“The Kennedys of Massachusetts: Founding Father Joseph Patrick Kennedy’s (1888-1969) Influence on U.S. President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) and U.S. Senators Robert F. Kennedy (1925-68) and Edward M. Kennedy (1932-).” Dialogue Given to Book Review Group, Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, June 15, 2009, by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Sept. 6, 1888, East Boston, Massachusetts. Newborn Joseph Patrick Kennedy (Joe Sr.) would father 9 Irish Catholic children (4 sons, 5 daughters), mold them into a powerful political family. Three sons became U.S. senators, the first of the three became U.S. president.

First an Overview. Joe Sr., aided by his wife Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890-1995), firmly yet lovingly raised, cajoled, commanded their 9 children to be first, best (second best did not count) in school, sports, politics, public service. Joe determined to get rich quickly to finance a political dynasty. Why? For prestige, power, influence. To speed his way and his 4 sons’ way to high office. For his daughters to marry advantageously. To enhance Kennedy fame and influence.

Joe Sr. skirted the law while appearing respectable. He kept family life separate from business and sexual escapades. His children reflected his aggressive ways, yet each child changed.

His first-born favorite, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr. (Joe, Jr., 1915-44), was groomed to become the first Irish Catholic President (pretentious but true).

Second born John F. Kennedy, called Jack, 2 years younger, had every childhood disease. He nearly died of scarlet fever. His later illnesses and back trouble (one leg was half an inch shorter than the other) were misdiagnosed, mistreated until 1947, age 30, when he was correctly diagnosed with life-threatening Addison’s disease.

Jack’s ailments, hospitalizations, medicines, short life expectancy, and three Catholic last rites were kept quiet to protect his political future. His later healthy bronze appearance came from medicines, malaria, and the Florida sun.

Yet his bright boyish looks, smile, flippant good humor drew people to him. He had rare charisma. The Kennedy children seemed to say, we are special, smart, help each other, stick together; are first, best, and will be important in public life.

Joe Sr. evaded the World War I draft. Before World War II he was a Hitler appeaser. Yet each of the 4 sons served in the military. Joe Jr. enlisted before Pearl Harbor, became a Navy pilot, died a hero piloting a dynamite-laden plane which exploded Aug. 12, 1944, targeting a Nazi rocket launch site.

Leadership then fell to Jack, also a WW II decorated hero. His PT-109 (Patrol Boat) in the Solomon Islands was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. Two crewmen died. Jack helped save the remaining 11.

At war’s end, Jack reluctantly entered politics, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (1947-53), the U.S. Senate (1953-60), and the U.S. presidency during 1,036 days of Cold War crises. Jack’s election victories, including his razor-thin 1960 presidential win over Richard Nixon, occurred largely through Joe Sr.’s money and connivance.

Cold War warrior Jack turned toward peaceful coexistence with the Soviets early in his short presidency, after the April 17, 1961, bungled anti-Castro Bay of Pigs invasion, planned by Pres. Eisenhower’s CIA, and during the Oct. 1962 near-nuclear war over the Cuban Missile crisis, both described later.

Bobby Kennedy too changed: from fierce U.S. Congressional investigator of mafia bosses, to hard-driving manager of Jack’s election campaigns, to–as U.S. Attorney General–Jack’s protector, adviser, and secret emissary to help defuse Cold War crises. Later, as Senator, then as presidential hopeful, Bobby inspired millions of have-nots with hope.

Last-born Ted (Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-) lost public respect at Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, July 18, 1969. Leaving a night-time party with Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, Ted’s car skidded off a bridge, overturned in water. Mary Jo, trapped inside, died.

Ted escaped but lost his chance to be president. He has since been a hard working, long serving U.S. Senator, hailed by some as the last liberal lion.

End of Overview.

Now patriarch Joe Sr.: born and about to be named for his father, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, when his mother, Mary Augusta née Hickey Kennedy (1857-1923), said no, Patrick is too Irish; name him Joseph Patrick Kennedy. Save him from prejudice as seen on help-wanted signs: “N-I-N-A,” No Irish Need Apply.

Old Protestant Mayflower elites controlled Boston society and finance. Yet at Joe’s birth Boston’s Irish grew in political strength. Joe Sr.’s East Boston-born father, a stevedore, saloon owner, ward boss, and state legislator helped needy immigrants. In return they gave him their votes. A Democratic Party king-maker he was part owner of Boston’s first Irish-owned bank.

Little Joe made his own money selling newspapers, peanuts, candy on East Boston docks. On Jewish holy days he lit stoves for observing Jews. He attended the elite Boston Latin School (1901-08) and Harvard College, excelled socially and in baseball, dated beautiful Rose, daughter of popular politician John F. Fitzgerald (1863-1950), called Honey Fitz.

Joe cultivated classmates and roommates most likely to help him later in business. He eased his way academically by sending, through his father, cases of Haig & Haig and Scotch whiskey to his professors. To Joe, winning, being first, was everything.

After graduation, as Assistant State Bank Examiner, Joe learned how to use inside information. He bought a failing investment bank, shifted its holdings to defaulted home mortgages, repainted vacated houses, sold them at high prices. To prevent a hostile takeover of his father’s bank, Joe borrowed money from family, stopped the takeover, became the bank’s president, married Rose. The Boston Herald  headlined: “Bank President at the Age of 25.” Joe learned how to influence the press, whom to befriend, what favors to call in, what threats to use. He told his children: things don’t just happen; you make them happen.

Joe’s gifts of liquor and money kept the Kennedy name prominent and clean. His gift list or pay-off list included New York Times journalist Arthur Krock (1886-1974); Time magazine writer Hugh Sidey (1927-2005); press lords William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951); Time, Life, Fortune’s Henry R. Luce (1898-1967).

Seeking exemption from WW I army draft and using political pull, Joe became assistant manager of Bethlehem Ship-Building dockyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. The shipyard built destroyers for the Allies, one of which was behind in payment. Joe refused delivery. U.S. Navy Assistant Secretary Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR, 1882-1945) visited Quincy to break the impasse. FDR said: Now Joe we need those destroyers. I’m going to send tug boats to get them, escorted by U.S. marines. Joe had to comply.

After WW I, Joe joined Boston’s best investment company, Hayden, Stone; then opened his own office next to Hayden, Stone to better trade using its name. He manipulated the market with a pool of traders. They traded particular stocks back and forth among themselves, raising the stock’s price ever higher.

The trading public, seeing the stock’s unusual rise, bought wildly, bidding up its price. At an agreed upon high price, pool members sold out. The stock price fell, public investors lost, Joe and pool members were enriched. Joe told a friend: “…it’s so easy to make money in the market we’d better [cash] before they pass a law against it.”

During Prohibition (1920-33) Joe bought liquor from overseas, had it shipped to off-shore islands, from which criminals transported it to speakeasies. Joe sold liquor long after Prohibition, stored it for later sales, used liquor as gifts and bribes.

Joe first bought 31 small New England movie houses. Attracted by movie money, glitz, and available showgirls, he opened a Hollywood office, bought a struggling studio, made it profitable producing low budget Tom Mix westerns and Rin-tin-tin-type dog pictures popular with small town moviegoers.

In Hollywood (1919-35) Joe made films, acquired more theaters, bought Pathé News, formed RKO, first studio to make all-talking movies. He had a Hollywood love affair with glamorous movie actress Gloria Swanson (1897-1983). She was 28, married to her third husband. Joe, 38, was smitten.

Rose tolerated Joe’s many dalliances. In 1920, a pregnant Rose left her 3 children with servants for a trial separation in her father’s house. Honey Fitz told her: Your children need you; your husband needs you…. If you need more help…get it. If you need a bigger house, ask for it. If you need more private time for yourself, take it…. ” Rose returned to Joe and the children. After ninth-born Ted she insisted on separate bedrooms.

Rose would always be Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy; enjoy the children’s achievement; keep them active, thriving, striving; enjoy the Kennedy fortune, travel in style, live in grandeur, find comfort in church ritual.

In 1927 Joe moved the family from Boston to the Bronx suburb of Riverdale near the Hudson River. He later bought homes in Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, (summers), in Palm Beach, FL (winters), and in MD near Washington, DC, to entertain politicians and media people.

Joe attributed his move to New York to Brahmin anti-Irish prejudice. When a Boston newspaper kept referring to him as “Irish Catholic,” he complained: What do you have to do to be called an American! I was born here. My father was born here. My daughters have no chance in Boston society.

A hidden reason for moving to New York was shame. To prevent takeover of his father’s bank, Joe, had borrowed money from relatives whom he never repaid.

Joe anticipated the 1929 Wall Street crash. He saved, actually increased, his fortune. He foresaw lengthy socio-economic upheavals of the Great Depression and said in 1930: “…in the next generation the people who run the government will be the biggest people in America.”

Joe raised big money for NY Governor FDR’s campaign as Democratic presidential candidate. At the Chicago June 1932 Democratic convention Joe saw that if FDR was not nominated on the first ballot, another compromise candidate would be chosen. He phoned newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst, in San Simeon, California: we’re deadlocked. Release the 86 votes you control to FDR.

Wanting but denied the Treasury Secretary post, Joe accepted the first chairmanship (1934-35) of newly created Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate Wall St. abuses. Advisors warned FDR: Joe is Wall St.’s worst crook. FDR laughed: I’m getting a crook to catch crooks. Critics later admitted that Joe did a good job correcting Wall St. abuses.

FDR next named Joe to head the U.S. Maritime Commission (1936-37). Thinking that war was likely, FDR wanted Joe in this post to strengthen U.S. private cargo-carrying capability. Joe succeeded.

Joe next wanted to be U.S. Ambassador to Britain, a prestige post for himself and family. He lobbied for it through FDR’s eldest son James (Jimmy) Roosevelt (1907-91) by aiding Jimmy’s Boston insurance business. Jimmy told FDR. Knowing Joe’s presidential ambitions, FDR thought: best keep Joe in London under State Department control.

Joe’s ambassadorship (1938-40) topped his political career. Britishers first admired Joe’s blunt talk and his large photogenic family. The Kennedys were presented to the King and Queen; spent a weekend at Windsor Castle. Invaluable to Joe Jr. and Jack was being sent as ambassadorial aides on fact-finding trips through Hitler’s Europe, Stalin’s USSR, Franco’s Spain.

Joe’s mistake was to go beyond the dominant isolationism of the time. He unwisely publicly backed appeasers Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1863-1937); Nazi Luftwaffe admirer Charles Lindbergh (1902-74) then living in England; U.S. born Lady Nancy Astor’s pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic following.

Fearing a Nazi invasion, Britishers disliked Joe’s public remarks that democracies could and should coexist with dictatorships. He was labeled dangerous, his phone was tapped when he told the press that democracy was finished in England and would soon be finished in the U.S. if they became involved in Europe’s wars.

