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Reversing the Curse: Agricultural Millennialism at the Illinois Industrial University1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
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In the spring of 1868, sixty-eight students gathered to become the first matriculants of the Illinois Industrial University. They had responded to a summons by the state legislature to engage in a bold new mission of publicly funded mechanical and industrial education, a move which would, Illinoisans hoped, bring lavish prosperity to their fellow citizens and themselves. Like other colleges of the period, utilitarian and democratic rationales motivated the I. I. U. leadership to establish their school. Quoting their commission by the Morrill Act, the trustees said the university's “chief aim” was to educate “the industrial classes” by teaching “such branches of learning as are related to Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, and Military Tactics, without excluding other scientific and classical studies.” And yet, there was an even more radical and compelling vision among the I.I.U. faithful, one which was distinctively theological: “The hope of the Trustees and Faculty,” they said, “is that the Institution will produce … men of Christian culture … able and willing to lend a helping hand in all the great practical enterprises of this most practical age.”
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References
2 For histories of land-grant universities, see Edward Danforth, Eddy Jr., Colleges for Our Land and Time (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957)Google Scholar; Edmond, J. B., The Magnificent Charter (Hicksville, N.Y.: Exposition, 1978)Google Scholar; Hatch, Richard A., An Early View of the Land-Grant Colleges (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Allan, Nevins, The State Universities and Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962)Google Scholar; and Ross, Earle D., Democracy's College (Ames: The Iowa State College Press, 1942).Google Scholar Each of these lengthy works explains the democratic and utilitarian rationales for land-grant colleges and universities, but none speak of any explicitly theological reasons, emphasizing instead the glories of research and professional specialization, available for any one regardless of class. An earlier work, Shepardson's, Whitney H.Agricultural Education in the United States (New York: MacMillan, 1929)Google Scholar, credits democratization and the Turner thesis for Western education, but not religion. Ross does mention that the clergyman president and leaders of the New York People's College said in 1858 that they sought to teach “the revelations of the Bible” in a “perfect combination of Study with Labor,” and “Justice to Woman,” and that Iowa State taught “Agricultural Theology” and held Sunday chapel services (25, 109). He also says that Illinois was unusual compared to other public land-grants because, citing Burt Powell, “the tradition of sectarian higher education presented complications and obstructions” (Ross, 37). Tracing the origins of the first four public agricultural colleges (Michigan State, Perm State, Maryland, and Iowa State), Edmond never mentions theological motivations for the schools, none of which had presidents who were formerly clergymen (7–14). Nevins's read on the situation is that the land-grants “divorce[d] university work from religious trammels” (110); similarly, Eddy says “One of the phases of the revolution … was the break from the hold of orthodox religion on the minds of the people” (1), with secularism's triumph over religion's tyrannical superstitions being a pervading theme throughout his book. Moving beyond the conventional land-grant histories, Phillips's, Sarah T. article, “Antebellum Agricultural Reform, Republican Ideology, and Sectional Tension,” Agricultural History 74:4 (fall 2000): 799–822Google Scholar, describes how 1862 legislation created a federal Department of Agriculture, launching the land-grant movement and a Northern push for scientific farming. Richard, Bardolph's “Illinois Agriculture in Transition, 1820–1870,” Illinois State Historical Society, journal 41:4 (12 1948)Google Scholar chronicles the Illinois situation, noting the economic hardships of farmers during the early I. I. U. period. 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3 Illinois Industrial University, Circular and Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Illinois Industrial University, Urbana, Champaign County (Champaign, Ill.: n.p., 1868), 4. Justin Morrill himself said the land-grant act would aid the ministry of churches. See Morrill, Justin S., Speech of Hon. Justin S. Morrill of Vermont on the Bill Granting Lands for Agricultural Colleges; Delivered in the House of Representatives, April 20, 1858 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1858), 14.Google Scholar Regarding the education of the “industrial classes,” Peter H. Fitzgerald and James Gregory Behle have found that the democratization proposed initially by politicians and assumed by later historians did not in fact occur at the nineteenth-century land-grants; see Fitzgerald, , “Democracy, Utility, and Two Land-Grant Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: the Rhetoric and the Reality of Reform” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 07, 1972)Google Scholar, and Behle, , “Scholars from the Sod: The Social Origins and Backgrounds of Students at the University of Illinois, 1868–1894” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 1996).Google Scholar
4 Making claims to promote Christian civilization was initially not unusual for the land-grants. Cornell's leaders, in their 1867 “Features of the University,” said “The Cornell University, as its highest aim, seeks to promote Christian civilization” (Eddy, 56). Neither Cornell faculty nor students, however, would be judged based upon religious opinions. Solberg, Winton U., in “The Conflict between Religion and Secularism at the University of Illinois, 1867–1894,” American Quarterly 18 (summer 1966): 183–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, says that, although state universities hastened the move to secularism (185), “[Illinois' Regent J. M.] Gregory was clearly more evangelical than contemporaries who led the revolution in higher education” (186). Ross, E. D., in “Religious Influences in the Development of State Colleges and Universities,” Indiana Magazine of History 46 (1950): 343–62Google Scholar, provides a key argument for this paper, that, in the American Midwest, campus culture adopted and perpetuated the values instilled by the religious communities in a particular region. James Michael, Davis's “Frontier and Religious Influences on Higher Education, 1796–1860” (Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois University, 1975)Google Scholar agrees. In the I. I. U.'s case, those communities were overwhelmingly Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Congregational, the entire student body being Protestant, with “the majority” hailing “from frontier denominations known for their evangelistic fervor” (Behle, 204). Longfield, Bradley J., in “From Evangelicalism to Liberalism: Public Midwestern Universities in Nineteenth Century America,” in The Secularization of the Academy, eds. Marsden, George M. and Longfield, Bradley J. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, 46–73)Google Scholar, showed how other public schools in the Midwest consciously cultivated a Christian identity, ethos, and self-understanding. Arriving at an entirely different conclusion, Nevins says clergy often attacked land-grants as godless and immoral institutions, citing Bishop Candler taking on the University of Georgia (53).
