PHR Spring 2013

Penn History Review Journal of Undergraduate Historians Volume 20, Issue 1 Spring 2013

Christopher Allen

Alex Gradwohl

on Kenyan Colonial Missions

on Herbal Abortifacients

Max Levy

Gabriel Fineberg

on the Legacy of Rabbi Hirsch

on Mobile Credit

Penn History Review Journal of Undergraduate Historians Volume 20, Issue 1 Spring 2013 Editor-in-Chief Elya Taichman 2014, Diplomatic History

Editorial Board Alicia DeMaio 2013, American History Madeleine Shiff 2013, European History Brady Sullivan 2013, American History Serena Covkin 2014, American History Catherine Imms 2014, World History Cole Kosydar 2014, American History Gregory Segal 2015, Diplomatic History

ABOUT THE REVIEW Founded in 1991, the Penn History Review is a journal for undergraduate historical research. Published twice a year through the Department of History, the journal is a non-profit publication produced by and primarily for undergraduates. The editorial board of the Review is dedicated to publishing the most original and scholarly research submitted for our consideration. For more information about submissions, please contact us at phrsubmissions@gmail.com.

Funding for this magazine provided by the Department of History, University of Pennsylvania.

Cover image: President Theodore Roosevelt standing on Glacier Point at Yosemite National Park, May 17, 1903.

Source: Harvard Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permissions in writing. The authors and artists who submit their works to Penn History Review retain all rights to their work.

Copyright Š 2013

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Penn History Review Volume 20, Issue 1 Spring 2013 Contents: Letter from the Editor........................................................6 Missions and the Mediation of Modernity in Colonial Kenya Christopher Allen.................................................................8 Herbal Abortifacients and their Classical Heritage in Tudor England Alex Gradwohl...................................................................44 From Torah im Derekh Eretz to Torah U-Madda: the Legacy of Samson Raphael Hirsch Max Levy.........................................................................72 Mobile Credit: The Effect of Credit Cards on Consumer Spending in the United States in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century Gabriel Fineberg................................................................94 Honors Thesis Abstracts History Honors students................................................121

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Letter from the Editor:

We are pleased to present the first issue of the twentieth volume of the Penn History Review, the Ivy League’s oldest undergraduate history journal. The Review continues to publish outstanding papers written by University of Pennsylvania undergraduate students based on original primary research. The four articles selected cover a remarkable array of topics, demonstrating the diversity of Penn’s History Department. In addition to these exemplary articles, the Penn History Review also has the privilege of publishing senior honors theses’ abstracts. The abstracts are not only fascinating, but provide a glimpse into the research history students undertake as part of the Department’s honors program.

Our first article, Missions and the Mediation of Modernity in Colonial Kenya, by Christopher Allen, considers the influence of British missionaries in Kenya during the Colonial era. Allen focuses his research on the intermediary role of missionaries between colonial authorities, settlers, and African interests in the region. Primary sources, including letters and documents from all sides, are integrated into the analysis and make for a fascinating read. The essay serves as an interesting piece of historiography because Allen discusses a side of the missionary story not often told.

The second piece, Herbal Abortifacients and their Classical Heritage in Tudor England, by Alex Gradwohl, explores the extent to which herbal abortifacients were known and used in the Tudor period.

The article proposes that despite a silence from the medical and herbal instructive texts, and a socio-religious taboo on abortions, classical knowledge of herbal abortifacients was preserved and made available to Tudor women. The paper traces the roots of the ancient knowledge of these drugs to Greco-Roman times and explains the measures the Catholic Church took to prohibit their use. Gradwohl also details the types of abortifacients with special emphasis on texts of the Tudor period. The essay closes with a discussion on the social significance of women controlling their own fertility in Tudor England.

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Max Levy authored the next essay, From Torah im Derekh Eretz to Torah U-Madda: the Legacy of Samson Raphael Hirsch. Levy seeks to answer why Rabbi Hirsch, a giant in Torah study in nineteenth century Germany, has faded from the scholarship of Modern Orthodox learning. Indeed, Hirsch built his work on the foundation of ancient and medieval Jewish texts but formulated a unique perspective from which to consider Torah study and Jewish life. Levy looks at the ideological similarities between Hirsch and Modern Orthodox thought, identifies the gap that emerged between the two, and offers several explanations for why this might be the case.

The fourth and final piece, Mobile Credit: The Effect of Credit Cards on Consumer Spending in the United States in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, by Gabriel Fineberg, analyzes the revolutionary changes that credit cards have had on consumerism.

The article details the development of the credit card industry and how such an immense business became possible. Fineberg then proves that credit cards transformed consumer spending because they combined effective payment mechanisms with unique borrowing features enabling consumers to spend great quantities with greater ease. The essay presents compelling quantitative and qualitative data in addition to psychological analysis on how credit cards affect consumer behavior.

The Review would like to thank the many members of the history faculty who encouraged their students to submit their work for publication, as well as Dr. Thomas Max Safley, the undergraduate chair of the History Department, for his support, Dr. Yvonne Fabella, without whom there would be no publication, and, of course, the History Department and the University of Pennsylvania for their ever generous financial support and their continuing efforts to promote undergraduate research and the study of history. Lastly, I would like to thank the Editorial Board, without whose editing and hard work none of this would have been possible.

Elya A. Taichman Editor-in-Chief

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Photograph of an unnamed Tugen tribesman at Lake Baringo, Kenya

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Missions and the Mediation of Modernity in Colonial Kenya Christopher Allen “One would scarcely believe it possible that a centre so new should be able to develop so many divergent and conflicting interests… There are already in miniature all the elements of keen political and racial discord… The white man versus the black; … the official class against the unofficial… all these different points of view, naturally arising, honestly adopted, tenaciously held, and not yet reconciled into any harmonious general conception, confront the visitor in perplexing disarray.”

– Winston Churchill, My African Journey1

European missionaries played a crucial role in colonial development. Colonial East Africa, throughout its history of settlement and control by the British, from early exploration to the State’s origin as the East Africa Protectorate (1895 until 1920) to its later status as Kenya Colony (1920 until independence in 1963), was an environment in which settlers, colonial authorities, and missionaries found themselves inextricably connected.

Dependent on each other, these relationships were often symbiotic. However, while this “white man’s country” more than 4,000 miles from London encouraged the positive development of relationships between these disparate European coteries and allowed each group unique possibilities for expansion, the associations were not always without friction.2 The relationship between settlers, missionaries, and colonial authorities in Kenya was also tenuous. Divided by socioeconomic background, economic interest, cultural pursuits, moral identity, and legalpolitical beliefs, the groups shared little beyond skin color. While all three parties were concerned with pacifying and proselytizing

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Africans, they often pursued conflicting agendas according to their interests. Settlers, those Europeans (usually British) who came to profit from the economic opportunities in East Africa, developed farms and cultivated livestock and were most focused on economic issues. The British government and its representatives and administrators in Africa were motivated by the economic development and political stability of Kenya. Missionaries, however, were focused on Africans’ sociopolitical condition and concerned with disseminating religious ideology; their efforts resulted in the integration of Africans’ into the new European socio-cultural and economic framework. During the later stages of colonial rule, the agendas of the settlers and the Government were increasingly in conflict as the British government attempted to provide more pacifistic legislation at the expense of settlers’ economic and political-judicial interests. Missionaries found themselves caught between defending African interests and maintaining Kenya’s position as a colony in the British Empire.3 Essentially removed from the economic concerns of settlers and colonial authorities, missionaries advocated for European policies that often amounted to a political-economic morality (though their own policies directed towards Africans ultimately imposed a certain religious and secular morality).4 Because they were largely unconstrained by government determined legal delimitations and managed to avoid much of the hostility Africans directed towards colonial agents, Missions were an efficacious means of influence.5 The activities of missionaries in Europe and Africa, while often motivated by self-interest, helped to balance the social, economic, and political agendas of settlers and colonial authorities. Moreover, missionaries fundamentally shifted African socio-economic culture towards the British model. They played a crucial role in developing stable relationships with sometimes-aggressive African ethnic groups and helped to provide pacification through non-militaristic means for the benefit of both settlers and colonial authorities alike. This essay will explore the relationships between the 10

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three groups and ultimately suggest that missionaries played an important role in mediating the development of Kenya, helping to create a state that propagated and balanced settler, colonial, and African interests.

East Africa’s geo-economic limitations imposed on both settlers and colonial authorities. Natural resources were less in Kenya than in other colonies and its industrialization was, for this reason, limited.6 The geo-economic realities of the Colony meant that economic development during the colonial period never progressed far beyond agriculture and trade, giving the small group of farmer-settlers who first colonized the region significant political-economic advantage. In order to develop agriculture in new colonial communities, settlers relied on British support and investment. In turn, these settlers were “deliberately encouraged… to make [colonial investment] pay”; the British government sought “to recoup imperial outlays on the defense, administration, and railway” and believed settlers were the means by which this might be accomplished.7 This dependency afforded the settlers political-economic influence in London. However, while colonial authorities saw the settlers as “agents” of the Crown, the comparatively small settler population viewed African labour as a crucial component in the Colony’s development; in fact, it was so important that “the demand for labour [was] a sufficient basis for the conservation of native life.” Settlers and colonial authorities both gave great weight to “the importance of the masses, to direct them in agricultural and industrial activities essential… to the larger economic operations of the Colony.”8 While these limitations and considerations initially aligned settlers and colonial authorities economically, they would eventually prove divisive as questions regarding the place of African ethnic groups imposed politically and economically on both groups.

The colonial agenda for Kenyan development was dependent on a stable state and a favorable economic situation; thus, colonial authorities were necessarily focused on Penn History Review

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socioeconomic development. Especially during the early period of colonialism in Kenya, the British government advocated for a policy of indirect rule in order to minimize the costs associated with colonial expansion – this meant that the relationships with local leaders in which colonial authorities, settlers, and missionaries alike were all necessarily involved were extremely important to maintaining sociopolitical stability and economic advantage.9 However, it largely fell to missionaries to cultivate a stable socio-political environment in which colonialism could be successful. The Kenya Report on Disturbances argued that “[t] he Government has shown very clearly that it looks to Christian forces to… [fight an] Ideological war.”10 Unlike the missions, settlers and colonial authorities remained physically and socially separate from African ethnic groups. Though missionaries were often able to establish amicable relationships with African ethnic groups through non-violent means (such as education or medical care), colonial authorities frequently used violence in order to reinforce European superiority and enforce British legislation.

Accordingly, Sir Charles Eliot, the colonial administrator and Commissioner for the Protectorate wrote in 1905 that “[a] lthough [certain aspects of the colonial agenda] could only have been abolished by force and the strong arm of Government, we must not forget the immense debt which Africa owes to gentler methods, to moral influence and missionary enterprise.”11 Britain’s efforts to establish economic and political control resulted in a decline in the African population of more than twenty-five percent in the generation after 1900, largely because of the Government’s nationally pervasive, “systematic[ly] aggressive” colonial agenda.12 However, as Eliot suggests, the missions provided an alternative to the British government’s more aggressive policies, allowing Britain to exert comprehensive influence on colonial African society.

While they forcibly established political and economic control of East Africa, the British government depended on settlers to develop Kenya’s economy; in turn, those 12

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Unidentified Photographer, Missionary Fathers with Villagers, ca. 1920-1940, Kenya, postcard

Unidentified Photographer, Missionary Father with Villagers, ca. 1920-1940, Kenya, postcard

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settlers were dependent on the government to subsidize their economic initiatives. Both groups believed in their racialeconomic superiority and political dominance. British colonel Richard Meinertzhagen records his discussion with the High Commissioner Charles Eliot on that colonial administrator’s vision of Kenya: [He] envisaged a thriving colony of thousands of Europeans with their families [and] intends to confine the natives to reserves and use them as cheap labour on farms. I suggested that the country belonged to Africans and that their interests must prevail over the interests of strangers. He would not have it; he kept on using the word “paramount” with reference to the claims of Europeans.

I said that some day the African would be educated and armed; that would lead to a clash. Eliot thought that that day was so far distant as not to matter and that by that time the European element would be strong enough to look after themselves; but I am convinced that in the end the Africans will win and that Eliot’s policy can lead only to trouble and disappointment.13 Here, Meinertzhagen highlights the sentiment of superiority that shaped colonial and settler relations with African ethnic groups.

He also describes Eliot’s vision of an Africa economically dominated by British landowners and reliant on the exploitation of Africans. Though the conversation took place in 1902, Meinertzhagen presciently alludes to the conflict that such a system would precipitate. It is exactly this socioeconomic dichotomy that missionaries helped to mediate, minimizing violent conflict for decades by reshaping African ethnic groups in ways that made them more socioeconomically and politically compatible with settler and colonial ideologies (especially through educational programs) while also curtailing the extent to which these politically abrasive British policies could be 14

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implemented. W. McGregor Ross, the Director of Public Works in East Africa between 1905 and 1923 and a member of the Legislative Council between 1916 and 1922, argued that “[m] issionaries were enlightened, in some measure, as to the possible trend of events, and were given to understand that they would be expected to use their influence to maintain calm in the native districts around them.”14 He suggests that an awareness of the parochial environment and of regional attitudes in conjunction with influence on their local communities often allowed the missions to establish a détente between European and African coteries with conflicting interests.

Settlement was an instrument of British policy over which the Colonial Authority wanted to maintain control and which they tried to shape through their political and economic agenda.15 During the early period of colonialism in Kenya, land was given away to the East African Syndicate, “[a] powerful syndicate with influential directors in London”, and sold cheaply to settlers.16 This land was too valuable to white colonists for it to be “lock[ed] up” in African control.17 However, since land was widely available and political regulation was lax, its distribution became increasingly difficult to regulate: “the Norfolk [Hotel and bar] was dubbed ‘The House of Lords’ where, it was claimed, more [extra-legal] land transactions took place at its bar than anywhere else in the Protectorate.”18 This sort of informal distribution of land precluded government control (but might be considered part of their laissez-faire economic agenda for the early stages of the Colony’s development) and came at the expense of natives’ access to fertile grazing grounds and agricultural plots. In response, missionaries advocated for the ability of Africans to have guaranteed ownership of land and attacked the Government and the Kenya Land Commission for their inequitable land distribution policies. In a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Dr. Norman Leys, an influential member of the Church and its mission, a medical officer in Nyasaland, and an historian of Kenya, details the Penn History Review

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problems associated with the Colonial Office’s land policies and the “economic” unrest it produced. Reflecting on the difficult conditions under which Africans were living in 1918,19 Leys suggests that it is: an immediate necessity that governments in Eastern Africa should ensure for every family rent free land as secure in law as the land that the Crown has granted to Europeans. This rent free land must furthermore be situated in the area of the tribe to which the family belongs, and it must be adequate to the cultivation of crops for sale. These conditions are each strictly necessary if the general suspicion natives have that they are being squeezed out of the free occupation of land in their own country is to dispelled.… Unrest is probably nowhere else so great in Eastern Africa as it is among those who pay Europeans every year in rent several times larger than the purchase price paid to the Government by the Europeans for the land used, land in many cases which natives regard as the property neither of Government nor of individual Europeans but as their own.… [T]here can be no reason why at this time of day the law should give the occupying native no protection against the confiscation of his land, except the fact that the government never knows when it may discover that it wishes to confiscate.20 In a “Memorandum on the Land Question in Tropical Africa” written for the Mandates Committee of the League of Nations in 1922, Leys argues in a similar vein, outlining problems as well as potential policies in order to ensure the stability of the Colony and the well-being of its African residents.21 The Church’s international influence highlighted those concerns that Africans were unable to voice. The Mission brought the regional problems of those who were disenfranchised to both a popular 16

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and a political audience, describing land abuses in newspapers and in Parliament, the League of Nations and Whitehall. While the colonial Government ignored its regional commissioners arguing for similar policies,22 the powerful Church lobby would allow for a more politically assertive position on the part of the Missions. The intervention of the State and its efforts to develop the settler economy, balance settler and African political positions, and delimit African sociopolitical autonomy encouraged the development of a productive capitalist economy, but also had negative socioeconomic and political implications for Africans. Writing in 1939, Albert Colby Cooke, a contemporary of the colonial establishment, describes a “dependent empire” reliant on both “the British people”, who contributed to its expansion and the “good faith of the Colonial Office”, which made such individual outlays and national growth possible. He further suggests that it was predominantly settlers (rather than Africans) who benefitted from the “roads and water supply”, “[a]gricultural subsidies” and “scientific research services and agricultural education” provided by the Government.23 The British Colonial Office leveraged its political authority, secured through its investment in the Colony, in a judicious manner. Though colonial authorities were involved in the economic development of the State, they limited their judicial and political engagement. At a dinner hosted in 1923 by the Royal African Society, a group representing settlers, the Duke of Devonshire, Secretary of State for the Colonies claimed, [T]he policy which [the British Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin’s] Government was hoping to pursue was that which provided tranquillity to other people. I do not think that either [Baldwin] or any of his colleagues had any illusions on the subject that however successful they might be in attaining that object, they would not be able to participate to any extent in that state.24

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At this gathering sponsored by those settlers who were often beneficiaries of the colonial system, the Duke of Devonshire suggests that it is in the best interests of the British state to minimize its involvement in the everyday social and political function of Kenya. His position of respect at the dinner demonstrates the cordial tenor and reciprocal nature of the colonist-settler relationship. The Duke of Devonshire’s comments highlight the minimal role both settlers and colonial authorities believed the British government should play in the operation of the State in order to “provide tranquillity to other people.” While the Duke of Devonshire does not specify who these people are, those to whom the Government most often afforded “tranquillity” through legitimatized political means were settlers, though the stability of the State depended on the peaceable order of local interest groups. While district commissioners were involved in the State’s functioning, their judicial, social, and political suggestions were often ignored by the colonial authorities in Nairobi or the British government in Whitehall.25 The Colonial Office was cautious in dealing with complex or costly issues or becoming involved in situations in which the imposition of a political agenda could interfere with the socioeconomic stability of the state. In most cases, the British authorities shaped their agenda around the interests of settlers rather than Africans. It would take the strong political lobby of the Church to precipitate change within the colonial bureaucracy and to mediate the political and economic tensions that did arise between settlers and colonists.

Settlers advocated, in both London and Nairobi, for policies that would promote their own economic interests.

These “economic nationalists” lobbied for policies that would stimulate the internal market by legitimizing a socioeconomicracial hierarchy and favoritism that allowed for the exploitation of Africans and African land in order to support white settler industry and agriculture.26 In an article in the Kenya Weekly News entitled, “Settler’s Role?” an anonymous “Englishman” 18

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describes the agenda and political-economic opinions of white landowners in Kenya: Jefferson held that Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness are the right of every man. And Mozeljkatse, King of the Matabele, held the land, the rain, and the sun are his right. Are they? Show me the contract showing that you will not accept existence without these various boons. They are all, indeed, not rights, but rewards.

If Africa, America, Australia lay uncultivated under wandering bands of lazy savages they were justly taken for the home-lands of those escaping from the weariness, the fever and the fret…. Where men sit and hear each other groan. … Everyone then has the right to earn liberty, happiness, a place on the land, in the sun and the rain?’ Surely this explains at least some of the reasons for the Settlers coming, and justifies their colonisation.27 The passage suggests the capitalist political-economic agenda of the “Englishman,” or rather, English settlers en bloc.

The “Englishman” argues for a political framework that accommodates, within capitalist doctrine, settlers’ land grabbing and their exploitation of natives. Moreover, the letter also alludes to the expectations settlers had of their government and the opportunities they were promised. Settlers colonized East Africa in tandem with the Government; the symbiotic relationship between the two groups shaped, at least in the late nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, expectations of policy and production. Settlers aimed “to ensure that the metropole makes no liberalising concessions to the black majorities, and the basic method is constant reactive clamour and blocking manoeuvres.”28 And indeed, often, Kenyan settlers were effective. Their aristocratic position (one British paper called them “Bluebloods in the Wilds”) and social and educational background afforded them “close and intimate Penn History Review

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connections with the ruling elites of twentieth century Britain.”29 The socioeconomic similarities amongst the settlers also meant that they held similar positions on important political and economic issues and forged close connections with officials in London.30

The political and economic sway settlers held allowed them to shape the colonial world in a significant way. In a letter to the Colonial Secretary in 1918, Dr. Norman Leys wrote, “[European landholders] control and direct… life in all its phases… These few hundred men with their agents and dependents in trade, form a highly organized body, represented on the legislature and acutely conscious of their position.”31 Leys, a Christian Socialist, draws attention to the political and economic power of settlers over the lives of Africans. However, Ley’s religious and political affiliations as well as the recipient of his letter, namely the Colonial Secretary, demonstrate the way in which religious-humanitarian ideology and its corresponding political principles were increasingly being communicated to government officials. His political ideology spread throughout Europe and became popular amongst church leaders such as Handley Hooper, a member of the Church Missionary Society; Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury; and J. H. Oldham, the secretary of the International Missionary Council, all of whom eventually advocated similar positions.32 Leys also carried influence within the Colonial Office itself: J. H. Oldham wrote in 1925, soon after the publishing of Leys’ Kenya, that “I am told that your book has woken up the Colonial Office…”33 Indeed, Leys himself had “no doubt that… my book has induced a change of policy.”34 It was with the support of individual, influential members of the Church and with the advocacy of the Church institutions with which they were affiliated that policy in Britain could be influenced.35 The ideological alliance of Church leaders, missionary organizations, and humanitarian groups amounted to an effective political lobbying tool, enabling the groups to advocate for a moral component of politics. The 20

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vocal lobby, comprised of such groups as the Church Missionary Society, Aborigines Protection Society (with its Quaker roots and affiliation), the International Missionary Council, and the London Missionary Society, articulated the concerns of missionaries in Kenya to politicians and to the public, precipitating shifts in British colonial policy.36

Both missionaries and settlers formed powerful political lobbies. Though missions did not share the same socioeconomic relationship that settlers did with colonial authorities and British politicians, they invested in a similar approach, competing for the ear of politicians in Whitehall, especially through public campaigns. Public outreach would galvanize the public and encourage the response of the political establishment. In a letter to Norman Leys, J.H. Oldham wrote, “I agree with you entirely as to the primary importance of publicity…. Publicity is a comparatively clear issue. I agree, as I have said, that it is the first thing and I am trying, so far as time and strength permit, to assist in it…. Assisting in publicity is a continuous job and I am doing, and will continue to do, all I can find time for…”37 Major political-ideological advocates for missionaries included the London Missionary Society, the Church of Scotland Mission, and the Church Missionary Society while the Archbishop of Canterbury helped missionaries engage the public and influence the political elite. In 1918, Protestant missions established an alliance, which served as a liaison with the Government, facilitating discussion based on empirical research in the Colony, and sociopolitical policy suggestions.38 The missions also sought sympathetic members of Parliament and influential government figures or members of the aristocracy to promote their ideological agenda politically. During the circumcision debates in 1929 for example, though missionaries failed to change public policy, they obtained the support of Katharine Stewart-Murray, the Duchess of Atholl, who became a keen political advocate for them.

