Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
December 2, 2001
The Noblest Work
Ray Schreurs was a man with a mission last April at the service auction; he was determined to win the right to choose the sermon topic, and he patiently outbid the competition until he did. He wanted to hear, and he wanted us all to hear, about the work of the famous reformer and Unitarian, Horace Mann. Mann was a naturalistic theist, a theological radical for his day, and his values presage the emergence of a humanistic philosophy that would appear a generation or two after his own. His legacy of humanistic social reform is with us today.
Horace Mann was a product of two fundamental historical currents; the Puritan/Yankee/Victorian ideal of the perfectibility of humanity through self-control, reason, and benevolence, and the social dislocations of industrial growth and economic change in the first half of 19th century New England. The latter may be illustrated by a handful of snapshots out of his life story. Mann was one of five children born into a farm family in Franklin, Massachusetts in 1796. His father's will, composed in 1809 when Thomas Mann knew that he was only days from dying of consumption, and his son Horace was fourteen, distributes property that would have constituted moderate prosperity in the terms of the community and the time. The property had been held by Mann forbears for three generations, and it was assumed that it was a permanent establishment for gradual wealth to be carefully accumulated over successive generations of respectable yeoman farmers. But unbeknownst to him, Thomas Mann would the last to farm 'Mann's Plain', as the property was known. Of the three sons he expected to inherit his property and his lifestyle, Stephen would drown at the local swimming hole little more than a year later. The youngest, Horace, went about the endless exhausting tasks of a farming household with silent rebellion in his breast. While his body ached with weariness, his mind thirsted for greater knowledge and stimulation than the horizons of his father's fields. There had to be a more satisfying way of making a living. The eldest son and heir, Stanley, would be seduced by the risky promises of a developing economy, mortgaging the property and his sister's dowery to invest in the textile mills which came to dot the landscape of New England, including Wrentham and Franklin. Horace Mann would recall his childhood as one of poverty and drudgery bordering on abuse; by the standards of the time it was not, but the standards would change dramatically in the course of his lifetime, and his life work would be shaped to some extent by his effort to establish for all children what those standards ought to be.
Young Horace was close to his older brother Stephen, and already troubled by the Calvinist orthodoxy of the local minister, Nathanael Emmons. That Emmons took the occasion of Stephen's accidental death from swimming on the Sabbath, when he ought to have been at church, as an opportunity to remind other youthful hearers of the horrors of hell, awaiting all such unrepentant sinners, multiplied his mother's distress, and cast the surviving brother into an agony of guilt, fear, and almost hysterical grief. No one in his family or community seems to have been able to help Horace resolve his emotional and theological despair; that grieving, exacerbated by later losses, would be a lasting part of his outlook.
Despite his mother's resistance to any further diminution of the family circle, Horace began earnestly trying to prepare himself for the entrance qualifications for Brown University in Providence, thirty miles from his home. The only available assistance was an alcoholic one-time schoolmaster, a brilliant classicist, but now too often drunk to teach regularly. From him, Mann extracted the rudiments of Latin and Greek; for help in mathematics, he walked four miles each way to the parsonage in Wrentham for sessions with the minister there. Finally, at the age of 20, he presented himself for an interview with Asa Messer, the president and admissions officer at Brown, and was accepted as a member of the sophomore class, with deficiencies. The pedagogical technique even in higher education at the time would be considered pathetic today; aging professors, some quite hard of hearing, expected students one by one to recite verbatim passages from their text books, including the printer's errors. Mann's exercises in composition were evaluated on their ornamental literary and rhetorical style, without regard to accuracy of statement or research. He learned to turn a carefully crafted phrase, and to let his moral, political and religious preconceptions flow unchecked. Out of this developing skill, he found himself emerging as the class orator among his fellow students, both in public college exhibitions and in private debating clubs. He graduated as valedictorian, addressing his classmates and faculty on "The Gradual Advancement of the Human Species in Dignity and Happiness."
