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The Moral Significance of the Common School: A Sociological Study of Local Patterns of School Control and Moral Education in Massachusetts and New York, 1837-1840

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Charles E. Bidwell*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago

Extract

Sociologists are becoming reacquainted with history. Some seek in broad patterns of national development an understanding of social growth and decay. Others detail processes of social change from the minute data of local history. Although these scholars draw their materials from the past, they do not work as social historians. Their primary aim is not to illuminate the periods or places that they study but to move beyond particular data, using them to test or generate propositions of more general applicability.

Much of this work centers on the development and stabilization of the national state, and American sociologists, especially, are keenly interested in the conditions for the emergence of durable political democracy. In research of this kind, one's attention falls naturally upon arrangements for schooling, for it is often argued that political stability, especially in democracies, rests on the extension of common education.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1966 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. See, for example, such recent works as Clark, S. D., The Developing Canadian Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Eisenstadt, S. N., The Political Systems of Empires (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1963); Lipset, Seymour M., The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1963); Gusfield, Joseph, Symbolic Crusade (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1965). Especially in the use of comparative designs many of the studies return to the classic questions and methods that occupied Max Weber.Google Scholar

2. Cf. Eisenstadt, , op. cit ; Lipset, , op. cit. Google Scholar

3. Cf. Clark, , op. cit. Google Scholar

4. This interest is represented most notably by Lipset, Seymour and his students, especially in his Political Man (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1959).Google Scholar

5. Lipset, , ibid. , pp. 5560; Bendix, Reinhard and Rokkan, Stein, “The Extension of National Citizenship to the Lower Classes,” paper read to the 5th World Congress of Sociology, 1962.Google Scholar

6. For an interesting discussion of this question from a different viewpoint see Anderson, C. A., “State Education and Cultural Alienation,” Yearbook of Education, 1966. Google Scholar

7. This opposition, of course, is especially likely in religiously pluralistic countries. The relation of state, church, and school, for example, has been especially acute in England. See Sacks, Benjamin, The Religious Issue in the State Schools of England and Wales, 1902-1914 (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1961).Google Scholar

8. This discussion follows very closely the discussion by Lipset in The First New Nation, pp. 13-98. It also relies on Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, Inc., 1955).Google Scholar

9. Cf. Miller, Perry, The Life of the Mind in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966), Book I.Google Scholar

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11. Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 216–53.Google Scholar

12. Mead, Sidney E., “Denominationalism: The Shape of Protestantism in America,” Church History , XXIII (1954), 291320.Google Scholar

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14. The best recent data on this point will be found in an unpublished paper by Williamson, J. G. and Swanson, J. A., “The Growth of Cities in the American Northeast,” mimeographed, 1966.Google Scholar

15. Cf. Handlin, Oscar, Boston's Immigrants, 1790-1880 (rev. ed.; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959); Ernst, Robert, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863 (New York: King's Crown Press, 1949).Google Scholar

16. The events in these controversies are detailed at some length in Culver, Raymond B., Horace Mann and Religion in the Massachusetts Public Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929) and Bourne, William O., History of the Public School Society of the City of New York (New York: William Wood and Company, 1870). Billington's account of the New York controversy is marred by a tendency to read the present into the past: Billington, Ray A., The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938).Google Scholar

17. The Society was a private, charitable foundation that had enjoyed marked favor both in Albany and the Common Council of New York City. It disbursed the city's entire share of the state common-school fund to support its own schools.Google Scholar

18. Every Democratic candidate in the city not endorsed by the Catholics was defeated.Google Scholar

19. Cf. the discussion by Perry Miller of the open-endedness of the Girard decision, op. cit., Book II.Google Scholar

20. The entire study will be reported in a forthcoming volume tentatively entitled, Religion, Politics, and Popular Education: New York and Massachusetts in the 1840's. Google Scholar

21. In the present analysis, the city ward data were aggregated by city, so that cities and townships were the actual units. This was done because, in the cities, patterns of schooling were city-wide. In view of its peculiar arrangements for common education, New York County was removed from the data. For convenience, the units of analysis are referred to subsequently as “towns” or “townships,” but these terms more precisely refer to townships and cities.Google Scholar

22. Note that questions 1 and 2 exclude city wards.Google Scholar

23. The concept of the moral community is derivative of Ferdinand Tönnies' gemeinschaft. See his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Leipzig: H. Buske, 1935).Google Scholar

24. From this viewpoint, Horace Mann's activities in Massachusetts and those of John Spencer, his counterpart in New York, can be interpreted as responses to a loosening of religious integration at the state level with the emergence of denominational voluntarism.Google Scholar

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28. For example, see the classic discussion by Durkheim, Émile, The Division of Labor in Society , trans. Simpson, George (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1947).Google Scholar