While lobbies may not have been the most productive way for missions to effect sociopolitical change, the politicized Penn History Review

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advocacy of the Church in support of African interests was difficult to ignore.39 Settlers, colonial authorities, and Christian missionaries themselves recognized the role the missions played, or could play, in influencing government policy. W. McGregor Ross, writing in 1927, described the “remarkable” efforts of the Church Missionary Society, which “can now be seen to have had a profound influence upon British policy in Central Africa, and consequently upon the destinies of millions of African natives.…”40 The lobbying effort of the Church in conjunction with the missions’ public outreach, affected politicians to such a degree that the British “Government found it a matter of increasing difficulty to face Parliament with any concurrence.”41 Education proved to be a crucial tool to develop and control Kenya. The size of the state made administration difficult, especially because Kenya had a relatively small administrative staff. The 250,000 square miles and the numerous African ethnic groups that made up the Colony were challenging to pacify and shape.42 Education allowed Europeans to mold the state from the bottom up and its power to influence Africans made it a point of contention for settlers, missionaries, and colonial authorities. It was, however, missionaries who primarily controlled education during the colonial administration of the colony. Settlers argued vociferously that missionary education was “‘spoiling the native’” and caused “the disruption of tribal life… which made administration difficult.”43 These British settlers supported missionary efforts in so far as they overlapped with their own interests, but had little regard for African societies or developing natives for any purpose other than their own economic benefit.44 The limited investment of the Colonial Office and their expenditures aimed at developing the economic infrastructure of the country left little money to devote to education; consequently, missionary education proved the most efficacious manner by which colonial authorities could provide instruction at least approximately like that they had imagined. Moreover, it was through their educational 22

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programs that missions were able to shape African society. John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman argue that one of the colonizers’ primary goals in Kenya was “to convert [their] superior coercive force over Africans into a legitimate authority accepted by Africans and therefore mediated through their own pre-existing or emergent relations of power.”45 Missionary education introduced European ideology to Africans in an acceptable, or indeed, even socially and economically valuable way, while encouraging African ethnic groups to empathize and at least tacitly accept colonial authority.46 Members of the Kikuyu, an ethnic group in East Africa, claimed that “[t]he Gospel… began to form a new nation from that of old Kikuyu.… We are at the beginning of a great building up of new customs and the forming of Christianity.”47 Through their intellectual and spiritual proselytization, missionaries exerted such influence that they were able to establish the Kikuyu Association, which was led by chiefs who sided with British colonial authorities. Missionary education connected African ethnic groups to British colonial authorities by legitimizing Europeanization and providing the ideological and moral structure upon which the colonial authorities could establish their own authority48 and institutions as well as providing Africans with the skills they would need to survive in (or support) a European-structured economy. Leys argued that the “chief aim” of the State-sponsored education the missions provided was “[exploitive] wealth production” while the Kenya Missionary Council argued that “[t]he main needs of the adult population are agricultural rather than literary. The efforts of Missions must be ancillary to the activities of Government, which alone can plan on an effective scale.”49 Both passages suggest an inextricable connection between Government and Church that was manifest in education, one which reinforced the racial-economic hierarchy and supported Africans only in so far as it allowed them to function within, and provide support for, the colonial sociopolitical and economic construct.

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Unidentified Photographer, Children in a Classroom, ca. 1920-1940, Kenya

While settlers and colonial authorities blamed missionaries for destabilizing African ethnic groups and interfering with “tribal life,” colonial authorities recognized the importance of developing a European-educated ethnic population familiar with colonial culture, rather than one only trained to work on settler farms. Ultimately, these divergent interests were reconciled through the educational program of the missions: The primary object of mission education is to make Christianity intelligible. The Government’s chief care is to make Africans obedient subjects and diligent producers of wealth, while the great aim of European planters and merchants is to make as many Africans as possible work for wages. These obviously different motives involve different educational ideals. Some compromise between them is of course possible and, as things are, inevitable.… Missionaries recognise perfectly well that education should not only provide information 24

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and stimulate intelligence, but also fit Africans for their place in society… [I]ndustrial training on any scale by both Catholic and Protestant missions began only when, several years ago, Government first gave substantial grants in aid.… European opinion in Kenya thinks it is the duty of missions to turn out large numbers of workers in metal, stone, bricks and wood, clerks, printers, telegraphists, and so forth for work in both official and private employment. Many missionaries nowadays accept that duty thus urged upon them.… inevitably mission education is increasingly devoted to supplying ordinary commercial demands.50 This approach to education, one that integrated the pedagogical objectives of the colonial administration and settlers with the spiritual emphasis of the missions, stemmed directly from the colonial government that subsidized academic outreach.

However, this synthesis of objectives was not manifest clearly in the classroom, especially after the Government began to support education financially. The confidential minutes of J. H. Oldham’s speech at the Conference on Christian Education in East Africa in June, 1930 detail the problems of this sociopoliticaleconomic-academic construct in practice: “[t]he accepted theory was that Government and missions were partners in education and that missions should not only have a share in the conduct of education, but also be allowed a voice in the shaping of policy. In actual fact the partnership tended to work out in a very one-sided fashion [in favour of the Government].”51 In effect, missionaries had established themselves as social and economic agents of the empire, acting through education to shape the Colony and the Africans therein.

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to, a more traditional African milieu. The Church recognized the importance of mission schools and in the 1926 edition of The Church Missionary Outlook argued that “[i]n Kenya... the mission school is the most successful evangelistic agency that we have”.52 This intellectual proselytization was important because “[w]hat alone in the end really matters in Kenya is what goes on in the minds of Africans.” The Church played a seminal role in this process, “forming afresh [Africans’] conceptions of duty and their ideas of society.”53 In a letter to the Director of Education in Kenya the Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa lists, among other benefits of education, the “[e]limination of political, economic, and social unrest [and the] [d]evelopment of Colonial patriotism and loyalty to the Crown.”54 The letter also suggests that education could provide “sensible native leadership entirely loyal to the real interests of the Colony” and might “encourage all forms of cooperation both with Government and also with the non-African elements of the population who are vitally concerned in the welfare of the Colony.”55 Indeed, a report by the Headmaster of the Kikuyu Alliance High School confirms that missionary schools had the “opportunity” to mold students, as “[m]ost of the future leaders of the country pass through our hands.”56 These were leaders that had been “raise[d] up… both for the Church and for the State.”57 Missionary education, Norman Leys suggests, “enabled Europeans to subjugate [Africans]” and “taught [them] their place in the world” – it provided a means by which the Government could pacify, shape, and control an unruly African populace, giving them the skills to succeed (or survive) in a European-structured economy and shaping their character in such a way as to encourage a receptivity towards the European system.58 While the education missions provided mediated the development of Kenya by Europeanizing African ethnic groups and encouraging the adoption of British ideology, it also gave Africans the tools to resist colonial authority later in the twentieth 26

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century. Missions supported local governments (even while trying to influence them) and missionary education allowed African ethnic groups to respond to colonialism, articulating themselves in a linguistic, cultural, political, and economic manner that Europeans could understand. Settlers believed that missionary education encouraged the dissolution of the “racial hierarchy� and while this might not have been the agenda all of the missions had in mind, education certainly helped to precipitate some of the African-led socioeconomic shifts that occurred towards the end of colonial rule (for example, Jomo Kenyatta, the first prime minister of Kenya and an outspoken critic of the colonial Government, was a product of mission schools ).59 Many African communities appreciated the education they received from missions for exactly this reason.60 Despite their amenable relationship with the colonial Government, missionaries were able to advocate for social changes that shifted the socio-political position of Africans and altered their relationship with settlers, disrupting the established hierarchy. The education missions provided, even while it imposed on natives from the colonial level, would encourage social, cultural, and economic change from the subaltern level, allowing Africans to redefine the structure of Kenyan society even while being influenced by Europeans.61 Though lobbies and government petitions were not always an effective way for missionary groups to create societal change, education allowed them a chance to encourage certain cultural shifts through the influence of Africans themselves.

While the British government shaped policy and law in the colonies, its proclivity towards indirect rule meant that its presence was not overbearing in Kenya. Rather than petition for specific legislation, settlers often advocated for decreased government involvement in what they saw as their land and their state.62 This philosophy persisted until the mid-nineteen twenties at which point the threat of rebellion amongst African groups required British intervention. In early colonial Kenya, there was an “essential irrelevance of constitutional forms in a Penn History Review

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settler society.”63 In one instance, when the Land Office would not approve a site chosen by Lord Delamere for a flour mill, he arranged for a band of natives to light a fire under their building – after they piled firewood around the stilts of the structure, the bureaucrats inside reluctantly acceded to his requests.64 In another instance of recalcitrance, settlers threatened to kidnap the governor and take political and administrative control of the Colony when they were worried about their interests being ignored. James Griffiths, the British Colonial Secretary, claimed after his visit to Kenya that “settlers ‘indicated that any [political] changes imposed on us against our wishes would be resisted, even to the extent of unconstitutional action.’”65 Lord Cranworth, a British settler managing a farm in Kenya, “was only half-kidding” when he described the country as a place where “‘[t]here are some settlers who stone their Governors and shoot natives.’”66 However, the British government frequently condoned behavior of settlers because often, the agendas of the two groups overlapped: the settlers’ economic interests constituted a crucial component of the Government’s plan for colonialism. In addition, the conservative political stance of settlers and their position of economic control made it difficult to impose progressive policies from London.67 The Duke of Devonshire, Secretary of State for the Colonies, implied as much in his 1923 address to the African Society: “I should have thought it would have been more appropriate if the African Society had devoted the evening to addressing the Secretary of State rather than the Secretary of State attempting to address the African Society.”68 Here, the Secretary of State for the Colonies irreverently acknowledges the inversion of the customary socioeconomic-political hierarchy in which settlers were now demanding the attention of politicians. The passage also suggests that colonial authorities struggled to see “African Society” as made up of anything more than European settlers.

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development, missionaries tried to mediate the development of the State through its subaltern culture (especially through education) as well as by appealing to the British public.

Organizations and individuals were able to influence British policy by petitioning government officials and campaigning for public support. Often, however, it was public support that shaped the colonial system on the ground, rather than advocacy directed towards individuals in government.

General Philip Wheatley, a soldier, newspaper correspondent, and Kenyan settler who moved to the Colony in 1919, argued, “‘after all, in the ultimate result, it will be the simple English voter who will decide [on many of the issues associated with colonialism].’” 69 Indeed, Leys writes that “If O[rmsby]-G[ore],” the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1922-1929 and Colonial Secretary between 1936 and 1938, “thinks he can do anything whatever in E. Africa without the public behind him he must be even more easily deceived than I had feared.”70 One article published in the local Huddersfield Examiner newspaper on June 1, 1923 begins, “How Kenya colony shall be governed may not seem a question that touches very intimately the lives of Huddersfield folk, but it is, nevertheless, one for which none of us can shirk responsibility. We are all of us citizens of the British Empire…”71 Newspapers encouraged British citizens to become politically involved, while also providing an important avenue by which to shape public opinion. Lord Delamere recognized this when he cabled The Times [of London]: “…Is British taxpayer, proprietor of East Africa, content that beautiful and valuable country be handed over… Englishmen here appeal public opinion, especially those who know this country, against the arbitrary proceeding and consequent swamping bright future of the country.”72 His cable cost £20 in 1904, the equivalent to about £1,150 or $1,700 today.73 He would later have a pamphlet printed in order to further shape the public position. Both the cost and content of the cable demonstrate the importance of public opinion in shaping colonial policy.

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Missionaries were cognizant of the value public support could have on promoting their political positions. They relied on individuals like Bishop Willis, Bishop Peel, Handley Hooper, J. H. Oldham, Norman Leys, the Archbishop of Canterbury, J. W. Arthur, and Randall Davidson among other Church officials and religious leaders to influence public opinion. These people were intimately connected with the activities of missionaries in Kenya and their perspectives on colonial life and the condition of African ethnic groups. A letter from Norman Leys to J. H. describes the structure and agenda of the missionary lobby and its relationship with the British public: “The real work [is] done by thousands [of Church affiliates] who with common conscious aim ripened public opinion. That is what is needed for Kenya…

Publish the facts and get people to lay them alongside their consciences and their intelligences and the question what should be done will answer itself.”74 Many members of the British public saw missionaries and their political, ideological, and spiritual advocates in Britain as “the ‘conscience of empire,’” providing them with information about, and context for, government policies.75 One letter from a missionary in Nairobi to Rev. H. D. Hooper at the Church Missionary Society describes European abuses on mining reserves in Kenya and links those missionaries doing work in the Colony with Church officials in Britain lobbying for policy changes: We did all we could this end but it is a pretty hopeless fight… The Bill went through the second and third reading on Wednesday, and the Secretary of State for the Colonies having already given his sanction before it went to Legislative Council; it has become law!... Canon Burns has fought this Bill with all his power, and he told them quite plainly that if we had the rush of Europeans in the Kavirondo Reserve it would only end one way, and that would be a fight, and we know who will suffer, not the prospector but the unfortunate native.… [I]t 30

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makes me wild to think the way [the Colonial authorities] are behaving in the Kavirondo reserve. I think that with these papers [attached to the letter] I have given you all the information that I can. I know that you will leave no stone unturned to help us.76 Letters like these gave popular Church leaders and influential members of religious institutions like the Church Missionary Society (here, for example, Handley Hooper) the information they used to influence public sentiment. This partnership between missionaries and public figures in London resulted in a number of popular published criticisms of government, seen in innumerable letters to the editor and editorials published in British papers, and affected government policy to such a degree that missionary groups were criticized by colonialists for their support of African ethnic groups and their willingness to press the public to support native interests.77 Missionary groups and Church-affiliated institutions proved to be extremely effective at molding public opinion, enabling them to shape the colonial state and circumvent the close personal relationship that colonial settlers and British politicians shared.

Missions played a difficult but important role in the colonial empire, specifically in Kenya. Colonial influence, the driving force behind the modernization of Kenya, was not imposed only by the metropole through its agents; rather, it was exerted through the economic pressure of settlers, through religious and humanitarian groups in Britain, and perhaps most significantly, through those European missions which would educate, influence, advocate for, and pacify native Kenyans.

Missions were able to assuage the difficulties associated with colonial assimilation: Africans “almost to a man, they used to hate us Europeans (they certainly looked like it) but now God has done something for them that has taken away all that hate and given them the clue to finding the answers that their people need.�78 The influence of missions was profound and while the Penn History Review

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Government was effectively limited to controlling policy and settlers and to influencing socioeconomic measures, missions were able to mediate policy and shape the lives of Africans.

Indeed, the Commissioner for the Protectorate, Sir Charles Eliot, claimed that “[t]he opening of a new mission station has seemed to me to be generally as efficacious for the extension of European influence as the opening of a Government station, and there are districts in East Africa… in which European influence has hitherto been represented almost entirely by missionaries, but which have made as great progress as the regions which have been taken in hand by Government officials.”79 However, caught between disparate agendas, the position of missions was a challenging one. They found themselves responsible for advocating for those Africans whose support they managed to co-opt only by defending their interests while at the same time, missionaries’ position as white Europeans in Africa dependent on British government support tied them ineluctably to the settler and colonial coteries. Missionaries saw themselves as responsible for defending a rapidly growing settler population and were reliant on a system of colonial support that provided them with the law, order, and protection they needed to effect change. Missionaries’ ability to encourage change operated on a number of different levels. The political lobby provided an effective means by which the missionaries could reach politicians directly while education in Kenya and public political-ideological campaigns in Britain allowed them to shape policy through the popular support of their agenda. The missionary position was one that had to balance conflicting interests; nonetheless, the inextricable connection between the missions and all of the major socioeconomic groups in Britain and Kenya and their comprehensive approach to creating social, cultural, political, and economic change ensured that the missions played an important role in mediating the development of colonial Kenya.

1 Winston Churchill, My African Journey (1908, Reprint London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 18.

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Sir Charles Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), 302.

3 See, for instance, the white paper, Indians in Kenya: Memorandum (1923) which, while it was intended to resolve the conflict between Indians and Europeans, did so by giving “paramountcy [sic] of African interests” in the colony. It was “also a response to pressures from the International Missionary Society and the archbishop of Canterbury.” (Irving Kaplan et al., Area Handbook for Kenya, 31) 4 Missions could “‘exert a formative influence on [African] social life’” (J. H. Oldham) and their “‘aspiration after a new world-order will be ineffective unless education .. is built on a profoundly Christian basis. Without Christ in our schools we shall fight in vain for Christian civilisation. Therefore let us see to it that our boys and girls, the hope of the future, grow up with a genuine knowledge of Christ which will influence their whole outlook upon life. A general acceptance of the meaning of moral terms, based upon the definite teaching of Christianity, can alone lead the peoples… to a permanent and mutual understanding.’”(Cardinal Hinsley, The Listener (14 December 1939), in Kenya Missionary Council, Report of the Committee on Educational Policy (Nairobi: 21 June, 1940), 2).

5 “If missions come to be regarded by the natives as a department of State, their influence in the future will be totally destroyed.” Norman Leys to the Editor of The Scots Observer (Glasgow), 25 December 1926, in Norman Leys and J. H. Oldham, By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys and J. H. Oldham, 1918-1926, ed. John W. Cell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 294.

6 Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 14.4 (Dec. 1976), 598; “Explorers of Kenya … as well as IBEAC and later protectorate officials, had not learned of any exploitable mineral deposits that might have offered a solution to the protectorate’s early economic problems. The 2

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lack of any important mineral resources… was confirmed by comprehensive surveys in 1902 and 1903, and experts and the government concluded that agriculture for export was the only way to make the protectorate pay for itself.” (Irving Kaplan et al., Area Handbook for Kenya (Washington D.C.: American University, 1976), 27).

7 Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” 602; M. P. K. Sorrenson, Origins of European Settlement in Kenya (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968), 48.

8 Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa, African No. 1100, CO 879/121/4, 224.

9 Irving Kaplan et al., Area Handbook for Kenya (Washington D.C.: American University Press, 1976), 20.

10 Kenya Report on Disturbances, 1949, 2.

11 Sir Charles Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate, 239.

12 Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” 599-601; It should be noted that famine as a product of settlers’ agricultural efforts and economic agenda as well as disease contributed to this figure as well.

13 Richard Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary: 1902-1906 (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1957), 31.

14 W. McGregor Ross, Kenya from Within: A Short Political History (1927: London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1968), 376.

15 Even British settlers were limited by colonial authority: Lord Delamere, one of the earliest colonial settlers, requested land three times and was denied twice because the colonial authorities had objections to his requested allotment. (Errol Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers (London: Heinemann, 1985), 82.)

16 Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers, 100.

17 Ukamba Province Land file, Eliot to Landsdowne. From: Michael Thomason, “Little Tin Gods: The District Officer in 34

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British East Africa,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1975): 153.

18 Trzebinski, The Kenya Pioneers, 102.

19 “Analysis reveals the simplest fact of unrest, although not probably the most important in the end, to be economic….

These economic grievances arise out of the conditions of land tenure and of labour for Europeans. No detailed description of the varying conditions under which land is held and cultivated is necessary. It is sufficient to mention the fact that nowhere except in the ten mile strip on the coast—and there almost all the land has passed out of native ownership—has any native individual, family or tribe legal title to any land, and the equally important fact that besides thousands of natives who are entirely dependent for food on land held under Europeans, land for which they often have to pay rent either in money or in unpaid labour, there is a much larger number of natives who have merely just enough ground on which to grow their necessary food to whom it is quite impossible to grow crops for sale, wherewith to pay the tax money and to buy trade goods.”

Letter from Dr. Norman Leys, Medical Officer, Nyasaland to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Downing Street, 7 February 1918. From: Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, ed. John W. Cell, 91-2.

20 Letter of Dr. Norman Leys, Medical Officer, Nyasaland to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Downing Street, 7 February 1918, Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, 92.

21 “To sum up, Europe has hitherto failed, in four-fifths of tropical Africa, to protect native land rights from spoliation.

Nothing has been done or is being done to render impossible the alienation of such land as Africans still occupy.” Leys, “Memorandum on the Land Question in Tropical Africa,” for the Mandates committee of the League of Nations Union. 15 February 1922 [Edinburgh House, Box 200], Leys and Oldham,

By Kenya Possessed, 211, 215.

22 See: Michael Thomason, “Little Tin Gods: The District Penn History Review

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Officer in British East Africa,” 153.

23 Albert Colby Cooke, 138-139.

24 “Dinner of the Society,” Journal of the Royal African Society 22.88 (Jul. 1923), 321.

25 See, for example, the suggestions of John Ainsworth, a provincial colonial administrator in Kenya, to more senior colonial and governmental authorities. Ainsworth petitioned colonial authorities to change the political and economic practices structuring African-White relations. He advocated “raising the status of these [African] citizens of the Empire” and suggested that the colonial government adopt a more “beneficient [sic] policy for their future”, directed towards creating a “contented, industrious, and progressive… population.” Disappointed with the position of Africans as the “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for white immigrants, Ainsworth advocated social, political, and economic reform.

However, it took months of petitioning before he was even acknowledged by the Colonial Office in London who had “heard nothing of [his petitions] before now”, that is, months after he initially submitted them. “The Colonial Office did not get a direct answer; Nairobi [the Kenyan seat of colonial authority] simply promised to examine the problem and nothing further transpired.” From: Michael Thomason, “Little Tin Gods: The District Officer in British East Africa,” 146, 159.