After his graduation, Mann spent a brief period reading law as a clerk, intending to enroll in the law school at Litchfield, Connecticut, but was tempted back to Brown by a position as a junior tutor. In this capacity he became familiar with Asa Messer's family, particularly his youngest daughter, Charlotte, but neither her charms nor the modest salary of a tutor nor his indifferent success as an instructor made the situation really satisfying to him. He made his move to Litchfield, and in 1823 he was admitted to the bar and the practice of law in Dedham, Massachusetts. In Dedham, Mann continued his public oratory as well as practicing law, and four years later he was elected to the state legislature. There he became a champion of railroads and economic development, a defender of religious freedom, and an opponent of the legal prohibition of alcohol, though a supporter of the voluntary temperance movement. He was persuaded by the efforts of the Dedham Temperance Society and the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance that alcohol was the single root cause of the increased poverty and crime that today's historians would attribute to more comprehensive social changes, including economic development and increasing immigration. But Mann concluded that such social reforms as the elimination of drunkenness ought to be undertaken through voluntary efforts to raise public consciousness. The state, he thought, had an appropriate interest in regulating the availability of such injurious forces as alcohol, but ultimately the demand for it could only be stemmed by showing people its destructiveness and teaching them to abstain. His legislative efforts in this regard failed, but the process of the argument shaped his principles.
Most significant of all Mann's work as a state legislator was his interest in the situation of the mentally ill. In 1827, both a committee of the legislature and a voluntary association filed reports concerning the treatment of those in prison who were technically classified as "lunatics and persons furiously mad", deploring the conditions in which they were kept and the complete lack of treatment or hope for their illnesses. Horace Mann responded to these grim pictures by persuading the state House to order a survey of all such "lunatics and persons furiously mad", by reading studies, largely from Britain, about the cure of mental illness, and by personally visiting a new treatment center at Hartford. Having marshaled his facts, he made an eloquent and successful plea for the Commonwealth to establish, build and fund a hospital in which such persons might be treated with dignity and kindness, and might even recover. Having signed the bill in 1830, Governor Levi Lincoln quickly appointed Mann as chair of the three commissioners responsible to oversee the construction, organization and staffing of the hospital, telling him, when Mann protested the appointment, "You got us into this scrape, and you must get us out." The hospital that he and his two co-commissioners subsequently opened was to be for long a model, architecturally, politically, and philosophically, not only of humane treatment for the mentally ill, but of what science, moral eloquence, and practical benevolence could accomplish towards the improvement of human society and humanity itself.
As his political endeavors and accomplishments mounted, the young legislator/lawyer was not a happy man. Grief continued to follow him, with the death of his sister's husband in 1824, and 1825 three of his brother Stanley's children died within days of each other. While Horace had no desire to return to his mother and sister's household, he found his hotel room in Dedham a cheerless place. He was seen as a popular and eligible bachelor, but it was his facile wit that he showed the public, not the despondency and depression that characterized his solitary life. Finally, in 1829, Charlotte Messer, the daughter of his former college president, turned twenty, and Mann drafted a careful letter in which he formally sought her permission to visit her "as an avowed admirer". Her response was not instantaneous, occasioning him some anxiety, but when it came it was satisfactory. After a year of eager courtship, conducted largely by letters preserved among his papers, Horace and Charlotte were married, and he triumphantly carried his delicate and idealized bride off to Dedham to set up housekeeping. What might have been the fate of this most Victorian marriage is a matter of speculation; for almost two years they had moments of very sweet happiness, interspersed by periods of illness when Charlotte would usually return to her parent's home, and stretches when Mann was away in Boston attending legislative meetings. Before their second anniversary, she died in his arms, and the fragile balance of serenity that he had attained in the face of his former losses was utterly swept away. As the love story had been Victorian, so was the grieving; for the rest of his life, Horace Mann would approach the first week of August with a literally sickening dread. In the first year after Charlotte's death, his friends feared for his reason, and that he might do himself harm. "That which gave light and beauty and reality to all is gone," he wrote; "Desolation has done its perfect work." He sold or gave away every article of furniture from their home, and moved from Dedham to Boston, so painful was any reminder of his brief happiness.