5 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, First Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Industrial University (Springfield, Ill.: Baker, Bailhache, 1868), 64Google Scholar. The biblical “sweat of their brows” idea appears in some earlier American writings. Robert, Beverly, in his History and Present State of Virginia [1705], ed. Wright, Louis B. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947)Google Scholar, saw America as a prelapsarian Eden, with the Native Americans having retained their purity by missing Europe's corrupting artificial vanities, having “‘seem'd to have escaped, or rather not to have been concern'd in the first Curse, Of getting their Bread by the Sweat of their Brows: For, by their Pleasure alone, they supplied all their Necessities; namely, by Fishing, Fowling and Hunting; Skins being their only Cloathing; and these too, Five Sixths of the Year thrown by: Living without Labour, and only gathering the Fruits of the Earth when ripe, or fit for use: Neither fearing present Want, nor solicitious for the Future, but daily finding sufficient afresh for their Subsistence’” (17). Leo, Marx, in The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, quotes Charles Fraser, in “The Moral Influence of Steam,” Hunt's, Merchant's Magazine 14 (06 1846): 499–515)Google Scholar, saying: “for so wonderfully does it [that is, steam] relieve the necessity of physical exertion, that it seems destined, in its future action and developments, to disturb the moral economy of the world, by opposing that great law of the universe, which makes labor the portion of man, and condemns him to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow” (Marx, 199). In Jonathan, Periam'sThe Groundswell: a History of the Origin, Aims, and Progress of the Farmers' Movement (St. Louis, Mo.: N. D. Thompson, 1874)Google Scholar, former I.I.U. Head Farmer Periam offers a dissenting voice from the I.I.U. trustees' opinion, saying that, after completing an agricultural education, farmers, “instead of despising the labors of the farm, will glory in the fulfillment of the great command—far less a curse than blessing—which says, ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread’” (541). Furthermore, the I. I. U.'s communitarian, agricultural, and millennialistic focus reminds one of various Utopian communities in nineteenth-century America. For example, John Adolphus Etzler, in his 1833 Utopian tract, “The Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men,” theorized that labor could be vanquished through technology, bringing prosperity for all people. And yet, the I.I.U. leaders and students hailed from mainstream evangelicalism. Regardless of theological roots, as Paul Boyer has said, “From the days of the Puritans to the latest California commune, the impulse to form highly cohesive communities knit together by a common ideology and a snared vision of social harmony has been a constant in American history” (in Pitzer, Donald E., ed., America's Communal Utopias [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997], xi).Google Scholar From a different vantage point, yet arriving at a similar conclusion, Paul, Buhle, in Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American Left (London: Verso, 1987)Google Scholar, says “Guilty Calvinism and innocent utopianism mixed strangely together in virtually every American radical reform movement from the seventeenth century” (59). Yet while much attention has been given to the unique Utopian sects, little if any scholarship delves into the Utopian aspects of the more normative denominational churches. One exception is Curry's, Janel M. “Dutch Reformed Worldview and Agricultural Communities in the Midwest,” in The Dutch-American Experience: Essays in Honor of Robert P. Swierenga, eds. Hans, Krabbendam and Wegenaar, Larry J. (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 2000), 71–89Google Scholar, in which the author argues that Calvinism emphasized communal solidarity. It is not evident that I.I.U. leaders like J. B. Turner and J. M. Gregory were reading the Utopians' writings, but surely they would have been aware of their communities. And there were certainly theological resources enough within evangelical Christianity for the I. I. U. leadership to formulate and emphasize agricultural millennialism without direct experience of a sectarian Utopian community themselves. Gregory's condemnation of the Spiritualist movement, as well as his outspokenness on abolition and temperance, locate him firmly within the northern evangelical camp of mainstream, denominational Christianity. According to James, Dombrowski, in The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America [1936] (New York: Octagon Books, 1966)Google Scholar, by the 1870s a realized eschatology was developing in mainstream churches that focused on God's immanence, “destroy[ing] the distinction between the secular and the religious world,” an outgrowth, he says, of Calvinism, “a reaffirmation of the Puritan ideal of theocracy,” which set the stage for the full-fledged Social Gospel (14–15). For more on the Reformed influence on Illinois' colleges, see Daniel Thomas, Johnson, “Puritan Power in Illinois Higher Education Prior to 1870” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974).Google Scholar Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray have written that the “Old Northwest” featured a “Midwestern doctrine of materialism and morality,” with a millennial hope in human potentiality and progress honoring the “sanctity of labor” and human equality. See Cayton, and Gray, , eds, The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 10–12.Google Scholar