26 Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” 605; For further discussion see E. A. Brett, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa: The Politics of Economic Change (New York: NOK Publishers, 1973).

27 “‘Englishman’”, “Settler’s Role?”, Kenya Weekly News, July 12, 1946.

28 Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” 611.

29 C. J. Duder, “‘Men of the Officer Class:’ The Participants in 36

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the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme in Kenya, African Affairs, 92.366 (Jan. 1993), 75-6.

30 Kenyan settlers, those “representatives of power and privilege in the British Empire” all had to have “sufficient capital resources” before coming to Kenya. Many also were products of the elite institutions of the establishment (for instance, the military officer corps) and British private school system. Kenya was often referred to as “‘the Public Schoolboy Colony’ or ‘par excellence the retired officer’s colony’”. (C. J. Duder, “‘Men of the Officer Class:’ The Participants in the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme in Kenya, African Affairs, 92.366 (Jan., 1993), 69-71). Their common background, economic and social pursuits, concerns, and goals meant that they were often, though not always, able to advocate politically in a unified way.

It is worth noting that missionaries often came from a very different background and maintained very different interests and agendas and so were often not able to interact with settlers in productive ways, though they did have missionaries who worked in that milieu; “Lord Delamere and Lord Francis Scott in Kenya maintained excellent contacts in London, and in a key figure like Sir Edward Grigg (later Lord Altrincham), Governor of Kenya, 1925-30, the settlers had a most sympathetic and influential person on the spot.” Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” 613.

31 Diana Wylie, “Confrontation over Kenya: The Colonial Office and Its Critics 1918-1940,” The Journal of African History 18.3 (1977), 428.

32 Idem, 429.

33 Letter from Oldham to Leys, 30 September, 1925, Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, 275.

34 Letter from Leys to Oldham, 26 March 1925, Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, 254.

35 “Undoubtedly much alleviation of severe conditions for natives has been effected by clergy and missionaries, by the Penn History Review

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process of confidential interviews with Governors, or by reporting to Mission headquarter offices in Great Britain, which in turn make representations to the Colonial Office. When remedy is not obtained by this routine, it is generally left to the Archbishop of Canterbury to focus public attention upon malpractices by exposure in the House of Lords. He is not as popular in Kenya as he might be.” Ross, Kenya from Within, 115.

36 J. H. Oldham, in letters to the Archbishop of Canterbury, describes meetings with Sir Edward Grigg (a member of Parliament and governor of Kenya) and Leo Amery (member of Parliament, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Colonial Secretary) (Letter from Oldham to Archbishop of Canterbury, 10 June 1925. From: Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, ed. John W. Cell, 265). He also requests that the Archbishop of Canterbury try “to convert Geoffrey Dawson [editor of The Times] and Lord Astor [Owner and publisher of The Observer]” while saying that he “probably, can get into touch, after the debate in the Lords, with H. A. L. Fisher [member of Parliament, president of the Board of Education]… or if necessary with J. H. Thomas or Ramsay MacDonald. There are other people like the Prime Minister [Stanley Baldwin] and Lord Salisbury, who might be influenced as well as, of course, Amery himself.” (Letter from Oldham to Archbishop of Canterbury, 13 May 1925, [IMC (Geneva), Box 93]. From: Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, ed. John W. Cell, 258).

The letters detail the network of relationships that influential missionaries maintained the depth of relationships they had in political circles however, it also highlights the importance of public opinion in shaping policy (“If the earmarking of part of the loan is the best way of going forward, we may have to make a strong effort to convince public opinion.”)

37 Letter from Oldham to Leys, 9 March 1925, Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, 251-2.

38 Renison Muchiri Githige, “The Mission State Relationship in 38

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Colonial Kenya: A Summary,” 120.

39 For further discussion of the power of lobbies in Britain see Renison Muchiri Githige, “The Mission State Relationship in Colonial Kenya: A Summary,” and E. A. Brett, Colonialism and Underdevelopment in East Africa: The Politics of Economic Change, 145.

40 W. McGregor Ross, Kenya from Within, 37.

41 Ibid.

42 In his diary, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen describes just how difficult it was to control the state militarily, administratively, or economically from the top down, especially early in the twentieth century: “Here we are, three white men in the heart of Africa, with 20 nigger soldiers and 50 nigger police, 68 miles from doctors or reinforcements, administering and policing a district inhabited by half a million well-armed savages who have only quite recently come into touch with the white man, and we are responsible for the security in an area the size of Yorkshire. The position is most humorous to my mind…”

From: Richard Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary: 1902-1906, 32.

43 Report by the Headmaster on the Kikuyu Alliance High School, Airgraph from E. Carey Francis to Rev. H. M. Grace, 25 April, 1944; Githige, “The Mission State Relationship in Colonial Kenya: A Summary”, 113.

44 L. S. B. Leakey argued in 1936 that “So long as the interests of the African do not threaten those of the settler community, the settlers are prepared to help the native. But, and this is quite natural, if there is any conflict of interests the settler puts his own interests first. The natives of Kenya know this only too well, and that is why they are so apprehensive that the demand of the Kenya settler for self-government will one day be granted.” (L. S. B. Leakey, Kenya Contrasts and Problems (London: Methuen and Company Limited), 109.)

45 John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, “Coping with the Contradictions: The Development of the Colonial State in Kenya, 1895-1914,” The Journal of African History 20.4, White Penn History Review

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Presence and Power in Africa (1979), 490.

46 The efforts of the missions and their educational and sociospiritual proselytization “have a most vital bearing upon contact and adaption. They incorporate an enormous attack upon the native’s mind, habits, beliefs, upon his views of world and transhuman powers, upon his customs, his social and mental arrangement, and his psychic equilibrium. This attack… [has served] as an instrument for animating European expansion.”

Richard C. Thurnwald, Black and White in East Africa: The Fabric of a New Civilization (London: George Routledge and Sons, Limited, 1935), 212.

47 Robert Strayer, “Mission History in Africa: New Perspectives on an Encounter,” 8.

48 “What is seen and done on [Mission stations] is giving many, perhaps already most Africans in Kenya, a new moral standard.” (Leys, Kenya, 247).

49 Norman Leys, “Missions and Governments: Objects of Christian Education” The Scots Observer (Glasgow), 27 November 1926, Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, ed.

John W. Cell, 287-290; Kenya Missionary Council, Report of the Committee on Educational Policy, (Nairobi, Kenya: 21st June, 1940), 7.

50 Leys, Kenya, 259-261.

51 Minutes from the Conference on Christian Education in East Africa, 16-17 June 1930, 1-3.

52 The Church Missionary Outlook (London: Church Missionary Society, 1926), 53:186.

53 Leys, Kenya, 258.

54 Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa, African No. 1100, CO 879/121/4, 224.

55 Ibid.

56 Report by the Headmaster on the Kikuyu Alliance High School, Airgraph from E. Carey Francis to Rev. H. M. Grace, 25 April, 1944.

57 Minutes from the Conference on Christian Education in East 40

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Africa, 16-17 June 1930, 1-3.

58 Norman Leys, Letter to the Editor: “The Education of the African”, Manchester Guardian, October 16, 1926, Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, 277.

59 Dane Kennedy, Islands of White, 163.

60 “We, members of the Local Native Council of Central Kavirondo, have heard this statement [claiming they did not want to be educated by missionaries] which we find in the Report of the Education Department. It grieves us very much indeed. … Never have we said bad things about mission schools. It is because we thoroughly approve of them that we vote them large sums of money every year. The other day we asked to increase these votes. We wish them to grow in strength and size.…” (Members of the Local Native Council’s response to the Director of Education and the Education Department of Kenya, W. Arthur Pitt-Pitts, The Educational Report of 1929 and the Attitude of the Mission in 1931, 1931) 61 “[M]issionary societies are making a serious endeavour to give to the peoples of Africa, who have been suddenly swept into the fierce currents of western civilisation, an education which will enable them to meet these new conditions.” Oldham to the Editor, Manchester Guardian, 29 October 1926, Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, 280.

62 On May 15th, 1923 at a Dinner for the African Society, the Earl Buxton, its president, claimed: “I think it was a very satisfactory feature of our public life of late years, that Colonial questions and Dominion questions have got out of the rut of Party politics—and will never get back to them. What is that policy? It is a very simple one. So far as the Dominions… are concerned, Downing Street not many years ago used to be a name synonymous with a fussy and timid old grandmother who interfered and thwarted them in matters they thought they knew better how to deal with. The Colonial Office now is more of the nature of the benevolent Uncle. Neither the Secretary of State, nor Parliament, nor this Country desires to Penn History Review

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interfere with their affairs in any way whatever. We have given them the full opportunity and power to deal with their own affairs, and we desire that they should have complete control over them. IN fact [emphasis his], as someone said, we were quite prepared to let them go to the Devil in their own way; or, alternatively to work out their own Salvation. As regards the Crown Colonies, the Colonial Office assists them as far as it can in improvement and development. Their development is no doubt an advantage to this Country…” (From: “Dinner of the Society,” Journal of the Royal African Society, Vol. 22, No. 88 (Jul., 1923), 320. The passage demonstrates the connections settlers have with colonial authorities, as the speaker whom the Earl Buxton is introducing at the dinner was the Duke of Devonshire, the Secretary of State for the Colonies. More importantly, however, the passage suggests the positive sentiments settlers hold for small government, preferring the presumably disengaged, detached, distant, uniformed, but wellmeaning and generous “benevolent Uncle” to the antithetically positioned government-paralleling “fussy … grandmother who interfered and thwarted” behavior she could not understand, but believed “knew better how to deal with.”

63 Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” 611.

64 Nicholas Best, Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979), 67.

65 Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” 611.

66 Nicholas Best, Happy Valley, 68.

67 A. J. P. Taylor argues that “‘Englishmen escaped democracy and high taxation by establishing themselves in Kenya as territorial aristocrats on the old model’.” (From: C. J. Duder, “‘Men of the Officer Class’: The Participants in the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme in Kenya, African Affairs 92.366 (Jan. 1993), 70.

68 “Dinner of the Society,” Journal of the Royal African Society, 42

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22.88 (Jul. 1923), 321.

69 Michael Gordon Redley, “The Politics of a Predicament: The White Community in Kenya 1918-32,” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1976), 107.

70 Letter from Leys to Oldham, 26 February 1925, Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, 242.

71 Huddersfield Examiner, June 1, 1923; Michael Gordon Redley, “The Politics of a Predicament: The White Community in Kenya 1918-32,” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1976), 108.

72 Cable from Lord Delamere to The Times, August 28, 1903, Nairobi; Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country: Lord Delamere and the Making of Kenya, Volume 1: 1870-1914 (1935: London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), 120.

73 The National Archives’ Currency Convertor, http://www. nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency/default0.asp#mid.

74 Letter from Leys to Oldham, 10 March 1925, Leys and Oldham, By Kenya Possessed, 253.

75 Githige, “The Mission State Relationship in Colonial Kenya: A Summary,” 117.

76 Letter from a Nairobi missionary to Rev. H. D. Hooper, Church Missionary Society, 23rd December, 1932 on mining in native reserves.

77 Githige, “The Mission State Relationship in Colonial Kenya: A Summary,” 112.

78 Kenya Report on Disturbances, 1949, 2-3.

79 Sir Charles Eliot, The East Africa Protectorate, 241.

Photo Sources: Page 8: Wilfred Thesiger, Portrait of a Man, 1961, photograph, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford Page 13 top: International Mission Photography Archive, Yale Divinity School Library, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll123/id/50571 Page 13 bottom: International Mission Photography Archive, Yale Divinity School Library, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll123/id/50593 Page 24: International Mission Photography Archive, Yale Divinity School Library, http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll123/id/50601

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Herbal Abortifacients

Herbal Abortifacients and their Classical Heritage in Tudor England: Alex Gradwohl

Although birth control is often considered to be a modern innovation, various forms of homeopathic anti-fertility measures have been in use since ancient times. Discussed at length by the great Greco-Roman medical authorities, certain herbs have long been utilized for their abortion-inducing properties. Centuries later, the extensive herbal guides and other medical texts of Tudor England seem to largely ignore the subject of anti-fertility herbs. Despite this apparent silence, however, classical knowledge of herbal abortifacients did not disappear in sixteenth century England. Influenced by changing attitudes and social acceptability concerning abortion, English medical and herbal writers included disguised information about certain herbs’ potential abortive uses, providing Tudor women with an important means to control their fertility.1 It is easy to overlook the inclusion of abortifacients when examining Tudor medical and herbal sources since they generally do not overtly reference or explain the uses of these herbs.

However, these and other texts show that, in practice, Tudor women both commonly knew of and used herbal abortifacients.

Most of the direct references to the practice denounce it but, in doing so, the authors show that they viewed the use of such herbs as a substantial problem. Malleus Maleficarum (the widelycirculated treatise on witchcraft originally published in 1486 and infamous for fueling the witch craze of the following centuries) states that “a man can, by natural means, such as herbs, savin [juniper] for example� either prevent a woman from conceiving or force a miscarriage if she is already pregnant.2 The authors of Malleus Maleficarum devoted a considerable amount of space to 44

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vehemently condemning the practice, indicating its prevalence.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Jane Sharp, author of The Midwives Book, also criticized women who used “destructive means to cause barrennes,” but admitted, “some persons have presumptuously ventured upon it.”3 Non-medical sources also contained veiled references to abortive herbs, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet (written during the late 1590s) in which a mad Ophelia gathers herbs and keeps only rue for herself: “there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me; we may call it herb-grace o’Sundays. O! you wear your rue with a difference.”4 While rue in this context functions partially as a symbol of regret, it is also a powerful abortifacient. By having Ophelia keep some for herself, Shakespeare gives credence to the popular theory that Hamlet’s mad lover is pregnant.5 It can be assumed that Shakespeare’s audiences would understand his references, indicating a general public awareness of rue’s special uses. These types of references make it clear that abortive herbs were both commonly known and at least somewhat frequently used.

If contemporary medical books did not overtly explain how to use abortifacients, how did women learn of such practices?

Many Tudor women probably learned about the special uses for certain herbs from one another.6 Oral transmission, however, was not the only method of disseminating herbal knowledge. Modern scholars minimize the extent to which ancient classical texts served as a major source of information about herbal abortives.

Literacy rates during the sixteenth century markedly rose, making textual resources increasingly accessible in Tudor England.7 This is due to the rise of the humanists and Protestantism, both of which emphasized the importance of reading original texts for oneself. Both groups pushed for literacy and education that extended to women as well as men, emphasizing a “broad classical education” for young girls, particularly among the upper classes.8 With higher literacy rates, sixteenth century women as well as men would have been able to interact with textual sources of herbal knowledge, both ancient and contemporary.

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Like sixteenth and seventeenth century sources, medieval medical texts did not list specific herbs or how exactly to use them. The late thirteenth century book of “women’s secrets” entitled De Secretis Mulierium is similar to Tudor texts in that it referenced abortifacients mainly in order to condemn their use: “There are some evil women,” a commentator wrote, who “procure an abortion by boiling down certain herbs which they know well.”9 The author gave no hint as to what these “certain herbs” might be. Other books of secrets mentioned specific herbs known to act as abortifacients, but these authors did not describe their potential abortive uses.10 Medieval Europe’s most influential text on women’s medicine, the Trotula, does not even address the topic, mentioning only amulets and other magical cures (such as carrying a weasel’s testicles) as potential antifertility measures.11 Thus, medieval texts seem to be largely silent as sources for Tudor women’s knowledge of abortive herbs.

Classical texts on medicine and botany provide a more likely option for the source of such information. Greco-Roman tradition strongly influenced English medical practice during the sixteenth century. Medical practitioners revered authors such as Galen, Dioscorides, Pliny and Hippocrates. These men discuss abortifacients quite openly, specifically indicating drugs that will cause an abortion (abortum facit).12 Greeks and Romans used both contraceptives and abortives, distinguished by Soranus in his Gynaecology: “a contraceptive [atokion] differs from an abortive [phthorion], for the first does not let conception take place, while the latter destroys what has been conceived.”13 Many authors—including Aristotle, Caelius, Aurelianus, Dioscorides, Galen, Pliny, Soranus, Theodorus Priscianus, and Hippocrates— described certain herbs’ abortive qualities and how to best take advantage of them in a similarly frank, open manner.14 For example, De Mulierum Affectibus, a Roman medical text in the Hippocratic tradition, proclaims that “there is nothing better” than elleberos (a type of plant more commonly known as “squirting cucumber”) used as “an abortive pessary.”15 These 46

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classical writers were equally clear about the effects of such drugs. Dioscorides used a phrase that translates directly to “kills the Embrya” in the description of a number of plants, including elleboros, rue and calamint.16 The discussion of herbal abortives extended beyond medical texts, with the famous playwright Aristophanes including quips and puns referencing pennyroyal (a commonly known abortifacient) in a number of his works.17 The inclusion of such references in plays intended for a popular audience clearly indicates a widespread public knowledge of abortive herbs. Aristophanes is not simply an aberration; other authors, including Procopius and Ovid, made similar references, underscoring a certain degree of general acceptance and understanding.18 Despite this common acknowledgment, anxiety about abortifacients and birth control is evident in some classical sources. The root of this concern, however, stems not from moral qualms but instead from the fact that female control of reproduction threatened male hegemony. Roman laws on abortion dealt only with the father’s right to make a decision on the issue.19 Given the Roman family structure, which depended so heavily on the complete control of the paterfamilias, it is no surprise that the problem here is one of masculine power and control, not of morality.

Another source of concern for classical texts is the potential health risks of abortive herbs. In discussing abortifacients, Soranus concluded, “it is safer to prevent conception from taking place than to destroy the foetus.”20 Nowhere in his verdict did he mention a sense of right or wrong; he made his conclusion based on the woman’s health. Any Greco-Roman concern was legal or medical, not moral, in nature. Thus, although abortifacients were the subject of legislation and discussion, there was no sense of “taboo” or censure surrounding them.

Classical moral neutrality towards abortifacients ended with the rise of Christianity. The church taught that intercourse should only be procreative and, therefore, condemned Penn History Review

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abortifacients. For example, the Epistle of Barnabas, thought to have been written during the first half of the second century, advised, “thou shalt not procure abortion, thou shalt not commit infanticide.”21 Here, Barnabas equated abortion with infanticide, reflecting the church’s increasing association of the two. Three centuries later, St. Jerome unequivocally stated the church’s views: “some, when they find themselves with child through their sin, use drugs to procure abortion, and when (as often happens) they die with their offspring, they enter the lower world laden with the guilt not only of adultery against Christ but also of suicide and child murder.”22 The Church clearly conflated abortion and murder, condemning anyone who aborted their child. In a world dominated by religious dogma, this view heavily influenced English opinions on abortifacients and, as the early Church of England showed few theological differences from the Catholic Church, this mindset held dominance through the Tudor Period.

British law codes reflected the change in attitudes towards abortion dictated by the Catholic Church. Unlike Roman law, which only regulated abortifacients in their relation to a father’s rights, English law banned abortion entirely. Henry de Bracton’s thirteenth century De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (Of the Laws and Customs of England) states, “If one strikes a pregnant woman or gives her poison in order to procure an abortion, if the foetus is already formed or quickened, especially if it is quickened, he commits homicide.” 23 This law reflected the belief that a fetus acquired a soul after its first movements, known as quickening, which usually occurred around 18 weeks.24 The fetus’ movements mark it as human, which is why “poisoning” the child after this point was considered murder. Aborting a fetus before quickening was legal but considered sinful, which correlated with the Church’s position.25 This policy remained part of English common law through the sixteenth century and beyond. Therefore, in the Tudor period, providing a woman with an herbal abortifacient was punishable by law.

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between canon and civil law, abortion and anti-fertility cases were usually tried in ecclesiastical court, indicating that such offenses may have been viewed more as moral crimes than as acts endangering the welfare of society as a whole.26 Before the 1534 Act of Supremacy, anti-fertility measures were under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church. Pope Innocent VIII’s papal bull of 1484 reiterated the Church’s views on abortion and contraception, condemning those who “ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women… and hinder men from begetting and women from conceiving.”27 Significantly, the Pope labeled such people as witches, illustrating a significant connection between birth control and witchcraft. Even after Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church in 1534, this link with “dark magic” and its unequivocal denunciation of abortion continued to influence popular attitudes.

Concern with abortive herbs was only further heightened with the rise of widespread persecution of witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Known as the “Witch Craze,” this outbreak of accusations and trials is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of over 40,000 people, mostly women.28 The Malleus Maleficarum, a text infamous for its role in encouraging accusations of witchcraft, condemns witches for procuring abortions “by natural means, such as herbs,” naming such practices as one of the “horrible crimes which devils commit against infants,” and encouraging the association of witchcraft with abortifacients and herbs in general. 29 The Malleus also links witchcraft and midwifery, as midwives were responsible for all aspects of women’s reproductive systems and possessed information on herbs’ anti-fertility properties.30 Any public discussion of abortifacients would have risked not only religious condemnation but also prosecution for witchcraft.31 In sixteenthcentury England, abortifacients were a decidedly taboo subject.

As already indicated, a close examination of Tudor-era medicinal texts reveals that many authors managed to include information about the abortive properties of certain herbs. The Penn History Review

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sixteenth century witnessed a profusion of instructive guidebooks on both midwifery and herbs. The latter, known simply as “herbals,” catalogued and described the uses of many different plants and herbs, medicinal or otherwise. These works relied heavily on classical sources, influenced no doubt by humanist emphasis on the importance of primary texts. The authors of these works constantly cited Greco-Roman sources, validating their statements with phrases like “Dioscorides writeth” or “saith Pliny.”32 In some cases, the English writer simply translated the earlier source, copying it nearly verbatim.33 However, in their reliance on ancient sources, Tudor herbalists encountered the problem of how to discuss abortifacients: classical authors’ frank descriptions of abortive herbs would have been quite unacceptable for sixteenth-century England.

In order to include the information of their sources and provide as comprehensive a guide as possible, writers disguised the abortive uses of herbs. Plants that ancient authors claimed would abortum facit were listed as helpful in bringing on delayed menstruation, aiding a difficult childbirth, expelling the afterbirth, and, more rarely, drawing out a dead child.34 Within the Tudor texts, these maladies were merely a guise.35 All of these uses were legally and morally acceptable, as well as legitimate medical complaints, yet still conveyed the same end result as an abortion—expelling substances from the uterus.

