43 minute read
Finding the Joy in Labor
Salt Lake High School students posed with their fly traps, 1915. From 1913 to 1915, manual training students in Salt Lake City produced hundreds of traps to eradicate house flies. Dr. Samuel G. Paul, the city’s public health commissioner, referred to the traps as “implements of warfare” against the insects. They were part of a citywide campaign that also included a bounty for dead flies and a pamphlet sent to every home about the risk of disease flies posed. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 16153.
Finding the Joy in Labor in the Salt Lake City School District
BY ELIZABETH EGLESTON GIRAUD
In 1912, after having taught grade school children for seventeen years, Emma Frances Daft embarked on her high school teaching career in the art department of the Salt Lake High School. Although trained in fine art, she was known locally for her expertise in applied arts, specifically jewelry making, metal crafting, and leather tooling, and she instructed her students in these mediums. 1 Daft worked at the height of the arts and crafts movement, an artistic philosophy of the early twentieth century, also known as “craftsman,” which sought social and economic reform through design to reverse the damaging effects of industrialization. The movement influenced residential architecture, most notably in the construction of the bungalows that compose entire neighborhoods in Salt Lake City and are characterized by their earth-hugging silhouettes of broad, deep porches and low-pitched roofs. Although Daft limited her teaching to the materials listed above, the arts and crafts movement also incorporated furniture, ceramics, decorative tiles, and textiles, ideally to embellish the craftsman home. It is difficult to know how doctrinaire Daft was in terms of integrating the arts and crafts aesthetic into her own bungalow, which still stands at 463 South Douglas in Salt Lake City, but Daft’s professional work as an art teacher, her ongoing education both locally and in California, and her involvement in the local art community indicate her strong desire simply to create.
For arts and crafts followers, this philosophy fostered a nostalgia about preindustrial society, inspiring them not to seek a return to the past but to reform a consumerist culture forced to rely on poorly made, mass-produced goods. The inferior quality, they believed, resulted from industrialization’s reliance on repetitive work, which had eliminated the satisfaction workers once enjoyed in the production process. As opposed to England, where craftsmen reformers adhered to a socialist agenda, in the United States they worked within the existing economic framework to enable workers to produce goods exhibiting “integrity” and “honesty.” Such programs, they believed, would empower consumers to identify skilled workmanship and allow laborers the pride of participating in the full range of production. Craftsman advocates sought to unite the hand with the mind in the production process in order to achieve “joy in labour.” 2
Both photographs of Daft’s students’ work and the lofty discourse of local contemporary observers indicate her arts and crafts sensibilities (see figure one). 3 She was an example of the many committed enthusiasts of craftsman undertakings at the turn of the twentieth century. The arts and crafts philosophy, however, was more than a design perspective. As an aesthetic component of the larger Progressive Era, it contained a major educational impulse. This impulse helps us understand the deeper ways it aligned with the progressive movement, which had the revamping of education as one of its central objectives. Educators and reformers believed implementing manual training programs could be the solution to achieve these objectives. Embraced by both progressives and craftsmen, these programs became the channel by which the arts and crafts philosophy influenced the early twentieth century educational landscape. Salt Lake City’s educational administrators were very much in the vanguard of modern instructional reform, and they also wanted to use manual training in their young school district. Studying the discourse among Salt Lake’s school men and women offers an up-close view of how the craftsman ethic shaped contemporary educational theory in a rapidly growing western city. The view adds nuance to our understanding of the progressive movement in Salt Lake City and demonstrates the cultural impact of arts and crafts beyond the evidence of material culture.
Fig. 1. This display of work created by Emma Daft’s students clearly shows the arts and crafts style. Etched metal items, such as trays and wall sconces, show sinuous lines of plants and birds, and the leatherwork is incised with abstract, foliated patterns. Also included is a craftsman household emblem: table lamps with angled, metal bases and cut-out metal or leaded glass lampshades. These designs and materials reflect the craftsman goal of producing items that were handmade and thus “honest,” exhibiting the connection between the spirit of the worker and the end product. Reproduced in Devotees and Their Shrines, 116.
Emma Daft and her students at work. In 1914, Alice Merrill Horne, an influential advocate of Utah art, described Daft as more than an artisan; “she is an artist” who, because of her talent and training possessed “a gift of originality in shaping materials into artistic forms.” Reproduced in Devotees and Their Shrines, 117.