6 Jonathan Baldwin, Turner, “The Millenium [sic] of Labor,” Transactions of the Illinois State Agricultural Society 1 (1855): 55–61Google Scholar; Eugene Davenport, “Address,” Addresses: Dedication Agriculture Building, University of Illinois, May 21, 1901 (program booklet), 39–45, University of Illinois Archives, series no. 8/1/0/7, box no. 1. Davenport paid homage to Turner's millennial vision when the University dedicated a building for the study of agriculture. Turner's emphases feature some similarities of other agricultural Utopias during the nineteenth century. In “The Associationists: Forging a Christian Socialism in Antebellum America,” Church History 52:1 (March 1983): 36–49Google Scholar, Carl J. Guarneri argues that religionists in the U.S. co-opted Charles Fourier's socialist theory, constructing theologies that syncretized it with their doctrines: “When Associationists contended that their ideology was a logical outgrowth of contemporary religious beliefs, they were not only accommodating Fourierism to the American Christian scene, but they also were giving new and distinctly socialist meanings to common religious concepts and rhetoric” (41). Furthermore, he says, “In an era when religious ferment led thousands of Americans into reform movements, even supposedly secular radicals derived sustenance from Christian ideas and symbols and sought to infuse the new socialism with their power” (49). Both Turner and the I. I. U.'s first Regent, John Milton Gregory (who tried to maintain political neutrality on campus), were Republicans, not Christian Socialists (see Mary Turner, Carriel, The Life of Jonathan Baldwin Turner [Jacksonville, Ill.: n.p., 1911]Google Scholar, and Kersey, Harry A. Jr., John Milton Gregory and the University of Illinois [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968], 20, 26, 27, 29, 34, 180).Google Scholar Likewise, most students were Republicans (Behle, 204). And yet the I. I. U. leaders' ideas express a progressiveness that, along with like-minded contemporaries, paved the way for liberal theology. Regarding Turner's use of “Millennium,” Guarneri says “Millennial longings could be found among a wide spectrum of Americans that included Mormons, abolitionists, presidents, business leaders, revivalists, and Fourth of July orators” (43). Both Turner and Gregory were outspoken abolitionists and temperance advocates. Regarding the link between mechanization and millennial deliverance, Leo Marx cites a Harvard-trained lawyer, Timothy Walker, saying, in his “Defence of Mechanical Philosophy,” North American Review 33 (July 1831): 122–36)Google Scholar, that a society “will make the greatest intellectual progress, in which the greatest number of labor-saving machines has been devised,” prophesying a millennial Utopia where “machines are to perform all the drudgery of man, while he is to look on in self-complacent ease” (Marx, 185). And, Marx says, the I.I.U.'s contemporaries who authored “Improved Hay-Maker,” Scientific American 2 (March 1860, new series): 216Google Scholar, asked, “Are not our inventors absolutely ushering in the very dawn of the millennium?” (Marx, 198). For the pervasiveness of millenarian thought and rhetoric during the period, see Gaustad, Edwin S., The Rise of Adventism: Religion and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper and Row, 1974)Google Scholar, and the numerous writings on the topic that have followed. Regardless of whether his beliefs were original or co-opted, Eddy says Turner's was the very earliest voice calling for mechanical and industrial education, and a key influence upon Justin Morrill's decision to establish land-grants (23–27). James, Gray, in The University of Minnesota: 1851–1951 (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1951)Google Scholar, cites one “Oliver H. Kelley,” who by “the middle of the 1850s … had already become a sort of agricultural John the Baptist” (33). Possibly there are unknown others in this prophetic band.
7 Carriel, 9, 30, 46, 61. According to Carriel, Turner got into trouble because “he was not in sympathy with the theology of that day, especially the doctrine of election and predestination.” His outspoken “antislavery principles” were a source of alienation in the community, as, she says, both Jacksonville and Illinois College—with the exception of the New England aristocracy of professors—were proslavery, as “the wealth and social activity of the village was led by the Southern element.” President Beecher, for example, had resigned in 1844, after going east on a fund-raising trip and receiving a letter in Boston that asked him not to return to the college.
8 Ibid., 64, 73.
9 Jonathan Baldwin, Turner, A Plan for an Industrial University for the State of Illinois, Submitted to the Farmers' Convention at Granville, Held November 18, 1851 (1851).Google Scholar
10 Jonathan Baldwin, Turner, “Industrial Universities for the People,” in Burt E. Powell, Semi-Centennial History of the University of Illinois, Volume I: The Movement for Industrial Education and the Establishment of the University, 1840–1870 (Urbana: The University of Illinois), 382–83Google Scholar; Jonathan, Periam, The Groundswell. A History of the Origin, Aims, and Progress of the Farmers' Movement (St. Louis, Mo.: N. D. Thompson, 1874)Google Scholar; Rev. Talmage, T. DeWitt, D.D. The Battle for Bread. A Series of Sermons Relating to Labor and Capital. (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1886)Google Scholar. Turner's speech anticipates a link between Christianity and organized labor that would become more evident in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Talmage's book provides a later example. Periam, formerly the I.I.U.'s “head farmer,” traces the origin of the farmers' movement which Turner heralds in his speech.
11 Turner, , “Industrial,” 374.Google Scholar Nevins says that, during the 1860s, the transition from classics and recitation to modern topics and experimentation was occurring within American higher education as a whole (Nevins, 1–2, 53–54).