Jane Sharp’s popular guide for midwives, The Midwives Book; or, the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, offers an interesting example.36 Taken at face value, Sharp seemed to criticize the use of contraceptive or abortive measures, stating that she “cannot think justifiable” women who intentionally cause infertility.37 However, this offers a relatively weak rebuke when compared to condemnations invoked by sources like the Malleus Malificium. A sarcastic comment about the immorality of the Catholic clergy immediately follows her reprimand about abortifacients, leaving the overall impression that she did not fully support the denunciation of abortions.

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Sharp offered a more pointed statement on the abortive potential of certain herbs when discussing remedies to bring on menstruation, warning her audience of midwives to “do none of these things to women with child, for that will be Murder.”38 In reference to this quote, John Riddle—a modern expert on herbal abortifacients and contraceptives throughout history— wonders “whether she wrote out of conviction or intimidation.”39 Given the fact that providing a pregnant woman with “poison in order to procure an abortion” was considered homicide and punishable by law, it is not surprising that Sharp included this disclaimer.40 Buried in the midst of a number of long sections on how to “provoke the termes,” cure “Menstrual blood stopt,” and “Bring away the Secundine, or after-burden,” this one-line warning seems relatively insignificant.41 In fact, by including this line, Sharp informed her readers, perhaps intentionally, that the herbs listed to encourage menstruation—including mugwort, myrrh and calamint—can also procure an abortion.42 These were all abortifacients acknowledged by ancient sources, indicating that their associations with abortive properties had survived into Sharpe’s time. Additionally, Riddle points out that some of Sharp’s instructions to “urge the terms” (“terms” being a common English euphemism for menstruation at this time) are a bit odd. For “strong country people” she recommends a number of mixed syrups and pills from the apothecary instead of simpler and far more practical garden variety abortifacients (these would have been easier for “country people” to obtain), which she certainly knows of and discusses elsewhere.43 One explanation is that Sharp is purposefully including information that her intended audience would know how to interpret. “Urge the terms” (or “encourage menstruation”) could be read as code for an abortion in that forcing the body to menstruate (“urging the terms”) while pregnant would bring an end to said pregnancy—a fact that any trained midwife would understand.

Like Sharp, some of the great herbals of Tudor England include remedies to help encourage menstruation, speed Penn History Review

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delivery and expel afterbirth. Two of the sixteenth century’s most important herbals were those of William Turner and John Gerard. Turner’s popular and influential New Herball, originally published in 1551, was one of the earliest English books of its kind and earned Turner the title “father of English botany.”44 In addition to a strong reliance on classical sources, Turner drew heavily on continental medical works.45 John Gerard, a highly respected English botanist, published the Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes in 1597.46 This well received work, covering a vast body of herbal knowledge, is largely a translation of the widely read herbal by Dutch botanist Rembert Dodoens.47 Both Turner and Gerard discuss herbs known to have abortive properties; however, Gerard was generally a bit more explicit about their potential use. This may be attributed to Gerard’s later publication date or the fact that Turner, a Protestant minister, may have been more conservative.48 In either case, Turner never directly referenced abortive properties while Gerard boldly explained how stinking gladdon (xyris) “will cause abortion.”49 Gerard’s treatment of abortion is not at all condemnatory; in fact, he said that it “profiteth being vsed in a pessary” (a pessary being a vaginal suppository, at this time almost always used for contraceptive purposes).50 Turner, in contrast, only stated that xyris is “good to sit over for weomen’s diseases.”51 It is important to note, however, that Gerard’s bluntness in this case was extremely unusual and, as Riddle points out, this is the only time Gerard actually uses the word abort or abortion.52 Besides this one instance, however, information on abortifacients is not given directly but instead disguised with ambiguous phrasing or as cures for delayed menstruation or birthing difficulties. Comparing the herbals with their ancient sources, it becomes clear that authors like Turner and Gerard strayed from the original instructions as little as possible, often using vague terms that allowed for multiple interpretations.

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connections with more “acceptable” reasons for flushing the womb, such as encouraging menstruation or easing birth. This allows for the identification of the most commonly utilized herbal abortifacients during the Tudor period.

To identify the herbs popular in Tudor times, it is necessary to examine the classical counterparts to the English herbals. Plants belonging to the Artemisia family, including mugwort and southernwood, were some of the most frequently referenced and widely used abortive herbs in the Greco-Roman period.53 Artemisia had long been connected with women’s reproduction and for good reason—modern studies have proven that it is an effective abortifacient.54 The major authority on this herb’s uses is Dioscorides, who explained that all types of artemisia are: good to be put into womanish insessions [baths] for the driving out of the menstrua, and the secondines, and the Embryo…Much of the herb being applied to the lower part of the belly moves the menstrua, but the juice of it being kneaded together with myrrh, and applied, doth draw from the matrix as many things as the [bath]; the hair of it is given in drink the quantity of 3 dragms for the binging out of the same things.55 English discussions of artemisia drew directly from this text.

Turner’s description of mugwort was essentially a translation of Dioscorides, maintaining the same instructions (mix in with baths, apply to the “nethermost parte of the belly,” eat the “toppes and leaves”) and measurements (“in the quantite of thre drammes”).56 There is, however, an important change. Whereas Dioscorides referred to driving out “the menstrua and the secondines and the Embryo,” Turner wrote, nearly identically, “their sykenes… their secondes and their byrth.”57 Dioscorides’ uses the term εμβρυον, meaning literally “something that grows within,” referring to a growing embryo.58 He was not describing Penn History Review

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an already dead human or a fully developed child ready to be born; he was providing instructions for the abortion of a fetus.

Turner, however, used the word byrth, a vague term that could refer to a forced early “birth” (i.e. an abortion), the expulsion of a stillborn, or simply a regular delivery.

Other Tudor medical writers also discussed artemisia in a way that clearly shows their knowledge of Dioscorides. Gerard recommended it be “boyled as bathes… to bring downe the monethly course,” while a practitioner in physicke known as “A.T.” described a poultice applied to the navel which helped speed delivery and afterbirth.59 Though none of these sources explicitly mention artemisia’s abortive properties, their intimate knowledge of Dioscorides’ methods indicated that they were not ignorant of the usage he reported; they simply rephrased it.

Sharp, for example, recommended the potion and bath described

by Dioscorides as aids to help “provoke the Termes.”60 Thus, she offered her readers a disguised description of artemisia’s potential—for what is an abortion if not the forced provoking of delayed menstruation.

Another abortifacient known to both the ancients and sixteenth century English writers was rue, a plant commonly found throughout Europe. Like artemisia, modern experiments on animals have shown that rue is capable of inducing abortions, especially when administered within the first few days of pregnancy.61 Dioscorides labeled rue explicitly as an abortifacient that can bring on menstruation and kill “the Embrya.”62 Given his heavy reliance on Dioscorides and other classical authors, Gerard must have known of rue’s abortive potential. His description, however, was not quite as blunt. According to him, rue purged “the secondine” (afterbirth fluids and materials), “the dead childe, and the unnaturall birth.”63 Like Turner’s discussion of artemisia, Gerard’s use of phrases such as “unnaturall birth” and “dead childe” without specifying whether or not the fetus was already dead before the use of the herb leaves room for interpretation. If references in Shakespeare are any indication, the English public 54

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Medieval illustration of gardening Rue, from the Tacuinum Sanitatis

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Thirteenth century depiction of an herbalist preparing pennyroyal, a traditional herbal abortifacient

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was somewhat aware of the abortive qualities of rue.64 Women seeking to terminate pregnancy knew how to interpret Gerard’s rather vague language and follow his recommendation of “the iuyce of Rue drunke with wine.”65 Several members of the mint family, specifically pennyroyal and calamint—often confused or regarded as the same herb—were other commonly known abortifacients. The Greeks and Romans knew pennyroyal well as an anti-fertility drug, with references ranging from the plays of Aristophanes and Herodas to the medical texts of Pliny and Galen.66 Such sources also knew of the herb calamint. Of the plant, Dioscorides stated, “the leaves beaten small and given in a Pessum [a pessary] doth kill the Embrya, and expel the menstrua.”67 Centuries later, Gerard more delicately wrote that calamint is “maruellous good for young maidens that want their courses.”68 Although he did not identify it as an abortifacient, an unwanted pregnancy would certainly encourage a “young woman” to “want their courses.”

Gerard clearly read Dioscorides (in fact, he quotes the Greek author directly earlier in his section on mints) and therefore knew that calamint could cause abortions.69 Turner’s discussion on “The Vertues of Calamint” also hinted at the herb’s abortifacient capabilities. He wrote, “the leves brused and layd in wolle and put into the place of conception draweth douune weomens syckenes.”70 Turner’s discussion of calamint was surely drawn from Dioscorides’ text, as the English text explicitly referenced the Greek master and Turner copied the method of application almost directly.71 Additionally, Turner’s use of the phrase “place of conception” when referring to the vagina seems unusual, especially when compared to Gerard’s euphemistic references to a woman’s “secret part” or Sharp’s ambiguous words like “privities” or “secrets.”72 The phrase “place of conception” implies that the conception has already taken place; thus, the cure for the so-called “weomens syckenes” is actually an abortion.

Another herb recognized for its abortive and general anti-fertility properties is known as aristolochia or, perhaps Penn History Review

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more fittingly, birthwort. Dioscorides reported that, when drunk with wine, pepper, and myrrh (another supposed abortifacient), aristolochia “doth cast out all the remaining purgaments, and the menstrue and the Embrya.”73 Both Gerard and Turner repeated Dioscorides’ recipe.74 When translating Dioscorides, the Tudor herbalists replaced the word embrya, the Greek author’s statement indicating abortion. Turner claimed that the herb could draw forth “weomens floures and their byrth and all the burdenes that the mother is charged with.”75 The final phrase is incredibly vague and could refer to a wide range of “burdenes,” including, of course, an unwanted pregnancy. Gerard’s statement is slightly more concrete: the aristolochia concoction “expelleth whatsoeuer is left in the matrix [uterus] after the childe is deliuever, the floures also and dead children.”76 By “dead children,” readers could assume Gerard meant miscarriages (children who have died in the womb); however, he technically did not specify if the child was already dead before administering the concoction, only that the herb “expelleth… dead children.” For a female reader looking for abortifacients, this may have been enough of a hint. Aristolochia does, in fact, act as both a contraceptive and abortive drug, showing a one hundred percent interceptive rate for mice in recent studies.77 Juniper, also known as savin or savine, is another abortive herb described by both ancient and Tudor sources.78 Like aristolochia, juniper has proven to be an extremely effective but somewhat toxic abortive drug, interrupting a significant percentage of animal pregnancies, especially with increased dosages.79 Dioscorides offered a relatively generic statement on juniper: “being dranck with wine they… driue out the Partus [offspring, birth, a thing from the womb.]”80 Galen, however, explicitly identified the herb as an abortifacient, as well as a contraceptive, stating simply “ekballei,” which means, “it aborts.”81 This, perhaps, is the text from which Gerard drew his relatively unconcealed statement of juniper’s abortive properties: “The leaves of Sauin [savin] boyled in Wine and drunke… bring 58

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downe the menses with force, draw away the after-birth, expell the dead childe, and kill the quicke.”82 Gerard’s specification that the herb brings on menstruation “with force” is suspicious in itself, but the final statement, that savin will “kill the quicke” is the most blatant statement of the herb’s abortive possibilities.

“The quicke,” in this case, is vernacular referring to a quickened or moving fetus; essentially, the text provides instructions for an abortion relatively far into the pregnancy.83 Perhaps Gerard was less disguised when discussing this abortifacient because he wanted to impart to his readers that savin may be used for laterterm abortions, indicating that other herbs may have been most effective shortly after pregnancy (as modern research suggests is actually the case). It is possible that he thought such an insignificant phrase would become lost within his nearly 1,500page epic of an herbal. In either situation, however, one must wonder at how Gerard got away with such blatant speaking, as well as why he chose to be so explicit here when he clearly recognized the necessity of disguising his information elsewhere.

Despite vague language or phrasing, it seems that the authors understood the abortive properties of these herbs (artemisia, rue, pennyroyal, calamint, aristolochia and savin, among others). They sought to furtively communicate such uses to their readers with suggestions on how to encourage menstruation, expel afterbirth, or speed delivery. This indicates that Tudor women knew much more about herbal abortifacients and, more generally, anti-fertility agents than historians have otherwise assumed. The availability of this information would have enabled these women to control their own reproductive systems, providing them with a strong, albeit largely hidden, tool to assert some degree of power over their lives in a maledominated society.

The social structure of Tudor England was heavily weighted in favor of patriarchic control at the expense of female independence. Legally and socially, women were subordinate to the men in their lives: first their father and, later, their husband.

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They were only legally independent if they became widows. A woman’s purpose was to marry and become a wife and mother; those who failed to do this—spinsters—were seen as oddities or failures, destined to live unhappy lives dependent on their charitable relations.84 In a seventeenth-century commentary on English law, the anonymous “T.E.” wrote that women, “are understood either married or to be married and their desires are subject to their husbands.”85 Legally, a husband had total power over his wife as well as her property; wives had “no action” (no legal redress) under common law.86 A voice or position in ‘higher matters,’ such as law and government, was beyond their reach. As T.E. stated, women “make no laws, they consent to none, they abrogate none.”87 They certainly held no posts in government and were excluded from nearly all professions.88 As Elizabethan political theorist Sir Thomas Smith declared, women were “made to keep home and nourish their family and children and not to meddle with matters abroad, nor to bear office in a city or commonwealth, no more than children or infants.”89 Tudor women seemingly had little power over their own lives or society at large.

Despite this male dominance, however, women may have been able to exercise more control in less obvious capacities.

Compared to their contemporaries on the Continent, English women enjoyed a rather high degree of liberty. A visitor to England in 1575 commented that while “wives in England are entirely in the power of their husbands…they are not kept so strictly as they are in Spain or elsewhere.”90 Travelers marveled that English women were able to go to market without their husbands and often managed the household. Although women were officially excluded from taking a profession, there were often economic partnerships between husband and wife, especially among the lower classes.91 Similarly, in a recent article, Barbara Harris argues that though women were officially excluded from government institutions, they may have played an influential role in English politics from their positions at court and in large 60

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aristocratic households.92 Knowledge of abortifacients would have provided women with another mechanism of control, giving them a hidden source of power over their health. By the Tudor period, medical practice had become increasingly professionalized, requiring license and education, which automatically excluded women.93 Almost all medical texts were written by men (Gerard, Turner, A.T., among many others), with Jane Sharp’s midwifery text serving as a notable exception. However, women were receiving medical training, just not in an official capacity. In preparation for their roles as household managers, women learned the essentials of healing, which included herbal remedies.94 Lady Margaret Hoby, for example, discussed the health of her friends and dependents in her diary, describing various healing measures and medical remedies.95 Beyond this, midwives and “wise women” certainly played a large, albeit decreasing, role in day-to-day healthcare for their fellow women. Although their main task was assisting with childbirth, these women would have possessed both the knowledge and the specific herbs necessary to help induce an abortion.

Beyond those working in the medical field, knowledge of herbal abortifacients gave all women a higher degree of control over their reproductive decisions and more sexual independence both within and outside of marriage—a fairly revolutionary concept. Canon and civil law as well as societal pressure condemned extra- and pre-marital intercourse for women. Men, however, conducted affairs often, both as bachelors and once married. A man, for example, could visit brothels quite publicly and still lead a successful life within the community.96 Women, on the other hand, were held to much stricter standards: they were expected to remain chaste until marriage and faithful once wed.97 Women who engaged in extra-marital affairs were shamed and punished. “Cucking stools” were used to reprimand adulterous wives by dunking them repeatedly into a body of water, meant to “cool [their] immoderate heat.”98 Other women were paraded Penn History Review

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through the streets in procession with an angry mob.

These different standards for men and women were addressed in a 1617 pamphlet written by an unknown woman using the pseudonym Ester Sowernam: “if a man abuse a Maide & get her with child, no matter is made of it, but as a trick of youth; but it is made so hainous an offence in the maide, that she is disparaged and vterly vndone by it. So in all offences those which men commit, are made light and as nothing, slighted ouer; but those which women doe commit, those are made grieuous and shamefull.”99 If the maid Sowernam described had not gotten “with child” the indiscretion could have remained secret and her reputation would have been preserved. Women risked much more with pre- or extra-marital affairs because they, unlike men, could bear the physical proof of their moral indiscretion in the form of a child. Unwed mothers were considered to be “ruined women” and they, along with their bastard children, experienced ostracism and humiliation. In addition to this social stigmatization, these mothers potentially faced raising their child unprotected and unassisted—a very difficult task in such a male-dominated world where women had limited economic opportunities. One must also take into consideration the extreme danger associated with childbirth in Tudor England. Without modern hospitals or knowledge of sanitation and disease, the maternal mortality rate was quite high, probably upwards of 1% (i.e. one in 100 births).100 With such dire consequences for extramarital pregnancies, it is perhaps not surprising that illegitimacy rates were quite low, averaging at around 2.5%.101 Such evidence has indicated to many that Tudor women conformed to societal standards regarding pre- and extra-marital sex; however, if these women knew of means to end or prevent pregnancy, the low number of illegitimate births would not necessarily mean they did not engage in affairs. As sex, especially pre- or extra-marital sex, remained a taboo subject, it is difficult to find concrete evidence of this type of sexual practice. Other sources, however, implied that women’s affairs were more 62

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common than societal standards dictated. Popular bawdy plays and literature often featured young maids sneaking out with their lovers and many widely known jokes poked fun at cuckolded husbands.102 These comic tales are by no means proof positive of female sexual practice; however, they do show that the idea of women engaging in pre- or extra-marital intercourse was wellestablished in the public consciousness.

Knowledge of herbal abortifacients would have made such affairs more feasible by providing women with the ability to reduce the chance of physical evidence and burden in the form of an unwanted child. The fact that knowledge of abortive herbs was included in major medical guides and seems to have been relatively widespread indicates that women were utilizing the information. This means that Tudor women were quite possibly more sexually independent and engaging in pre- or extra-marital intercourse more frequently than both their contemporaries and modern scholars have otherwise assumed. There is, however, no concrete evidence to support this type of scenario. Pre- and extra-marital intercourse was a serious sin and affairs still risked discovery even without resulting in pregnancy. Additionally, herbal abortifacients could be dangerous if not administered properly and were not 100% effective. The important point, nevertheless, is that such affairs would have been more feasible and potentially more common as women possessed the means to somewhat control their own fertility.

Even within a marriage, herbal abortifacients allowed women a higher degree of control over their lives. There are many reasons why a married woman may have wanted to engage in intercourse with her husband without producing a child. As already discussed, childbirth was quite dangerous for women and other health concerns may have factored in as well—a woman who was already weak, sick or had a history of difficult births would have had ample reason to avoid becoming (or staying) with child. Additionally, many wives, especially in poorer families (who certainly would have had access to common Penn History Review

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garden-variety herbs with abortive properties) simply did not have the time, desire, energy or resources to care for a child, especially if they already had a large family. England’s high child mortality rate may have also served as incentive for parents to avoid the risk and emotional distress of a child: infant mortality may have been as high as 20% and only seven or eight out of every ten children were expected to live to age ten.103 There is, in fact, some statistical support for the use of “family planning” methods within a marriage. The birth rate in Europe between the late fifteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries averaged around six children per married woman. This is significantly less than what would have been expected—a recent study found that without any form of fertility regulation the rate should have been between 9.8 and 11.6 children per married woman.104 This deficit can, of course, be attributed to many different causes, one of which is simply abstinence. With such widespread knowledge of herbal abortifacients, however, it seems likely that herbs such as artemisia, rue and pennyroyal probably played a role. Since child rearing was generally the responsibility of the mother, the ability to limit the number of children she had would have been an important area of control for a Tudor woman.

In a largely male-dominated society where women had few legal rights, knowledge concerning abortive herbs was not just practical, it was powerful. It gave both married and unmarried women a means to control an important aspect of their lives: their sexuality and fertility. The durability of such information—from the texts of classical antiquity to Tudor herbals—proves that it was both remembered and utilized by generations of women.

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An abortifacient is defined as a substance that can be used to induce the termination of a pregnancy.

2 Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (London: Pushkin Press, 1948), Part 1, Question XI, 77.

3 Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, trans. Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 128.

4 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, iv. 5, noted by John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 49.

5 See Riddle, Eve, 49; Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550-1650, (Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 2; Robert Painter and Brian Parker, “Ophelia’s Flowers Again” Notes and Queries 41 (1994) 42-4.

6 Riddle, Eve, 134.

7 “The Sixteenth Century: Review,” Norton Anthology of British Literature, accessed 22 April 2012. http://www. wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/16century/review/ summary.htm.

8 Miriam Balmuth, “Trends in Female Schooling and Literacy: England, 1500-1700,” (paper presented at the Annual Conference of the New York State Reading Association, Kiamesha Lake, NY, November 7, 1984) 9 Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets : a Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 103.

10 Riddle, Eve, 101-2.

11 The Trotula: a Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, trans. Monica H. Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 34, 97, 99.

12 Soranus, Gynaecology, trans. Oswei Temkin (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1956) i.62.

13 John M. Riddle, “Oral Contraceptives and Early-Term 1

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Abortifacients During Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Past & Present 132 (Aug. 1991), 7.

14 Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Medicine: Roman Medicine (1998, Reprint, Omaha: Horatius Press, 2001), 644.

15 Riddle, “Contraceptives,” 20.

16 Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, trans. John Goodyer (1655), ed. Robert Gunther (1934, Reprint, New York: Harper, 1959), 3.52, 3.43, 4.150.

17 John Scarborough, “Contraception in Antiquity: the Case of Pennyroyal,” Wisconsin Academy Review 35.2 (March 1989), 20.

18 Prioreschi, Roman Medicine, 645.

19 Riddle, Eve, 87.

20 Soranus, Gynaecology, i.62.

21 Barnabas, “Epistle of Barnabas” trans. Kirsopp Lake, Early Christian Writings, accessed 22 Apr. 2012. http://www. earlychristianwritings.com/barnabas.html; L. W. Barnard, “The Date of the Epistle of Barnabas: A Document of Early Egyptian Christianity,” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 44, (Dec. 1958), 101-107.