To compound his woes, Mann's older brother, Stanley, was in deep financial trouble, and Horace was a co-signer on many of his loans. Stanley would eventually take the coward's way out, abandoning his wife and surviving children as well as his debts, and flee west to Louisville, Kentucky, 'to make a new start', where he would quickly die, presumably of drink. For Horace, in his lonely longing for his lost love and the family they might have had, Stanley's desertion was particularly bitter. In this mood, sleepless and despondent, Mann concluded that there could be no possible joy in his future life; only duty and the work of reform remained to claim his such energy as he had. "The great, I may almost say, the only object for which I have lived is no more," he wrote to Charlotte's sisters, "if my feelings do not fasten on something else, I shall be without a motive in life." Concerned friends, including the ubiquitous Elizabeth Peabody and her sisters, Sophia and Mary, campaigned to have him elected to the Massachusetts Senate, and in 1834 the high tide of Whig victory carried him into office. Meanwhile, Mann was finding some little solace for his despair in the preaching of the renowned Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing. Channing, while giving Mann a comforting rational hope for an afterlife, was also challenging him to believe and to practice the perfectibility of human nature through improving influences. Already half-persuaded by the temperance advocates, Mann read Channing's words, "One gifted man, with his heart in his work, who should live among the uneducated, to spread useful knowledge and quickening truth, by conversation and by books, by frank and friendly intercourse, by encouraging meetings for improvements, by forming the more teachable into classes, and giving to these the animation of his presence and guidance... one gifted man, so devoted, might impart a new tone and spirit to a considerable society." Here was the kind of object onto which his desolate feelings might fasten; not a promise of personal happiness, which he believed forever beyond him, but a summons to the satisfactions of duty, and the improvement of the world by the wider inculcation of his own ideas of morality, responsibility, and benevolence.
Education was not initially Horace Mann's highest priority in the work of reform. Yet as it came to his attention in his first years as a state senator, he began to see it as the key to all the other social challenges that beset the changing order of his culture and the new nation. The diversity not only of opinion but of moral standards that he encountered in Boston was antithetical to the small town culture in which he had been raised and the pious adolescent aspirations shared by his university classmates. Both the entrepreneurial wealth of the new city industries and the ethnic religious and cultural distinctiveness of arriving immigrants competed for allegiance with the traditional Puritan Yankee values which constituted Horace Mann's understanding of human nature and duty. He had wrenched his mind and spirit free from an intolerable Calvinist judgmentalism, but that only ushered him into the liberal demand for endless improvement in himself, in the structure of society, and in human conduct generally. For Mann himself, the obligation of self-improvement had no correlative expectation of happiness, and his measure of social improvement was primarily the extent to which his fellow citizens agreed with and performed his definition of their duties.
His interest in schools began with Governor Edward Everett's desire to establish a state board of education as a way to bring some order to the chaotic assortment of common schools in Massachusetts. Everett had attended the University of Gottingen, and while there had been impressed by the efficiency of the Prussian state-run school system, an enterprise which would fascinate an entire generation of American reformers, statesmen, and educators. When Everett's proposed board was passed by the legislature in 1837, it was intended as an advisory body, empowered chiefly to collect information about schools throughout the state through the services of a hired secretary. Horace Mann, by now president of the state senate, an acknowledged leader in the Whig party, and a credible future candidate for governor, was nevertheless fairly thoroughly disenchanted with politics. Having relinquished all hope of personal contentment, he was essentially seeking a path to righteous martyrdom, and in the obscure and underfunded office of secretary to the board of education, he felt he had found his sacrificial crusade. He had also come to believe that the degree of reform needed to make society what it ought to be had little hope of being realized given the attitudes of his own contemporaries. He wrote, "Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmalleable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast-iron, but children are wax. Strength expended upon the latter may be effectual, which would make no impression on the former." He might not be able to persuade the priest-corrupted European immigrants, or the wealth-dazzled bankers and mill owners, of his social ideals, but he could indoctrinate their children, if only he could get his hands on them.
