 . . . Summer 1997
'So Young a Man . . . So Old a Head'
It was Alice Chipman who nudged him out of many of his orthodoxies. A woman who years later would invite her older children to watch her give birth so that they would understand the process, Alice dropped John straight from the ivory tower into the ethical and practical muddles of daily life. As Dewey himself put it after her death, "My wife used to say quite truly that I go at things from the back end. I'm hampered by too much technical absorption."
A shy child, for which he blamed his Calvinistic New England background, Dewey lived in his head. As Max Eastman, one of Dewey's students at Columbia decades later and a close friend, observed, "Ideas were real objects to him, and they were the only objects that engaged his passionate interest." His brothers and cousin formed his social world, and it was with them that, at 15, he entered the University of Vermont in 1875 in his hometown. Following graduation in 1879, he passed three lonely years in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and Charlotte, Vermont, teaching high school and reading philosophy. On the advice of a mentor with whom he'd been privately studying, he set his mind on a PhD at Johns Hopkins University and, borrowing $500 from an aunt, went to Baltimore in 1882. There, he met two teachers who shaped his life. George Sylvester Morris, also a Vermonter, was the new head of the University of Michigan philosophy department but lectured fall semesters at Hopkins. G. Stanley Hall, who taught in the spring term when Morris was back in Ann Arbor, had studied under William James at Harvard and was the first to receive a doctorate in psychology in America. At the time, psychology was so new a field that it embraced hypnotism, spiritualism and various pre-Freudian "mind cures," as well as empirical study of the human body. Hall, himself, had conducted extensive experiments on muscles. Morris and Hall exerted diametric pulls on Dewey's beliefs. Morris represented traditional religious philosophy, while Hall's empiricism threatened any belief system grounded on faith. Morris won out, at first. It wasn't until Morris died that Dewey would cast aside his religious orthodoxy. But by then Dewey had already chosen a wife who, her daughter Jane Dewey would later write, "had a deeply religious nature but had never accepted any church dogma. Her husband acquired from her the belief that a religious attitude was indigenous in natural experience, and that theology and ecclesiastic institutions had benumbed rather than promoted it." When Dewey graduated from Hopkins in the spring of 1884, Morris offered him an instructor's post at Michigan at a $900 salary. Dewey's family had been friends of James Burrill Angell, the president of the U-M who had headed the University of Vermont when Dewey was a child. Dewey's letter of acceptance to Angell included greetings from his parents. Dewey arrived in the fall, when Morris was again at Hopkins, and until Morris's return for the spring semester, Dewey constituted the entire philosophy department. As he sat at dinner with Chipman in their boarding house, his burden must have seemed heavy for such a young man, for a writer on a student publication, the Palladium, summed him up sympathetically: "I never knew so young a man with so old a head."
A surveyor and fur trader with the Hudson Bay Company, Fred Riggs joined the Chippewa tribe, learned their language and staunchly defended the rights of Native Americans against the government. It was from her grandfather, who refused to belong to any church while contributing money to many, that Chipman acquired her independence of thought. (Her decision to marry a university philosophy professor was nothing like her sister's choice of Isaac Topping, who traveled with a circus-like road show, complete with a singing donkey. Augusta is said to have become a composer and writer.) Alice Chipman graduated from Fenton High School in 1875 or '76 and took a year's worth of music courses at Fenton's Baptist Seminary. It is unclear what she did before coming to the U-M in 1883, other than teaching in nearby Flushing. GETTING STARTED U-M's Department of Philosophy, like most of its counterparts elsewhere in that era, had previously served mainly as a pulpit from which ministers dispensed spiritual guidance to students. Morris's appointment in 1870 was the first to a non-clergyman. He became chairman in 1881 and permanently cut his ties with Hopkins a year after Dewey's arrival. Morris was a kind-hearted man who was consistently named a favorite professor in the seniors' annual polls. Dewey's first classes at U-M were Empirical Psychology, Special Topics in Psychology, and History of Philosophy. In the second semester his offerings were all in philosophy: Formal Logic, Greek Science and Philosophy, and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. His teaching style was not without problems. "He would fall silent for several moments in the middle of lectures," says the Dewey Center's Hickman. "Some of his students saw it as incompetence, others as responding to their questions." In his earnest efforts to learn students' names, Dewey annotated his class rolls. Against one woman's name were the words "yellow feathers" for the hat she wore. Dewey's classes fascinated students, who considered them exotic. The Argonaut recorded this exchange: "Dewey in Logic: 'Mr. H., give an example showing the fallacy of non sequitur.' Mr. H: 'A man is a tree; a stone is a house; ergo, a bird is a reptile.' Dewey applied for membership at the Congregational Church, becoming member #959. He joined the Student Christian Association (SCA), one of the largest campus organizations and was soon conducting a weekly SCA Bible-study class. In his first Sunday speech before the SCA, "The Obligation to Knowledge of God," he asserted that "belief is not a privilege, but a duty-'whatsoever is not of faith is sin.'" In the spring before Dewey came to Michigan, Morris had organized a Philosophical Society modeled on groups at Dublin, Cambridge and Edinburgh. At its first fall meeting, Dewey spoke on "Mental Evolution." Dewey's talks were not limited to philosophy or religion. His address to the Political Science Association on "The Rise of Great Industries" was an early example of his concern for the degradation of workers. In early 1885, Dewey began work on his first textbook, Psychology, which he finished the next year. During that period, he also wrote two noteworthy articles for the journal Science. The articles were among the first efforts at social science research, what Dewey called the "first fruits" of the "statistical method." He analyzed data gathered on the health of women college graduates in an effort to address scientifically whether or not higher education destroyed women's health. Both the topic and the method were uncharacteristic for Dewey at the time. It suggests that by 1885 he was a feminist and one of the reasons may have been the influence of Alice Chipman.
