Chapter VIII: Love the Unlovely

Sam read the resolutions in what his friend, John Greenleaf Whittier, like to call his "sweet persuasive voice."(1) He had need of all his persuasiveness; sweetness would probably do little good. He was bent on convincing the gathered citizens of Syracuse to raise taxes enough to pay for a school system free to all the children who wanted to come. Gathered in Market Hall(2) that February 10 of 1848, the city's leading residents listened to the resolutions they had asked Sam to write as a foundation for the kind of school system their newly-incorporated city should have.(3)

Most of the resolutions caused little comment and passed easily; not so, the Reverend Mr. May's Resolution 4. “Resolved," he read, that it is as fitting and proper that a complete system of schools, free to all the children of this city, should be amply sustained at the public expense as that our city government . . . should be so supported.”

The citizens stirred. Some resisted. The resolution was "accepted in principle," reported the Onondaga Standard, but some doubted its expediency "at the time." The citizens appointed a group of five stalwarts: John Wilkinson, Dennis McCarthy, Henry J. Sedgwick, Hiram Putnam and Hamilton White, to consider a detailed plan of public schools as May had recommended. This properly balanced group was to report back to another meeting.(4) Wilkinson and Putnam were both members of May's Unitarian Society; Wilkinson had served as trustee of School District in the village of Syracuse;(5) Putnam, as trustee of the old District No.7 schools and as an exceedingly vocal secretary of the Onondaga Common Schools Association.(6) Sedgwick and White were Calvinists; McCarthy a Catholic. All were interested in the schools.

New York State as a whole had never provided free schools for its children. Parents who wanted their children to go to school paid "rate bills," the difference between what the state school fund and local taxes provided and what the schools actually cost. Parents who did not pay could not send their children unless they were willing to be declared paupers and let their children stand the shame.(8) Only two of every seven children in Onondaga County went to school regularly enough to be counted.(9) The proud or the frugal just let their children run the streets.

The idea of socialized education was stoutly resisted by some in that day and in that city. Many who owned land or industry, and some who had neither, resisted the idea of paying good tax money to educate other people's children. What would happen to the spirit of private enterprise, they queried, if the schools were free to all? Surely parents with initiative wanted, indeed demanded, to pay their own way! The others weren't worth bothering about. Proponents of free schools had to fight not only the economy minded and the advocates of laissez-faire, but sectarians who wanted no schools they could not dominate, and child labor lords who balked at the prospective loss of cheap help.(10).

(In 1850 when May engaged in the battle for free schools on a statewide basis, he begged Horace Mann to address an approaching free school convention in Syracuse because the free school law was being attacked by "certain wealthy individuals and moneyed institutions.”(11))

May maintained, as he always had, that free education would promote prosperity and insure the safety of democratic institutions, as well as help abolish the worst effects of poverty, crime and intemperance. “If it be greater wisdom to prevent evil than to attempt its remedy," declared May in the preamble to his 1848 resolutions, “then will every community that has due regard to its own good be careful that a system of thorough intellectual and moral culture for all the children within its embrace shall be well appointed and amply sustained.”(12)

In little more than two weeks the citizens of Syracuse succumbed to such arguments. Inhabitants of New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, and Williamsburgh had preceded them.(13) On February 28 an adjourned meeting of citizens approved a plan recommended by its committee—a plan providing for a general system of schools governed by an eight-man board of education chosen by the city's Common Council, "the schools to be free.”(14)

At its initial meeting the new Syracuse Board of Education elected as its first president Hiram Putnam, a former sea captain with some of the glamour of the China trade still about him.(15) In subsequent sessions Putnam's board opened a Pandora's box by decreeing that every school day should open with prayer or scripture;(16) ordained that the only teachers hired should be those abstaining from tobacco and the use of liquor as a beverage,(17) and set salaries for these moral paragons at $35 to $50 per month for men, $15 to $18 for women.(18) (The major advantage of hiring women became rapidly more visible.) To finance school expenses the state empowered the city to lay a biennial property tax.(19)

On April 26, the clerk could write with a proud flourish, "Resolved, that the President of the Board give public notice that the Common Schools of the City will be opened free to all the children of the City.”(20) Syracusans did love to italicize that significant word.

Thus the words from May's pen had come alive for hundreds and thousands of children. "To no two men," a biographer of the succeeding generation was to say, "was the school system of Syracuse more indebted than to Captain Putnam and his beloved pastor, Samuel J. May.”(21) May framed the school system for rich and poor, white and black alike. Putnam made it work.

