>Part 1 of 3 Parts. General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) and Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-August 30, 1869.

Part 1 of 3 Parts. General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) and Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-August 30, 1869.

By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270. Email bfparker@frontiernet.net

The hot spring health spas of Virginia were the first gathering places of southern and northern elites after the Civil War. It was at the Greenbrier Hotel, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the most popular of the hot spring spas, that Robert E. Lee and George Peabody met by chance for a few weeks during July 23-August 30, 1869. For each this meeting was a symbolic turn from Civil War bitterness toward reconciliation and the lifting power of education.

Lee was then president of Washington College, Lexington, Virginia (1865-70, renamed Washington and Lee University from 1871). Peabody had just (June 29, 1869) doubled to $2 million his Peabody Education Fund, begun February 7, 1867, to advance public education in the South.

Historical circumstances had made both Lee and Peabody famous in their time, Lee’s fame more lasting; Peabody’s, strangely, soon forgotten. Yet when they met in 1869 Peabody was arguably better known in the English speaking world and more widely appreciated.

For Lee, age 62, hero of the lost Confederate cause, it was next to the last summer of life. For Peabody, age 74, best known philanthropist of his time, it was the very last summer of life. They were the center of attention that summer of 1869 at “The Old White.” They ate together in the public dining room, walked arm in arm to their nearby bungalows, were applauded by visitors, and were photographed together and with others of prominence.

Robert E. Lee’s Father

Born in Stratford, Westmoreland County, Virginia, Robert Edward Lee was the son of Revolutionary War hero Henry Lee (1756-1818), popularly known as “Light Horse Harry.” Henry Lee was a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress (1785-88), member of the Virginia Convention for the Continental Congress (1788), served in Virginia’s General Assembly (1789-91), was Virginia Governor (1792-95), was appointed by George Washington to command troops to suppress the “Whiskey Insurrection” in Western Pennsylvania (1794), served in the U. S. Sixth Congress (1799-1801), and last served in the War of 1812.

Despite this impressive record (Congress voted him a gold medal for his American Revolutionary War exploits) Henry Lee was a less than satisfactory husband, a poor family breadwinner, an absentee father to his five children, was often hounded by creditors, and was several times imprisoned for debt.
Robert E. Lee was age six when he last saw his father, who left to regain his health in the West Indies. Young Lee was age eleven when his father died. Robert E. Lee’s biographer, Emory M. Thomas wrote: “All his life, Robert Lee knew his father only at a great distance.”

Robert E. Lee’s Career

Robert E. Lee attended private schools in Alexandria, Virginia. At age 18, with family finances prohibiting attending a private college, Robert E. Lee, bent on a military career, applied for admission to the tuition free U. S. Military Academy, West Point, New York. His family and friends sent petitions and letters of recommendation to Secretary of War John C. Calhoun (1782-1850). In the summer of 1825 R. E. Lee entered West Point as one of 107 new cadets.

Forty-seven of that entering class graduated, Lee among them. He was an exemplary cadet, without a single demerit, held every cadet post of honor, and graduated second in his class of 1829. He was assigned to the engineer corps where he soon won a high reputation. On June 30, 1831, two years after graduating, he married Mary Randolph Custis, daughter of a grandson of Mrs. George Washington (Martha Washington, 1731-1802).

Distinguishing himself as chief engineer in river drainage and fort-building projects, he served in the Mexican War, where General Winfield Scott (1786-1866), valuing his military and engineering skills, constantly consulted him.

Lee was superintendent of West Point (1852-55). He was the United States military officer ordered to put down the John Brown (1800-59) insurrection at Harper’s Ferry federal arsenal, Virginia, October 16, 1859. Abolitionist Brown’s fanatical attempt to steal federal weapons in order to arm slaves for an insurrection against the South helped precipitate the bitter four-year Civil War.

Faced with the “irrepressible conflict,” General Winfield Scott reportedly told President Abraham Lincoln that Lee was worth 50,000 men. Lee was offered command of Federal forces, April 18, 1861, but declined. He told Francis Preston Blair (1791-1876), who approached him on behalf of President Lincoln: “…though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States.” Loyal to Virginia, Lee resigned from the United States Army, April 20, 1861.

In Richmond Virginia, at the request of the Virginia Convention, he was placed in command of the Virginia forces, April 23, 1861. Lee’s organizing ability, grasp of military strategy, and his integrity held out for four bitter Civil War years against overwhelming Union strength in numbers, manpower, and economic resources. Faced by inevitable crushing defeat Lee surrendered to General U. S. Grant, Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, April 9, 1865.

He told his defeated troops: “…You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that our merciful God extend to you his blessing and protection.”

With the Confederate cause lost, Lee sought obscurity and declined to lend his name to commercial ventures. When first invited to the presidency of small, obscure and struggling Washington College, Lexington, Virginia (August 1865), Lee hesitated. He wrote the trustees that he was “an object of censure” to the North, that his presence might “cause injury” to the college.

Knowing that Lee’s name and fame would attract students, the trustees persisted. Lee accepted. His biographer Emory M. Thomas wrote that Lee quickly “established himself as a presence in Lexington,” and that in the five years of life left to him (1865-1870) became “the savior of Washington College.”

Greenbrier Hotel, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia

The first inn at what is now the Greenbrier Hotel, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, was built in 1780, long before West Virginia became a state in 1863. It was a favorite resort for southern elites who gathered there to meet relatives and friends, to rest and recuperate, and to drink and bathe in its healthful mineral springs. Lee, with heart trouble, needing rest, was an occasional health spa visitor, particularly at the Greenbrier.

At the Greenbrier the summer of 1868, Lee heard that some young northern visitors were receiving a frosty reception. He asked the young southern women who surrounded him if one of them would go with him to greet and welcome the young northern guests.

The young lady accompanying him, Christina Bond, asked, “General Lee, did you never feel resentment towards the North?” She recorded his quiet reply, “I believe I may say, looking into my own heart, and speaking as in the presence of my God, that I have never known one moment of bitterness or resentment.” The next summer of 1869 at the Greenbrier he met George Peabody for the first and only time.

Peabody’s Career
George Peabody was third of eight children born to a poor family in Danvers (renamed Peabody, April 13, 1868), 19 miles from Boston, Massachusetts. After four years in a district school (1803-07) and four years apprenticed in a general store (1807-10), the 16-year-old in 1811 worked in his oldest brother’s clothing store in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

His father’s death that year (May 13, 1811) left the family in debt, their Danvers home mortgaged, with the mother and five younger siblings forced to live with relatives. The Great Fire in Newburyport (May 31, 1811) occurred eleven days after his father’s death. The fire, coming as it did during an economic depression in New England, led many to leave that town and migrate to the South.

An improvident paternal uncle whose Newburyport store had burned in the fire encouraged his 16-year-old nephew, George Peabody, to open with him a drygoods store in Georgetown, District of Columbia. Needing credit, backed by Newburyport merchant Prescott Spaulding’s (1781-1864) recommendation, Peabody secured a $2,000 consignment of goods, basis of his first commercial venture in the Georgetown drygoods store (1812).

His uncle soon left for other enterprises. Young Peabody operated the store and was also a pack peddler selling goods to homes and stores in the D. C. area. With Washington, D. C., under siege by the British he volunteered and served briefly in the War of 1812.

Fellow soldier and older experienced merchant Elisha Riggs, Sr. (1779-1853), took the 19-year-old Peabody as traveling junior partner in Riggs, Peabody & Co. (1814-29), Georgetown, D.C. The firm, which imported clothing and other merchandise for sale to U. S. wholesalers, moved in 1815 to Baltimore and by 1822 had Philadelphia and New York City warehouses.

Peabody early took on the support of his family. He sent clothes and money to his mother and siblings, and by 1816, at age 21, he paid off the family debts and restored his mother and siblings to their Danvers home. Handling the Peabody home deed, Newburyport, Massachusetts, lawyer Ebon Mosely wrote George Peabody (December 16, 1816): “I cannot but be pleased with the filial affection which seems to evince you to preserve the estate for a Parent.”

Peabody paid for the education at Bradford Academy (now Bradford College), Bradford, Massachusetts, of five younger relatives. He bought a house in West Bradford for his relatives studying at the academy, where his mother also lived for several years.

He later paid for the complete education of nephew Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-99), first U. S. paleontologist at Yale University; nephew George Peabody Russell (1835-1909), Harvard-trained lawyer, niece Julia Adelaide (née Peabody) Chandler (b. 1835), and others.

Deprived, as I was…

Peabody’s May 18, 1831, letter to a nephew named after him, George Peabody (1815-32), son of his oldest brother David Peabody (1790-1841), hinted at his motive for educating his relatives and for his later philanthropies.
Particularly fond of this nephew, Peabody paid for his schooling at Bradford Academy and received regular reports of his nephew’s progress. When this nephew asked his uncle for financial help to attend Yale College, Peabody replied in a poignant letter.

Peabody wrote his nephew: (his underlining): “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.”
Sadly, this favorite nephew died at age 17 on September 24, 1832, in Boston of scarlet fever, his potential unfulfilled.

Selling Maryland’s Bonds Abroad

As purchasing partner in the United States and abroad for Riggs, Peabody & Co. (renamed Peabody, Riggs & Co., 1829-48), Peabody made four buying trips to Europe during 1827-37.

In the mid-1830s several states began internal improvement of roads, canals, and railroads requiring European investment capital through state bonds sold abroad. In 1836 the Maryland legislature voted to finance the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. On his fifth trip abroad, February 1837, Peabody represented both his firm and was also appointed one of three agents to sell abroad Maryland’s $8 million bond issue.

In the financial Panic of 1837 the two other agents returned home without success. Peabody remained in London the rest of his life (1837-69), 32 years, except for three visits to the United States. Nine U. S. states in financial difficulty, including Maryland, stopped interest payments on their bonds sold abroad. Peabody faced a depressed market, with British and European investors angry at nonpayment of interest on their U. S. state bonds.

Peabody bombarded Maryland officials with letters urging that interest payments on Maryland bonds be resumed, and retroactively. His letters were published in U. S. newspapers. Abroad, he also publicly assured foreign investors that interest nonpayment was temporary and that repayment would be retroactive. He finally sold his part of the Maryland bonds to London’s Baring Brothers.
The Panic of 1837 eased. The nine defaulting states resumed their bond interest payments. Peabody’s faith that they would do so was justified and appreciated. His integrity became known to an ever-wider circle.

Some minor fame came to Peabody when the Maryland Legislature (1847-48), realizing what he had done, voted him unanimous thanks for upholding its credit abroad and for declining the $60,000 commission due him.

He had not wanted to burden the state treasury during its financial difficulty. In transmitting these resolutions of thanks, Maryland Governor Philip Francis Thomas (1810-90) wrote Peabody, “To you, sir…the thanks of the State were eminently due.”

London-Based Banker

In London, Peabody gradually reduced his trade in drygoods and commodities. Under the firm name of George Peabody & Co. (1838-64) he made the transition from merchant to international banker. He sold U. S. state bonds to finance roads, canals, and railroads; helped sell the second Mexican War bonds; bought, sold, and shipped European iron and later steel rails for U. S. western railroads; and helped finance the Atlantic Cable Co.

Asked in an interview, August 22, 1869, how and when he made most of his money, the London-based securities broker and international banker said, “I made pretty much of it in 20 years from 1844 to 1864. Everything I touched within that time seemed to turn to gold. I bought largely of United States securities when their value was low and they advanced greatly.”

Morgan Partnership

Often ill and urged by business friends to take a partner, Peabody on October 1, 1854, at age 59, took as partner Boston merchant Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90), whose 19-year-old son John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) began his banking career as New York City agent for George Peabody & Co., London On retirement, October 1, 1864, unmarried, without a son, and knowing he would no longer control his firm, Peabody asked that his name be withdrawn.

George Peabody & Co. (1838-64) continued in London as J. S. Morgan & Co. (1864-1909), Morgan Grenfell & Co. (1910-18), Morgan Grenfell & Co., Ltd. (1918-89), and Deutsche Morgan Grenfell (since 1989), a German-owned international banking firm.

Peabody was thus the root of the J. P. Morgan international banking firm. He spent the last five years of his life (1864-69) looking after his philanthropic institutions, begun in 1852 with the motto: “Education: a debt due from present to future generations.”

Philanthropist

Peabody early told intimates and said publicly in 1850 that he would found a useful educational institution in every town and city where he had lived and worked. His 1827 will left $4,000 for charity. His 1832 will left $27,000 for educational philanthropy out of a $135,000 estate.

Founded Seven Libraries

Ultimately his philanthropic gifts of some $10 million included seven Peabody institute libraries, with lecture halls and lecture funds. These were, like the lyceums and the later chautauquas, the adult education centers of their time.

Later, Andrew Carnegie’s (1835-1919) libraries and other funds, John D. Rockefeller’s (1839-1937) funds and foundations, Henry Ford’s (1863-1947) funds, and those of others far surpassed Peabody’s philanthropy. But it was Peabody’s gifts which first initiated, set policies, patterns, and inspired the later vast educational foundation movement.

The seven Peabody Institute Libraries are in: Peabody, Danvers, Newburyport, and Georgetown (all in Massachusetts); and in Baltimore, where the Peabody Institute of Baltimore (from 1857, total gift $1.4 million) consisted of a unique reference library whose books from European estates Peabody, through agents, bought and shipped to Baltimore. The Library of Congress early borrowed from its rare book collection.

The Peabody Institute of Baltimore also had an art gallery, lecture hall and lecture fund, a Conservatory of Music, and gave annual prizes to Baltimore’s best public school students. In 1982 the Baltimore Reference Library and the Peabody Conservatory of Music became part of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Other Peabody libraries are in 6-Thetford, Vermont, where he visited his maternal grandparents at age 15, and in 7-Georgetown, D.C.

