USA > Massachusetts > Barnstable County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 31
USA > Massachusetts > Norfolk County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 31
USA > Massachusetts > Plymouth County > History of Plymouth, Norfolk and Barnstable counties, Massachusetts, Vol. I > Part 31
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CHAPTER XX NEW ENGLAND CONSCIENCE RAMPANT.
So-Called Western Cordiality and Democracy Expression of The Trans- planted Yankee-Plymouth County Man and What He Did With "The Wisconsin Idea"-New Forms of Education But the Same Spirit of Intellectual Striving-Samuel Adams Sold Idea of Revolution By Means of the Town Meeting-Five Thousand New Englanders and the Emigrants' Aid Society Helped Colonize Kansas-Most Cities of United States Financed By New England-Sits Pretty on The At- lantic With an Unparalleled Future.
Many there are, and many there always have been, who have taken delight in referring to "The New England Conscience" as something to conjure with, as the cause of ribald merriment. "The New England Conscience" is a phrase capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters, when handled carelessly ; but there is such a thing as "The New England Conscience," and it is something which needs no apology and its definition is the definition of America itself. From this local area, which nurtured or produced the men who laid the foundations on which rest the freedom and glory of the United States, have gone forth pioneers whose influence has been felt in the making of the great Middle West and the Far West. The "native son" of California who seems to be imbued with the notion that he is entitled to the inheritance of the Pacific slope was a native son because he had a New England father, possessed of the "will to do and soul to dare" to "go west and grow up with the country."
The New England conscience, says James Phinney Munroe in his entertaining hook, by that name, "was an admirable, selective force, picking out the ruggedest from the English stock, strengthening it by a fight against the wilderness, proscrib- ing from contact with it all idleness, ungodliness and frivolity. A good means to an important end, but in itself an ill-favored thing. Economizing and concentrating the forces necessary to found America, it was narrow as avarice, morbid as egoism. It exalted harsh, unlovely deeds into Heaven-inspired acts, and was blind to all human purposes, but death. Those early New Englanders, condemning the sym- bols of formalism, were slaves to form. Their spiritual life was a ceaseless cere- monial, their pious observances were rigid rules of etiquette without which one could obtain neither favor nor even audience of the Almighty.
"This spirit of caste, largely induced by their geographical isolation, kept our ancestors not provincial but parochial. It fostered a condition of life and a type of character doubtless never again to be possible in the world's history. Having done its work, having founded soundly and peopled strongly an exceptional region, the New England conscience had no further necessity of being. It is no less an anachronism than the formal, mannered speech in which its dread decisions
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were embodied. Both demanded leisure, and haste is the dominant characteristic of today .... Having made the discovery that luxury-the material reward of life- is mainly a question of transportation, we are striving to annihilate time and space .... Already we are launching aerial ships and are turning inquisitive, neigh- borly eyes toward Mars. The insoluble mysteries of yesterday are the schoolboy's reading-lesson of today; and the Land of the Anthropophagi is the picnic ground of the tourist .... Our careers must start at a point where those of many of our ancestors ended. Their anxious, year-long problems have become our five-minute hesitations, their crises-two or three in a lifetime-our daily experiences. Ameri- cans are now not only of the world, they are of a world that knows and avails itself of steam and electricity, that finds the air too dull a medium for intercommunication and seeks to use in place of it the subtler ethers.
"The new conscience localizes heaven and hell within the individual instead of beyond the stars; the new religion of service which finds His work waiting to be done on every street corner; and the new gospel, that of physical, mental and spiritual simplicity.
