USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from the year 1876 to the year 1916 > Part 12
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Hezekiah S. Russell, mayor in 1900 and 1901, was born in
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Pittsfield, December seventh, 1835. He was a son of Solomon L. Russell, and he thus fell heir to a warm affection for Pittsfield; but in his youth a spirit of adventure led him to the western frontier and to Australia, where, in the construction camps of railroad and telegraph lines, he learned the ways of rugged men. About the year 1860, Mr. Russell returned to his native town and established a shop for the manufacture of iron machinery and boilers; to this industry he devoted himself successfully until 1902, when he retired from active business. In 1887 and 1888 he was one of the town's selectmen. He was a member, in 1892, 1893, and 1894, of the city's board of public works. He died on May twelfth, 1914.
His opinions were not pliable; and in governmental service he was sometimes hampered by a kind of overpositiveness. The worth of his contributions to town and city was chiefly prac- tical; he was likely to apply himself with more contentment to the execution than to the determination of municipal plans; and especially in the conduct of business having to do with public improvements his integrity and workmanlike sense were of uncommon value.
To men of many sorts in Pittsfield, Mr. Russell was endeared by a helpful kindliness, by a frank pleasure in companionship, for the social instinct was strong in him, and by a bluff, but genial, independence of speech and bearing, which was a blended pro- duct, perhaps, of the frontier experience of his youth and of the village democracy of his early manhood. In his later years, which were bright with frequent testimony of popular regard, he represented the survival in Pittsfield of a distinctive type of that New England townsman who was imbued with a stalwart notion of equality, but by nature courteous, who was sternly averse to shirking any duties of a good citizen, but philosophically resolved at the same time to get due enjoyment and humor out of life as he went along.
The practical results of the plan of local government adopted by Pittsfield in 1890 were never, in the first twenty-five years of its operation, so unsatisfactory to the citizens as to induce them to change it radically. In 1895, upon the recommendation of the city council, the state legislature passed an act revising
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Pittsfield's charter, but the changes were not material, except in providing for the consolidation of the sewer commission and the board of public works, and for an arrangement of electing councilmen, which insured constant membership in the lower board of some men of at least one year's experience in that body. In 1903 revision of the charter was again agitated, but a com- mittec of members of the city government and of private citizens, to which the matter was referred, was apparently convinced that a new charter was preferable to an amendment of the existing one; and accordingly, in 1904, the city council obtained from the legislature the passage of an act which framed a radically new charter, and stipulated that it should be submitted to the voters of Pittsfield twice, if by them rejected in the first instance.
The proposed charter of 1904 established a city council of a single board of twenty-one aldermen, of whom seven were to be chosen by the entire electorate, centered a large measure of ad- ministrative authority in the mayor, and delegated to the people the election of the city clerk, city treasurer, city auditor, and the collector and assessors of taxes. The council's power to grant public franchises was by several provisions restricted; an effort was made to separate more sharply the legislative and ex- ecutive functions of the municipal government, and to facilitate the fixing of responsibility. To the mayor was given the power of appointment for three years of the superintendent of poor, the board of health, and the city physician, and for one year of the city solicitor and a single commissioner of public works.
Both in 1904 and in 1905, this charter failed of popular ap- proval at the polls. The fact seems to be that the public mind judged the old charter to be defective in one respect only. Ex- perience had shown that the election of many officials by a con- current, rather than a joint, vote of both boards of the city council was liable to result merely in a deadlock, which sometimes might seriously impede the conduct of business. It was maintained in 1904, however, that this difficulty might be remedied more easily than by throwing overboard the entire charter, under which it was possible, and by experimenting with innovations so com- plete as those contained in the plan of city government then pro- posed. Furthermore, the suggested concentration of authority
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in the mayor and his commissioner of public works was not re- garded with general complacency. The negative votes against the new charter were, in 1904, 2,229 to 1,457 in favor, and in 1905 they were 1,590 to 1,222, while in the latter year there were cast 1,721 blanks. The electorate was obviously uninterested.