12 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, First Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Industrial University (Springfield, Ill.: Baker, Bailhache., 1868), II, 198Google Scholar; Turner, in Powell, 374; Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Third Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Industrial University (Springfield, Ill.: State Journal Printing Office, 1870), 84–85.Google Scholar
13 Carriel, 230–31.
14 Dombrowski claimed that organized labor impacted mainstream Protestant theology during the 1870s (3–7), and that “many labor leaders, while disavowing ecclesiastical religion, were professed followers of Jesus” (6). This sounds like the attitude and rhetoric of the farmers' movement of which Turner was a part. For more on agriculturalists' impact on the region during the 1870s, see Scott, Roy V., “Grangerism in Champaign County, Illinois, 1873–1877,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 43:3 (07 1961): 139–63.Google Scholar
15 Brett Hunn, Smith, “Envisioning and Embodying a Public, Protestant Paideia at the University of Illinois, 1867–1880” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2002), 29–41.Google ScholarMendenhall, T. C., writing in Alexis Cope's History of the Ohio State University, Volume I: 1870–1910 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1920), xiiGoogle Scholar, says that Ohio's denominational colleges campaigned against establishing Ohio State, yet tried to get Morrill Act funding for themselves, a situation analogous to Illinois'. Interestingly, too, Kentucky and Oregon initially attached their land-grant efforts to existing denominational schools (Edmond, 33–35). After much debate, Illinois decided against this option.
16 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Industrial University (Springfield: Illinois Journal Printing Office, 1872), 354.Google Scholar
17 Carriel, 55. According to Turner's daughter Carriel, her father turned down a bid to become the University's first Regent. The contemporary consensus is that Turner was never offered the job.
18 Turner, , “Industrial Universities for the People,” in Powell, 374.Google Scholar
19 Dombrowski says that, in the emerging Social Gospel theology, “In the passion of Jesus was seen the crowning achievement of a life spent freely in the service of man, the symbol for all time of the social passion that should characterize all human relation-ships” (17). Evil social forces, therefore, could be overcome through collective service to society, as Jesus had done in his day.
20 Illinois Industrial University, The Illini 4:2 (November 1874): 34.
21 Ibid., 35. Gregory's comments here appear to contradict the trustees' statement cited in this article's second paragraph. But their notion of reversing the curse did not mean the complete absence of labor. Instead, they sought to bring work into balance, redeeming it from drudgery and injustice so it could enable laborers to become more fully human. Virtuous labor was not unique to the I. I. U. Edmond says that manual labor was normative for land-grants during the early period, as was military drill, as specified by the Morrill Act itself (162–65). But he makes no mention of any one providing a theological rationale for labor as Turner and Gregory had done. Leo Marx, however, says that American romantic literature and landscape painting has reflected the pastoral ideal of the farmer's family living peacefully and harmoniously in what he calls “the middle landscape.” The Scottish cleric Hugh Blair's 1783 lectures—arguing a “middle state” between crude farm labor and effete scholarly reflection and ease—were, he adds, a textbook in American colleges until the mid 1800s (103), while the Unitarian minister Richard Price—a friend of Franklin and Jefferson—echoed this idea in his Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution [1785], saying “The happiest state of man is the middle state between the savage and the refined, or between the wild and the luxurious state” (105). Other voices Marx lists include Celadon's 1785 pamphlet The Golden Age, which foresees a millennial American paradise (105–7), and Crèvecoeur's popular Letters from an American Farmer [1783], which emphasized America's democratic farmer and the potential for a middle state in the new nation (113–15); his farmer says, “Sometimes I delight in inventing and executing machines, which simplify my wife's labor” as, in America, “human industry has acquired a boundless field to exert itself in—a field which will not be fully cultivated in many ages!” (116). Marx's book affirms this paper's thesis, that Americans saw their land as a new Garden of Eden, to be tamed and stewarded through covenantal labor, and the use of technology to assist in this quest. Gail Finney argues for a similar romanticism in Continental fiction in The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1984)Google Scholar. Regarding the intersection of history, the machine, and the garden, a 1984 conference at Michigan State yielded five articles—some of which discuss Marx, Henry Nash Smith, Jeffersonianism, and so on, specifically—in the section called “The Role of Ethics and Values in Agriculture,” in Sustainable Agriculture and Integrated farming Systems, eds Edens, Thomas C., Cynthia, Fridgen, and Battenfield, Susan L. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1985).Google Scholar A four-year workshop on Humanistic Studies of the Environment at M. I. T. resulted in Jill Ker, Conway, Kenneth, Keniston, and Leo, Marx, eds., Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).Google Scholar Three articles from Merritt Roe, Smith and Leo, Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar directly inform this thesis: Merritt Roe, Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture” (1–36)Google Scholar; Smith, Michael L., “Recourse of Empire: Landscapes of Progress in Technological America” (37–52)Google Scholar; and Perdue, Peter C., “Technological Determinism in Agrarian Societies” (169–200).Google Scholar Regarding the intersection of theology, technology, and agriculture, Frederick Kirschenmann's “Rediscovering American Agriculture,” Word and World 13 (summer 1993): 294–303Google Scholar is one of a series of ten articles in that issue of the journal shedding light on the relationship of “faith, science, and technology.” Following Marx's thesis to the I. I. U. situation, William, Cronon, in his exhaustive Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991)Google Scholar, documents Chicago's role as Nature's market-place and center of civilization, not only for Illinois, but for the entire Midwest, which was a reality in the I. I. U.'s early days.