"This modern type of conscience has developed new concepts of religion. Our churches may be emptier of worshippers than when the tythingman held legal sway; but our streets and houses and offices are fuller of the real presence of God. The women's clubs, the men's gatherings, the various social organizations of which every American hamlet has at least one are, most of them, when viewed too closely, rather absurd; looked at in the aggregate, however, they are magnificent. For they signalize the final emancipation of New England and the New England spirit from the reign of that selfish individualism which sought only its own salvation. The modern individualists, with their flaunting of vulgar wealth, with their disre- gard of others' rights, with their legal and illegal grasping of everything within their reach, hold still, of course, the centre of the stage; but the real work of civili- zation is being done by those thousands and tens of thousands who, wittingly or unwittingly, are laboring for each other and for the uplifting of the world.
"The shut-in, conventional, censorious morally dyspeptic existence of earlier America is being transformed into the out-door loving, toleration, friendliness and genuine democracy of today."
This rather long quotation from James Phinney Munroe is used be- cause it is recognized as a valuable contribution to the story of the progress and development of the New England spirit and the New Eng- land conscience, which have remained true to type, and had their part in leavening the whole lump of the glory which is America. The more thoughtful study we give to the way in which problems were handled and solved by the colonists, the struggle against annihilation with the aborigines, the rebellion against tyranny from the English, and French, the struggle for the preservation of the Union, the more we come to the realization that those were "times which tried men's souls." Those were times when rumors of threatened massacres had to be taken in hand determinedly, without waiting to investigate their authenticity. The sentiment of human relationships and love of the land of one's birth had to be sacrificed that the experiment of democracy might go on. Mistakes were made, injustice was sometimes done. So it was in the conquering of the Great West. The lynching law was not justified by
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the principles of jurisprudence but is made for law and order, even though there were martyrs who dangled undeservedly at the end of a rope, adjusted with good intentions.
But, in a latter day, the stirring up of hatred by means of the phrase "Remember the Maine" was the compelling influence which stimulated enlistments and nerved a peace-loving generation to conquer an empire. A generation later "He kept us out of war" was a phrase of propaganda which won reelection, by the votes of an unprepared and unready elec- torate, of a "watchful waiting" president. That same voting force a few months later, fed on propaganda which kept pace with preparations for participation in the World War, marched forth "to make the world safe for democracy" to the strains of
"And we won't come back till it's over, over there."
What a whale of a difference a few words make!
Teeing off from old Plymouth Rock, driven by the New England spirit, impregnated with the New England conscience, "westward the star of empire takes its way" and the Pilgrim and Puritan progeny mingle with the latter-day Pilgrims, where the soil is black but hearts beat true, where a pebble is a curiosity but there is a "grit" not of the earth earthy. The pioneer-draftsman drew new designs upon the trestle- board of the broad prairies as faithfully as they had hewn civilization out of the pine forests of the Massachusetts coast wilderness. The cod-fish of the Old Colony and the bean pot of Boston were no less symbolical and faithful reminders of the beginnings of America, when the melting pot was stirred to regenerative action and the pork-packer became the successor of the fisherman. And so, by the covered wagon and the transcontinental railroad, both with Yankee starters, the Atlantic spirit and conscience ploughed through to the Golden Gate, giving and getting. Forefather's Day is now observed all the way from Eastern Standard Time to the Philippines, for the name of the New Englander, with the birthmark of the Old Colony, is seen all along the blazed trail.
In the year 1927, the secretary of the Associated Industries of Massa- chusetts, deplored the tendency of the young men who were graduated from the Eastern institutes and universities to seek their fortunes in other parts of the country. The burden of his plea was that New Eng- land was sowing and cultivating and other States took the harvest; thus far the Massachusetts manufacturers had not made an adequate bid for the service of the graduates; they had taken what was left after the cream had gone to other States. New England industries had become planted in the West by New England planters, to the detriment of New England.
Such a complaint may be characterized as patriotic or provincial. The saving grace is that there is another side to the picture. There have been people with unusual visions, native to New England, who have chafed
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or been handicapped by the conservatism of the East, when they had a message to impart. These men have found their freedom to express themselves and teach their convictions and visions in the more receptive atmosphere of the "wide open spaces."
