The desks of administrators can be very busy places. Pay forms and monthly reports, letters from well-wishers and complaints from clients all meet up for a time, only to be distributed again through proper channels. These reams of official paperwork breathe life into the finely ordered flowcharts of managerial authority. For Horace Mann, however, sitting in 1837 as the inaugural secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, the seemingly straightforward injunction “to collect” and “diffuse information … throughout every part of the Commonwealth” demanded an administrative scope hardly known in the organizational vocabularies of the day. This is not to say, as earlier scholars have argued, that constitutional government in the early republic lacked administrative reach. Recent scholarship on executive administrations and energetic state regulatory regimes all attest to an antebellum institutional landscape of efficacy and sophistication. Yet this early order, effective as it was in the performance of such specific responsibilities as managing postal contracts or licensing taverns, offered little precedent for the systematic recognition of every school, and every student, within “every part of the Commonwealth.” Without a preexisting organizing schema, Mann and his circle drew from an unlikely source to describe this project of administrative formation: the liberal Protestant vocabulary of universal salvation. Freely appropriating from a controversial religious doctrine that rejected the orthodox god of stern judgment in favor of a motherly deity of infinite compassion, early administrators outlined a system of state government that directly engaged all residents “like a mother … with open arms” and “in equal measure,” caring and comprehensive—an institutional order “designed, like the common blessings of heaven, to encompass all.” Critics lashed out at this “clique of Unitarian or infidel statesmen,” fearful about the “controlling powers of a Central Board” no less than the seemingly feminizing “ascendency of sympathy over justice.” But perhaps this should not be surprising. The newly created Massachusetts Board of Education represented more than an attempted expansion of central authority over the interests of local rule: It appeared, in a way, as the institutional embodiment of what one advocate called the “great, providential, motherly office of the state,” an organized movement to shape an apparatus of the constitutional state in the cultural self-image of an educated, ecumenical, and ambitious early administrative class.Footnote 1
Scholars have long been fascinated with the social, cultural, and economic impact of Mann, of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and of early public education in general. This article, however, revisits this familiar territory to take an inward turn, looking beyond the social effects of public school reform to examine the formation of state school administration as a significant story in its own right. Certainly, as we shall see, the well-organized opposition levied in the name of the “good old principles of our ancestors” suggests that contemporaries did not miss the importance of this moment of institutional creativity. After all, administrative reformers' work to shape state government as “the only institution capable of extending its beneficent arms to embrace and cultivate … every child that comes into this world” directly challenged an existing state institutional order that depended on the authority of local men of esteem—those fathers, schoolmasters, and town officials empowered by law to speak for their subordinates—to uniformly apply legislative policy to a far-flung and heterogeneous populace. The representation of the state “like a mother, tak[ing] care of its children” thus unfolds as a claim on the institutional framework of early republican state government, an organizational schema that not only made possible the comprehension of the commonwealth as a coherent object of administrative knowledge, but underscored the very systems of surveillance and responsibility and discipline and labor policy that constituted the earliest structures of statewide school administration. To be sure, even the most sophisticated of the earliest comprehensive state school administrations—preeminently in Massachusetts, where advocates of liberal Protestantism were especially strong, but also in Michigan, Iowa, and to some extent Ohio—were puny in comparison to their present-day counterparts, “chiefly unbureaucratic in structure,” according to David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, and “exhibiting only rudimentary professionalism.” Yet, as alien as the priorities of the “maternalist” administrators in these states seem today, the basic organizational structures associated with Mann and his acolytes sustained themselves into the late nineteenth-century, becoming themselves the objects of later episodes of administrative reform. Sponsors of state reform were fully aware that the administration of “every part of the Commonwealth” was an act of cultural ambition. For “when the state-house is the hearth,” as Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson invoked the domesticated imagery so precious in reformist circles, “then the perfect state has come.”Footnote 2
By suggesting that the cultural strategies of an ambitious class helped to organize the apparatuses of the comprehensively administrated state, this article unfolds at the intersection of cultural history and the study of American political development, two lines of analysis heavy with insight yet often working at cross-purposes. Historians of political culture, for their part, have told us much about the motivations, the principles, and the objectives of partisan experience in the early national and antebellum United States. Examining the rhetoric and the practices of political behavior, historians have identified strong patterns of gender, racial, and religious assumptions that not only defined party identification as, say, Jacksonian Democrat or Anti-Jackson Whig, but in fact help shape party policy objectives. Representations of aggressively antistatist and religiously “pietist” Jackson men and of urbane Whigs preoccupied with the perfectionist possibilities of moral or economic “internal improvements,” fashioned first in the scholarship of Lee Benson nearly a half-century ago, continue to provide inspiration for a new generation of political and cultural historians. Yet this fruitful work, though explaining well the changing behaviors of people working in and around established political institutions, has largely avoided examining the institutional infrastructure of government itself as a cultural artifact. This might be seen as a lost opportunity. After all, political scientists and historians of the “new institutionalism” have identified the same era as one of explosive growth in the regulatory capacities of constitutional government, especially at the federal