22 Kersey, Harry A. Jr., John Milton Gregory and the University of Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Kersey, Harry A., “John Milton Gregory as a Midwestern Educator: 1852–1880” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1965)Google Scholar; Allene, Gregory, John Milton Gregory: A Biography (Chicago, Ill.: Covici-McGee, 1923)Google Scholar; Brett, Smith, “Envisioning,” 15–22.Google Scholar
23 Powell, 275.
24 John Milton, Gregory, The Right and Duty of Christianity to Educate (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Walden, Ames, 1865), 7.Google Scholar
25 Ibid., 7–8, 11, 14, 15. A fellow Baptist, President John Bascom of Wisconsin, echoed similar progressive and early Social Gospel ideas in an 1887 baccalaureate address called “The Christian State.” See Merle, Curti and Vernon, Carstensen, The University of Wisconsin: 1848–1925 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), 287–88.Google Scholar
26 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Fourth Annual Report, 221.
27 Regarding the preaching task of the era's college presidents, see Longfield, Bradley J., “From Evangelicalism to Liberalism: Public Midwestern Universities in Nineteenth-Century America,” in The Secularization of the Academy, eds. George, Marsden and Bradley, Longfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Earle D. Ross, Democracy's College. Alan Nevins cites Benjamin Ide Wheeler of California as arguing against chapels at land-grants, because the state “had to avoid entanglements with dogma” (82). Edmond, however, said daily and Sunday chapels were normative and compulsory at land-grants during the early period (164). Ross agreed, adding that voluntary Bible classes, prayer meetings, “Y” activities, and even the occurrence of revivals were common (Democracy's College, 132). Eddy even reluctantly agreed, emphasizing the nonsectarian character of religion on campus (Eddy, 65–66). Along with Solberg, J. Gregory Behle, in “Educating ‘The Lord's Redeemed and Anointed’: The University of Illinois Chapel Experience, 1868–1894,” The Master's Seminary Journal 11:1 (spring 2000): 53–73)Google Scholar, says the I. I. U. held chapel services and encouraged its students to worship in local churches. James, Gray'sThe University of Minnesota: 1851–1951 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951)Google Scholar describes a small, territorial school led by pious clergy and others from 1851–1868 (13–35). The Morrill Act changed the school's focus onto agriculture after 1868. In the 1870s, they had morning chapel (47) and a course in moral philosophy taught by a clergyman (48). Otherwise, no specific mention is made of student religious life on campus, but President Folwell is quoted as saying “If students … are liable to be led astray at a University within sight of twenty church spires it is a sign that something is radically wrong with the influences that surround them at home” (69). According to Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen, compulsory daily chapel began early at the University of Wisconsin, and in 1857 Sunday afternoon chapels with local clergy began, arranged by a faculty chaplain, who was appointed in 1859 (176). In the 1860s, courses in Natural Theology and Evidences of Christianity were required, chapel was standing room only, Professor Sterling held public prayer meetings in his lecture room, and the Preceptress led kneeling girls in prayer meetings, Sunday Bible lessons, and attendance at local church services (407). Some students, like John Muir, began and ended the day with prayer, and some attended Sunday morning and evening services at local churches, along with Sunday afternoon chapels (190). Chapel became voluntary in 1868–69, and, after dwindling attendance since 1874, abolished in 1885 (409–10). Voluntary groups like the Christian Association (in 1871) and the YMCA (in 1881) filled in the gap (411–12). The only university-sponsored influence left by the 1880s was prayer at commencement (412). Bob LaFollette said Bascom's Sunday afternoon chapel talks were among the most important influences of his life, with the President endorsing trade unions, strikes, Richard Ely's support of European socialism, equitable distribution of wealth, and prohibition (288–89). Yet Cope says that, unlike the I. I. U., none of the nineteen founding Ohio State trustees were clergyman (25–30), and only one of the original seven faculty was (64–73). Another difference was that, since President Orton, a geologist, was against it, no chapel services were held during the 1870s (76–77). Succeeding Orton was a clergyman president whom the trustees elected in hopes of establishing “religious exercises” on campus, but even he failed to accomplish it (77–83).
28 Powell, 315–16.
29 Students of the Senior Class, eds., The Student (Illinois Industrial University) 2:4 (April 1873): 42.Google Scholar
30 Board of Trustees, Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Industrial University (Springfield, Ill.: State Journal Printing Office, 1875), 63, 67–68, 73.Google Scholar
31 Ibid., 74–76.
32 Ibid., 62.
33 Ibid., 77.
34 Students of the Senior Class, eds., The Student (Illinois Industrial University) 2:1 (January 1873): 7.Google Scholar
35 Powell, 314–15.
36 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Fourth Annual Report, 71.
37 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Second Annual Report, 273.
38 In The Machine in the Garden, Marx quotes Jefferson, in Query XIX of his Notes on the State of Virginia, saying “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue” (122). And, in The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960)Google Scholar, Merrill D. Peterson cites Philip Nicholas telling the 1829–30 Virginia Constitutional Convention: “‘I believe if there are any chosen people of God, they are the cultivators of the soil. If there be virtue to be found anywhere, it would be amongst the middling farmers, who constitute the yeomanry, the bone and sinews of our country” (43–44).
39 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Third Annual Report, 247. On a 1786 trip to France, Jefferson said that, eschewing cities and dignitaries, he preferred to tour farms and visit with farmers, noting that the postfeudal village system of France was inferior to the family farm of the United States, and that Americans in France should concentrate on studying their agriculture, mechanics, and architecture, the fields which most prospered at the I.I. U. See Peterson, Merrill D., Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York: Oxford University Press), 350–52Google Scholar, a book the author calls the “biographical companion” (xii) to The Jefferson Image, which attempts to find a more accurate account of the “real” Jefferson.