Dr. McCarthy and the Wisconsin Idea-Dr. Charles McCarthy went from a boarding house on Joslyn's Court in Brockton, through Brown University, an educational institution in Providence, Rhode Island, the town founded by Roger Williams, the lover of freedom and an open mind; to the University of Wisconsin, there to work out what he has called "The Wisconsin Idea." This is the university in which Professor Henry Steenbock recently discovered that, by treating food with sun- light, it was possible to get a fourth vitamen, a great boon to humanity, inasmuch 'as its infusion into ordinary food, by means of the ultra-violet ray, causes such food to be a preventive of rickets in children, and anae- mia in later life. To safeguard this discovery from those who would ex- ploit it for financial gain, Professor Steenbock applied for a patent and m'ade over his rights to the University of Wisconsin. He refused offers for rights which would have made him wealthy, as he did not intend to pervert his life's greatest work by selling it. He lived up to the tradi- tions and spirit of the university.
That same university has received with open arms and an open mind another teacher and thinker from Massachusetts, formerly a president of Amherst College, and described by his admirers as a man "whose only indiscretion was being fifty years in advance of his time." This high- minded experimenter, thinker and humanitarian, Dr. Alexander Meikle- john, has received from the University of Wisconsin full official author- ity to work out his ideas of a liberal education with the student body. Concerning his connection with "The Wisconsin Idea," if Dr. Mc- Carthy's phrase may be borrowed for another man from Massachusetts with a soul to dare, the New York "Herald Tribune" said in an editorial :
Ever since Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn's resignation of the Amherst presidency the hope has been widely entertained that he would find just such a "laboratory" as the 'University of Wisconsin has now provided him to test with a free hand his conceptions of a liberal education. He has had abundant sympathy from friends and skeptics, too, in his desire to cut loose from the leading strings of formal col- lege traditionalism. His failure, for very practical reasons, to remold the habit of an old New England college by no means proved that his scheme of teaching and learning in the "college of tomorrow" where "living will be taught as any game is taught-by playing with good players," was of no value.
No strings appear to be attached to Dr. Meiklejohn's initative power at Wis- consin, as announced by President Glenn Frank. He has full official authority to work out his ideals with his own teaching staff and a body of 250 students, freshmen and sophomores, regular members of the university, who elect to enter the Meikle- john circle, "roped off," as President Frank expresses it, within its own boundaries.
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No educator could hope for a more liberal opportunity to realize aspirations that can flower only in congenial soil.
This high-minded experiment is creditable to the great state university which has the means and the enterprise to indulge in it. Many share with Dr. Meiklejohn the opinion that American college education is in the main unstimulating, if not intellectually barren. The prophet of tomorrow's college has had reason to be pessimistic while his fine talents lacked generous exercise in the art of shaping plastic material. In the possession of his new studio he has ample occasion for op- timism and may it be rewarded.
Of course the poet, the dreamer and the idealist never have the sup- port of everybody and it is not necessary to go outside of Plymouth County to find an adverse opinion regarding Dr. Meiklejohn's crusade and the wisdom of the University of Wisconsin in being willing to furnish an opportunity for him to try out his experiments. The Brock- ton "Times," in an editorial printed one day in February, 1927, voiced this opposition as follows :
Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn, former president of Amherst, now Brittingham professor of philosophy in the University of Wisconsin, by permission of President Glenn Frank, of the university, and the state board, is going to try out some "free- dom" experiments in education. He will take two hundred and fifty freshmen and sophomores and fool with any methods of teaching and contents of study which may seem promising. Thus we continue our mad career toward the will-o-the-wisp goal of "self expression" and away from discipline and hard work. Apparently nothing is going to stop our continuued disintegration except some frightfully arresting catastrophe or a prolonged period of hard times. Times change and customs and ideas must change with them, but history does not afford a single example of great and enduring success being gained except through discipline and hard work.