* * *

Education, May believed, was a basic right of all citizens in a democracy. After he arrived in Syracuse in 1845 he fought to extend this right to all the culturally deprived: Negroes, juvenile delinquents, Indians, idiots [sic] and women. He surprised one convention of teachers by urging them to go into their schools in the spirit of Christ, "meaning to seek and to save them that are lost; being especially mindful of the neglected, ill-looking., ill-dressed, ill-tempered, not wishing them away, but rejoicing to have an opportunity to do for them in school what is not done for them at home. Let this class of children be at once made to feel that they are really cared for; that they are not shunned but sought after; not despised but valued; not doubted, but trusted; not despaired of, but hoped for . . . Love the unlovely, and they will put their unloveliness away.”(22)

The juvenile delinquents of May's day and locality were the canal boys, scruffy youngsters who drove the animals pulling the boats down the Erie. As he walked to town from James Street hill and crossed the bridge over the canal every day, May was astonished to hear the obscenities floating up in piping childish tones from the towpath below.

Fresh to a new community and intrigued by its particular problems, May promptly inquired about the canal boys. He discovered they were often abused and neglected.(23) In the winter the homeless ones huddled in the salt boiling houses(24) or sought food and shelter in the Onondaga County jail, an institution which so jammed in the boys with the older offenders that the Teachers’ Advocate denounced it as a "school of vice" for the young.(25).

May acted promptly. Invited to a meeting of ministers in December of 1845, he proposed a memorial to the legislature insuring the boys some protection to their persons, compensation for their services, homes and suitable schooling in the winter for the orphans, and a reformatory for those "who should become delinquents.”(26)

A convention of citizens heard May's description of the young boys who trudged through their city and inhabited their jail; the citizens, petitioning the legislature, asked for a house of refuge in Syracuse for the reformation of "canal boys and other juvenile delinquents under 18" who might otherwise go to jail or workhouse.(27)

May was disappointed in the result. The legislature did establish a western House of Refuge, but in Rochester instead of Syracuse,(28) and the system of guardianship and the other advantages he craved for the children were omitted. Down through the years he pressed Syracusans to set up a reform school for "'truant and refractory children." He was always thwarted. Such an institution, the city fathers invariably replied, would be too expensive to contemplate.(29)

He thus gave unqualified support in 1867 when a Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. James O'Hara, bought the old, poor-farm building at Split Rock south of the city, and established a reform school. Father O'Hara imported as teachers four members of the Christian Brothers, an order, as May explained to his Protestant fellow citizens, devoted especially to "the reformation of the vicious and juvenile delinquents." May wrote a special letter for the Syracuse Daily Journal, calming fears that Protestant boys admitted might be converted into Roman Catholics and calling on the wealthy and benevolent of the city to make the school "what we so much need.”(30)

May had a special affinity for these small social outcasts. He often visited a reform school headed by a friend of his who reported that the boys "crowded right around him when he came into the playground . . . . He did not lecture them but showed them something new about their games. . . ."(31)

This tolerance and understanding did not extend to a sentimental softness about youthful crime, however, especially when his own interests were involved. May was enormously pleased when Syracusans built and named a public school for him in 1868. He sent for a football to Boston, the only proper place to send for anything, and when it came, hobbled off to the school ground despite his 70 years and bad leg to show the boys of the May School how to play football.(32) When a group of six to 10-year-olds broke windows in the May School, however, he promptly filed a complaint. On his oath the boys were arraigned and charged with malicious mischief. All pleaded not guilty, were tried, convicted, and sentenced to a fine of $10 each.(33) May loved children but he would take no nonsense from them.

May exerted an equal effort for the education of Indians. When he arrived in Syracuse, he found a run-down remnant of the once mighty Onondagas inhabiting a reservation a few miles south of the village. Disputes between Christian Indians and those who adhered to the religion of the Long House, plus a general indifference on the part of the whites around them, had blocked educational progress on the reservation. May had long been fascinated by these "aborigines,” and he could never bear to hear them spoken of as an “effete race, destined to extermination as fast as the superior races of man shall come on to take possession of the lands. . . .” Indians should be educated, he felt, "to help them unfold the nature that God has given them, in which we see traits enough like our own to assure us they are human, and therefore capable of becoming partakers of the divine.”(34)

Now he had an opportunity; the Indians on December 22, 1845, had agreed to let their meeting house be used for a school. The Christian Indians wanted a teacher to make their children good, reported the Teachers’ Advocate, the pagans wanted their children educated to enable them to cope with the whites who were not so good.(35)

