USA > Indiana > Historic Indiana : being chapters in the story of the Hoosier state from the romantic period of foreign exploration and dominion through pioneer days, stirring war times, and periods of peaceful progress, to the present time > Part 31
USA > Indiana > Historic Indiana : being chapters in the story of the Hoosier state from the romantic period of foreign exploration and dominion through pioneer days, stirring war times, and periods of peaceful progress, to the present time, centennial ed. > Part 31
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agriculture, manual training, cooking, and sewing, is to be coupled with the regular literary course. This reasonable plan will equalize the advantages for education between the city and country youth; and there will be less incentive for them to desert the farm for the towns and better results at less cost surely will follow the centralization of rural schools for which Indiana educators are now contending. If instruction in agriculture and home economics is given in the schools, the youth who are to be the farmers and homemakers can afford to remain longer in attendance at school. Technical instruction in their home school for the practical work which is to be their career will retain them in the country where they may be growing more proficient in their vocation instead of drifting into the forlorn ranks of unskilled labor.
For many years after free schools were fully in- stalled throughout the State, there was no law making attendance compulsory, and truancy, or very in- different regularity was common, as in other States. In 1897 and 1901, laws were enacted compelling attendance at school until the age of fourteen; and the same law provided that books and clothing should be furnished when there was necessity. Only one written notice of habitual truancy to the parent or guardian of a child is required in any one year. The parent who violates the requirements of the law may be fined or imprisoned. "Truancy being the primary school of crime," the State recognizes that it is the part of wisdom to demand the regular attendance of the twenty-five thousand children who have been gathered in by the truant officers, and still greater vigilance in carrying out these laws is of imperative
Cabinet Work Done in the Public Schools of Bluffton.
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importance to the State. As manual training and industrial instruction become multiplied there will be less work for the truant officer, less crime to be pun- ished. When the schools have trained enthusiastic teachers, and are equipped to fit their pupils for the active duties of life, while pursuing their regular school course, then it may be said of the boys and girls in country and town, as it was said of the little Graysville, Indiana, school, "All of the children in this community attend school regularly-boys and girls who are far beyond the compulsory age limit. Not only so but they dispense with their recess and part of their noon hour and devote that time to hand work, and the children in this school passed the strongest examination in the regular lessons of any children in the country." Leaders of the educational work in Indiana are working for a time when in all of the high schools there will be commercial, industrial, or agricultural courses coupled with the academic studies; then the State may expect the other half of its boys who enter, not to drop out of high school as they now do; and the girls to "dignify the office" of house- wife, when domestic economy is required for gradua- tion along with history and political economy. Moving steadily, if slowly, along these lines, the Indiana schools are advancing in practical utility. Between sixty and seventy-five towns have already instituted manual training and domestic instruction. Beautiful equip- ment produces most gratifying results at Fort Wayne, Madison, Indianapolis, Greensburg, Richmond, and other cities.
The county schools have made even greater strides, proportionately. In an agricultural State like Indiana, industrial training will, in the very nature of things,
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be very largely instruction in agriculture; this should lead the children back to rural employment and ambitions. It is interesting to note the efforts that are being put forth by educators to enlist the interest of the youth in the principles of agriculture. In pre- senting a course for teachers to pursue, State Superin- tendent Cotton clearly showed the object of this training when he said that the course will direct the boys and girls to an intelligent study of agriculture which will inspire in them a respect for honest labor, and show them there is a demand for brains on the farm. The country schools are clearly combining artistic, scientific, and manual training in a most practical and attractive way. The average layman in the cities, who has not had his attention called to the progress being made, would be surprised and delighted with a walk around the school garden at Delphi, in Carroll County, where each pupil is given six feet of mother earth to plant and cultivate in a practical way; where an orchard affords practical lessons in fruit raising, a tiny plantation of nut trees an experiment in forestry, and the ornamental grounds an example of landscape gardening. An inspection of the laboratory work in the county schools of Randolph, Henry, Johnson, and other counties would awaken the citizens to the studies that are being carried on regarding soils, seeds, injurious insects, and processes of cultivation. A visit to the centralized schools in Wells County at Bluffton, Lima, and in scores of other centres would surprise the visitor who sees for the first time the bench work, cabinet pieces, and pottery made by the industrial classes; and learns how number work, language lessons, and nature study are taught from the practical experiences in the garden plot.