Three Museums of Science

He endowed the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (anthropology); the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University (paleontology), both 1866; and what is now the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (1867), containing maritime history and Essex County historical documents, including most of George Peabody’s letters and papers.

Other Gifts

He gave the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of Mechanic Arts (Baltimore) $1,000 for a chemistry laboratory and school (1851); Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, $25,000 for a mathematics professorship (1866); Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, $25,000, for a mathematics and civil engineering professorship (November 1866); and former general, then President Robert E. Lee’s Washington College (renamed Washington and Lee University, 1871), Lexington, Virginia, $60,000 for a mathematics professorship (September 1869).

He gave $20,000 publication funds each to the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore (November 5, 1866), and the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (January 1, 1867). He gave to the United States Sanitary Commission to aid Civil War orphans, widows, and disabled veterans $10,000 (1864). To the Vatican charitable San Spirito Hospital, Rome, Italy, he gave $19,300 (April 5, 1867). He built a Memorial Congregational Church in his mother’s memory in her hometown, Georgetown, Massachusetts, $70,000 (1866).

For patriotic causes he gave to the Lexington Monument in what is now Peabody, Massachusetts, $300 (1835); the Bunker Hill Memorial, Boston, Massachusetts, $500 (June 3, 1845); and the Washington Monument, Washington, D. C., $1,000 (July 4, 1854).

Peabody Education Fund

His most influential U. .S. gift was the $2 million Peabody Education Fund (PEF, 1867-1914) to promote public schools in the eleven former Confederate states plus West Virginia, added because of its poverty. For 47 years the PEF helped promote public schools in the devastated post-Civil War South, focusing on public elementary and secondary schools, then on teacher training institutes and normal colleges, and finally on rural public schools.

Continued in Part 2 of 3 Parts.

. Comments, corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net

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>Part 2 of 3 Parts. General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) and Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-August 30, 1869.

Part 2 of 3 Parts. General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) and Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-August 30, 1869.

By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270. Email bfparker@frontiernet.net

Without precedent, the PEF was the first multimillion dollar U.S. educational foundation. Historians have cited its example and policies as the model forerunner of all subsequent significant United States educational funds and foundations.

Famous in his time, largely forgotten since, even underrated by most historians, George Peabody was in fact the founder of modern American philanthropy.

Many of the over 50 distinguished PEF trustees (during 1867-1914) who held high offices in the U. S. were also trustees of other later, larger, and richer funds and foundations. They thus helped spread the PEF’s influence far and wide.

The common goal of these late nineteenth century, early twentieth century funds and foundations was to use private foundation wealth as levers to help solve education, health, and economic welfare problems in the U. S. South, elsewhere in the U. S., and worldwide.

High Offices Held by PEF Trustees
Twelve of the over 50 PEF trustees were state legislators, two were U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justices, six were U.S. ambassadors, seven U.S. House of Representatives members, two U. S. generals, one U. S. Navy admiral, one U. S. Surgeon-General, three Confederate generals, seven U.S. Senators, three Confederate Congressmen, two church bishops, six U. S. cabinet officers, three U.S. presidents (U.S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Grover Cleveland), or eight U.S. presidents if Peabody Normal College and its predecessor institutions are included, and three financiers.

The three financiers who were PEF trustees included J. P. Morgan, himself an art collector and philanthropist of note; Anthony Joseph Drexel (1826-93), inspired as PEF trustee to found Drexel University, Philadelphia; and Paul Tulane (1801-87), inspired as PEF trustee to found Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Permitted to disband when their mission was accomplished, the PEF trustees gave (1914): $474,000 to fourteen state university colleges of education in the South; $90,000 to Winthrop Normal College, South Carolina; and funds to the Southern Education Fund, Atlanta, still aiding African-American education. The bulk of the PEF, $1.5 million (required matching funds made it $3 million), went to George Peabody College for Teachers (1914-79), Nashville, sited next to Vanderbilt University, which still thrives as Peabody College of Vanderbilt University (hereafter PCofVU, since 1979).

Peabody College of Vanderbilt University

Traced genealogically in Nashville for some 220 years, Davidson Academy (1785-1806) was chartered by North Carolina eleven years before Tennessee’s statehood; rechartered as Cumberland College (1806-26); rechartered as the University of Nashville (1826-75); rechartered as Peabody Normal College (1875-1909, created and supported by the PEF); rechartered as George Peabody College for Teachers (1914-79), which continues as PCofVU (from 1979).

Faced with greater class and race divisions and with greater financial difficulties than counterpart colleges in other U.S. sections, what is now Peabody College of Vanderbilt University rose phoenix-like again and again to produce educational leaders for the South, the nation, and the world.

Peabody Homes of London

Wanting to do something for the working poor of London, Peabody followed social reformer Lord Shaftesbury’s (1801-85) suggestion–that low-cost housing was the London poor’s greatest need. Peabody gave a total of $2.5 million (from 1862) to subsidize low rent model housing in London.

Some 34,500 low income Londoners (March 31, 1999) lived in 14,000 Peabody apartments on 83 estates in 26 of London’s boroughs. The Peabody Trust, which built and administers the Peabody Homes of London, valued at some $1.53 billion, is Peabody’s most successful philanthropy (and least known by Americans).

Last U.S. Visit

Long ill, sensing his end was near, George Peabody made his last four-month U. S. visit, June 8 to September 29, 1869, to see family and friends and to add gifts to his U. S. institutes. Greatly weakened, he was met in New York City by intimates who also sensed this as his last U.S. visit.

The New York Times, June 9, 1869, reported his arrival “in advanced age and declining health….” “Wherever he goes,” the article read, “he is worried by begging letters from individuals expecting him to get them out of some scrape… Now that he is in America he should be left to the quiet and repose he so greatly needs.”

He went to Boston (June 10, 1869), then rested in Salem, Massachusetts, at nephew George Peabody Russell’s (1835-1909) home.

On July 6, 1869, his nephew wrote to his uncle’s intimate business friend William Wilson Corcoran (1798-1888), who was at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia: “…Mr. Peabody…is weaker than when he arrived…. He has…decided to go to the White Sulphur Springs…[and asks you to] arrange accommodations for himself, and servant, for Mrs. Russell and myself.”

In mid-June 1869 Peabody quietly visited the Boston Peace Jubilee and Music Festival and listened to the chorus. At intermission, Boston Mayor Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff (1810-74) announced Peabody’s presence, which brought “a perfect storm of applause.”

In a Sunday, June 20, sermon closing the Boston Peace Jubilee, the Reverend William Rounseville Alger (1822-1905) mentioned that George Peabody had done more to keep the peace between Britain and America than a hundred demagogues to destroy it.

On June 29, 1869, in more than doubling his fund for southern education, he wrote his trustees: “I now give you additional bonds [worth] $1,384,000….. I do this [hoping] that with God’s blessing…it may…prove a permanent and lasting boon, not only to the Southern States, but to the whole of our dear country….” He added $50,000 to his first Peabody Institute Library (Peabody, Massachusetts, total gift $217,600). At the July 14, 1869, dedication of the Peabody Institute Library, Danvers, Massachusetts (to which he gave a total of $100,000), he said: “I can never expect to address you again collectively…. I hope that this institution will be…a source of pleasure and profit.”

At a July 16, 1869, reception, Peabody Institute Library, Peabody, Massachusetts, his 30 guests who arrived by special train from Boston included former Massachusetts Governor Clifford Claflin (1818-1905), Boston Mayor Nathaniel Bradstreet Shurtleff, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner (1811-74), and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94). Poet Holmes read aloud a poem titled “George Peabody” written specially for the occasion.

Two days later (July 18, 1869) Holmes described Peabody in a letter to U.S. Minister to Britain John Lothrop Motley (1814-77) as “the Dives who is going to Abraham’s bosom and I fear before a great while….” On July 22, 1869, longtime friend Ohio Episcopal Bishop Charles Pettit McIlvaine (1799-1873) wrote to Peabody’s philanthropic advisor Robert Charles Winthrop (1809-94): “The White Sulphur Springs will, I hope, be beneficial to our excellent friend; but it can be only a very superficial good. [His] cough is terrible, and I have no expectation of his living a year….”

White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-Aug. 30, 1869

This was the background when Peabody arrived by special train at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23, 1869. Present was Tennessee Superintendent of Public Instruction and later U.S. Commissioner of Education John Eaton, Jr. (1829-1906).

John Easton wrote in his annual report: “Mr. Peabody shares with ex-Governor Wise the uppermost cottage in Baltimore Row, and sits at the same table with General Lee, Mr. Corcoran, Mr. Taggart, and others…. Being quite infirm, he has been seldom able to come to parlor or dining room, though he has received many ladies and gentlemen at the cottage…. His manners are singularly affable and pleasing, and his countenance one of the most benevolent we have ever seen.”

Peabody’s confinement to his cottage prompted a meeting on July 27, 1869, at which former Virginia Governor Henry Alexander Wise (1806-76) drew up resolutions of praise read in Peabody’s presence the next day (July 28, 1869) in the “Old White” hotel parlor. The resolutions read in part: “On behalf of the southern people we tender thanks to Mr. Peabody for his aid to the cause of education…and hail him ‘benefactor.’”

Peabody, seated, replied, “If I had strength, I would speak more on the heroism of the Southern people. Your kind remarks about the Education Fund sound sweet to my ears. My heart is interwoven with its success.”

Peabody Ball

Merrymakers at the “Old White” held a Peabody Ball on August 11, 1869. Too ill to attend, Peabody heard the gaiety from his cottage.

Historian Perceval Reniers wrote of this Peabody Ball: “The affair that did most to revive [the Southerners'] esteem was the Peabody Ball…given to honor…Mr. George Peabody…. Everything was right for the Peabody Ball. Everybody was ready for just such a climax, the background was a perfect build-up. Mr. Peabody appeared at just the right time and lived just long enough. A few months later it would not have been possible, for Mr. Peabody would be dead.”

The PEF’s first administrator Barnas Sears (1802-80), present at White Sulphur Springs that July 23-Aug. 30, 1869, recorded why Peabody’s presence there was important to the PEF’s work in promoting public education in the South. Sears wrote: “…both on account of his unparalleled goodness and of his illness among a loving and hospitable people [he received] tokens of love and respect from all, such as I have never before seen shown to any one. This visit…will, in my judgment, do more for us than a long tour in a state of good health….”

Famous Photos of George Peabody and Robert E. Lee

Peabody, Lee, and others were central figures in several remarkable photos taken at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 12, 1869. In the main photograph the five individuals seated on cane-bottomed chairs were, left to right: Turkey’s Minister to the U.S. Edouard Blacque Bey (1824-95); General Robert E. Lee, Peabody, William Wilson Corcoran, and Richmond, Virginia, judge and public education advocate James Lyons (1801-82).

Standing behind the five seated figures were seven former Civil War generals, their names in dispute until correctly identified in 1935 by Leonard T. Mackall of Savannah, Georgia (from left to right): James Conner (1829-83) of South Carolina, Martin W. Gary (1831-81) of South Carolina, Robert Doak Lilley (1836-86) of Virginia, P.G.T. Beauregard (1818-93) of Louisiana, Alexander Robert Lawton (1818-96) of Georgia, Henry Alexander Wise (1806-76) of Virginia, and Joseph L. Brent (b.1826) of Maryland.

There is also a photo of Peabody sitting alone and a photo of Lee, Peabody, and William Wilson Corcoran sitting together.

Peabody’s Gifts to Lee

That August 1869 Peabody gave Lee a small private gift of $100 for Lee’s Episcopal church in Lexington, Virginia, in need of repairs (William Wilson Corcoran also gave $100). Peabody also gave to Lee’s Washington College Virginia state bonds he owned worth $35,000 when they were lost on the ship Arctic, a Collins Line steamer, sunk with the loss of 322 passengers on September 27, 1854, 20 miles off Cape Race, Newfoundland.

Peabody ’s petition to the Virginia legislature to reimburse him for the lost bonds had been unsuccessful when he gave Lee’s college the value of the bonds for a mathematics professorship. Eventually the value of the lost bonds and the accrued interest, $60,000 total, were paid by the State of Virginia to Washington and Lee University With wry humor Lee’s biographer C.B. Flood described George Peabody’s gift: “It was generosity with a touch of Yankee shrewdness: you Southerners go fight it out among yourselves. If General Lee can’t get [this lost bond money] out of the Virginia legislature, nobody can.”

Peabody left White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, August 30, 1869, in a special railroad car provided by longtime friend, Baltimore and Ohio Railroad President John Work Garrett (1820-84). Lee rode a short distance in the same car with Peabody. They parted, never to meet again.

Peabody recorded his last will (September 9, 1869) in New York City, had his tomb built at Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts (September 10, 1869), ordered a granite sarcophagus to mark his grave, and boarded the Scotia in New York City September 29, 1869. He landed at Queenstown, Ireland, October 8, 1869, and was rushed to rest at the London home of longtime business friend Sir Curtis Miranda Lampson (1806-85), where he died November 4, 1869.

Lee Sent His Photograph
On Sept. 25, 1869, at the request of Peabody Institute Librarian Fitch Poole (1803-73, Peabody, Massachusetts), Lee sent Poole a photograph of himself, adding that he would “feel honoured in its being placed among the ‘friends’ of Mr. Peabody, who can be numbered by the millions, yet all can appreciate the man who has [illumined] his age by his munificent charities during his life, and by his wise provisions for promoting the happiness of his fellow creatures.”

Lee on Peabody’s Death

Reading of Peabody’s death in London (November 4, 1869), Robert E. Lee wrote (November 10, 1869) to Peabody’s nephew George Peabody Russell, who had been with his uncle in White Sulphur Springs and there had met Lee: “The announcement of the death of your uncle, Mr. George Peabody, has been received with the deepest regret wherever his name and benevolence are known; and nowhere have his generous deeds–restricted to no country, section or sect–elicited more heartfelt admiration than at the South. He stands alone in history for the benevolent and judicious distribution of his great wealth, and his memory has become entwined in the affections of millions of his fellow-citizens in both hemispheres.”