level. Modifying an earlier historiography that imagined early national government as a distant and minimal “state of courts and parties,” these scholars have followed Theda Skocpol and Stephen Skowronek to illuminate a state energetic and purposeful, effecting the lives of all sorts of ordinary Americans through a host of semiautonomous administrative structures such as post offices and pension bureaus. Still, apart perhaps from allusions to a general “Jeffersonian” antiadministrative bias, the uses of culture as a frame for understanding state formation have not been a part of these analyses. Scholars have relied instead on models of rational intent and expected outcomes to map this institutional landscape. This article suggests that culture in fact can be a crucial component of this history of administrative development. And it is through an examination of the language and practice of maternalist administrative organization that I hope to show the work of administrative formation as more than a response to a perceived need (although it is certainly this.) Administrative forms are, in a very practical way, the product of cultural struggle.Footnote 3
The Cultures of Governance
It would certainly have been jarring to hear early American administrators speak of republican government as “a nourishing mother, as wise as she is beneficent.” This was not simply because republican government recognized only men as participants in “the obligation of contracts” or the organization of political representation, which were constitutionally privileged acts that law reserved for men alone. Rather, it was that the constitutional landscape of juridical property rights and popularly elected institutions was itself constructed out of contending masculinities: the justice of the property holder and the righteousness of the partisan. In this light, the constitutional order was more than conventionally manly. It can be understood, in an important way, as the institutional realization of republican manhood itself. Preoccupied with organizing free men as the subjects of equal rights, such an order could hardly comprehend life outside of the institutions of republican self-rule, where free men lived not only as fraternal equals, but by Common Law as the masters of women and children (and slaves and servants and apprentices.) Republican liberation, and republican government, was about men, whether figured in a “just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own” or in the “manly language of freedom” articulated by a virtuous people against Federalist “skum.” As the singular site of equal rights and of equal recognition in a radically unequal social world, constitutional government defined in its institutional forms the very possibilities of republican manhood in the early nation.Footnote 4
To bridge this gap between the fraternal imperatives of constitutional rule and the structured inequalities of a patriarchal social order, state governments relied on localities to implement general policy upon a distinctly unrepublican social world. Brought into existence by legislative action and not by constitutional provision, localities—town, counties, districts—were mostly corporate bodies, like bridge companies or turnpikes, artificial individuals chartered to carry out certain public services. Thus it was the locality itself as a fictive individual with rights and duties, and not the actual individuals who populated the landscape of everyday life, that defined the focus of state government regulatory power in the early nineteenth century. And states relied on these entities to perform vital constitutional responsibilities such as tax collection, as well as regulating the licensure of taverns or the provision of schools or poorhouses. Indeed, federal administrations, for their part, were hardly more capable of comprehending a hierarchical populace within a single organizational frame; even an administration as totalizing and expansive as the U.S. Census recognized only household heads by name while simply enumerating the number of family dependants as attributes of the household. To be sure, the administrative capacities of early state governments, and of the federal government, were considerable; their powers to instigate “internal improvements” or to regulate the sale of public lands had an enormous impact on the lives of all sorts of ordinary citizens. But unlike the comprehensive pretensions of Mann's administrative project, these state governments did not intend to understand entire populations within a central organizational frame. Instead, states performed general responsibilities through the use of fictive men to mediate between the fraternal institutions of constitutional rule and a promiscuous and unruly populace.Footnote 5
Perhaps, in this regard, the best example of this fraternal culture of the early republican constitutional order is the place of schooling in the decades after the American Revolution. After the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, republican governments routinely “encouraged” localities to provide at least some primary schooling, usually with paeans “to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them,” but also with subsidies and with laws directing certain towns or districts keep some kind of school. The logic behind this preoccupation with schooling, indeed, was a post-Revolutionary commonplace: “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion,” Washington himself warned, “it is essential that public opinion be enlightened.” Even avowed political enemies could agree that schools were a “nursery of wise and good men,” necessary for the operation of republican government. Strangely enough, however, though self-styled patriots of all stripes imagined schooling as indispensable to the republic, schools themselves remained steadfastly local institutions. Located both outside of and prior to the constitutional order of state government, schools ideally prepared men to participate in the practices of republican political experience, Jefferson announced, “to notice [representatives'] conduct with diligence, with candor, and judgment” no less than “to enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts, in writing.” (Women, too, benefited from the ethos of civic schooling, as local schools after the Revolution increasingly offered primary education for girls.—This development would profoundly affect American society in the nineteenth century.) It would be wrong to suggest that schools were imagined to actually make citizens—unenslaved women, though denied suffrage and many property rights solely because of their sex, were still citizens. Instead, schooling promised something more functional: to “make men into republican machines,” in Benjamin Rush's famous formulation, “if we expect them to perform their parts properly, in the great machine of the government of the state.”Footnote 6
