 . . . Fall 1997
John Dewey published "The Psychology of Infant Language" in 1894. In his discussion of children’s speech, he listed son Frederick’s early vocabulary: "See there, bye-bye, bottle, papa, mamma, grandma, Freddy, burn, fall, water, down, door, no-no, stop, thank you, boo (peek-a-boo)" and an all-purpose word, "daw." Some of their Ann Arbor neighbors censured the Deweys’ unorthodox methods. Mrs. Alfred Lloyd, the wife of a philosophy professor, told Savage of other parents "who had to convince their own children that they couldn’t ignore shoes and stockings as the Dewey children did. Once a local policeman was prodded by some well-meaning neighbors into advising Mrs. Dewey about the severe climate. Mrs. Dewey promptly told the policeman that it was none of his business as she was quite capable of bringing up her own children."
It was the Hinsdales who reported the shock John and Alice caused when it was known that in 1893 the two older children were "given an opportunity to stand by during the birth [of brother Morris] while Mrs. Dewey explained the process." The key word in Dewey’s philosophical system was "growth—how people become themselves," notes Larry Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University. The germ of Dewey’s brand of pragmatism, which he initially called "instrumentalism," was found in his emphasis on ideas, says U-M professor emeritus Arthur W. Burks, "ideas that were instruments for adapting to the environment and improving your life." As Dewey explained in an 1892 article for The Inlander, a U-M journal he co-founded in 1891, the meeting of mind and reality is thought; in their reciprocal contact, the mind gives ideas to the world, and the world gives back truth. Drawing upon his ideas about how people learn, Dewey experimented with the department’s teaching methods. In her biography of her father, Jane Dewey, the Deweys’ sixth child, revealed that his own schooling had bored John; he’d disliked the rigid, passive way of learning forced on children by the pervasive lecture-recitation method of that time. In 1891, he tried something revolutionary in one of his courses: he allowed free discussion. So bemused was the University community that the Michigan Daily, which began publishing in 1890, reported on the "new plan" for the course Introduction to Philosophy: "No lectures are given, the subject being developed entirely by discussion among members of the class, stimulated occasionally by questions from the Professor." Dewey associated democracy with the more socially inclusive educational opportunities afforded by Midwestern institutions, and with Michigan, under James Burrill Angell, in particular. "To all who taught under him," Jane Dewey wrote, speaking for her father, "Angell remains the ideal college president, one who increased the stature of his institution by fostering a truly democratic atmosphere for students and faculty and encouraging the freedom and individual responsibility that are necessary for creative education. ... The fact that the institution was the natural culmination of the coeducational state education system made a deep impression on Dewey." In his unsigned column, "Angle of Reflection" for The Inlander, Dewey tried on the role of social critic that he would be known for in later years. He lauded Midwestern universities for being "of and for the people, and not for some cultivated classes." In another article he defended immigrant political operatives in big city machines like Tammany Hall, saying that they do the "necessary work to which we refuse to put our hands." Before leaving for Minnesota, Dewey had made the acquaintance of a newspaper man, Franklin Ford, an editor of Bradstreet’s newspaper in New York. The two became friends, Ford sitting in on Dewey’s courses, Dewey learning about the newspaper trade from Ford. Their discussions led to plans for a newspaper, Thought News, scheduled for an 1892 debut. Bruce Kuklick, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Chuchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey, reports that the "wacky" enterprise ended as an embarrassment for Dewey. The statements announcing the paper were written in a jargony gobbledegook that sank the project before a single issue appeared. The journal "shall set forth the facts themselves," ran one of the promotional articles, "[and] report new investigations and discoveries in their net outcome, instead of in their overloaded gross bulk." Another read that the Thought News would report not "the charters and the laws, but the boodle." The traditional press recognized an easy mark when it saw one. Noting that Thought News did not plan a regular publishing schedule, the Detroit Tribune concluded that "Mr. Dewey proposes to get out an ‘extra’ every time he has a new thought." Dewey scrapped the plan. Years later, he wrote to biographer Savage that the project had been "over-enthusiastic" and that "the idea was advanced for those days, but it was too advanced for the maturity of those who had the idea in mind." Alice Dewey responded to the brouhaha by taking herself off to Hawaii.