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The enthusiasm in the corn clubs has been mentioned in the chapter on agriculture. The local trustees in the townships and instructors from Purdue University have given their assistance in encouraging these innovations, and in helping the teachers.
School gardens and lawns have been introduced in some town schools, giving great pleasure, and are instructive in homemaking and a decided impulse to civic improvements.
If the study of elementary agriculture, in the schools, is in its infancy, advanced instruction in that science, and all of the others, has been well provided for in the great State Agricultural University at La Fayette. Instruction was begun at Purdue University in 1874. It was founded as Indiana's land-grant college, auth- orized by Congress in 1862, when thirteen million acres of government land were set aside for the es- tablishment of industrial colleges throughout the Union. The act stated that the schools to be organized were for the promotion of agriculture and the mechanic arts, without excluding other scientific and classical studies. Purdue is one of sixty-five institutions which have been organized in different States and Territories. Purdue University at present has an annual enrolment of about fifteen hundred students with a faculty numbering over a hundred. The experimental farm and campus comprises one hundred and eighty acres of beautiful land with about twenty-five buildings crowded for room to accommodate their students. The equipment is constantly being added to, in the effort to keep pace with the demands of the times. Scientific and agricultural progress, in this day, ad- vances by leaps and bounds, so that these schools are always in urgent need of facilities. The legislatures
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of adjacent States have provided much more boun- tifully for their colleges affording similar lines of instruction. This parsimony has handicapped every State college in Indiana. Private bequests and en- dowment is the only way in which Purdue University can be kept up to date, if the General Assembly. of Indiana does not assume a more vigorous support of the institution. The United States Experiment Station for Indiana is an organic part of Purdue Uni- versity, and the very important Farmers' Institutes of the State are conducted by the board and faculty of this college. The different engineering departments are attended by students from every part of the nation. The Mechanical Engineering School has attained an international reputation as one of the foremost schools of its kind in our time.
The lives of the teachers of Indiana, past and present, in the schools and colleges of the State, would be an interesting history of the culture and progress of thought in the commonwealth. The men and women of this profession have been the greatest factors in the State's advance, the most important element in training its citizenship.
In tracing the history of Indiana's schools from the wilderness cabin through the days when all instruction was by paid tuition in private schools and semin- aries and when this period was followed by the brave struggle of the more enlightened for a system of free public schools, we have arrived at the summit. In the two State universities the Indiana public school system is logically rounded out. In three quarters of a century, a complete chain of progressive depart- ments of instruction from kindergarten to universities were established. The State may well claim that it
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Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University.
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has not worked in vain. The outline for the necessary system to be maintained and strengthened has been established. Indiana has taken her place among the foremost States in her provision for popular education. In time the backward districts will be brought up to the general standard; and supplementary legislation will increase the efficiency of the laws for all of the communities. A union of councils between legislators and educators, and harmony between the academic and technical universities should keep Indiana steadily in the front rank of educational affairs.
Owing to the central location of the commonwealth, Indiana colleges should play an important part in the development of interstate community of interests. In speaking of the value, to an Eastern man, of taking a part of his schooling in the middle West, that astute observer, Edward S. Martin, recently said: "The West can make a strong claim to be the most instructive section of our country. It can be argued with much force that the ideas that are most potent in our national life come from there, that the spirit of the West is the dominating American spirit, and that to comprehend the West and live in fellowship with it, is an immensely valuable detail of American education." 1
1 Martin, Edward S., in an editorial article in Harper's Weekly.
CHAPTER XIX
THE QUALITY OF THE PEOPLE
W HAT do you value most of all that you have won?" was asked of a frontier woman. Without an instant's hesitation she replied, "The standards by which generations of my family were bred." The ruling class among the early settlers of Indiana were of this mind. It was the severing of these ties, as well as personal loneliness, that added to the pathos of their isolation on the frontier.
