Madeline McDowell Breckinridge and the Battle for a New South

4: "Our hope lies in the children" 1901-1904

72 Chapter 4 “Our hope lies in the children” 1901–1904 From 1901 to 1904 Madge began to build upon many of the ideas that she had already developed and publicized in the Herald. In most instances she worked with one of the newly formed organizations—the Civic League, the Associated Charities, or the Woman’s Club of Central Kentucky. The latter had formed in 1894 as part of the Kentucky Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Fortnightly Club merged with it in the late 1890s. The reforms Madge promoted through these groups ranged from the founding of parks, playgrounds, and kindergartens to attempts to persuade officials to include manual training in the schools and to secure the passage of compulsory education, a juvenile court, and child labor laws. At this point in her life, no single activity or interest predominated—she addressed one issue after another.1 All of these reforms, however, represented aspects of the Progressive reform movement that was developing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Madge’s close association with Sophonisba Breckinridge put her in direct contact with many of the leading reformers in Chicago , and Sophonisba herself began to emerge as one of the significant social scientists of the day. The Chicago connection proved especially important because “Chicago progressives were often at the heart of national campaigns for legislation or programs intended to address social problems,” as one author has noted. Nisba’s association with Jane Addams and other social settlement workers at Hull-House—a group whose influence resonated all the way to the nation’s capital—her close association with such Progressives as Julia Lathrop, Grace and Edith Abbott, Florence Kelly, Graham Taylor, and many others, plus her research into issues of immigrants, tenements, juvenile delinquency, labor and working 73 Our Hope Lies in the Children conditions, and a wide variety of other social problems provided ample fuel for her sister-in-law’s reform aspirations.2 During the last half century historians have debated the nature of the Progressive reform movement and the people who participated in it. Most agree that the movement resulted from the forces of urbanization, Madeline McDowell Breckinridge, seated at a desk at Ashland. Courtesy of Special Collections and Digital Programs, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky, Lexington. 74 Madeline McDowell Breckinridge industrialization, and immigration that swept the country in the decades following the Civil War, leaving people with the feeling that they had lost control of their lives to outside forces. Likewise, the supposed increase in corrupt political machines in many cities and the influence of gigantic corporations that wielded unprecedented economic and political power troubled the public. Many historians also agree that Progressives were optimists who believed in human progress and sought to correct problems, often through governmental intervention and regulation. But whether they were looking backward, seeking to restore some idealized version of economic individualism and egalitarianism that had never existed, or were modernizers advocating efficiency, discipline, and centralization— sometimes to the detriment of democracy—whether social control or social justice motivated them, or whether they meant to control business or aid it are issues still being debated. In addition, many studies have emphasized the role Protestant religious and moral values played in the movement . Historians of the 1950s and 1960s often deprecated Progressives as either naive environmental determinists or lackeys of corporate business interests. They also generally described them as urban, middle-class, native-born Americans, usually college-educated professionals. Richard Hofstadter, for example, emphasized a status revolution and depicted the Progressives as members of the old liberal aristocracy who were resentful at being displaced by the nouveau riche business class. Other historians have noted that the conservative counterparts of the Progressives often fit this same demographic description, that some Progressive reforms appealed more to the working class than the middle class, and that much of the legislation they sponsored expanded democracy and benefited lower socioeconomic groups. Virtually all agree that these reformers placed great stress on education as the means of finding the solution to problems.3 Certainly, great diversity existed in the Progressive movement, but at all levels women played an important role. Their activities gave greater force to the argument that the participation of women in national affairs would make life more decent. Though Madge Breckinridge emerged as one of the leading reformers—indeed, arguably the leading reformer—in Kentucky, in many ways she did...