Mildred Hinsdale, who lived next door to the Deweys, remembered when John and Alice once visited, "Dewey gave his wife an opportunity to conduct the entire conversation, and she so obviously enjoyed it." Another friend passed an evening with Alice, "discussing vital issues, and among other things she gave me a talk on Zola—his scope, his scheme, his success."
Part of Alice Dewey's amusement came from her children. Alice described to a friend, who reported it years later to Savage, that she once found her children "stark naked" in the attic. "Fred ... was trampling solemnly up and down the attic floor, the other two lurking in a corner. Mrs. Dewey asked, `Fred, what are you doing?' Fred replied, `We are playing Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. I am the Lord God Almighty walking in the cool of the evening. Evelyn and Morris are Adam and Eve hiding from the face of the Lord.'"
Alice, who had graduated from U-M in 1886 at the age of 27, continued to work for the interests of young women at the University, who were so isolated in their boarding houses that they had little social life. She was part of the founding of the Women’s League in 1890 and held an open house every Friday for any female students who wished to come by. When U-M alumna Lucy Maynard Salmon (1876 AB, 1883 AM), a Vassar faculty member and the inventor of "domestic science," returned to deliver a series of talks in 1893 on how to improve the conditions of servants, Alice—no doubt with the aid of her own live-in maid, Annie B. Kusterer—opened her home for students to meet Professor Salmon.
Jane Dewey noted that her mother was not a church member and that she had maintained to Dewey from the beginning of their relationship that religious dogma was inimical to religious spirit. It is surprising, then, to find Alice one of 40 women present at Mrs. Angell’s in the "oppressive heat" of a June day in 1894, just before she left Ann Arbor, for a meeting of the Congregational Church’s Women’s Home Missionary Association at which she offered a prayer.
Archibald and Lucina Dewey, John’s parents, came to live with them at the end of 1890 in the Forest Avenue house, The Dewey’s social life centered around Mrs. Morris and her children and the George H. Meads, who became lifelong friends. In the summers, Dewey attended Thomas Davidson’s Concord School of Philosophy at Glenmore, New York, in the Adirondacks, giving the family vacations away from Michigan.
These men, all raised with the same religious beliefs, brought strong empirical science to the department’s psychology offerings and secularized the philosophy courses. They distrusted undemocratic organizations, were uneasy with creeds and pledges and had the mutual trust that like-minded people bent on reform often require.
At Michigan, Dewey, Tufts, Mead and Lloyd created a department remarkable for its innovation. Right after returning in 1889, Dewey revised U-M ethics courses away from their religious grounding and sought publicity for the changes by publishing a four-page outline in the new, secular journal of the Ethical Cultural Society. Dewey’s generation was seeking spiritual significance to replace their growing disbelief in America’s dominant religion, reform Protestantism, says historian Bruce Kuklick of Penn. In 1883, before Dewey joined Morris at Michigan, some students had expressed this growing skepticism and agnosticism by protesting the religious, or "Hegelian," bias of Morris’s department. But while questioning or rejecting the truths of religion, students yearned for a moral life and purpose. Dewey answered this desire in his new system of ethics. Unique among departments, philosophy advertised in the Daily, inviting students to meet with the faculty to discuss classes for the ensuing semester. A typical notice in October 1891 read, "I will meet students for consultation every evening this week after 8:00 at 15 Forest Ave. John Dewey." Dewey also tinkered with testing, sometimes substituting quizzes for final exams and in one course, Psychological Introspection, simply asked students to keep journals. The department was almost comically responsive to its students. Tufts apologized for his first semester’s efforts in an 1890 Daily ad: "I wish now to thank the members of this class for the patience they have shown in the trying work of breaking in a new instructor and to promise that, in the knowledge I have received at their hands, I shall do much better next time." Dewey increased the offerings not only for undergraduates, but especially for graduate students, whom he encouraged by teaching more courses himself. Indeed, though head of the department, he taught as many as five courses and 150 students a term, often more than he had as an instructor. He added an aesthetics course by inviting Fred N. Scott of the English department to offer the University’s first interdisciplinary course. Altogether, in Dewey’s last year at Michigan, the three faculty members and Scott offered 28 courses. The answer may lie in his relationship with President Angell. Immediately after his return to Michigan in 1889, Dewey simultaneously wrote his new secular ethics curriculum and became a trustee of the SCA. In the ensuing years he led a Bible class and addressed the Congregationalists’ convention.