Against this reliance on localities to mediate between the republican state and the denizens of the republic, administrative reformers in Mann's extended circle struggled mightily to justify the extension of state government beyond the tight bounds of republican brotherhood. There were, to be sure, many ways that one could articulate this expansion of state administrative capacity. Vocabularies of speed and efficiency proliferated in the existing administrative order, constituting perhaps the foundational ethos of the early administrative “clerk state.” The rigid and strictly functionalist Prussian educational system, designed to produce skilled civil service functionaries, was also a subject of discussion among the administratively minded. But, for Mann and his reformist circle, their ecumenical god's “equal allotment of divine providence” offered an organizational vocabulary capable of describing a system of governance far more expansive than the instrumentalist priorities of ordinary administration, an apparatus “designed, like the common blessings of heaven, to encompass all.” The appeal resonated. Eager to participate with a reformist celebrity in this “great providential motherly office of the state,” as one New Hampshire colleague put it, letters from across the United States poured into Mann's State House office. The promise of “a government of goodness and affection” resonated well beyond the narrow circle of the Unitarian-dominated Massachusetts Board of Education, fascinating not only those of relatively conventional religiosity, but attracting even strictly orthodox men like John Pierce of Michigan—an acolyte of Mann and a stern Protestant of the old school—who easily referred to the early Michigan Department of Public Instruction as an autonomous administrative agency endowed with its own “living soul” and “animating spirit.” This is not to say that all who participated in this administrative project thought alike. Certainly this was not the case. But they were sufficiently familiar with the cultural languages of domesticated sentiment to participate enthusiastically in conversations about the uses and the possibilities of government. The words of the motherly state offered a practical medium to articulate a system of government unknown in the annals of republican political theory, an apparatus of state government expansive and active, “a State,” as Mann insisted, “of affection and sympathy.”Footnote 7
And in a way, it is this notion—of the “State of affection and sympathy”—that captures much of the cultural struggle embedded in administrative reformers' efforts to reorganize the structures and the scope of early republican state government. Though “Affection” (mostly of the “fraternal” or “brotherly” type) was a familiar artifact in the national discourse of republican liberation since the earliest days of the Revolution, “sympathy” was a different story altogether. Unlike the fraternal equality of “affection,” “sympathy” represented, for many men at least, the very measure of inequality, of difference, not at all a domain of equal rights that defined the possibilities of the republican state but instead, in Adam Smith's paradigmatic formulation, a “kind of pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others.” In liberal circles, however, the motif of sympathy that would echo through early descriptions of administrative organization defined not the pitiful inequalities of difference and dependence, but, perhaps strangely, the possibility of absolute inclusion and universal equality. To perform this bit of political alchemy, ecumenical Protestants mobilized their preoccupation with domesticated care to imagine equal recognition written not in the republican substances of property rights or electoral mobilization, but in the possibilities of “a heart to be melted, and a conscience to be roused” that made even the most despised “just like the rest of us.” Thus, according to the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing (a great friend of Mann), the familiar calculus of “Sympathy with the injured or oppressed” was not simply bad form. It was, as he drew upon familiar republican political categories to explain the wider landscape of human interaction, “partial and exclusive.” Of course, to traditional republicans, this exclusivity was precisely the virtue of sympathy. But for the ecumenical community around Mann, the organizational logic of universal sympathy symbolically transformed a hierarchical and pitiful populace into a population of equals, suitable subjects of an expansive yet still self-consciously republican “motherly office of the state.”Footnote 8
Outside of the circles of liberal administrative reformers, however, men committed to the republican political vocabularies of justice and virtue recoiled at the strange uses of a word as familiar as “sympathy.” One group of Philadelphia “young men,” for example, took to the streets to condemn “the dangers of elevating sympathy above justice” when confronted by talk of administrative reform in Pennsylvania (a reform that did not arrive until after the Civil War). Other critics, equally committed to the virile masculinities of their self-consciously republican forefathers, saw in the reformist project the “remarkable … ascendancy of sympathy over the sterner virtues.” These men were not attacking the promise of free public schooling, nor did they reject the moral goodness of sympathy. As scholars have repeatedly found, very few Americans opposed public education per se, while classical republicans and fire-and-brimstone evangelicals equally extolled the benevolence of pity. What they could not understand, however, was a political ethic of sympathy as virtuous or as just in the way that distinguished the worthy from the deficient. This confusion over the political meanings of sympathy was, in a way, only a struggle over metaphors and, as such, was simply a symptom of a deeper conflict between the partisans of republican brotherhood and the advocates of administrative order. But it was a persistent difficulty, and one that spoke to the divergent grammars of manhood and political experience that underscored this conflict over the shape of the administrative state.Footnote 9
Building an Administration