In 1910, however, a lively movement toward alteration of the charter began, in the course of which was exhibited more sig- nificantly the popular opinion of the conduct of municipal affairs since the incorporation of the city. Having advised charter revision in his inaugural address, the mayor of 1910, William H. MacInnis, appointed by order of the city council a committee of thirty-three to consider the subject. Only two of the committee were members of the city government. Under the auspices of the committee, a charter was drafted. Its salient features were a single board of seven aldermen, whose function was strictly legislative, and a mayor liberally invested with executive powers and authority to appoint executive officers. This instrument was endorsed by the city council, and permission was sought from the legislature to submit the legalization of it to the vote of Pittsfield. The General Court, in April, 1910, referred to the succeeding legislature the petition of the Pittsfield charter com- mittee, and further progress was necessarily delayed.
Early in 1911, another petition was presented to the legis- lature by Pittsfield citizens desirous of a commission form of municipal government, wherein five commissioners, elected at large, should exercise all the powers of the mayor, city council, and board of public works, and which should embody the prin- ciples of popular referendum and initiative, and of the recall of elective officers. On February tenth, 1911, the legislative com- mittee on cities visited Pittsfield and held a public hearing on the charter question. There the advocates of the proposed charter of 1910 and those of the commission form offered their claims, and ground was taken also by a third party, which ad- hered to the existing charter, with slight modifications. A bill, after a somewhat troubled experience in both houses of the General Court, was finally signed by the governor on July nine- teenth, 1911, by which it was provided that the adoption of one of these three plans of local government should be decided by ballot of the voters of the city, at the following state election.
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Pittsfield's diseussion of the subject now assumed the vivacity, and at times the heat, of a rousing political campaign. There can be little doubt either that the people wished to be informed or that they were informed as to the merits and demerits of each of the three plans. In effeet, however, the debate finally so shaped itself that it was a popular examination of the working of the bieameral charter in Pittsfield, and of the results there achieved under it. Against the old eharter were advanced the arguments that it fused legislative with executive authority, that its two boards and its method of choosing administrative officers invited manifestations of partisanship and factional jealousy, and that under it, when things went wrong, the publie had no means of imputing the blame to the true souree. Most of the voters, nevertheless, were inelined to ask themselves in what eonerete instanee during the twenty years under the old eharter, imperfeet though it might be, Pittsfield's municipal interests had signally suffered, and to east their ballots according to the weight of the answer. Thus the outcome at the polls in November, 1911, may be considered as the community's judgment, not alone of the comparative merits of the three proposed plans, but of the quality of municipal administration by Pittsfield eitizen- ship. In favor of retaining the existing charter, so amended as to preelude the necessity of choosing many officials by eoneurrent vote of the two boards of the council, there were east 2,805 ballots, while 1,519 voters opposed its readoption. As a secondary proposition, the commission form of government was favored by 1,462; the single board plan, which had become known as the Quiney charter, received 1,159 affirmative votes. The manner in which the threefold question was officially presented at the polls was not quite unambiguous, but the numerical results made it clear that a radical change of charter was not deemed necessary.
Most of the questions similarly submitted by authority of the state to the popular referendum in Pittsfield have received an affirmative decision by the electorate with a regularity some- what eurious, and with a generous accompaniment of blank bal- lots not gratifying to the ardent publicist. Except in 1893 and 1894, the decision of the eity election was in favor of granting licenses for the sale of intoxicating liquor.
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The vote of Pittsfield was cast for the Democratic nominee for President of the United States at the national election of 1892, and for the Republican presidential candidate in 1896, 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912. In 1892, nevertheless, the city chose a Republican mayor, and Democratic mayors were elected in 1908 and in 1912. So far as sheer figures and dates are indica- tive, the intrusion of national politics into the administration of municipal affairs was not violent; nor, indeed, was the operation therein of any factional or personal partisanship so patently in- jurious as to drive Pittsfield to that needful self-display of smirched municipal linen, which is an unhappy episode in the history of too many American cities. Strife of faction at Pitts- field's city hall has sometimes discouraged competency, some- times impeded progress, but consequences publicly and seriously disastrous have been withheld.