Roughly bounded by 1890 to 1920, the Progressive Era was a response to the changes that had profoundly altered the United States during the nineteenth century. By 1900, the rise of big corporations, the separation of the workplace from the home, the demographic shift from independent small communities to interconnected urban centers, the rise of the middle class, and the expansion of women’s involvement outside the home had reordered America economically and socially. 4 Because these trends formed such a complex matrix of change, reformers associated with a variety of interests emerged, hoping to mitigate the adverse impacts of industrialization. During the same period Utah had also experienced great change, evolving from its pioneer past to adopt the cultural, social, and economic characteristics of mainstream America. Salt Lake City’s population tripled, and it became a city of regional significance. 5 The increasing social complexity of the territory and its capital city prompted a substantial amount of reform legislation, addressing occupational safety, professional licensing, and agricultural product safety, to name a few things. To a large extent the rancor between Latter-day Saints and their neighbors abated, allowing middle- and upper-class citizens of both camps to join forces and pursue a long list of municipal improvements, including city beautification, street improvement, pest control, and air pollution. 6
At the same time that reformers implemented their progressive improvements, Salt Lake City developed a local response to the arts and crafts movement. The city did not have the same communities and venues craftsmen had established elsewhere to promote their ideals of joy in labor. Nationally, these institutions took the form of retail stores, such as the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts; communities, such as Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms in New Jersey; and model industries, such as the Newcomb art program at Tulane University. Local publications, however, demonstrate that residents were aware of the arts and crafts philosophy. Newspapers carried advertisements for Stickley furniture, articles explaining “Arts and Crafts Mission Furniture,” and descriptions of a “Mission House and Stable.” 7 Women’s clubs, such as the Ladies Literary Club, hosted visiting speakers who lectured the cultured set on artists and craftsmen ethics. (In December 1916, for example, Daft presented a paper on the history of jewelry making, followed by an exhibition of handmade jewelry, at the literary club.) The local tendency to blur the line between fine and applied art was reflected in arts exhibitors’ shows, where paintings shared the stage with decorated household items. In 1908, the Deseret Evening News announced the formation of an Arts and Crafts Club, the purpose of which was to “Promote mutual advancement along literary, musical, architectural and painting lines as well as to create a social harmony between those interested in the arts.” 8 Two years later an article in the Salt Lake Herald Republican urged readers to attend an opening reception for the annual state art show, at which officials purchased paintings to add to the state art collection. In this case, crafts were presented with both fine and performing arts. 9
Bungalows are one of the signal representations of the arts and crafts movement. Pictured here is Emma Daft’s Salt Lake City bungalow, as it appears in 2020. Elizabeth Giraud, photographer. Courtesy of the author.
The expansive array of progressive reforms often diverged from the narrower focus of arts and crafts philosophy. Both camps, however, found common ground in educational reform. By the end of the nineteenth century, educational theorists bemoaned students’ reliance on rote learning, teachers’ emphasis on recitation, the lack of graded classes, and above all the haphazard availability of secondary instruction. Public officials and businesspeople feared that America’s substandard educational system imperiled national economic stability. This was especially true of the lack of high schools. Until the twentieth century, American high schools were rare institutions designed to prepare young men for a college education, despite the low matriculation rate of secondary school graduates in universities. 10 High school course offerings, namely classical languages and mathematics, were subjects with little practical application. 11 Americans increasingly pushed for a public high school education that engaged the intellect and offered instruction in relevant topics for a variety of populations. In response to these appeals, in 1892 the National Council of Education, the “inner brain trust of the National Education Association (NEA),” appointed the “Committee of Ten” to propose a reorganization of the nation’s high schools. Composed primarily of college presidents and high school principals under the leadership of Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, the committee recommended replacing classical language with modern, emphasizing modern scientific subjects, and making high school a source of knowledge and skills for non-college bound youth to use throughout life. 12
Salt Lake City school administrators faced not only the challenges their colleagues everywhere experienced but also the fact that their young district had displaced the unique theocratic system of “ward schools.” In 1890, the Utah Territorial Legislature passed the Free Public School Act to establish a secular school system, supported by a revised funding system and managed by a centralized administration. The legislation established the Salt Lake District as a consolidated school system dependent on tax revenue rather than tuition and provided elected boards with increased influence. 13 Jesse F. Millspaugh, the first superintendent of the Salt Lake District, organized the new consolidated district from a fragmented parochial system in the context of these national and local challenges. By the end of his decade-long tenure in Salt Lake, Millspaugh had overseen the construction of sixteen elementary schools, increased attendance from 57 to 79 percent, and instituted graded classrooms. 14
Although both Millspaugh and his successor, Frank Cooper, mentioned manual training in their reports to the district’s board members, their support was lukewarm. It was not until David Henry Christensen’s appointment that the district’s implementation of manual training gathered momentum. Serving from 1901 to 1916, Christensen was the third superintendent of the Salt Lake District. He built upon the foundation Millspaugh constructed and came to the position with the perfect credentials to lead Salt Lake City’s district at the onset of the new century. Born in 1869 in Manti, Utah, Christensen attended a Protestant mission church, recounting later that he learned under “the inspiring influence of some very rare men and women of the finest scholarship and training.” 15 In 1890, at age twenty-one, Christensen graduated from the University of Deseret (later known as the University of Utah) and rose quickly through the administrative ranks of the Utah County District. He interrupted his career to serve an LDS mission in Germany prior to undertaking European study. While in Germany he studied “all types of schools” including the German secondary school manual arts programs, considered to be the best in the world. Upon his return from Europe, Christensen planned to pursue doctoral work at the University of Chicago but abandoned this scheme after accepting an unsolicited offer as superintendent of the Salt Lake District when he was only thirty-two. 16
Thus, Salt Lake City had a young superintendent who was a native Utah Latter-day Saint yet familiar with other populations, was an experienced educational administrator, and was exposed to Germany’s technical secondary training program. Christensen was well-equipped to steer the young district in a community where religious antagonism still simmered, the population boomed, and non-Mormon European immigrants arrived in large numbers. His reports to the district’s board members and his papers describe the public debate regarding the role of schools in society, how to adjust the curriculum to engage students, and how to prepare youth for the modern world. A true progressive, Christensen viewed his success as dependent on a centralized administration, the systematic assessment of employees’ performance, and the efficient allocation of resources in order to steer the district through a period of expansion. His reports and those of the district’s top administrators reflected the faith of progressive era managers in the use of a systematic approach fortified by data to solve problems.