It is not surprising that men like Mann could see so much promise in the vision of the motherly state. Born into the declining late-eighteenth-century rural economy of the Massachusetts countryside, and reduced to weaving women's hats for sale in town, young Horace could not expect to attain the status of freeholding household head that defined the highest possibilities of manhood in the early republic. So perhaps he was especially prepared to rethink the fraternal emphases of early republican political culture as he joined the flood of young men fleeing the collapsing household economies of the Massachusetts countryside. At Brown University, Mann cut his teeth under controversial Unitarian president Asa Messner (though Brown was a Baptist institution) and alongside future reformist celebrities such as Samuel Gridley Howe, Barnas Sears, and Samuel Green. He quickly demonstrated great fluency in the charitable ethos of caring for the displaced and unfortunate. Elected state representative in 1827, Mann parleyed this education in liberal “benevolence” into public renown with his efforts on behalf of charitable institutions for the care of “unfortunates” in Massachusetts, championing especially an “asylum for the safe-keeping of lunatics and persons furiously mad.” Certainly this “benevolent” impulse also animated Mann's work for the Massachusetts Board of Education, which he supervised as secretary for nearly a decade after its formation in 1837. But the administrative imperatives toward wide state oversight, as invoked by the legislature, defined the board as a new and unprecedented animal. Though tiny by our present-day standards, the board's mere existence as a state administration charged with comprehensive oversight, contemporaries understood, represented an important development in state government organization. Almost immediately, fellow travelers celebrated the board as “the most powerful state establishment in the nation.” And, indeed, the powers conferred on the board over the upcoming decade to limit the distribution of public monies to complying districts, to subsidize standardized schoolhouses and library books, and to regulate the training and employment of teachers, represented a difference in kind from other states' efforts to “encourage” local schooling through contribution or endowment. Letters poured into Mann's Boston office from interested observers in the United States and Europe, enduring personal relationships that would become the locus of a trans-Atlantic culture of government reform. The board's publications—its famous Annual Reports and its semiofficial Common School Journal—quickly made their way to legislatures in all twenty-six states.Footnote 10
For all the accolades, however, there remained no practical model of what the comprehensively administered state ought to look like. To articulate the possibilities of the board, Mann drew from the vocabularies he knew. Wishing away the existing landscape of autonomous school districts (which of course never really disappeared), Mann “imagine[d] a State … divided into [equal] sections,” regular and open, consisting of infinite reproductions of universal units of measure, a flat plane of abstract space dotted by “nineteen-hundred schoolhouses … in parallel rows, in either direction … nineteen hundred luminous points, each one shedding its beams through a radius of little more than one mile, would cover the whole surface of the state with a flood of light.” Like the liberal god of universal salvation, Mann's administrative imagination comprehended the breadth of the human and geographic landscape at a quick glance, “every part of the Commonwealth” would be illuminated in infinitely reproducible units of nineteen-hundred symbolic hearth fires. This vision of comprehensive administration dispensed with the nodes of local power that characterized the institutional reality of the republican state, imagining the commonwealth instead as a coherent object of political knowledge in itself, comprehensively measured and administratively contained. Such a plane of administrative possibility seemed to Mann an objective precondition for the systematic organization of a state apparatus that intended to integrate the commonwealth's entire population within its organizational plan. Yet contemporaries did not miss the cultural underpinnings of “this plan of government.” Evangelicals like Matthew Hale Smith, an advocate of private religious schooling who believed in judging the righteous rather than recognizing the multitudes, routinely accused Mann of base hypocrisy, describing him as “a dogmatist, a sectarian, jealous and confident, as all sectarians are.” And on this point Smith showed considerable insight. For the vision of a comprehensive state administration was a reflection of the ecumenical religious beliefs of this early administrative class.Footnote 11
Mann's depiction of an administrated polity realized in the light of a thousand little hearths was only a metaphor. But the systems of administrative oversight that they described were, after 1837, increasingly real. The first tangible realization of this administrative order lay in the production of official forms to survey the limits of the administrative project. Indeed, the capacity of official data forms to reconstitute the sovereign commonwealth in administrative terms was, in itself, considerable. This involved collating data on all 750,000 inhabitants, socially divided by class and color and sex and family and religion and locality, into a series of infinitely reproducible columns and tables; translating the exploding, heterogeneous citizenry of the commonwealth, the babble of persons and families and sects, into something immediately comprehensible—an abstracted “population” that defined the state itself as an object of administrative operation. Beneath the cacophony of distinctions and inequalities and differences that proliferated in republican political life lay a truth revealed only in chart form, like the one marked “AGGREGATE,” that summed up the entire commonwealth in total and in brief, simple numbers that “encompassed all” within the scope of Mann's administrative apparatus. If, as Mann's biographer critically observed, “children were not children, but a generalized mass of statistics,” it did not mean that this administrative vision minimized their importance. It simply translated their specificity within local systems of rule into an emerging administrative vocabulary, one that could not be contained within towns, or in counties, or even in the families that had been the traditional units of official measure in state and federal censuses. This was the state as a “population”—all individuals were equally recognized in the pure abstraction of comprehensive numbers. The teeming and diverse populace of the growing commonwealth was made instantly recognizable in the tables and charts of mandatory paperwork. Again, it is important to remember that the board, though an instrument of state administration unprecedented in power and scope, was not empowered to destroy such familiar categories of membership as towns, sects, and families. But the data form, as the organizational modality of the universal, the regular, and the infinitely reproducible, made the polity itself comprehensible as the object of unified and unifying state regulation.Footnote 12