“I beg, in my own behalf,” Lee continued, “and in behalf of the Trustees and Faculty of Washington College, Virginia, which was not forgotten by him in his act of generosity, to tender the tribute of our unfeigned sorrow at his death. ¶With great respect, Your obedient servant R.E. Lee.”

Concern Over Lee’s Attending Peabody’s Funeral

Lee had been invited to attend Peabody’s final funeral service and eulogy, South Congregational Church, Peabody, Massachusetts, followed by burial in Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts, February 8, 1870.
But Peabody’s intimates feared that Lee’s attendance might evoke an ugly incident. After President Lincoln’s assassination, Congressional radical Republicans, bent on revenge, crushed the defeated South with military rule. This anger was also strong among New England abolitionists.

Robert Charles Winthrop, Peabody’s philanthropic advisor and president of the PEF trustees, who was to deliver Peabody’s funeral eulogy February 8, 1870, feared that Lee’s attendance might bring on a demonstration. On February 2, 1870, Winthrop wrote two private and confidential letters, the first to Baltimorean John Pendleton Kennedy (1795-1870): “There is apprehension here, that if Lee should come to the funeral, something unpleasant might occur, which would be as painful to us as to him. Would you contact friends to impart this to the General? Please do not mention that the suggestion came from me.”

Winthrop also wrote to Corcoran: “I write to you in absolute confidence. Some friends of ours, whose motives cannot be mistaken, are very anxious that Genl. Lee should not come to the funeral next week. They have also asked me to suggest that. Still there is always apprehension that from an irresponsible crowd there might come some remarks which would be offensive to him and painful to us all. I am sure he would be the last person to involve himself or us, needlessly, in a doubtful position on such an occasion.”

Winthrop continued to Corcoran: “The newspapers at first said that he was not coming. Now, there is an intimation that he is. I know of no one who could [more] effectively give the right direction to his views than yourself. Your relation to Mr. Peabody & to Mr. Lee would enable you to ascertain his purposes & shape his course wisely…. I know of no one else to rely on.”

One of the two Washington College trustees who planned to attend Peabody’s funeral had earlier written to Corcoran (January 26, 1870): “I first thought that General Lee should not go, but have now changed my mind. Some of us believe that if you advise the General to attend he would do so. Use your own discretion in this matter.”

Lee Too Ill to Attend

Lee explained in a January 26, 1870, letter to William Wilson Corcoran: “I am sorry I cannot attend the funeral obsequies of Mr. Peabody. It would be some relief to witness the respect paid to his remains, and to participate in commemorating his virtues; but I am unable to undertake the journey. I have been sick all the winter, and am still under medical treatment. I particularly regret that I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you. Two trustees of Washington College will attend the funeral. I hope you can join them.”

On the same day Winthrop wrote his letters (February 2, 1870), Lee wrote his daughter Mildred Childe Lee (1846-1904) that he was too ill to attend: “I am sorry that I could not attend Mr. Peabody’s funeral, but I did not feel able to undertake the journey, especially at this season.”

Corcoran too replied to Winthrop that Lee had no intention of coming. Corcoran could not imagine, he wrote, that so good and great a man as Lee would receive anything but a kind reception. Himself ill, Corcoran wrote to Lee his regret that he could not attend to pay his respects to “my valued old friend.” Peabody’s intimates were relieved at confirmation that Lee’s illness would definitely keep him from the funeral.

Trans-Atlantic Funeral Overview

Lee, Corcoran, and much of the English-speaking reading public, awed by Peabody’s unusual 96-day transatlantic funeral, awaited its final scene: Robert Charles Winthrop’s eulogy and Peabody’s final burial (both February 8, 1870).
Peabody’s funeral was unprecedented in length, pomp, and ceremony; was marked by cold stormy weather; involved the highest officials of England and the United States; was vastly publicized in the press of both countries; and was observed in person by many thousands of Britons and Americans.

The Peabody funeral included: 1-Westminster Abbey service (November 12, 1869) and temporary burial there for 30 days (November 12-December 11, 1869). When Peabody’s will became known requiring burial in Salem, Massachusetts, 2-the British cabinet decided (November 10, 1869), at Queen Victoria’s suggestion, to return his remains for burial in the U. S. on Her Majesty’s Ship HMS Monarch, Britain’s newest and largest warship, repainted for this grim occasion slate gray above the water line, with a specially built mortuary chapel.

Next came a 3-U. S. government decision (made between November 12-15, 1869) to send the United States corvette USS Plymouth from Marseilles, France, to accompany HMS Monarch to the United States. Then followed 4-transfer (December 11, 1869) of Peabody’s remains from Westminster Abbey, London, on a special funeral train to Portsmouth, England, impressive ceremonies at the transfer of remains from Portsmouth dock to HMS Monarch, specially outfitted as a funeral vessel.

Next came the 5-transatlantic crossing of HMS Monarch and the USS Plymouth (December 21, 1869 to January 25, 1870) from Spithead near Portsmouth, past Ushant, France, to Madeira Island off Portugal, to Bermuda, and north to Portland, Maine, chosen by the British Admiralty because of its deeper harbor.

A covert rivalry had early erupted between 6-Bostonians and New Yorkers about which city could provide the more solemn ceremony as receiving port. Thinking themselves the center of northeast society and fashion, each was disappointed when the British Admiralty chose Portland, Maine, whose deeper harbor more safely accommodated HMS Monarch’s large size.

End Part 2 of 3 Parts. Concluded in Final Part 3 of 3 Parts. E-mail 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.

Final 3 of 3 Parts. General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) and Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-August 30, 1869.

Final 3 of 3 Parts. General Robert E. Lee (1807-70) and Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, July 23-August 30, 1869.

By Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker, 63 Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270. Email bfparker@frontiernet.net

A contemporary news account described the petty jealousy: “When the mighty men of Boston knew that England’s…”Monarch” was bringing the body of the great philanthropist to his last resting place, they called a meeting and decided with what fitting honors and glories it would be received…. but, when the telegraph flashed the astounding news that little Portland was to be the port…all was changed….[Bostonians were sure] that the Portlanders…would blunder….”

On January 14, 1870, on President U. S Grant’s approval, 7-U. S. Navy Secretary George Maxwell Robeson (1829-97) ordered Admiral David Glasgow Farragut (1801-70), a PEF trustee, to command a U.S. naval flotilla to meet HMS Monarch and USS Plymouth in Portland harbor, Maine (January 25, 1870). HMS Monarch’s captain then requested, on behalf of Queen Victoria, 8-that the coffin remain aboard the Monarch in Portland harbor for two days (January 27-28, 1870).as a final mark of respect. Thousands of visitors, drawn to the spectacle, viewed the coffin in the somberly decorated Monarch’s mortuary chapel. Peabody’s remains then 9-lay in state in Portland City Hall (January 29-February 1, 1870), viewed by thousands. 10-A special funeral train from Portland, Maine, bore the remains to Peabody, Massachusetts (February 1, 1870). 11-Lying in state of Peabody’s remains took place at the Peabody Institute Library (February 1-8, 1870).

The final ceremony, the press announced to an awed public, was to be 12-Robert Charles Winthrop’s funeral eulogy at the South Congregational Church, Peabody, Massachusetts, attended by New England governors, mayors, Queen Victoria’s son Prince Arthur, and other notables (February 8, 1870). Final burial would then follow at 13-Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts.

Why Such Unprecedented Funeral Honors?

Daily reports on Peabody’s sinking condition in London had appeared in the British press. After his death the London Daily News recorded (November 8, 1869): “We have received a large number of letters, urging that the honours of a public funeral are due to the late Mr. Peabody’s memory.” The Dean of Westminster Abbey, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815-81), was in Naples, Italy, November 5, 1869, when he read of Peabody’s death. Years later he recorded: “I was in Naples, and saw in the public papers that George Peabody had died. Being absent, considering that he was a foreigner, and at the same time, by reason of his benefactions to the City of London, entitled to a burial in Westminster Abbey, I telegraphed to express my wishes that his interment there should take place.”

The Alabama Claims
Peabody died during tense, near warlike U. S.-British angers over two U. S. Civil War incidents, the Alabama Claims (1864-72) and the Trent Affair (September 8, 1861). CSS Alabama was a notorious British-built Confederate raider which sank 64 northern cargo ships during 1862-64.

Without a navy, with its southern ports blockaded by the North, Confederate agents slipped secretly to England, bought British-built ships, armed them as Confederate raiders, renamed them Alabama, Florida, Shenandoah, and others, which sank northern ships and cost northern lives and treasure.

Officially neutral in the U. S. Civil War, British officials were continually reminded of their breach of neutrality by U. S. Minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams (1807-86). Official U. S. demands for reparations for damages from British-built raiders (from1862) were resolved at a Geneva international tribunal (1871-72), requiring Britain to pay the United States $15.5 million indemnity.

At Peabody’s death, November 4, 1869, this Alabama Claims controversy was unresolved and tense. Americans were angry; Britons were resentful. A desire to defuse angers over the Alabama Claims was one reason British officials first, and then United States officials to surpass them, outdid each other in unusual homage to Peabody’s remains during his transatlantic funeral.

Trent Affair

There was also lingering resentment over the still rankling November 8, 1861 Trent Affair. On the stormy night of October 11, 1861, four Confederate emissaries, seeking aid and arms from Britain and France, evaded the Union blockade at Charleston, South Carolina, went by ship to Havana, Cuba, and there boarded the British mail ship Trent, bound for Southampton, England.

brThe Trent was illegally stopped in the Bahama Channel, West Indies (November 8, 1861) by USS San Jacinto’s Captain Charles Wilkes (1798-1877). Confederates James Murray Mason (1798-1871, from Virginia), John Slidell (1793-1871, from Louisiana), and their male secretaries were forcibly removed and imprisoned in Boston harbor’s Fort Warren Prison.

Anticipating war with the U. S., Britain sent 8,000 troops to Canada. But United States jingoism subsided. President Abraham Lincoln reportedly told his cabinet, “one war at a time,” gentlemen, got the cabinet on December 26, 1861, to disavow the illegal seizure, and released the Confederate prisoners on January 1, 1862. But resentments lingered.

Besides softening near war U .S.-British tensions, another reason behind the Peabody funeral honors was British leaders’ sincere appreciation for Peabody’s gift of homes for London’s working poor. Many marveled that an American would give that kind of gift in that large amount to a city and country not his own. Britons also valued Peabody’s two decades of efforts to improve United States-British relations.

Prime Minister Gladstone

On November 9, 1869, in a major speech at the Lord Mayor’s Day banquet, Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1808-98) referred to British-U.S. difficulties and then mentioned Peabody’s death: “You will know that I refer to the death of Mr. Peabody, a man whose splendid benefactions…taught us in this commercial age…the most noble and needful of all lessons–…how a man can be the master of his wealth instead of its slave [cheers].”

“And, my Lord Mayor,” Gladstone continued, “most touching it is to know, as I have learnt, that while, perhaps, some might think he had been unhappy in dying in a foreign land, yet so were his affections divided between the land of his birth and the home of his early ancestors, that…his [wish] has been realized–that he might be buried in America, [and] that it might please God to ordain that he should die in England [cheers]. My Lord Mayor, with the country of Mr. Peabody we are not likely to quarrel [loud cheers].”

Prime Minister Gladstone’s cabinet met at 2:00 P.M., November 10, 1869, and confirmed Queen Victoria’s suggestion of a Royal Navy ship to return Peabody’s remains. Peabody funeral researcher Allen Howard Welch wrote: “The Queen, in fact, was personally grieved, and it was her own request that a man-of-war be employed to return Peabody to his homeland.”

In the handing over ceremony of Peabody’s remains from U .S. Minister to Britain John Lothrop Motley to HMS Monarch’s Captain John Edmund Commerell (1829-1901), December 11, 1869, Portsmouth, England, U. S. Minister Motley explained: “The President of the United States, when informed of the death of George Peabody, the great philanthropist, at once ordered an American ship to convey his remains to America. Simultaneously, the Queen appointed one of Her Majesty’s ships to perform that office. This double honor from the heads of two great nations to a simple American citizen is, like his gift to the poor, unprecedented. The President yields cordially to the wish of the Queen.”

Praise for the Peabody Homes of London, 1862

Peabody’s housing gift for London’s working poor was announced March 12, 1862, while the U. S. and Britain still raged over the September 1861 Trent Affair. Peabody’s gift evoked surprise and admiration in the British press, a sampling of which follows.

London Times, March 26, 1862: “Mr. George Peabody has placed £150,000 in the hands of a committee to relieve the condition of the poor of London. It is seldom that good works are done on such a scale as this one by an American in a city where he is only a sojourner…. [He] gives while he lives to those who can make no return…. He does this in a country not his own, in a city he may leave any day for his native land. Such an act is rare….”

London Daily Telegraph, March 27, 1862: “The noble gift of Mr. Peabody actually takes away the public breath…and sends a thrill through the public heart…. A man gives his fortune during his lifetime for an object going back to a resolution he had held more than a quarter of a century…to elevate the poor. Party strife and national bickering have not changed this good American; wars and rumours of wars have not turned him…from his…purpose.”

London Morning Herald, March 27, 1862: “One of the merchant princes of the world has just presented [London] with a gift for which thousands will bless his name…. Whilst his countrymen are warring…with each other, this generous American is working out…good-will among his adopted people.” London Sun, March 27, 1862: ” How can England ever go to war with a nation whose leading man among us thus sympathizes with and blesses her poor? Who of us will not set the deed of Mr. Peabody…against that of Captain Wilkes….?”