No one regrets the extreme democracy of the West. This social freedom, permitting superior individuals no matter what their ancestry was, to rise to their appropriate level, infuses hope into the soul of both the humble of native birth and the Old World immi- grant. It develops a vigorous, efficient, and capable population, but it inevitably brings down the average of culture, for several generations. Social conditions in Indiana are typical of the Republic. New people of varying traditions have come into all the States, faster than they could be assimilated and at the same time the general tone of information and culture be kept up to the standard of the most enlightened.
Of this better class are the people who are recognized as being the responsible, representative citizens, who have been the leaders of thought and action in the first century of Indiana's history. No one has given
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more fitting recognition of this element, which has controlled the State in its short past, than the editor of the Dial when he said :
"There is in the middle West, indubitably, a social temper which seeks the best in things of the mind and of the spirit. We have fallen heir-legitimately enough, surely-to the idealism of the New Englander. Perhaps the twin spirits of idealism and shrewd utilitarianism which were pretty clearly to be distinguished in our Yan- kee forebears have fused in some degree in us, so that at one angle we seem to have lost one, and at another angle the other. Yet they both remain, modified but active, and the result is a social life in reality finer, stronger, more wholesome, at least more vitalized, one may say without offence, than in that older region. Nowhere in America are ideas more welcome. Nowhere are they examined with more self-control. We are the most teachable of communities and we are, beneath everything, the most aspiring. If we are naïve, if we lack urbanity, finish, it is because we are fresh, exuberant, and very young. But those who come to know the life of the West come to realize that its humanity is large and deep, and that its grave and kindly spirit will bear us far. The quality of moral and intellectual earnestness, that is, the main current of the life of our region, is pretty generally underestimated. Yet it is the factor, one believes, of greatest importance in the life of America to-day. It is well for the West to recognize this, not boastfully, but with a sense of all it involves."
To say that Indiana differs in enlightenment in any respect from the other States is not in accordance with the facts. The dominant race, the master force in its civilization, has remained the Anglo-Saxon strain which was attracted by the fertile acres. They came over the mountains from the English families
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settled in the sea-coast colonies and later from the other States. Colonel Cockrum, who knew so many of the old settlers, says: "As a whole the people who were the pioneers of this State were from the best families of the countries from which they moved; intelligent, brave, hearty, and honest." The change of habits, the new environment, the very fertility of the soil, the remoteness from older civilizations, the untrammelled spirit of the frontier, produced a variant of the type, without doubt; but the racial character- istics, and relative social position, have been main- tained. Indiana, like the other States, has had her share of immigration from foreign countries. There was the handful of French who were left of the settle- ments at the posts on the Wabash, the early accessions of Scotch-Irish, the Swiss vineyard-planters who set- tled along the Ohio, and a wave of European refugees, fleeing from the ill-fated conditions in their father- lands during the Napoleonic wars. Later there were hordes of Irish and German laborers, who were imported into the central counties to work on the canals and other internal improvements. Then gradually, as the years passed, and factories were established, and the coal mines were developed, all nationalities joined the original population; but there has been com- paratively little intermarriage between the educated people of the English strain and later arrivals. They were welcomed and they prospered, but they became one with the communities without these alliances. It has required all of the energies of the progressive citizenship to assimilate these accessions. · Ere the whole population could become enlightened, self- controlled, and delicately considerate of others, there was a new immigration at hand.
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In Indiana, education was early regarded as the "deepest hope of all ultimate, attainable qualities," and the public school and university system was established. There are few congested centres of population in the commonwealth, and there is work for all who are able to do manual labor, but it is a slow process to bring these accessions up to the average. The cause of backward conditions in material improve- ments which are the outward manifestation of progressive people seems to be the force of inertia in these un- cultured classes. This inertia also reaches into the class elected to office, and prevents desirable State and municipal legislation. The shiftlessness and ig- norance of this minority are what hampers the progress toward well-kept cities and farms, but this fact is common to all of the States.
