Robin G. Schulze | Robin G. Schulze on "Prize Plants" | Environmental History, 8.3

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Robin G. Schulze on "Prize Plants"

THIS PHOTOGRAPH originally intrigued me because, growing up in the public schools in suburban southern Connecticut in the 1970s, I learned absolutely nothing about plants. The only thing I remember growing in biology class was mold in a plastic Petri dish. The various lab sciences I took in college—physics, aerodynamics, astronomy—did nothing to dispel my ignorance of the flora that permeated my daily life. Only in my thirties, when my husband and I bought a home with some land and I became a passionate gardener in central Pennsylvania, did I learn anything about plants. My purchase of a pickax and a small azalea (which I came very close to killing) led to lessons in climate zones, soils, root systems, pruning, drainage, mulch, compost, insects, earthworms, and birds. I also learned a great many lessons in humility in at least one protracted struggle to outwit a groundhog.

The failings of my formal education were not unique. Neither would most public educators of the 1970s have conceived of my lack of nature knowledge as in any way troubling or problematic. Not so at the turn of the twentieth century. The photograph reprinted here from Clifton F. Hodge's 1902 book, Nature Study and Life, bears witness to at least one important period in American history when what children knew and did not know about animals and plants became a matter of national concern. As Ralph Lutts has noted, some form of nature education had been present in American public schools throughout much of the nineteenth century, taught either in the name of the spiritual uplift of natural theology or the abstract scientific rigor of Linnaean classification.¹ In the Progressive era in America, however, Nature Study took on a new life as a means of vital educational and national reform. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American school children planted and tended gardens, watched polliwogs develop into frogs, tamed and bred animals, and learned to identify trees. They were encouraged, both boys and girls, to get their hands dirty.

The notion of just how such activities functioned as "reform" in the minds of Progressive educators, scientists, and civic leaders is a complex issue. In part, the enthusiasm for Nature Study sprang from cultural anxieties about the growing "virtual" quality of modern American life. As more and more people abandoned the country for the city and traded the nature-centered rhythms of rural life for the rush of industrial urbanity, white middle-class Americans began to sense that their lives were becoming increasingly artificial. The ever-advancing "conquest" of nature that Progressives heralded as the basis of American achievement brought with it a widening array of distinctly unnatural consequences. Lit streets and factories turned night into day and times of rest into times of work. Refrigeration and railroads outstripped the limitations of agricultural seasons. For the first time in American history, urban dwellers could consume goods without any direct contact with the original ecosystems that made them possible or the environmental costs that attended their production. Urban Americans of the late nineteenth century increasingly became creatures of what William Cronon has dubbed "second nature," the industrial metropolis's organized commercial facsimile of the original ecosystems it imported and exploited to support its life.²

Children of the Upsala Street School in Worchester, Massachusetts, display their prize plants, 1900. Reprinted from Clifton H. Hodge, Nature Study and Life (1902).

The children of such a disconnected world, Progressive educators feared, would be unfit for American life in a variety of ways. Lacking any access to the strenuous life of the outdoors, they would be physically feeble. Lacking any knowledge of how to manipulate and control the natural world, they would be passive dupes of the corporations that both exploited them and provided for them. Lacking any vital relation to the natural world, they would readily accept and propagate the wasteful destruction of the country's natural resources. Lacking any grounding in the "real" life of the country or the truths of natural forces, they would be easy prey for popular delusions and group psychoses. As Professor A. S. Packard of Brown University argued, Nature Study was of "prime importance" in teaching a child to recognize a fact in "these days of Christian Science and other fads."³

Nature Study, then, was for both urban and rural children. In a rural setting, educators posited, it would grant boys and girls the scientific knowledge they needed to better control and enjoy their surroundings. Nature Study would help to keep children down on the farm. In an urban setting, Nature Study would serve the ever-entwined Progressive goals of social reform and social control. The driving "method" of Progressive Nature Study was that of careful, direct observation of the natural world. Rather than rely on books to answer their questions, children were encouraged to trust their own experiences—to use their senses and, on the basis of their observations and experiments, form their own conclusions. "The chief value of nature study in character building," wrote David Starr Jordan, the famed ichthyologist and Stanford University president, "is that, like life itself, it deals with realities. ... One must, in life, make his own observations, frame his own inductions, and apply them in action as he goes along."⁴ In the words of Professor John Coulter, head of the Botany Department at the University of Chicago, Nature Study produced "that intellectual freedom in which one sees and thinks for himself."⁵ Nature Study's promise of "intellectual freedom" went hand-in-hand with its promise of intellectual discipline. Children who learned to carefully observe nature and faithfully record its truths would, educators argued, themselves become truthful. Children who learned to distinguish natural "facts" from errant fancies would be safe from the primitive superstitions, intellectual fads, and "higher foolishnesses" (Jordan's term) that Progressive scientists sought to remove from America's modern cities and, particularly, the immigrant populations who lived there.