London Review, March 29, 1862: “From America of late has come war, desolation, and animosity. The close ties of…friendships that linked Englishmen and Americans…seemed dissolved…. In the midst of this comes Mr. Peabody’s gift to discard prejudices on both sides of the Atlantic. We have had a desperate family quarrel, and almost come to blows; Mr. Peabody…by a well-timed act…awakens…better sentiments.” Leeds Mercury, March 27, 1862: “An American citizen has now come forward to excite the wonder and admiration of the world.”

When friend and sometime agent Horatio Gates Somerby (1805-72), a Vermont-born London resident genealogist, sent Peabody these London newspaper clippings, Peabody replied: “I had not the least conception that it would cause so much excitement over the country.”

British Honors

British honors evoked by Peabody’s gift to London included membership in the ancient guild of the Clothworkers’ Company of London (July 2, 1862). He was granted the Freedom of the City of London (July 10, 1862), the first of only five American so honored; others being President U. S. Grant, June 15, 1877; President Theodore Roosevelt, May 3, 1910; General John J. Pershing, July 18, 1919; and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 1, 1945.

Peabody had been denied membership in London’s Reform Club (1844) when Americans were disdained because nine U. S. states had stopped interest payments on their bonds sold abroad. When payment was resumed retroactively Peabody, who had publicly urged this course, was admitted to the Parthenon Club (1848), the City of London Club (1850), and the most prestigious Athenaeum Club (March 12, 1862). The Fishmongers’ Company of London made Peabody an honorary member (April 18, 1866). When Oxford University granted him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree (June 26, 1867), undergraduates cheered, waved their caps, and beat the arms of their chairs with the flat of their hands. Jackson’s Oxford Journal (June 29, 1867) recorded: “The lion of the day was beyond a doubt, Mr. Peabody.”

Peabody’s seated statue, sculptured and cast by Salem, Massachusetts-born William Wetmore Story (1819-95), paid for by public subscription, was unveiled July 23, 1869, on London’s Threadneedle Street, near the Royal Exchange, by Queen Victoria’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. The only four statues of Americans in London include George Peabody (1869), Abraham Lincoln (1920), George Washington (1921), and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1948).

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria’s advisors had informed Her Majesty that, when asked privately, Peabody had declined either a baronetcy or the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. To accept would be to lose his U. S. citizenship, which he felt he could not do.

Her Majesty’s Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell (1792-1878) suggested instead a letter from the Queen and the gift of a miniature portrait of the Queen, such as was given to foreign ambassadors who signed a treaty with Britain.

The Queen’s letter to Peabody, March 28, 1866, expressed thanks for his “noble act of more than princely munificence…to relieve the wants of her poor subjects residing in London. It is an act…wholly without parallel…. “The Queen…understands Mr. Peabody to feel himself debarred from accepting [other] distinctions.” [She asks him instead] “to accept a miniature portrait of herself, which she will have painted for him, and which…can…be sent to him in America.”

Peabody thanked the Queen by letter on April 3, 1866. He received Her Majesty’s miniature portrait from British Ambassador Sir Frederick Bruce (1814-67) in Washington, D.C., March 1867. It was 14″ long by 10″ wide, had been especially painted for him by British artist F. A. C. Tilt, baked on enamel, and set in a sold gold frame, said to have cost $70,000. It was deposited in a specially built vault, with Peabody’s other honors, in the Peabody Institute Library, Peabody, Massachusetts.

John Bright to the Queen on George Peabody

British statesman and Member of Parliament John Bright (1811-89), who had befriended Peabody from 1867 and had gone fishing with him on the Shannon River, Limerick, Ireland, dined with the Queen, December 30, 1868. Bright recorded in his diary the conversation: “Some remarks were made about Mr. Peabody: it arose from something about Ireland, and my having been there on a visit to him. [The Queen] remarked what a very rich man he must be, and how great his gifts.”

[Bright recorded that Peabody] “told me how he valued the portrait [the Queen] had given him, that he made a sort of shrine for it, and that it was a thing of great interest in America. Peabody then “said to me, ‘The Americans are as fond of your Queen as the English are.’ To which she replied, ‘Yes, the American people have also been kind to me.’”

Queen Victoria’s Second Letter to Peabody

Leaving London suddenly on what he knew would be his last U. S. visit, Peabody was in Salem, Massachusetts, when he received Queen Victoria’s second letter. She wrote (June 20, 1869): “The Queen is very sorry that Mr. Peabody’s sudden departure has made it impossible for her to see him before he left England, and she is concerned to hear that he is gone in bad health.”

The Queen continued: “She now writes him a line to express her hope that he may return to this country quite recovered, and that she may then have the opportunity, of which she has now been deprived, of seeing him and offering him her personal thanks for all he has done for the people.”

Publishing the Queen’s letter, the New York Times added: “Queen Victoria has paid our great countryman a delicate and graceful compliment. Mr. Peabody left England unexpectedly, his departure known only to a few friends. His feeble health became known to the Queen through London newspapers. With her goodness of heart which Americans never fail to appreciate she sent him a personal letter.” On July 19, 1869, Peabody replied, assuring the Queen of his “heartfelt gratitude.”

Queen Victoria’s Last Contact
Learning of Peabody’s hasty return to London (October 8, 1869), before she knew of his precarious condition, she asked her privy councilor Arthur Helps (1813-75) to invite Peabody to visit her at Windsor Castle. Helps wrote to Sir Curtis Lampson in whose London home Peabody rested (Oct. 30, 1869): “‘Regarding Mr. Peabody, the Queen thinks the best way would be for her to ask him down to Windsor for one or two nights, where he could rest–and need not come to dinner, or any meals if he feels unequal to it; but where she could see him quietly at any time of the day most convenient to him.” But it was too late. Largely unconscious his last days, Peabody died November 4, 1869.

U. S. Honors

Chief among Peabody’s U. S. honors was the U. S. Congressional Resolution of Thanks and Gold Medal for his PEF, passed in the U.S. Senate (March 8, 1867), in the U. S. House (March 9, 1867), and signed by President Andrew Johnson (March 16, 1867), who welcomed Peabody at the White House (April 25, 1867). These, his Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard University (July 17, 1867), and his other honors received in the U. S. and England, are displayed in the Peabody Institute Library, Peabody, Massachusetts.

Winthrop’s Eulogy, February 8, 1870

All was ready for the final act: Winthrop’s eulogy of George Peabody, February 8, 1870, a bitterly cold day. Thousands poured into tiny Peabody, Massachusetts, by special morning trains which ran full from Boston. Large crowds were quiet and respectful. The 50 state troopers had little to do but give directions.

South Congregational Church filled quickly. Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Arthur (1850-1942), in the seventh pew from the pulpit, held all eyes. His retinue, including British Minister to the U. S. Sir Edward Thornton, sat nearby.

Behind Prince Arthur sat HMS Monarch Captain John E. Commerell, USS Plymouth’s Captain William H. Macomb, Admiral Farragut’s staff, Massachusetts Governor William Claflin, Maine Governor Joshua L. Chamberlain, the mayors of eight New England cities, Harvard University President Charles William Eliot (1834-1926), and others.

On the first six rows sat Peabody’s relatives, elderly citizens who knew him in youth, and the trustees of his institutes and funds. Anthems were sung. Scripture was read. Robert Charles Winthrop rose to give the eulogy.

Robert Charles Winthrop was the descendant of an early governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a Harvard University graduate, trained in Daniel Webster’s law office, member and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Peabody’s philanthropic advisor, and the PEF board of trustees president.

Winthrop began: “What a career this has been whose final scene lies before us! Who can contemplate his rise from lowly beginnings to these final royal honors without admiration? His death, painless and peaceful, came after he completed his great dream and saw his old friends and loved ones.”

Winthrop continued: “He had ambition and wanted to do grand things in a grand way. His public charity is too well known to bear repetition and I believe he also did much private good which remains unknown. The trusts he established, the institutes he founded, the buildings he raised stand before all eyes.”

“I have authority for saying,” Winthrop continued, “that he planned these for many years, for in private talks he told me all he planned and when I expressed my amazement at the magnitude of his purpose, he said to me with guileless simplicity: ‘Why Mr. Winthrop, this is no new idea to me. From the earliest of my manhood, I have contemplated some such disposition of my property; and I have prayed my heavenly Father, day by day, that I might be enabled, before I died, to show my gratitude for the blessings which He has bestowed upon me by doing some great good to my fellow-men.’”

The words underlined above are engraved on Peabody’s marker in Westminster Abbey, London, where his remains rested for 30 days, November 12-December 11, 1869. That marker and the above words on it were refurbished for the February 12, 1995, bicentennial ceremony of Peabody’s birth held in London’s Westminster Abbey.

Winthrop further said: “To measure his gifts in dollars and pounds or in the number of people served is inadequate. He did something more. The successful way he arranged the machinery of world-wide philanthropy compels attention. It is a lesson that cannot be lost to history. It has inspired and will continue to inspire others to do likewise. This was the greatness of his life.”

“Now, all that is mortal of him,” Winthrop said, “comes back, borne with honors that mark a conquering hero. The battle he fought was the greed within him. His conquest was the victory he achieved over the gaining, hoarding, saving instinct. Such is the conqueror we make ready to bury in the earth this day.

Winthrop continued: “And so was fulfilled for him a prophecy he heard once as the subject of a sermon, on which by some force of reflection lingered in his mind and which he more than once mentioned to me: ‘And it shall come to pass in that day, that the light shall not be clear nor dark; but it shall be one day which shall be known to the Lord, not day, or night: but it shall come to pass that at evening time it shall be light.’” Winthrop said that Peabody first heard this text, Zechariah 14: 6-7, in a sermon by the Reverend Dr. John Lothrop (1772-1820) of Brattle Street, Boston, date not known.

Winthrop concluded: “And so we bid thee farewell, noble friend. The village of thy birth weeps. The flower of Essex County stands at thy grave. Massachusetts mourns her son. Maine does honor to thee. New England and Old England join hands because of thee. The children of the South praise thy works. Chiefs of the Republic stand with royalty at thy bier. And so we bid thee farewell, friend of mankind.”

Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Mass.

The New York Times described the final burial scene at Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Massachusetts, on February 8, 1870: “There were about two hundred sleigh coaches in the procession. The route was shortened somewhat in consequence of the prevalence of the storm. On arriving at the Peabody tomb, there was no special service, the coffin being placed reverently therein, after which the procession returned to the Institute, and the great pageantry attending the obsequies of the great philanthropist was ended.”

Harmony Grove Cemetery’s 65 acres of avenues and walks, first laid out in 1840, had been a thick walnut grove when Peabody was a boy. He could see it from the attic of the house where he was born. On a knoll where he had once played he had chosen the family burial plot on Anemone Ave., lot number 51. There, where he had brought together the remains of his mother, father, sisters, and brothers, he was laid to rest. Ninety-six days of unprecedented funeral honors had ended. His works remain. Public memory of him has since grown dim, except at his institutes and among those who care to search the records.

Memory has also dimmed of those few days that summer of 1869 at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, when two old men, one from Massachusetts, the other from Virginia, turned from Civil War strife to the healing power of education. One, a lifelong soldier, had become president of a struggling college; the other, a volunteer for 14 days in the War of 1812, merchant, London-based banker, and creator of philanthropic institutions.

The two old men walked arm in arm, enjoyed each other, spoke of educating new generations, of reconciliation, of healing, and of better days to ahead.

END OF MANUSCRIPT. Corrections, errors, suggestions appreciated: 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.

William Heard Kilpatrick (Nov. 20, 1871-Feb. 13, 1965), Progressive Educator and Educational Philosopher, by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

William Heard Kilpatrick (Nov. 20, 1871-Feb. 13, 1965), Progressive Educator and Educational Philosopher, by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net


KILPATRICK, WILLIAM HEARD (Nov. 20, 1871-Feb. 13, 1965), educator and philosopher of progressive education, was born in White Plains, GA, son of James Hines Kilpatrick, a Southern Baptist minister, and Edna Perrin Heard, a teacher.


Kilpatrick had an orthodox upbringing and did well in school. In 1888 he entered the sophomore class at Mercer University (Baptist, Macon, GA), excelled in mathematics, and earned the B.A. degree in 1891. A Mercer trustee encouraged him to study mathematics and physics at Johns Hopkins University, 1891-92. There he was transported from a conservative rural atmosphere to a liberal community of inquiring scholars. Mercer granted him the M.A. degree in 1892 for his Johns Hopkins graduate study. Because of administrative changes, he did not get a hoped-for Mercer teaching job.


His first teaching post at Blakely Institute, a combined elementary and secondary public school in southwest Georgia, required that he attend a July 1892 summer session at Rock College Normal School, Athens, GA. There he learned of the educational theories of German educator Friedrich Froebel, kindergarten founder and learning-through-play advocate (Kilpatrick later wrote Froebel’s Kindergarten Principles Critically Examined, New York: Macmillan, 1916); and of Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who urged teaching by encouragement without harsh discipline. He was impressed by Education Professor Otis Ashmore, who told of the interest stimulated among his students at Chatham Academy, Savannah, GA, so that they studied without supervision in his absence. Ashmore’s example, Kilpatrick later wrote, was the origin for his 1918 project method article. At an April 8, 1893, Chautauqua tent meeting at nearby Albany, GA, he heard visiting Cook County (IL) Normal School director and progressive educator Francis Wayland Parker. He then read Leila E. Patridge, The “Quincy Method” Illustrated (New York: E.L. Kellogg, 1885), describing Parker’s successful progressive education methods used while he was Quincy, MA, school superintendent. He taught mathematics in the eighth, ninth, and tenth grades at Blakely and was co-principal, 1892-95. There he first experimented with nontraditional teaching and administration.