22 St. Jerome, “Letter to Eustochium” trans. W.H. Fremantle, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers Series II, Vol 6, ed. Phillip Schaff (Canterbury: T. & T. Clark, 1892), 27, letter 22, section 13.

23 Henry Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, ed. George E. Woodbine (1915, Reprinted, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942) l. 28, 2.341.

24 Sarah M. Butler, “Abortion by Assault: Violence against Pregnant Women in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth- Century England,” Journal of Women’s History 17.4 (2005), 9-10.

25 Ibid.

26 Riddle, Eve, 129 27 George Lincoln Burr, “The witch-persecutions” from Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 66

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1897), 7.

28 Lois Martin, A Brief History of Witchcraft: Demons, Folklore and Superstition. (London: Constable and Robinson, 2010), 5.

29 Malleus, 77.

30 Ibid.

31 For more on the connection with witchcraft, see Henry Boguet’s Examen of Witches Drawn from Various Trials (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 88; Barbara Ehrenreich, Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers, 2nd Edition, (New York: The Feminist Press, 2010); and Laroche, Medical Authority.

32 William Turner, A New Herball, or The First and Seconde Partes of the Herbal of William Turner Doctor in Phisick (1551 Reprint, London: Arnold Birckman, 1568), 61; John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London: Bonham and John Norton, 1597), 718-719.

33 See for example: Dioscorides 3.127 and Turner, 64.

34 Some continental sources, such as Leonhart Fuchs’ De historia stirpium (Basel: 1542), are more direct in their discussions of abortifacients. Although herbal guides from the continent served as models for English authors, the same degree of ‘plain-speaking’ is not found in British texts. See Riddle, Eve, 142-143.

35 Riddle, Eve, 91.

36 Although Sharp’s book was not published until later in the seventeenth century, her work was extremely important in reflecting the experiences and advice of a practicing midwife.

It is also highly likely that Sharp’s information (especially concerning recipes for medicines to “provoke the terms”) reflects what was available during the Tudor period because, as Elaine Hobby argues in her introduction to the text, earlymodern midwifery manuals borrowed extensively from each other. See Elaine Hobby, introduction to The Midwives Book

by Jane Sharp, xvi-xx.

37 Sharp, The Midwives Book, 128.

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Sharp, The Midwives Book, 221.

Riddle, Eve, 154.

40 Bracton, De Legibus, l. 28, 2.341.

41 Sharp, The Midwives Book, 198, 179, 167.

42 Sharp, The Midwives Book, 220.

43 Riddle, Eve, 154.

44 Laroche, Medical Authority, 29.

45 Ibid.

46 Riddle, Eve, 182-4.

47 Ibid.

48 Laroche, Medical Authority, 29.

49 Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 60.

50 Ibid.

51 Turner, A New Herball, 23.

52 Riddle, Eve, 184.

53 Riddle, Eve, 32.

54 Laroche, Medical Authority, 167; Riddle, Eve, 48.

55 Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 3.127.

56 Turner, A New Herball, 64.

57 Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 3.127; Turner, A New Herball, 64.

58 Henry Alan Skinner, The Origin of Medical Terms (1949, Reprint, Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1961), 158.

59 Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 11041105; A.T., practitioner in physicke, A Rich Store-House or Treasury for the Diseased, (London: Thomas Purfoot, 1596) cap. 206.

60 Sharp, The Midwives Book, 198.

61 Riddle, Eve, 14-15.

62 Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 3.52.

63 Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 1257.

64 See notes 3 and 4 65 Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 1257.

66 Scarborough, “Contraception in Antiquity,� 21-22.

67 Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 3.43.

38 39

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Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 688.

Of Mints: “Dioscorides teacheth that being applied to the secret part of a woman before the act, it hindreth conception.”

(Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 682).

70 Turner, A New Herball, 103.

71 Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 3.34.

72 Turner, A New Herball, 103; Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 682; Sharp, The Midwives Book, 38.

73 Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 3.6.

74 Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 849; Turner A New Herball, 59.

75 Turner, A New Herball, 59.

76 Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 849.

77 Anita Pakrashi, Bulbul Chakrabarty and Anasuya Dasgupta, “Effect of the Extracts from Aristolochia Indica Linn. on Interception in Female Mice,” Experientia 32.3 (15 March 1976), 394-5.

78 Elaine Hobby, glossary to The Midwives Book, 320.

79 Riddle, Eve, 54-5.

80 Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, 1.104.

81 Galen, De Simplicium Medicamentorum, 6.2.15 (Kuhn ed.), noted in Riddle, “Contraceptives,” 13.

82 Gerard, The Herball or General Historie of Plantes, 1378.

83 Riddle, Eve, 184.

84 Alison Plowden, Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (New York: Atheneum, 1979), 164.

85 T.E., The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, Or, The Lawes Provision for Woemen: A Methodicall Collection of Such Statutes and Customes, with the Cases, Opinions, Arguments, and Points of Learning in the Law, as Doe Properly Concerne Women. (London: Miles Flesher, 1632) Book I, Section iii, 6.

86 T.E., Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, Book III, Sections i & vii, 116-118, 128.

87 T.E., Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, Book I, Section 68 69

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iii, 6.

88 Plowden, Tudor Women, 165.

89 Smith, De Republica Anglica, as noted by Jeffrey Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1995), 18.

90 Van Meteren as noted by R.E. Pritchard, ed. Shakespeare’s England: life in Elizabethan and Jacobean Times (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 29.

91 Pritchard, Shakespeare’s England, 28.

92 Barbara Harris, “Women and Politics in Early Tudor England,” The Historical Journal 33.2 (June 1990), 259.

93 Riddle, Eve, 122.

94 Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, 53.

95 Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (1599-1605), ed. Dorothy M. Meads, (London: Routledge, 1930), 68. For example, Hoby discusses the death of her friend Doctor Brewer, attributing it to “a medeson he minestred to him self to cause him to sleep” (68).

96 Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, 51.

97 An important exception is intercourse between an engaged couple which, while officially condemned, was far more acceptable and, it seems, relatively common. See Pritchard, Shakespeare’s England, 27.

98 Pritchard, Shakespeare’s England, 42.

99 Sowernam, Ester, “Ester Hath Hang’d Haman: or an Answere to a Lewd Pamphlet, Entituled, The Arraignment of Women” (London: Printed [by Thomas Snodham] for Nicholas Bourne, 1617), 24.

100 For reference, according to a 2010 report by the CIA, the world’s highest modern maternal mortality rate is 1.1% (Chad), with the United States holding at around 0.02% and the United Kingdom at 0.012%.

For statistics for Tudor England, see Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, 37 & Pritchard, Shakespeare’s England, 28.

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Pritchard, Shakespeare’s England, 27.

Pritchard, Shakespeare’s England, 28.

103 Singman, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, 39.

104 Riddle, Eve, 173.

101 102

Photo Sources: Page 55: http://faculty.bsc.edu/shagen/STUDENT/ Joy&Chris/abortiset.html Page 56: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/abortion/legal/ history_1.shtml

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The Legacy of Rabbi Hirsch

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch

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From Torah im Derekh Eretz to Torah U-Madda:

The Legacy of Samson Raphael Hirsch

Max Levy

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) was part of the earliest generation of Jews born and raised outside of the confines of the ghetto and in the intellectual capital of Europe: Germany. In the nineteenth century Germany was a society saturated with philosophical and literary giants and in the midst of profound creativity by Idealist and Romantic thinkers. Internally, the German Jewish community was undergoing change in the nineteenth century as Reform Judaism—against which Hirsch was an extremely outspoken ideological opponent—rose to prominence. As a dynamic leader, prolific writer, and an innovative thinker, Hirsch confronted these challenges and emerged from this crucible as a pivotal rabbinic figure who operated under his mantra of “Torah im derekh eretz” (Torah with the way of the land”) within both the world of traditional Judaism and that of German culture and intelligentsia. Twentieth-century American Jews faced a similar allure of cultural and intellectual assimilation.

Yet despite the many parallels between Hirsch’s milieu and that of modern America, his legacy remains rather ambiguous among those whose lifestyle and religious hashkafa (worldview) most closely mimic Hirsch’s ideology—Modern Orthodox Jews.

While American Modern Orthodox thinkers continue to draw on Hirsch as a source of inspiration and legitimacy for their vision of openness toward secular culture, historical circumstance and genuine intellectual disagreements have relegated Hirsch’s ideology to the periphery.

Hirsch’s Conception of Torah and German Culture

In order to understand Torah im derekh eretz, it is important to examine its two core components: Hirsch’s Penn History Review

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understanding of Torah and his relationship with secular knowledge. Hirsch’s conception of Judaism is grounded in his conviction in the primacy of biblical texts and in the indisputable truth of the Torah. He believed that the Jewish people received “the revelation of [God’s] will as a guide to human life – the Torah.”1 The Torah’s divinity is therefore unquestionable and its significance as the source of commandment is irrefutable. But in order to understand God’s will more clearly, Hirsch sought a pure and direct approach to Torah study that would ascertain the peshat, or simple meaning, of the text. Thus Hirsch disparaged scholars who analyzed Judaism using mystical and irrational frameworks. According to Hirsch, such beliefs “[make] Jewish law appear antiquated, obsolete, and moribund.”2 He insisted that his epoch demanded an approach to Torah that would present the rationality and cogency of its system. In his opinion, such an approach necessitates the classification and explication of mitzvot (commandments) in order to ascertain the fundamental principles behind religious ceremony.3 Nevertheless, according to Hirsch, man’s observance of God’s commandments cannot be contingent on man’s ability to rationalize them. Since “the very essence of Israel’s Being rests upon the Torah” it is impossible to construct a system of Judaism that disjoins the Jewish people from Torah law.4 As opposed to many of his traditional contemporaries, Hirsch did not completely circumscribe Jewish existence within the strict confines of Halacha (Torah law); rather, he believed that secular philosophy plays a crucial role in developing Judaism.

Hirsch himself attended the German Gymnasium and studied at the University of Bonn, in addition to devoting considerable time to independent study.5 Most tellingly, Hirsch’s writings reflect ample tropes from German Enlightenment and Idealist thought that—although not made explicit—defined much of his philosophical approach to Judaism.6 For example, Hirsch’s emphasis on Biblical study, anachronistic for a nineteenthcentury traditional rabbi, reflects Johann Gottfried Herder’s 74

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notion that “the literature of a people reveals its fundamental characteristics.”7 Additionally, Hirsch approached the issue of man’s knowledge of God from a seemingly Kantian perspective by arguing that man can only know God through revelation. Thus Hirsch contended, “The idea of God is the result of personal or national experience in the history of our people as recorded in the Torah.”8 Like Kant, Hirsch proposed that the foundation of man’s relationship with God is the actual knowledge derived from revelation; a religion grounded solely in reason would provide an insufficient basis for commitment.9 The pervasive signs of secular influence in Hirsch’s work are not peripheral or coincidental; rather, they are crucial to the fundamental principles of his thought. Although Hirsch did not use these sources explicitly, German philosophical ideas manifested in foundational principles of his ideology.

While aspects of Herder and Kant’s ideas permeate Hirsch’s thought, the two most significant philosophical influences on Hirsch’s ideology are two towering figures of nineteenth-century German thought: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805).10 According to Hirsch’s biographer, Noah Rosenbloom, Hegel had a monumental impact on Hirsch’s philosophical conception of Judaism. Rosenbloom argues that Hirsch adopted aspects of Hegelian metaphysics, objectivism, historicism, and teleology.11 Moreover, Hirsch believed in the notion of a basic spirit of Judaism that “is a potential in the Bible which became actualized in subsequent rabbinic literature.”12 This facet of Hirsch’s thought closely mirrors the fundamental Hegelian notion that the Idea of Spirit is actualized through history. Hegel himself was a very systematic thinker and Hirsch’s attempt to classify and rationalize the entirety of the Jewish experience echoes the all-encompassing nature of Hegel’s philosophy.

The Romantic poet Schiller so captivated Hirsch’s intellect that the Schiller Festival in 1859 prompted Hirsch to Penn History Review

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deliver a speech to the Israelitischen Religionsgesellschaft’s School in which he praised Schiller’s contributions to the world and specifically to Judaism. Hirsch said, “Who understood as well as Schiller how to so beautifully express truths that can save the world and men.”13 Hirsch adamantly believed that Schiller grasped the profundity of human experience and articulated it in a way that was comprehensible to the masses. He even claimed that, “[Our Sages] would have greeted Schiller as one of their own, and would have recognized only familiar tones among his sounds.”14 In almost radical language Hirsch emphatically declared that Schiller was a unique thinker and artist whose works penetrated the core of Jewish values, thereby bringing Schiller into the intellectual Jewish fold by virtue of his commonalities with the Jewish tradition. Evidently, Hirsch believed in the possibility of an organic relationship between secular and Jewish philosophy.

Not only was Hirsch interested in German intellectual trends, but also he was a fiercely proud German and embraced many aspects of broader European culture. Most importantly, he believed that, “European culture had substantive, not merely instrumental value.”15 In other words, Hirsch did not view the diffusion of secular culture into Jewish life as detrimental to German Jewry since much of European culture, he believed, was intrinsically good and not just useful. In an essay in 1854, Hirsch wrote, “[Orthodox Judaism] has no reason to fear the light of the world or fear that its own light be eclipsed by the bright sunshine of any genuine culture.”16 Hirsch saw no reason to completely shy away from secular culture, despite the natural limits of cultural integration that he defended. Moreover, a close reading of the rest of his 1854 essay reveals a profound implication: by describing Jewish culture as a “light,” Hirsch evokes common Jewish symbolism of the light of Torah, or the light that the Jewish people are unto the world.17 Yet Hirsch describes German, or Western European, culture as a “bright sunshine,” thereby implying that it too serves to better mankind, 76

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perhaps with greater vigor even than the “light” of nineteenthcentury German Jewry. That Hirsch judges Europe to offer a “genuine culture” additionally suggests either that either European culture is substantively on par with Jewish culture, or that it is qualitatively distinct from Judaism. If the latter, it appears that Hirsch believes European culture offers benefits unavailable with a hermitically constructed Judaism. According to Rosenbloom, “Hirsch…[had] a deep emotional feeling for German and a strong attachment to German culture.”18 That Hirsch wrote and lectured largely in German­—when Rabbis had written commentaries and Biblical exegesis in Hebrew for centuries—was not only a product of pragmatism but also of an ideological commitment to German culture.19 Hirsch’s emphatic appreciation of German culture distinguished him from many of his predecessors and almost all of his Eastern rabbinical peers.

Torah im Derekh Eretz The term that Hirsch used to express his complex ideology that maintained the integrity of the Torah while engaging with western philosophy and culture was coined “Torah im derekh eretz.” Literally “Torah and the way of the land,” Hirsch’s used “way of the land” as a reference to secular society. Hirsch envisioned that, “The Jew was to be a ‘human being and a Jew’ (Mensch-Jisroel), a Jew to whom no values and no achievements of ‘pure humanity’ were alien, whose Jewishness meant a higher rung of humanness.”20 An ideal Jew, for Hirsch, is one who is intimately familiar with all aspects of secular culture that are compatible with authentic traditional Judaism— contributions of “pure humanity.” Not to know such aspects of the world is to deny oneself the full potential of humanness. Although Hirsch was certainly not the first rabbi to embrace aspects of secular culture, his strong formulation turned what previously existed mainly in the realm of practice into a nuanced ideology. Moreover, Hirsch’s great-grandson, historian Mordechai Breuer, posits that Hirsch reached a new level of cultural embracement whereas his predecessors mostly Penn History Review

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championed toleration of secular culture. The study of secular knowledge and the attainment of general wisdom became veiled in near messianic terms for Hirsch, because Torah im derekh eretz extended beyond a pragmatic structure of Judaism and into an ideal way of life by which Jews could gain even greater merit in God’s eyes.21 A comparison of Hirsch’s thought with the ideologies of the Medieval philosopher and Torah scholar Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) and the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) sheds light on Hirsch’s unique nature within the canon of Jewish thought. At first blush both Maimonides and Mendelssohn appear to mirror Hirsch’s model of Torah im derekh eretz due to their own similarly positive views of secular culture; however, further examination reveals that despite structural similarities there are sharp distinctions between the three thinkers. Hirsch contends, “[Maimonides] is responsible for all the good which blesses the heritage of Modern Judaism as well as for the evil which afflicts it.”22 Although Hirsch praised Maimonides for strengthening Judaism, he sharply criticizes Maimonides for approaching Judaism from the external perspective of Greek philosophy and attempting to reconcile Judaism with those philosophical notions. In contrast, Hirsch insisted on an organic and innate understanding of Judaism. Similarly, Hirsch admired Mendelssohn’s “brilliant respect-inspiring personality” and appreciated much of his approach and his efforts to understand the mitzvoth.23 On the other hand, Hirsch admonished Mendelssohn for not building a philosophy of Judaism based on an internal, Torah-centric rationality. Consequently, Hirsch acknowledged the great debt Jews owed Maimonides and Mendelssohn but at the same time he affirmed the need for a new approach to Judaism.

Hirsch’s piercing criticism of both Maimonides and Mendelssohn for relying on systems of thought external to Judaism seems to contradict the secular influences on his ideology discussed previously. This ostensible inconsistency 78

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may be resolved by a distinction in approach between Hirsch and Maimonides and Mendelssohn. Hirsch did not attempt to reconcile Judaism with Hegelianism, and indeed, he felt no need to do so. Hegelianism provided Hirsch with the tools to unearth authentic Judaism and to articulate it attractively. In contrast, Maimonides and Mendelssohn had starkly different agendas, since their projects were primarily aimed at philosophical reconciliation.24 Therefore, as Rosenbloom explains, Hirsch saw the Maimonidean and Mendelssohnian undertakings “as a model in approach but not in the execution of [their] concepts.”25 Like his predecessors, Hirsch’s goal was to articulate a modern, intellectually compelling framework of Judaism. While he certainly saw his work in the same vein as these monumental figures, Hirsch demanded a distinctly different methodology.

Two Modern Reactions to Hirsch

Given the similarities between the cultural allure of nineteenth-century Germany and twentieth-century America, one may expect Hirsch’s influence among American Modern Orthodoxy to be ubiquitous.26 Indeed, Hirsch’s writings are popular and numerous translations of his key texts are available to an American audience; however, American Modern Orthodox Rabbis rarely engage the full breadth of Hirsch’s philosophy and hashkafa. Some praise Hirsch as an important Jewish thinker yet completely sanitize and distort his beliefs in order to constrict and suppress his relationship to German culture. Others engage him as a crucial example of a traditional Jew who maintained strict halachic (ritual law) observance while encountering the broader world. Nevertheless, they do not develop his thought into the philosophical foundation for their own frameworks and instead prefer to use Hirsch on a more superficial level. Neither party embraces the full implications of Torah im Derekh Eretz.

Those American Jews who wish to limit Hirsch’s views interpret his openness towards German society as either misrepresented or merely a historical necessity.27 The Artscroll biography, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, encapsulates this Penn History Review

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notion, for it barely mentions the many German thinkers who substantially impacted Hirsch’s thought. As one of the most prominent presses for Jewish publications aimed at an American Orthodox audience, Artscroll’s message is exceptionally noteworthy. The author contends that Hirsch was acutely aware of the dangers inherent in studying secular subjects, and therefore, allowed such study in a very qualified way and “under the guidance of those well versed in Torah, who could point out how and why the Torah rejects those ideas.”28 This argument is completely inconsistent with the life of Hirsch who attended university, was steeped in secular knowledge, and praised Friedrich von Schiller as one whom Jews must greet with blessing, “Blessing and praise to him who has imparted of His wisdom to mortals.”29 Even within the milieu of American Modern Orthodoxy’s flagship institution, Yeshiva University—the Jewish university dedicated to combining Torah and secular studies—there is a tendency among some rabbis to stray from the spirit of Hirsch’s words by minimizing the scope of Hirsch’s worldview.30 In 1989, in the very first issue of Yeshiva University’s journal on Jewish Thought, The Torah U-Madda Journal, Rabbi Mordechai Willig wrote an essay that builds a defense for the study of secular subjects. Willig identifies leniencies that allow studying in order to earn a living and at times to understand Judaism better.31 Yet in his legalistic rhetoric, Willig completely misses the flavor of Hirsch’s insistence on the ability of German culture to enrich Judaism and provide a “genuine culture” for Jews. Interestingly, in the very same journal issue, Professor Walter Warzburger castigates the blatant misinterpretations of Hirsch that frequently occur in America.32 This disagreement within The Torah U-Madda Journal indicates the widespread contention over Hirsch’s legacy, especially within the community that purportedly supports Hirsch’s appreciation of secular knowledge, culture, and society.

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Hirsch is invoked regularly as a source of inspiration for the school’s motto and mission of Torah U-Madda (“Torah and Wisdom”).33 At the same time, it appears that Rabbi Hirsch’s ideas do not form the driving ideology behind the formation of Yeshiva University, nor is there an attempt to engage him as a systemic thinker. In Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm’s treatise on Yeshiva University’s ideology, Torah Umadda: The Encounter of Religious Learning and Worldly Knowledge in the Jewish Tradition, an entire chapter is devoted to Hirsch’s thought.

Nonetheless, Hirsch is included as only one of many historical precedents for YU’s project. In fact, he is only allotted more discussion because his context and writings are more explicitly relevant, not because they are perceived as more philosophically pertinent.34 As a result, Lamm emphasizes Hirsch’s formulation of Torah im derekh eretz and not his philosophical contributions to Judaism.35 Moreover, Lamm places Torah im derekh eretz on a long historical trajectory that culminates with Yeshiva University, thus suggesting that Hirsch was significant in this historical chain but not someone whose legacy stands alone.

