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“The Queen of the Lobby”: Mary Hunt, Scientific Temperance, and the Dilemma of Democratic Education in America, 1879–1906

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Jonathan Zimmerman*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University

Extract

Pennsylvania's statehouse, the journalist surmised, had “never witnessed such a sight.” Neither had he. Gazing across the galleries, he was astounded to find them packed—with women. Women! Women crowding the benches, women standing in doorways, and women “clustered in bunches of color in the narrow little aisles”—all awaiting news of Pennsylvania's “scientific temperance” bill, which faced a final vote that afternoon. The bill would require all state public schools to provide instruction in “the nature and effects of alcoholic drinks and other narcotics.” Additionally, all new teachers would be required to pass an examination in the subject, which would have to be taught “as thoroughly as other required branches”—and schools that failed to comply with the legislation risked the loss of state education funds.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Amendment Herald (Pittsburgh), Apr. 1885, frame 110, roll 14, Temperance and Prohibition Papers, Ohio Historical Society (joint Ohio Historical Society–Michigan Historical Collections), Scientific Temperance Federation Series (hereafter STF Series).Google Scholar

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7 Bordin, Ruth describes the WCTU as a bridge between “conservative” American women and more “radical” suffragists; similarly, Barbara Epstein describes the Union as a temporary way station on the road from domesticity to feminism. Bordin, , Woman and Temperance, 158; Epstein, Barbara Leslie, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn., 1981), ch. 5. See also Zollinger, Janet Giele, “Social Change in the Feminine Role: A Comparison of Woman's Suffrage and Woman's Temperance, 1870–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Radcliffe College, 1961); Paulson, Ross Evans, Women's Suffrage and Prohibition: A Comparative Study of Equality and Social Control (Glenview, Ill., 1973). But see also Blocker, Jack S. Jr., “Give to the Winds Thy Fears”: The Women's Temperance Crusade, 1873–1874 (Westport, Conn., 1985), ch. 5; Rosenthal, Naomi et al., “Social Movements and Network Analysis: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century Women's Reform in New York State,” American Journal of Sociology 90 (Mar. 1985): 1044–45.Google Scholar

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17 Both Hunt's supporters and her adversaries used military metaphors to describe her organization. See, for example, Ferguson, W. B., “Temperance Teaching and Recent Legislation in Connecticut,” Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1900–01 (Washington, D.C., 1902), 1037; “Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Public Schools,” Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1889–90 (Washington, D.C., 1891), 696.Google Scholar

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22 Peterson, Paul E., The Politics of School Reform, 1870–1940 (Chicago, 1985), ch. 3; Reese, William J., Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements during the Progressive Era (Boston, 1986), xx, xxii; idem, “Between Home and School: Organized Parents, Clubwomen, and Urban Education in the Progressive Era,” School Review 87 (Nov. 1978): 17. See also Schlossman, Steven, “Before Home Start: Notes toward a History of Parent Education in America, 1897–1929,” Harvard Educational Review 46 (Aug. 1976): 436–67.Google Scholar

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27 New York W.C.T.U., W.T.C.U. Handbook. 75, 6566.Google Scholar

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30 At the root of STI's dispute with scientists lay the question of whether alcohol should be classed as “food” or “poison.” Hunt and her allies acknowledged laboratory evidence that the body oxidizes alcohol like other foods—but continued to insist that the addictive potential of liquor justified the appellation “poison.” Levine, Harry G., “The Committee of Fifty and the Origins of Alcohol Control,” Journal of Drug Issues 13 (Winter 1983): 95116; Pauly, Philip J., “The Struggle for Ignorance about Alcohol: American Physiologists, Wilbur Olin Atwater, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64 (Winter 1990): 366–92; Rumbarger, John J., Profits, Power, and Prohibition: Alcohol Reform and the Industrializing of America, 1800–1930 (Albany, N.Y., 1989), ch. 6.Google Scholar

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32 Kliebard, Herbert, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (London, 1986), 4151; Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1963), ch. 14; Kett, Joseph, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977), ch. 7.Google Scholar

33 Ferguson, , “Temperance Teaching in Connecticut,” 1036; Argus (Albany), 1 Aug. 1895, frame 213, roll 10, STF Series. In arguing that “the educational profession as a whole was sympathetic” to Scientific Temperance, STI's most recent historians conflate “old” Progressive educators (like Harris) who supported STI and “new” child-study Progressives who skewered it. Tyack, et al., Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 158.Google Scholar

34 Hunt, Mary H., “Is It a Moral or a Scientific Question, or Both?” School Physiology Journal 5 (Dec. 1895): 50; Hunt, , History of Scientific Temperance Instruction, 41; Hunt, Mary H., “Temperance Instruction in the Lower Grades,” School Physiology journal 5 (Oct. 1895): 18; Hunt, Mary H., An Epoch of the Nineteenth Century: An Outline of the Work for Scientific Temperance Education in the Public Schools of the United States (Boston, 1897), 28; Hunt, Mary H., “How the Twentieth Century May Bring Emancipation from Alcohol,” School Physiology Journal 14 (May 1905): 131.Google Scholar

