Department of History

Fieldston School .

Inventing Gotham

Document-Based Question Ð New York Progressivism

Based upon David Menschel's DBQ for the US History course

Defend and/or refute the following statement using the documents below and your knowledge of

the Progressive era:

New York Progressives at the turn of the nineteenth century believed in equality, respecting difference and maintaining the integrity and distinctiveness of different cultures.

Document A

Source: W.E. B. DuBois, 1903

Ò[We] feel in conscience bound to ask of this nation three things:

1. The right to vote.

2. Civil equality.

3. The education of youth according to ability.

The South ought to be led, by candid and honest criticism, to assert her better self and do her

full duty to the race she has cruelly wronged and is still wronging. The North Ð her co-partner

in guilt Ð cannot salve her conscience by plastering it with gold. We cannot settle this problem

with diplomacy and suaveness, by ÔpolicyÕ alone. If worse comes to worst, can the moral fiber of

this country survive the slow throttling and murder of nine millions of men?....

By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords

to men, clinging unwaveringly to those great words which the sons of the Fathers would fain

forget: ÔWe hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal...ÕÓ

Document B

Source: Charles Dickens, American Notes (1843

"There is one quarter, commonly called the Five Points, which in respect of filth and wretchedness, may be safely backed against Seven Dials, or any other part of famed St. Giles ... [in]these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth, such lives as are led here [and] bear the same fruits here as elsewhere [i.e., Ireland]. Poverty and wretchedness are rife. The coarse and bloated faces at the door have counterparts at home and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs [mentioned in previous chapters] live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all fours? And why they talk instead of grunting?"

Document C

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890

Where Mulberry Street crooks like an elbow within hail of the depravity of the Five Points, is "The Bend," foul core of New York's slums ... Around "the Bend" cluster the bulk of the tenements that are stamped as altogether bad, even by the optimists in the Health Department ... In the scores of back alleys, of stable lanes, and hidden byways, of which the rent collector alone can keep track, tthe poor] share such shelter as the ramshackle structures afford with every kind of abomination rifled from the dumps and ash barrels of the city ... There is scarce a lot that has not two, three, or four tenements upon it, swarming with unwholesome crowds.

Document D

Source: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890

ÒThe Five Points Mission and the Five Points House of Industry have accomplished what no

machinery of government has availed to do. Sixty thousand children have been rescued by

them from the streets... their work still goes on... gathering in the waifs, instructing and

feeding them, and helping their parents with advice and more substantial aid... The House of

Industry is an enormous nursery school with an average of more than four hundred day scholars

and constant boarders... It is one of the most touching sights in the world to see a score of babies,

rescued from homes of brutality and desolation... saying their prayers in the nursery at

bedtime. Too often their white night-gowns hide tortured little bodies and limbs cruelly

bruised by inhuman hands. In the shelter of this fold they re safe, and a happier little group

one may seek long and far in vain...Ó

Document E

Source: Jacob Riis, The Peril and Preservation of the Home, 1887

ÒThe Mulberry Bend... That was the worst pigsty of all, and here again let me hark back to the

murder I have spoken of so often. I do not believe that there was a week in all the twenty years

I had to do with the den, as a police reporter, in which I was not called to record there a

stabbing or shooting affair, some act of violence. It is now five years since the Bend became a

park and the police reporter has not had business there during that time; not once has a shot

been fired or a knife been drawn. That is what it means to let the sunlight in!Ó

Document F

Source: Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 1890

Document G

Source: John Dewey Advocates a Democratic Schoolroom, 1900

ÒSome few years ago I was looking about the school supply stores in the city, trying to find

desks and chairs which seemed thoroughly suitable from all points of view Ð artistic, hygienic,

and educational Ð to the needs of children. We had a great deal of difficulty in finding what

we needed, and finally one dealer, more intelligent than the rest, made this remark: ÔI am

afraid we have not what you want. You want something at which the children may work.

These are all for listening.Õ That tells the story of the traditional education. Just as the

biologist can take a bone or two and reconstruct the whole animal, so, if we put before the

mindÕs eye the ordinary schoolroom, with its rows of ugly desks placed in geometrical order,

crowded together so that there shall be as little moving room as possible, desks, almost all of

the same size, with just space enough to hold books, pencils, and paper... the bare walls... we

can possibly reconstruct the only educational activity that can possibly go on in such a place. It

is all made Ôfor listening;Õ it marks the dependency of one mind upon another... [T]he child is

supposed to take in as much as possible in the least possible time... Everything is arranged for

dealing with children en masse, as an aggregate of units...

The imagination is the medium in which the child lives. To him there is everywhere and in

everything which occupies his mind and activity at all a surplusage of value and significance.