If progressive reformers and arts and crafts enthusiasts found common ground through education, manual training was the fine point on which they pinned their hopes. Manual training was the conduit for introducing craftsman philosophy into schools and inculcating youth with an appreciation of labor. Also referred to as “manual arts,” “vocational training,” or “industrial arts,” manual training appeased the concerns of experts that education had become overly abstract and irrelevant. 17 Hoping to provide youth with practical skills, manual training proponents believed teaching children to use their hands as well as their minds would help them study traditional subjects and that instructing adolescents in trade skills would improve their employment possibilities. 18
Christensen’s belief in the merits of manual training was a function of its immense national popularity in the first decade of the twentieth century, his recent exposure to its use in the German educational system, and his cognizance of the need for skilled manual labor through his involvement in his family’s corporation: the Christensen Construction Company, which undertook large-scale excavation projects and built new road and rail alignments. 19 In 1911, Christensen’s belief in the efficacy of manual training led him to Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, whom he visited with his family. Two years later, he invited Washington to visit Utah and deliver several lectures to school teachers, the public, and members of the “colored congregation of the Baptist Church.” Washington, Christensen believed, was one of the “first six of the great constructive educators of the United States.” 20
David H. Christensen in his office at the Salt Lake City and County Building. Christensen’s background and experience made him an ideal fit for the needs of the Salt Lake School District. Christensen papers, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
Booker T. Washington, apparently with David Christensen’s children when the family visited the Tuskegee Institute. Christensen papers, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
Christensen drove the implementation of manual training in the district. In 1902, he expressed his commitment to manual training in his first Salt Lake superintendent’s report and indicated his belief in its economic significance: “In this progressive and utilitarian age, the humane aspect cannot consistently be considered to the exclusion of the economic. It is this commercial phrase of the question that has given such prominence, of late years, to industrial training in the schools for both sexes. While the mind must be trained to think, the productive power of the nation can be enhanced only to the extent that the co-ordinate motor activities give tangible expression to thought.” To this end, Christensen requested the board fund a “Mechanical Training Department” to teach a oneyear course for mechanical drawing and wood work for eighth grade boys and a one-year course in “plain sewing” for seventh and eighth grade girls. 21
The program grew quickly. By 1904, the district had hired a supervisor of manual training and domestic arts and a director of sewing who, together, instructed hundreds of students in almost every district grammar school. The following school year the district could offer wood working to high school boys. It also hired as the district’s supervisor of art John Leo Fairbanks, who came from a Utah family of talented artists and had recently returned from studying in Paris. 22 Judging from the narrative in the superintendent’s reports and from personal correspondence in Christensen’s papers,
Fairbanks served as the arts and crafts ballast to Christensen’s manual training zeal. Each man exemplified the beliefs of the progressive and craftsman factions that manual training could reshape society by helping youth learn to use their hands as well as their brains. While Christensen believed manual training was a key component in the efficient deployment of educating youth, Fairbanks believed drawing and art should be the basis of almost all study. Their convictions had different origins but they sought to accomplish similar goals.
Although Fairbanks eventually incorporated his commitment to art in the context of practical application to manual training, at the beginning of his career with the Salt Lake District he espoused a loftier purpose in teaching art. “Besides aiming to acquire skill in expressing with the creations of the hands,” he wrote in a 1905–1906 report, “we aim to lead the children to appreciate the appropriate and beautiful, to acquaint them with the best art products of the world, to cause them to love nature, and to help them realize that the meanest things and the most ordinary surroundings are not wholly devoid of beauty.” 23 Fairbanks’s aesthetic ambitions for Salt Lake’s schoolchildren— when contrasted with Christensen’s pragmatic goals—indicate the philosophical distance between the progressives and the crafters. Their comments, however, display an affinity for each other’s perspective. Christensen described the arts and crafts emphasis on respect for labor when he wrote,
Fairbanks, on the other hand, made the case for the pragmatic necessity of teaching art to youth: “When it can be shown that art is practical, that there is educational need of it, that it is no fad, that children can make objects of use and beauty while developing judgment and good taste one does not need to argue for the arts.” 25
Whether viewed as practical or lofty, however, all champions of manual training believed that instructing young children to use their hands as well as their minds would help them academically. It was the bedrock tenet of the program. In 1911, Mary Dysart, principal of the Emerson School, wrote “I would recommend the proper employment of the hands as a means for developing brain power as the equal of at least any other.” 26 In a 1908 article in the Utah Educational Review, E. L. Miner, the teacher of manual training at the State Normal School (University of Utah), wrote that meaningful training should be related to school work and social life. “Exercises evolved from the class study, or community interest, or the social activities are of much great educational value,” he asserted, and continued to explain that students often performed beyond the expectations of a particular grade. First graders made hammock stands and doll house furniture in conjunction with the study of the home, second graders produced “looms and a store” in order to study industrial activities, and third grade students constructed bird houses as an outgrowth of nature study. 27
The Salt Lake principals and teachers found that manual training not only produced an abundance of homemade goods but elicited good behavior and reinforced academic lessons. Principal Lizbeth Qualtrough wrote of her students’ experience at the Oquirrh School: “Manual training seems to us to be the solution of so many educational problems that have hitherto baffled us. In arithmetic . . . Manual training . . . can take the pure number abstraction and make of it a concrete reality upon which he can get a mental grip. Nothing will so develop powers as this union of hand work and head work.” 28 A few years later, E. B. Mitchell, the head of manual training for the district, wrote in a similar vein: “It is my opinion that there should be a closer correlation of the subjects of arithmetic, art, geography, manual training and the study of natural laws. How many teachers know that arithmetic is applied in the shop more often than the tools?” 29
In the upper grammar school grades, manual training was gendered, with seventh and eighth grade boys learning mechanical drawing and wood working in shop classes, and girls studying sewing and cooking in “domestic science.” Although many young girls learned such skills at home, theorists’ practice of attributing technical expertise to homemaking skills was in keeping with the progressive emphasis on professionalization. 30 In 1907, Christensen expressed the national rhetoric on domestic arts to the female students of the district when he reported, “We certainly should look after the health and happiness, both present and future, of boys as well as girls, by giving the girls an opportunity to learn the fundamental of a scientific and economic knowledge of preparing food and clothes.” 31 In 1911, the principal of the Emerson School wrote that “there is something wrong in the education of any girl who enters upon life’s duties without high standards as a home maker.” 32 Just as mechanical drawing and shop would positively shape boys’ characters, Anna Corbett, the director of sewing, reported that her sewing students “are being taught habits of virtue, economy, judgment, persistence, and neatness.” 33 Thus, training in the domestic arts not only exposed girls to scientific knowledge but upheld their standards of civility and provided moral uplift. The Salt Lake District’s employment of domestic science also corresponded to the national enthusiasm for scientific application to homemaking. Ellen H. Richards, the nationally renowned founder of home economics, imprinted technical knowledge on homemaking by emphasizing the chemistry of cooking, cleaning air within the home, and ensuring a clean water supply. Richards believed that while women belonged in the home their work had a technical and scientific basis. 34
A group of girls from sewing class with their projects, June 1914. Lincoln School, 440 West 500 South, Salt Lake City. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 15740.
