Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740-1870

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4 The Age of Egalitarianism, 1820-1840: The Ideal of Popular Education Reform! The word echoed and re-echoed throughout the Age of Egalitarianism. From 1820 to 1840, people seemed determined to remake American society in almost every way imaginable. Millennalism, Millenarianism, spiritualism, Mormonism, and schisms of countless varieties swept through the religious life of the nation. Older causes, such as prison reform and temperance, were joined by newer callings, such as antislavery, women's rights, and popular education. The realm of health did not escape the wave of reform, for homeopathy and Sylvester Graham's system of vegetarian dietetics found many converts. There were even attempts to reinvent society, for a number of communal experiments, the most notable of which was that of Robert Owen at New Harmony, Indiana, flourished, if only briefly. 1 What common thread, if any, unified this crazy quilt of reform organizations? Ralph Waldo Emerson devoted an essay to the subject , "New England Reformers," and perceptively concluded, "In each of these movements emerges . . . an assertion of the sufficiency of the private man."2 Emerson's "private man" had emerged by I 820 as a result of the convergence of several factors: the decline of the respectability, the decay of deference, the rise of the middle classes. The reform movements were for the most The Age ofEgalitarianism 109 part a middle-class phenomenon, both a means of struggling for equality and a ratification of their newfound status. The gospel of these newly risen classes was equality, expressed in the simple phrase, "One man is as good as another." Elitism in any form was regarded as a mortal enemy to the good of the republic. Reform was thus also imperative to remove any unfair advantages one might have over another. To be sure, there were isolated voices of dissent from the gospel of equality and varying degrees of resistance to reform. The most articulate nay-sayer was James Fenimore Cooper, who would write in 1838, "'One man is as good as another' ... is true in neither nature, revealed morals, nor in political theory."3 Cooper and others of his ilk were shouted down, or at least ignored. Americans living between 1820 and 1840 believed egalitarianism could be a fact. The finding of some recent historians, notably Edward Pessen, that egalitarianism was in many ways a myth, does not change the fact that Americans from 1820 to 1840 believed that they were living in a land of equality.4 This belief is illustrated by a keen observer of the American scene during tl'lis era, Dr. Thomas Nichols. Dr. Nichols evaluated America as both a detached observer and a knowledgeable participant, for he grew to manhood in England, spent most of his adult life in America, and then returned to England. He stated, "As none were very rich, and none had any need to be poor, and as all were equal in theory, and not very far from it in practice, we all went to the same schools, and were taught by the same schoolmasters."5 The gap between theory and reality was sufficiently slim to keep people believing that equality was a fact. Nichols also mentioned the central reforrri in an age of reforms: education. Americans had long paid lip service to the notion that education was the most important need in a nation in which the people ruled. Now, however, the people really were ruling. The franchise had been extended nearly to the point of universal white male suffrage, and the newly certified voters were no longer electing their social betters to office as a matter of course. The republic was truly in the hands of the man with the ballot, and it was more imperative now than before that he be properly educated 110 The Age ofEgalitarianism so that he might correctly discharge his responsibilities to the commonwealth. The obvious first step in this mission was to develop and improve local schools, and this was done a thousand times over throughout the country. By the end of the period, Horace Mann was in place as secretary ofthe Massachusetts Board ofEducation, building a public school system that would be copied allover the nation. Again and again in lectures and publications, Mann hammered home the message that the unprecedented responsibilities thrust upon American citizens required them to prepare themselves by acquiring the "unexampled wisdom and rectitude" that a public school education had to offer.6...