35 “On Duty,” “The Watch-tower,” Union Signal, 6 Feb. 1890.Google Scholar

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37 As Tyack, David and Hansot, Elisabeth have noted, small-town superintendents during this era often “acquired new ideas about education in their training and in their professional associations” and “became carriers of an adopted cosmopolitanism.” Tyack, and Hansot, , Managers of Virtue, 178.Google Scholar

38 Clipping, , Hartford Post, 18 May 1893, frame 426, roll 8, STF Series; Goodwyn, Lawrence, “Organizing Democracy: The Limits of Theory and Practice,” Democracy 1 (Ian. 1981): 48; Tallmann, Mary E. to MHH, 6 Feb. 1902, frame 65, roll 12, and E. O. Orr to MHH, [1902?], frame 383, roll 12, STF Series.Google Scholar

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41 Tyack, and Hansot, , Managers of Virtue, 204; Higham, , “Hanging Together,” 27; Hawley, Ellis, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton, N.J., 1966).Google Scholar

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46 For alternative—but equally undemocratic—formulations of the Platonic Good in education, see Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York, 1987); Hirsch, E. D. Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston, 1987); Giroux, Henry A., Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, Mass., 1983).Google Scholar

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49 Tyack, et al., Law and the Shaping of Public Education, ch. 6.Google Scholar

50 Ibid., 166, 156; Gatewood, Willard B. Jr., ed., Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and Evolution (Nashville, Tenn., 1969), 36, 39, 246.Google Scholar

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54 Indeed, “teachers' control” may be less democratic, because teachers receive less public scrutiny—and less public pressure—than high-profile, mayoral- or board-appointed superintendents experience.Google Scholar

55 In a column first published the day after Bryan's death, Mencken savaged Bryan's anti-evolution supporters as “gaping primates,” “a simian rabble,” “yokels,” “rustic ignoramuses,” “the anthropoid rabble,” “yahoos,” and a “forlorn mob of imbeciles.” Mencken, H. L., “In Memoriam: W. J. B.” in The Vintage Mencken, ed. Cooke, Alistair (New York, 1955), 163–67. See also Lippmann, Walter, American Inquisitors: A Commentary on Dayton and Chicago (New York, 1928).Google Scholar

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57 Lippmann, Walter, “Why Should the Majority Rule?” in The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy, ed. Rossiter, Clinton and Lare, James (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 13.Google Scholar

58 By “intellectually unfit,” 1 mean only that most advocates of anti-evolution did not possess the educational background or credentials of the “modernists” who opposed them. I do not, however, share Butler's fear of their influence—nor do 1 think the matter is relevant in evaluating whether anti-evolution was “repressive.” Google Scholar

59 According to the theory developed here, even the hilarious bill proposed in one state legislature to change the value of pi from 3.1416 to 3.000 (“because the Bible described Solomon's vase as three times as far around as across”) would not necessarily qualify as “repressive.” We would deem it repressive only if it squelched deliberation—if, for instance, students were not allowed to question the legislature's act. Nelkin, , Creation Controversy, 31.Google Scholar

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61 See Szasz, Ferenc Morton, The Divided Mind of Protestant America, 1880–1930 (University, Ala., 1982).Google Scholar

62 Immigrant parents often worried that STI would alienate them from their offspring. See, for example, Hunt, Mary H., “Practical Working of the Ainsworth School Physiology Law in New York State,” School Physiology Journal (Oct. 1896), 21. Teachers, meanwhile, complained about the “overdrawn” statements in textbooks and the young age at which students were introduced to the subject. Male teachers seemed more likely than female instructors to resist STI. See, for example, teacher surveys at frame 381, roll 11, frame 398, roll 12, frame 410, roll 12, and frame 508, roll 12, STF Series.Google Scholar

63 Gutmann, , “Democratic Education in Difficult Times,” 17; idem, Democratic Education, 103–4, 76, 42–44.Google Scholar

64 Kenneth Strike has suggested that popular demands upon school curricula should be rejected if they are “motivated by … the desire to restrict familiarity or inquiry.” Yet both the STI experience and more recent curricular controversies suggest that this “intentionalist” standard is far too strict, excluding censorious impulses that—in practice—often enhance critical inquiry. Strike, Kenneth, “A Field Guide of Censors: Toward a Concept of Censorship in Public Schools,” Teachers College Review 87 (Winter 1985): 246; Boyd, , “The Changing Politics of Curricular Policy-Making,” 604.Google Scholar

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67 Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, 303, 335 ; Barber, , Strong Democracy, 235, 224. For critiques of Bellah et al., see Reynolds, Charles H. and Norman, Ralph V., eds., Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, Calif, 1988).Google Scholar

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69 Freeman Butts, R., The Civic Mission in Educational Reform: Perspectives for the Public and the Profession (Stanford, Calif., 1989), 121, 130.Google Scholar

70 Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, 303.Google Scholar