When the SCA took the lead in trying to shame students during a wave of cheating in 1893, Dewey spoke sternly to his class, and his words were recorded in the SCA's Bulletin. "But the blame lies most largely with the respectable and upright students who connive at the evil by silence or merry-making ... I shall endeavor not to go to sleep in class, but shall not act as a spy ... I wish it understood that anyone who may come to the classroom and cheat, I regard with the utmost contempt, not simply officially, but personally." When Dewey first came to the U-M in 1884, he was known to Angell as the son of friends from his days as president of the University of Vermont in Burlington. Dewey acted the role of loyal son, participating in religious events at Angell's side. In the days before he left for Minnesota, however, Dewey did not call on Angell to bid him good-bye. Angell overlooked this slight when he chose Dewey to take Morris’s place. Embarrassed, perhaps grateful, and always respectful, Dewey again threw himself into the religious activities he shared with Angell. No doubt the 1891 arrival of his parents—especially his pious mother—who immediately joined his church, drew him closer to his religious roots. But Chicago, a Baptist school with a Baptist president, did not catch him up in the same kind of obligations. The University of Chicago opened its doors in October 1892, and was there to be inspected when Michiganders made their way to visit the Columbian Exposition the next year. The U-M was represented in the State of Michigan's exhibit by a collection of stuffed animals and by books written by professors, including three by Dewey. Dewey had conducted visual perception and memory tests for a nationwide study sponsored by the American Psychological Association for the Exposition. President and Mrs. Angell collected $200 toward decorating the Women's Building at the Exposition at a musicale at their home in February 1893. That summer, before leaving for the Adirondacks, the Deweys stopped in Chicago to see the fair. Perhaps as a response to the salaries Chicago announced when it opened in October 1892, the U-M Regents that same month revamped faculty salaries and, for the first time, rewarded length of service. Professors would no longer be stuck for life under a salary ceiling of $2,200. As if these changes were meant for Dewey, the Regents raised his salary to $2,700 the very next week.
Resigned to its losses, the Michigan community mourned briefly. The SCA invited Dewey to give his final speech in Ann Arbor in Newberry Hall (the topic, "Reconstruction") and honored him by hanging his portrait there. To encourage literature at the University, he and Fred Scott founded The Inlander, and Dewey opposed those who sought to bar coeds from the editorial board. He published several books while he was at U-M, notably an expanded view of his ethics curriculum, Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics, in 1891, replaced by The Study of Ethics: a Syllabus in 1894. He revised his Psychology textbook and wrote for the Andover Review and the new Psychological Review. One of Dewey’s greatest contributions to U-M came in 1892 when he was one of six faculty members appointed to look into the situation of graduate students. Until the committee recommended the formation of an administrative council for graduate students within the Literary College, undergraduates and graduates had been mixed together. A separate graduate school was established in 1912; in 1935, it was named for Horace H. Rackham when he contributed money for a building. I have had years of working practically alone, you know the conditions at Ann Arbor. Moreover, the kind of studies I have pursued, and my natural bent of mind have united to give me a habit of isolation in work. The thing I have chiefly learned in the last two years is the extent to which this habit of isolated work has fixed itself upon me and the great serious difficulty I have in getting into cooperative relations with people—my theories to the contrary notwithstanding. Others have suffered from it and you have.