Joe sent his family home for safety. He moved himself away from London bombing. FDR won reelection. Joe resigned. Out of public office, his chance at the U.S. presidency lost, Joe went home, dreading WW II’s effect on his children and fortune.

We now switch to a bare bones time line: 1940, June: Jack graduated from Harvard. At Joe Sr.’s urging and with New York Times journalist Arthur Krock’s editing, Jack rewrote his Harvard senior thesis, “Appeasement at Munich” (on why England was unprepared for WW II), had it published as Why England Slept, a bestseller.

1941: Joe Jr. enlisted in the Navy; became an experienced naval fighter pilot. Jack, despite health problems, with Joe, Sr.’s help, passed a helpful Boston physician’s physical exam for navy acceptance. Assigned to Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., Jack had a torrid love affair there with Danish-born Inga Arva (1913-73) falsely suspected of being a Nazi spy.

The FBI alerted Joe Sr., who ended the affair, and had Jack transferred. After more training, Lt. Jack, wanting war action, became a PT (Patrol Boat) skipper.

Still 1941: Mentally backward third born first daughter Rosemary Kennedy (1918-2005), then 23, became uncontrollable. Believing a frontal lobotomy might help Rosemary, Joe ordered it done without consulting Rose. The procedure failed. Rosemary’s condition worsened. Institutionalized, seldom mentioned, she was a hidden Kennedy tragedy.

1943: Recovering from his war injuries, Jack was awarded two medals for his PT 109 heroism. Still 1943, Oct. 5, Bobby, nearly 18, enlisted in the Naval Reserve.

1944: May 6. Second daughter “Kick” (nickname for Kathleen), a Red Cross worker in England, married a British lord, William Cavendish (1917-44). Four months later he died in battle. Another family tragedy.

Still 1944: A worse tragedy on Aug. 12, 1944. Joe Jr.’s plane, on a secret mission, exploded. He was awarded a posthumous Naval Cross. Joe Sr. induced the Navy to name a destroyer USS Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr., on which Bobby Kennedy in 1946 served as seaman.

1945: Jack, out of the Navy, as a Hearst journalist covered the birth of the United Nations in San Francisco and politics in Britain. Still 1945, Nov.: Joe Sr. consolidated much of his fortune to buy Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, the world’s largest privately owned rent-producing building.

1946: Jack, thin, gaunt from illness aggravated by war wounds, won his first elected office to the U.S. House of Representatives. He assembled a good staff, met his constituents’ needs, read, thought, prepared himself for his time of destiny.

1947: Fall: Jack, age 30, ill in London, was for the first time accurately diagnosed with Addison’s disease, a hormonal disorder that causes fatigue, weakens the immune system, usually leads to early death.

1948: Bobby Kennedy, Harvard College graduate, entered the University of Virginia law school. Still 1948, May 13: “Kick” (for Kathleen), widowed in 1944, was engaged to another British nobleman, Peter Fitzwilliam (1910-48). She was killed with him in a plane crash over southern France. Another Kennedy tragedy.

1950: Ted Kennedy, then 18, entered Harvard College. Next year, 1951, he was caught cheating (another student took his Spanish exam for him). He was expelled. Ted enlisted in the Army, served as an MP (Military Police) in Germany, returned to finish at Harvard, and entered the University of Virginia law school.

1952: Jack’s leap from the House to the Senate. Jack challenged incumbent Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902-85), well known Brahmin, WW II hero, favored to win on the coattails of the unbeatable Republican presidential contender General Dwight Eisenhower.

Still 1952: Undeterred, Jack targeted women voters. Jack’s sister Eunice held hundreds of campaign teas. Thousands of women of all ages flocked to Kennedy teas; were wooed by Jack’s movie star charisma. Lodge later blamed his defeat on those darned teas. More important than the teas was Joe’s large loan to Boston Post’s owner John Fox, a diehard Republican and Lodge supporter. The Boston Post’s switch from Lodge to Jack enabled Jack’s narrow win.

1953, January: Bobby Kennedy became a lawyer for a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating communists in government, chaired by controversial Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy (1908-57). McCarthy hired Bobby because Joe Sr. had contributed to McCarthy’s election.

After McCarthy’s wild unsubstantiated charges ruined patriotic Americans’ careers, the U.S. Senate voted to censure him. Senator Jack Kennedy, not wanting to censure a family friend, did not vote. He was then having life-threatening back surgery. Critics later faulted Jack for not voting by proxy.

Still 1953, September 12: Bachelor Jack, 36, married Jacqueline Bouvier (1929-94), called Jackie. She was well educated at Vassar College, had a junior year at French universities, earned a degree from George Washington University, D.C., where she worked as a photojournalist. She met Jack at a friend’s home. Jack, busy campaigning for his first 1952 U.S. Senate seat, knew that as a Senator and presidential hopeful he needed a wife.

Joe Sr. liked Jackie. She tolerated the noisy active Kennedys. But like Rose with Joe, Jackie knew of, was hurt by, but tolerated Jack’s womanizing. They had daughter Caroline (1957-), son John, Jr. (1960-99). She lost two other babies, one at birth, the second soon after birth. She was a much loved First Lady, and after his assassination, created, with writer Theodore White (1915-86) the Kennedy “Camelot” myth.

1955: Recovering from his second back surgery, Jack reflected on the meaning of courage. He read intensely on past courageous U.S. Senators who from conscience and principle voted against majority opinion, knowing their vote might end their careers. Jack’s resulting 1956 book, Profiles in Courage, won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography. When critics charged that Jack’s speech writer Theodore Sorenson (1928-) was Jack’s ghost writer, Jack and Sorensen showed book drafts to prove that, despite research and editing helpers, Jack was the sole author.

1956, Aug. 16. Chicago’s televised Democratic presidential convention. Jack introduced, to wild acclaim, its nominee, Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson (1900-65). Stevenson threw the choice of a running mate to the convention. Jack, in the running, lost to Tennessee’s Estes Kefauver. Jack’s father had told him: don’t run with Stevenson. Eisenhower will win reelection. The Democrat’s loss will be blamed on your Catholicism. Jack later said Dad was right, but by getting himself noticed in 1956 he positioned himself better for a 1960 presidential run.

1957: Bobby Kennedy became chief prosecuting lawyer for the U.S. Senate Rackets Committee investigating criminal use of labor union retirement funds. Bobby’s relentless pursuit of Jimmy Hoffa’s (1913-75) teamsters’ union and major criminals gave him national TV exposure. It also made many underworld figures hate the Kennedys.

1960, Jan. 2: Jack’s Race for the Presidency. Jack’s Catholicism was tested when in the Wisconsin primary he won few Protestant votes. He defused the anti Catholic bias in Protestant West Va. and in Houston, TX, where he told Protestant ministers: I am bound by the U.S. Constitution, not by the Catholic church. As Democratic presidential nominee., July 13, 1960, Jack began the race for the White House.

Still 1960, Sept. 26: CBS TV, Chicago. First of Jack’s 4 debates with Republican Richard Nixon (1913-94), Vice President for 8 years, more experienced, better known. But Nixon had a 5 o’clock shadow, perspired, seemed ill at ease. On TV Jack looked youthful, handsome, intelligent. Jack won by a razor thin 118,000 votes, becoming the 35th U.S. president, youngest (age 43) ever elected, first Roman Catholic. Jack’s narrow win, say critics, came from Joe Sr.’s money, spread in W. Va. and Chicago by Mafia boss Sam Giancana (1908-75).

1961, Jan. 20, Washington, DC, Jack’s inauguration, a freezing sunny winter’s day, pomp and ceremony. Jack’s most soaring words: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” And less remembered: “My fellow citizens of the world…ask not what America can do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

Jack, in an open limousine, Jackie by his side, was driven past the reviewing stand. Jack stood, locked eyes with his father, tipped his top hat. Tears welled. A moment to remember.

Still 1961, March 1: Jack created the Peace Corps. On May 25 Jack set a national goal: to land a man on the moon and return him to earth before the end of the 1960s. 1961, April 17: Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, planned under Eisenhower.

Jack, newly elected, inexperienced, believed CIA advisers: that Florida-based U.S. Army-trained anti-Castro Cubans would invade Cuba to install a friendly government atlow risk. Jack approved; was shocked when alerted Castro’s superior force killed 114 invaders, captured and jailed 1,189 others.

Fearing a possible nuclear exchange with Russia, Jack stopped a planned U.S. Air Force cover for the Bay of Pigs invaders. He was sorry he had not canceled the illegal invasion. This failed Cuban invasion plus other Kennedy provocations, some believe, triggered angers leading to Jack and Bobby’s assassinations.

Still 1961, June 3-4: Jack’s talks with Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) in Vienna went badly. Jack told an intimate: Khrushchev thought me young, inexperienced, naïve. He wiped the floor with me. 1961, August: Khrushchev built the Berlin wall dividing East Berlin from West Berlin. 1961, Dec 19: Joe Sr. suffered a stroke, was partially paralyzed, wheelchair bound, unable to speak except for a guttural drawn out “No.”

1962, Oct. 16-28: Jack was shown photos of Russian missile sites being built in Cuba. Why did Khrushchev do this? Fear of another U.S. invasion of Cuba; fear that the CIA would assassinate Castro; fear of U.S. missiles in Turkey aimed at Russia; fear of U.S. in West Berlin, an escape hatch for needed East German workers.

Still 1962. Assembling a top secret advisory Executive Committee, led by his brother Bobby, Jack kept to his schedule but frequently met with them.

Option 1, urged by military extremists: air strikes to bomb the sites. But air strikes invite retaliation, might provoke nuclear war.

Option 2, urged by moderates: blockade Cuba, stop and search approaching Russian ships. But blockade is an act of war; better call it “quarantine.”

Option 3, which Jack secretly used, covert diplomacy. Jack sent Bobby to negotiate with the Soviet ambassador and a Soviet secret agent close to Khrushchev: Russia to remove its Cuba missiles in exchange for Pres. Kennedy’s promise not to invade Cuba and later quietly to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. Khrushchev removed the missiles, Moscow-Washington, DC hotline was installed. Jack, relieved, said: thank God for Bobby.

1963, Nov. 22: Dallas, Texas. Jack, accompanied by Jackie, went to Texas to heal a liberal-conservative split among Texas Democrats whose votes he needed for his second term election. Politicians visiting volatile Texas had recently been roughed up. “We’re headed for nut country,” Jack told Jackie.

Despite some heckling signs, Jack was well received in San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth. In Dallas, driving in an open limousine through cheering crowds, Democratic Gov. John Connally’s (1917-93) wife Nellie, sitting in the front seat with her husband looked back, said to Jack: Mr. President, you can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you.

The limo slowed down in Dealey Plaza past the Texas Book Depository. Crack. A bullet entered the back of Jack’s neck, exiting his Adam’s apple, into Connally. Jack, his hands to his throat, slumped. Two more shots, the last one took off part of his skull and brains. Dead at Parkland Hospital. A stunned nation. The world mourned.