The philosophy department was unusually welcoming to women students. When Chipman graduated in philosophy in 1886, six of the department's 13 graduates were women, while only 15 of LS&A's 95 graduates were women. John's shyness had always concerned his friends. Daniel Coit Gilman, the president of Hopkins, advised John not to be "so bookish; don't live such a secluded life, get out and see people." But John didn't have to go out to meet Alice, and they must have attracted each other almost immediately, for by March 1885 they were discussing marriage. "It was good luck--or was it good sense?--that John Dewey fell in love with such a woman. An adoring sissy might have left him half of what he did become," wrote Eastman. "In his mild and limp way ... he would stick to his own course of action, barring rational arguments to the contrary with the momentum of a mule. There was a full-sized moral and intellectual admiration between them." Alice had taken courses in philosophy before Dewey came, and took his courses as well. His admiration for her showed up in his letters to her over the summer of 1885 and at holidays. He imagined her "haunting the library"; he sought her help on his Plato course, asking her to "look up references and lay out the course generally in order to remove the burden from my mind." Between them, Dewey and Chipman questioned many assumptions about women. Dewey's articles on women's health pointed to the need for exercise, despite what he called "the aversion of American women, especially the educated, to bodily exertion." At the time, the U-M's gym was not only inadequate for male students, women were allowed to use it only three hours a day. When its administrators urged more students to join--to persuade Lansing to fund a new facility--women responded enthusiastically. This alarmed what the Argonaut called "anti-coeducationalists," who worried that the women would drive out the Rugby Association and gain "enough strength to be a prominent factor in Gym Management." Fifty women organized to gain admission and to support the new building drive. If Alice Chipman was not one of those 50 women, it would be surprising. Although little is known about her before the 1885-86 academic year, her activities then show a determination to do what she could to make the University more welcoming to its women students. Her ire was raised in October 1885, when male students carved out a reading room for themselves in University Hall, the behemoth of a building on State Street that housed nearly all University departments. In their sanctuary, the men enjoyed their journals and caught up on papers from home. Women, reported the Argonaut, "are practically debarred." So Chipman and three friends won the use of the south dressing room and fitted it out as a reading room for women.
As the end of the 1886 academic year approached, Chipman was completing her substitute-teaching of Higher English and German courses at Ann Arbor High School. She also prepared a talk for the Philosophical Society, "Pantheism and Modern Science."
A gleeful report appeared in the Argonaut that "at the progressive euchre party given at Miss Condon's last Thursday evening, our worthy instructor in Philosophy, Dr. Dewey, succeeded in capturing the booby's rattle."
Graduation in 1886 brought its traditional whirl. Chipman sat on the committee that issued invitations to the Senior Reception and posed with the other "senior ladies with their hats." One thing she did not deign to do was follow the convention of providing her height, weight, and hair and eye color for the Castalian senior class summary.