Formerly, the term Hoosier meant a backwoods- man, to a resident on the Atlantic coast. As late as the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia, two gentlemen of birth and lineage from the Wabash, both descended from old colonial stock, and both of commanding presence, personally, overheard an Eastern woman say: "Well, I've seen the glories of the earth here. I've seemed to travel from the Oc- cident to the Orient, but before I go home I should like to see a genuine Hoosier." The humor of the situation was too much for our unintentional eaves- droppers. The two gentlemen, with habitual courtly grace, turned, and bowing said, "By your leave, madam, we present ourselves as humble citizens of Indiana." Disillusioned, one more denizen of the East went home after a friendly interstate chat with the gentlemen-with a fairer appreciation of Hoosierdom.
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By the part played in the Civil War, Indiana placed herself, as it were, among the States. The gallant record of her troops, and the conspicuous ability of her war governor and citizens, revealed to the East the position the State had gradually grown to occupy, while they had still been thinking of the Wabash as the frontier, and Hoosiers as benighted. In 1906, the New York Sun called attention to the fact that Indiana was the only State which had a solid delega- tion of college-bred men in the two houses of Congress. Massachusetts had theretofore ranked highest in this particular. The Indiana men, however, have an unbroken record of collegiate education.
It is admitted that the West in general has "con- tributed to manners a certain frankness of demeanor, a certain unquestioning sincerity in the attitude of man to man, which has a beauty, no less than moral value, quite beyond appraisal. In course of time the manner developed from this fundamental trait of frankness, and coupled with real refinement, should become the most gracious and altogether charming that American life has yet evolved." Nevertheless, "vulgarity is an eighth deadly sin," as Lowell says, "and worse than all the others put together since it perils your salvation in this world." But Europeans and Chinese criticise the manners of our older States, with condescension; and mayhap it will always be that the older civilizations will be critical of the younger.
Indiana people of culture especially resent the pro- nouncement of one of their prominent politicians, that " Indiana achieves the true meaning of the common people. It is the home of the average American." They claim that such a statement belies history, that
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such an assertion proceeds from the demagogue who is fond of referring to the people, but never claims to belong to them unless he is running for office. Gentle birth has been the heritage of the real leaders of thought and life in the Hoosier State from its begin- ning. It is interesting to note in Oliver Smith's reminiscences how many gentlemen with talents and manners he found among the pioneers who continued in public life until his time. Speaking of some, he tells of their "energy that never slumbered, their integrity that was never questioned, their high con- ception of morality and religion, coupled with social qualities of the first order." Again he introduces to us a group of which one was "a courteous and polished gentleman," another "is a fine scholar and well-read man," and another "a distinguished specimen of the last generation."
General Lew Wallace says of his father, who was one of the pioneers of the State:
"Added to the graceș, he had a pleasant voice and manner more stately and gracious than we meet to-day; the urbane sweetness to which we give the name of high breeding. There were fewer books then, and they were of the best, and constant familiarity with them gave a stateliness of speech and a certain dignity that comes of keeping good company. They dined with Horace and supped with Plutarch, and were scholars without knowing it."1
An early settler tells of a new book that was reported in a neighboring settlement: "At last there came a day when my father could spare a horse from the plow, and I went in quest of the book, which was
: Wallace, Lew, Autobiography. New York, 1906.