For the next twelve years, until he was elected to the United States Senate in 1848 upon the death of John Quincy Adams, Mann traveled, wrote, spoke and campaigned tirelessly for the establishment and improvement of public education in the state of Massachusetts. The same combination of fact-finding, moral suasion, humane appeal, oratorical technique, and attention to administrative detail that had gotten the state hospital for the mentally ill built, he turned to the elevation of teachers and schools. There must be new, more comfortable and suitable buildings; Mann researched and published plans for model classrooms and school houses. Corporal punishment must cease, and sectarian religious dogma must be eliminated. Teaching must be work for which men and women were appropriately trained, not the last resort of the otherwise unemployable. Working with both private benefactors and state and local appropriations, Mann oversaw the founding of five "Normal Schools", institutions with two-year programs dedicated to the preparation of teachers for the public schools. He conducted an endless round of county and small town conventions, urging local school authorities to adopt central organization, a unified curriculum, and consistent expectations of both teachers and students, and encouraging communities to support public funding for free education. He wrote annual reports to the state school board, intended to be published by the legislature, combining statistical data, educational theory, and political, moral, and even, as we have seen, economic, arguments extolling the value of a literate and educated public in a democracy. The constant travel and speaking were overly demanding, and drained his stamina; Mann would never again be physically robust after this period. The writing and studying of reports, the politics, the planning and the persuading and the fund raising to get his ideas implemented challenged his mental energies as well.
Yet Horace Mann thrived in this environment of challenge, and in the end bent it to his will. He was possessed of the serenity of unruffled conviction; he wrote to a correspondent that, "...where social institutions are not widely established, or where the manners and customs, and the tone of feeling that pervade society among a people whose law is public opinion, are wrong, then the machinery is out of order, and those who can both perceive how it is, and how it should be, are commissioned to set it right." His was clearly a charismatic presence; at over six feet, his height was impressive. Legend had it that his hair had whitened entirely during the night he kept vigil beside his dying bride and then her body; however that may have been, it was gray early and strikingly. His eyes were described as piercing and melancholy, and he was a powerful speaker, who enjoyed debate and could hold an audience for hours extemporaneously, though he preferred to speak from a carefully prepared manuscript.
In 1843, midway through the course of his dozen years as secretary to the board of education, Mann planned a tour of English and European educational, charitable and correctional institutions together with his friend, the educational reformer Samuel Gridley Howe, on what was also to be Howe's honeymoon with Julia Ward. Less than a month before their ship was to sail, Mann startled Boston society by proposing that Mary Peabody marry him and join the trip. Mary, who had entertained a silent affection for Mann since meeting him shortly after Charlotte's death, agreed, and they had a devoted marriage until his death in 1859, as well as three sons. In 1852, after losing his federal senate seat to pro-slavery forces, Mann accepted the invitation to serve as the first president of Antioch College, a bold educational experiment in 'the west', and arrived with his family in Yellow Springs, Ohio in September of 1853. For six years of failing health, he labored at the dual Herculean tasks of sorting out the new college's financial chaos, and shaping an educational institution that should incarnate in the raw material of the sons and daughters of the prairie his ideals of physical, mental and moral aspiration. He death was a Victorian set piece equal to the rest of his life, as the college students surrounding his bed were individually blessed and exhorted to work for the good and asked to sing a hymn together, after which he told his family, "Now I will bid you all goodnight," and breathed his last.
I want to thank Ray for giving me this opportunity to make the acquaintance of Horace Mann; perhaps he, more than any other of our New England Unitarian ancestors, actually typified the 'character' that those Yankee philosophers meant when they spoke of 'salvation by character.' If I recognize the unreflective parochialism of his views, and the subtly dangerous coercion in his plans to perfect humanity and society in his own image, it is a helpful corrective to my own self-righteous assumptions. At the same time I can only admire the expansive curiosity and eagerness for knowledge that characterized his intellect, the indisputable self-discipline of his endless energy and accomplishments, and the profound intensity of his desire to alleviate suffering wherever he found it, and to give happiness as he understood it to as many of his fellow human beings as he possibly could. Some of Horace Mann's achievements have been romanticized by history; a few of them have rusted into forms he never imagined, but we owe his ideas a great debt. He foresaw the extent to which education is power; not merely the education of the elite, but of every child, so that the wheels of democracy might turn upon wider knowledge rather than narrow self-interest. He was fond of a phrase, was Horace; it is all but obligatory to end an account such as this with his valedictory statement from his final commencement address; "I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." But I'm inclined to think that he might also have approved a more recent, and more tart distillation of his message: You think education is expensive? Try ignorance.