At the inevitable meeting of citizens, with May serving on the resolutions committee, Syracusans petitioned the legislature to grant $600 for an Indian schoolhouse plus a four-year appropriation for maintenance. This demonstration project was to show the educability of Indians, a proposition still sharply under question. Acting with unaccustomed alacrity, the state legislature allocated six hundred dollars for a school plus a grant of $250 annually for the next five years.(36)

Speaking in a language he hoped would be acceptable to his Indian hearers, the Rev. Mr. May on November 12, 1846, helped dedicate the new little white schoolhouse on the reservation. "Brothers," he said, "I am happy to be here today." True, the day was dark and cloudy and the season dismal and "this seems like the sad condition of the Indians now. But soon we know spring will come and these trees will be covered with leaves; and the fields will look green and beautiful . . . ."

"Now, I consider the building of this school house here, as the spring season to the Onondagas. Knowledge and goodness will be to you and your children, what the light and warmth of the sun will be to the fields and trees. They will cause you to look bright and happy; they will cover you with the green leaves and flowers of improvement; and enable you to bring forth in abundance the fruits of the good spirit.”(37)

Not all the dedicatory speakers displayed such tact. One minister of puritanical mien urged his auditors to be more like the Mohawks, Oneidas and, Senecas. Then you will not be idle, drunken and despised," he commented helpfully. “You will learn to be useful and happy in this life and you may be happy in the life to come.”(38) Not surprisingly, it was Mr. May and not the Rev. Mr. Gregory who continued through the years to help Indians raise money for their schools and obtain qualified teachers, and to serve the Indians as a sort of unofficial agent in dealings with the state.(39)

The education of the mentally retarded aroused May's particular interest after Dr. Harvey Wilbur, pioneer American educator in the field, transferred the “New York Asylum for Idiots" from Albany to Syracuse in 1855.(40) The first state institution to be formally established for the education of the retarded,(41) the idiot asylum rose on a hill west of the city and proved an object of interest to educators from all over the country. May took pleasure in escorting such visitors as Horace Mann to the asylum, and May himself addressed a Syracuse meeting on the subject of idiot education with Dr. Wilbur and several of his students in the audience.(42) Dr. Wilbur was experimenting with May's favorite instructional method, object teaching, and May followed his work with interest, hoping, as he wrote Barnard, to discover what might be learned from idiot education "applicable to the teaching of all children.”(43)

May based his case for still another special kind of education, that of women, on the same Jeffersonian reasoning that undergirded his general philosophy of education. "Women have natural rights, no less than men," he declared, "and because natural they are also inalienable, and can never be set at naught or disregarded with impunity.”(44) In what he believed was the first defense of woman's rights from an American pulpit, May asserted that the female mind is competent; indeed, "the majority of female children are so much more disposed to study and so much quicker to learn than those of the other sex that there may be found in the community a greater number of pretty well instructed women than men.”(45)

No matter how great their intellectual needs or powers, May declared, "women are still denied the benefits of higher education, thus depressing the sex and leaving them at the mercy of men. Educate the women, May advised, and admit them to public councils. Wars will less frequently arise and the redemption of the world will come more quickly.

May found ample room for agitation in a community where the Union Lyceum could meet to debate the question: "Are the females as susceptible of intellectual improvement as the males,”(46) and where the Teachers' Advocate could quote a speaker blaming women's bad health on the overworking of the female mind in the seminaries.(47)

May's pioneer sermon caused a stir in the community and made an impact in this country and abroad. Published first in 1846, it went through several editions both here and in England , and it achieved the largest circulation of any of his writings.(48) Some Syracusans took a dim view of this brand of philosophical heresy. In a long sermon on "The Christian Citizen's Duty Towards the Propagators of Error," the city's Episcopalian rector, the Rev. W. B. Ashley, castigated May particularly for his role in "unsexing women.”(49)

In many ways, however, western New York was particularly receptive to such reform thought. Horace Mann on a speaking tour found the western part of the state more alive to the importance of thorough female education than Massachusetts. And the women! The young ladies of the west simply amazed Mann in their size, strength, and general development. He wrote Cyrus Peirce in astonishment after visiting one Rochester boarding school for young ladies. "Twenty such foreheads, marveled Phrenologist Mann,”I never saw, 'all in a row.’”(50)

On these trips Mann often visited the May home where he could see another typical young woman of the west, May's daughter Charlotte. Of her scholarship, May was inordinately proud.(51) Charlotte flourished in a family singularly devoted to education. Though her father liked to write about learning, her mother was the real scholar of the family. Mrs. May knew more about the contents of her husband's library than he did; was singularly devoted to English letters, history and the arts; read French fluently, and in her old age learned enough Italian to enjoy the major poets.(52) Surrounded by such women, May could put considerable faith in the competence of the female mind.