While Lamm admits that, “Insofar as Torah im derekh eretz as a theory is concerned, Torah Umadda shares with it to a greater extent than it diverges from it,” the theory presented by Lamm appears rather divorced from Hirsch as a luminary figure and his precise impact is left ambiguous.36 Historical Explanations

Hirsch’s relative unimportance as an intellectual figure in Modern Orthodox American Jewry can in part be attributed to the sharp decline in the popularity of his thought after his death.37 While during his life Hirsch ascended to the pinnacle of German Orthodoxy, his religious community suffered several setbacks following his death. Although several prominent German rabbis such as Esriel Hildesheimer, David Hoffman, and Dr. Solomon Breuer continued Hirsch’s work after his death, Hirsch’s Frankfurt Yeshiva did not sustain itself by producing rabbinic leaders.38 Moreover, in succeeding generations, Hirsch’s model Penn History Review

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of religious life met increasing skepticism. Some contemporaries believed that he remained too guarded against German culture, while others “clung to his thought structure, but did not feel secure enough to keep building at it.”39 That is, they idealized the form of Judaism that he espoused but were not well grounded enough to progress further within his system. After the Holocaust, Hirsch’s teachings met equal hesitation but this time with the opposite result. According to historian Marc Shapiro, “Many of the young Orthodox were no longer interested in intellectually grappling with religious and philosophical problems. Rather, they were looking for an easier solution, which they found in Eastern European Orthodoxy.”40 Hirsch’s Orthodoxy was indeed challenging because it sought to balance competing forces of influence—the religious and the secular.41 After the Holocaust many Jews deemed the closed world of Eastern European Jewry as a more accessible model of Jewish life that promised greater communal success. Consequently, Hirsch’s ideology failed to gain a strong foothold in the generations that followed him.

There is an additional historical explanation for Hirsch’s limited presence in America: in the first half of the twentieth century, the major rabbinic leaders and a broad swath of laymen who formed the early cadre of Modern Orthodox leaders were much more influenced by the Eastern European Yeshiva world than by German neo-Orthodoxy. Although there were notable exceptions such as Rabbi Bernard Drachmann, who had a PhD from the University of Heidelberg and studied with Zacharias Frankel, and Rabbi Phillip Hillel Klein, who had a PhD from the University of Jenna and studied with Rabbi Hildesheimer, the majority of prominent ‘Modern Orthodox’ rabbis in America were similar to Rabbi Moses Zebulun Margolies (Ramaz) who studied in bastions of traditional Eastern European learning, such as Kovno (modern-day Lithuania) and Bialystok (modernday Poland).42 While Drachmann and Klein were active in the Orthodox community they did not build or shape landmark Orthodox institutions. A critical case that demonstrates the early 82

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reliance of American Modern Orthodoxy on Eastern European rabbinic authorities occurred during the early twentieth century in Washington Heights.43 An influential leader in Baltimore and Manhattan, Rabbi Shimon Schwab, turned to illustrious Eastern European rabbis—Rav Barukh Ber Leibowitz, Rav Elchanan Wasserman, Rav Avraham Yizhak Block, and the Rogatchover Rebbe Rav Yosef Rozin—for advice regarding the permissibility of studying secular subjects. The rabbis’ responses are antithetical to Hirsch’s opinion and mainly reflect the view of Rav Elchanan Wasserman that “secular studies are the exact opposite of Torah.”44 While this particular case is merely one incident, it demonstrates where American rabbis found their roots. As one of the early discussions regarding American Orthodox Jews studying secular subjects, it was likely a formative event that influenced the ongoing discussion of secular culture in an American context.

Perhaps the most pivotal transition for American Modern Orthodoxy was the appointment of Bernard Revel as the first Rosh Yeshiva and President of the fledgling Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Rabbinical School in 1915.45 Revel was an extraordinary individual with the unusual skillset needed to help define the young Yeshiva University. Originally from Kovno, he was recognized as a Talmudic genius at a young age and received ordination from Telshe Yeshiva at the age of sixteen.

Upon arriving in America he furthered his studies at New York University, Dropsie College, and the University of Pennsylvania.46 While in some respects Revel emerged as an ‘American Hirsch,’ steeped in Torah and philosophy, he never saw himself as the bearer of Hirsch’s legacy, which he believed was specific to Hirsch’s time.47 Revel’s Judaism was bred in the traditional yeshivot of Eastern Europe and therefore, while he advocated secular studies, his conception of Torah remained that which he fashioned in Telshe. His embrace of secular studies did not stem from Hirsch’s ideology but from practical considerations.

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prevented him from turning to Hirsch for anything more than historical precedence for engaging secular culture and learning.48 Intellectual Rejection

The continued underrepresentation of Hirsch in American Modern Orthodoxy can also be attributed to an intellectual rejection of Hirsch’s ideas. Some scholars argue that Hirsch’s influence was profound on a communal level because of his innovation in the field of Jewish education, but as a Jewish thinker, they claim, he did not develop novel ideas.49 Consequently, for these Jews, Hirsch is a source of inspiration for creating institutions that promote openness towards education and culture, but he does not offer an intellectualization or halachic discourse regarding its permissibility. Rather ironically, some Jewish thinkers such as the influential Modern Orthodox Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein rarely turn to Hirsch for philosophical formulations because they criticize him for falling prey to his own complaint against his intellectual predecessors. Namely, Lichtenstein criticizes Hirsch for championing a humanism containing “an element that has been engrafted” just as Hirsch decried the work of Maimonides as too heavily influenced by Greek philosophy.50 Despite Hirsch’s own claims that he seeks an authentic and organic conception of Judaism that purely arises from internal sources, Lichtenstein and other scholars view Hirsch as promoting a particular philosophical approach and imposing structures that are derived from German philosophy.

Indeed, Hirsch’s conception of secular knowledge is based on the notion that no true form of knowledge is foreign to the wisdom derived from Torah and religion. Shapiro contends that Hirsch saw “a single tree growing from one root that sends its branches out in many directions.”51 Torah and secular wisdom are not two completely different worlds for Hirsch, rather they are but two different forms of knowledge—two different branches—in God’s world. According to Shapiro, “His ideal, the Mensch-Jisroel, was not the product of an interconnection or even a fusion.”52 Hirsch aspired for a balance between these 84

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two aspects of worldly wisdom. As a result, Hirsch appeared much less concerned about conflict between Torah and secular wisdom than many of the rabbis who followed him because Hirsch believed that the two modes of thinking fill different voids in man and serve different functions. Unquestionably, Torah remains at the center of the Jewish people’s existence, but secular knowledge joins and complements the immutable knowledge of the Torah, thereby providing another window into the world.53

In contrast to Hirsch’s formulation, Yeshiva University’s faculty have historically promoted a notion of synthesis that draws heavily from the work of Maimonides. In his inaugural address as President of Yeshiva University in 1944, Dr. Belkin described “the blending of science and religion and the integration of secular knowledge with sacred wisdom.”54 Integration implies not the harmonious coexistence of Hirsch, but the fusing of two threads of knowledge into one completely unified view of the world—exactly what Maimonides sought to do with his attempts at reconciliation eight hundred years earlier. Belkin’s successor, Rabbi Lamm, expressed the same ideology in his analysis of Torah U-Madda by arguing that the final stage in the history of Torah U-Madda denies “the ultimate metaphysical validity of the bifurcation of cognitive experience” and instead advocates a comprehensive vision of man’s intellect.55 Lamm insists that a Jew must occupy only one vantage point that incorporates his Torah and general knowledge when approaching the world. Lamm defends this approach from Hirsch’s attack on Maimonides by claiming that Maimonides believed that reason and revelation are derived from the same source and thus Greek philosophy merely provided the tools to help articulate and unlock the reason that was inherent in Torah and intrinsically part of God’s system.56 Furthermore, Lamm rejects Hirsch’s specific terminology of Torah im Derekh Eretz in part because of its political connotation with Hirsch’s communal separatism and he labels his chapter about Hirsch as “The Cultural Model,” further Penn History Review

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separating the two thinkers.57 While Hirsch nonetheless remains important for Lamm’s defense and history of Torah U-Madda, he is not essential for Lamm’s ideological and philosophical explication or justification.

Conclusion Hirsch’s teachings have lost their profundity and philosophical importance among American Orthodoxy. Clearly, the most dominant and influential thinker of the past century for Modern Orthodox Jews is Rabbi Dr. Joseph Soloveitchik, and neither he nor his prominent students rely much on Hirsch in their writings.58 Soloveitchik earned a PhD from the University of Berlin and was exposed to German Jewry, but it is probable that he found German Jewry severely lacking in comparison to the overwhelming religious milieu of his family’s Volozhin Yeshiva.

Additionally, Soloveitchik – whose father and grandfather were famous for their erudition of Maimonides – Revel, and other Eastern European rabbis displaced in America, sought to place themselves on the historical trajectory of Eastern European Jewry from which they derived their own approaches to Torah. Part of this vision was certainly due to the their respective backgrounds and part stemmed from the general shift among American Jews who in the wake of the Holocaust viewed Eastern Europe as the source of authentic Judaism and thus desired for their yeshivot to be the Kovno or Volozhin of America.59 Despite the current victory of the Maimonidean approach, Hirsch continues to serve as a source of inspiration, at least indirectly, for many American Jews who invoke his legacy as a precedent for embracing western culture. It is impossible to determine, however, whether Hirsch himself would be content with Modern Orthodoxy’s development of Torah im derekh eretz into Torah U-Madda.

While its proponents adhere to his commitment to both Torah and the secular world, Torah U-Madda aligns with the Eastern European legacy – often associated with the Lithuanian Yeshivot – and with Maimonides’ philosophy that Hirsch argued eroded the authenticity of the Jewish experience. What is certain, 86

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is that a more sophisticated understanding of Hirsch would grant contemporary Jews a more nuanced appreciation for Orthodoxy’s confrontation with modernity and in the process enrich the modern religious experience.

Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters, trans. Joseph Elias (Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers, 1995), 59.

2 Noah Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform: The Religious Philosophy of Samson Raphael Hirsch (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1976), 136.

3 Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horeb: A Philosophy of Jewish Laws and Observances, trans. Dayan Dr. I Grunfeld (London: The Soncino Press, 1962), ciii.

4 Hirsch, Nineteen Letters, 117.

5 Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 58, 61-62.

Some historians have hailed him as an autodidact.

6 Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 152153. Rosenbloom discusses Hirsch’s schedule of study in Oldenburg. The intense schedule provided daily allotments for the study of Greek, history, Latin, physics, mathematics, and geography (72).

7 Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 153. That Hirsch made analysis of biblical texts his primary focus was unusual among traditional rabbis, whom for generations had viewed the Talmud and halachik (legal) codices as the most important Jewish texts. In his excellent work on the Eastern European Yeshivot (institutions of higher Jewish learning), historian Shaul Stampfer, in discussing the curriculum at the prominent Volozhin Yeshiva, says that although Bible and kabbala (mysticism) were studied, “the main emphasis in Volozhin, however, was always on the Talmud” (Shaul Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012, 42). It is clear from his writings 1

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that Hirsch did not devote the same attention to Talmudic studies as he did to study of the Torah. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) was a German Enlightenment philosopher, theologian, and poet. For a general introduction to Herder’s life and thought see The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Johann Gottfried von Herder” by Michael Forster, accessed 10 April 2013, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2008/entries/herder/.

8 Grunfeld, Horeb, xliii.

9 Alan Mittleman, Between Kant and Kabbalah: An Introduction to Isaac Breuer’s Philosophy of Judaism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 30-31. Also see The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Kant’s Philosophy of Religion,” by Philip Rossi, accessed 10 April 2013, http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/kant-religion/.

10 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was the most important post-Kantian German Idealist. His philosophy attempted to create a comprehensive philosophical system that incorporated a conception of history, art, religion, the state, the subject and object of knowledge, and the mind and nature.

He is famous for the notion of thesis—antithesis—synthesis, which is derived from his ontology as well as for his teleological account of history that influenced Karl Marx. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1749-1805) was a German Romantic author and philosopher who, along with Goethe, is often cited as one of Germany’s elite literary figures. Schiller was Christian and devoted much of his writings to exploring aesthetics and the notion of freedom. That Hirsch identified this Christian Romantic as particularly important for Jewish thought demonstrates Hirsch’s ability to search his intellectual milieu broadly for sources of influence and inspiration.

11 Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 153-174.

12 Ibid., 153.

13 Marc Shapiro, “Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Friedrich von Schiller,” The Torah U-Madda Journal 15 (2008-20009), 88

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176.

14 Ibid.

15 Mordechai Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany, trans.

Elizabeth Petuchowski (New York: Columbia Press, 1992), 22.

16 Hirsch, Collected Writings, VI:147.

17 See Isaiah 60:3.

18 Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 109.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., 69. Note that “pure humanity” refers to secular society.

21 Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, 73.

22 Hirsch, Nineteen Letters, 119.

23 Hirsch, Nineteen Letters, 123; Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 124.

24 Allan Arkush, Modern Jewish Philosophy, eds., Peter Gordon and Michael Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 36-37. Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed seeks to explain the Torah in accordance with principles of Greek philosophy.

25 Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 128.

26 A complex term to succinctly define, Modern Orthodoxy in America can be described as the movement that seeks to embrace aspects of secular society while remaining true to Orthodox theology and practice of halacha (Jewish law).

27 There is an ongoing debate among religious Jews whether or not Hirsch permitted the study of secular subjects as a leniency for sha’at hadchak, a time of danger. If so, then Hirsch would believe that it is permissible only in extenuating circumstances but that le’hatchitla (from the outset) it is not ideal.

28 Rabbi Eliyahu Meir Klugman, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1996), 205 and 207.

29 Shapiro, “Samson Raphael Hirsch and Friedrich von Schiller, 174.

30 Although Modern Orthodoxy does not operate within a clearly defined governing body, as does the Conservative and Penn History Review

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Reform movements, a majority of American Modern Orthodox rabbis have received ordination from Yeshiva University or have studied with rabbis trained at or affiliated with Yeshiva University. As a result, Yeshiva University serves as a good barometer for the Modern Orthodox rabbinate.

31 Rabbi Modechai Willig, “Secular Studies: Are they for Everyone?,” The Torah U-Madda Journal 1 (1989), 91-103.

32 Dr. Walter S. Warzburger, “Confronting Challenges of the Values of Modernity,” The Torah U-Madda Journal 1 (1989), 107.

33 “Torah U-Madda” is the motto of Yeshiva University and used to encapsulate the institutions ideology of emphasizing both study of Torah and secular knowledge. The exact limits of this approach are contested. Rabbi Lamm’s work discussed below is one of the most important attempts to explore the ideology of Torah U-Madda because Lamm served as President of Yeshiva University for many years, was a student of the monumental Modern Orthodox thinker Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, and is regarded as a prominent spokesperson for American Modern Orthodoxy.

34 Norman Lamm, Torah Umadda: The Encounter of Religious Learning and Worldly Knowledge in the Jewish Tradition (Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc., 1990), 24-25. Here Hirsch is seen as one of many precursors who embraced Torah while engaging in secular subjects.

35 Lamm’s chapter on Hirsch does not evaluate him as a systematic thinker.

36 Lamm, Torah Umadda, 124.

37 Prominent Orthodox thinkers—such as Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993), Eliezer Berkovits (1908-1992), David Hartman (1931-2013), and Aharon Lichtenstein (1933-present)—make little use of Hirsch in their philosophical work. Of those, only Berkovits was trained by German rabbis.

38 Lamm, Torah Umadda, 119-120; Grunfeld, 24-25, regarding the rabbis who continued his legacy. Although Hildesheimer 90

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was not a student of Hirsch’s, the two figures shared much in common including their teacher Rabbi Isaac Bernays. From his seminary in northern Germany, Hildesheimer pursued many of the same goals that Hirsch pursued in southern Germany.

39 Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, 164.

40 Marc Shapiro, “Torah im Derekh Eretz in the Shadow of Hitler,” The Torah U-madda Journal 14 (2006-2007): 85.

Even Hirsch’s own descendants, the Breuers, aligned with the Lithuanian yeshiva world and had rabbis from Telshe and Mirrer (Mir) educating their children rather than teachers who espoused Hirsch’s embrace of secular culture. See Jeffrey Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 219.

41 It is important to note that although thinkers like Maimonides had also struggled with this balance, Hirsch was innovative in part because he made acceptance of secular society an ideology for the masses and not just the intellectual elite. See Jacob J. Schachter, “Torah u-Madda Revisited: The Editor’s Introduction,” The Torah u-Madda Journal 1 (1989), 3.

42 Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America, 124, 135, 144. The term Modern Orthodox is problematic in general and especially when discussing Early 20th century American Jewish history.

Until after World War II it is difficult to distinguish neatly between different categories of Orthodox Jews. For the sake of this paper, the term ‘Modern Orthodox’ applies to those Orthodox Jews that seriously and ideologically engaged modern society and secular studies. Drachman and Klein both became important religious leaders in Manhattan and were influential in the creation of national institutions. Drachman served as president of the Orthodox Union and Klein was one of the founders of the Orthodox Jewish Congregation Union. Klein also was president of the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, which became part of Yeshiva University under the guidance of Bernard Revel.

43 In email correspondence, Gurock agreed that American Penn History Review

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Orthodoxy consistently turned to Eastern Europe and not central Europe for religious guidance and inspiration.

44 Willig, “Secular Studies: Are they for Everyone?,” 96-97.

45 Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America, 143. As the first President and Rosh Yeshiva, and as the figure responsible for helping formulate the Yeshiva College, Revel had an instrumental role in shaping Yeshiva University.

46 Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America, 143.

47 Revel’s Biographer, Aaron Rothkoff, argues, “Revel’s outlook was not motivated by the weltanschauung of the Orthodox Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch of nineteenth-century Germany. Hirsch’s positive attitude toward secular study was in reaction to the vast inroads made in Germany by Reform Judaism, in the wake of the new epoch that had its origin in the Renaissance and humanism” [Aaron Rothkoff, Bernard Revel: Builder of American Jewish Orthodoxy (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 72].

48 It is worth noting that as he added more professors teaching academic or secular subjects at Yeshiva University he also enhanced the core Talmud program with Eastern European Rabbis (Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America, 144).

49 Schachter, “Torah u-Madda Revisited: The Editor’s Introduction,” 3. Robert Liberles presents a similar emphasis on Hirsch as a community leader in his essay, “Champion of Orthodoxy: The Emergence of Samson Raphael Hirsch as a Religious Leader” AJS Review Vol. 6 (1981), 43-60.

50 Aharon Lichtenstein, Leaves of Faith: The World of Jewish Living Volume 2 (New York: Ktav Publishing, 2004), 304.

51 Shapiro “Torah im Derekh Erez in the Shadow of Hitler,” 93.

52 Ibid.

53 Concerning the centrality of Torah see Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Collected Writings Vol. VI, David Bechhofer and Elliott Bondi, eds. (New York: Philipp Feldheim, 1990), 41.

54 Schachter, “Torah u-Madda Revisited: The Editor’s 92

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Introduction,” 8.

55 Lamm, Torah Umadda, x.

56 Ibid., 105.

57 Ibid., 124.

58 Hirsch is essentially absent from Soloveitchik’s writings, including his ideologically defining pieces: Lonely Man of Faith (1965) and Halachik Man (1983). In his essay on secular culture, Soloveitchik’s disciple Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein does not even mention Hirsch.

59 The yeshivot in Kovno and Volozhin were two of the largest and most influential institutions of Jewish learning in Eastern Europe.

Photo Source: Page 72://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Think-AgainThe-enduring-legacy-of-Samson-Raphael-Hirsch

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Mobile Credit:

The Effects of Credit Cards on Consumer Spending in the United States in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

Gabriel Fineberg

Credit has been a defining staple of commerce and transactions since antiquity and “buy now pay later” schemes date back to biblical times. Benjamin Franklin illustrated the paramount significance of credit when he once remarked, “remember that credit is money,” and President Herbert Hoover echoed this sentiment when he exclaimed, “let me remind you that credit is the lifeblood of business, prices, and jobs.”1,2 Perhaps the most significant development in the history of consumer credit to date

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was the emergence of the bank issued credit card. The bank credit card has assumed a substantial role in contemporary consumer theory and personal finance. As of 2010, bank issued credit card transactions for U.S. households totaled 15.25 billion in volume and exceeded $1.2 trillion in value.3 The growing prominence and proliferation of bank credit cards has promoted increased consumer spending. The data show an unequivocal correlation between augmented personal consumption and credit card usage.

The percentage of households using credit cards increased from 16 percent in 1970 to 64 percent in 1995, with average monthly charges surging from $125 to $500 inflation adjusted dollars over that same period. Likewise, during that same interval, average household expenditure accelerated rapidly from an inflation adjusted approximately $10,000 to $35,000.4

Source: David S. Evans, “The Growth and Diffusion of Credit Cards in Society,” pg. 65.

Credit cards have encouraged increased consumer spending in the United States in the final three decades of the 20th century because they have served two distinct functions: they were—and remain—a convenient means of paying for goods with a universally accepted charge card as well as a mechanism for borrowing money to finance short term purchases. The card’s payment function was made possible by the establishment of a comprehensive network that provided the requisite organizational structure to elicit the participation of all the major Penn History Review

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market players: banks, merchants, and consumers. Among other properties, this collaborative enterprise provided the convenience, universal accessibility and psychological underpinnings to significantly alter and aggrandize consumer expenditures. With respect to borrowing, the credit components associated with the card afforded consumers new avenues to finance purchases on credit. Specifically, the borrowing features of the card allowed cardholders to pay for goods with loaned money, which encouraged more spending with greater efficiency, synchronized cash flows with spending, and eased liquidity constraints that induced future spending. The credit card was innovative because, as a whole, it functioned as a versatile and unrestricted mobile credit vehicle. Bank issued credit cards and the underlying credit networks upon which they relied revolutionized and catalyzed the increase in consumer spending in the United States during the late-twentieth century by combining effective payment mechanisms with unique borrowing features.

The Payment Side—Universal Processing:

Perhaps the greatest legacy of the unrestricted bank issued credit5 card remains its universal properties. Although some stores in the United States offered individual, store specific charge accounts before the advent of credit cards—a topic that will be discussed later in greater detail—the bank issued card could be used to purchase goods at any of the vast number of merchants affiliated with the credit card network.6 In essence, the credit card introduced portable and transferable credit spending capabilities. With the universal bank issued card, credit cards functioned as a virtual currency honored at all network affiliated merchants. Under this arrangement, consumers enjoyed the many benefits associated with both the payment and borrowing features of the credit card, which dramatically altered both the manner and extent to which American consumers spent their discretionary income. However, to a large degree, the unique structure of the credit card network served as a vital prerequisite 96

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for the introduction and proliferation of credit cards in the U.S. market. In short, “the banks that issued the card did so because they believed they would profit from fees and interest, the merchants that accepted them believed that customers would make additional and larger transactions with the cards, and consumers thought the cards were the best vehicle for payment or borrowing relative to alternatives.” 7 The card brought the banks, merchants, and consumers under one umbrella. Without this distinct organizational payment structure, the credit card would have remained economically unviable, the borrowing and payment features would have been severely restricted, and consumers would not have realized the consumption gains that credit cards induced.

