02.18
On the advice of a friend, I’ve been reading a book called Before Scopes. It’s subtitled as “Evangelicalism, Education, and Evolution in Tennessee, 1870-1925″. It’s a survey of the events leading up to the famous Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee where the school board indicted John Scopes for teaching evolution in his classroom, in violation of the Butler bill. The Scopes trial itself really isn’t of interest to me, but public education in the South is. So I have been making my way through it and it’s very good. It chronicles the pre and post-war Tennessee educational environment and gives it a pretty fair hearing in my opinion. It’s a story that we could all learn from today.
But, on to the point. One of the forces behind public education in the post-bellum South is something he refers to as the Peabody Education Fund. That peeked my interest and I filed it away to follow up later. Well, low and behold, while reading a paper that my wife sent to me by John Taylor Gatto, I ran into a reference to “…George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South…”. So I just had to dig a little and find out who this guy was and why he was so interested in Southern schooling. After researching a little bit, I guess I should have heard of this guy before.
From what I can tell, George Peabody was a founder of the banking company that eventually became J.P. Morgan(Morgan’s son would later sit on the trust fund’s board), and also Morgan Stanley. He is considered the first “philanthropist”, in the modern sense. An extremely wealthy individual who devotes his latter years to benevolence. He sounds to me a lot like Walter Annenberg. It’s actually uncanny how close the comparison is. Down to the fact that Peabody lived his last years in London, and Annenberg was the ambassador to the U.K. in his latter years. Anyway, it looks like he created the Peabody Education Fund in 1867, and died a few years later. He set up a trust for the distribution of the money, with little or no restrictions or caveats on how it was doled out. Again, very similar to Annenberg.
I found some of his letters to the trust board in the New York Time’s archives section, and as far as I can see, the guy’s motives were honest. He seemed to genuinely believe in the cause he was starting. Things would start to change, however, in 1879 as the interest rate on government bonds slowed the amount of money that the fund was generating. The board called on a petition to the Federal government to appropriate money for Southern education initiatives. This idea would only grow as the board later included William McKinley and then later President Teddy Roosevelt. In 1883, the board said that “no private benefactions or endowments, however liberal,” would be able to meet the great need of southern education, and called again on National moneys.
In going through the trust’s report from 1880, there are some revealing things as well in the language:
It will thus be seen that in 1870 nearly one-third of the
population of those States consisted of recently liberated
slaves, owning but little or no property, and generally with
no means of acquiring any except by manual labor in grain
or cotton fields. If we add to these the number of whites
who were impoverished by the war, it will probably appear
that one-half of the entire population is incapable of bear-
ing taxation.
…
Where large masses of population are
uninformed, and in need of the common necessaries of life,
nothing is more easy than for artful demagogues to inflame
their minds against their more fortunate countrymen, who,
by patient industry and thrift, have been able to surround
themselves and their families with all the appliances of
comfort and luxury.
So we see a few reasons here for the need for education that the trust saw. Restoring a taxable constituency and easing tensions between the haves and the have nots. Remember that this board was made up almost exclusively of business tycoons who had in their self interest, a population that was not hostile to them. This was definitely one of the aims of early public schooling, that would become even more and more prominent as the century turned. So much of the public school system can be traced directly back to wealthy magnates and tycoons such as Rockefeller, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Morgan, etc. That whole 1880 report is fascinating. Take your time to read through it when you can.
As the 19th century came to a close, the fund began to focus mostly on training teachers for the public schools. This was the subject of the meeting in 1901, as well as talk of the nature of the emerging shool system. The manager of the trust called it a “duty of government” to educate the people, and praised that the American public education was “free from ecclesiastical control” and “severed” from “sectarian domination”. It’s chilling to see that even in 1901, religion was being purged from the school system as a requirement of taking this private/government money. This only intensified as the years went on, and most Southern states bought into it hook, line and sinker.
No Comment.
Add Your Comment