There were, however, instances of gender crossover in the realm of manual training. In 1914, the principal of the Jefferson School, W. J. McCoy, wrote that as long as boys made ironing boards and sleeve boards in manual training they could learn how to iron. McCoy identified two benefits of boys learning this skill: they would take more interest in what they were making if they knew they would use the article themselves, and their pride in their appearance would increase if they knew how to properly press their clothes. “It is really noticeable, that many of these boys are ‘picking up’ and are really succeeding in their work because of these things. The slouch is always indifferent to everything and his school work is likely to suffer.” 35
The comments of one administrator, however, mirrored the hope of some progressives that manual training would bolster masculinity. In 1910, Principal Oscar Van Cott of the Wasatch School averred that the incorporation of art and crafts into the curriculum caused effeminacy and lowered the graduation rate of boys at every level of schooling. In his report to Christensen, Van Cott inquired,
According to Van Cott, administrators should allot more time for boys to partake of traditionally male craft activities to uphold socially responsible gender roles. This was very much an objective of those who believed manual training could close the gap between students perceived as rough, working-class youth and overly sensitive weaklings. 37 Many progressives feared that the affluence associated with the rise of early twentieth-century consumerism threatened manliness, prompting cultural elites to encourage middle-class men to cultivate “regeneration” to stave off ennui. Van Cott reflected a contemporary fear that painting, weaving, and clay modeling would usurp the robust physicality American boys needed. 38
Despite the misgivings of Principal Van Cott, the numerous reports of principals and administrators revealed their acceptance of crafts as a constructive method to teach young children the basic concepts of arithmetic, social studies, and natural history. Manual training and crafts fit in with other enrichment programs, such as cultivating a school garden or raising poultry. As children advanced through school, however, manual training and the related role of art and crafts invited scrutiny whether students were being unduly pushed toward a particular path too early in their school years. To some extent, the discourse focused on administration of manual arts programs within bread and butter issues. 39 Should educators incorporate manual training into the existing curriculum or should it be a distinct course alongside the traditional “classical,” “English,” or “scientific” tracks? Should districts separate industrial institutions apart from the main high schools? Other debates revolved around the purpose of manual training. Should manual training prepare students for jobs and support the community’s industrial sector? Should it create the joy in labor so treasured by craftsmen? Was it simply a way to bolster “every power of muscle, mind and heart?” 40 Ultimately, the debate articulated Progressive Era rhetoric, contemporary values regarding education, and class assumptions regarding professionals and so-called bread winners. 41
Christensen and his fellow administrators, primarily George A. Eaton, the high school supervisor during Christensen’s tenure, argued these questions within the broader context of the variety of educational options they could formulate. In 1915, the Board of Education hired the educational theorist Ellwood Cubberly to undertake a survey of Salt Lake City’s school system. Cubberly and his Stanford associates praised the Salt Lake District for its efficient deployment of meager financial resources and noted that Salt Lake City was “essentially a city of the so-called middle class. This should make the maintenance of any public enterprise such as schools, a relatively easy matter.” 42 But it was not so simple. How could administrators meet the needs of children who did not finish grammar school, did not pursue high school after eighth grade, attended high school for only two years, or graduated from high school with no plans to attend college? What of the “overage” students, some of whom were still in the lower grades well into their teens? What of the “hand-minded” who failed academically but responded to constructing things? Where should seventh-grade students who could handle the demands of high school curriculum attend school?