The question of the relation of the school to the childÕs life is simply this: Shall we ignore this

native tendency, dealing, not with the living child at all, but with the dead image we have

erected, or give it play and satisfaction?... Unless culture be a superficial polish... it surely is

this: the growth of the imagination in flexibility... When nature and society can live in the

schoolroom, when the forms and tools of learning are subordinated to the substance of

experience, then... culture shall be the democratic password.Ó

Document H

Source: Felix Adler, Founding Address, New York Society for Ethical Culture, 1876

ÒAn anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world,

and no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly

sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment...We are drifting in the seething tide of

business, each one absorbed in holding his own in the giddy race of competition, each one

engrossed in immediate cares and seldom disturbed by thoughts of larger concerns and ampler

interests. Even our domestic life has lost much of its former warmth and geniality. The happy

spirits of unaffected content and simple endearment are sadly leaving our low-burnt hearth-

fires...

There is a great and crying evil in modern society. It is want of purpose. It is that narrowness of

vision which shuts out the wider vistas of the soul...

[I]f the moral elevation of ourselves, the moral training of ourselves, be also an object worth

achieving, Nay, if it be the highest object of life on earth, then we dare not trust for its

accomplishment to the sparse and meager hours which the busy world leaves us. Then, here as

elsewhere, society must set apart some who shall be specialists in this, who will throw all the

energy of temper, all the ardor of aspiration, all the force of heart and intellect, into this

difficult but ever glorious work...The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and

comforting, animating and stirring to action...

We propose to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. Thus shall we avoid even the

appearance of interfering with those to whom prayer and ritual, as a mode of expressing

religious sentiment, are dear. And on the other hand we shall be just to those who have ceased

to regard them as satisfactory and dispensed with them in their own persons... The freedom of t

hought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with

the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect. But if difference be

inevitable, nay, welcome in thought, there is a sphere in which unanimity and fellowship are

above all things needful... Diversity in the creed, unanimity in the deed! This is the practical

religion from which none dissents...Ó

Document I

Source: Felix Adler, Founding Address, May 15, 1876

The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect. But if difference be inevitable, nay, welcome in thought, there is a sphere in which unanimity and fellowship are above all things needful. Believe or disbelieve as ye list - we shall at all times respect every honest conviction. But be one with us where there is nothing to divide - in action. Diversity in the creed, unanimity in the deed! This is that practical religion from which none dissents. This is that platform broad enough and solid enough to receive the worshipper and the "infidel." This is that common ground where we may all grasp hands as brothers, united in mankind's common cause. The Hebrew prophets said of old, To serve Jehovah is to make your hearts pure and your hands clean from corruption, to help the suffering, to raise the oppressed. Jesus of Nazareth said that he came to comfort the weary and heavy laden. The Philosopher affirms that the true service of religion is the unselfish service of the common weal.

Document J

Source: Felix Adler, founder of the Workingman's School (today, the Ethical Culture Schools)

The ideal of the school is to develop individuals who will be competent to change their environment to greater conformity with moral ideals.

[The purpose of the Workingman's School is] to give the best to the poorest; to utilize the very highest results of educational theory and practice for the benefit of those who stood most in need of such aid, in order that in their upward struggle laboring people might be thoroughly equipped with knowledge and rights standards of conduct.

Document K

Source: Felix Adler, History and Aim of the Ethical Culture School, 1904

The end set up is a social, an ethical one. The means taken to attain this end are:

First, the inculcation of the democratic spirit. The School is not and will not be permitted to

become a class school. The education of the rich apart and the poor apart is an evil and an

injury to both. Children of the rich and poor and of different nationalities and races t o meet

together and learn to respect one another, both in their work and in their play.Ó

Secondly, the awakening of serious intellectual interests and enthusiasms in order to counterbalance the pleasure loving and self-indulgent tendencies which are fostered by the life of a great commercial city....

Document L

Source: Felix Adler, "Letter to Mr. Alfred Wolff," in defense of the decision to admit some paying

pupils, July 15, 1890

When the school was founded a two-fold aim was announced and the two aims were so closely interwoven that it seemed impossible to separate them one from the other. The one aim, as you know, was pedagogical; the other one was... to contribute toward the solution of the labor question, by the elevation of the working class.... The working class are likely to find friends and helpers in their struggles from among those [members of the elite who are their peers] who have sat on the same school benches with them and who, under our system, have been taught to respect labor and the laborer. I must here add that the importance of a cooperation between the higher classes and the working class in the effort to ameliorate social conditions has of late years assumed large and ever larger dimensions.... I [also] feel that... [the working class] need leaders, at least sympathizing co-workers, among the upper classes and where can that spirit and fellowship be better generated than in a school that embraces both classesÉ

A class school, whether for the poor or the rich, is a mistake. In a democracy, children of the wealthy should learn respect for human qualities irrespective of externals [and] the children of the poor should gain refinement by association with the more advantaged.

Document M

Source: Workingman's School, Graduating Class of 1890