'NO TWO PEOPLE WERE EVER MORE IN LOVE' Years later, Dewey told Eastman, "No two people were ever more in love." On October 1, they were "at home" at 44 Thompson, south of Jefferson on the west side of the street. In their second year of marriage they rented 84 South State on the west side between Madison and Monroe. Their first child, Frederick Archibald, was born in July 1887. With marriage and motherhood, Alice's life became almost completely private, lived out in the social exchanges of faculty members. Jane Dewey recalled that the Morrises' home was "the focal point of the Deweys' social life." The Morrises often entertained the Philosophical Society and other groups for discussion, music and refreshments. From time to time the Deweys also entertained one of his classes, so some intellectual life did come Alice's way. Besides continuing to be listed as a resident member of Collegiate Sorosis, there are no further mentions of Alice before the family left for Minneapolis in 1888. HIS PURE REASON IS CRITIQUED With the publication of Psychology, Dewey became a national figure, but not all the attention was approving. Dewey argued that the findings of psychology supported the tenets of religious philosophy, but did not buttress his argument with proofs. He took a similar neo-Hegelian approach in asserting that logic proved that God was a necessity. His failure to use empirical evidence to support his argument disappointed his old Hopkins teacher Hall, and Hall's old teacher, William James. Their criticism of his book, says Hickman (James is said to have sighed, "Poor Dewey," after reading the book), forced Dewey to re-examine his thinking and nudged him along the path toward pragmatism. Meanwhile, Dewey continued to shape University life. In January 1888, he went to Detroit to make arrangements with officials for the founding of the U-M Republican Club, and he continued to be active in the Student Christian Association although Alice had never joined. As the all-male YMCA movement grew, more college Christian organizations were forced, in the Argonaut's words, "to expel their lady members." Dewey steadfastly backed the SCA's refusal to do so. Between 1884 and 1886, Dewey was accorded a kind of honeymoon in student publications that let him slip through the nets cast for professors' absurdities. But in 1888, the attacks, called "grinds," began. The Oracle, the leader in the satire trade, reported that students were "vending the only authorized translation of Dewey's Psychology at fabulous prices." President Angell's son, James R., one of Dewey's students who would become his colleague at the University of Chicago, made a poetic assault, describing Dewey "with countenance changeless as stone,/ ever recalling the north frigid zone." To drive home the point, the anonymous author of Sophster's New Dictionary created this definition: "Dew(e)y.-Adj. Cold, impersonal, psychological, sphinx-like, anomalous and petrifying to flunkers." In February 1888, Dewey announced that he was taking a position at the University of Minnesota. In response, the Argonaut accused the University of paying faculty too little and freezing all instructors at $900, and all associate professors at $1,600 whether they had been at Michigan one year or all their lives. It hotly pointed out that extra money that had been set aside for faculty salaries had been spent on the boiler house instead. "How long," the Argonaut asked, "can the University stand the loss of such men?" Although a brief biography in the Argonaut called Dewey's Psychology "one of the 'stiffest' text books in existence," it ended, ". . . his friends can wish him no greater success, than that his past may be prophetic of his future." In June, the paper gave notice of Dewey's last talk at the SCA on "Christ and Life," and noted, "This will be the last time that the University students will have an opportunity to hear him before he leaves for his western home and it is hoped that there will be a large attendance." Why did Dewey leave? Money was no doubt an inducement; his salary at Minnesota was $2,400. But he may also have found it necessary to put physical distance between himself and Morris, his beloved mentor and friend, in order to follow the new paths where his thinking was leading him. When he returned to the Michigan faculty the following year, he found the place to begin building a distinctively American philosophy.
Linda Walker '66 MSW is an Ann Arbor writer. She will complete our history of Dewey at Michigan in our next issue. She thanks the staff of the Bentley Historical Library; Larry Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, Southern Illinois University; Eileen Roddy of the Fenton Historical Society; and Louisa Pieper, historic preservation coordinator, City of Ann Arbor.
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They were an extraordinary couple. John Dewey and Alice Chipman were 25 when they met. He was a new instructor of philosophy, so green that when he made his first foray to a barbershop, he was mistaken for a freshman. When he left for the University of Chicago 10 years later, he was, with William James, the leading philosopher of his time and had pioneered new theories in psychology and education.
Prof. Dewey: 'Very well, Mr. H., only it's rather an extreme case.'"
He discussed the poetry of Browning before the Unity Club. His lifetime commitment to education led to Dewey's helping found in 1886 a Schoolmaster's Club, which brought high school teachers to Ann Arbor to hear lectures on such topics as memory, imagination and attention. He also made university accreditation visits to schools in Fenton, Owosso and Muskegon.
Chipman left the University another legacy: a unique sorority. Two traditional sororities were on campus in 1886, but what she and other like-minded women desired was an organization that was not a secret society. She and her friends found a model in a New York group called Sorosis, which claimed among its international membership such luminaries as Lucretia Mott, George Sand and George Eliot. The Michigan women obtained permission from Sorosis to create a college chapter. With an insignia designed by Tiffany, Collegiate Sorosis was born. The women named members of the faculty, "Sorosis brothers"; perhaps Dewey was among them. Chipman remained a member throughout her life.
This sketch of Dewey's and Kingsley's ill-fated picnic appeared in the student newspaper Palladium of 1886. The caption read: DUET. J. Dewey and H.H.Kingsley
of a new club of University people,' reported the Argonaut. 'It takes its name from the Russian tea pot around which the members will gather on the snug winter evenings of the coming season.' Discussing Turgenev and Tolstoy gave John and Alice more chances to be together. They were not the only couple in the Samovar Club to marry. Elsie Jones and Charles Horton Cooley (standing at left in the back row) also married. Cooley was one of the founders of sociology. Alice is second from left, but Dewey is absent from the year-end photo.