1963-68: Numbed by Jack’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy wrestled with his faith, was heard to cry, Why, God? Why? He cared for widowed Jackie and her two children; oversaw Jack’s funeral; left the Lyndon Johnson (1908-73) administration; was elected U.S. Senator from NY in 1964; in early 1968 ran for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The evening after winning the California primary, he thanked followers in Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel, exited with a crowd through the hotel kitchen. Shots were fired. Bobby died.

The adoration thrust upon him, Bobby knew, was really for martyred Jack. Yet Bobby’s touch was magical too. His was an unfulfilled promise. Had he lived, won the presidency, there would have been no Nixon, no Watergate, a likely Vietnam resolution, a better U.S. and world.

1968-present: Lastly there’s Ted. Jack, before winning the U.S. presidency had the Massachusetts governor appoint Jack’s Harvard roommate to his (Jack’s) senate seat. Ted, in 1962, at age 30, minimum age for a senator, ran for and won Jack’s seat. In 1980 Ted halfheartedly sought the Democratic presidential nomination. He lost to Pres. Jimmy Carter. Abandoning presidential hopes, Ted, already a successful senator, focused on human rights and health legislation. His brain cancer evoked much sympathy and admiration. Even Republican John McCain called him “the last lion.”

Now, some brief conclusions. Joe Sr. looms large because he, with Rose’s help, directed the children’s lives, made it all possible. The sons always asked themselves: what would Dad want me to do? Betty, how would you characterize the Kennedy brothers?

Founding father Joe drove his sons toward high achievement. What Joe Jr. would have become and done we don’t know. Jack, who carried on Joe Jr.’s political drive, was the most visionary, achieved the most in his short time as president. Bobby, the most sensitive, absorbed the best from Jack.

Ted, the muddled youngster, grew the most, redeemed himself by long service to the mass of have-nots. Jack’s, Bobby’s, Ted’s virtues and contributions outshone their many faults and misdemeanors. They helped overcome the sins of the father. Frank, what did we learn in this study of the Kennedys of Massachusetts?

That good often comes from bad. That robber baron Joe Sr. was a taker, his sons became givers, healers. We learned about Wall Street shenanigans; about the 1930s Great Depression; how fascist dictators provoked WW II, that isolationism is self defeating in an interconnected world; about the Cold War, about nuclear threat; about Jack and Bobby (did they herald the explosive 1960s?); about Ted, a sinner becoming noble through his long crusade to uplift the have-nots. A good study to do—with you.

And I with you (shake hands). Thank you for being here. END.

Books Read for this Paper

Clymer, Adam. Edward M. Kennedy: a Biography. NY: William Morrow & Co., 1999.

Collier, Peter and David Horowitz, The Kennedys: An American Drama. NY: Summit Books, 1984. (Detailed, very good).

Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2003.  (Deservedly ranked high by critics)

Douglass, James W. JFK and the Unspeakable: Why he Died and Why It Matters. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008. (Influenced by Thomas Merton, Catholic theologian author’s strong conspiracy scenario says JFK was killed by a powerful cabal of war profiteers because Cold War Warrior JFK changed to peacemaker as U.S. president and in a second term would have curtailed U.S. war profiteer influence).

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. NY: Simon & Schuster, 1987. (Excellent, readable, original sources; author of much praised Team of Rivals, on Lincoln).

Goodwin, Richard N. Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1988. (JFK’s intimate, staff member, writer on Latin Americans; husband of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin).

Harrison, Barbara and Daniel Terris. A Twilight Struggle: The Life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. NY: Lothrop, Lee &Shepard Books, 1992. (Authors were researchers on Home Box Office documentary, “JFK In His Own Words”).

Hersh, Seymour M. The Dark Side of Camelot. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1997. (Critical of the heroic caste placed on the Kennedys).

Johnson, Chalmers. Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. NY: Henry Holt, 2006, p. 96. (Insights into U.S. imperial treatment of Castro’s Cuba, Eisenhower, JFK eras).

Kennedy, Joseph P., Sr. Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy. Amadanda Smith, Ed. NY: Viking, 2001. (Shows patriarch’s warmer family side).

Kennedy, Robert F. Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis; With Introductions by Robert S. McNamara and Harold Macmillan. NY: Franklin Watts, 1969. (Day-by-day account by key player, with related documents).

Kessler, Ronald. Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded. NY: Warner Books, 1996. (Most “tell all” critic of patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy by Boston Herald’s 20+-year police reporter, investigative reporter, and editorial writer; interviewed many Kennedy intimates).

Koskoff, David E. Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974. (Good solid work).

Krock, Arthur. Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line. NY: Funk &Wagnalls, 1968. (Influential New York Times journalist and head of its Washington News Bureau, who was on Joe Sr.’s pay roll to make the Kennedys look good. Like Joe Sr’s other intimates he was dropped when he fell out of favor).

Leamers, Laurence. The Kennedy Men, 1901-1963, the Laws of the Father. NY: HarperCollins, 2001. (Good account of the male Kennedys).

Lifton, Robert Jay, and Richard Falk. Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism. NY: Basic Books, 1982. (Chap. 17, pp. , 228f, brief insightful 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis account shows how close Khrushchev-JFK came to WW III, pressured less over defense of national territory, reacting more from home critics; Khrushchev by military-political critics for allowing U.S.-anti-Communist advances; JFK by Republicans in a Congressional election year for weak foreign policy and bungling efforts to eliminate Castro. Good on JFK’s secret back door diplomacy with Khrushchev and Khrushchev’s accepting the humility of removing the missiles).

Maier, Thomas. The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings. NY: Basic Books, 2003. (Considerable details on the Kennedys; best on Kennedys’ Irish origins and connections).

Manchester, William. Remembering Kennedy: One Brief Shining Moment. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1983. (Jackie frowned on parts of this book).

Perret, Geoffrey. Jack: A Life Like No Other. NY: Random House, 2001. (Useful).

Shaw, Mark. The John F. Kennedys.: A Family Album. NY: Farrar, Straus, 1964. (Photo rich).

Smith, Sally Bedell Smith. Grace and Power: The Private World of The Kennedy White House. NY: Random House, 2004. (Having both a rake-like father and husband, Jacqueline Kennedy—though hurt– loved, understood, forgave both; JFK steadily learned how wonderfully valuable Jackie was in his career).

Sommer, Shelley. John F. Kennedy: His Life and Legacy. NY: HarperCollins, 2005. (Introduction by JFK’s daughter Caroline Kennedy cites his early reading of great lives with leading him to leadership to improve people’s lives. Author worked 14 years with younger visitors at John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston).

Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. NY: W.W. Norton & Co, 2003 (See Index for Bay of Pigs; Berlin Crisis; Central Intelligence Agency; Cuba Missile Crisis; Kennedy, John F.; related topics).

Thomas, Evan. Robert Kennedy: His Life. NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000. (Excellent, balanced).

Thompson, Robert E. and Hortense Myers, Robert F. Kennedy: The Brother Within. NY: Macmillan Co., 1962. (Early account which did not have access to Bobby Kennedy’s papers).

Internet Sources for: Kennedys of Massachusetts

1. Over 500,000 entries: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Kennedy+family+of+Massachusetts&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

2. John F. Kennedy (1917-63) Photos: Part One: The Early Years: Source: http://www.historyplace.com/kennedy/early.htm

3. Bay of Pigs, April 17, 1961: date Sources: http://library.thinkquest.org/11046/days/bay_of_pigs.html
and: http://library.thinkquest.org/11046/days/references.html
and: http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~mhunter/ pigs.htm

4. Miller Center on JFK and related topics: http://millercenter.org/academic/americanpresident/kennedy/essays/biography/print

5. Articles on JFK by Robert Dallek, author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2003, especially good on JFK’s illnesses:
Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/by/robert_dallek

6. Over 100 articles on the the Kennedy family: Source: http://search.americanheritage.com/search?q=Kennedy+family+of+Massachusetts&
ie=utf8&site=AH&output=xml_no_dtd&client=AH&lr=&proxystylesheet=AH&oe=utf8&g
etfields=author.title.pubdate.pubname.section.category&requiredfields=&searc
h=Search

7. Time Lines of Kennedy family of Massachusetts: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=Time+Line%2C+Kennedy+family+of+Massachusetts&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

About the Authors: For authors’ bio-sketch and to access their many articles in blog form type in google.com (or other search engine) Franklin Parker or Franklin & Betty J. Parker or bfparker@frontiernet.net

End of Manuscript.

1 of 2 Parts: “Thomas Philip (Tip) O’Neill, Jr. (1912-94), Congressman; Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives (1977-86).” By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Review of and Commentary on: Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill, by Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., with William Novak (New York: Random House, 1987), and related sources.  Given in Dialogue Form at Uplands Book Review Group, April 15, 1996.

Tip O’Neill grew up in a politically active Irish working family in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, physically near but culturally far from elite Yankee-oriented Harvard College.

Growing up Irish shaped O’Neill’s political education more than did the Boston schools he attended: Gaelic school, parochial St. John’s Grammar and High School, and Jesuit-run Boston College.

On a summer job cutting Harvard lawns in June 1927, 14-year-old O’Neill watched white-linen-suited Harvard graduates under outdoor commencement tents laughing, joking, and illegally drinking champagne (prohibition was then in effect). O’Neill wrote of the incident sixty years later:

“As I watched those privileged, confident Ivy League Yankees who had everything handed to them in life, I made a resolution that someday I would make sure my own people could go to places like Harvard [for] the same opportunities that these young college men took for granted.” (O’Neill and Novak 1978)

This experience helped set O’Neill on a political career, winning eight elections to the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1936-52), becoming its minority leader (1947-48) one year and speaker the last four years (1948-52).

He then won 17 elections to the U.S. House of Representatives (1952-86, 34 years), winning John F. Kennedy’s U.S. House seat when Kennedy became U.S. Senator in 1952.

He was Democratic U.S. House Whip (1971-73), U.S. House Majority Leader, (1973-76), and U.S. House Speaker (1977-86). As Speaker the last 10 years, he presided over the U.S. House, formed its committees and named their members, and shaped and passed important legislation. He stood third in line from the U.S presidency, after the president and vice president.

His 1987 book, Speaker of the House (this blog gives the highlights of that book), details the tumultuous half-century of his political career (1930s-80s) and pulls no punches in describing U.S. political figures and events.

Tip O’Neill’s grandfather, a refugee from the 1840s Irish potato famine, left County Cork, Ireland, 1845, for Boston, Mass. He became a bricklayer in North Cambridge, where Tip’s father, Thomas Philip O’Neill, Sr., was born. Tip’s father was also a bricklayer and a local politician who in 1900 was elected to the Cambridge City Council.