At the onset, the bank credit card fell far short of being universal by contemporary standards. After the introduction of the first credit card in 1950, over 100 small banks began to issue credit cards, most of which floundered immediately, but the most notable was Bank of America’s BankAmericard.8 At its inception in 1958, the BankAmericard operated under a fundamentally different framework than do contemporary credit card companies. The card could be issued exclusively through Bank of America, then the nation’s largest bank, and could be used to charge purchases on 30-day lines of credit only at merchants with whom San Francisco based Bank of America had contracted directly. However, longstanding federal regulations dating from Andrew Jackson’s crusade against the Second National Bank restricted banks from operating across state lines. The McFadden-Pepper Act of 1927 and the Banking Act of 1933 granted states the authority to prohibit interstate branch banking. These laws had prevented the rise of a nationally issued and accepted card.9 The legislative environment became even more hostile towards national banking institutions at the very moment charge payment cards were taking hold in America.

Previously, some banks circumvented geographical restrictions through a legal loophole that allowed holding companies to own Penn History Review

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banks in several states. In 1956 the Bank Holding Company Act prohibited this sort of interstate branching unless both the states involved explicitly permitted it.10

Existing legislation not only limited the sphere of influence of large credit issuing institutions such as Bank of America, but also precluded most consumers in semi-urban and rural markets from the credit card industry. Banks restricted card operations to densely populated cities where they could justify the high cost of investing in infrastructure to service and market their cards. Moreover, merchants would accept discounted compensation from consumers using the cards only in markets that offered high sales volume. Likely as a result of the unfavorable legislative climate, at the midpoint of the 20th century, no single bank retained significant market share of the American consumer banking industry. As such, each lacked the resources and infrastructure to launch a nationally issued and recognized card brand. Under this backdrop, Bank of America faced the most auspicious circumstances relative to its peer institutions. Not only was San Francisco-based Bank of America the nation’s largest bank at the time, but California remained one of a few states that permitted intrastate branching operations, which gave the bank quick access to a large, affluent, and loyal customer base.11

Beginning in 1965, Bank of America took the first significant step to provide a national base for its credit card and pioneered the operational structure that has remained largely intact as the present day industry standard. The bank launched the BankAmerica Service Corporation, which served as a national licensing organization to franchise the BankAmericard to local banks, which were henceforth authorized to issue a card that carried the nationally recognized BankAmericard trademark. In 1970, at the behest of its franchise holders,12 Bank of America spun off the Bank Americard operation and formed what is known as a “network joint venture.�13 A joint venture is an economic term that denotes a legally binding agreement in 98

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which the parties agree to participate in a specified enterprise by contributing equity, sharing control, and each assuming a specified portion of profits and losses.14 Under the terms of this cooperative, Bank of America and the other banks, credit unions, and traditional money lending institutions that had licensed the rights to the BankAmericard became members of the joint venture, called National Bank Americard Inc. and Visa from 1976 onwards.15 Each member institution would be responsible to issue charge cards to consumers, sign up merchants to accept the cards, or do both. As such, the credit card company—the brand logo that appears on the card such as Visa or MasterCard—is not an entity that directly lends money on credit to consumers.

Rather, the credit card company is an administrative arm of this joint venture of cooperating, but separate, banking institutions, each of which assumes its own credit risk in full when issuing cards. While the credit card company represents the interests of its member institutions, it operates independently and performs mostly centralized functions to manage individual accounts, settle disputes between consumers and merchants, market and advertise member services, innovate instruments for credit lending for members, protect against fraud, and regulate internal policies that govern protocol for member institutions.16 This network solved the problems of early independent attempts to provide mass universal credit, which faced inhibiting fixed costs and undiversified risk. The networks diffused the costs and uncertainty amongst all member banks, which also provided additional incentives for even smaller banks that lacked the capital to spend large sums to join.17 Thus, the networks transformed the customer’s local card into a national card that could—and would—be used ubiquitously.

In the wake of BankAmericard’s success, another group of financial institutions collaborated to form the Interbank card Association in 1966, which changed its name to MasterCard in 1980 and operates employing an almost identical structure to Visa. The Credit Card industry failed to collect much data during Penn History Review

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its nascent years—the late 1950’s and early 1960’s—but the number of banking institutions that joined the BankAmericard network serves as a testament to the rising popularity of the credit card. From just one institution at its commencement in 1958, the card had 6 issuers in 1966, 243 in 1970, and over 6,500 in 1998.18 In general, this influx of banks provided even more credit options for consumers, even in the most remote markets, and ultimately boosted credit card usage. The credit card lending institution grew to such an extent that a number of monoline banks—issuers that engage wholly or primarily in issuing credit cards—emerged, such as MBNA and Capital One. The monoline banks accounted for a significant portion of the new credit available and among the 50 largest issuers in 1997, monoline banks accounted for approximately 16 percent of charge volume.19

Source: David S. Evans, “More than Money: The Development of a Competitive Electronic Payment Industry in the U.S.,” pg. 15.

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Merchants: In evaluating the role of the universal credit card on consumers, there likely exists a natural propensity to circumvent or marginalize the crucial role of the merchant. However, all transactions require the participation of at least two parties. To date, consumers can use their credit cards only at merchants who accept the card. Conversely, merchants, who must surrender a merchant’s discount that averages approximately 3 percent on every purchase, will not accept 97 cents on the dollar unless they believe they will lose more money in forgone sales revenue than the merchant discount. This phenomenon led to the chicken and the egg problem or a bandwagon effect as credit cards were first introduced. Consumers did not want a card that merchants did not accept, and merchants refused to pay a premium for cards that were not yet popular. Accordingly, credit card usage is considered a positive externality because the cards are more valuable to each party in the system when the number of people using and accepting them grows.20 The emergence of the universal bank issued card proved to be the solution that broke the vicious cycle.21 The structure of the joint venture meant that the individual banks had to sign up relatively fewer consumers to expand the network quickly enough to entice both merchants and consumers to join. Moreover, to encourage spending and achieve market penetration, many of the individual banks assumed unconventional levels of credit risk by mailing free credit cards to thousands of customers, many of whom were traditionally non-creditworthy.

This campaign to create an entirely new payment market using the universal features of the joint venture succeeded spectacularly. The percentage of households with at least one credit card increased from 15 to approximately 40 percent from 1970-1977. Moreover, consumers were actually using their cards, as the percentage of total consumer debt made up by credit card debt spiked from roughly 3 to 17 percent in that same period.22 Merchants responded in kind, and the number of Visa Penn History Review

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merchant locations doubled in that period from 1970-1977 and quadrupled by 1997.23 Additionally, although merchants were receiving slightly less revenue for each product sold because of the merchant discount, experimental studies by researchers Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester suggest that consumer willingness to offer substantially more when sellers accept credit cards made up for the difference and actually increased revenue.24 According to economist David Evans, by 1997, “credit cards had established themselves as an essential payment mechanism among most merchant segments. At gas stations, apparel shops, department stores, electronics outlets and many other retailers, credit cards had even become the dominant form of payment.�25 Consumers:

Of course, as a payment mechanism, the universal bank issued credit card has provided innumerable and valuable benefits to consumers that have revolutionized both the method by which consumers spend and the quantity they consume. As means of payment, the bank issued credit card, which eventually could be used at most stores nationally, became a substitute for cash. In fact, historical data substantiate this proposition and illustrate that indeed increased bank credit card usage remains highly correlated with decreased cash usage. For example, in 1984, paying with cash was still more prevalent than paying with credit cards. Yet, by 2003, as the percentage of all transactions involving a credit card increased significantly from 20 to 40 percent, the percentage change for transactions using cash dipped by 33 percent.26

As consumers began tendering payment with credit cards with increased regularity, the payment structure underlying credit card usage facilitated spending that was otherwise limited when cash or checks were the only payment options. Foremost, the physical convenience the credit card provided should not be understated. Bank notes must be carried en masse to purchase items in bulk if one hopes to avoid multiple trips. Because most 102

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consumers felt uncomfortable carrying so much money at one time, they simply made smaller purchases. A study by Visa in 1996 corroborated this conclusion, illustrating that consumers tended to use cash for small purchases under $60 and credit to tender larger amounts.27 Though consumers can always pay by check, the typical checkbook weighs 14 times more than a credit card, and according to a survey of American adults in the 1990’s, approximately 40 percent of Americans preferred not to carry a checkbook.28 Similarly, a Gallup poll confirmed that consumers preferred credit cards to checks because writing checks at checkouts counters is inconvenient and takes too long. Thus, credit cards expedited the checkout process and accelerated the flow of business, which encouraged more purchases in a given period.29 Furthermore, the credit card provided additional security features that aided consumers. Drafted in 1968 in response to tremendous losses due to credit card fraud, Title IX section 901 of the FDIC consumer protection regulatory code limited consumer liability to $50 if a credit card was misused fraudulently. By contrast, cash carries full liability and is difficult to trace, and checks are subject to an intricate web of highly technical legal statues that would likely tax the consumer’s time, if not also his wallet. Moreover, credit card usage increased commerce, as checks were often difficult to use outside of one’s local community. Merchants, wary of bounced or forged checks, frequently refused to honor unfamiliar checks, as opposed to the credit card, each of which displayed a nationally recognized brand name. The credit card particularly facilitated consumer spending by allowing people greater accessibility to purchase goods outside of local communities.30

In fact, the notion that credit cards could be used to guarantee payment triggered explosive sales growth for expenditures on common goods that required a system of insuring payment. For example, hotel room and car rental sales accelerated as companies lowered prices because they could obligate customers to present credit cards to reduce the Penn History Review

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risk that customers would shirk reservations or damage rented merchandise. The mail order industry, which typically required the customer to first mail a check and then wait for the product, benefited fabulously in the form of lowered costs, improved service, decreased waiting times between orders and delivered goods, more cash receipts, and increased sales. In addition, consumers could now buy tickets for movies, sporting events, plays, concerts, and other venues over the phone by using their cards. Eventually, the card opened up the door for second-hand markets where individual, non-retail sellers could exchange with individual buyers using services such as eBay. 31 As the Internet became more prevalent in commercial and personal life, it added even more value and flexibility to payment card purchasing.

Another prominent manifestation of the universal joint network venture that influenced consumer spending substantially is the ability to offer reward and affinity programs.

In fact, commercial law and electronic commerce scholar Ronald Mann states explicitly that “both [rewards and affinity programs] encouraged consumers to spend or borrow more than they otherwise would.32” In 1978, Visa introduced the first affinity program which allowed a non-member’s (non-bank’s) logo to be displayed on the face of the card. The program partnered member banks with large non-financial institutions that, in exchange for a percentage of the profits, offered affinity cardholders significant discounts and special offers for their products and services. Alternatively, some affinity programs promoted spending by promising to donate a percentage of all transactions to a charity or a favored institution, such as the Democratic or Republican Parties, the NAACP, or even the New York Yankees.33,34 The affinity cards generated additional card usage and sales predominantly from customers loyal to the affinity institutions or those seeking the affinity discounts and promotions.35 But, the affinity programs would have been neither economically viable nor would they have attracted such popular non-member sponsors without the large customer base 104

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and high sales volumes that the credit card networks afforded.

Affinity cards achieved a sizeable market share relatively quickly.

By 1986, 296 associations had developed affinity programs, this number swelled to 4,500 organizations by 1998, and from 20002006 the share of loyalty cards in the credit card market grew from 10 percent to 25 percent.36 Beginning in the 1990’s, credit card companies instituted a reward system to entice prospective cardholders. Once again, because credit card networks generated such high sales volume card companies could partner with other organizations to offer attractive amenities such as frequent flyer miles, favorable insurance policies, rental discounts, and some companies even offered cash back.37 The credit card industry invested tremendous sums to promote their rewards programs; for example, in 1996 MasterCard spent $102 million and Visa $227 million to operate these initiatives. These marketing campaigns paid dividends as customers increased their credit card spending to earn rewards. Recent data suggest that the average monthly expenditure on a rewards card is $943, compared to $360 on a card that does not offer a reward.38�

Perhaps the most significant impact of the credit card’s payment functions on consumer spending was simply the idea of a universal credit card. Conceptually, the quarter of an ounce credit card served as a virtual wallet capable of purchasing thousands of dollars of merchandise. The almost instantaneous, mobile access to vast sums of money induced consumers to spend more liberally. Certainly, part of what caused consumers to spend more with credit cards was the physical ability to do so.

This pattern of increased spending associated with a preference for credit card use led psychologist Richard Feinberg to propose what other authors have termed the credit card effect. Feinberg analyzed consumer spending data and conducted experimental case studies where participants who used a credit card exhibited a greater willingness to pay higher sums. Based on the results of these studies, author Juliet Schor suggested that consumers were somehow conditioned to spend more with credit cards, Penn History Review

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describing the results of one case study where “participants exhibited an almost Pavlovian response to spending more after exposure to a MasterCard logo.39” Feinberg simply referred to the cards as “spending facilitating stimuli” and attributed this conditioning to the notion that credit card users experience only an indirect sense of loss that psychologically masks the full extent of the void after tendering payment.40 When shoppers pay by cash or check, they must physically surrender one good, the cash or check, in exchange for the merchandise they purchase, which generates either a sense of mutual exchange or forfeiture.

The loss is immediately tangible and palpable. Whereas one had $40 in her wallet beforehand, she now has only $25, and thus she feels poorer and less able to spend. Conversely, following each card-based transaction consumers feel only an indirect loss as they retain their charge cards, and with credit cards they face the charges only later. Finally, psychologists—including Feinberg— have pointed to the industry’s effective marketing techniques.

Networks have buttressed the spending effect by using “colorful logos and schemes associated in the minds of their customers with increased gratification and financial empowerment. The American Express logo- a Roman centurion in full regalia has obvious connotations of mastery and control.”41 Furthermore, aggressive advertising campaigns and card designs have branded credit cards as sleek, sexy and fashionable instrumentsindispensable accessory for leading a comfortable lifestyle. Of course, the credit features of the card, which will be discussed next, also contributed significantly to heightened spending.

The Borrowing Side—The Use of Credit in Consumerism: The credit card is a double-edged sword. While the benefits of the universal payment features and payment functions have been heretofore discussed extensively, the bank issued credit card also pioneered and popularized an easily accessible mechanism for borrowing on credit to finance purchases. Prior to the advent of the credit card, with few exceptions, consumers 106

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had to render payment immediately upon purchase. Although in small towns and rural areas many local merchants operated informal tabs for loyal patrons, the institution of credit in America until the 1940s was reserved primarily for commercial enterprises and qualified or highly collateralized individual borrowers. Historian Lewis Mandell characterizes the consumer credit landscape in the beginning of the 1950s as follows: “if a bank had a consumer loan department it was often found in the basement where no one could see the furtive borrower.”42 Although Mandell’s humorous caricature likely underscores a degree of economic reality, credit cards were by no means the first form of consumer credit in America. The earliest instances of large scale credit issuing were programs in the late 18th- 19th century for farmers who needed loans to purchase land and capital to grow their produce far in advance of when they would receive revenue from the harvest. As such, they borrowed against expected future income.43 The other major historical development that eased consumer credit constraints was the growing popularity of high priced household durable goods, commencing with Singer’s sowing machine in the mid-nineteenth century and gaining traction in the early 20th century with the advent of automobiles, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and other pricy household durables.44 Accordingly, hotels and large retail stores began issuing “charga plates” to mostly upscale loyal customers. The charga plate, an embossed metal address plate that identified the account holder, allowed the consumer to finance purchases at that particular store on 30-day credit.

Subsequently, oil companies issued equivalent instruments called courtesy cards that limited sales on credit to gas stations owned and operated by the firm.45 Nevertheless, to obtain any type of non-store or company specific credit, consumers relied primarily on the conventional closed end bank loan. These secured collateralized loans required extensive background checks, a visit to the bank for an interview, and copious amounts of paper work. Indeed, because they were so tedious to obtain, people Penn History Review

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“Charga Plates” with accompanying cases. These “Charga Plates” are relatively modern. The older versions were completely metal and contained engravings with the customer’s personal account information.

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sought them predominantly to finance significant purchases or service pre-existing debt.46

The credit card served as an innovative vehicle for mass consumer credit that combined two essential credit features: it was an unsecured line of revolving credit. An unsecured line of credit is a non-collateralized or non-asset-backed agreement in which the borrower can draw up to a predetermined credit limits at any time and pays interest only on money actually withdrawn.

A line of credit facilitates borrowing- and therefore spending as well—because the borrower needn’t approach the bank (lender) each time he needs money. Unlike a term loan, which grants the borrower a lump sum to be paid back with interest at a contractually agreed upon later date, the unsecured line of credit allows the borrower to segment the loan and doesn’t require him to specify the amount upfront. The unsecured line of credit was integral to the credit card market. Risk adverse consumers had no reason to assume debt and incur interest expenses before making routine purchases. For the most part, they would make only as many purchases as they could finance with existing, predominantly liquid assets. As the unsecure line of credit proliferated with the rise of store and then credit cards, consumers could now make purchases by simply assuming a conditionally interest-free debt at the time of purchase.47 In essence, Consumers were making the decision to borrow a fractional sum of their credit limit each time they made a small purchase.48 Satisfied with this arrangement, consumers began paying by credit more frequently. According to a report from the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, outstanding credit card debt vaulted from a mere $828 million dollars in 1967 to over $14.2 billion dollars in 1977, an astounding average annual growth rate of nearly 35 percent over a 10 year period.49 The Federal Reserve’s annual Survey of Consumer Finance reports from 1970-1995 reveal that charge volume on credit cards surged from approximately 3 percent of household income in 1970 to almost 20 percent in 1995.50 Penn History Review

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The second and perhaps more radical breakthrough of the bank issued credit card was the nature of the unsecured credit line – revolving credit functionality. Until the emergence of the BankAmericard in 1958, institutions that provided consumer credit, such as hotels and restaurants, offered only installment credit where outstanding balances must be repaid by the contractually agreed upon date in one lump sum or pursuant to a predetermined amortization schedule. Even the first so called “credit cards,” such as the Diner’s club card introduced in 1949-50 and the American Express card of 1958, required cardholders to repay outstanding balances in full at the end of each month. Revolving credit allowed consumers to defer payments indefinitely. However, outstanding balances beyond a certain period—typically the end of the month for a credit card—were subject to high interest charges averaging 18 percent.

Bank of America did not introduce the first 30-day interestfree revolving credit scheme; that distinction belongs to J. L. Hudson’s of Detroit in 1956.51 However, only two years later, the BankAmericard accumulated a tremendous market share of the revolving credit market, and by 1980 credit card debt accounted for 98.57 percent of all outstanding revolving consumer debt.52 Moreover, revolving credit card debt began to displace other forms of consumer debt. Between 1980 and 1996, the share of revolving credit card debt leaped from 25 to nearly 70 percent of total consumer debt, as installment credit skidded from 25 to 10 percent and all other forms dived from 50 to 20 percent in that same period.53 Consumers began using revolving debt to finance purchases with increased frequency. The average household monthly card balances increased from less than 1 percent of household income to just over 5 percent between 1970 and 1995.

Furthermore, the fraction of households carrying any monthly balances rose from 40 to 65 percent in those years and average balances more than quadrupled in the same period from $700 to over $3000.54

Economists David Evans and Richard Schmalensee 110

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argue that the revolving credit feature became so widely accepted because it allowed households to borrow against future income. Typically, a wage earner’s income increases until middle age and then remains relatively stable, or even slowly recedes, until retirement. Because people try to distribute their wealth uniformly over their lifetime, younger people with lower current wages borrowed against the higher levels of income they expected to earn in their middle years. Traditional bank loans heavily restricted this behavior and eschewed loans to younger people because they lacked extensive credit histories.

Moreover, these traditional lenders faced an adverse selection problem, whereby the most avid customers for debt tended to be the least creditworthy.55 While credit cards did not provide a panacea to these liquidity constraints, they served as an effective mechanism for consumers to spend more by borrowing against future income. The cards diffused the risk of default among many predominantly creditworthy consumers and limited an individual bank’s (lender’s) liabilities. Empirical data support these findings. Between 1989 and 1995, as the amount of credit available to US households increased from $515 to $900 billion dollars, younger people levered up. Those between the ages of 18 and 24 amassed credit card balances that were on average 50 percent of their income, up from only 20 percent just 6 years earlier. A jarring, more recent study in 2004 concluded that only 8 percent of graduate students paid their bills in full each month and typically carry roughly $10,000 in debt on average.56 Conversely, although all age groups experienced increased credit card debt—a function of greater usage across the board—50year-olds and up owed only approximately 20 percent of their income in 1995.57 As such, Robert Mann asserts that “empirical research by psychologists suggests that credit cards play an important role in fostering compulsive buying by university students in particular.”58

The credit card market has become segmented predominantly into two classes of users: transactors and Penn History Review

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revolvers. A significant portion of credit card holders make little or no use of the revolving credit features. In fact, the phenomenon of not carrying a balance became so prevalent that it has earned those who do so the moniker “transactors,” as opposed to the “revolvers” who regularly accrue interest charges.

To meet the demands of both constituencies, credit companies offer both transaction and finance oriented cards.59 Revolving credit disproportionately benefits the lower-middle class by allowing them to spend even in times of need, and therefore revolvers tend to be more indigent. According to a consumer survey report, in 2009, 56 percent of households with active credit cards were considered revolvers who regularly financed purchases using credit.60 The credit card has facilitated spending for this group by providing a reliable line of credit of last resort even as traditional banking institutions, which offer significantly lower interest rates, frequently reject their loan applications.61 The persistent inability of low-income households to obtain traditional loans has in turn inflated the perception among the poor that credit cards are their only recourse for borrowing noncollateralized cash.62 Because lower-class households tend to subsist on a meager, likely uncertain, and often irregular stream of payments, they utilize credit cards to finance the purchase of such necessities as food, clothing, rent and other basic staples.

