Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist

One: From Calvinism to Evolutionism

one From Calvinism to Evolutionism John Dewey’s life as a public philosopher and reformer is probably one of the more thoroughly documented careers of any American intellectual in this century . Yet remarkably little is known about Dewey’s childhood and his early professional life prior to undertaking his academic career as a philosopher. Dewey is partly to blame for this gap because he wrote almost nothing about these lost years, and he preferred to begin his own autobiography, published in 1930 when Dewey was seventy, by describing his intellectual interests as an undergraduate at the University of Vermont.1 Perhaps Dewey didn’t think there was much worth reporting before that time, and by all accounts Dewey seemed to have had an unexceptional childhood. Dewey’s daughter Jane tried to correct this de¤ciency in her biography in 1939 by persuading her father to furnish more details about his early years. Jane Dewey succeeded in completing a family history with personal anecdotes and occasional insights about Dewey’s early development that propelled him toward philosophical pursuits.2 Several of Dewey’s former students and colleagues also contributed their recollections of their personal association with Dewey in articles and unpublished interviews, but their commentaries largely focus on his later years at Columbia University.3 Max Eastman, a former Dewey student, had more success than other close Dewey friends in getting him to reveal more details about his childhood and youth. Eastman, who had an amiable relationship with Dewey, probed Dewey’s early years with a disarming wit that brings Dewey’s persona alive.4 Not until 1977, however, when George Dykhuizen published his biography, which involved extensive research in the Dewey archives and correspondence, including interviews with Dewey family members, did a more coherent picture emerge.5 living by the creed of redemption Dewey was born in 1859 into a middle-class Vermont family whose self-educated father, Archibald, traced his lineage to descendants who ®ed Flanders to escape religious persecution. They eventually settled in a farming colony in western Connecticut. Archibald gave up on farming in his mid-forties to run a grocery business. To the dismay of some prohibition-minded neighbors, he possessed the only license to dispense liquor for medicinal purposes. Archibald took time out in 1860 to serve as quartermaster of a Vermont cavalry unit for four years during the Civil War before resuming his business. The young Dewey and his two surviving brothers, Davis and Charles (John Archibald died in an accident at home at two and a half years old), got reacquainted with their father after the war. He was personable, had a dry sense of humor, and forgave more debts than was ¤nancially advisable. Archibald had a surprisingly wide-ranging though intellectually super¤cial interest in literary ¤gures that included Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, and Hawthorne and political philosophers William Thackeray and Thomas Carlyle. Dewey’s father was fond of quoting from these writers’ works, delivering his recitations with an entertaining oratorical ®ourish. Dewey’s father also had an uncanny ability to recall (or so he claimed) exactly what he was doing when he was his sons’ ages. This striking gift for recollection through mental association may have stimulated John’s curiosity in psychological processes.6 Dewey’s mother, Lucina Rich, came from a well-to-do, better-educated, and politically active family whose grandfather was a congressman and whose father served as a “lay” judge in a county court. Lucina took pride in her family upbringing and the fact that both her brothers were ¤rst-generation college graduates, a goal she ardently sought for her own sons, two of whom, John and Davis, obtained Ph.D.’s. She was a devoted mother, spendthrift, and disciplinarian who made sure her sons had plenty of books to read and lots of chores to complete. When he was old enough, John delivered papers after school until he got a summer job at fourteen, “tallying” in a lumberyard.7 Lucina was a devout Congregationalist who expected her sons to adopt the Calvinist creed in word and deed. Her strong religious convictions re®ected the con®icting currents of religious belief characteristic of the Reconstruction era. She was a member of the Universalist sect who occupied the liberal wing of Calvinism. Universalists rejected as elitist the doctrine of the elect, believing instead that God would forgive anyone who confessed their sins. This democratic conception of redemption was appealing because it was never too late, as Saint Augustine declared...