The Irish were united by poverty, Roman Catholicism, and enmity toward oppressive absentee English landlords. In Boston they opposed wealthy English Mayflower descendants living in fine homes with sons in elite schools like Groton and Harvard.

The well known jingle comparing working class Irish with English Mayflower descendants goes:

“In good old Boston town
Home of the bean and the cod
The Lowells talk only to the Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.”

Irish warmth, friendliness, gift of gab, charisma, and storytelling talent led Tip O’Neill from boyhood toward a political career.

Job notices which read NINA (no Irish need apply) also determined O’Neill to help his own working class neighbors, especially the needy, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or color.

In turn, the Irish, French Canadians, Italians, and Jews dug the clay that made the bricks that built the fine homes of the rich Yankee English in and around Boston and that enlarged Harvard’s vine-covered buildings.

In this urban ghetto setting, politicians, young and old, rang doorbells to get out the Irish vote. Those running for office knew that to win they needed the backing of Irish ward bosses whose duty was to give patronage jobs to help the needy.

Thomas Philip O’Neill, Jr. (called Tom at home and later “Tip” by others) was born December 9, 1912, a cold winter day, while his father carried a protest sign on a freezing picket line outside Harvard College.

Harvard had hired scabs to break a bricklayer union strike for better wages and working conditions. The O’Neills and their working class neighbors proudly wore the union label.

Tip O’Neill’s mother, Rose A. (Tolan) O’Neill, died of tuberculosis when he was nine months old. A nun watched over Tip so that his father, brother, and sister could attend the funeral.

For six years a French Canadian housekeeper raised Tip. He grew up with a French accent. His father remarried. His stepmother was good to him. Knowing he had no mother, the parish priest and parochial school nuns kept an eye on him.

The nickname Tip came from Edward “Tip” O’Neill, St. Louis Brown’s baseball player of the 1880s, whose skill at hitting tip fouls drove frustrated pitchers to walk him.

The Irish loved sports, especially baseball, which they were sure the Yankees stole from an Irish game called rounders. Growing up Irish and surrounded by Revolutionary War memorials meant that, instead of playing cowboys and Indians, Tip and friends played “Down the English Yankees.”

In 1914 Tip’s father, high scorer on a civil service test, became sewer commissioner for Cambridge, enabling him to give patronage jobs to over 1,700 people and to influence private contractors.

Tip learned urban ghetto patronage politics at home, at Knights of Columbus meetings, at other Catholic organizations, while arguing ball games in bars and in political clubs where card-playing, beer drinking, and political talk went hand in hand.

In his teens and into his twenties Tip hung out at Barry’s Place, later called Barry’s Corner, named after the Barry family who lived in a two-story building, 149 Ridgley Avenue, North Cambridge, where Rice, Cedar, and Middlesex streets converged.

When the ground floor barbershop became vacant, Tip and friends pitched in 50 cents each to rent what became their lifelong club. Dave Barry, living upstairs, a Boston Globe sportswriter, sparked much figuring of baseball batting averages, dividing times at bat into number of hits.

Practicing quick mental arithmetic stood Tip in good stead later as a quick vote counter in the state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives. Early Barry’s Corner regulars were mainly Irish, some French Canadians, one black member, and Jewish member Lenny Lamkin, who later managed Tip’s congressional district office.

After the building was sold and torn down for apartments, Barry’s Corner regulars met each June at the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Massachusetts Avenue. (Buckley 1994)

Tip lived by rules his father taught him: always remember his roots, live a clean and honest life, show loyalty and reciprocity, fulfill responsibilities (you are your brother’s keeper), share life’s necessities with those in need, and resolve differences by compromise.

Tip heard much of the patronage politics of John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, Boston’s first Irish mayor, whose daughter Rose was John F. Kennedy’s mother.

But Tip’s practical political mentor was James Michael (Jim) Curley, three times Boston mayor and one-term Mass. governor. Jim Curley was to most a wily machine politician; to others a Robin Hood benefactor, the model for novelist Edwin O’Connor’s novel, The Last Hurrah, made into a popular John Ford-directed film in 1958, starring Spencer Tracy.

At age 16, still in school, O’Neill rang doorbells to get out the vote for New York Governor Al Smith’s 1928 run for the presidency. O’Neill was popular with peers and teachers, active in sports, but an average student.

On graduating from St. John’s High School in 1931, he drove a brick company truck for a time. At age 20, in 1932, he helped get out the vote for presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). At the urging of his parish priest and his teacher, Sister Agatha, he entered Boston College in 1933. The Boston College yearbook for 1936 listed him as age 23, 6’ 2”, weight 215 pounds.

In 1934, a college sophomore, he visited relatives in Washington, D.C. Missy LeHand, FDR’s secretary, was from Tip’s neighborhood in North Cambridge. She had earlier told him, “If you ever come to Washington, give me a call at the White House.” He called. She invited him to the White House, met him at the gate, and asked, “Would you like to meet the president?”

O’Neill later wrote, “I was speechless. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was like God to me.” They met. Awe mixed with shock when O’Neill spoke to the wheel-chair bound president. That meeting also helped determine Tip on a political career to help have-nots. (O’Neill and Novak 1987)

Still in college and living at home in Cambridge, he ran for and lost by 150 votes election as North Cambridge city councilman, his only political defeat. Before the vote he was surprised when longtime neighbor Mrs. O’Brien said: Tom (he was called Tom at home), I will vote for you, even though you did not ask for my support.

Stunned, O’Neill said, “Mrs. O’Brien, I have lived across the street from you for 18 years, have cut your grass summers and shoveled snow from your walks winters. I didn’t think I needed to ask for your vote. Mrs. O’Brien said, “Let me tell you something, Tom–people like to be asked.”

O’Neill took this lesson to heart, the origin of his oft-repeated maxim: “All politics is local.” Tip learned early that a politician serves at the pleasure of his constituents; that voters have names, faces, minds, and opinions; that they have problems they want your help on; and that they expect you to ask for their vote. (Editorial 1995, Nolan 1994)

At age 24 in 1936, just out of college, he won election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, where he served eight terms (to 1952).

The same Sister Agatha who got him to enter Boston College had earlier introduced him to longtime sweetheart Mildred Ann (Millie) Miller, a grade behind him at St. John’s School and the daughter of a Boston elevated trainman. They were married in June 1941. She never dreamed she was marrying a lifelong politician.

They had five children. Tip’s autobiography is dedicated: “For Millie, the Speaker of My House, a loving wife and mother [of five], and my partner through so many triumphs and trials.”

The Massachusetts Legislature

In eight tough elections to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, O’Neill emulated his father’s and Jim Curley’s service to constituents, while avoiding Curley’s corrupt methods.

O’Neill liked the social part of campaigning, ringing doorbells and meeting people. He was pleased when constituents told him they had voted for him because his father had helped one of their relatives when in need.

Republicans had dominated the Massachusetts legislature for over a hundred years. O’Neill began as one of 62 Democrats outnumbered by 178 Republicans. Most Republicans were Yankee Protestants from Boston’s financial institutions and strongly pro-big business.

Outnumbered, Democrats like O’Neill could do little to initiate new legislation but spent their time getting patronage jobs for their constituents. He helped many youngsters enter college by finding them summer jobs. He got their fathers New Deal public works jobs.

As a Mass. House member, he regularly received 50 snow buttons for constituents for snow removal jobs at $3 to $4 a day. After a snow storm, the poor and jobless lined up outside his home for the snow removal jobs that put bread on their tables.

His first bill to become law removed license fees for youngsters selling newspapers and magazines. As a boy he had sold The Saturday Evening Post for pocket money.

In 1937 he opposed a loyalty oath bill, an unpopular position to take since his constituents, especially veterans, were patriots. But his independent stand marked him as a man of principle and a potential leader. In 1947 he became Mass. House minority leader.

That year, Republican Governor Robert F. Bradford called O’Neill to his office and said: Mayor Jim Curley has been found guilty of mail fraud and is going to federal prison. If I remove him as mayor, the Irish will say I am a bigot. If I let him be mayor again after his jail term, Republicans won’t reelect me. I want to name City Clerk John Hynes as acting mayor until Curley gets out of prison. Will you ask Hynes if he will serve with that understanding?

O’Neill went to Hynes, who said: if I take Curley’s job, my city council bosses will take my clerkship job from me. Tell the governor I will fill in for Curley as mayor only if I am guaranteed return of my clerk’s job. The recommendation went in that way.

Curley was in jail five months until U.S. Representatives John McCormack got President Harry S Truman to pardon Curley. Years later, when O’Neill told Curley of his part in the affair, Curley asked: you did that? I always thought it was my lawyers, so I sent them clients who must have earned them a million dollars.

In 1948 O’Neill was called to the Boston district office of U.S. Representative John McCormack, then U.S. House Minority Whip and the most influential Democrat in New England. McCormack said: If you take the lead in doing the necessary leg work, I can raise the money needed to win a Democratic majority in the Massachusetts House.

Armed with campaign funds, O’Neill and aide, Tommy Mullen, went to Republican districts, identified the most popular Democrat, usually a lawyer back from World War II, and offered to pay his campaign costs if he would run as a Democrat for the Massachusetts House. The result of the massive statewide effort won the Democrats 120 seats over 118 Republican seats, a bare majority that reversed a hundred years of Republican rule. (Woodlief 1994)

O’Neill rose rapidly in the Mass. state House. His Democratic peers elected him Minority Leader in 1947 and Speaker in 1948. He pushed through many “little New Deal” bills.

When a neighbor with two children with Downs syndrome told of having to lock them out of sight because of inadequate state facilities, O’Neill launched a campaign that made Massachusetts mental health services the best in the nation. He helped double teacher salaries and gained benefits for veterans and the elderly.
Boston’s Mayor Curley took Tip under his wing, giving him poems to memorize, books to read, and tips on how to make great speeches. O’Neill reciprocated in 1952, his last year as Massachusetts House speaker, by pushing through a pension bill for Curley, then old and in need.

John F. Kennedy

In 1946, O’Neill then 34, first met John F. Kennedy, then age 28, skinny and bashful, still recovering from World War II wounds received while commanding a PT boat in the Pacific. Although backed by his rich father, Joseph P. Kennedy, with high political ambitions for his sons, John F. Kennedy seemed to local politicians then, including O’Neill, unlikely to go far.

Some said jokingly that young Kennedy had thrown his diaper into the ring but didn’t stand a chance. “But,” O’Neill later wrote, “he grew [in experience] like nobody I’ve ever known, and he went on to become one of the great political leaders of our time.”

Initially Kennedy considered running as Mass. lieutenant governor, but his father decided instead that he should run for the U.S. House of Representatives. O’Neill was then running for his sixth term in the Mass. legislature.

Father Joseph Kennedy’s cousin, Joe Kane, managed John F. Kennedy’s campaign, stressed young Kennedy’s war record, and got writer John Hersey, Pulitzer Prize winner for his novel, A Bell for Adano, to write of Kennedy’s PT boat heroism.