He again studied at Johns Hopkins University, summer 1895; then taught seventh grade at and was principal of Anderson Elementary School, Savannah, GA, 1896-97. He also studied at the University of Chicago under John Dewey, summer 1898, later noting that he was not initially impressed by Dewey. He was at Mercer University, 1897-1906, taught mathematics, was vice president, 1900, and acting president, 1904-06, but resigned when the trustees were concerned about his doubting the virgin birth. Summer sessions he attended while at Mercer University included Cornell University, summer 1900, under Charles de Garmo, disciple of Johann Friedrich Herbart, and a Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored summer school for teachers, Knoxville, TN, where he heard psychologist G. Stanley Hall. He taught in Columbus, OH, in 1906-07 before enrolling as a student at Teachers College, Columbia University (hereafter TCCU), in 1907.


Dean James Earl Russell had merged progressivism and professionalism to make TCCU a leading U.S. teacher education center. Kilpatrick studied under Dewey, who had left Chicago for Columbia University in 1904, Paul Monroe, major U.S. educational historian, E. L. Thorndike, and others. He impressed Monroe in a class paper documenting the beginning of Dutch schools in New Amsterdam (New York) in 1638, not 1633, as previously believed. Teaching history of education part time, he began a dissertation on Benedict Spinoza, did not find enough material, returned to the origin of Dutch schools, and completed his dissertation in 1911 (Monroe helped get it published by the Department of the Interior as The Dutch Schools of New Netherland and Colonial New York. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912).


In 1908 Kilpatrick wrote in his diary, “Professor Dewey has made a great difference in my thinking.” Dewey wrote to Professor John A. MacVannel, Kilpatrick’s major professor, “He is the best I ever had.” Kilpatrick spent the rest of his professional career and long life at TCCU where he was a student, 1907-09; received the Ph.D. in 1912, was lecturer in education, 1909-11; assistant professor, 1911-15; associate professor, 1915-18; professor of philosophy of education, 1918-37; and thereafter emeritus professor.


Kilpatrick was catapulted to fame by his 1918 article, “The Project Method,” Teachers College Record, 19 (September 1918), pp. 319-335. By “project” Kilpatrick meant any purposeful learning activity which the student wanted to do wholeheartedly. This active, interest-motivated, and life-like activity was seized upon by progressive teachers as a useful curriculum device. Course content was divided into units or projects students could complete alone or in small groups under teacher guidance. The project method, seen as a welcome antidote to traditional education, gave Dewey’s child-centered education a practical teaching methodology and helped the shift from subject- and teacher-based education to child-centered education. It was popular in progressive elementary schools in the 1930s and was revived in the open classroom atmosphere of the late 1960s.


Kilpatrick commanded attention at TCCU by his courtly manner, erect stature, and lion-like mane of silvery white hair. He attracted students by using small group discussions. With notable skill he divided educational problems among small groups in a large class, each group discussed a specific problem, a group chair reported findings to the large class (numbering in the hundreds), followed by discussion and debate. His success in this procedure earned for him the title of the “Million Dollar Professor,” which came from the headline of a New York Post article (March 6, 1937) by David Davidson, estimating that his 35,000 graduate students paid over a million dollars in tuition fees to TCCU before he retired in 1937.


He married Marie Beman Guyton (they had three children) on December 27, l898 (she died May 1907); he then married Margaret Manigault Pinckney on November 26, 1908 (she died November 1938); and finally married Marion Y. Ostrander on May 8, 1940 (she had been his secretary).


He taught summers at the University of Georgia, 1906, 1908, and 1909; the University of the South (Knoxville), 1907; was visiting professor, Northwestern University, 1937-38, and taught summer sessions there, 1939, 1940, 1941; taught summer sessions, Stanford University, 1938; University of Kentucky, 1942; University of North Carolina, 1942; and University of Minnesota, 1946. His trips abroad included school visits, lectures, and meetings with prominent educators in Italy, Switzerland, and France, May-June 1912; Europe and Asia, August 1926-June 1927; and round the world, August-December 1929.


He received honorary LL.D. degrees from Mercer University, 1926; Columbia University, 1929; and Bennington College, 1938 (which he helped found in 1923 and where he was president of the board of trustees, 1931-38); the honorary D.H.L. degree from the College of Jewish Studies, 1952; and the Brandeis Award for humanitarian service, 1953.


After retiring from TCCU, 1937, he was president of the New York Urban League, 1941-51; chairman of American Youth for World Youth, 1946-51; chairman of the Bureau of International Education, 1940-51; and on the board of directors of the League for Industrial Democracy.


Kilpatrick had severe critics but many more admirers and followers. His eighty-fifth birthday, November 20, 1956, celebrated at Horace Mann Auditorium, TCCU, resulted in a special March 1957 issue of Progressive Education, “William Heard Kilpatrick Eighty-Fifth Anniversary,” containing 10 articles. Both heralded and criticized as John Dewey’s chief educational interpreter, Kilpatrick was a leading advocate of progressive education. He died after a long illness at age 93 on February 13, 1965.


References


Kilpatrick gave to the Special Collections, Teachers College Library, Columbia University a handwritten diary (begun 1904) of over 40 volumes, scrapbooks, unpublished papers, and a two-volume typescript from taped interviews with his biographer, Samuel Tenenbaum. An oral history memoir is in the Special Collections, Butler Library, Columbia University Archives. His 14 books and 375 articles are listed in “Writings of William Heard Kilpatrick,” Studies in Philosophy and Education, Vol. 1 (November 1961), pp. 220-230.


His more important books include Foundations of Method, New York: Macmillan, 1925, which expands on his project method (translated into Chinese, Japanese, and Russian); Education for a Changing Civilization, Macmillan, 1926 (translated into Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, German, and Italian); Education and the Social Crisis, A Proposed Program, New York: Liveright, 1932; The Educational Frontier, New York: Appleton-Century, 1933, containing his articles and articles by other leading progressives (he was book editor), and said to be the characteristic progressivist work of the 1930s; Group Education for a Democracy, New York: Association Press, 1940 (translated into Japanese, Korean, and Spanish); and Philosophy of Education, New York, 1951 (translated into Spanish).


Samuel Tenenbaum, William Heard Kilpatrick: Trailblazer in Education, New York: Harper, 1951, is the authorized biography based on taped interviews. Other biographical sketches are William Graebner, “William Heard Kilpatrick” in the Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement Seven, 1961-1965, John A. Garraty, editor, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981, pp. 434-436; and Franklin Parker, “William Heard Kilpatrick, 1871-1965,” School and Society, Vol. 93, No. 2264 (October 16, 1965), pp. 368-371. Insights about Kilpatrick’s influence are in John L. Childs, American Pragmatism and Education, New York: Holt, 1956; Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education,1876-1957, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961; Ernst Papanek, “William Heard Kilpatrick’s International Influence: Teacher of World’s Teachers,” Progressive Education, Vol.34, No.2 (March 1957), pp. 54-57 (entire issue has 10 evaluative articles honoring Kilpatrick on his eighty-fifth birthday); and “W. H. Kilpatrick: After 93 Years,” Teachers College Record, Vol. 66, No.4 (January 1965), pp. 346-364, containing three articles. Topical selections from his writings are compared with others in Leslie R. Perry, editor, Bertrand Russell, A.S. Neill, Homer Lane, W.H. Kilpatrick: Four Progressive Educators, London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967.


Critics include Albert Lynd, Quackery in the Public Schools, New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1953, pp. 212-253; and Augustin G. Rudd, Bending the Twig: The Revolution in Education and Its Effect on Our Children, New York: Sons of the American Revolution, 1957. A Catholic critic is Joseph McGlade, Progressive Educators and the Catholic Church, Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1953.


Thirteen contributors evaluated his influence in a special issue on “William Heard Kilpatrick, 1875-1965,” Educational Theory, Vol. 16, No.1 (January 1966), 98 pp. Obituaries appeared in The New York Times, February 14, 1965, p. 92; New York Herald Tribune, February 15, 1965; and San Francisco Chronicle, February 15, 1965, p. 26. END OF MANUSCRIPT.


Send 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

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1 of 2 Parts: Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Remembered Guru of the 1950s-60s, by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

1 of 2 Parts: Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Remembered Guru of the 1950s-60s

by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

If you’ve never heard of Eric Hoffer, you are in for a surprise.

Hoffer was rare: a laboring man and self-taught philosopher; a Los Angeles skid row tramp who thought and wrote books; a California migrant fruit picker who wrote aphorisms, pithy sayings, with insights into events and trends of our time; a San Francisco longshoreman who wrote The True Believer, a best selling analysis of mass movements; a bold man on President Lyndon Johnson’s National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, who told African Americans: stop crying about prejudice and pull yourselves and your people out of the ghetto, out of the gutter; a passionate man who electrified viewers when interviewed by James Day on San Francisco’s education TV station KQED and by Eric Sevareid on CBS TV. Phone calls praising him lit up CBS affiliate switchboards all over the country. Hoffer was rare indeed.

His heyday was the 1950s and ’60s. His first book clarified the motives and hatreds of dictators Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, and their true believer followers. But in 1968-69, by criticizing Blacks and by praising President Lyndon Johnson, he lost his liberal following, was no longer everyone’s guru.

Still, more than two decades after his death, a reappraisal of his life, books, and ideas still surprises and delights readers.

Eric Hoffer was born in the Bronx, New York City, July 26, 1902, the only child of Knut and Elsa Hoffer, Alsatian Germans. His mother, a small woman, carried him often, a big baby, in her arms until he was 5 (1907) when, holding him, she fell down a flight of stairs, leaving him with a permanent cleft in his forehead. Two years later she died. Perhaps from the shock, Eric temporarily lost his eyesight and memory from ages seven to 15 (1909-17).

He never went to school, did not learn a trade, and was constantly cared for by Martha Bauer, a Bavarian peasant who came over on the boat with his parents and lived with them. This surrogate mother was big, warm, and loving. Her care, fondling, cooking, and telling him of the clever things he did and said made his eight years of blindness and memory loss a happy time. His father, with whom he spoke little, he later speculated, was the village intellectual and atheist, as well as a carpenter and cabinetmaker, who would say about his small library of books, “There’s money in the cupboard.”

When Eric occasionally cried, his father put him on a table near the cupboard where Eric arranged and rearranged the books by size, thickness, weight, and binding color, an experience he thought later somehow helped him to classify and organize notes and ideas. Before his blindness, he somehow learned to read English and German by age 5, probably with his mother’s help. At age 15 (1917) his eyesight and memory returned. Fearing a return of blindness, he read feverishly, mainly in a nearby secondhand bookstore which had just acquired a large library from an estate auction. F. M. Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which caught his eye, he read and later reread because he remembered his father saying of him during his blindness and memory loss, “What can you do with an idiot child?”

Martha Bauer returned to Germany in 1919 when Hoffer was l7. His father died in 1920. That year, with $300 left by his father, he bought a train ticket to Los Angeles, California. He landed on skid row and for the next 10 years (1920-30) washed dishes and did odd jobs. “You might say,” he wrote, “I went straight from the nursery to the gutter.”1

In the depression (1930-41), along with the Okies and Arkies, he followed the crops as a migrant farm worker; panned for gold around Nevada City near Lake Tahoe, was a stonemason and odd job man, always living near small town libraries where he read voraciously in his spare time.

About to pan gold in the mountains in late 1936 and anticipating that he might be snowbound, he went to Lieberman’s secondhand bookstore, San Francisco, and paid a dollar for the first thick book he saw with small print and without pictures. It turned out to be The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, the John Florio translation (17th century scholar), which, he later said, reads like Francis Bacon’s essays and the King James version of the Bible. “It has,” Hoffer said, “sentences with hooks in them.” He did get snowbound and wrote, “I read the book through three times. How I loved Montaigne’s language. I could taste the way he shaped each sentence, and for the first time in my life it occurred to me that maybe I could write things like that.”2 Asked later to explain his luck in finding Montaigne and his hit-or-miss stumbling on writers who influenced his thinking, Hoffer replied by quoting Louis Pasteur’s remark, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Hoffer quoted Montaigne to fellow crop pickers up and down California’s San Joaquin Valley. When problems or arguments arose, they asked him, “What does Montaigne say about that?”

In the early 1930s, resting in a federal camp near El Centro with some 200 other jobless migrant workers, he noticed that over half of the men were maimed or crippled, physically or mentally. For the first time he realized that he belonged to a group of misfits, undesirables, who had taken the path of least resistance, the open road. Yet he and they had intelligence, tolerance, good will, and little viciousness.

Why had they not made more of their lives? Crossing a barren desert on foot a few weeks later, the answer came to him. Only a pioneering task, like making the desert bloom, could fire their minds and set them to do the impossible.

Tramps as pioneers? Misfits transformed, in the Islamic term, into true believers? It seemed absurd. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced. Many pioneers, he speculated, like the men in the camp, could not hold steady jobs; were drunkards, gamblers, fugitives, and outcasts. “If in the end they shouldered enormous tasks, endured unspeakable hardships, and accomplished the impossible, it was because they had to…. Once they tasted the joy of achievement, they craved for more,” he later wrote. Hoffer had found an idea, a working hypothesis, an understanding—of who he was, the life he lived, and the temper of his time.3

The media, then full of posturing by Hitler and Mussolini, led Hoffer to see hundreds, thousands, then millions who formed and backed the Nazis, fascists, and communists as misfits and undesirables, joining mass movements to shed their blemished, spoiled, and fouled selves. This insight was the origin of Hoffer’s first book, The True Believer, 1951.

How did he get it published? In late 1938 he read an issue of Common Ground, a magazine trying to interpret America to the foreign-born and vice versa. Excited about the magazine’s point of view, he sent his thoughts about tramps as pioneers in a letter to the editor (Louis Adamic). Associate Editor Margaret Anderson replied. She could not publish his letter, but liked it and had sent it to Eugene Saxon at Harper & Brothers.

Saxon suggested that Hoffer write his autobiography. Hoffer declined. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hoffer volunteered for the army, was rejected because of a hernia, and took the hardest job he could find to help the war effort, as a San Francisco longshoreman (1942-67). Thinking while he worked, mainly nights, and jotting down his thoughts during work breaks, days off, and weekends, Hoffer honed and polished The True Believer, mainly during month-long dock strikes in 1946 and 1948. In 1948 he sent his handwritten manuscript to Margaret Anderson with $100 to cover typing. After it was returned and revised, he asked a candy store owner to wrap the manuscript to mail to Harper. The True Believer, 1951, is dedicated to “Margaret Anderson, without whose goading finger which reached me across a continent, this book would not have been written.”