40 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Third Annual Report, 351–52. The U.S. Department of Agriculture echoed this view, through Lewis, Bollman'sThe Industrial Colleges: The Nature of the Education to be Given in Them; Their Several Kinds and Courses of Instruction Considered (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dec. 10, 1864)Google Scholar, saying that “The Creator” has “given dominion” over the animals to the farmer (8). In The Groundswell, former I. I. U. head farmer Jonathan Periam listed only two American “fathers of modern Agriculture,” namely Jefferson and Washington (33). Bollman, however, blames Jefferson's states' rights political theory for the Southern rebellion: “Mr. Jefferson made [words[ … poison; the Apostles, by [words], offered eternal life” (11). But Leo, Marx's friend Henry Nash, Smith, in Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950)Google Scholar, said Americans moved west to cultivate their “Garden of the World” (12), which “became one of the dominant symbols of nineteenth-century American society—a collective representation, a poetic idea (as Tocqueville noted in the early 1830s) that defined the promise of American life. The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth, all centering about the heroic figure of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow” (123). In the Midwest, “the idealized Western yeoman” cultivated the Garden (133), and Smith cites a few literary examples—including some millennial-like quotes from a missionary—to illustrate (134–44). Jefferson, he said, started the dream of cultivating the West's garden (15–18), and the nation followed. But alas, he concludes, the failure of the Republicans' 1862 Homestead Act (165–73), and the aridity of the high plains and far west (174–83), dashed any hope of agricultural Utopia (189–94). Regarding the influence of Jefferson on agricultural romanticism, Dumas, Malone'sJefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948–1981)Google Scholar is the most detailed and scholarly Jefferson biography. As previously cited, Merrill D. Peterson's extensive work on Thomas Jefferson informs the agricultural utopianism of the I. I. U. His The Jefferson Image in the American Mind traces how constructed histories and ideas that are attributed to Jefferson informed American identity and policy over time, concluding “‘it was Jefferson more than any other man of his time who foresaw the fruitfulness of the application of science to agriculture’” (403). Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: a Biography chronicles Jefferson's personal agricultural research work, both in Virginia and in France, on fruit, vegetable, and rice crops. Regarding the mystery of Jefferson's opinion on farming versus manufactures, Peterson cites a 1793 letter: “I wish to heaven the spirit of mill-building and manufacturing … could spread itself to Albemarle…. We are miserably circumstanced … as to the disposal of our wheat” (537). The machine in the garden would bring a better price for flour in Richmond. Peterson also edited a book of eleven solid essays called Thomas Jefferson: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).Google Scholar More recent works on Jefferson include: Joyce, Appleby, Thomas Jefferson (New York: Times Books, 2003)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Richard B., Thomas Jefferson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Loewer, H. Peter, Jefferson's Garden (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 2004)Google Scholar, containing chapters dedicated to the dozens of flora Jefferson, the great agriculturist, grew. Apple-by's book, as part of The American Presidents series, is a more popular work by design and affirms prior historians' conclusions about Jeffersonian agriculturalism, adding this clarifying statement: “Agrarian self-sufficiency never appealed to Jefferson; he plumped [sic] instead for a rural prosperity built on the export of America's bumper crops” (116). Bernstein also agrees with the consensus, saying Jefferson had a “vision of the good society as an agrarian republic of independent yeoman farmers supporting themselves by their own labors. Self-sufficient to the greatest possible degree, they would maintain their virtue, the necessary ingredient for preserving a republic, refusing the seductive lures of manufactured luxury goods and the economic activities (trade and commerce) that created and distributed them” (x). Other helpful books on Jefferson, agriculture, and virtue include: Kennedy, Roger G., Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Gaustad, Edwin S., Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996)Google Scholar; and Miller, Charles A., Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
41 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Third Annual Report, II.
42 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Fifth Annual Report, 227.
43 Ibid., 233; Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Third Annual Report, 397.
44 Carriel, 151.
45 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Third Annual Report, 398–99.
46 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Fourth Annual Report, 358.
47 Ibid., 358–59.
48 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, First Annual Report, 149.
49 Powell, 304.
50 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, First Annual Report, 154–55.
51 Ibid., 172–73.
52 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Second Annual Report, 321–22.
53 Ibid., 320.
54 Ibid., 295.
55 Smith, , “Envisioning,” 163–67.Google Scholar
56 I use “paideia” here in the same sense as does Lawrence Cremin in his American Education series (referenced in note 2 above) as a way to describe the ethos of a particular learning community.