Hersey’s article appeared as “Survival” in The New Yorker, was reprinted in Reader’s Digest, and flooded the Massachusetts district Kennedy wanted to represent.

That article plus the Joe Kane-run campaign plus father Joseph P. Kennedy’s $300,000 won young John F. Kennedy his U.S. House seat.

O’Neill was in a bind. Kennedy’s competitor for the U.S. House seat was Mike Neville, O’Neill’s Mass. House colleague who had come up through the Cambridge city council. Kennedy asked O’Neill repeatedly to back him, but O’Neill said he had to remain loyal to Mike Neville.

After Kennedy won, he told O’Neill: I thought I could win you over, but I was wrong. You stuck with your buddy, Mike Neville. You are a man of your word. Next time I run, I want you on my side. Kennedy, like O’Neill, valued loyalty.

It was John F. Kennedy who helped O’Neill get from the Massachusetts House to the U.S. House of Representatives. In January 1951, JFK confided to O’Neill that he (Kennedy) would run the next year either for the Massachusetts governorship or for the U.S. Senate. He wanted O’Neill to know that if O’Neill wanted to run for Kennedy’s U.S. House seat, he had a year to get ready. O’Neill, definitely interested, won that seat, kept it for 34 years, and through it became a national figure.

Robert F. Kennedy

As a U.S. House member, O’Neill could name four delegates to the 1956 Democratic National Convention. Asking O’Neill to let his brother Robert F. Kennedy be one of those delegates, John F. Kennedy said:. Bobby is brilliant. I want him to work for me at the convention in case lightning strikes and I’m asked to be Adlai Stevenson’s vice presidential nominee.

O’Neill, who had already chosen three Massachusetts delegates, gave up his own delegate seat to accommodate Robert F. Kennedy. Robert showed no gratitude. O’Neill mentioned this incident to father Joseph P. Kennedy, who said: don’t expect appreciation from my boys. They’ve had so much done for them that they expect such things. Jack is soft and forgiving, but when “Bobby hates you, you stay hated.”

O’Neill heard in the late 1950s that Robert F. Kennedy planned to run for his (O’Neill’s) House seat. A concerned O’Neill asked John F. Kennedy about this threat. After checking with father Joseph P. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy reported his father as saying, “Bobby will not be a candidate in Tip O’Neill’s district…. Tip is a friend of the family.”

Years later, a Newsweek writer told O’Neill that in 1968 on a plane to Los Angeles, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy asked the writer how he knew so much about Congress. The writer said: I get my information from Tip O’Neill, “the sharpest guy on the Hill.” Robert said, “Tip and I have never been friendly, but when I get back from this trip I’m going to look him up.”

Within days of that conversation Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.

O’Neill had political guile but held little rancor. Before O’Neill retired
in 1986, the slain Robert F. Kennedy’s son, Joseph P. Kennedy, 2nd, asked and received O’Neill’s blessing to run in his district for his U.S. House seat. O’Neill’s second maxim after “All politics is local,” was “Yesterday’s enemies aretomorrow’s friends.”

When John F. Kennedy became president in 1960, his U.S. Senate seat was held by his Harvard roommate until 1962, when Ted Kennedy, then age 30, won that same Senate seat. Two years later, 1964, Robert F. Kennedy won election to the Senate from New York.

Their father Joseph P. Kennedy planned and paid for these moves, including John F. Kennedy’s 1960 successful run for the presidency.

Lyndon B. Johnson as John F. Kennedy’s Vice President

O’Neill helped get Lyndon B. Johnson to run as John F. Kennedy’s vice presidential candidate. At the 1960 Democratic convention, O’Neill early saw that Kennedy would win on the first ballot. He so reported to key politicians. Present was U.S. House majority leader John McCormack, who said to Johnson’s mentor, Sam Rayburn: Tip says Kennedy will get the nomination on the first ballot.

Texas Congressman Pat Wright, also present, said to Rayburn: if Kennedy wants Lyndon as his running mate, Lyndon cannot decline. Rayburn, hitherto adamant that Johnson accept only the top spot, told O’Neill: tell Kennedy that if he wants Lyndon, to call me. I’ll get Lyndon to accept.

O’Neill reported all this to Kennedy, who said: I need Lyndon to win the national election. But I was afraid he would turn me down. Because of what you say, I’ll call Rayburn. If he tells me Lyndon will accept, I’ll make the offer.

Lyndon B. Johnson still hesitated. The younger, less experienced John F. Kennedy had been his main opponent for the presidential nomination. To win Lyndon Johnson over, Kennedy told O’Neill: bring Lyndon to Boston to give a major speech. Get out the crowds for him. Make Lyndon happy.

O’Neill got labor union members and students to attend, bands to play, and brought Lyndon Johnson to the Boston meeting just as crowds poured from office buildings. A mounted police officer directing traffic got off his horse to let Lyndon climb on. Waving a ten gallon hat, Lyndon made the horse rear back. The crowd went wild. Lyndon signed on as Kennedy’s vice presidential candidate. The rest is history.

The John F. Kennedy Presidency

Sam Rayburn, Tip O’Neill, and others struggled to get President John F. Kennedy’s bills through the House, but Kennedy’s aides were inept at working with Congress. O’Neill himself broke ranks on Kennedy’s federal aid to education bill.

President Kennedy felt he had to bend backward to please those adamant about separation of church and state. O’Neill, irritated because parochial schools were denied federal funds despite using the same textbooks as the public schools, voted against the bill which, as it happened, never came out of the Rules Committee. Still, Kennedy held no hard feelings.

When Kennedy’s aides threatened to replace House Speaker John McCormack, Tip O’Neill brokered a reconciliation. Another difficulty occurred in 1961 when Kennedy asked O’Neill to help Ted Kennedy become the Democratic nominee as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.

Ted Kennedy’s Democratic opponent was John McCormack’s nephew. Tip O’Neill’s intervention helped ease the Kennedy-McCormack tension when Ted Kennedy won the Democratic nomination and defeated his Republican rival, Henry Cabot Lodge’s son.
Tip O’Neill was proud of John F. Kennedy’s presidential style; courageous handling of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis; and achievements in civil rights, space exploration, and arms control. O’Neill knew Kennedy to be skeptical about the military and believed Kennedy would have pulled us out of Vietnam if he had lived to win a second term.

O’Neill and Kennedy talked about the November 1963 Dallas trip. O’Neill asked Kennedy: why spend your time and energy patching up the Connelly-Yarborough conflict in Texas?

Stunned by John F. Kennedy’s assassination, O’Neill discounted conspiracy theories. But five years later, he heard Kennedy intimates Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers say they were sure they heard two shots from behind the fence on the grassy knoll.

O’Neill said: that’s not what you told the Warren Commission. They replied: we testified that way to avoid more pain for the family. After that, O’Neill was skeptical about the Warren Commission findings.

But O’Neill preferred to remember how he and the nation were thrilled by John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address (”Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”). O’Neill admired Kennedy and Jackie’s glamour, the talented people they brought to the White House, and their making Americans feel that this country had a place for everybody, regardless of race and religion.