If the language of the motherly state underscored the state as the object of administrative knowledge, it also pointed inward to describe the formation and cohesion of the administrative structure itself. Mann spent considerable energy wrangling with local school committees, which were comprised of “men of standing,” who hired and supervised teachers under the district system. Though it was far beyond the legislature's intent, Mann demanded the integration of preexisting structures of local surveillance—the “prudentials” who scrutinized individual schools and the “superintendents” who operated at the level of the town—within the organizational ambit of the board itself. Local officers resisted; still, such an expansion seemed to Mann natural, unfolding always in the language of “cooperation” and a mutually engaging “council and sympathy” capable of incorporating an endless number of teachers and middle-level administrators “into the system unconsciously.” This administrative reformation was not simply a sentimental operation of instilling appropriate feelings. It was about the display of total commitment to the organizational ideology of maternalist administration. Ultimately it was the “stimulus of acting under the public eye” (a mode of intimidation “allowable … among adults”) that enforced the performance of individual responsibilities within the system, as superiors sent reports of subordinates' behavior directly to Mann's office in the State House. Sometimes these reports discussed basic competence, academic knowledge, or the inability to keep classroom order. But just as likely they identified breaches of prescribed deportment such as drinking, swearing, and carousing that were so offensive in the reformist idiom of motherly care. This administrative position, boundless in its organizational ambitions yet preoccupied with the minutia of functionaries' behavior, constituted the chief operational aim of the state board. The reason, Mann wrote in the first of his famous reports, was rather simple: “for in a system so extensive and complex, not only aught its several parts be scrutinized and their details mastered, but the relation and fitness of each wheel to the whole machinery should be scanned … because nothing however minute, can be unimportant, which will ultimately affect the value of the product.”Footnote 13
Perhaps it should not surprise, then, that lower-level workers in the system understood quite well what was expected of them. Official examinations of teachers who lined up for a chance at the state payroll (the funds were actually raised by local taxes but, Mann insisted, disbursed with the board's consent), after all, emphasized less intellectual acuity, though a basic mastery of material was expected, than administrative knowledge. One fellow traveler, writing in the official organ of the Massachusetts Board of Education, cut right to the quick: the “number one order” of public educators was not knowledge or justice, but “sympathy.” Another job aspirant, the author of the Rollo series of children's books, Jacob Abbott, placed front-and-center his capacity to transverse the body and insinuate himself directly in the heart of his students. Students, Abbott wrote,
feel as if he was on their side, taking their heart, as it were, against the difficulties + dangers and troubles which surround them. Thus he becomes one of them … a partaker in their feelings … They imbibe his sentiments, insensibly and spontaneously, not because he enunciated them, or proved them in lectures, but because he exhibits them in living reality … This sort of sympathetic action between heart and heart has far greater influence upon all mankind, than formal teaching and exhortations. It is the life and spirit of virtue, in contradistinction from the letter and the form.
Others who crossed paths with administrative reform followed the same route. One job-seeking Michigander made sure to highlight his expertise in “quiet and sympathetic government” when offering his services, closely following the advice of a well-known reform pedagogue that “all virtue is … modest, silent, unobtrusive, hiding itself.” Such words echo through antebellum reform movements. Yet this was something more than an effort to “remake the selves of others.” This was the language of administrative life in antebellum Massachusetts, articulating the self-consciousness of an early administrative class. No one, in this light, refuted the truism that schooling was about knowledge. What the State of sympathy constituted in the structures of public schooling, rather, was a new kind of official knowledge, supervised through a centralized system of organizational surveillance, disciplined by examination and official review, and reproduced through the machinery of the motherly state.Footnote 14
Such an organizational framework, with its vision of universal integration and cohesive purpose, appeared to Mann a natural, almost organic, process. Locals, however, had a harder time accepting their own administrative subordination. “The power and duty of [the local] Committee to make regulations have never been questioned before the present season,” one Plymouth superintendent complained. Mann's aggressive attempts to reorganize district and town administrations within the reach of the state board, usurping authority over street-level decisions concerning the “classification of scholars and the discipline and regulation of schools” seemed far removed from the legislature's original intent. Mann did not back down in this engagement. He renewed his aggressive (and rather questionable) assertion that no hiring, no supervision, no expenditures could take place without the board's consent. Resistance over issues of local rule persisted. Other local administrators, banding together with local parents and teachers, appealed to the state senate for protections from the “overwhelming powers of the Central Board” in matters of daily operation and school policy. Indeed, the 1840 narrow defeat of reform-friendly Whigs in Massachusetts put the board in a perilous position for a time (though it was a coterie of reformist Democrats who ultimately saved the system). Yet the Board of Education became more comprehensive after Mann's departure in 1848, even expanding its supervisory control through legislation such as the compulsory schooling law of 1851. Maternalist administrators like Mann's successor Barnas Sears saw this as evidence of a new age of “government [that] is … as maternal as human nature will afford.” Opponents, however, continued to resist this assault on the organizational foundations of the republican state.Footnote 15
The Organization of Bodies