CHAPTER IX
SCHOOLS.
T HE condition of Pittsfield's public schools in 1876, and the curious discord concerning them into which the communi- ty had allowed itself to drift, can be understood only by recalling some of the town's previous experience in the support and management of free education.
It is necessary in the first place to remember that for many years the public school system in Pittsfield had been shot through and through by village politics. This was the case in many New England towns; Pittsfield's case was peculiarly aggravated. As early as 1781, the school question was turned into a battlefield for political partisans. The newly constituted state government required every town of the size of Pittsfield to maintain a gram- mar school on penalty of indictment and fine. Pittsfield's im- poverished town government in 1781 was Whig, and it failed to comply with the grammar school law for the perfectly good reason of lack of funds. The excuse was one which the state authorities in those days of almost universal financial distress might readily have accepted; but nevertheless the Tory politicians of the vil- lage promptly tried to discredit the local Whig administration by pressing the grand jury to indict the town for non-compliance, and they inserted an article in the town meeting warrant of 1781 "to see if the town will raise money to set up a grammar school to save the town from fine". A hot and protracted political fight ensued, in which the voters wholly lost sight of the educa- tional interests involved. The Whig majority opposed a gram- mar school long after it was financially possible, and merely be- cause it was advocated by their Tory assailants.
Thus at an early period the school question, according to a modern phrase, "got into politics", whence it was not destined soon to emerge. Pittsfield was an isolated village, where political
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feuds were bitter and inheritable almost beyond belief. The ancient grammar school quarrel outlived both the old Whig and Tory parties; it injured the cause of public education for at least half a century; and it was revived, with much of its original acrimony, by the local agitation in 1849 which resulted in the erection of the first high school building.
It should be borne in mind, too, that the New England dis- trict system of maintenance and control of the common schools had been exceedingly popular in Pittsfield and most agreeable to the political temperament of its people. Although, in 1850, an act of the General Court had enabled any town to abolish its school districts and to take possession of their property under cer- tain prescribed rules, Pittsfield steadfastly declined to do so. Not until compelled by the state legislature in 1869, did the town re- linquish the system, and then with regretful disapproval which affected the popular mind for several years thereafter. In 1871, the legislature passed a law permitting towns in which the school district system had been abolished by the act of 1869 to reinstate that system by a two-thirds vote; and the Pittsfield town meeting of that year favored reinstatement by a vote of 61 to 37-only slightly less than the requisite majority. The abandonment of independent school districts had seemed to many citizens like parting with an essential prerogative of self- government, and in 1876 they were still in a hostile mood toward the town system of schools by which the old system had been superseded.
Their attitude was not unnatural. Pittsfield had thirteen school districts in 1869, and several of them were as rich and populous as an ordinary Berkshire village. It has been plausibly maintained, indeed, that in Massachusetts, until the middle of the last century, the school district, and not the town, was the real political unit of the Commonwealth. In school district meetings, many men had learned their first lessons in the trans- action of public business and had made their first voyage on the cross seas of public debate. The districts were, in one sense, miniature republics, sovereign states, and they could not be wiped out of existence without provoking among their citizens a fondness for criticizing adversely, and perhaps unjustly, the
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results under the central authority, which had displaced them.