Christensen’s narratives indicated a perspective more inclusive than that of Eaton, who tended to espouse the application of classifications to sort out the questions described above. Eaton frequently mentioned “differentiation,” an educational term for steering students as early as seventh grade on a career path. Although Eaton displayed a commitment to high school students’ welfare, he frequently sounded much like David Snedden, a prominent educational theorist. Applying the social efficiency model to education, Snedden believed that schooling should develop the skills of the child necessary for the needs of society rather than accommodate the individual needs of the child. 43 Referred to as the “Czar” in the Red and Black, the Salt Lake City High School yearbook, Eaton embraced social efficiency theory when he addressed the high attrition rate of high school students by dismissing them as lacking a serious purpose. “High Schools everywhere have too many pupils who are there simply because they have to be there in obedience to a parent’s dictation,” he warned. “They might be doing something really serviceable to themselves and to mankind if they were employed at some manual labor.” 44 Eaton’s scorn reflects a low opinion of the intellectual acumen of working class youth. 45
In 1910, voters passed a $700,000 bond to construct a new high school, two grade school buildings, and a technical high school on the Salt Lake High School property. 46 At the time of the passage of the bond, the existing Salt Lake High School was located on the current site of West High School at 200 West and 100 North. 47 The high school consisted of several buildings scattered over a large area that lacked amenities such as an auditorium and was inconvenient for east-side students. Since its establishment in 1890 the district’s high school student body had expanded from twenty-six to 1,448 by the end of the 1909–1910 school year. 48
The need for funding and space for a modern high school campus presented an ongoing challenge for district officials, whose consideration of adequate secondary school facilities entailed equitably providing opportunity to a young population of diverse backgrounds, needs, and aspirations.
The new high school, which for a few years was referred to as the “Eastside High School” (and later simply as “East”), would be the classical or academic institution while the Salt Lake High School would be the industrial or technical school. Although most would not attend a university, Eastside High School students could prepare for university course work. The technical high school would provide “the commercial courses, manual training courses, domestic science and other subjects and courses whose aim is to equip the graduate for bread winning.” In 1908, prior to the passage of the bond but after officials had devised the bifurcated curriculum, H. P. Henderson of the Salt Lake Board of Education justified the program as bringing “the school system into even closer touch with the social and industrial needs of our community,” writing that it would “prevent a duplication of subjects and an overlapping of courses in the two schools.” 49
In 1912, the Technical High School opened. Situated on a north–south axis adjacent to what is now 400 West, the building was organized in three parts: the central two-story block was constructed first and later flanked by one-story wings on either end completed in 1920. The new building allowed the Mechanical Arts Department to expand its course offerings substantially. “Previous to its construction, the boys taking this course could work with wood only. Now there are outlines of study in machine work, forging, moulding and applied arts. . . the courses . . . are finding much favor among the students who are inclined to the practical.” 50 The local firm of Cannon and Fetzer designed the building in the Prairie Style that architectural historians have attributed to the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York. 51 The brick piers and the wide frieze provided space for the installation of sculptures and bas-relief panels designed by the renowned sculptor Mahonri Young, a Salt Lake City native. Cast in concrete, the sculptures depicted laborers working in carpentry, masonry, metallurgy, and pottery. The three-panel bas relief showed people laboring in industrial shops. 52 Given the purpose of the building, the incorporation of art into the structure represented one of the city’s best arts and crafts examples depicting art in harmony with labor.
A copy of a drawing of the new Technical High School, November 13, 1911. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 12812.
With the construction of the Technical High School, Salt Lake City followed the example of a number of other cities building separate manual arts schools. These included Toledo, Brooklyn, Chicago, and the well-known experimental school Calvin Woodward established at Washington University in St. Louis. 53 In 1911 and 1912, Fairbanks and board members toured technical high schools on the East Coast and in the upper Midwest to determine what equipment and coursework might be advantageous to the Technical High School. Fairbanks provided a lengthy evaluation in which he promoted the position he had long advocated: the importance of incorporating drawing as having “universal application, is democratic in its scope, and is essential in the school curriculum.” To Fairbanks, the ability to draw was a necessity not only as an art form but as an essential prerequisite for “mechanical drawing, cabinet work, forge and machine shop . . . all other industrial or vocational courses.” 54 In a letter to Christensen, Fairbanks recounted his conversation with a machine specialist at the Vocational School for Boys in New York, who stated that “mechanics must be able to talk with the pencil without mechanical assistance.” 55 Fairbanks also noted the comprehensive list of subjects the New York school offered, which included architecture, domestic skills, and applied art in every category except fine art in addition to trades. Fairbanks’s correspondence with Christensen indicates that although he promoted fine arts as a source of beauty he also understood art’s pragmatic application in an industrial context. As the district’s art supervisor, Fairbanks accommodated Christensen’s agenda to use manual training as a counterweight to intellectual study, to motivate the “hand-minded” to remain in school, and to support industry.