U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson and Vietnam

In early August 1964 two U.S. warships on intelligence patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin near North Vietnam were allegedly fired upon. President Johnson asked Congress for approval to take “all necessary measures” to halt Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.
O’Neill hesitated to sign the Tonkin resolution. He confided to House Speaker John McCormack his suspicion that the military wanted to use the Tonkin incident for all out war. He told McCormack he was thinking of voting against the resolution. McCormack advised him not to vote against Tonkin. It will make you seem to be a traitor to your country.
Politically, McCormack was right, but O’Neill felt that his vote for Tonkin was the worst vote of his 34 years in the House. The House supported the resolution 414 to 0, the Senate 88 to 2, including support by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, who later changed his mind and was Pres. Johnson’s most powerful opponent on the war.
O’Neill, whose congressional district had 22 colleges and universities, including Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was often asked to speak about the war. Protesters challenged his hawkish views. His home was picketed by war protesters, once by activist actress Jane Fonda.
Challenged when he spoke at Boston College, his alma mater, where two of his children who were then students. O’Neill told protesters: I think I know more than you do. I’ve been briefed by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, General William Westmoreland, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and the CIA.
A student then asked O’Neill: have you ever once been briefed by the other side? O’Neill was taken aback. The more he thought about it, the more he sought out dissenting views. Marine General David Shoup, who retired rather than go public with his dissent, told O’Neill that the U.S. was sending American boys to die in a war it could not win. Americans would simply not tolerate bombing North Vietnam to oblivion. O’Neill was told that hawkish advisors were keeping these and other dissenting views from President Johnson.
In June 1967 the O’Neills visited their daughter, a foreign service staff officer in Malta, a rest and recreation place for American military from Vietnam. O’Neill asked their opinion. He was told that the Vietnam War was not winnable, that it was only wasting American lives and resources.
Deciding to go public, O’Neill told his Massachusetts constituents in a September 1967 newsletter: I now see the Vietnam conflict as a civil war in which U.S. involvement is wrong. Parents in his district with sons in Vietnam pilloried him. Tip O’Neill’ wife Millie was berated.
A livid President Johnson confronted O’Neill in the White House: “What kind of an SOB are you?” O’Neill told Johnson of his many talks with dissidents and of his gradual conviction that the war was unwinnable unless North Vietnam was bombed to extinction, something the American people would never countenance.
Johnson said: No, I can’t bomb North Vietnam to extinction. It would mean a third world war involving the USSR and China. Johnson put his arm around O’Neill and said: Tip, I see now that your changed view is a matter of conscience. Don’t talk to the press. Give me time. I will read the anti-war reports, as you suggest.
O’Neill’s now-dovish views became known. Anti-war groups asked his advice. He suggested that they influence families of soldiers in Vietnam to urge their Congressmen to break with the Administration’s war policy. On March 31, 1968, an almost broken Pres. LBJ announced that he would not seek nor run for the presidency for a second term.
O’Neill played another little known part in ending the Vietnam War. House votes on bills were public record. But votes on amendments to bills, counted by unrecorded teller voting, were not publicly known. O’Neill tried but failed in the early 1960s to put an end to this unrecorded teller voting.
Now, with Vietnam frequently on the agenda, Common Cause and other groups wanted the public to know of growing House member anti-war votes on amendments to bills. O’Neill lined up 182 sponsors. In August 1970 the House made votes on amendments public information.
A scholar writing on the Vietnam War later told O’Neill: very few people know of your part in ending that war. You broke with Johnson, swayed your Democratic colleagues, and ended unrecorded teller voting so that the public learned of mounting House votes on bill amendments against the Vietnam War.
O’Neill’s last contact with former Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson came during a televised football game in Dallas between the New England Patriots and the Dallas Cowboys. Interviewed at half time, LBJ said: I want to say hello to my two great friends in Boston, John McCormack and Tip O’Neill. Watching the game, O’Neill was touched that Johnson had forgiven him.
Tip O’Neill’s Rise in U.S. House Leadership
John McCormack retired as U.S. House Speaker in 1970, replaced by Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma with new House Majority Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana.
Wanting a regional balance and a big city liberal, the Democratic leadership chose O’Neill as Majority Whip in 1971 over other contenders. In October 1972 a plane carrying Hale Boggs disappeared in the Alaskan wilderness. Lengthy searches proved fruitless. Boggs had to be replaced.
O’Neill announced his candidacy, was unanimously elected Majority Leader, and told Mrs. Lindy Boggs that if Hale came back, as they all prayed he would, he (O’Neill) would give up the office. O’Neill moved in, retaining in the office Hale’s great seal of Louisiana until he moved into the Speaker’s office in 1977. (Nolan 1994)
Pres. Nixon and the Watergate Crisis
O’Neill was involved in sensitive behind-the-scenes negotiations over the national constitutional crisis of Watergate. This 1973-74 crisis involved several overlapping events: Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew’s forced resignation, Agnew’s replacement as Vice President by Republican U.S. Representative Gerald Ford, U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings and forced resignation, Ford’s succession as thirty-eighth U.S. President, and President Ford’s pardon of Nixon.
Vice President Agnew
During the Pres. Nixon-Watergate Crisis Tip O’Neill was U.S. House Democratic Majority Leader under U.S. House Speaker Carl Albert (his second term).
U.S. Vice Pres. Agnew was under grand jury investigation on charges of taking bribes on state and federal contracts while Baltimore County Attorney, while Maryland’s Governor, and while U.S. Vice President.
Desperate for a way out, Agnew (or his lawyers) found a precedent when in 1827 the U.S. House had cleared Vice President John C. Calhoun of profiteering on Army contracts. On September 25, 1973, Agnew asked Carl Albert, O’Neill, and other House leaders that he be investigated by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee instead of by a federal court.
U.S. House Speaker Albert was willing to help Vice Pres. Agnew, but O’Neill demurred, guessing that Agnew wanted a U.S. House investigation to drag on until he (Agnew) could legally collect a government pension.
Agnew resigned as U.S. Vice President October 12, 1973, allowing Pres. Nixon to name a successor. Nixon preferred his Treasury Secretary John Connelly, three-time Texas governor and John F. Kennedy’s Naval Secretary. But O’Neill and others told Pres. Nixon that U.S. House Democrats would not confirm Connelly, a Democrat-turned-Republican.
U.S. House Speaker Albert and O’Neill urged Pres. Nixon to consider Michigan’s Republican Representative Gerald Ford. Ford was chosen on October 12, 1973, and confirmed by Congress on December 6, 1973.
O’Neill On U.S. Pres. Nixon
O’Neill was glad that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee did not have to investigate Agnew, for he believed it would soon be occupied with Pres. Nixon’s impeachment hearings. On June 17, 1972, inept burglars, found to be under White House orders, were arrested riffling the Democratic National Committee office in Watergate, a Washington, D.C., office-apartment complex.
Earlier, O’Neill had intimations from Republican-turned-Democratic Party fundraiser George Steinbrenner, a friend, who confided to O’Neill why he and others had stopped contributing to the Democrats. Steinbrenner said that he was being harassed by Republicans in government agencies. Difficulties would stop, he was told, if he gave money to a Democrats-for-Nixon campaign.
O’Neill also heard of other illegal Republican fundraising tactics. He did not understand why Republicans were breaking the law in illegal fundraising when Pres. Nixon’s reelection in 1972 seemed so certain.
Pres. Nixon occasionally played poker with Tip O’Neill and other congressmen early in his eight years as Vice President under Eisenhower. As U.S. President Nixon became aloof, suspicious, and imperial. O’Neill thought that what made Pres. Nixon and his staff nervous and secretive was Nixon’s compulsion to defeat the Democrats so badly that they would not mount a challenge for another 20 years. O’Neill was disturbed when he put together the Watergate burglary with what he had earlier heard from Steinbrenner and others.
O’Neill knew that if U.S. House Democrats were going to respond to Watergate, it would fall on him (O’Neill) as Majority Leader, since U.S. House Speaker Albert preferred to avoid controversy. In January 1973 O’Neill told U.S. House Speaker Albert: We better get ready. Nixon is going to be impeached. Neither Albert nor other House leaders took O’Neill’s warning seriously.
O’Neill also had intimations about Pres. Nixon’s tapes before their existence was made known July 16, 1973, in Senate Watergate Committee hearings.
Six months earlier (January 23, 1973), O’Neill and other congressmen were called to a White House briefing by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about a Vietnam cease fire. Pres. Nixon kept interrupting Kissinger with long explanations of his own without letting Kissinger finish. O’Neill wondered why Nixon, while speaking, kept looking, not at them, but up at a ceiling chandelier.
O’Neill guessed (correctly) that Pres. Nixon was talking to a hidden microphone, giving his own version of the Paris cease-fire talks, a version in which he, not Kissinger, would be the hero. The tapes, O’Neill guessed, were to be used in Pres. Nixon’s memoirs, which would make him look great in history and which when published would earn him a fortune.
At first, everyone shied away from impeachment talk, believing that constituents would vote out of office any congress member trying to impeach a sitting U.S. president. These thoughts persisted until O’Neill made known the April 1973 findings of his pollster, William Hamilton, that congress members voting for impeachment would not be seriously hurt politically.
William Hamilton’s poll was confirmed when O’Neill spoke about possible impeachment in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Republican territory, without evoking resentment. The public now wanted to know if their president was a crook.
As early as July 31, 1973, Massachusetts Democratic Representative Father Robert Drinan introduced in the House the first impeachment resolution. At U.S. House Speaker Albert’s request, O’Neill asked Drinan to table the resolution, an important move as it turned out because a House vote that early would have defeated the Drinan impeachment resolution and Nixon would have finished his second term.
By a strange twist of history, Pres. Nixon’s downfall was foreshadowed in a June 20, 1972, Brooklyn, New York, primary election for a U.S. House seat. Young attorney Elizabeth Holtzman defeated by 600 votes 84-year-old incumbent Emmanuel Celler, who was the U.S. House Judiciary Committee chairman. Celler would never have let the committee vote impeachment.
But Celler’s defeat made the next ranking Democrat, New Jersey Representative Peter Rodino, chairman of that committee. Rodino, like O’Neill, was Catholic, a liberal Democrat, and from an urban ethnic constituency. (Rodino had co-sponsored the bill making Columbus Day a national holiday.)
The complex national crisis came to a head when Vice President Agnew resigned October 10, 1973. Agnew’s replacement by newly sworn in (Dec. 6, 1973) U.S. Pres. Gerald Ford, cleared the way for Chairman Rodino’s U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s unassailable impeachment evidence. Pres. Nixon’s forced resignation, August 9, 1974, the only president ever to do so, allowed Nixon to kept a $60,000 annual federal pension, office space, and other perks he would have lost if impeached.
That historic Rodino-chaired U.S. House Judiciary Committee also brought to national attention a new heroine, Texas Democrat Barbara Jordan, an African American woman and a Lyndon B. Johnson protégé (he had urged that she be on that committee). Her impressive knowledge of the Constitution, eloquent diction, and moral authority won the nation’s respect.
On August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford took the oath of office as the thirty-eighth U.S. President. A month later (September 8, 1974) Ford called O’Neill: I’m going to pardon Nixon. He’s sick. His daughter Julie calls me every day about her father’s depression. I don’t want to see him go to jail. He’s suffered enough. I can’t run this office until I pardon him and end this national nightmare.
O’Neill thoughtfully concurred. He later called Pres. Ford, his golf playing friend, and said: Isn’t this a wonderful country. We had a national Watergate crisis. We changed presidents with order and dignity. Without a revolution or a gun fired or even a fist fight. But we must be vigilant, O’Neill concluded, “Next time there may be no watchman in the night.”
Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill
Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan, about the same age, both from working families, grew up Democrats during the 1930s Depression, with Franklin D. Roosevelt their common hero. O’Neill’s father and Reagan’s mother were renowned for serving the less fortunate. Both men were sociable, outgoing, wonderful storytellers, sports buffs, had backed Harry S Truman, condemned school lunch cuts, urged civil rights laws, and backed low-cost public housing.
Reagan changed political parties and became a Republican, O’Neill believed, when he made big money as a radio announcer and movie actor, bought California real estate, and found himself in the 90 percent tax bracket. He then moved in rich circles, forgot his roots, and reflected the anti-poor prejudices of rich friends.
Before the 1980 election, the Republicans tried to embarrass O’Neill and the Democrats. They ran a TV ad with an O’Neill-look-alike driving a fancy white car that ran out of gas. The voice-over made it humorously clear that it was time to vote out of office Democrats who had run out of ideas and out of favor. The TV ad backfired. Instead of hurting O’Neill, it made him a national figure. (Matthews 1994)
President-elect Reagan paid a courtesy call on Tip O’Neill, November 1980. They swapped stories about Notre Dame football. O’Neill explained how Congress worked and its relations with the Presidency. Reagan, thinking of other things, told how well he had worked with the California legislature. O’Neill said, “That was the minor leagues. You’re in the big leagues now.” Mr. President, O’Neill told Reagan, we disagree politically but can always be friends after working hours.
They were warm personal friends. But privately O’Neill was sad that Reagan, great on sports and movies, a gifted storyteller, fundraiser, and communicator, knew so little about the problems of ordinary working people, and knew so little about how government worked.
O’Neill believed that Reagan won the 1980 election not for his programs but because of the nation’s long agony over American captives in Iran, because of Pres. Carter’s failed rescue attempt, and because Americans wanted to end the Carter presidency. “Against a strong Democratic opponent in a healthy economy,” wrote O’Neill, “Ronald Reagan would have had no…chance of being elected president of the United States.”
Three days after Pres. Reagan was shot in March 1981, O’Neill visited him. That shooting, O’Neill wrote, won Reagan public and media sympathy. Reagan’s smile, good looks, and staff-managed public appearances helped make him a public hero.
Press acclaim, O’Neill believed, led Americans to think that Reagan’s election victory had turned the country around. O’Neill pointed out that Reagan received less than 51 percent of the total popular vote, Carter 41 percent, and third party candidate John Anderson 6.6 percent. Since only 54 percent of eligible voters actually voted, the lowest percentage since 1948, Reagan’s so-called landslide win was by fewer than 28 percent of eligible voters.
The press and the public, cynical about the presidency since John F. Kennedy’s death, recalled Lyndon Johnson as crude, Richard Nixon as a liar, Gerald Ford as a bungler, and Jimmy Carter as incompetent. In this atmosphere, the press portrayed Reagan as a folk hero and turned his presidency into one long photo opportunity.
During 1981-86 O’Neill felt alone confronting a Republican president and a majority Republican Senate bent on cutting social programs he (O’Neill) cared so much about. O’Neill was at a low point in his career. Millie saved him. She fixed his tie, kissed him, and asked, “Do you believe in what you are fighting for?” “I sure do,” he answered. “Then go out and do your job,” she said.