Morcover, the conduct of school affairs, for a few years after 1869, was not so manifestly efficient and harmonious as to enlist friends for the new regime, although it was upheld by such earnest committeemen as Charles B. Redfield and William R. Plunkett. At the annual town meeting of 1868, the town instructed its school committee of nine members to employ, for the first time, a superintendent of schools, and the committee accordingly en- gaged Lebbeus Scott. Mr. Scott was a conscientious official, but had he been Horace Mann himself, it is not likely that his efforts would have been hospitably acclaimed by the unawed electorates of the thirteen school districts, accustomed to super- intend their own concerns. The town, at the annual meeting of 1869 and in spite of a forcible appeal by James D. Colt, refused to make an appropriation for the salary of a superintendent; and the school committee of that year was compelled to put into operation the new system of schools without the aid of anybody who could devote his entire time and energy to the task.
In 1871, however, the town instructed the committee to em- ploy one of its members as a superintendent, and Dr. John M. Brewster was selected. His period of service, which continued for five years, was for him one of stress and storm. Dr. Brewster, in office, was an idealist, who appreciated fully the importance of his position. He was not a pacificator, capable of smoothing the road for an unpopular innovation. After he had been super- intendent for a year, the town meeting refused to make provision for his salary. Mr. Redfield and Mr. Plunkett promptly de- clared that they would, in that case, withdraw from the school committee; and the meeting as promptly reconsidered and re- versed its vote. Dr. Brewster's salary by a vote of the town in 1873 was fixed at $2,000. The next year it was cut in half. The committee again stood by him, and in 1875 found a way to increase his compensation to $1,500; whereupon the town, at the annual town meeting of 1876, declined again to appropriate money for the employment of any superintendent. Dr. Brewster celebrated his retirement to private life by telling his adversaries, in a caustic letter, exactly what he thought of them. "I believe," he wrote, "that the majority of our citizens earnestly desire that
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their public schools shall not continue to be made, upon the annual recurrence of town meeting, mere toys and playthings in the hands of educational sceptics and ultra-economists."
A share of Dr. Brewster's troubles was probably due to the fact that upon him devolved much of the thankless business of grading the former district schools. Before 1869, all of the com- mon schools in District No. 1, which included the central portion of the main village, had been graded, with a single exception; but elsewhere the ungraded system ruled. That system was highly convenient, because scholars of all ages might always, under it, attend the school nearest home. Educationally, it was wasteful of time and effort. But it was an inherent part of the school district plan; as such it was long and jealously cherished by public regard in Pittsfield; and the reformer who attempted to eradicate it could not hope for popularity. Nevertheless, a comprehensive scheme of gradation was initiated in 1874, and two years later only one-seventh of the pupils attended ungraded schools.
Thus the town's committee to which was entrusted the man- agement of public education in 1876 faced a difficult problem. A long series of wrangles over school affairs had made public opin- ion of them irritable. That antagonism to progressive educa- tional methods, which must be expected anywhere, had been in Pittsfield exaggerated. Not only had the town, somewhat angri- ly, denied to the committee a professional superintendent, but also it had reduced the total appropriation for the maintenance of schools to $24,600, a sum less by $6,400 than that voted in the previous year. The sudden retrenchment cannot be ascribed solely to hard times.
A record of the school year ending in 1876 shows that there were then in the high school 65 pupils and three teachers; in the four grammar schools, 333 pupils and twelve teachers; in the eleven intermediate schools, 533 pupils and fourteen teachers; in the fourteen primary schools, 881 pupils and fifteen teachers; and in the eleven ungraded schools, 314 pupils. The number of teachers in the ungraded schools is not stated. Presumably it was eleven, which would make the aggregate number of teachers fifty-five. The membership of pupils in the forty-one schools
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was 2,126. There were twenty-five schoolhouses owned by the town.
Nothing can be more obvious than that a close and daily supervision was essential in order to obtain even passable effi- ciency from a system of this size. Except in high schools and less frequently in grammar schools, the business of a teacher in public schools had hardly attained the dignity of a permanent profession. There had been many faithful and competent teachers in the district schools, but stability of personnel and of method had been lacking. The report of the school committee of Pittsfield in 1839 noted as an unusual fact that the same teach- er had officiated in one of the district schools for so many as three successive terms. Although nominally unified, the public schools of Pittsfield in 1876 still needed the coherence imparted by a fixed and harmonious control, and, lacking the advantage of it then, the whole cause of free education might have suffered greatly for several years, because of the peculiarly sensitive state of the popular mind.