The construction of the Technical High School, however, prompted concern, at least among educators, that its students would be relegated to the harsh world of manufacturing with little recourse to culture. At the beginning of 1911, in a letter to the president of the Agricultural College of Utah, John Widtsoe, Christensen contested the criticism from fellow educators who disapproved of the “segregation” of students in the two schools as eliminating “the culture element” from the technical students. While the report and Widtsoe’s correspondence is not located in Christensen’s papers, evidently the report expressed a concern of reducing the position of educated men to the working-class level. “We are going to produce that ‘social equality of classes’ not by bringing the ‘socially efficient educated man’ to a lower plane by lessening his possibilities during the process of training . . . but by lifting the laboring man to a higher and more remunerative field of activity through special and expert training during at least the major part of his apprenticeship and preparation.” Christensen used social efficiency rhetoric to defend the Technical High School, in that “segregation is necessary in the interests of the highest degree of efficient instruction.” For Christensen, the risk of “unnecessary multiplicity and intermixture of courses” outweighed a potential loss of opportunity for the manual training students. 56
In 1914, the Eastside High School opened. Along with the Salt Lake High School and the Technical High School, the east and west side institutions were administered as one school on two different campuses. 57 The year before, Principal Eaton reported that it would be “most feasible plan” that the “mechanic arts, domestic science and the commercial courses be given exclusively” in the westside campus, and that classical, English, and normal preparatory courses “be reserved for the east side and that the scientific course be offered at either place.” 58 A local newspaper’s mention of “apprehension, entertained last fall” referred to the concern of parents and students that the district would establish geographic boundaries and thus curb pupils’ options; however, Christensen did not have to resort to this because the high school student body divided itself evenly. 59 The administrators also did not strictly divide the academic and technical courses, so that while the west-side campus coursework focused on technical subjects, it would offer the first two years of classical courses after which students could transfer to the east campus and prepare for university. 60
The concern regarding the split in courses between the two high schools reflected that manual training was simply not as popular as the school men had anticipated. Low enrollment in the manual training course concerned and puzzled the administration as few students graduated from either the manual training or domestic science tracks. Ernest A. Smith, the superintendent who succeeded Christensen after his resignation in 1916, noted that while the commercial course attracted one-half of the west campus’s student body, the mechanical arts course attracted “scarcely a corporal’s guard.” The investment of $150,000 in the Technical High School building on the westside campus and related equipment did not warrant cost of educating fifty students in manual training. 61
Eaton, Christensen, and various supervisors had long tried to rectify the perception of manual training as the poor relation among school courses. It was not easy. Teachers often referred to manual training as a solution to helping “the backward student or the overage pupil” who were “in no sense dullards,” and board president J. T. Hammond exposed a bias toward the academic youth when he asserted that the district could establish a trade school “without lowering the requirements for training the intellect.” 62 Christensen stated that the district had to attach “a little more dignity” to manual training “by placing it with all other high school courses.” 63 Many educators, however, did not want to abandon crafts or manual training but instead resisted funneling youth into an industrial or trade course. They viewed art, crafts, and manual training not as a route to employment but as a component to a child’s development. “The primary purpose of manual training is not to make tradesmen, but to keep alive and develop the creative side of the individual,” wrote Anna Corbett, the director of sewing work. 64 In 1914, Principal Mary Dysart of the Emerson School extolled the enthusiasm of her young students for manual training but noted “our children are many sided, and capable of education along many lines.” She refuted “the criticisms of those who would make bankers, counting house drudges and bookkeepers of the children whom we are turning out of our elementary schools” as missing the point of education, which she believed should “prepare the individual for life.” 65
In 1916, Supervisor of Manual Training Milton Clauser, who had relocated from Denver to work for the Salt Lake District, expressed his dismay regarding the ambivalent approach toward manual training in the district. He quoted his colleagues from previous years’ reports, insinuating that manual training suited the “slow” children or the overage pupils and that the vocational needs of youth were barely considered. Clauser threw down the gauntlet: “Either the industrial subjects are worthy of recognition in promotions, or all this talk of enriching the curriculum and adapting it to community needs is more or less a contradiction.” 66
Why had a program the administration so robustly supported declined? Broadly, manual training was an educational fad, an impulse within the American educational system that garnered tremendous support for a couple of decades because it supplied scaffolding at a time when the modern American school system was feeling its way, testing educational theories and defining its place in American society. Ultimately, administrators misjudged working class youth by assuming that if they came from wage-earning families, they did not possess aspirations to carry them beyond their background. Manual training, educators hoped, could at least expand their potential for higher pay with more status within laboring vocations. 67 In 1919, Jacob H. Tipton, a manual training instructor at the University of Utah, wrote in his master’s thesis that manual training had fallen far short of its supporters’ expectations. He listed the reasons manual training failed to live up to its promoters’ anticipation: administrators did not allocate enough time for manual training, teachers did not have necessary training, and rather than waste time on wood working manual training students should instead learn housebuilding skills. Tipton was candid regarding a major impediment to training students for trades in public school: “The parents often object to having their children trained to be mechanics or anything approaching the trades; they wanted the children educated so that they would not have to work.” 68
Manual training did not disappear, but it changed. In 1921, Edward W. Gesswein, the district’s supervisor of industrial arts, wrote that, “It is now logically conceded that it [work in the shop] is only of value as a school subject in that proportion to which it contributes to the boys’ general educational development.” Ironically, in the Salt Lake District boys as young as junior high age were getting instruction in a wider range of trade subjects than at the height of the movement as they received training in cement, carpentry, sheet metal, and electricity, yet “no attempt is made in the course to prepare a boy for a trade.” 69 In the ultimate nod to the working-class mien of West High School, constructed in 1922, George Eaton wrote that East High School should become a cosmopolitan institution like its west-side counterpart. “A public high school offering only the so-called academic subjects is today an anachronism,” Eaton opined, proposing that East have commercial and home economics departments similar to West’s and a modified manual training in wood work, electricity, and advanced cabinet making. Such implementation might mitigate “this condition [that] stamps the East High School as an aristocratic institution, one in which the poor boy or girl has no chance to acquire what they term a practical education.” 70
As the second decade of the twentieth century closed, the arts and crafts movement waned. The promise of united art and labor did not come to pass, the consumer economy of the 1920s eliminated the handicraft mania, and the Art Deco style supplanted craftsman rusticity for ornamental treasures. Manual training had held out the promise of relieving school attrition, elevating employment opportunity for youth, reinforcing good citizenship, and building strong characters. While it is questionable that it achieved such a substantial list of objectives, it significantly influenced the discourse among various interests of how to wrest the nation’s education system from an antiquated model of rote learning and narrow curricula. In Salt Lake City, the discussion correlated with a surge in population and the community’s cultural, social, and economic maturation. Although its role within the school system changed over time, the implementation of manual training contributed to the formation of a modern school system with the flexibility to provide social mobility. The triumph of the comprehensive high school recognized “the rights of the individual” by placing students’ aptitudes at the highest level of the hierarchy of needs. 71
In 1916, Christensen resigned from his superintendent position in order to manage his family’s excavation construction business and also in response to acrimony among members of the board of education. 72 In an undated article in his papers, Christensen said he resigned not because he could not get elected, “but because he is tired of the everlasting nagging by a few people.” 73 In addition to managing the Christensen Construction Company, he remained involved in education by serving on the Board of Regents from 1917 to 1951. In 1948, the University of Utah recognized his contribution to education by awarding him an honorary doctorate. In 1956, Christensen died at age eightysix. 74 Fairbanks stayed on as art supervisor of the Salt Lake District until the mid-1920s, when he joined the faculty at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He became the chair of the Art and Architecture Department and remained in Corvallis until his death in 1946. 75 By 1920, Daft was living with her married daughter in Berkeley to recuperate from ill health. 76 She was sixty years old by then and had left the teaching profession. In June 1916, at the end of Christensen’s tenure as superintendent, she wrote to him that she “realized what a good and true friend I have in you, and that this testimonial [a high school diploma] paid in full for all the long years of hard work and struggle.” 77 In California, Daft turned to poetry as a creative outlet, publishing two books of verse and contributing to poetry periodicals in the United States and England. In 1954, she died in Yuba City, California, acclaimed as a “noted poet” who had received notable recognition. 78
Students at work in the West High blacksmithing shop, November 23, 1915. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 16599.