57 Illinois Industrial University, The Illini 3:6 (June 1874): 147.
58 Smith, , “Envisioning,” 221–29.Google Scholar
59 Illinois Industrial University Board of Trustees, Second Annual Report, 258.
60 Illinois Industrial University, The Illini 3:2 (February 1874): 41–42.
61 Students of the Senior Class, eds., The Student (Illinois Industrial University) 1:3 (January 1872): 9.
62 Cope, 109.
63 Ibid., 110.
64 See Dombrowski, The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America, and Phillips, Paul T., A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 1880–1940 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).Google Scholar While Turner was formulating his ideas in the late 1840s and articulating them by the 1850s—with Gregory doing likewise in the 1860s—Phillips and Dombrowski start the Social Gospel movement in the 1870s or 80s instead. Similarly, Jacob H. Dorn, in “An Optimistic Millennialism: Edward Bellamy's Vision of Socialism as ‘Applied Christianity,’” and “The Kingdom of God as Cooperative Commonwealth: Socialist Christians, the Millennial Ideal, and the State” (both found in Expectations for the Millennium: American Socalisit Visions of the Future, ed. Buckingham, Peter H. [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002], 1–18, 35–54)Google Scholar, cites examples of socialism rising within mainstream Christianity, but reluctantly, and no earlier than the 1880s. Dombrowski traces the move by noting wealthy manufacturer and Princeton Seminary trustee Stephen Colwell's publication of New Themes for the Protestant Clergy (31–34) and his endowing a chair in Christian ethics at Princeton in 1871 (60); the impact of the “Christian Labor Union,” organized in Boston in 1872 and disbanding in 1878 (77–83); emerging national conventions of socialist groups from the 1870s forward (74–76); Henry George's troubled reflections on poverty in the 1870s, leading to his influential writings and speeches in the 1880s and 90s (35–49); the advent of sociology in the seminaries (60–73); and Richard Ely's pioneering work in economics (50–59). Interestingly, by the end of his own career, John M. Gregory was moving increasingly away from history and toward economics instead. And the Baptist President of the University of Wisconsin, John Bascom, was, by the late 1880s, a fan of Ely's as well: see Curti and Carstensen, 287–88.
65 Guarnari makes this point, as do others who write on the topic. Comparing the intersection between the I.I.U.'s vision and ideals and those of Utopian and/or socialist religious communities in America has been helpful. Other works on the topic not cited so far in this paper include: Jim, Bissett, Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904–7920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999)Google Scholar, arguing that mixing Jeffersonianism and evangelical Christianity easily yields agrarian socialism; Buckingham, Peter H., ed., Expectations for the Millennium: American Socialist Visions of the Future (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002)Google Scholar; Dorrien, Gary J., Reconstructing the Common Good (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1990)Google Scholar, although covering a period after the I. I. U.'s founding, contributes in its introduction by arguing for the necessity of Christianity's providing a framework for commonwealth in America; Herscher, Uri D., Jewish Agricultural Utopias in America, 1880–1910 (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, in which the author argues that the motivation for agriculture was to correct the imbalance of wealth in society, giving the poor a chance to prosper; Mandelker, Ira L., Religion, Society, and Utopia in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984)Google Scholar, devoting most of its energy to John Humphrey Noyes's theology and the Oneida community, but bringing in other influences of the period; Nordhoff, Charles, The Communistic Societies of the United States [1875] (New York: Shocken Books, 1965)Google Scholar, arguing that religious societies work while labor unions fail; John Humphrey, Noyes, History of American Socialisms [1870] (New York: Hillary House, 1961)Google Scholar, claiming that revivalism and socialism are interdependent and necessary in America, as they were in ancient Christianity (25–29); Raven, Charles E., Christian Socialism, 1848–1854 (London: MacMillan, 1920)Google Scholar, tracing the development of a Christian socialism in Britain, which anticipated its appearance in the U.S. and yet was contemporary to Turner and Gregory; Sutton, Robert P., Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Religious Communities, 1732–2000 (Westport, Conn.: Prager, 2003)Google Scholar; Francis Robert, Shor, Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America, 1888–1918 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997)Google Scholar; and the classic by Alice Felt, Tyler, Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860 (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1944)Google Scholar, devoting 150 pages to “Cults and Utopias,” covering a broad range of topics such as revivalism and democracy, educational reforms, abolition, and temperance.
66 Solberg, Winton U., The University of Illinois, 1867–1894: An Intellectual and Cultural History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), 132–34.Google Scholar
67 Illinois Industrial University, The Illini 4:5 (February 1875): 154.
68 Illinois Industrial University, The Illini 4:1 (October 1874): 4–5.
69 Board of Trustees, Ninth Report (Second Biennial) of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Industrial University (Springfield, Ill.: Weber, 1878), 107–8.Google Scholar
70 Solberg, , The University of Illinois, 1867–1894, 226–27.Google Scholar Peter H. Fitzgerald's dissertation analyzes findings at the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota. He proposes a new social history as an antidote to existing land-grant histories, examining the “rhetoric” of utility and democracy as uttered by Turner, Gregory, and similar leaders, concluding that, despite the rhetoric of utility and democracy, land-grants' practices revealed a lingering devotion to the liberal arts, and were elitist by Midwestern, middle-class Protestant standards. Analysis of theology in the rhetoric is absent in Fitzgerald's study.