Probably May exerted his most decisive effort for coeducation on Andrew D. White. In 1857 May read with disapproval a White article in the New Englander asserting that a "mere flowing of abridgements" was enough education for a woman. May exploded. Such was serious error, he wrote White, “how serious I hope you will live long enough to realize fully—and acknowledge frankly.

The education, the training of women ought in all respects to be as thorough, as profound, as that of men. Indeed, if the education of either sex should be the more complete, it is that of the female; for to them more than to the other is committed the instruction of children. But I would have both sexes educated equally well—educated together.”(53)

White accepted the older man as counsellor as well as friend; after White became president of Cornell University, the two often met either in Syracuse or Ithaca to confer about the affairs of the institution.(54) On July 1, 1871, White visited May, now seriously ill in his daughter's home in Syracuse. White told the old man of a liberal gift promised to Cornell on condition that young women should have the same advantages as young men. The old spark flared; Sam was delighted. Cornell should have his own portrait of Prudence Crandall if the offer were accepted, he promised, and said good-bye in his old cheerful and affectionate way. At ten that evening, he died.(55)

In the fall of 1875, the Syracuse Daily Journal was able to report "one tenth are females" of the new freshman class at Cornell University.(56)

A final aspect of May's conviction that education should be extended to all was his belief that people of every age might profit by continued learning. He was continually promoting projects for adult education and helped to found lyceums, lecture series, forums, societies for mutual instruction, and the Franklin Institute which became the Syracuse Public Library. Through May's friendships with the famous, Syracuse enjoyed such speakers as Caleb Cushing, Horace Mann, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, and Carl Schurz. May tried to snag Emerson, but never succeeded.(57)

In a day when "high" schools were regarded with suspicion by many as the trappings of aristocracy, May fought for a free high school in Syracuse to extend the limits of common school education for all. In early Syracuse the only bridge between common school and college came in the private academies which flourished and died depending on the skill of the principal and the number of moneyed patrons they could attract. They were generally a mediocre lot; none approached the excellence of those in Pompey, Cazenovia, and Homer.(58)

When May was 61, his fellow citizens elected him president of the Syracuse Board of Education, a prime position of power from which to press his ideas for reform. He first raised the question of a public high school at a board meeting in 1865, persuaded Andrew D. White to canvass the city sampling sentiment, and arranged for a public meeting at which citizens voted to float a $75,000 bond issue.(59) In 1869 he had the satisfaction of presiding at the dedication exercises for a new high school and of taking most of the credit for its establishment.(60)

May never lost this flair for reform. At the age of 72 he began agitating for one of the new kindergartens to be added to the Syracuse school system. He called the kindergarten "that improvement in the common method of teaching very young children." He imported Miss Elizabeth Peabody, prime mover of the new American kindergarten movement, to address the Syracuse citizenry(61) and pressed the idea on the city council.

He did not live to see the kindergarten system introduced into the city nor the establishment of the new Syracuse University, another development he had long favored. As his life ended, however, he could take pleasure in having helped to extend the privilege of education to many who might have gone illiterate, and to lengthen the span of formal learning for many others whose schooling would have been both meagre and short.

Footnotes

(1) J. G. Whittier, "The Antislavery Convention of 1833," Atlantic Monthly, XXXIII (February, 1874), pp. 166-172.

(2) Much village life centered on this structure which housed both a market and a hall used for gatherings of citizens. See Charles E. Fitch, "Market Hall," Syracuse Daily Herald, October 16, 1898.

(3) For details on the city's new status and that of its schools, see above, p. 66.

(4) Onondaga Standard, February 16, 1848.

(5) "Journal of School District No. 5, 1839-1848," Ms. volume, Archives of the Syracuse City School System.

(6) In Memory of Captain Hiram Putnam (n.d., n.p.), Hiram Putnam file, Onondaga Historical Association.

(7) Common School Journal, I (March 15, 1839), pp. 81, 82.

(8) District School Journal, VII (November, 1846), p. 142.

(9) District School Journal, VII (June, 1846), p. 205.

