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3 Pursuing “Noble Endeavor”: Educating Clerical Workers at the Peirce School In a 1915 promotional pamphlet Philadelphia’s most prominent business college , the Peirce School, utilized a fictitious student, “Tom Brown,” to guide readers through the school and offer information regarding its physical layout ,student services,and academic programs.1 Tom,whom we met in chapter 2, describes Peirce in detailed, glowing tones, but one gleans preciously little about him beyond his gender and his youth. His parents still have “the responsibility of selecting a school which will fit him for something definite.”2 The pamphlet offers nothing beyond this scanty,skeletal information to flesh out Tom’s background. Few historical resources exist to trace the profiles of people who contemplated entering the office or sales workforce at some point in their lives. Published census data, unfortunately, cannot describe intergenerational economic mobility—the movement of a family’s children into a class status different from their parents’. Study of the Peirce School’s student body,however,permits important inferences about this.In addition, examining the rhetoric the school put out regarding white-collar work, as well as its curriculum, can help us grasp some of the formative experiences that clerical workers had. Two-year business colleges were new institutions in industrial-era urban America, and Peirce was an important fixture in Philadelphia throughout this period.The school prepared thousands of students for office or sales employment .Thomas May Peirce,Chester N.Farr Jr.,A.F.Carll,and R.D.Carll founded the school in 1865 as the Union Business College of Philadelphia, named in honor of the victorious side in the Civil War. The founders had witnessed the economic expansion fueled by the conflict and believed that this would continue in peacetime. They surmised that the city’s merchants 60 city of clerks and manufacturers would need legions of workers trained in the most modern clerical methods to fill their growing and modernizing establishments. Years later Peirce recalled: When I organized Peirce School, in 1865, I had not the surplus wealth of a millionaire, but I had a clear apprehension of a popular want of large dimensions . I knew from business men that advertisements for help were answered by the hundreds and that rare was the case in which more than one per cent. of the applications rose to the dignity of consideration. I did not have money to found a school and endow it, but I had time, I had youth, I had some degree of courage, and I gave myself to the work of training the ninety-nine per cent. of applicants who wanted to go into business and whose previous preparation did not secure for them even consideration at the hands of an employer.3 On September 18 the college opened in Haydn and Handel Hall, north of Center City, and received its first nine students. By 1870 Farr and the Carll brothers had dropped out of their original partnership with Peirce, and he remained the sole director of the institution until his death in 1896. He tinkered with the school’s name, over the years calling it Peirce’s Union Business College, the Peirce College of Business, the Peirce School of Business and Shorthand, and the Peirce School of Business Administration. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the school boasted that it was the largest business school in the United States, “exceeded only [by] the great universities,” and that it had sent 30,000 “highly trained” men and women into the white-collar world.4 The institution’s name was not the only thing that changed between 1865 and 1920. In 1869, feeling that the school was isolated outside the central business district, the directors decided to move it to the Inman Building, at Tenth and Chestnut streets,much closer to many of the businesses where the school’s students hoped to find jobs. In 1881 the college migrated one block east to the Record Building, where it stayed until 1915, when it relocated to its present location, just west of Broad Street on Pine Street. The seven-floor Pine Street building housed a wide array of facilities besides classrooms.The ground floor included the school’s administrative offices, a waiting room, a library, and a large assembly hall. Two elevators whisked students, faculty, and staff upward. The floors above sheltered a reading room, a lunchroom, kitchens, a “ladies’ cloak-room,” a gymnasium, locker rooms, two bowling alleys...

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