An answer to the above view is contained on a tablet which the class of 1910 presented to the University of Wisconsin, the words of the regents who investigated somewhat radical teachings of Professor Richard T. Ely seventeen years before, and, in acquitting him, said: "Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."
Dr. Charles McCarthy was, for ten years or more, legislative librarian in the state of Wisconsin, constantly in touch with the legislation of that state which attracted so much attention throughout the country. As librarian of the legislative reference department and as a member of the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, this former Brockton boy had opportunities to see events in that state of legislative experiments from a different standpoint than any other man, and he had opportunities to inject into the experiments something of "the New England conscience." In that connection, Dr. McCarthy said in a book which he wrote, entitled "The Wisconsin Idea," "I, a wandering student, seeking knowledge,
Plym-19
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came knocking at the gates of the great University of Wisconsin, and it took me in, filled me with inspiration, and when I left its doors the kindly people of the state stretched out welcoming hands and gave me a man's work to do."
The late President Theodore Roosevelt said of the work of Dr. Mc- Carthy, who, it must be remembered by readers of this history is men- tioned here because he was a strong type of the typical New Englander seeking expression in an open-minded atmosphere: "Mr. McCarthy emphasizes the lesson that cheap clap-trap does not pay, and that the true reformer must study hard and work patiently. Moreover, Mr. Mc- Carthy deserves especial praise for realizing that there is no one patent remedy for getting universal reform. He shows that a real reform movement must have many lines of development."
Mr. McCarthy said: "The 'forty-eight' Germans, those of the Carl Schurtz type, came fresh from a struggle for liberty in the old country, and brought with them as high ideals as any people who ever came to America. Under these influences, the farms of Wisconsin were settled and an orderly, careful government established. A New England stream arriving about the same time brought with it high educational ideals, which endowed the whole Northwest with colleges and institutions of learning."
The writer of this history holds no brief from the University of Wis- consin and has no desire to advertise it, beyond the opportunity to use it as a typical mid-Western institution of learning which welcomed from the first, and still does -- as witness the opportunity afforded ex-President Meiklejohn, already referred to-a fusion with "the New England conscience."
John Bascom, a man of the highest type of New England character, was one of the presidents of that university. On December 13, 1911, memorial services were held for this New England teacher in the Uni- versity, and among the tributes paid was one by Dean E. A. Birge, in which he said: "No social influence in Wisconsin during the past gen- eration has been more potent than that of Dr. Bascom."
Dr. McCarthy, like many other Old Colony men, went West, not only to "grow up with the country" but to assist, if possible, the country in growing up with high ideals, including, if you please, "the New England conscience." A few quotations from Dr. McCarthy's book will give an insight into the purpose of his useful life, brought to an end a few years ago, by his untimely death, in the full tide of his usefulness, while still a young man :
Is there not some way of keeping history from repeating itself? Is there not some means by which we can maintain the youth of the nation, keep poverty at a minimum, and wealth, caste and privilege from commanding, conquering and finally destroying the nation?
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The hardy woodsman, the sturdy American who has battled with the elements, swift rivers and vast forests, may frown at the suggestion of legislation mentioned here. This man in the legislature, powerful in his own strength, frowns upon laws for the limiting of hours of labor for women and children as "Un-American." It will be felt by men of this kind (and they have been the sturdy, old oaks of Ameri- can life after all) that there is something very softening in this kind of legislation. Indeed a weakening influence may occasionally creep in but by looking over long periods of time we find that selfishness has always won, so it is not the softening influence that we need to fear but the pauperizing influence, which comes from another kind of paternalism-that of the largess of the great millionaire or the successful proconsul of Ancient Rome. The pages of Gibbon and Ferrero are full of instances which are comparable to actual conditions in our own country today. There is a corrupt influence from large concentration of wealth and its unhappy distribution which will cause more beggarism, more softening and more synco- phancy than all the laws which can be put upon the statute books regulating the hours of labor of women and children.