O’Neill was critical of the Reagan administration’s invasion of Grenada in October 1983. It was O’Neill who finally blocked U.S. funding of right wing Contras in Nicaragua. Reagan aides called the Contras freedom fighters. Through his aunt, a Maryknoll sister, and through contacts with Maryknoll priests and nuns working in Nicaragua, O’Neill came to see the Contras as bandits and murderers.
Asked after retirement what he was proudest of in his last years under the Reagan presidency, O’Neill said without hesitation saving social security. (O’Neill and Novak 1987; Farrell 1994)
In the 1980s O’Neill talked tough to Republican industrialists. Raise your hands, he told them, if you went to school on the GI Bill, were educated through the National Defense Education Act, or used a government loan to attend a private college When 80 percent raised their hands, O’Neill asked, “Would you be here now without that help?” How can you sit there and back this administration that refuses to help the next poor guy up the ladder of success?
Reagan often told the anecdote of the black welfare woman who collected welfare checks under different names, even after Joe Califano and other Democrats proved that such cases never existed. Reagan knew the anecdote was not true, O’Neill said, but deliberately told it for the anti-Democrat-big-spender reaction it evoked.
There are abuses in the military too, O’Neill wrote, but nobody demanded that the Defense Department be shut down. O’Neill called Reagan a rich man’s president, helping the Pentagon on weapon systems and the wealthy on tax breaks, but without compassion for the poor.
O’Neill’s Political Testament
O’Neill idolized Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota’s Democratic Senator and Vice President under Lyndon B. Johnson. Humphrey told O’Neill in 1978, “I won’t be around much longer, but I know you’ll be out there fighting for all the causes…you and I have supported.” Both were sad. They knew Humphrey was dying of cancer.
O’Neill admired a statement from a Humphrey speech so much that he kept it framed in his office:
“The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadows of life–the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”
Tip O’Neill as “Man of the House”
O’Neill ended his 1987 political testament, Man of the House, by recalling that he began his political career in 1936 believing in work and wages. Fifty years later he was still a bread-and-butter liberal who believed that every family deserved to earn an income, own a home, educate their children, and have afford medical care. Government, he believed, has an obligation to help all Americans achieve this dream.
The idea that government helps the needy is now out of favor, he wrote in 1987 Successful people today brag about “the good old days” and yearn for less government and fewer social programs.
But in the so-called good old days of the 1930s, O’Neill recalled, half the population lived in poverty, one-fourth were out of work, those with jobs worked long hours at low pay, only the rich had health insurance and social security, and there was no real middle class.
We have come far in 60 years, O’Neill wrote: high school education is nearly universal, almost two-thirds of young people enter higher education. Our country has a thriving middle class and a safety net for those who cannot help themselves.
He remembered that day in June 1927, watching privileged Harvard graduates laughing and drinking champagne without a care in the world. He dreamed then of devoting his working life to bringing similar opportunities to all Americans.
In Man of the House, his political testament, O’Neill shrugged off the big spender label political foes pinned on him. What he cared most about was giving people a better chance at life. Many of his dreams, he wrote, had come true. But more still needed to be done.
Tip O’Neill’s Retirement
Sometimes ill, wanting more time with his family, and recalling that Speakers Rayburn and McCormack had stayed in office too long, O’Neill retired with the close of the 99th Congress. Polls showed him almost as popular as President Reagan.
On his last day, Friday, October 17,1986, Congressional colleagues showered him with tributes. The Clerk read U.S. House Resolution 603, thanking him for the “able and impartial manner” in which he had presided as Speaker, and wishing him “a richly deserved and fulfilling retirement.”
Majority Leader Thomas Foley said, “All of us on both sides of the aisle sense that this is a truly historic occasion.” O’Neill’s longtime colleague in both the Massachusetts House and the U.S. House, Representative Edward Boland said of him, “He [is} one of the most recognizable figures in America, and [as Speaker] rivals the influence of…Clay, Reed, Cannon, Rayburn, and McCormack.”
Ed Boland and O’Neill, both Irish Catholic, sports buffs, and the same age, were elected to Congress from Massachusetts the same year, 1952. Tip and Millie O’Neill had early decided it would be best for his political career for him to stay in Washington Mondays through Thursdays, with long weekends back home in North Cambridge. Boland and Neill shared a Washington, D.C., apartment for 25 years, 1952-76. When O’Neill became Speaker, the family joined him in a condominium home in Maryland.
Before O’Neill’s farewell address, Pennsylvania Representative Murtha gave O’Neill an Irish blessing:
“May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
Until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His Hand.”
In his farewell to Congress, O’Neill’s said:
“Fifty years ago I ran for public office and…never expected it to be a career as long as this. ….We will always be great as long as we recognize the rights of one another across the aisle. ….I will always be a man of the House of Representatives.” (Congressional Record 1986)
He walked off the floor to thunderous applause, the longest continuous House Speaker since Congress first met in 1789.
Tip O’Neill’s Last Years
A familiar sight on C-SPAN, whose televised House coverage he helped initiate, he became a big hit in TV commercials. His tall rumpled heavy-set figure with bulbous nose and white thatched hair made him instantly recognizable as he popped out of a suitcase in one TV ad and plugged Federal Express in another TV ad.
He joked about his girth, long since expanded to some 260 pounds, saying that he had lost thousands of pounds over the years on various diets.
O’Neill kept a busy pace in retirement, despite some illness in 1987: colostomy surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to remove a cancerous tumor on November 18, 1987. Twelve days later he had another operation for an enlarged prostrate. He was later hospitalized for pneumonia and other ailments.
Tip O’Neill’s Honors
When Harvard University gave him an honorary degree in June 1987, he was touched less by the degree than by students’ long sustained applause. Over a long political career, Harvard scholars had largely dismissed him as a machine politician. He had never sought to curry their favor. Time passed. Attitudes changed. The North Cambridge man who as a l4-year-old had cut Harvard lawns for seventeen cents an hour, had moist eyes when Harvard students gave him thunderous applause.
He received other honorary degrees, including one from Boston College, his alma mater. Boston College also named the main library on the Chestnut Hill campus for him and endowed a chair in political science in his name. Gifts for the latter totaled $l.3 million from alumni and others. (Nolan 1994)
At a November 18, 1991, White House ceremony President George Bush awarded O’Neill the Medal of Freedom. The citation ended: “The United States honors this distinguished legislator for his leadership, amity, good humor and commitment to service and freedom.” (Nolan 1994)
Ten years earlier, in February 1981, O’Neill had privately teased George H.W. Bush when the new Republican Pres. Reagan gave his economic views before a televised joint session of Congress. Speaker O’Neill and Vice President Bush sat on the dais in full public view behind Reagan.
Retaining their public smiles, O’Neill, during applause, whispered to Bush, “Voodoo economics, George; Voodoo economics.” It was the phrase Bush had used publicly about Reagan when they competed as Republican presidential rivals. Bush, embarrassed but smiling, whispered back, “Quiet, Tip, quiet.”
Tip O’Neill’s Death
Wednesday night, January 5, 1994, Tommy (Thomas P. O’Neill, 3rd, former Massachusetts lieutenant governor) sat with his father in Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Tip was there for tests, having recently felt unusually tired. They ate coffee ice cream and talked about how well the Boston College football team had done that season, especially quarterback Foley. You know, he’s a North Cambridge boy, said Tip. You know who his grandmother was? Verna, who used to run Verna’s Dough Nut Shop, across the street from the church (St. John’s, North Cambridge). It was a landmark in the neighborhood for years. “Remember Verna’s honey dipped doughnuts? Gee, those were great doughnuts.”
Tip grew quiet, said he felt tired and went to bed.
Tip O’Neill died that night (January 5, 1994), age 81, of cardiac arrest, the last Democratic leader of the old school, a familiar congressional figure and easily the most beloved. Pres. Bill Clinton, whose own mother died within an hour of O’Neill’s death, said: “Tip O’Neill was the nation’s most prominent, powerful and loyal champion of working people.” (O’Neill 1994)
Tip O’Neill’s Funeral
Funeral events for Tip O’Neill, held in bone-chilling cold weather during January 8-11, 1994, was by any measure one of the grandest in recent New England memory. A snow storm which had closed Logan Airport subsided, allowing dignitaries to land from all over the United States and abroad. Not since James Michael Curley died in 1958 had a Bay State dignitary lain in state in the Massachusetts State Capitol, Beacon Hill, Boston.
The O’Neill family came to the lying in state early Saturday, January 8, 1994. By one estimate, some 7,000 visitors braved the outside cold (22 degrees Fahrenheit with a wind chill of three below zero), climbed the steep outdoor steps of the state capitol, entered the impressively domed and bedecked Hall of Flags, and filed solemnly past O’Neill’s flag-draped open casket.
Eyes were moist, journalists noted, when U. S. Representative from Boston J. J. Moakley knelt and touched O’Neill’s shoulder in the casket. Others were moved when one of Tip O’Neill’s grandsons reached into the casket and put a fresh cigar in the Speaker’s coat pocket.
Tip O’Neill’s Funeral Mass
The Rev. John P. Carroll, O’Neill’s grammar school friend, presided at the funeral mass, Sunday, January 9, 1994, at St. John the Evangelist Church, North Cambridge. Boys from the St. Paul Choir School of Boston filled the church with music, ending with “America the Beautiful.” The casket was wheeled to the front of the church.
On the front pews near the casket sat Millie O’Neill, son Tommy, U.S. Vice Pres. Al Gore and Tipper Gore, former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, Massachusetts Governor William F. Weld, and U.S. Representative Joseph P. Kennedy, 2nd (D. Mass.).
Frank Minelli, O’Neill’s barber, sat near former U.S. House Speaker Thomas Foley. John Gimigliano, O’Neill’s shoe cobbler friend, sat alongside retired Red Sox star Carl Yastrzemski. Lenny Lamkin, who had managed O’Neill’s district office, sat near Vice President Al Gore.
Minelli, Gimigliano, Lamkin, Russ Cutter, and others were Barry’s Corner regulars, one of whom reminded the others that Tip O’Neill had said he’d rather be a lamppost on Barry’s Corner than be with any of the important people he’d ever met around the world.
Another of the Barry’s Corner regulars recalled that some 500 had attended the June 1986 Barry’s Corner reunion when they heard Tip O’Neill would not run for the House again. Hearing this, Russ Cutter, a Barry’s Corner original, wept. (Buckley 1994)
Prominent Republicans present were, besides former Pres. Ford, U.S. Sen Howard Baker (R. Tenn.), Bush’s deputy chief of staff Andrew Card, Representative Robert Michel (R. Ill.), and U.S. Sen. Robert Dole (R. Kan.).
The many Democrats included Representative Dan Rostenkowski (D. Ill.), former Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D. Mass.), Senator Joseph Biden (D. Del.), and Senator Christopher Dodd (D. Conn.), former U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright (D. Texas), Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, Democratic White House Budget Director Leon Panetta, former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, and other state officials and legislators.
Over 150 members of Congress had come for the funeral, along with a delegation from Ireland led by Minister for Justice Maire Geoghegan Quinn. Cardinal Bernard Law delivered the final blessing.
First to speak after the Mass was granddaughter Catlin, who read “The Sermon on the Mount,” which Tip O’Neill once called the greatest political speech of all time.
Daughter Rosemary read an Irish poem, “Lament for the Death of Owen Rowe O’Neill” by Thomas Davis. The last three lines of this lament for a fallen l7th century Irish hero at the massacre of Drogheda, Ireland (1649), reads:
“Oh! why did you leave us Owen,
why did you die?
Your troubles are all over,
you rest with God on high
But we’re slaves and we’re orphans,
Owen!
Oh! why did you die?”
U.S. Representative J.J. Moakley of Boston recalled humorous incidents in the 40 years he had been with O’Neill. Once, they were together when Moakley spotted Warren Beatty heading toward them. Knowing that O’Neill seldom went to the movies, Moakley said, “Mr. Speaker, you know Warren Beatty.”
O’Neill said, “Warren, ol’ buddy.” They talked for awhile. O’Neill gazed into Beatty’s eyes and said, “Gee, you’re a good looking bum. You oughta be a movie star.” Warren Beatty laughed, patted O’Neill’s shoulder, and said, “Tip, you’re always kidding,” and walked away. Moakley asked, “Tip, you know who that was?” O’Neill said, “Yeah, the lion tamer Clyde Beatty’s son.”
Tip O’Neill’s Son Remembers
Tommy O’Neill, smiling, eyes glistening, told of being with his father the night he died, of their eating coffee ice cream, talking about football and quarterback Foley and about Foley’s grandmother, Verna, and her wonderful honey dipped doughnuts. Tommy listed other things his father loved, including Boston College, America, Congress, Democrats of course, and even Republicans. Being Catholic and a joker, Tommy smiled, my father always said about Republicans, “Hate the sin but love the sinner,” even President Reagan, his beloved nemesis, whom he loved to call “Reegan.”
Tommy told how, to family and intimates, when Reagan’s name came up, his Dad would laugh and say, “Ballyporeen!,” the name of the Irish village where President Reagan’s family came from. “Know what it means?” he’d ask. “Valley of the small potatoes,” he’d answer and roar with laughter.
“Our Dad, said Tommy, loved North Cambridge, Barry’s Corner, St. John’s Parish, and his family:
You, Kip. You, Michael. You, Susan. You, Rosemary. You, Chip. You, Jo-Ann. You, Jackie. All you grandchildren. And, Mommy, the world knows he loved you. {He] always said that if he hadn’t met Millie, he’d have gone into the Church, to be a priest….And he loved God, who has called him home.” (McGrory 1994)
Eyes misted as Tommy ended with a poem Jim Curley once gave Tip O’Neill to memorize, a poem Tip O’Neill often recited for departed friends at Barry’s Corner reunions and at wakes:
“Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end;
Yet days go by, and weeks rush on,
And I never see my old friend’s face,
For life is a swift and terrible race.
He knows I like him just as well
As in the days when I rang his bell
And he rang mine.
We were younger then,
And now we are busy, tired men;
Tired with playing a foolish game,
Tired with trying to make a name.
‘Tomorrow,’ I say, ‘I will call on Jim,
Just to show that I’m thinking of him.’
But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
And the distance between us grows and grows.
Around the corner-yet miles away..
‘Here’s a telegram, Sir…’
‘Jim died today.’
And that’s what we get, and deserve in the end;
Around the corner, a vanished friend.”
So Long, Mr. Speaker
Journalists, out in force, eagerly collected remembrances about O’Neill which filled Boston newspapers, some of which follow:
•Former U.S. Representative Brian Donnelly from Dorchester told how O’Neill saved homes in his district from the wrecking ball. State officials pored over plans for a tunnel, part of the Central Artery project, which called for tearing down East Boston homes. “Over my dead body,” O’Neill growled, lumbering to the blueprints, flicking ashes from his cigar over them, frightening state Transportation Secretary Fred Salucci, who yelled: O.K., O.K., we don’t knock down Eastie houses. (Miga 1994)
•Donnelly also told of an immigrant family from Brockton who came to him seeking U.S. citizenship for their son just killed in Vietnam. Donnelly found himself so snarled in red tape that in desperation he took the family to O’Neill. Tip listened patiently, rang up U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, explained, and when Rodino balked, O’Neill roared, “Peter, you didn’t hear me. This kid’s gonna be an American before the day is over.” That day the dead soldier became an American citizen by vote of Congress. (Miga 1994).
•Gene Hurley of Needham told how O’Neill helped him receive his veteran’s disability benefits. “He always had a minute for you. And he never promised anything he couldn’t deliver.”
•Eva S. Dspanos of Cambridge remembered how the Speaker filed legislation to allow her and her brother, both from Greece, to remain in America.