At the beginning of Dewey’s career, Johns Hopkins’s president, Daniel C. Gilman, had worried about Dewey’s habit of keeping to himself. Dewey’s intelligence and creativity, and the energy with which he pursued his ideas, made him seem indomitable. But it appears that in his teaching, collaboration with colleagues and administrative tasks, he continued to struggle against the intractability of his own nature.
Alice died of congestive heart failure at 68 in 1927 after 41 years of marriage. John remarried in 1946 at the age of 87. He and his wife, Roberta Grant Dewey, adopted two children. He died June 2, 1952, at the age of 92. The University of Chicago announced this September that, despite protests, it was closing the Department of Education that Dewey founded in 1895.
Linda Walker ’66 MSW is an Ann Arbor writer. She thanks Karen Jania and other staff of the U-M Bentley Historical Library; Larry Hickman, director, Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University; Wystan Stevens, Ann Arbor historian; Susan Wineberg, president, Washtenaw County Historical Society; and Louisa Pieper, historic preservation coordinator, City of Ann Arbor.
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The Deweys had gone to the University of Minnesota in 1888, lured there by a higher salary. But after only five months, they heard the shocking news that George Sylvester Morris, Dewey’s mentor and friend and the head of U-M’s philosophy department, had died. Morris had suffered from overexposure on a late February fishing trip with his son, and died on March 23 at the age of 48. President James B. Angell asked Dewey, who had taught at U-M from 1884-1888, to take Morris’s place. Despite a pay cut of $200—the U-M had a $2,200 salary cap—Dewey accepted.
Professor and Mrs. Trueblood were dinner guests in the Dewey home on one occasion. They were not aware of the fact that John and Alice Dewey were developing some interesting theories and practices on the education of children. When, from self-protection, Mrs. Trueblood attempted to restrain one of the children from using her as a target, Mrs. Dewey shook her head and whispered, "Leave him alone. His father is studying him."
The daughters of Burke A. Hinsdale, an historian who lived next door to the Deweys, told Savage that the Dewey children’s doctor "gave up doctoring the Deweys because she would not sanction their ways of caring for their children. They always had colds and sniffles."
probably seeking help and comfort during Archibald’s final illness, for he died in April 1891 at the age of 80. It seems that Lucina Dewey remained with John and Alice.
Before Dewey, first C. S. Peirce and then William James developed pragmatism—the principle that the meaning of an idea was to be found in the examination of its consequences in action. But it was Dewey, with Tufts, Mead and Dewey's pupil James R. Angell ’90, ’91 MA (President Angell’s son), who would create the center of pragmatism at the University of Chicago.
But it was within SCA that he was most active. He taught a course on Greek influences on the early church, spoke on "our Puritan inheritance" at the SCA New England night and was the inaugural speaker when Newberry Hall (the home of the SCA and now of U-M’s Kelsey Museum) opened in October 1891.
But against Chicago’s offer of $4,000, $2,700 just wasn’t enough. Dewey may also have been worried about U-M’s future; the Panic of 1893 forced many students to drop out—women’s enrollment fell 10 percent. Nor was Dewey persuaded to stay by the promise of a corner office on the ground floor of the new Tappan Hall. His former colleagues James R. Angell and James Tufts were already on the U-C faculty, and Tufts recommended Dewey to Harper. When the offer came, Dewey negotiated an eventual raise to $5,000, then accepted. George Mead left with him.
Dewey’s Michigan legacy is rich, and he seems to have thrived in his many friendships and associations here. That makes it hard to understand a letter he wrote to a former student and close friend in 1897 after a brief misunderstanding:
The Deweys left Chicago for New York’s Columbia University in 1904, over a dispute with Harper. Another trip to Europe resulted in the death of a later-born child, 8-year-old Gordon, from typhoid fever. While in Italy, they adopted a boy, Sabino. Altogether, Alice and John had seven children.