29. Great numbers of persons were reached, but revivals were generally more effective with persons already in the church. See Cross, , op. cit. , and Miller, , op. cit., Book I.Google Scholar

30. This argument holds equally whether one is considering relations between single congregations or coalitions of congregations.Google Scholar

31. This point is based especially on the ideas presented by Coleman, James in Community Conflict (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957).Google Scholar

32. This is the “standard” interpretation of the Jacksonian period. Cf., Benson, Lee, Turner and Beard (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960); Fox, Dixon Ryan, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919); Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945).Google Scholar

33. See also Hartz, , op. cit. Google Scholar

34. Bay State Democrat , July 28, 1840.Google Scholar

35. Bodo, , op. cit. , pp. 330.Google Scholar

36. Lipset, , Political Man , p. 32.Google Scholar

37. Benson, , The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy , pp. 123207.Google Scholar

38. Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1965); Gusfield, , op. cit. Google Scholar

39. Cf. Almond, Gabriel, “Plutocracy and Politics in New York City” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1938); Gusfield, , op. cit. Google Scholar

40. The study relied especially on these sources: 6th Census or Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the United Statesin 1840 (Washington, D.C.: Blair and Rives, 1841); The 7th Census of the United States, 1850 (Washington: Robert Armstrong, 1853); Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Board of Education and Secretary of the Board, Annual Reports, 1837 through 1840 (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1838-1841); New York State Superintendent of Common Schools, Annual Reports, 1837-1840 (Albany, 1838-1841); Barber, John W., Historical Collections (Worcester, Mass.: Dorr, Howland, and Company, 1841); Holland, Josiah G., History of Western Massachusetts (Springfield: Samuel Bowes and Company, 1855); Massachusetts Register and U.S. Calendar (Boston: Joseph Loring, 1839, 1840, 1841); Barber, John W. and Howe, Henry, Historical Collection of the State of New York (New York: S. Tuttle, 1842); Disturnell, J., A Gazetteer of the State of New York (Albany, 1842).Google Scholar

41. The number of local histories employed was too large for citation here. The extensive collections of New York and Massachusetts town and county histories in the University of Chicago Library and the Newberry Library were surveyed fully.Google Scholar

42. Secretary, Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Reports, op. cit. ; New York State Superintendent of Common Schools, Annual Report, op. cit. Google Scholar

43. Fell, Marie Leonore Sr., The Foundations of Nativism in American Textbooks, 1783-1860 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1941); Smith, E. D., The Doctrinal Content of American School Textbooks before the Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1953).Google Scholar

44. Secretary, Massachusetts Board of Education, Annual Reports, op. cit. Google Scholar

45. The lists of town ministers for 1838-1840 were found in the Massachusetts Annual Register, op. cit. Data were not available for 1837.Google Scholar

46. Microfilms of the 1850 Marshals' returns for Massachusetts and New York, held by the Newberry Library, were used.Google Scholar

47. Most useful were Adams, William F., Ireland and Irish Immigration to the New World from 1815 to the Famine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932); Matthews, Lois K., The Expansion of New England (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909).Google Scholar

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49. This classification followed Benson, , The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy , pp. 198207.Google Scholar

50. The New York data were kindly supplied by Lee Benson from his study of Jacksonianism in New York. For a description of these data, see Benson, , The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy , pp. 340–41. The Massachusetts materials come from Massachusetts Legislature, Report of the Committeeto Make a Valuation of the Polls and Property of the Commonwealth (Boston: Wentworth, 1841).Google Scholar

51. Benson, , The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy , pp. 340–41.Google Scholar

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53. Labovitz, Sanford I., “Methods for Control with Small Sample Size,” American Sociological Review , XXX (1965), 243–49. The use of this method of control requires that the index itself be correlated with the dependent variables. This condition was met in all cases, the correlations varying from +.33 to +.61.Google Scholar

54. The data provided too few cases for adequate analysis, but in a more impressionistic comparison of the morally integrated towns, there were no systematic differences in school control or moral curricula with shifts of dominant religious beliefs.Google Scholar

55. Benson, , The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy , pp. 123207.Google Scholar

56. Miller, Perry, op. cit., Book I.Google Scholar

57. Clark, Joseph S., A Historical Sketch of the Congregational Churches in Massachusetts from 1620-1858 (Boston: Congregational Board Publication, 1858). Smith, Arthur, The Baptist Situation of Boston Proper (Boston: Griffith-Shellings Press, 1912), pp. 11-26.Google Scholar

58. Gerth, Hans and Wright Mills, C. (eds.), From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 184. Here Weber argued that the perceptibility of differences of class interests and life chances would generate class action.Google Scholar