The systematic efforts to reconfigure local systems of school organization within the expanding matrices of state government caused considerable consternation for advocates of the “good old principles of our ancestors.” Yet for all the outrage over the reconstruction of the institutional state, it was in the board's attacks on physical punishment of students where administrative reformers met perhaps their most sustained resistance. Mann, announcing the board's position, was uncharacteristically straightforward on this point: “I am decidedly of the opinion, and the facts sustain me in this assertion, that no child ever need corporal punishment at school.” The sentiment was universally shared among reformist types, who insisted that a “moral education” in kindness and empathy would internalize discipline through the formation of a “conscience.” To the defenders of the old order, however, the reformist attack on bodily punishment struck to the very heart of their existence as “masters” in a fraternal republic. This threat was not simply to the jobs of old-time schoolmen. It was an assault on the very institutional and cultural foundations of the republican state itself—those structures of local regulation and of access to the systems of constitutional rule that made the existence of schoolmasters comprehensible in the first place. In this light, then, there should be no wonder why the motherly administrative order provoked such insistent and articulate opposition. For these heated discussions about organizational discipline erupted from the deep cultural disjunctions incited by institutional possibilities of the early administrative state.Footnote 16
“Old-time schoolmen” took this assault on their institutional authority very personally. Certainly they were insecure about the power of their “rod” in the shadow of the motherly state. Universally acknowledged as the symbol of masterly power, the “rod”—the switch, the ruler, the strap (its specific form is not so important here)—promised the preparation of the youngster for entry into the institutional domain of republican citizenship through the obliteration of the body as the locus of idiosyncrasy, of difference, and of self-interest. Quoth the Proverb (as did opponents of Mann and the Board): “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it from him.” As the instrument of republican discipline, the rod defined the fundamental relationship between explicitly unequal and violently patriarchal relations that characterized the power of localities and the apparatuses of equal recognition defied by the constitutional state. Sparing the rod, in this sense, not only spoiled the child, it destroyed the organizational discipline that made the republican institution possible. For “it is the province of a master, by the weight of his authority as a master,” wrote one master obviously invested in the promise of mastery, “to fix these dogmas in the minds and hearts of children as the basis of that good character which the whole of succeeding life is to build up by the performance of the duties of good citizens.” Without the naked violence of the “rod,” there could be no organization of “good citizens.”Footnote 17
As the archetypal instrument of republican organizational discipline, the rod did not simply work on the body of the uncooperative apprentice. Rather, its use circumscribed the limits of political community, integrating youngsters within the organization of republican institutional possibility. Writing in an Ohio Common School journal, one “schoolmaster” instructed that the object of “the whip” was not physical injury; it was used “to strike the boy and the beholders with terror.” The performance was successful in this case: “Half frightened to death, the younger of them crowded into the corners of the room, while the older ones, still fearless, sat still and looked on.” At times, the forced participation in collective violence against the willful verged on riot. Writing on behalf of a prison reform society in 1843, William B. Fowle remembered that
In my youth, if a boy played truant, a posse of boys were dispatched after him, and without any writ or other form of law, the culprit was seized + dragged through the streets to school. Then no writ of habeas corpus was allowed, but a proclamation of habeas roddus was made, the offender's breeches were taken down, he was mounted on a large boy's back, his legs and hands were holden by two other boys, and in this exposed condition, the rod was administered by the master at his discretion. Such a scene was always such a frolic, that the boys used to consider it a special favor to be allowed to act as a horse to the truant, or to hold one of his legs.
The lessons were harsh but inevitable; this was an education in organizational virtue. It is strange that there were no stories of young girls beaten in all of these discussions about the administration of the rod (indeed, there is no scholarship at all on the corporal punishment of young women); perhaps their masters were kind. But, for young men, the rod was a machine of transformation, disciplining childhood “frolics” into a coherent fraternity capable of operating within the republican organizational order.Footnote 18
Seeing the future existence of the republic written on the bodies of children, masters simply could not understand reformers' universal commitment to an order “of affection … that disciplines the moral feelings of the subjects.” The schoolmen struggled to find words to express their confusion. “Sympathy,” again, appeared the code word of choice to hash out this institutional struggle. In the “ascendancy of sympathy over the sterner virtues,” schoolmasters in the Association of Masters of Boston Public Schools saw a republican world turned upside down. To the masters, as for an earlier generation of critics, sympathy remained an instrument of special concern, the province of “sanative” institutions for the special care of those degraded persons outside the bounds of republican institutional life. “The very condition of the unfortunate, is one of dependence and privation,” said one of the masters, making clear to identify the incapacitated in familiar vocabularies of independent manhood. “The feelings they naturally excite in the mind,” he went on to categorize, “are those allied to compassion” and not to general regulation. Twenty years after the masters' report, one advocate of corporal punishment carried on with this theme. “Sympathy is a noble and creditable sentiment,” Henry Drake asserted, “but it should not wholly be extended upon bad boys.” This did not mean that the sympathy of “unaided love” was without virtue. But it could not be just or patriotic or even really republican. In the imagination of fraternal mastery, sympathy as the lynchpin of the reformist organizational program continued to remain incomprehensible. For sympathy, they continued to insist until well after the Civil War, could only define the exception and never the rule.Footnote 19
The contests over corporal punishment struck to the heart of the masters' identity as republican men. Positioned at the pass where the radical and intensely contested inequalities of social “disorder” pressed up against the equal recognition of republican rights, the use of “the rod” signified a crucial function in the operation of constitutional government, instilling the virtues of “patriotic desire” through the systematic subjugation of wild and willful bodies. To be sure, schools did not have a monopoly on corporal punishment. The U.S. Navy, too, regularly employed physical beatings by “the lash” to organize institutional discipline. But the properties of the rod were never the same as the lash. Naval discipline was about containing anarchy in a shipboard population “possessing a physical majority sufficient to throw off and to defy all control.” The use of the rod, on the other hand, was an organizationally creative act, producing the “duty of citizens” that decades of republican rhetoric identified as a precondition for the republican state. Thus it is not hard to understand how the assault on corporal punishment could be so threatening to schoolmasters. For the attack on the rod unmanned the possibilities of an upright republican manhood, undermining the prospects of fraternal equality in the very act of dislodging the local master from the organizational plan of the republican state.Footnote 20
