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.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/06/edith-edith-again.html?m=1

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?

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/06/the-little-house-at-melrose.html?m=1

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.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/06/edith-edith.html?m=1

The Newspaper Map

Some New York newsstands still use wooden blocks to keep
papers from blowing away. The Sun ceased publication in 1950.

When I was growing up, my father’s job involved writing, editing, and a bit of public relations.  As a result, he often received promotional material that combined imaginative graphics with fun facts, and he would diligently pack these items into his leather briefcase and bring them home to my brother and me.

One of our treasures was a poster of the U.S. presidents that stopped at LBJ.  We would spread it out on the wood floor and pore over it, and to this day its configuration of the presidents is how I envision them: in rows on shiny pale blue paper, their portraits in black and white and framed by ovals.  They come to me in heavenly groups of seven (joke) – Washington to Van Buren, William Henry Harrison to Buchanan, Lincoln to Benjamin Harrison, and so on.  

William Henry Harrison framed by an oval

My father also brought home a map of the U.S. marked with all of the major daily newspapers.  The names of the papers were confounding and – because of their association with unfamiliar cities – rather exotic.  

Cleveland Plain Dealer

New Orleans Times-Picayune

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Sacramento Bee

Jackson Clarion-Ledger

Des Moines Register

Hartford Courant

San Jose Mercury News

Most of these newspapers were founded well before the Civil War.  The Hartford Courant was founded in 1764.  Obviously, the names are vintage and contain words that are not in common usage today.

Cleveland Plain Dealer, circa World War I

A plain dealer was an honest broker.  Registers and ledgers referred to the endless lists of information, usually related to debt, travel and mail, which occupied many pages of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century newspapers.  Bee possibly meant a group of people working together, like a sewing bee.  But who knows?  Perhaps it referred to the insect bee which gathered and spread news as if it were pollen.

Mercury must have been derived from the Roman god Mercury, who was a messenger.  The picayune was a Spanish coin whose name came from the French word picaillon.  Courant, also from the French, means running.   

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1897

It’s nearly impossible to write about newspapers without bemoaning their slow death.  Yet despite hundreds of consolidations during the past several decades, many of the original names -- or vestiges of them -- remain.  The 1982 merger of the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution resulted, for example, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  That’s pretty remarkable, considering our unsentimental penchant for tossing out the old. 

Returning to the sixties.

After my father brought the map home, it took a few days to memorize the names of the newspapers.  I remember walking home from school on a spring afternoon, announcing them inside my head as if it were 1941 and I was a big band leader, introducing the members of the rhythm section.   

 Jackson Clarion-Ledger
Jackson, Mississippi, 1912

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/05/the-newspaper-map.html?m=1

Back to the Future: a century after the 1920 census

Census taker (lower right) with American Indians, 1910

An entire century will separate the 1920 and 2020 censuses, so one would think that the issues surrounding the two surveys are as different as night and day. But that is not the case. Immigration and political power were front and center 100 years ago, just as they are today.

The Trump Administration’s decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census has created a national uproar and drawn federal lawsuits and appeals. Opponents argue that adding the question will discourage participation among non-citizens and even legal immigrants, causing an under-count of both of those groups. Using that faulty data, they claim, federal agencies then will apportion resources both inadequately and unevenly, hurting low-income and marginalized communities through the coming decade.

Adding questions to the census is hardly unprecedented.  Since the first census in 1790, the number and type of questions in the survey have been changed periodically. The 1920 census, for example, added several questions.

Woman census taker in Chinatown,
New York City, 1920

Like the proposed 2020 citizenship question, these were directed at immigrants: What was the respondent’s native language? What was the native language of the respondent’s parents?  When was the respondent naturalized? The questions came at a time when both parties urged greater restriction of immigration, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe, in response to the widespread post-World War I public backlash against immigrants. 

Some immigrants may have been scared off by concerns about their status. But the people who were really frightened by the prospect of that 1920 census were members of Congress.

What did these legislators fear? Just like today, it was the reapportionment of seats in the House of Representatives. Reapportionment is mandated by the Constitution to assure that representation reflects the distribution of the population. It occurs every ten years, based on census information.

In 1910, when the results of the census were made known, they revealed a total population of 92,228,496, with a rural population of 50,164,495 and an urban population of 42,064,001. Obviously, the next census would report a population greater than 100 million.

Far more significant would be the shift from rural to urban; the next census would show that – for the first time in American history – more people would reside in U.S. cities than on farms.

Alfred Stieglitz's iconic photograph of 
immigrants, "The Steerage" (1907)
(Permission of the Getty Trust)

Thus, following the 1920 census, the nation would face a major shift in political power. Reapportionment would dictate that less populous states would lose House seats and urban areas would gain them. That was why some rural House members publicly declared, as early as 1918, that the census had little value. Others urged that immigrants be eliminated from the count altogether.

Reapportionment brings a new political balance each decade, but it also can mark significant cultural and social change. Hence the Anti-Saloon League hustled politicians to rush through Prohibition before the House was reapportioned, for a constitutional amendment to ban liquor never would have passed if urban legislators were the majority in the House. 

The census became a metaphor, as in this compelling
1922 poem by the radical writer and activist James Rorty.

Just seven months after the enumerators – as they were called – set forth with their questionnaires, the government revealed the first results of the new census. Ten states would lose rural seats (Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Vermont and Virginia) while ten states would gain urban seats (New York, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas).  

The prospect of such a drastic political realignment led the House Census Committee to violate its constitutional duty by repeatedly postponing and voting down reapportionment after the final census report. It became a perennial dance.

In their first attempt to avoid such drastic reapportionment, Congressional legislators proposed a measure that would have enlarged the House to 500 seats from 435 seats. It was voted down.

In 1922, President Harding said he’d had enough and insisted that reapportionment occur by March 1923. That vote was deferred. And so it went.

President Warren G. Harding

In 1924, the census committee announced that it would drop reapportionment because “adoption of the 1920 census would seriously affect agriculture and farming sections.”

In 1926, the House again rejected apportionment, claiming that it was not mandatory. Despite public anger and editorial outrage, the House again refused to move on reapportionment in 1928.

Finally, after the results of the 1930 census were announced, the House acted. But the damage had been done.   

If Congress had performed its duty, the Immigration Act of 1924 would not have been enacted. That xenophobic law set severe quotas for Eastern European immigrants and completely excluded most Asians, Indians, and Arabs. And Prohibition likely would have been repealed far earlier than 1933, due to overwhelming opposition among urban residents. 

This 1911 book was one in a series about
boys' adventures in various professions. 

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard arguments about the Trump Administration’s move to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The decision will dramatically affect reapportionment.

However the Court rules, it is remarkable to behold how closely the issues surrounding the 2020 census echo the past. Again we face a major shift in political power – 100 years ago it was toward the cities; in 2020, if the question is included, it may be away from the cities.

Just as significantly, the decision has the potential to stave off the future. When Congress refused to act on the 1920 census for ten years, it put off major changes in American life related to mass culture and the growing presence of minorities. In 2020, if the question is included and influence tilts back toward rural states, we too may be merely postponing a social transformation.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/04/back-to-future-century-after-1920-census.html?m=1

Full moon from the train

Photos by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/04/full-moon-from-train.html?m=1

Spring Tracery

Central Park

Photo by Claudia Keenan

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/04/springtime-tracery.html?m=1