointed Director of Indian Education in the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. 

“Fresh from the rich New York City suburb of Bronxville, where he superintended a model school system operating at an annual cost of $233 per student,” Time Magazine noted sarcastically, Beatty was “prepared to dispense the blessings of his faith to 81,000 young Amerindians.”

“White children’s loss will be Indian children’s gain,” retorted the editor of Progressive Education Magazine.

When FDR’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, tapped Beatty for the position, he hoped to advance the work of what was called the “Indian New Deal.” In the eyes of many government officials, academics, and reformers, the Indian New Deal presented the last opportunity for the federal government to begin to undo its institutionalized oppression of American Indians.

Now Willard Beatty would take up a challenge that had interested him at least since his college graduation in 1913 – perhaps further back, for he had awakened early to this persecution.

That occurred because he grew up under the wing of his uncle Earle A. Walcott, having been orphaned at the age of ten. It happened that his uncle was a civic leader, author, journalist – well, really a polymath with a zeal for reform – who became involved in nearly every issue that affected the state of California between 1890 and his death in 1931.

Earle Walcott reared Willard in San Francisco during remarkable times. He introduced him to history, art, literature, and more. After Willard graduated from high school and went off to Berkeley, Earle and his intellectually precocious nephew remained close.  

Willard W. Beatty, 1913 
(UC-Berkeley yearbook)

The development of deep lifelong interests, especially if they originate outside the classroom, has always intrigued me. There’s schooling, on the one hand, and education on the other.

My guess is that Willard Beatty’s attraction to American Indian culture, and his concern about the obstacles faced by Native Americans, grew out of two particular occurrences.

The first relates to The Commonwealth Club, a public affairs forum founded in San Francisco in 1903, whose members studied Progressive Era issues.

They were journalists, educators, judges, legislators, architects, philanthropists, urban planners, businessmen, etc. Over the years, they explored problems that ranged from prisons to child labor to conservation. The club become known nationally for tackling controversy. Even politicians considered its work above reproach.

Commonwealth Club, 1905 record; 
Earle Walcott is chair of Social Welfare

A founding member of The Commonwealth Club, Earle Walcott became its secretary in 1909. That year, the program included “Indian Rights and Wrongs.” Walcott invited three guests to make remarks following the presentation.

First, an attorney named C. E. Kelsey, a Special Agent for the Bureau of Indian Affairs assigned to take a census of non-reservation Indians who lived in the state,

Second, a Berkeley anthropologist, Alfred Lewis Kroeber, whose specialization was the language and culture of West Coast Indians,

Third, Cornelia Taber, chair of the Northern California Indian Association which aimed to teach self-sufficiency and the gospel.

These three people represented the way things were for California’s Native Americans around the turn of the 20^th century. They meant well, but it was business as usual with negligible improvement in quality of life, education, and opportunity.

However, historians consider the 1909 meeting an important step in bringing attention to grievous policies. Willard Beatty, whose uncle drew him into the work of the Commonwealth Club when he was quite young, surely found the presentation enlightening.  

***

A second event animated Beatty’s interest in American Indians: San Francisco’s 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition.

The 1906 earthquake created an opportunity for the city to reinvent itself. Among the most vocal proponents of a new urban vision, Earle Walcott made the case for hosting a world’s fair even as the city smoldered. Within a year, he had helped to form the Panama Pacific Exposition Company.

Corporate sponsorship figured large in the exposition, which drew nearly 19 million visitors. Ironically, one of the railroad companies, whose expansion devastated American Indians, built a pavilion where tribal members performed. In 1913, the San Francisco Municipal Record reported:

A reproduction of the Grand Canyon of Arizona and the Pueblo Indian village will be the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad’s exhibit at the 1915 Universal Exposition.    Indian tribes and villages will include representatives of the Pueblo, San Domingo, Navajo, Zuni and Hopi tribes of Indians. They will present their dances and customs in native costume. . .

The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad built a "Grand Canyon exhibit"
for the 1915 exposition

Elsewhere at the fair, tour-goers viewed the Smithsonian Institution’s vast collection of photographs of American Indians, as well as “specimens showing the advancement of the Indian in civilization” – blankets and rugs created by students at government-run Indian boarding schools.  

Neither The Commonwealth Club nor the organizers of the 1915 Exposition could claim that their work improved the lives of the California Indians.  

However, the 1909 meeting and 1915 exposition did inspire Willard Beatty.

Years later, as Director of Indian Education, Beatty closed the notorious boarding schools and opened day schools. He introduced bilingualism to Indian schools and added Native American culture and crafts to the curriculum, which tied into the progressive education philosophy of “learning by doing.”

Beatty addressed hundreds of issues in Native American life until he retired from the Department of Indian Education in 1952. These included health, discrimination, kinship, and poverty.