The Uses of Women
The Boston schoolmasters' anxiety did not spring from merely theoretical disagreements over the emerging apparatuses of the motherly state. For the systematic reorganization of public education under state supervision meant more than replacing one ruling ideology or one administrative apparatus for another. It meant replacing the schooling class of republican mastery with the soothing caste of maternal nurture. Though male opponents of the administrative project pleaded that “it is impossible for a female to have order,” newly established systems of public schooling depended in large measure on young women as the foot soldiers of the common school movement. The trend, as historians and other scholars have well pointed out, was remarkable. In the early nineteenth century, few women held yearlong teaching positions outside of elite “dame” academies; the great bulk of professional primary-school instructors were college boys who taught short terms with great turnover. Yet, by the later half of the nineteenth century, the male teacher—at least in schools we would now call “elementary schools”—was a dwindling rarity—fewer than one-quarter of all precollegiate schoolteachers were male. And in Massachusetts, the site of the earliest and most administratively complex public schooling in the United States, the feminization of schooling was even more remarkable. Women were present in heavy numbers from the get-go: in 1837, 60 percent of public school teachers were women, a number that increased to 73 percent in 1850 and, on the eve of Civil War, 82 percent. In states without centrally administered public schooling, by way of contrast, men continued to dominate the ranks of teachers before the Civil War.Footnote 21
This feminization of the teaching force in states with public systems of education has been well studied by scholars, and their conclusions are telling. Two reasons, time after time, pop up to explain this trend. The first is purely material: women were cheap. And at a time when discrimination against women was, at least among American men, almost universally unquestioned, this rationale did not constitute any kind of hidden agenda. Indeed, in a political environment where public funding was scarce and often quite insecure, it was just about celebrated. One Ohio advocate made plain his reasoning: districts that hired female teachers “are able to do twice as much with the same money as is done in counties where female teachers are … excluded.” And the reasons why are not difficult to see. In Michigan, women made 44 percent of the salaries that men made. In Wisconsin, women's share was 53 percent of men's in 1850. And in Mann's Massachusetts, women's salaries remained a steady 40 percent of men's throughout the bulk of the nineteenth century. It was a peculiarity of public schooling that the teaching profession became so quickly dominated by women. And the reason, at least in part, was simple: because it paid for the states to encourage this profound shift.Footnote 22
Women were useful because they were cheap, to be sure. But it was the symbolism of women's capacity to nurture small children that really resonated with the dream of the nurturing state. It was an antebellum commonplace—and not only among liberals—that “females are the natural guardians of children. Hence the fitness of the general custom of employing female teachers to take charge of the summer schools, where small children chiefly attend.” Such is the stuff of saccharine cliché. And there was an abundance of it. Woman “holds the reigns of the soul.” Their “manners are more mild and gentle, and hence more in consonance with the tenderness of childhood,” making them “incomparably better teachers of small children than males.” The reason seemed obvious: “Except in the family, she nowhere so truly occupies her appropriate sphere, as in the school room.” For administrative reformers, however, the symbolic energy of women's care was not simply left to vent into the atmosphere. Administration was meant to exploit the pent-up emotional energy of “a class, [that] never look[s] forward, as young men almost invariably do, to a period of legal emancipation … and hence their sphere of hope and of effort is narrower, and the whole forces of the mind are more readily concentrated upon present duties.” Like a natural resource, in Mann's mind at least, woman's “concentrated duty” was extracted from the life of “the family” to animate the possibilities of “schoolroom.” Access to such a valuable resource was not left to chance; Massachusetts state institutions “for the training of female teachers” were the first “normal” schools in the United States. Though some contemporaries bemoaned the feminization of public schooling, there should be little doubt that it was not women who defined this institutional structure. It was an expression of liberal manliness, of the capacity of men to monopolize and organize the expenditures of women's care within emerging systems of comprehensive state regulation. The gendered flowchart of organizational responsibility was unmistakable and irreversible. For if, as liberal minister Horace Bushnell wrote of the uses of women, “ministration is one thing and administration another,” then the growing army of women public school teachers could only serve to realize in human form the organizational ambitions of administrative men.Footnote 23
Still, there was another, less functionalist, and perhaps more overtly political use for women in this reorganization of state power. The display of women was the chief tactic in presenting state education as a nonpolitical and selfless enterprise, a move that not only sugarcoated pleas for public funds, but also worked to clothe the political ambition of administrative men in a language that denied its own existence as a political strategy. By bringing women into the machinery of official nurture, the architects of state school oversight imagined the whole administrative edifice as saturated with the invisible capital of the emotionally nurturing mother, a state that disappeared in the very presence of women's “unearthly desire.” Advocates of state education saw women as the conduits of administrative spirit, as “the modifying action of other causes, [who] works through them without being visible in them.” All this, to one antebellum commentator, could only work to make the politics of public education “seem more like creation, than administration.” Turning schools into “an emblem of that likeness of her heart,” women made the strategies of administrative men seem invisible, depoliticizing the cultural ambitions of administrative reformers in the very human organization of the motherly state. To be sure, supporters of reform fully understood that state school administration was not really about women at all, seeing the institutions of the motherly state as the embodiment (in a very gender-specific way) of administrative men's “seminal principles” and “germanitive powers.” But it was in the expropriation of young women's cultural image as the symbol of the motherly state where administrative reformers made perhaps their most important strategic move. They gained a cloak for nurturing men's ambitions, obscuring the threatening innovations of administrative order behind the cultural skein of women's quiet virtues.Footnote 24
