The Manliest Man: Samuel G. Howe and the Contours of Nineteenth-Century American Reform

Notes

275 NOTES Introduction 1. “Funeral of Dr. Howe,” Boston Daily Globe, 14 Jan. 1876. 2. Douglas C. Stange, Patterns of Antislavery among American Unitarians, 1831–1860 (Rutherford , N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977), 100–104. 3. “Funeral of Dr. Howe.” 4. The description of the service at the Boston Music Hall, including all quotations, is drawn from “Samuel G. Howe,” Boston Daily Globe, 9 Feb. 1876. 5. Bridgman to Lamson, 30 Jan. 1876, box 3, Lamson Family Papers, MHS. 6. JWH, Memoir of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (Boston: Albert J. Wright, 1876); Laura H. Richards, Samuel Gridley Howe (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935); Franklin B. Sanborn, Dr. S. G. Howe, the Philanthropist (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1891). 7. “50 Greatest Sons Picked at Harvard,” New York Times, 13 Sept. 1936, section N. 8. Hedda Hopper, “Dr. Howe Profile Set as Novel and Picture,” Los Angeles Times, 15 Apr. 1952. 9. The first crack in SGH’s armor appeared in 1956 with the publication of two histories: Harold Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe: Social Reformer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956); and Louise Tharp, Three Saints and a Sinner: Julia Ward Howe, Louisa, Annie, and Sam Ward (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956). Although Schwartz admires SGH’s many accomplishments, he portrays SGH as a rigid, often vindictive, and unforgiving “know it all.” Tharp in her biography of the Ward siblings depicts SGH as a domineering husband. Using JWH’s letters (some of which she cites, though these letters now appear to be lost or to have been available only to her), Tharp portrays JWH’s relationship with her husband as unpleasant. The letters recount, for example, SGH’s attempts (sometimes successful and sometimes not) to control his wife’s public appearances, writings, and assets. With the emergence of critical social history in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some historians began to question the assumptions behind what many of them saw as the triumphal and “exceptionalistic” versions of U.S. history presented by previous generations. Assuming the doubts Schwartz and Tharp raised about SGH’s good character, several of these historians also began to question his motives, especially those associated with his work for reform. The first critic to do so was Michael Katz, who, in The Irony of Early School Reform (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), presents SGH (a minor figure in his book) as part of a group of Massachusetts elites who shaped public education and juvenile delinquency reform in ways that were essentially conservative. SGH’s educational reform, in short, was more a matter of class preservation than it was a challenge to dominant class structures. In The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), David Rothman portrays 276 Notes to Pages 5–7 SGH as a reformer more disturbed by Jacksonian disorder than concerned with fundamental social change. A decade later, SGH’s cracked image as a heroic reformer received an especially severe blow with the publication of Harlan Lane’s When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York: Vintage, 1984). Lane argues that SGH was the central and most important advocate for the rise of oralism (the teaching of lip reading and speech) in nineteenth-century deaf education. Lane is uncompromisingly critical of what he sees as SGH’s deliberate attempt to deprive deaf people of a valid and reliable language in the form of American Sign Language. In Lane’s history, SGH becomes a central villain in a misguided and disastrous social program of oral communication. Around the time that Lane depicted SGH as a threat to deaf identity, literary and historical critics were rediscovering JWH. In her literary work and her correspondence they found depictions of an often stressful and sometimes unhappy marriage. Their works include Deborah Pickman Clifford, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Biography of Julia Ward Howe (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979); Mary H. Grant, Private Woman, Public Person: An Account of the Life of Julia Ward Howe from 1819 to 1868 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1994); Gary Williams, Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999); and Valarie H. Ziegler, Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe (Harrisburg, Pa: Trinity Press International, 2003). These critics portray SGH as an impediment to JWH’s aspirations, to her social relationships, and even to her identity. Moving beyond Tharp, they explore the contours of the marital problems, depicting SGH...