(10) Curti, Social Ideals of American Educators, p.87; Jackson, Free Schools, p. 93.

(11) May to Mann, May 21, 1850, quoted in Curti, Social Ideas of American Educators, p. 87. New York state schools were not entirely free until 1867 when the last of the rate bills were abolished.

(12) Onondaga Standard, February 16, 1848.

(13) District School Journal, VIII (March, 1848), p. 193.

(14) Onondaga Standard, March 1, 1848.

(15) Putnam Memorial Booklet; also “Minutes of the Syracuse Board of Education,” April 21, 1848.

(16) Board of Education Minutes, .May 9, 1848.

(17) Ibid., May 2, 1848.

(18) Ibid., May 2, 1848.

(19) “An Act in relation to the Public Schools in the City of Syracuse, Passed April 11, 1848, by the Senate and Assembly of the State of New York,” ms. volume, Syracuse City School System Archives.

(20) Board of Education Minutes, April 26, 1848.

(21) Putnam Memorial Booklet.

(22) May to Mann, October 20, 1844. May was disconcerted to find it was a new discovery to so many that "evil might be overcome with good" in school no less than elsewhere.

(23) May, Brief Account, pp. 35, 36.

(24) Teachers’ Advocate, I (December 31, 1845), p. 267.

(25) Teachers’ Advocate, II (August 20, 1848), p. 50.

(26) May, Brief Account, pp. 35, 36.

(27) Teachers’ Advocate, I (December 31, 1845), p. 267.

(28) Onondaga Standard, June 2, 1847.

(29) Smith, History of the Syracuse Schools, pp. 142, 153.

(30) Syracuse Daily Journal, September 23, 1867.

(31) May Memoir, p. 247.

(32) Ibid., p. 247.

(33) Syracuse Daily Journal, October 2, 1869.

(34) May, Brief Account, pp. 33, 34.

(35) Teachers’ Advocate, I (December 24, 1845), p. 249.

(36) District School Journal, VII (April 30, 1846), p. 60.

(37) District School Journal, November 14, 1846. Not all Syracusans were equally enchanted with the glories of education for Indians. "The advancement of education in the science of Agriculture and in letters," mourned the editor of the Onondaga Standard, September 2, 1846, "is destroying the charm of these rude festal scenes among this remnant of a once powerful tribe. And the time is not far distant when they will cease, and the places which now know them will know them no more."

(38) District School Journal, November 14, 1846.

(39) Galpin, "God’s Chore Boy,” p. 302; Samuel J. May diary, May 8, 1865, Cornell University.

(40) May to Barnard December 29, 1855, Barnard Papers.

(41) Syracuse Daily Journal, October 17, 1861.

(42) Syracuse Daily Journal, October 18, 1854.

(43) Harvey Wilbur, “Object Instruction System," American Journal of Education, XV (1855), pp. 191-208. Also May to Barnard, February 19, 1856, Barnard Papers.

(44) S. J. May, "Letter from the Rev. S. J. May to the Woman's Rights Convention, October, 1850," Letter from Angelina Grimke Weld to the Women’s Rights Convention held at Syracuse, September, 1852 (Syracuse: Master's Print, 1852), p. 8.

(45) Samuel J. May, The rights and condition of women: Considered in The Church of the Messiah, November 8, 1846 (Syracuse: Stoddard and Babcock, 1846).

(46) Religious Recorder, September 11, 1845.

(47) Joel Hawes, “Formation and Excellence of Female Character," Teachers’ Advocate, I (April 15, 1846), p. 502.

(48) Mumford, May Memoir, p. 190.

(49) Syracuse Daily Standard, November 23, 1852.

(50) Mann to Cyrus Peirce, March 27, 1852, Mann, Horace Mann, p. 360.

(51) May to "My dear uncle,” March 14, 1849, Massachusetts Historical Society.

(52) Mumford, May Memoir, pp. 276, 277. Interview with Charlotte's daughter, Miss Katharine Wilkinson, May, 1956.

(53) May to White, September 20, 1857, Cornell University.

(54) Interview with Miss Wilkinson.

(55) In Memoriam, p. 9.

(56) Syracuse Daily Journal, September 20, 1875.

(57) May to Ralph Waldo Emerson, August 13, 1856, Harvard University.

(58) Syracuse Daily Journal, January 13, 1847.

(59) Syracuse Daily Journal, December 5, 1866.

(60) Galpin, “God’s Chore Boy,” p. 298.

(61) Syracuse Daily Journal, June 27, 1870.