Christensen, Fairbanks, and Daft left their mark on the arts and crafts legacy of Salt Lake City through the implementation of manual training in the schools. At times hidden behind the reformist conversation regarding imprinting the practical on the intellect, craftsman ideals percolated in the dialogue over managing the district. Christensen was driven by efficiency, but Fairbanks consistently pushed back by emphasizing that art could engender the model student Christensen envisioned: respectful of labor, academically proficient, and economically productive. Year after year, Fairbanks imparted to his superiors the gains that students could make in all their studies with the proper art instruction. In 1917, upon Christensen’s appointment to the Board of Regents, Fairbanks’s comment in a congratulatory note perhaps best reveals the extent to which the craftsman ideal was inscribed on his soul: “I am certain you can help fashion the policy in my particular subject so that art will reach the people and give joy in labor as well as in leisure.” 79 As for Daft, as a teacher her influence was felt in the classroom rather than in district administration. Her popular classes did not seem to elicit commentary about their societal or educational value but rather that students enjoyed making things in her workshop. Her high school arts and crafts courses thus fulfilled a full circle: rather than uniting joy in labor, crafts became a pleasurable hobby, supporting leisure in a separate sphere from work. 80 One friend and former student, Ruth Harwood, the daughter of the esteemed artist James T. Harwood, wrote that other than her father, Daft stood out as her most influential teacher. “The thing which stands out most clearly to me in the hours with her was the joy of workmanship, that vital and beautiful quality of existence.” 81 Arts and crafts did not have to be associated with labor to be worthwhile but could simply bring forth joy. Through the many years of administering and teaching to the city’s youth by Christensen, Fairbanks, and Daft, the debate over what would best serve students, or the pleasure brought by simply making things, the arts and crafts tradition was embedded in the educational foundation of Salt Lake City’s public schools.
Notes
1. Alice Merrill Horne, Devotees and Their Shrines (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1914), 116–18.
2. The entire quote is “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labour” and comes from William Morris, the British founder of the arts and crafts movement. William Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” in William Morris and Arthur L. Morton, ed., Political Writings of William Morris (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984). See also, Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979), 85; and William Casement, “William Morris on Labor and Pleasure,” Social Theory and Practice 12, no. 3 (1986): 351–82.
3. Horne, Devotees, 117, 188.
4. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 164–95. The work of T. J. Jackson Lears, Edgar Krug, and Harvey Kantor illuminates the challenges and issues surrounding public education at the turn of the twentieth century, providing a framework with which to understand the response of the Salt Lake District’s administrators to these issues. This is particularly so with the question of determining the role of secondary education in the district and the purpose of manual training within the curriculum. Harvey Kantor, “Work, Education, and Vocational Reform: The Ideological Origins of Vocational Education, 1890–1920,” American Journal of Education 94, no. 4 (August 1986): 491; Edgar Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 198; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 69.
5. Salt Lake’s population was 44,843 in 1890; 53,531 in 1900; and 92,777 in 1910. “Table C: Population in Utah Urban Areas, 1860–1970,” Richard D. Poll, ed., Utah’s History (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989), 687.
6. Thomas G. Alexander, “Cooperation, Conflict, and Compromise: Women, Men, and the Environment in Salt Lake City, 1890–1930,” Brigham Young University Studies 35, no. 1 (1995): 6–39.
7. Salt Lake Tribune, November 2, 1913, p. 6; Goodwin’s Weekly (Salt Lake City, UT), April 4, 1903, p. 5; “‘Mission’ House and Stable,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 11, 1904, p. 11.
8. “Lovers of Art Forming Arts and Crafts Club,” Deseret Evening News, November 12, 1908.
9. “Letter to Art Lovers,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, December 4, 1910.
10. Krug, Shaping, 13.
11. Krug, Shaping, 11–13.
12. Frederick Buchanan, Culture Clash and Accommodation: Public Schooling in Salt Lake City, 1890–1994 (San Francisco: Smith Research Associates, 1996), 48.
13. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 22.
14. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 50. Millspaugh served from 1890 to 1898. Frank B. Cooper was the second superintendent and served from 1899 to 1901.
15. “Personal,” typescript, August 20, 1942, box 1, fd. 1, D. H. Christensen papers, Ms 627, Special Collections and Archives, J. Willard Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
16. Biographical sketch, typescript, box 1, fd. 1, Christensen papers.
17. I will use the term “manual training.”
18. Krug, Shaping, 217.
19. Christensen papers.
20. “Negro Educator Is Coming to Salt Lake for Two Lectures,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 22, 1913.
21. Board of Education, Twelfth Annual Report of the Public Schools of Salt Lake City for the Year Ending June 30th, 1902 (Salt Lake City: Ackerman, 1902), 78, 79 (hereafter, Annual Report). Most volumes of the Annual Report are available online via Hathi Trust Digital Library, accessed March 18, 2020, catalog.hathitrust .org/Record/100076206.
22. Vern G. Swanson, Robert S. Olpin, William C. Seifrit, Utah Art (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1991), 87–88.
23. Sixteenth Annual Report, 1905–1906, 86.
24. Twelfth Annual Report, 1901–1902, 78.
25. Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 138.
26. Twenty-first Annual Report, 1910–1911, 85.
27. E. L. Miner, “Manual Training. Its Development, Principles and Methods,” Utah Educational Review 1 (April 1908): 21–22. 2
8. Fifteenth Annual Report, 1904–1905, 98.
29. Twenty-second Annual Report, 1911–1912, 58.
30. Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 159; Krug, Shaping, 229.
31. Seventeenth Annual Report, 1906–1907, 61.
32. Twenty-first Annual Report, 1910–1911, 86.
33. Seventeenth Annual Report, 1906–1907, 148.
34. Krug, Shaping, 229–30.
35. Twenty-fourth Annual Report, 1913–1914, 85–86.
36. Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 174.
37. Lears, No Place of Grace, 81.
38. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern American, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 21–22.
39. Krug, Shaping, 217–248. Krug describes how schools were beset with a large population of youth without the structure with which to educate them.
40. Seventeenth Annual Report, 1906–1907, 144.
41. Eighteenth Annual Report, 1907–1908, 5.
42. Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1914–1915, 42.
43. Krug, Shaping, 253.
44. Salt Lake High School, Red and Black: Commencement (1910), 367, accessed May 14, 2020, issuu.com/westalumni /docs/1910.
45. Kantor, “Work, Education, and Vocational Reform,” 420.
46. Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 1, 86.
47. Salt Lake City’s street system west of Main Street changed in the twentieth century. The West High School campus is now located at 300 West and 200 North.
48. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 48; Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 91.
49. Eighteenth Annual Report, 1907–1908, 6.
50. Salt Lake High School, Red and Black (1913), 92–93.
51. “The Technical High School,” National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination (1980), available at State Historic Preservation Office, Utah Division of State History, Salt Lake City, Utah.
52. Norma S. Davis, A Song of Joys: The Biography of Mahonri Mackintosh Young, Sculptor, Painter, Etcher (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 1999), 62.
53. Krug, Shaping, 184–85.
54. Twenty-seventh Annual Report, 1916–1917, 168.
55. John Leo Fairbanks to D. H. Christensen, April 11, 1912, box 2, fd. 3, Christensen papers.
56. D. H. Christensen to John Widtsoe, January 16, 1911, box 2, fd. 2, Christensen papers.
57. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 77.
58. Twenty-third Annual Report, 1912–1913, 53.
59. “Even Division of High School Pupils,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 2, 1915.
60. “Vacation Days Nearly Over,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 25, 1913.
61. Twenty-seventh Annual Report, 1916–1917, 137–38.
62. Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 166 (first qtn.); Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1914–1915, 126 (second qtn.); Nineteenth Annual Report, 1908–1909, 6 (third qtn.).
63. Sixteenth Annual Report, 1905–1906, 124.
64. Eighteenth Annual Report, 1907–1908, 133.
65. Twenty-fourth Annual Report, 1913–1914, 75–76.
66. Twenty-sixth Annual Report, 1915–1916, 102–103.
67. Krug, Shaping, 217.
68. J. H. Tipton, “Methods of Teaching Mechanic Arts” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1919), 23.
69. Thirty-first Annual Report, 1921, 73.
70. Thirty-fourth Annual Report, 1924, 37.
71. Krug, Shaping, 245, 380.
72. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 88–91.
73. Journal of Education, 83, no. 6 (February 10, 1916), in box 4, fd. 8, Christensen papers.
74. “D. H. Christensen, Ex-S.L. School Chief, Dies at 86,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 7, 1956.
75. Tom Alder, “Idealized Realities: The Life and Art of J. Leo Fairbanks,” 15 Bytes: Utah’s Art Magazine, April 5, 2009, accessed March 17, 2020.
76. “Writer of Verse,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 25, 1928, 62.
77. Emma Daft to D. H. Christensen, June 16, 1916, box 2, fd. 5, Christensen papers.
78. “Death Claims Noted Poet,” Independent Herald (Yuba City, CA), April 1, 1954, p. 4.
79. John Leo Fairbanks to D. H. Christensen, May 31, 1917, box 2, fd. 3, Christensen papers.
80. This idea is drawn from Lears, No Place of Grace, 83.
81. “Ruth Harwood,” undated clipping posted on “Emma Frances Moyes,” accessed May 21, 2020, ancestry.com /family-tree/person/tree/112891950/person/260107 749107/gallery.