Just before the 1951 publication of The True Believer, he was befriended by Selden Osborne, a Stanford University graduate with a Master of Arts degree in political science. At Stanford Seldon Osborn had roomed for awhile with Clark Kerr, later president of the University of California. Selden, a longshoreman, yearned for leadership in the longshoreman’s union. An invitation to Sunday dinner at the Osbornes was followed by a lasting friendship with Mrs. Lili Osborne and her children, Hoffer’s only near permanent family attachment.

The True Believer asks what kind of people a mass movement appeals to and why? A mass movement appeals to those people wanting change because they are dissatisfied with themselves. Blaming their condition on forces outside themselves, they think that to change the world around them will cure their own problems.

A mass movement thus offers people a new identity, teaches its followers to hate the present, to be ready to die if necessary for a new, unspoiled, beautiful, perfect tomorrow. Mass movements are thus essentially interchangeable. But America was never captured by mass movements such as Nazism, fascism, and communism. In uprooting themselves from Europe to America, from the old to a new country, immigrants changed themselves with a new language, new clothes, and new identity.

Hoffer then asked himself: who are the potential converts to a mass movement? His answer was that they are misfits, people searching for a cause to give meaning to their lives. They are the newly poor who remember better days, the newly free who lack a close-knit family or community, temporary misfits such as adolescents or the unemployed, permanent misfits with lasting mental and physical defects, or the estranged with unfulfilled dreams of creativity. Included are the inordinately selfish, ambitious, bored, and sinners burdened by deep guilt.

Hoffer saw three kinds of people who start, lead, and consolidate mass movements: first, men of words (whom he later called “Intellectuals”) who start a mass movement. Second are men of action who lead the revolutionary phase of the movement and are usually uncreative, frustrated, self-righteous, petty, and rude. Third are practical men of affairs who take over and, if the movement survives, make leading the movement their careers.4

Hoffer’s second book, The Passionate State Of Mind, 1955, from his notebooks of the 1930s and ’40s, continued to describe the true believer as one who shakes the world. The true believer has a passionate mind which comes from dissatisfaction with one’s self. Such a person is usually uncreative and uses his or her energy only to convulse the world. The weak, Hoffer said, often conquer the strong because their very insecurity drives them to unite and to turn their weakness into strength. In times of great change, the weak become pioneers. Hoffer found hope in people’s capacity for compassion, pity, and helpfulness.5

While struggling to write his third book on intellectuals and on change, Hoffer had writer’s block. To “start the juices flowing again,” he kept a diary during 1958-59, published l0 years later, l969, as Working and Thinking on the Waterfront.

His editor asked him to remove uncomplimentary entries about Blacks–their laziness, hard drinking, noisiness, and prostitution. Hoffer refused. His diary comments on the unfolding drama in the third world and continued his obsession with intellectuals (that is, men of words). “The vigor and health of a society are determined,” not by intellectuals, but “by the quality of the common people….”6

His fourth book, The Ordeal Of Change, 1963, on the philosophy of history, has his most polished essays, is his best book, but has not been as widely read as The True Believer His ideas include:

1-Change comes first and then evokes revolution; not the other way around.

2-Third world countries resent and hate the U.S. because they desperately want to imitate us, but to them imitation means submission.

3-The greatest problem facing communist regimes is that people are unwilling to work in a controlled economic system.

4-The modern western world discovered and used science effectively because it saw the God it worshipped, Jehovah, as a master craftsman, a machine maker. Early scientists were on a religious quest to find the laws their God had built into His great cosmic machine. Modern science thus had its genesis in imitating God.

5-Distant hope is an opiate, but immediate hope is a stimulant. Upheavals in communist countries occur when hope first rises.

6-Loving oneself in a healthy way is a prerequisite to loving one’s fellowman. Thus we treat our neighbors as we treat ourselves.

7-All of man’s great inventions and great insights came from play, from playful moods. The wheel, for example, was a child’s toy before it was used for a chariot and wagon.

8-When forced out of corporate society, misfits are capable of becoming pioneers and leaders on the frontiers of human experience.7

By the time of The Temper of Our Times, 1967, and largely through Selden Osborne and University of California, Berkeley, political science professor Norman Jacobson, Hoffer became a Senior Research Political Scientist at Berkeley. He held Wednesday afternoon open seminars during 1964-72, at the height of student protests. Not sympathetic with their excesses, he often scoffed at “history made by juveniles.” Also, in 1963 and 1964, he gave 12 half-hour interviews on San Francisco’s KQED-TV, broadcast nationwide over the National Educational Television Network. They brought much mail, but he was seldom recognized on the street.

The message of The Temper of Our Times, 1967, is that a free people must reject all would-be saviors who tell them their humanness is wrong. Other themes of this book include:

1-Forced leisure can cause havoc when a skilled population is condemned to inaction by automation. Automation, Hoffer reflected, might release creative energy to produce a renaissance. Turn the whole society into a school, he said, where everyone learns what he needs to know, at his or her own pace, where learning never ends, and where everyone can reach full potential.

2-Black problems arise, not from lack of opportunity but from lack of pride. While there are no easy solutions, the only hope is for Black leaders to return to the ghetto to help lead a cleanup and building campaign that will give Blacks a sense of pride.

3-The modern age is the age of the intellectuals, those who are convinced that the masses are incapable of self-rule, that only they and fellow elites know what the masses need. The best defense against elite rule is to raise the intellectual level of everyone so that no elites exist and everyone is an intellectual.

4-Those who urge a return to nature are wrong. The battle between man and nature is the central theme of history. Man became human only when he broke away from the iron rule of nature. Manmade cities offer the best refuge against nature. We must not let our cities become uninhabitable.8

He retired in 1967 after 25 years as a longshoreman (1942-67). He was also interviewed that year on CBS-TV. Hoffer, who had minor literary fame until then, became an instant celebrity. Eric Sevaried visited him in San Francisco in May 1967. At the Fairmont Hotel bar, despite an argument, they understood and appreciated each other. After the meeting, Hoffer, nervous about the interview, called the Osbornes to say that everything would be all right. The next morning, Sevareid wrote, we “ran two cameras on him for two and a half hours while he talked, sweated, gulped water, and talked…. I flew back to Washington absolutely certain that we had in those cans the greatest film monologue I had ever had anything to do with in all my years in television.”

Sevareid threatened his New York bosses with mayhem if they shortened the program or ran it in other than prime time. Of the broadcast on September 19, 1867, repeated on November 14, 1867, Sevareid wrote, “The switchboards at virtually every CBS station carrying the broadcast lit up like a Christmas tree…. Hoffer made millions of confused and troubled Americans feel very much better about their country.”9

In the Sevareid interview, Hoffer praised Lyndon Johnson, then beleaguered with the war in Vietnam. Johnson quoted Hoffer in a speech. Within two weeks of the CBS interview, Hoffer and Johnson were photographed chatting on the White House lawn. A scheduled 5-minute meeting stretched into 55 minutes. Johnson was the second U.S. president to admire Hoffer, after Eisenhower, who handed out copies of The True Believer to friends. When Hoffer heard about it, he said, “It proved to me…that this is the kind of book any child can read.”10

His sixth book, First Things, Last Things, 197l, deals with man’s creativity, the dangers and potential of leisure, and the significance of cities. Highlights include:

1-”Man’s Most Useful Occupation,” is playfulness. Man is at his best when he spends time and energy on the superfluous.

2-The first walled cities provided refuge for human debris blown away from communal nomadic societies. Countries made up of villages are backward; those composed of cities are progressive.

3-The passage of modern youth to adulthood is painful. The problem is that young people no longer have to prove their adulthood. One solution is to put every adolescent to work cleaning up cities.

4-Don’t give power to intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse. Don’t become a permissive society, a chaotic society, which allows young people to teach before they have finished learning.11

His seventh book, Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973, is on the origin and nature of man. Highpoints are:

1-Beware of the dehumanization of man. Don’t let untalented, alienated groups gain political power.

2-Help learners become creative people because they alone remain young and continue to grow. Creativity exists in the masses, should be recognized and nurtured because it offsets all the problems posed by troublemakers.12

In 1978 the Public Broadcasting Service-TV presented “Eric Hoffer: The Crowded Life.” He was interviewed and the actor Richard Basehart read from his works.

In his eighth book, Before the Sabbath, 1979, he credits Jews with creating optimism, fanaticism, and the western mind. He wondered if the nineteenth century was perhaps the West’s golden age. Old age, he wrote, can give one a capacity for enjoying the beautiful things of the world without wanting to possess them.13

His last, ninth book was published in 1982, the year before he died: Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer.

Back in February 1970, at age 67, tired of being in the public eye, he said he was leaving public life, cutting back on his activities. “No more columns, no more television, no more pictures, no more teaching….I’m going to crawl back into my hole, where I started….I have become a professional scold, and it is not really me.” But he remained active.14

His own best epitaph is in his own words: “It is the crowded life that is most easily remembered. A life full of turns, achievements, disappointments, surprises, and crises is a life full of landmarks.”15

Reviewers and pundits called him a “literary stevedore” (New Yorker, 1951), a “dockside Montaigne” (Time, 1955), an “epigrammist on the waterfront” (Reporter, 1957), a “secular preacher” (Christian Century, 1963), a “philosopher of the misfits” (Time, 1963), a “docker of philosophy” (Life, 1967), and a “blue-collar Plato” (Newsweek, 1967).

Hoffer, like other self-taught people, loved learning and a good sentence; he cherished thinkers and books that appealed to him. He despised the communist, fascist, and Nazi intellectuals of the 1930s who wrought so much havoc.

He feared intellectuals with political ambitions because of their compulsion to dominate. His remedy was mass education. “Educate everyone so that all are intellectuals and no ruling elites can emerge,” he said. Mass schooling would also release the great talents Hoffer was convinced existed in common working people. Another way to release talents would be to encourage playfulness. Hoffer was convinced that the playful mood brought with it creativity.

Finally, one is fascinated with Hoffer’s theme that man (i.e., persons, men and women) is an unfinished creature who must finish himself; that is, humanize himself. Nature attains perfection, but people never do. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. His unfinishedness sets him apart. Unlike animals, human beings have fewer specialized organs, are born without a built-in tool kit. (Hoffer quotes Thomas Hardy: “Man begins when nature ends. Man and nature can never be friends”). A return to nature is a return to brute force. The ascent of humans was an effort to get out from under the iron rule of nature. Only then did man humanize himself, finish himself with technology. In doing so, he becomes a creator, a half god. To be human is to be free, to create.

Hoffer wrote in The Ordeal of Change: “Man’s only legitimate end in life is to finish God’s work, to bring to full growth the capacities and talents in all of us.” This thought is a good one to end on.

Continued in Part 2 of 2 Parts: References

Send 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.

2 of 2 Parts. Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Remembered: Guru of the 1950s-60s. References.

2 of 2 Parts. Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Remembered: Guru of the 1950s-60s. References.

by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

References

1. Tomkins, Calvin. Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968, p. 10.

2. Ibid., p. 19.

3. Ibid., p. 18.

4. Baker, James T. Eric Hoffer. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982, pp. 71-77.

5. Ibid., pp. 77-81.

6. Ibid., pp. 81-84.

7. Ibid., pp. 84-88.

8. Ibid., pp. 88-91.

9. Tomkins, op. cit., pp. ix-xi.

10. Ibid., p. 55.

11. Baker, op. cit., pp. 91-95.

12. Ibid., pp. 95-98.

13. Ibid., pp. 98-100.

14. New York Times (February 22, 1970).

15. Baker, op. cit., p. 1.

Articles by Eric Hoffer.

“Automation is Here to Liberate Us,” New York Times Magazine (October 24, 1965), pp. 48-49.

“The Awakening of Asia,” Reporter, 10 (June 22, 1954), pp. 16-17.

“Born ‘63. Graduated ‘74. Elected ‘76,” New York Times (March 9, 1976).

“The Clamor for Instant Happiness,” Los Angeles Times (October 20, 1968).

“Comments on the Human Condition,” Harper’s, 233 (November 1966), pp. 90-91.

“Fugitives from the Present,” Los Angeles Times (April14, 1968).

“God and the Machine Age,” Reporter 14 (February 23, 1956), p. 36.

“Hidden Currents that Guide Our Lives–The Wisdom of Eric Hoffer,” Family Weekly (September 24, 1972), pp. 6-7.

“How Natural is Human Nature?” Saturday Evening Post, 235 (January or February 13, 1962), pp. 26-27.

“‘I Savor the Joy of Dull Work,’” Family Weekly (October 17, 1976), pp. 4-5.

“The Intellectual and the Masses,” Pacific Spectator, 10 (Winter 1956), pp. 6-14.

“A Kind Word for Intellectuals,” Los Angeles Times (March 24, 1968).

“Leisure and the Masses,” Parks and Recreation, 4 (March 1969), pp. 31-34.

Livesay, Harold (et al., including Eric Hoffer). “Does America Still Exist?” Harper’s, 268 (March 1984), p. 43.

“Long Live Shame!” New York Times (October 18, 1974).

“The Madhouse of Change,” Playboy, 15 (December 1968), pp. 165-168.

“The Majority Must Act!” Los Angeles Times (July 28, 1968).

“Making a Mass Elite,” Holiday, 39 (March 1966), pp. 10-14.

“Man’s Real Habitat: the City,” Los Angeles Times (May 19, 1968).

“The Negro is Prejudiced Against Himself,” New York Times Magazine (November 29, 1964), 27-34. Letters to the Editor (December 13, 1964), pp. 28-29, 108-109.