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found, borrowed, and read with a zest now unknown, for it was one of Sir Walter Scott's immortal stories." The gentle influence of these cultured families was a welcome leaven in frontier neighborhoods; and later, as Mr. Nicholson has said, "the older Indiana towns enjoyed in their beginning all the benefits that may be bestowed upon new communities by a people of good social antecedents. In no old com- munity of the seaboard had loftier dignity been conferred by long residence or pioneer ancestry, than in Indiana." 1 Hon. Hugh McCulloch came out from New England and settled in Indiana in 1833, and knew the whole State well; of it he says:
"Indianapolis was fortunate in the character of its early settlement. Such men are rarely found in any place. Their superiors in intelligence, in enterprise, and moral worth can be found nowhere. What was true in regard to the early settlers of Indianapolis was also true of those in many other Indiana towns. Nor have their successors been degenerate. No State has been more prolific of superior men than Indiana." 2
Writing of one of the older towns, George Cary Eg- gleston said: "I have before me a long list, which I forbear to copy, of men who made Madison, or its near neighborhood, their home at that time, and who were conspicuously distinguished in State and nation for their intellectual achievements." 3
The careers of public men who have place in the pages of history cannot be touched upon in a volume
1 Nicholson, Meredith, Hoosiers. New York, 1900.
2 McCulloch, Hugh, Men and Measures of Half a Century, page 72. New York, 1888.
3 Eggleston, George Cary, First of the Hoosiers. Fenno, New York, 1903.
1
"Often from morning until night there was a continual rumble of wheels, and when the rush was greatest there never was a minute that wagons were not in sight."
From an old print.
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like this, but their abilities and their attainments must be considered in any estimate of the State's average of citizenship. Running over the list of gov- ernors, senators, and congressmen from the earliest time, the Indiana officials will be found representative of American ability, occupying those positions in each decade. A State which has furnished a President and three Vice-Presidents to the United States, who have all "magnified the office," and done honor to the commonwealth in those exalted positions, may lay claim to sending out representative men. The numerous Cabinet officers called from Indiana, in the course of the history of the country, have shown the quality of the State's public men, one of whom served as Secretary of the Treasury for three differ- ent Presidents. The rank of Indiana diplomatists at foreign courts and consulates has been second to none, and they have rendered distinguished service to the nation in these positions. As naval and military commanders, of high and low degree, no State has surpassed the officers of Indiana. Nor were any men braver fighters than the Hoosier regiments.
In letters and the arts there are men whom all delight to honor, and her faithful educators compare with any other section of the country. Scientists she has the results of whose investigations are watched for all over the world. It may be safely claimed that there is not a capital city of any other State in the Union whose citizens have maintained, through a quarter of a century, a club of representative men that could surpass the well-known Gentlemen's Lit- erary Club of Indianapolis. In the national fame of its membership, the interest of the papers and dis- cussions, the quality of its literary work, and the
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breadth of view and wide reading of the men who for many years past have served on its programs, there is no commonwealth but would be honored in possessing such a circle. The same might be claimed for similar circles in the other cities of Indiana.
It is not alone the men and women who have remained and labored within the State that show the quality of its people. The men who were born there, but who have gone out from Indiana, in earlier or mature years, also denote the character of her settlement. John Hay, one of the greatest premiers the United States has had, was born at Salem, Indiana, and his writings and great diplomatic career reflect credit on the State of his birth. John B. Eads, the civil engineer of the Mississippi jetties and constructor of St. Louis bridge, came from the Hoosier State. Joaquin Miller, the poet of the Sierras, first looked upon nature from the hills of southern Indiana, and the young poet William Vaughn Moody was born in New Albany. Dr. Billings, who manages the libraries of all Manhattan Island, was born at Rising Sun, Indiana. Hiram Powers, the sculptor, was from this State, and William M. Chase, the noted painter, who encourages and inspires, aids and cheers, the rising artists who come up to New York, was born in Johnson County, and began his art work in Indi- anapolis. Henry Mosler, the talented genre painter, now claimed by Cincinnati, is a native of Indiana. General Joseph E. Johnston, Generals Carrington and Burnside of great military fame, and Admiral Glisson and Commander Herndon were born in the White- water Valley. General Lawton has added laurels to his name and that of the State; and Erasmus Weaver serves the nation, as well as his native common-
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