By good fortune, a controlling hand was found of the right sort. The chairman of the school committee of 1876 was William B. Rice. As chairman also of the executive sub-committee, Mr. Rice assumed in effect all of the duties of a superintendent of schools, and he performed them with discretion and diligence. In 1877, the town gave the committee authority to employ a superintendent at a salary of $800, but the place could not be filled at that figure, and Mr. Rice continued to act as superin- tendent. In 1879 he accepted the office formally, and held it until 1885, when he was succeeded therein by Thomas H. Day, a member of the school committee.
It would be difficult to overrate the value of Mr. Rice's con- nection with the public schools of Pittsfield at this critical stage of their development. He was a practical man, whom the people already knew well, and he was far removed from the type of re- forming faddist, so abhorred by the hard-headed voters of a town meeting. Nevertheless, his realization was complete of the need of school reform, of progress, and of advanced methods of instruction; and that Pittsfield might obtain them he kept ham- mering away with a pertinacity which seemed to defy discourage-
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ment. Sentences from his report of 1878 indicate the liberal breadth of his ideas of public education. "To assign lessons and hear recitations is barely to touch the outside of the true sphere of the teacher's work. It seems to me that many, in discussing the public school question, almost entirely lose sight of the great question, why public schools should exist at all. To look upon the public schools as designed merely to fit children to get on in life, is to underestimate the immensely important interests which the public has in their maintenance."
Retaining always his keen, benignant, and salutary regard for free education, William B. Rice served Pittsfield as a school committeeman from 1872 to 1884 and from 1891 to 1911. The public schools of town and city have never had a more devoted and helpful friend.
The superintendency of Mr. Rice over the town's school af- fairs marked the beginning of a beneficial change, not only in the internal workings of the system, but also in the willingness with which the voters supported it. He recommended a liberal com- pliance with the statute concerning the provision of the free textbooks in 1878, and the town meeting of 1879 authorized the committee so to issue them. The annual appropriations for the maintenance of the schools were slowly but steadily increased. It was not so easy, however, to obtain appropriations for new schoolhouses.
The crusade which broke down much of the public apathy concerning the town's schoolhouses was led by James W. Hull, who was chairman of the school committee from 1877 to 1882, and it was strongly promoted by his associates. Their attack upon this indifference at the town meeting of 1878 was resolute and brisk. Several schoolhouses were overcrowded, and, from a sanitary point of view, almost medieval. The town meeting serenely declined to take action. In the following autumn, the work of the Orchard Street school was interrupted by a dangerous epidemic of disease which was clearly attributable to conditions in the building. The committee's indignant reference to the building in its report of 1879 made a brief excursion into the ironical. "Towns and committees" it declared, "have no power to set aside natural law." The town meeting of the same year,
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whether stung by this shaft or not, voted moncy for a new schoolhouse on Orchard Street. The committee in charge pro- vided a brick structure of a single story and four rooms, which, with additions made in 1895, still serves the city. The erection of this building and in 1876 that of the high school building on South Street, which was destroyed by fire in 1895, signalized the commencement of a new era of schoolhouse design and construc- tion; and until 1884 these were the only school edifices of brick in the city.
The main difficulties in providing new schoolhouses were those of the determination and of the expense of proper sites for them. The numerous small school lots inherited from the district system had been purchased in the days when apparently any land was good enough for a schoolhouse, if within a convenient radius of it there were forty or fifty school children of all ages. In the meantime, the value of land had been multiplied in the thickly settled parts of the town where existed the greatest need of modern schoolhouses; and the consolidation of schools, de- sirable both from an educational and an economic standpoint, was hindered by the lack of foresight of a previous generation of voters.
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