71 The secularization thesis in American higher education has been widely debated for the last decade or so. Regarding Illinois' case, Winton U. Solberg first proposed it in the 1960s, as mentioned in note 4 above, tracing the move from nonsectarian Christian identity in the Gregory years through waning Christian identity and the disestablishment of chapel by 1894. Others more recently advocating the secularization thesis include the authors in George, Marsden and Longfield, Bradley J., eds., The Secularization of the AcademyGoogle Scholar; Marsden's The Soul of the American University; and Julie A. Reuben's The Making of the Modern University. Of course, Robert Bellah had already suggested a similar thesis in “The Triumph of Secularism,” Religion and Intellectual Life 1 (winter 1984): 13–26Google Scholar, and Henry C. Johnson published an article backing the secularization thesis called “‘Down from the Mountain’: Secularization and the Higher Learning in America,” The Review of Politics 54 (fall 1992): 551–88)Google Scholar. Two articles in Stanley, Hauerwas and Westerhoff, John H., eds., Schooling Christians: “Holy Experiments” in American Education (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 129–83)Google Scholar— Michael G. Cartwright's “Looking Both Ways: A ‘Holy Experiment’ in American Higher Education” and Stanley Hauerwas's “On Witnessing Our Story: Christian Education in Liberal Societies”— enhance the discussion. Hart's, D. G. “The Troubled Soul of the Academy: American Learning and the Problem of Religious Studies,” Religion and American Culture 2 (winter 1992): 49–77)CrossRefGoogle Scholar suggests that the academic study of religion has had an uncertain status from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Conrad, Cherry'sHurrying Toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)Google Scholar examines the role of theology and ministry in late-nineteenth-century American higher education and proposes a key concept for this paper, that a “pan-Protestant,” nonsectarian ecumenical ideal reigned among clerical higher educators during the period, with clergy throughout America like Jonathan B. Turner and John M. Gregory unwittingly paving the way for liberal Christianity and the Social Gospel. Potts's, David B. article, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century: From Localism to Denominationalism,” History of Education Quarterly 11 (1971): 363–80)CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues the opposite, that denominational ties strengthened over the nineteenth century, with less of a conscious responsibility to the larger society outside of sectarian boundaries. Roberts, Jon H. and James, Turner'sThe Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar asserts that religion in American higher education declined in the latter nineteenth century due to a specializing professorate and an increasing empirical certainty that rendered religion irrelevant and therefore obsolete. Those not advocating the secularization thesis have published on the topic as well, including an introduction to the literature on both sides of the issue forwarded by Steve, Bruce in Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar See also the wonderful dialogue found in Sommerville, C. John, “Secular Society/Religious Population: Our Tacit Rules for Using the Term ‘Secularization,’” journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1998): 249–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hollinger, David A. in “The ‘Secularization’ Question and the United States in the Twentieth Century,” Church History 70:1 (03 2001): 137–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sommerville, , “Post-secularism Marginalizes the University: A Rejoinder to Holliger,” Church History 71:4 (12 2002): 848–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hollinger, , “Why Is There So Much Christianity in the United States? A Reply to Sommerville,” Church History 71:4 (12 2002): 858–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
72 According to Edmond, in 1860 the average U.S. farmer produced enough food for five people, while by 1970 it was sixty-one people (150); Moores says it is four and one-half, and twenty-seven, with 60 percent of Americans on farms in 1862 compared to less than 6 percent in 1970 (Moores, Fields of Rich Toil, vii). Eugene V. Debs complained as early as 1900 that “the great bonanza farm is driving the small farmer to bankruptcy and ruin” (Fogarty, Robert S., “Introduction: the Promise of a Better Future,” in Expectations for the Millennium: American Socialist Visions of the Future, ed. Buckingham, Peter H., xi).Google Scholar
73 Lisa, Collins, “FarmAid Rolls On Despite Rain, Cold,” The Daily Illini, Monday, 23 09 1985, 1Google Scholar; George, Paaswell, “Performers Hope Attention on the Farmers is Profitable,” The Daily Illini, Monday, 23 09 1985, 3Google Scholar; Associated Press, “Group Will Grade Politicians on Efforts at Aid for Farmers,” The Daily Illini, Tuesday, 24 September 1985, 9.Google ScholarKermit, Eby's “Technology and Man,” Religion in Life 30:1 (winter 1960–1961): 46–52Google Scholar laments the inability of young Hoosiers to make a living farming, and its larger economic fallout on unskilled labor.
74 To illustrate one denomination's environmental concerns in the 1970s, see Conner, John T. and Hessel, Dieter T., The Agricultural Mission of Churches and Land-Grant Universities (Ames: The Iowa State University Press, 1980).Google Scholar The book stemmed from a 1978 United Presbyterian Church in the USA conference, convened in Ames, Iowa by UPC-USA Moderator Conner, consisting of campus pastors and professors from ten land-grant universities. Although affirming a Turneresque vision of modern agriculture's ongoing ability and duty to efficiently and inexpensively feed the world's poor, some expressed concern about the ongoing destruction from fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, failure to rotate crops, and the dissolution of community and livelihood associated with large-scale farming technologies. “Green” Christians share similar concerns today. One wonders how Turner, the proponent of the erosion-fighting Osage orange hedgerows, which have only recently been removed from Illinois landscapes, would feel about these late-twentieth-century developments, or about a spring 2004 lecture—held in the University's Jonathan Baldwin Turner Hall—on developing agricultural systems of “permaculture,” which are better for the environment. For a brief history of activism against environmental pollution in the U.S., see Barbara, Epstein, “Grassroots Environmental Activism: The Toxics Movement and Directions for Social Change,” in Earth, Air, Fire, Water, eds. Jill Ker, Conway, Kenneth, Keniston, and Leo, Marx, 170–83.Google Scholar
75 Darcy, Hendricks, ““Going Back to the Field,”” The Daily Illini, Friday, 21 04 2000, 18–19.Google Scholar For a study of an ongoing romanticism forged by the intersection of Jeffersonian idealism with “formal” and “informal” religiosity, see Brinkerhoff, Merlin B. and Jacob, Jeffrey C., “Quasi-Religious Meaning Systems, Official Religion, and Quality of Life in an Alternative Lifestyle: A Survey from the Back-to-the-Land Movement,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26:1 (03 1987): 63–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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