Opening words
We gather this morning, summoned from our various tasks and our rare leisure,
To consider the life of character and service;
To reflect upon the use make of our days as they pass;
And to tell again the stories of our heritage,
And the heroic lives by which we know that heights of the human spirit.
Horace Mann, whose memory we honor today,
Was a contemporary and sometimes parishioner of the great Unitarian preacher,
William Ellery Channing,
And their views were similar on many issues.
I wonder if Horace Mann ever heard these words of Channings:
The great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young,
But to stir up their own;
Not to make them see with our eyes, but to look steadily and inquiringly with their own;
Not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth;
Not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs;
Not to bind them by ineradicable prejudice to our particular sect or peculiar notions,
But to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may be offered to their decision;
Not to burden the memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought;
Not to impose religion upon them in the form of arbitrary rules,
But to awaken the conscience, the moral discernment;
In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul;
To bring understanding, conscience, and heart into earnest, vigorous action
On religious and moral truth;
To excite and cherish the spiritual life.
It is to the awakening of our souls,
In understanding, conscience, and earnest, vigorous effort,
That we kindle this chalice;
May our minds be stirred by it,
And our hearts inspired to a more fervent love of truth.
Reading: from the last report to the Massachusetts State Board of Education, 1848
Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men -- the balance wheel of the social machinery. I do not here mean that it so elevates the moral nature as to make men disdain and abhor the oppression of their fellow-men. This idea pertains to another of its attributes. But I mean that it gives each man the independence and the means, by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility to towards the rich; it prevents being poor... If education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it, by the strongest of attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor... The spread of education, by enlarging the cultivated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.
The main idea set forth in the creeds of some political reformers, or revolutionizers, is, that some people are poor because others are rich. This idea supposes a fixed amount of property in the community, which, by fraud or force, or arbitrary law, is unequally divided among men, and the problem presented for solution is, how to transfer a portion of this property from those who are supposed to have too much, to those who feel and know that they have too little. At this point, both their theory and their expectations of reform stop. But the beneficent power of education would not be exhausted, even though it should peaceably abolish all the miseries that spring from the coexistence, side by side, of enormous wealth and squalid want. It has a higher function. Beyond the power of diffusing old wealth, it has the prerogative of creating new. It is a thousand times more lucrative than fraud; and adds a thousand fold more to a nation's resources than the most successful conquests. Knaves and robbers can obtain only what was before possessed by others. But education creates or develops new treasures, -- treasures not before possessed or dreamed of by anyone.
For the creation of wealth, then, -- for the existence of a wealthy people and a wealthy nation -- intelligence is the grand condition. The number of improvers will increase, as the intellectual constituency, if I may so call it, increases. In former times, and in most parts of the world even at the present day, not one man in a million has ever had such a development of mind, as made it possible for him to become a contributor to art or science. Let this development precede, and contributions, numberless, and of inestimable value, will be sure to follow. That Political Economy, therefore, which busies itself about capital and labor, supply and demand, interest and rents, favorable and unfavorable balances of trade, but leaves out of account the element of a wide-spread mental development, is nought but stupendous folly. The greatest of all the arts in political economy is, to change a consumer into a producer; and the next greatest is to increase the producer's producing power; -- an end to be directly attained, by increasing his intelligence.
Benediction:
Pour out light and truth, as God pours out sunshine and rain. No longer seek knowledge as the luxury of the few, but dispense it amongst all as the bread of life. Learn only how the ignorant may learn; how the innocent may be preserved; the vicious reclaimed. Call down the astronomer from the skies; call up the geologist from his subterranean exploration; summon, if need be, the mightiest intellects from the Council Chamber of the Nation; enter the cloistered halls, where the scholiast muses over superfluous annotations; dissolve conclave and synod, where subtle polemics are vainly discussing their barren dogmas; -- collect whatever of talent, or erudition or eloquence, or authority, the broad land can supply, and go forth, and teach this people.