Consequently, between 1977 and 1997 the percentage of lower income households that owned credit cards grew the fastest relative to other income groups. The two lowest income quintiles started with only 5 percent of households owning credit cards, and by the end of 1997 the respective percentages were sixty and thirty percent.63 It should be noted, however, that credit does not provide a limitless supply of free money. Impoverished families who use credit cards consistently but never receive additional revenue or sell significant assets to meet their growing liabilities will ultimately default, which will diminish their credit score precipitously and preclude them from future credit opportunities.

Nevertheless, even those not yet struggling financially but facing 112

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uncertain prospects or current liquidity constraints rely heavily on revolving credit. In the short run, most households cannot dramatically alter their spending habits because they incur regular fixed costs such as mortgage payments or child rearing expenses and many assets they own are highly illiquid. As such, when primary wage earners lose their main source of income and the bank refuses to extend a traditional loan, they can support themselves using the credit card debt before liquidating significant assets such a car or house, potentially for pennies on the dollar.

Source David S. Evans, The Growth and Diffusion of Credit Cards in Society, pg. 69.

However, the interest-free thirty-day loan is the quintessential feature of the credit card that most significantly transformed consumer spending, and it exists principally for the benefit of transactors. Transactors, who tend to be uppermiddle class consumers with access to more traditional avenues of obtaining credit that charge substantially lower interest, utilize credit cards primarily to float payment until the end of the month using interest-free debt. Float is the time period between when a payment is tendered and investible funds are made available to Penn History Review

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the payee.64 Transactors effectively substitute interest-free credit instead of paying out of pocket, allowing them to invest their own money in higher yielding accounts or securities, a portion of which can be liquidated or withdrawn to pay the bill at month’s end. Before the introduction of credit cards, consumers had to hold onto significant quantities of currency or highly liquid assets to meet their routine consumption demands. Furthermore, high balances of currency or checking accounts also resulted from a phenomenon John Maynard Keynes labeled the “precautionary motive,” a pattern whereby consumers preferred to hold an extra amount in currency or highly liquid accounts for emergencies and unexpected expenses.65 To the extent that those aforementioned expenditures and consumption demands could be charged to a credit card, balances held in currency or checking accounts could be reduced. As consumers enjoyed higher yields they had more disposable income with which to spend. For example, in 1995, households that had bank credit cards held approximately $815 or 25 percent less in checking account balances than card-less households. The reduction in checking account balances as a percentage of all financial assets was 3.5 percent or $54 billion, a shift that could have accounted for an added aggregate earned interest of $1.7 billion for households given the prevailing average savings rate of 3.1 percent.66

The bank issued credit card’s unique integration and synthesis of the interest-free grace period, monthly billing, and revolving credit features have also served as an effective home accounting tool that has catalyzed increased spending.

Credit cards helped consumers coordinate the timing of their consumption and income receipts by lifting the cash flow constraints of a periodic paycheck.67 If consumers saw a desirable item or a discounted limited time offer, they could purchase the good immediately and pay for it later with the arrival of their monthly statement. The genius of the credit card was the ability to purchase goods using money one did not yet own. The credit card fundamentally altered consumer spending patterns because 114

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it allowed shoppers to capitalize on sales and, more generally, shop with greater efficacy, efficiency, and therefore, frequency.

In many instances, the payment and financing options even enabled consumers to make purchases they otherwise could not have made.68 Another element rooted in the deferred payment scheme that appealed to consumers was the added security that accompanied the ability to contest charges. Contesting charges ensured quality control and protected the consumer from the abuses of crooked businessmen and faulty charges. Because the credit card user settled his account only at the end of the month, he could appeal to the credit card company and refuse to pay if deceived or exploited. Accordingly, consumers became less hesitant to make purchases with the knowledge that if the product was subpar they could contest the charges.69

As with other forms of debt and consumer credit, psychological factors govern the prevailing attitudes and spending patterns associated with the credit card’s borrowing features.

For example, consumer psychologist Robert Manning opined, “Consumer credit represents an erosion of the traditional cognitive connect or fiscal equilibrium between household income and consumption decisions… There is a wide disconnect between getting and spending that induces overspending.70” Accordingly, the “get now, spend later” attitude increases spending because consumers employ what behavioral economists term “optimistic bias.” Optimistic bias is the tendency to give excessive weight to the conspicuous and immediate aspects of a relationship and less weight to those terms that are less noticeable or deferred.

Consistent with these findings, another behavioral phenomenon called hyperbolic discounting alleges that consumers make valuations of future rewards or costs that are inconsistent over time. In tandem, these prejudices encourage consumers to borrow greater sums to reap the immediate benefits of spending while delaying the costs to some later date. Although these biases can precipitate grave financial disaster if practiced excessively, in moderation these attitudes merely shift the distribution of Penn History Review

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disposable income from savings to consumption.71 Conclusion: The bank issued credit card has secured its place as an invaluable tool in the modern consumer’s spending arsenal. Total annual credit card charges across the nation increased from about $69 billion in 1989 to more than $1.8 trillion in 2006. By 2008, credit cards accounted for over $2.5 trillion in global transactions a year, and more than 24 million merchants in over 200 countries and territories accepted the cards.72 The bank-issued credit card’s most innovative component and lasting impact was that it introduced a sophisticated and effective payment system that injected the benefits of purchasing on credit and personal finance into routine, everyday purchasing decisions. In this respect, the credit card was not only a novel product but also represented a methodological paradigm shift that radically altered the manner by which consumers approached spending.

Today, when a consumer uses cash to tender payment, he or she must pay a considerable opportunity cost in benefits, time, convenience, and spending flexibility. That consumer forgoes rewards and promotions that offset spending costs, the ability to earn higher returns on their money by using float, and the capacity to shop more efficiently by using interest-free 30-day loans to capitalize on current promotions or synchronize income receipts with payment obligations. Not only must the customer carry bulky checks or copious amounts of cash, if he or she is dissatisfied with the good or service purchased, he or she cannot contest the charges and can receive remuneration solely at the mercy and discretion of the merchant. Of course, the linchpin that made this enterprise feasible was the unique joint network venture structure that supported the universally recognized card.

Moreover, the psychological framework governing the cards encouraged additional spending. The credit card is a complex, multi-faceted entity that revolutionized consumer spending and has become a fixture of everyday life. Even in an age of digital 116

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consumerism with iPads, internet shopping, mobile banking, and virtual wallets, the legacy and ingenuity of the credit card persists.

Benjamin Franklin, “Advice to a Young Tradesman Written by an Old One” (Philadelphia: 1748), 1.

2 Herbert Hoover’s address in Des Moines, Iowa October 4th 1932, accessed 10 April 2013, http://quotationsbook.com/ quote/45191/.

3 Woolsey and Shultz, “Credit Card Industry Facts Website,” CreditCards.com News, accessed 23 January 2013, http://www. creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-industry-factspersonal-debt-statistics-1276.php.

4 David Evans and Richard Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing, (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999), 57 and 87.

5 Bank Issued Cards in the United States include only OpenNetworks such as VISA and MasterCard that involve banks.

American Express, Discover, and Diner’s Clubs cards are NOT Bank Issued Cards.

6 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 61.

7 Ronald J. Mann, Charging Ahead: The Growth and Regulation of Payment Card Markets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 16.

8 Lewis Mandell, Credit Card Use in the United States, (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1972), 5.

9 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 64.

10 Ibid, 43.

11 Lewis Mandell, The Credit Card Industry: A History (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 31.

1

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Mandell, “The Credit Card Industry,” 31.

Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 3.

14 Investopedia, “Joint Venture.”

15 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 66.

16 Ibid., 67.

17 Ibid., 35.

18 Ibid., 66.

19 Ibid., 209-210.

20 Mann, Charging Ahead, 82.

21 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 65.

22 Doncha Marron, Consumer Credit in the United States: A Sociological Perspective from the 19th Century to the Present (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 84-85.

23 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 133.

24 Mann, Charging Ahead, 48.

25 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 130-135.

26 Mann, Charging Ahead, 17.

27 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic 123.

28 Ibid., 31.

29 Ibid., 212.

30 Ibid., 31.

31 Ibid., 32.

32 Mann, Charging Ahead, 167.

33 Ibid., 167.

34 “NAACP Credit Card Services Website,” US Bank, accessed 10 April 2013, https://applications.usbank.com/oad/begin?loc ationCode=9586&sourceCode=72026 35 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 74-75.

36 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 74; Mann, Charging Ahead, 168.

37 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 146.

38 Mann, Charging Ahead, 168.

39 Marron, Consumer Credit in the United States, 7.

40 Mann, Charging Ahead, 47.

41 Ibid., 47.

12 13

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Mandell, The Credit Card Industry, 29.

Daniel Boorstin, “Credit History: The Evolution of Consumer Credit in America,” (Federal Reserve Bank of Boston), 6.

44 Mandell, The Credit Card Industry, 14.

45 Ibid., 18.

46 Mann, Charging Ahead, 40.

47 Ibid., 89.

48 Ibid., 42.

49 Gillian Garcia, “Credit Cards: An Interdisciplinary Study,” Journal of Consumer Research, 6.4 (1980), 328.

50 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 88.

51 Mandell, The Credit Card Industry, 25.

52 Ben Woolsey and Matt Shultz, “Credit Card Industry Facts Website,” Creditcards.com News, accessed 28 January 2013, http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-cardindustry-facts-personal-debt-statistics-1276.php 53 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 99.

54 Ibid., 87.

55 Ibid., 95.

56 Mann, Charging Ahead, 157.

57 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 98.

58 Mann, Charging Ahead, 156.

59 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 210.

60 Ben Woolsey and Matt Shultz, “Credit Card Industry Facts Website,” accessed 28 January 2013, http://www.creditcards. com/credit-card-news/credit-card-industry-facts-personaldebt-statistics-1276.php 61 This phenomenon is compounded during business cycles of stagnant growth, high unemployment, diminutive market confidence, and restrictive credit.

62 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 70.

63 Ibid., 89.

64 Allen N. Berger and David B. Humphrey, Market Failure and Resource Use: Economic Incentives to Use Different Payment 42 43

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Instruments (Washington, D.C.: Monetary and Financial Studies Section, Division of Research and Statistics, Federal Reserve Board, 1988), 51-52.

65 Mandell, Credit Card Use in the United States, 103.

66 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 91-94.

67 Mandell, Credit Card Use in the United States, 102; Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 92.

68 Evans and Schmalensee, Paying with Plastic, 31.

69 Ibid., 17.

70 Marron, Consumer Credit in the United States, 7.

71 Mann, Charging Ahead, 135.

72 Ben Woolsey and Matt Shultz, “Credit Card Industry Facts,�

Credicards.com News, accessed 28 January 2013, http://www. creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-industry-factspersonal-debt-statistics-1276.php

Photo Source: Page 94: http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/s/stubs.asp Page 108: http://image.timepassagesnostalgia.com/ watermarked/imagesd4/d427creditx2a.jpg

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Honors Thesis Abstracts

Senior Honors Theses: Jacob (Cobi) Blumenfeld-Gantz The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925: the Origins of the British-Druze Relationship and the Question of Syrian Nationalism My thesis explores the role of British government officials in the 1925 Great Syrian Revolt and their interactions with the main instigators of the revolt, the Druze of Syria. I used primarily British and Druze government cables for my primary sources.

In particular, I conducted research in English and Arabic in England (Kew National Archives) and Israel (the Central Zionist Archive and the Druze Archive). The paper begins by explaining the history and faith of the Druze people. The first chapter concludes by examining the interactions of the British and the Druze from the first substantial encounter in the 1830s to the eve of World War I. The second chapter discusses the period between World War I and the outbreak of the rebellion, with a focus on the development of Arab nationalism, the 1916 Arab Revolt, and broader British and French imperial interests in the region. The third chapter explores the dynamics between the British and the Druze during the 1925 revolt with specific attention on the British consul post in Syria.

Jacob Chefitz The 1924 Anglo-American Treaty on Palestine: The British Perspective on America’s Role in the Palestine Mandate, 1920-1924 This thesis is a study of the making of the 1924 Anglo-American Treaty on Palestine, in which the United States recognized the British Mandate of Palestine, and Great Britain guaranteed the Americans specific rights and privileges on par with other Penn History Review

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members of the League of Nations (remember that the United States Senate had voted against joining the League). While other scholars have analyzed the Treaty in the past, this thesis attempts to offer a fresh perspective by analyzing the crafting of the document through the lens of the British Foreign Service.

Using documents from the archives of the British Foreign Office, Colonial Office, and Cabinet—as well as some private papers—this thesis attempts to chronicle the sequence of events that spurred the Foreign Office to sign the Treaty. It argues as follows: the Anglo-American Treaty on Palestine emerged not out of legal necessity, but from the circumstances surrounding broader Anglo-American negotiations—which the Foreign Office initially wanted to avoid—over America’s role in the new, evolving international order, particularly with regard to the League of Nations Mandate system. For the British Foreign and Colonial Offices, the Treaty was an attempt to fortify the local Mandate government in the face of Arab opposition by eliminating American threats to the integrity and credibility of the British administration as a local sovereign and as an instrument of the League of Nations Mandate system. Contrary to what some might assume, the Treaty was less about American approval of Zionism and more about Great Britain’s conception of a new, evolving international order and America’s place in it.

What emerges is a more complicated picture of how the British Foreign Office, through the Palestine Mandate, tried to navigate and balance a number of competing issues: a commitment to the Balfour Declaration in the face of ever-increasing Arab protests, the maintenance of a healthy Anglo-American relationship when factors such as naval disarmament and the repayment of war debts threatened to disrupt it, and the strengthening of the League of Nations’ institutions, legal instruments, and ideals.

Alicia DeMaio “All the Success Which Could Be Expected:” Contemporary Responses to 122

Honors Thesis Seminar

Honors Thesis Abstracts

the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1803-1817 Contrary to what other historians have argued, the American public did not perceive the Lewis and Clark expedition as a failure whose goals they did not understand. Instead, the explorers’ contemporaries—as represented by newspaper editors, the literary elite, scientists, and politicians—viewed the venture as important for the future prosperity of America in a multitude of ways. By examining the texts these groups of people produced— articles, reviews of books written by the expedition members, scientific texts, congressional debates, satirical works, and letters, among others—a discourse responding to Lewis and Clark’s journey can be created. This discourse reveals that each of these groups used the Lewis and Clark expedition and the benefits it provided to comprehend the rapidly expanding United States and to understand the West as an American space united with the eastern states.

Arielle Kay Herzberg Ignaz Zollschan: An Insider’s View of Early Twentieth Century Racial Science and Zionism This thesis analyzes the works of Ignaz Zollschan, a Jewish scientist who lived in Vienna, Carlsbad, and London in the early-twentieth century. While throughout his life Zollschan consistently showed his fundamental concern for the survival of the Jewish people, his ideas on racial science and Zionism evolved.

I argue that although he initially accepted standard definitions of race and believed in a superior Jewish race, over time he came to reject strict racial categories and gave up on the idea of a racial hierarchy. I thus divide my thesis into three sections, asking three fundamental questions. How did Zollschan’s environment contribute to his racial scientific and Zionist theories? What exactly were his racial scientific theories and how did they Penn History Review

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change? What were Zollschan’s views on Zionism and how did they develop over time? The way in which Zollschan adjusted his theories reflect his context and show the influences of antiSemitic authors, Jewish scientists, Zionist figures, and British academics at various points throughout his life. Ultimately, Zollschan’s story reveals prominent early-twentieth century ideas of science, race, and culture, and therefore goes beyond the biographical study of a single individual.

Ben Kripke A Short-Lived “Brotherhood”: The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial-Native Friendship in Early Pennsylvania When founding the colony of Pennsylvania, William Penn sought to create a lasting friendship and “brotherhood” with the local Native Americans in accordance with his liberal Quaker values and vision of a religious Quaker utopia in which colonists and natives would live side-by-side in harmony. However, James Logan and Penn’s sons, John, Thomas, and Richard Penn, who largely conducted colonial-native diplomacy in the colony in the early-eighteenth century, willingly deviated from Penn’s peaceful policies in order to benefit the colony financially. This thesis constructs a narrative that elucidates the transformation of colonial-native relations in Pennsylvania between Pennsylvania’s establishment in 1681 and the Walking Purchase of 1737, in which Pennsylvania’s leaders unduly stripped the local natives of over 1,000 square miles of their land. By surveying the diplomatic policies of William Penn, James Logan, and Penn’s sons, this thesis explores the transformation of relations from mutually beneficial to dysfunctional.

Max Levy “Shmuel Alexandrov and the Making of a Modern Russian Jewish Philosophy” 124

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This thesis explores the life and thought of Rabbi Shmuel Alexandrov (1865-1941), a traditional Russian Jewish rabbi who was heavily influenced by Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), Hasidism, the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), early Zionism, German Idealism, and Russian philosophy. Although Alexandrov never held an influential rabbinical position, he developed and articulated a unique, and at times radical, ideology over many decades of prolific essay writing and correspondence with leading Jewish intellectuals, including Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, Ahad Ha’am, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, and Yehuda Leib Maimon. In his efforts to revitalize Russian Jewry from what he perceived as its spiritual and religious depravity, Alexandrov sought to formulate a modern approach to Judaism that would be intellectually compelling to twentieth-century Jews. Until recently, scholars have largely neglected Russian Jewish intellectual history. Even as historians have begun to explore the unique character of the Russian Haskalah, nearly no attention has been paid to the contributions that Eastern Europe made towards the development of modern Jewish thought.

By examining Alexandrov’s philosophy of Judaism, this thesis demonstrates that Russian Jewish philosophy deserves greater attention from contemporary Jewish intellectual historians.

Laurel J. Ma From Workers’ Struggles to Opposition Politics: The Social Movement for Democracy in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe (1980-2006) While existing historiography portrays 1998 as the beginning of a dark epoch known as ‘The Zimbabwean Crisis,’ it was actually the peak of a vibrant social movement that had made tremendous strides in democratization. This movement, which is underemphasized and often dismissed as a series of chaotic strikes, originated in the labor movement and grew to incorporate Penn History Review

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civil society, eventually leading to the formation of a strong opposition party that was the first to pose a legitimate threat to the ruling party, the Zimbabwean African National Union – Patriotic Front in over a decade. In this thesis, I attempted to answer the following questions: What were the origins of this popular struggle? How did it evolve into the Movement for Democratic Change? What light does it shed on the eventual fragmentation of the MDC? And most importantly, what does it illuminate about the nature of social movements in post-colonial Africa?

By examining Zimbabwean newspapers and political manifestos, speeches, and interviews of prominent leaders in the MDC, the ZANU-PF, and the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions, I argue that the ZCTU played a vital role in creating a popular movement for democracy in post-colonial Zimbabwe by providing an alternative voice to the ZANU-PF that eventually manifested as a powerful political party. However, in part because of its multi-racial, multi-class, and multi-ethnic character, the MDC soon became divided by competing interests and failed to develop a coherent ideology, ultimately alienating the workers who built its very foundations. While diverse citizens of Zimbabwe were able to compromise and coalesce temporarily to challenge the Mugabe regime under the vague slogan of “change,” in a climate of increased government violence and repression, tensions arose and self-interests became paramount.

Though the movement ultimately failed to unseat Mugabe and the ZANU-PF, this case study reveals that social movements are not monolithic and changeless, but rather complex, contradictory and contested, limited by their own hierarchies and inequalities.

Despite claiming to be the party of “the people,” the MDC was a site of heterogeneous forces continuously interacting sometimes in harmony but other times in opposition, influenced by their individual origins, ideologies, and financial sponsors. Indeed, 126

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democratic change, just as any other social transformation, does not occur in a vacuum but is simultaneously propelled and inhibited by existing structures.

Adin Pearl Shalom y Salud: Perspectives on Jewish Identity in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Soon after General Franco’s forces with the support of Hitler and Mussolini rebelled against the Spanish Republic in July 1936, the American Communist Party, under direction from Moscow, recruited volunteers to fight against Franco, whom the Communist Party considered part of an international fascist threat. Dubbed the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” nearly three thousand Americans fought against the Francoist rebels, while approximately half of those volunteers were young Jewish immigrants or children of Jewish immigrants.

While Jewish-American resistance to fascist aggression in the 1930s could have been used to challenge the later-developed historical narrative of Jewish passivity before and during the Holocaust, contemporary sources from the time of recruitment show that most of the Jewish volunteers viewed their participation in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade through an internationalist worldview that largely ignored any notion of national Jewish identity.

Therefore, it would have been misleading to consider them an example of specifically Jewish national resistance to fascism and Hitlerism. Nevertheless, as time passed after the end of World War II, many Jewish veterans of the Lincoln Brigade began to reconsider their notions of Jewish identity. By investigating how these perspectives were informed by post-World War II communal, national, and international developments, this thesis evaluates the evolution in Jewish identity that occurred throughout the greater Jewish political Left. Additionally, this Penn History Review

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thesis will show the impact of anachronism on generating historical narrative.

No Abstracts Available: Verónica Patricia Casellas The Political and Social Rhetoric of Women’s Organizations during the Spanish Second Republic and the Civil War Naomi Fujiki U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee and The Helsinki Final Act: The Emergence of a U.S. Helsinki Monitoring Group In The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe Joshua Herren Furious Acts: AIDS and the Arts of Activism, 1981-1996 Jun-Youb (JY) Lee Thousand Feet Across the Nation: The Great Peace March through Social Movement Theory Beryl R. Sanders You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught: The Retrospective Readings of South Pacific’s Racial Message Madeleine Shiff Outsiders in Berlin: Christopher Isherwood, George S. Messersmith, and William Shirer’s Responses to the Nazi Seizure of Power Drew Starling Struggling for the Narrative: the Intranational Cold War’s Battle over Texas’ American History Textbooks 128

Honors Thesis Seminar

Honors Thesis Abstracts

Drew Starling Struggling for the Narrative: the Intranational Cold War’s Battle over Texas’ American History Textbooks Alexandra Stern State of Rebellion: The Dakota Uprising in the Civil War Period Brady Sullivan Hostilities Commenced: The Mexican War and the War Powers Debate – May 1846 Daniel Weinblatt “This Joyfull Union:” The Union of England and Scotland under James VI and I

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