“Our Century of Juveniles,” Los Angeles Times (March 31, 1968).

“The Passionate State of Mind,” Harper’s, 209 (December 1954), pp. 61-63.

“The Process of Change,” Reporter, 10 (March 2, 1954), pp. 34-35.

“Reflections,” Weekly column. Los Angeles Times (January 1968-February 1970).

“Reflections: Intellectuals Cover Hitler to Oswald,” Pittsburgh Press (February 23, 1969).

“The Rise and Fall of the Practical Sense,” Reporter, 19 (December 11, 1958), pp. 27-28.

“The Role of the Undesirables,” Harper’s (December 1952), pp. 79-84.

“Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: ‘Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely,’” New York Time Magazine (April 25, 1971), pp. 24-25+.

“Thoughts on the Brotherhood of Man,” New York Times Magazine (February 15, 1959), pp. 12-17.

“A Time of Juveniles,” Harper’s, 230 (June 1965), pp. 16-20.

“What I Have Learned IV: Strategy for the War with Nature,” Saturday Review, 49 (February 5, 1966), pp. 27-29, 73-75.

“What We Have Lost,” New York Times Magazine (October 20, 1974), pp. 110, 112, 114, 116-117.

“Whose Country is America?” New York Times Magazine (November 22, 1970), pp. 30-31, 117-122, 124. Letters to the Editor (December 13, 1970), pp. 34, 79.

“Why Captive Peoples Revolt,” New York Times Magazine (August 23, 1953), pp. 12-16.

“Why Not Disenfranchise the Educated?” Los Angeles Times (August 4, 1968).

“A Workingman Looks at the Boss,” Harper’s, 208 (March 1954), pp. 48-49.

Other Books and Articles about Hoffer

“Awesome Epigrams,” Time, 90 (February 9, 1968), p. 60

Baker, James T. “Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983,” Contemporary Issues Criticism, Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1984, pp. 234-254.

“Blue Collar Plato,” Newsweek, 69 (January 16, 1967), p. 92

Burdick, E. “Eric Hoffer: Epigrammatist on the Waterfront,” Reporter, 16 (February 21, 1957), pp. 41-44.

Collier, Peter. “Eric Hoffer: The Wizard of Was,” Ramparts, 6, 15 (December 1967), pp. 65-68.

Cooper, Stirling M. “True Believers, Mass Movements and Education,” Alternatives in American Education, 2, 1-2 (September-December 1971), pp. 1, 12.

Crawford, Kenneth. “Passionate Believer,” Newsweek, 70 (October 16, 1967), p. 38.

Dunphy, Mary Elayne. “Philosopher Finds Great Store of Talent,” Seattle Times (October 14, 1968), p. 6.

“Eric Hoffer, Secular Preacher,” Christian Century, 80 (May 29, 1963), p. 727.

“Eric Hoffer: The Crowded Life,” The Schedule, Austin, TX (January 1978), p. 8.l

Erickson, Stanford. “Hoffer: Longshoreman, Intellectual,” Journal of Commerce and Commercial, 375 (January 25, 1988), p. 8A.

Ethridge, James M., and Barbara Kopala, eds. “Eric Hoffer,” Contemporary Authors: A Biographical-Bibliographical Guide to Current Authors and Their Works. Vol. 15. Detroit: Gale Research Co, 1966, pp. 2ll-212.

Evans, Walter A. “Work Is the Country’s Salvation”: Hoffer,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 14-15, 1968), pp. 1, 6.

Faber, N. “In His Own Words,” People, 9 (January 16, 1978), pp. 29-31.

Ferguson, Charles W. “Americans Not Everybody Knows: Eric Hoffer,” PTA Magazine, 61, 10 (June 1967), pp. 4-7.

Fincher, James. “Docker of Philosophy,” Life, 62 (March 24, 1067), pp. 35 ff.

“From the Waterfront,” Time, 90 (November 17, 1967), p. 66.

Frome, M. “Eric Hoffer,” American Forests (August 1968), pp. 3+.

Gould, Jack. “TV: More of Hoffer….” New York Times (January 30, 1969).

Hall, Isabelle McCaig. “Hoffer Blows During Talks on Violence,” Morgantown (WV) Post (October 24, 1968), p. 9A.

Harte, Barbara, and Carolyn Riley, eds. “Eric Hoffer,” 200 Contemporary Authors. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1969, pp. 152-153.

“Hoffer, Eric.” Current Biography, 26 (March 1965), p. 28ff.

“Hoffer, Eric.” Current Biography Yearbook 1965. New York: H.W.Wilson Co., 1965, pp. 200-203.

“Hoffer, Eric,” Political Profiles: The Johnson Years. New York: Facts on File, 1976, pp. 278-279.

“Ike’s Favorite Author,” Look, 20 (June 12, 1956), pp. 40-42.

“Johnson Pleased by a Philosopher,” New York Times (October 8, 1967).

Kemble, Patrick. “On Eric Hoffer,” Commentary, 48 (November 1969), pp. 79-82.

Koerner, James D. Hoffer’s America. LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1973.

“Literary Stevedore,” New Yorker, 27 (April 28, 1951), pp. 20-22.

Nightingale, Earl. “A Comment on Jews,” Earl Nightingale Our Changing World, #5285. Chicago: Nightingale-Conant Corporation, 1980.

Parker, Franklin and Betty J. “Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Revisited: Books and Ideas (A Dialogue).”Proceedings of the Forty-First Annual Meeting, Southwestern Philosophy of Education Society, Volume XLI. Edited by Wayne Willis. Morehead, KY: Morehead State University, 1991, pp. 96-107.

Parker, Franklin and Betty J. “Eric Hoffer (1902-83): Books and Ideas on School and Society.” CORE (Collected Original Resources in Education), XV, No. 1 (March 1991), Fiche 1 A06.

Parker, Franklin and Betty J. “Eric Hoffer (1902-83) Revisited: Books and Ideas (A Dialogue),” abstract in Resources in Education, XXXI, No. 12 (Dec. 1996), p. 152 (ERIC ED 398 138).

Petrosko, Joseph M. “The Alchemy of the Soul: A Study of Eric Hoffer’s Thoughts on Creativity,” Journal of Creative Behavior, 17, 2 (Second Quarter 1983), pp. 131-145.

“The Presidency,” Time, 90, 15 (October 13, 1967), pp. 25-26.

Russell, Charles. “‘Just Like Home,’ Remarks Hoffer on Seattle Arrival,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 14, 1968), p. 12.

Tomkins, Calvin. “Profiles: Creative Situation,” New Yorker, 42 (January 7, 1967), pp. 34-36+.

Wakeman, John, ed. “Eric Hoffer,” World Authors 1950-70. New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1975, pp. 654-655.

Reviews of Eric Hoffer’s Books (all published by Harper & Row)

The True Believer, 1951.

1-Brinton, Crane. New York Herald Tribune (May 27, 1951), p. 13.

2-Garside, E.B. New York Times (March 18, 1951), p. 10.

3-Krugman, H.E. American Journal of Sociology (November 1951), p. 297.

4-Martin, Neil. Christian Science Monitor (April 26, 1951), p. 11.

5-Newman, J.R. New Republic (December 10, 1951), p. 22.

The Passionate State of Mind, 1955:
1-Breit, H. “Workingman,” New York Times Book Review (April 1, 1956), p. 8.
2-”Dockside Montaigne,” Time (March 14, 1955), p. 114-115.
3-Gill, T.A. Christian Century (June 29, 1955), p. 760.
4-Jackson, J.H.San Francisco Chronicle (March 7, 1955), p. 19.
4-Rovere, R.H. New Yorker (May 21, 1955), p. 137.

The Ordeal of Change, 1963:
1-Barrett, William. Atlantic (April l963), p. 151.
2-Barrett, William. Critic (June 1963), p. 80
3-Christian Century (May 29, 1963), p. 727.
4-”Philosopher of Misfits,” Time, 8l, 11 (March 15, 1963), p. 109.
5-Pickrel, Paul.Harpers (April 1963), p. 96.
6-Schroth, R.A. America (April 13, 1963), p. 502.
7-Wills, Gary. “Eric Hoffer’s True Beliefs,” National Review, 14 (June 18, 1963), pp. 502-504.

The Temper of Our Times, 1967.
1-Adams, Phoebe. Atlantic (January 1967), p. 550.
2-Berube, M.R. Commonweal (January 27, 1967), p. 465.
3-Brown, Clayton. Library Journal (December 15, 1966), p. 6101.
4-Featherstone, Joseph. “Hoffer as Historian,” New Republic , 156 (June 3, 1967), pp. 30-32.
5-Konvitz, M.R. Saturday Review (April 8, 1967), p. 41.
6-Maddocks, Melvin. Christian Science Monitor (January 5, 1967), p. 7.
7-Oberbeck, S.K. Newsweek (January 16, 1967), pp. 90+.
8-Poore, Charles. New York Times, January 5, 1967.

Working and Thinking on the Waterfront,196.
1-Friedenberg, E.Z. New York Review of Books (May 8, 1969), p. 1100.
2-Garside, E.B. New Yorker (March 1, 1969), p. 70.
3-MacKenzie, Richard. “Man of Sense,” National Review, 21 (May 6, 1969), pp. 445-446.
4-Newfield, Jack. New York Times Book Review (February 26, 1969), p. 3.
5-Picht, D.R. Library Journal (February 1, 1969), p. 553.

First Things, Last Things, 1971.
1-Flaherty, Joe. New York Times Book Review (July 25, 197l), pp. 3, 12-13.

Truth Imagined, 1983
1-Publishers Weekly, 224 (October 28,1983), p. 63.
2-Williamson, Chilton, Jr. National Review, 36 (February 24, 1984), p. 58.

Obituaries
1-Bethell, T. “Eric Hoffer, R I P,” National Review, 35, 11 (June 10, 1983), p. 668.
2–Current Biography Yearbook, 44 (July 1983), p. 43.
3-Current Biography Yearbook, 83 (1984), pp. 466-467.
4-New York Times Biographical Service, 14 (May 1983), p. 563.
5-Newsweek, 101 (May 30, 1983), p. 102.
6-Publishers Weekly, 223 (June 3, 1983), p. 21.
7-Time, 121 (May 30, 1983), p. 88.
8-Turner, Wallace. “Eric Hoffer, 80, Dockside Scholar,” New York Times (May 23, 1983), p. 20.

TV Interviews of Eric Hoffer

By Eric Sevareid, New York: Columbia Broadcasting Television Network.

1. “Eric Hoffer: The Passionate State of Mind,” September 19, 1967.

2. “The Savage Heart: A Conversation with Eric Hoffer,” January 19, 1969.

By James Day, San Francisco: National Educational Television.

1. “Ordeal of Change,” July 31, 1963.

2. “The Role of the Intellectual,” August 6, 1963.

3. “The Role of the Weak,” August 13, 1963.

4. “The Nature of Man,” August 20, 1963.

5. “Man’s Struggle for Uniqueness,” August 27, 1963.

6. “From the Cradle to Skid Row,” September 3, 1963.

7. “The Growth of a Train of Thought,” November 8, 1964.

8. “Talent,” November 15, 1964.

9. “Automation,” November 22, 1964.

10, “The Mysterious Occident,” November 29, 1964.

11. “The New Age,” December 6, 1964.

12. “Reading and Writing,” December 13, 1964.

Doctoral Dissertations about Eric Hoffer.

1-Batty, Paul Wesley. “Eric Hoffer’s Theory of Mass Persuasion.” Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1970.

2-Carrier, Henry Nash, III. “Eric Hoffer’s Conceptual Approach to the Development of American Democratic Leadership.” D.A., University of Mississippi, 1973.

3-Hunter, Nevin Doran. “Drastic Change and Mass Movements: The Theories of Eric Hoffer.” Ph.D., University of Washington, 1971.
END OF MANUSCRIPT

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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.

Philip Vickers Fithian (1747-1776), a Princeton Tutor on a Virginia Plantation by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Philip Vickers Fithian (1747-1776), a Princeton Tutor on a Virginia Plantation by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net [63Heritage Loop, Crossville, TN 38571-8270, Ph. (931) 277-3268]

Philip Vickers Fithian was a northern tutor on a southern plantation just before the American Revolution. His journal and letters written during 1773-74 and kept at Princeton University Library, New Jersey, provide an accurate picture of Virginia life, education, and manners before the Revolution. Because Fithian was a tutor on the Carter plantation, Nomini Hall, Westmoreland County, Va., his journal and letters are of special interest. They offer an in intimate description of a plantation tutor's duties as well as glimpses of life and education in the colonial South.

Philip Fithian was born in Greenwich, Cumberland County, New Jersey, on December 19, 1747. His forebears three generations back in 1640 had emigrated from England. Little is known of Fithian's early education before his admission in 1770 at age 23 to the junior class of the College of New Jersey, renamed Princeton College in 1896 and later Princeton University.

The College of New Jersey was chartered in 1746 and opened in 1747 by the “New Light” (evangelical) Presbyterians in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Its second president was Aaron Burr. The College was moved to Princeton, New Jersey, in 1756, was occupied by British forces in the American Revolution, its buildings badly damaged, and then rebuilt under President John Witherspoon.

Dr. John Witherspoon, appointed president in 1768, two years before Fithian's admission, was a leading and well known Presbyterian minister. He was later a delegate from New Jersey to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Because of his missionary zeal as president of the College of New Jersey, he influenced many students studying for the ministry to go out to preach and teach in frontier communities, particularly in the southern colonies

Fithian graduated from the college at Princeton in September 1772.

The sudden death of his parents earlier that year had kept him from additional study at Princeton to prepare for the ministry. He went back to his hometown of Greenwich and studied Hebrew under Reverend Andrew Hunter. He also studied theology at nearby Deerfield. It was Reverend Hunter's son, then at Princeton, who wrote to Fithian that he heard that President John Witherspoon had been asked to find someone to fill a position as tutor on a Virginia plantation. Needing to earn money before he could complete his studies for the ministry, Fithian went to Princeton to see President Witherspoon and listened to him read the letter from Colonel Carter describing the position.