When Hodge took this picture in 1900, he was an assistant professor of biology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. One of America's first graduate research universities on the German model, Clark was the creation of founder and president G. Stanley Hall, the controversial professor of pedagogy and psychology who made it his life's work to combat the disconnected quality of modern urban life. A confirmed Darwinian and an advocate of evolutionary "recapitulation" theory, Hall believed that the development of white children from childhood to adulthood mimicked the evolutionary development of the race from savagery to civilization.⁶ Little boys, in Hall's view, were biological savages. As such, he believed, they were particularly inclined to be drawn to the natural world, albeit not in any rational or scientific way. Sensory contact with nature was key in Hall's mind to proper child development. The outdoors, he concluded, would eugenically inoculate boy children against the evils of over-sophistication and effeminacy as they grew.

Hodge was a firm believer in Hall's theories, which explained in part his own sense of the importance of the human relationship to plants. If child development recapitulated racial development from savagery to civilization, then a child, in order to become a fully civilized being, needed to replicate the cultural step that Hodge deemed most vital in moving the race out of barbarism: the domestication and cultivation of plants. "When we consider its universal and fundamental character in relation to civilization and human advancement," Hodge argued, "the omission of soil lore from a system of education of the young is suggestive of a relapse to barbarism. To allow a child to grow up without planting a seed or rearing a plant is a crime against civilized society, and our armies of tramps and hordes of hoodlums are among the first fruits of an educational system that slights this important matter."⁷

In Worcester, a community that Roy Rosenzweig has described as "a major industrial city with a large working class," Hodge's fears of racial backsliding must have seemed all too present.⁸ Well connected by railroads to the rest of the industrial east, Worcester was a factory center known for its metal trades and its production of machines and machinery. In 1900, first- and second-generation immigrants made up more than 70 percent of all of the blue-collar jobs in the city. Hodge lived and worked in a diverse, multi-ethnic metropolis of older immigrant groups—Swedes, French Canadians, and Irish—and newer arrivals, including Italians, Jews, Poles, Lithuanians, Albanians, Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks. Worcester provided a ready working laboratory for Progressive experiments in the reform and management of the booming industrial city—a laboratory of which both Clark University and Hodge took full advantage. Hodge trained teachers and introduced extensive courses in Nature Study into the Worcester public schools. By the time he took this picture of the children of the Upsala Street School, located in the industrial east side of the city, Hodge had conducted several years of Nature Study trials in the primary grades. He thought he had found the best educational means of ensuring Worcester a sane, civilized, assimilated American populace.

In my view, Hodge's photograph captures many of the poignant contradictions that haunted the relationship of Progressive reformers to the natural word. By all accounts, Hodge was a passionate naturalist who loved nature and, rightly, feared for its future. As a turn-of-the-century Progressive, however, he had difficulty reconciling his sense of the importance of the complete mastery of nature—Hodge's working definition of "progress"—with his desire to somehow protect the biotic world. Ultimately, Nature Study meant more to him as a means of saving the nation from racial backsliding than as a means of saving the nation's natural resources, although the goals were, in his mind, inter-linked. Barbaric children would lay waste to nature. Civilized children would use it wisely. Like many Progressives, Hodge believed that knowing about nature inevitably would lead to caring about nature. Rather than challenge the economic forces at work outside his window, Hodge believed that scientific education could solve the worst problems of capitalism. Through Nature Study, he strove to create enlightened participants in American progress.

In Hodge's photograph, the children from grades four through seven crowd together wearing what appear to be their best clothes to display their prize plants. The class is clearly multi-ethnic, representative of Worcester's immigration, old and new. Hanging from the rail at the back of the room are a series of Nature Study pictures, images of animals and birds, the most identifiable of which is, I think, some form of camel whose head tops the second vertical row from the left. The teacher, a young woman not much older than her pupils, stands in the midst of her charges. Looking at this portrait of earnest young children, most of them destined for lives as factory workers, the notion that teaching them how to grow butterfly bushes from seed might in any way empower them or protect the nation's nature seems farfetched.

On the other hand, these children did, I'm sure, learn quite a bit more about plants in school than I ever did. I can only speculate on how their own lessons in gardening changed their lives.

Robin G. Schulze is an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is completing a book entitled "Beyond the Yawp": Nature, Natural History, and the Origins of Modernist Poetry.

Notes

^1.� Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment (1990; reprint, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 25–26.

^2.� William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 263–65.

^3.� Quoted in W. J. Beal, "What Is Nature Study," Science N. S. 16 (5 December 1902): 911.

^4.� David Starr Jordan, "Nature Study and Moral Culture," Science N. S. 4 (7 August 1896): 149.

^5.� John M. Coulter, "Nature Study and Intellectual Culture," Science N. S. 4 (20 November 1896): 742.

^6.� See Gail Bederman's discussion of Hall in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 77–120.

^7.� Clifton F. Hodge, Nature Study and Life (Boston: Athenaeum Press, 1902), 10.

^8.� Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 10.

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