An Excess of Sympathy
By the middle of the nineteenth century, centralized state school administrations with significant regulatory power had become, if not commonplace, at least in place—not only in Massachusetts, but in Michigan and Iowa too, where liberal administrative reformers remained in close contact with Mann and emulated his systems of state organization. Despite the crucial place of maternalist language in the formation of the earliest apparatuses of comprehensive state organization, the operational ethos of the motherly state did not travel well outside the bounds of liberal Protestant organizational traditions. Perhaps it is not surprising that the post–Civil War administrators of the Freedmen's Bureau—created in 1865 to manage the incorporation of formerly enslaved southerners into “freedom”—proved unsympathetic to the nearly two thousand northern educational functionaries who subsequently occupied the federally funded infrastructure of 740 schools scattered through the former Confederacy. (Though the bureau had total authority over teachers and paid for the construction and maintenance of all school properties, teachers themselves drew their pay from various religious missionary organizations.) Immediately and persistently, teachers trained in maternalist organizational idioms inflamed the ire of a military bureaucracy preoccupied only with “maximizing the number of students per square mile.” By the end of the bureau's existence in 1868 there had been no resolution. Both teachers and administrators expressed considerable disappointment in the project that had seemed so promising at the close of the war.Footnote 25
The administrative knowledge imported by experienced schoolteachers constituted the chief irritant for military administrators. Alabama's education chief C. W. Buckley, for one, made clear the necessity of disciplining teachers to operate in the system of military bureaucracy. “The teachers will be instructed to execute orders,” he wrote to a potential county supervisor, “instead of following their sympathies at discretion.” This did not mean that military men felt themselves heartless, uncaring, and unsympathetic. Buckley did admit that he was at times “full of sympathy.” It was just that, like the Boston schoolmasters two decades earlier, his sympathy was not general, but particular, not a loving sigh of universal acceptance, but a pitiful plea for a “poor and struggling people.” To occupation administrators, the organizational ethic of official nurture seemed much worse than merely being incommensurable with the rigid functionality of an occupation administration. It represented a grave threat to the objectives of Reconstruction education policy. For if any educational worker showed “latitude,” wrote one Virginia administrator, “you will soon make a hole in your plans large enough for 2,000 children to go through.” The order was clear, R. M. Manley insisted: “they should not [and he was referring to teachers] yield to their sympathies.” Sympathy, in this man's army, was not an administrative practice. It was insubordination.Footnote 26
It was this organizational ethos of efficiency and accountability that defined the Gilded Age rebirth of administrative reform. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that many leading lights of Gilded Age “progressive” reform—like Francis Walker, the Quincy, Massachusetts, superintendent of schools—had experience in military organization. But the emphases on rigorous supervision, professional expertise, and practical application that underscored military-style organization reemerged after the war as a public platform for Gilded Age school reform movements. True enough, some educators could not take the pressure, like one experienced Indiana teacher for whom newer expectations produced nothing but self-doubt: “I cannot tell how rigid they will make the examination,” he wrote to his wife on the eve of his yearly examination, “and no doubt some of them will pass a better ex on the higher branches than I will.” But for bureau veteran and administrative reformer John Eaton, Jr., such rigidity was necessary to obliterate all traces of an earlier administrative generation, “a class of minds with no purpose … forever beginning and never ending,” a klatch effeminate, childish, distracted “in useless reverie, in dreams, in sentimentality.” The representation of comprehensive school administration, in this age of steel and steam, was not of a mother. It was a factory. For “[t]he great purpose of the school,” the first U.S. commissioner of education William Torrey Harris insisted, “can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.”Footnote 27
To be sure, these post–Civil War systems of “scientific” and “rational” administrative reform were a far cry from the organizational ethos of the motherly state. Yet the work of the antebellum administrators could not really be forgotten. The structures of discipline and surveillance, the reliance on an army of low-paid women teachers, the continuous publication of the Bureau of Education's famous Annual Reports, persisted—not only to the Progressive Era of efficiency-minded reformers, but indeed to the present day. These resonances of the administrative architecture of a self-consciously maternalistic class of early administrators provided the initial structures of an increasingly responsive state apparatus that transgressed the narrow boundaries of republican political ethics to include all in the body of the people. But such a process, as I have tried to show, was not at all an inevitable outgrowth of the past, nor was it a mere adjunct to the classed campaigns of private “benevolence” that were so popular among the self-consciously “respectable” set. It was a crucial innovation in the practices and the structures of American governance derived from the anxieties and ambitions of a class with little property and few numbers, who were yet rich in a political capital they held in abundance—the emotional capital of universally administrated nurture.