A tutor was needed to teach the eight Carter children. The three boys from ages 5 to 17 were “to study the English language carefully & to be instructed in Latin & Greek.” The five daughters were to be taught English. The tutor was to receive £60 in currency, room and board, have the use of the library, a servant, and feed for his horse. Witherspoon advised Fithian to go, even if for only a short time. Fithian was apprehensive. His friends cast doubt on the idea, and Fithian wrote to President Witherspoon to try to get a graduating senior to go in his stead. Fithian continued to worry through August and September 1773.

Finally, with misgivings, he decided to accept the position and left on horseback for Virginia in mid October. Just before he left, he wrote in his journal: “Rode & took Leave of all my Relations–how hard is it at last? My heart misgives, is reluctant, in spite of me; But I must away! Protect me merciful Heaven.”

Fithian's journal and letters tell that he rode horseback 260 miles in seven days and that he spent on his trip a total of £3.6 shillings and 5 pence. He reached Nomini Hall, the mansion on the Carter Plantation, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, on Thursday, October 29, 1773.

On Monday, November 1, 1773, he taught his eight pupils for the first time. The eldest son read the works of Salust, a Roman historian and politician, and studied Latin grammar. The middle son read and wrote English and did subtraction. The youngest son read and wrote English and did arithmetic sums. The eldest daughter read the Spectator papers, wrote a composition, and did her arithmetic. Three of the other girls went over their spelling and did some writing. The smallest girl was just beginning to learn the alphabet.

Fithian was agreeably surprised during his stay at Nomini Hall. Instead of the revelry and riotous living he had imagined, he found refinement, elegance, and culture. Robert Carter III was the descendant of a wealthy and influential Tidewater family. He was the grandson of the original immigrant, John Carter, who left England for Virginia in 1649, nine years after Fithian's own forebears had reached the new world. “King Carter,” as he was sometimes called, had acquired 13,500 acres and had become a successful planter and businessman. His son had expanded the family fortune, had obtained 330,000 acres, which he divided among his sons. He left Robert Carter III at age 21 the master of 70,000 acres.

Robert Carter had been sent at the young age of nine to William and Mary College in Williamsburg. From there Carter made his first trip to England, where he spent two years studying and gaining refinement, as his father and grandfather had done before him. Returning to Virginia in 1751, he married a 16-year-old girl of his own station whom he met on a trip to Maryland. She bore her husband 17 children. Those who lived she carefully trained during their early years.

Robert Carter III led a busy life at Nomini Hall. He managed his 70,000 acres, consisting of a dozen plantations. He grew tobacco and grain. He also rented large parts of his estate to others, some on money rental for fixed periods, some to white sharecroppers, supplying them with land, tools, and seeds. The sharecroppers returned to him a portion of the crops in payment.

Besides being a planter and a landlord, Robert Carter III was a manufacturer. He operated textile factories, salt works, smiths' shops, iron works, grain mills, and bakeries to fill his own needs and those of his neighbors. He owned ships which carried his supplies and those of other nearby planters on the Virginia rivers. He was also something of a banker and lent credit to others. At one time he owned over 500 slaves and employed many stewards, overseers, clerks, skilled craftsmen, and other workers.

Not all plantation owners owned so much as Robert Carter III did, but many Southerners of his station had a deep sense of obligation to society. They were justices in county courts, served as sheriffs, colonels of militia (Carter was a colonel of militia), and acted as vestrymen and church wardens in their parishes. Carter was in a real sense the protector, father, physician, and court of last resort for all people on the plantation. At 23 he was a member of the Governor's Council and spent a good part of each year attending the General Court in the capital at Williamsburg.

At home at Nomini Hall Carter read, practiced music, and took part in social life. Among the musical instruments at Nomini Hall were the harpsichord, harmonica, guitar, violin, German flute, and an organ specially built in England and transported for him to Virginia.

Fithian appreciated the refinement, culture, and benevolence of the ruling class that Carter represented. But Fithian was critical of slavery. Learning of the food allowance for slaves and hearing of harsh treatment of those considered to be difficult, he wrote of their owners, “Good God! Are these Christians?” Some overseers he called “bloody,” and he believed that black slaves from Africa were less economical than free white tenant farmers would be.

To note the graceful life of the upper class in the South is to look at only part of a large picture. The colonial South had well defined social classes. At the base of these were the slaves who provided the essential labor of the entire society.
BR>
Unlike the New England Puritans, the southern aristocracy reflected the conservative outlook of the English upper class and the Anglican (or Established) Church. While middle class Puritans came mainly for religious liberty, upper class Anglicans came primarily for the chance to gain large wealth.

The economic foundation of the South was laid in 1612 when John Rolfe successfully grew and processed tobacco. This money-making crop was much more important from the point of view of the Southerners' interests than rice and indigo. But tobacco took a heavy drain of essential minerals from the soil and needed more and more growing land and more and more field labor.

While plantation owners provided the ingenuity and the initial capital, slaves did the essential hard work. In between were English white indentured servants from the working class who paid for their passage by seven years of work and then, except for a few who left the South, became tenant farmers or small landowners or craftsmen. Thus the social class structure arose naturally out of existing conditions. The pattern became fixed: black slaves, white farm workers in various social categories, and a small top layer of wealthy plantation owners like Carter whose rule was buttressed by the government and by the established Anglican Church.

Education in the South had some things in common with education in the North, particularly a philanthropic concern for religious literacy, economic usefulness, and social welfare. Apprenticeship training, going back for its inspiration to the English poor laws, was practiced in all the colonies. In the South, apprenticeship opportunities were available for dependent white children, for orphan white children, and for some illegitimate mulatto or mixed-blooded children.

Most slave children were brought up at home by illiterate parents and were quickly put to field work or other work they could perform. Some planters did establish schoolhouses in abandoned tobacco fields and hired teachers. A few Old Field Schools, as they were called, were for black slave children, but most Old Field Schools were for poorer white children. Old Field School pupils learned little more than the ABC's and Anglican catechism.

One philanthropic agency which provided organized education for religious purposes was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, usually referred to simply as S.P.G. This missionary arm of the Anglican Church had been founded in England in 1701 by Thomas Bray, Church of England clergymen, for mission education work in the British colonies. But S.P.G. educational work in the American South was negligible.

Early attempts had been made to establish schools in Virginia using private donations. The Virginia Company had hoped to establish Henrico College in 1619 as a missionary school to convert the Indians to Anglican Christianity, but the college soon failed. An attempt by a clergyman, Patrick Copeland, to establish an East India Company school about the same time also failed. Some individuals did establish private free schools, similar to northern grammar schools, where the three R's, Latin, and religion were taught.

Two outstanding examples of these relatively few private schools in Virginia included a school founded by planter Benjamin Symes in
In 1659 Dr. Thomas Eaton gave several hundred acres, buildings, slaves, and livestock for another school. The Symes and Eaton schools united in 1805 to form Hampton Academy, and in 1902 Hampton Academy became part of the Virginia public school system.

Basically, however, the southern aristocracy, like the British upper class, believed that education was a private, family matter. In New England the Calvinistic Puritan desire for religious literacy led to government requirement and support, as in the Massachusetts school laws of 1642 and 1647, which aimed at universal elementary and secondary education.

But in the South the tradition of education as a private family matter was strong. Unlike the northern colonies, the southern colonial governments did not provide educational schemes for the common people. For the southern plantation elites, mothers trained their children during the very early years, then private tutors like Philip Fithian were hired for the intermediate years, and a further finishing education was obtained either abroad in English or French university colleges or at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Fithian's position at the Carter house was one close to the family. Those who lived in Nomini Hall besides the family, included Fithian, servants, a housekeeper, a clerk, a dancing master, and a nurse.

Some other plantation homes had fencing masters, tutors from abroad, and governesses from the continent hired chiefly for their knowledge of French and German languages. The southern plantation youth were exposed to a wide and liberal curriculum, which included classical literature, foreign languages, philosophy, dancing, fencing, and such practical subjects as surveying and law. The goal was not professional specialization but rather a gentlemanly education that aimed at character building. Southern plantation owners had some of the largest libraries in all the colonies. One of Philip Fithian's jobs was to catalog Colonel Carter's library of more than 1,000 volumes, containing many classics and books on manners, gardening, medicine and surgery, surveying, engineering, law, commentaries on law, architecture, and a wide range of other cultural subjects.

Philip Vickers Fithian went to Virginia in late October 1773 with some fear and trepidation. Ten months later, in late summer 1774, when he left Nomini Hall, he carried with him a deep affection for the Carter children and family. He left to do further study to qualify as a Presbyterian minister. Besides, he had a sweetheart in Princeton to whom he wrote often.

On December 7, 1774, before the Presbytery of Philadelphia, Fithian took and passed his examination for the ministry and was licensed to preach. That winter he filled several vacant pulpits in western New Jersey. In the summer of 1775 he went as Presbyterian missionary to pioneer settlements in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and Pennsylvania. Soon after he married Elizabeth Beatty of Princeton. At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Fithian enlisted as a chaplain in Heard's brigade of New Jersey militia. He was present at the battle of White Plains, New York. After suffering severe exposure during the battle, he died near Fort Washington on October 8, 1776. He was twenty-nine years and ten months old.

For a century and a quarter Philip Vickers Fithian's manuscript journal and the letters he wrote to friends and relatives remained unpublished. His brother Enoch had copied these in bound volumes from the loose and various-sized sheets on which they had been written. These seven volumes in Enoch Fithian's handwriting remained at the Princeton University Library until 1900, when they were published for the first time. The last edition was published in 1945.

The value of Philip Fithian's journal and letters lies in their graphic and intimate portrait of Virginia plantation life, culture, and education. For a small proportion of the children of moderate-to-large plantation owners, the South offered education by tutors like Fithian that was genteel, cultured, and refined.

For the children of white tradesmen and small land owners there were some private schools. For white indentured servants and sharecroppers there were relatively few Old Field Schools. Black slave children received practically no schooling.
Northern education spread faster among a growing and rising middle class. Southern education, favoring as it did a proportionately smaller plantation aristocracy, had less educational impact on a smaller middle class, had little effect on poor whites, and no effect on the black slave majority.
References
Adapted from Parker, Franklin, “A Princeton Tutor on a Virginia Plantation,” Tradition, III, No. 3 (December 1960), pp. 41-47.

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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.

Willard Goslin (1899-1969), Educator, School Principal, School Superintendent, and Education Professor at Peabody College, Nashville, TN.

Willard Goslin (1899-1969), Educator, School Principal, School Superintendent, and Education Professor at Peabody College, Nashville, TN. By Franklin & Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Willard Goslin, educator, was born in Harrisburg, Mo. in 1899. He was a teacher, school principal, school superintendent, and education professor at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, TN.

We Parkers knew him in the 1950s at Peabody College in Nashville, renamed Peabody College of Vanderbilt University in 1979. Goslin taught at Peabody during 1951-67. He was chairperson of its Division of Educational Administration and Community Development. He also headed Peabody College's $7 million U.S. Agency for International Development-funded Korea Teacher Education Project.

The lean, lanky farm-reared Missourian began teaching in rural schools at age 16, worked his way through Northeast Missouri State College, Kirksville, B.S., 1922; the University of Missouri, M.A., 1928; took courses at Teachers College, Columbia University, 1930, and Washington University, St. Louis, 1929-35; and later received honorary LL.D. degrees from Occidental College, Los Angeles; and also from Seoul National University, Korea, 1961.

Goslin became a high school principal at age 22 and was superintendent of a small school system in Slater, Mo., at age 23. He became school superintendent at Webster Grove, an upper middle class suburb of St. Louis, 1928-44; was school superintendent of Minneapolis, Minn., 1944-48; and finally school superintendent of Pasadena, Calif., 1948-51.

His forced resignation as Pasadena school superintendent became a cause célèbre among concerned educators and the interested public of that time. Pasadena, California, was the scene of a classic progressive-versus-traditional education confrontation soon after World War II. That confrontation reflected a changed U.S. mood early in the U.S.-USSR cold war. Post-World War II changes brought an influx of poor whites, African-Americans, and other minorities for war work. Their presence inevitably changed Pasadena, previously a wealthy spillover community of Los Angeles and Hollywood. Not only were they a challenge the Pasadena school system had to cope with, but they posed a threat to the long-time wealthy conservative power structure in that city and county.

As new school superintendent, Willard Goslin favored a progressive education curriculum which included studying about UNESCO and world affairs, teaching sex education, and integrating poorer white and minority students into the public schools. Inevitably the changes he urged evoked a postwar conservative reaction that forced his resignation. The Goslin case made national headlines and was described in newsman David Hulburd's This Happened in Pasadena (New York: Macmillan, 1951).

Peabody College President Henry H. Hill (1894-1987), like Goslin a past president of the American Association of School Administrators, had extensive personal ties to Willard Goslin. President Hill urged that Willard Goslin move to Peabody College to lend his educator skills and prestige to Peabody College's school administration programs. Goslin's 16 years as George Peabody College for Teachers professor and administrator were successful and mutually beneficial.

The co-authors well remember the excitement of his presence at Peabody College. Franklin Parker, on whose doctoral committee Prof. Goslin served, was a student in one of Goslin's early classes during the summer of 1952.

So many student registered for his course that a partition between classrooms had to be removed to accommodate them. The large enrolment he attracted resulted from the publicity about his liberal stand at Pasadena, his educational experience, attractive personality, droll humor, and down to earth educational philosophy.

Learn more about Willard Goslin's exciting career and influence as an educator in above-mentioned David Hulburd's This Happened in Pasadenaand by typing: Willard Goslin (1899-1969), Educator, in a search engine like google: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=Willard+Goslin&btnG=Google+Search

Send 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.