Today, historians debate Beatty’s legacy, especially his postwar tilt toward a policy of assimilation -- which he thought inevitable. Beatty’s nephew, who spent some time in the field, once told me that the family connection proved to be a mixed blessing.

Still, there is the story of young Willard Beatty; filled with passion, committed to action.

See other posts: January 23 & 16, 2016; November 4, 2015

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/08/the-education-of-willard-w-beatty.html

Through the Hourglass: The Education of Willard W. Beatty

San Francisco Story

Willard W. Beatty, age 15

The child’s parents, Mabel and William Beatty, met at the University of California-Berkeley during the early 1880s when the university was a scant fifteen years old. With Mabel’s younger sister Maude and older brother Earle, the couple made a foursome.

Student life was in full swing. Yearbooks reveal that Mabel, Maude, Earle and William participated enthusiastically in literary and glee clubs. All served as class officers. Earle hoped to become a novelist and the two sisters, teachers. The eldest of three brothers whose parents emigrated from Ireland, William planned to study law.

Mabel Walcott and William Beatty were
both active in student organizations at Berkeley.

“We have laid her course,” wrote Beatty of his peers in his essay as historian of the class of 1883; “straight for the noblest and highest.”

Yet that he could not do. In one of William Beatty’s early twists of the truth, he reported that his father, a policeman, had “conducted important milling operations and achieved large fortune several times.” Deception would be William’s downfall.

But for now, he studied law, set up a practice, and wooed Mabel for seven years while she lived and taught school in Livermore, on the eastern edge of the Bay Area. 

I imagine that Mabel had reservations about William since the courtship took so long. 

Finally married in 1890, they moved into an apartment in San Francisco and welcomed baby Willard a year later. William’s practice flourished. He commissioned an elegant home to be built at 2047 Pine Street, where the family moved in 1900.  

Mabel Beatty's observations of Willard's first year were included
in Notes on the Development of a Child, the 1899 thesis of
Milicent Washburn Shinn, a pioneering child psychologist who earned
a B.A. and a PhD at Berkeley.

But one year later Mabel died, and within a few months William fled creditors as a major embezzlement came to light.

“No one accuses him of dissipation,” reported one newspaper.  “He only lived beyond his means.  Jewelers, wine dealers, dry goods merchants, tailors, furniture houses, butchers, and vegetable vendors have claims against him.” The Pine Street house was sold and 10-year old Willard went to live with his uncle Earle.

Earle Ashley Walcott, around 1910 

Earle started his career as a journalist. His first venture, the Lodi Valley Review, tanked after nine months. He moved on quickly to edit the San Franciscan and then the San Francisco Chronicle. After working as a correspondent for the newly-established Los Angeles Tribune, he became editor of the San Francisco Examiner and finally the San Francisco Post. 

By 1910, he had published three novels – Blindfolded, The Open Door, and The Apple of Discord -- thrillers set in the Bay Area which drew on his detailed knowledge of the city’s underbelly: 

I have kept pretty closely to California in my writings. . . I’ve gone back to an earlier day in the city’s history – perhaps led by boyhood impressions. . . I have also taken the modern city a few months before the great conflagration, [now] replaced by cleaner if less picturesque structures.

California politics, culture, and social change – Earle Walcott lived and breathed in the thick of it.

He worked with the progressive Governor Hiram Johnson, the reform Mayor James Phelan, and the naturalist John Muir. He debated the future of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, public education, and California’s treatment of American Indians. 

Earle Walcott knew the traveler and author Robert Louis Stevenson, who counted Sonoma and Napa counties among his favorite places. He participated in the Bay Area’s Bohemian arts scene during the late 19^th century, mixing with Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and Frank Norris.

Over time, Earle focused increasingly on the civic arena. In “Calamity’s Opportunity,” an essay which appeared in the Overland Monthly soon after the San Francisco Earthquake, Walcott wrote: “The great fire gives to San Francisco the opportunity to snatch profit out of disaster.” 

He urged adoption of a grand city plan that the Chicago architect Daniel H. Burnham had presented to the board of commissioners one year earlier.

In 1909, Earle became executive secretary of the prestigious Commonwealth Club of California, whose members studied burning issues of the day. From this elevation, he set much of the reform agenda for the state as well as his city for two decades to come.

And in 1912, Mayor James Rolph appointed Earle to the Civil Service Commission. Of course he soon became its chair and continued to affect nearly every aspect of life in San Francisco until his death in 1931. 

Yet –

Arguably, Earle’s greatest influence was reflected in his nephew, who came under his wing at such a young age. Earle’s ideas and interests would kindle Willard’s lifelong pursuits.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/san-francisco-story.html

See also 2015 posts: November 4 + 11 + 29, December 2; January 12 + 16, 2016, August 3, 2016.