Place before the American people the ideal of Lincoln and search keenly into our conditions to discover why there are not more Lincolns. If in our modern life, conditions are not conducive to the highest type of American manhood we should attempt to find some way of helping men to help themselves. What is the need of philosophy or an "ism" when there is obvious wrong to be righted? .If certain social classes are forming among us, can we not destroy them by means of education and, through hope and encouragement, make every man more efficient so that the door of opportunity may always be open before him?
Not only through missionary endeavors in other parts of the country but at home the descendants of the Forefathers have endeavored to teach Americanization in the least objectionable and more effective ways, through educational advantages open to everyone.
Education and a Home Market-Plymouth Colony has always had a proud record in education. The starting place of the public school sys- tem, it has continued to take a forward look, contributing money liberally and arranging courses for the enlightenment of those ambitious to pur- sue studies in technical, commercial, agricultural and vocational pur- suits. Night schools have been established for many years for those who are employed during the day. Some are maintained by the larger towns, some by the Young Men's Christian Association branches, some as extension services from the colleges. There is another important edu- cational movement which has made great headway in the county and is contributing much to good citizenship. That is the Four-H Boys and Girls Club movement.
Every town in the county has its public library and most of them have regular lecture courses open to the public. Parks and playgrounds fur- nish recreational and educational advantages and there are social centres with their attendant blessings. Museums and art galleries are available means for culture and lessons in refinement. The county is especially rich in newspapers. There are two daily newspapers published in the
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county and many weeklies. One of the latter, the "Old Colony Mem- orial," published at Plymouth, has enjoyed a continuous existence since 1824 and has done its share in developing the community in its steady rise to better things and a more abundant life more than a century. The daily papers, published in Brockton, would be a credit to any municipal- ity, many times the size of our only city. The excellence of the county press makes it expedient to devote an entire chapter to that subject. The educational value of the churches and that of the civic organizations and fraternal societies also call for extended mention.
The public schools give the children of the immigrants from all coun- tries a common language and they begin to think of themselves as Americans. The public school is the most potent influence of all the agencies which enter into the process of making Americans. The his- tory and purpose of American institutions, the stories of American heroes, many of whom were of foreign birth, and the songs of patriotism are taught in the schools to the descendants of immigrants who have sought these shores for three hundred years.
The World War had a levelling influence and the Liberty Loan drives, the Community Chest drives and other movements in which color, re- ligion and nationality were forgotten, was the ice breaker which brought the Pilgrims from all nations closely together, with a wholesome respect for one another's characteristics and a charity for the differences which had formerly seemed insurmountable. A notable work was carried on then and is still carried on by the Brockton Young Men's Christian Association among the foreign-born. The organization and mainten- ance of the Cosmopolitan Club in that Plymouth County city is one of the side issues of the Americanization movement. The Cosmopolitan Club is composed of members representing twenty-six nationalities.
There were many foreign-born men and women employed in the Plym- outh County industries who had war gardens, furnished them by their employers. They were deeply appreciative of the opportunity afforded them to have a garden of their own. Many of them never hoped to own or have the use of a bit of real estate under their own control. With this introduction to agriculture, some of the abandoned farms of the county have since been taken up by these war gardeners and they are among the most successful vegetable raisers and poultrymen of Southeastern Massachusetts. Strange as it may seem, agriculture has never been an over-crowded business in this or adjacent counties.
The "Old Farmers Almanac," by Robert B. Thomas, this year being its one hundred and thirty-fourth, is a work greatly appreciated by the farmers of the present as well as the past. Many people have preserved these almanacs for many years. In the "Farmers' Calendar" for Decem- ber, 1796, the following admonition was given:
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The cultivation of the earth, ought ever to be esteemed, as the most useful and necessary employment in life. The food, and raiment, by which all other orders of men are supported, are derived from the earth. Agriculture is of consequence; the art which supports, supplies, and maintains all the rest.
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