•U.S. Representative Joseph P. Kennedy 2nd (Robert Kennedy’s son) recalled how he asked for and got retiring O’Neill’s endorsement to run for Congress from his (O’Neill’s) district.
•Neither Art Bardige nor his wife Betty ever met O’Neill but said that they felt he fought for average people, for fairness and justice and that it was important for their kids to see the funeral of this man.

•Linda and John Norton came to the funeral because O’Neill, a family friend, attended all their family wakes. We last “saw him at my wife’s uncle’s funeral,” said John Norton. “He just stood quietly in the back. He was a special guy.”
•Golf caddy Frank Doherty of Waltham said that being on the golf course with him was nonstop entertainment. “He didn’t care where the ball went; he only cared about finishing the story.”

•”Without [O’Neill], I wouldn’t have made it,” said blue blood Yankee and former Governor Endicott “Chub” Peabody. O’Neill had introduced him in working-class Irish wards by saying, “His name may not be O’Peabody, but he’ll make a good Democratic governor.” (Woodlief and Crittenden 1994)

End Part 1 of 2 Parts.  Continued in Part 2 of 2 Parts. References.

Send comments, corrections to: bfparker@frontiernet.net 

2 of 2 Parts: “Thomas Philip (Tip) O’Neill, Jr. (1912-94), Congressman; Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives (1977-86).” By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

References
[Main sources for this paper are O’Neill and Novak’s 1987 Man of the House, Farrell, J.A.’s (2001) Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, plus other references listed in the text and in References below].

“Around the Corner, A Vanished Friend…” (February 1994). Boston Irish Reporter, Vol. 5, No. 2, p. l.

Asci, Sue. (February 1994). “Remembering Tip,” Boston Irish Reporter, Vol. 5, No. 2, p. 2.

Barnicle, Mike. (January 6, 1994). “Compassion Was His Way of Life,” Boston Globe, pp. 1, 18.

Barnicle, Mike. (January 9, 1994). “The Best: That Was Mr. O’Neill,” Boston Sunday Globe, p. 25.

Borger, Gloria. (January 17, 1994). “Epitaphs: A Politician Who Was the Genuine Article,” U.S. News and World Report, Vol. 116, No. 2 , p. 18.

Brownstone, David, and Irene Franck. (1995). “O’Neill, Thomas Philip (Tip), Jr., 1912-94,” People in the News. New York: Macmillan Library Reference U.S.A., pp. 272-273.

Buckley, Steve. (June 1994). “Barry’s Corner Forever,” Yankee, Vol. 58, No. 6, pp. 82-86, 108-111.

“Bush Honored O’Neill in 91,” (January 6, 1994). Boston Globe, p. 19.

Carroll, James. (January 11, 1994). “Tip’s Exalted Place in History Turns on a Decision he Made on September 14, 1967,” Boston Globe, p. 15.

Clancy, Paul, and Shirley Elder. (1980). A Biography of Thomas P. Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Has useful Chapter Notes and Sources.

Clift, Eleanor. (January 17, 1994). “The Last Hurrah for Tip O’Neill, 1912-1994,” Newsweek, Vol. 123, No. 3, p. 22.

Congressional Record. (October 17, 1986). “A Tribute to the Honorable Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., Speaker of the House,”
Congressional Record-House, pp. H 11573-H 11575.

Congressional Record. (October 17, 1986). “Farewell Address of the Honorable Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., Speaker of the House.” Congressional Record-House, pp. H 11575-H 11576.

Davis, Thomas Osborne, as recited by Rosemary O’Neill at her father’s funeral. (January 11, 1994). “Lament for the Death of Owen Rowe O’Neill,” Boston Globe, p. 18.

Editorial. (January 7, 1994). “Tip: All Politics Was Local,” Boston Herald, p. 28.

Edwards. Mickey. (January 11, 1994). “Let’s Hope Tip Wasn’t the Last of His Kind,” Boston Herald, p. 25.

Farrell, John Aloysius. (2001). Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century. Boston: Little, Brown.

Farrell, John Aloysius. (January 7, 1994). “Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. 1912-1994: A Man of History Whom Caricature Cannot Define: O’Neill Recalled as Insider and Rebel,” Boston Globe, p. 21.

Farrell, John Aloysius, and Michael Grunwald. (January 6, 1994). “Colleagues Recall a Man Whose Politics Was Heart,” Boston Globe, p. 19.

Fitzgerald, Joe. (January 7, 1994). “Good Tip: O’Neill Was Just Grand,” Boston Herald, pp. back page, 78.

Frank, Barney. (January 7, 1994). “Tip Upheld Good Values in Tough Times,” Boston Globe, p. 15.

Gelzinis, Peter. (January 11, 1994). “So Long, Mr. Speaker: Despite the Pomp, He was a Family Man,” Boston Herald, p. 6.
Gelzinis, Peter. (January 9, 1994). “What We’ll Miss Most is His Politics of Caring,” Boston Sunday Herald, pp. 1, 4.

“He Cared…About Everyone,” (January 11, 1994). Boston Herald, p. l.

Hess, John L. (January 31, 1994). “Tip O’ the Iceberg,” Nation, Vol. 258, pp. 112-113.

“In His Own Words: O’Neill the Speaker,” (January 7, 1994). Boston Globe, p. 20.

“In Losing Tip, Boston’s Irish Have Lost a Great One,” (February 1994). Boston Irish Reporter, Vol. 5, No. 2, p. 6.

“Ireland Makes Him a Citizen,” (January 7, 1994). Boston Globe, p. 20.

Kahn, Joseph P. (January 7, 1994). “Tip: A Brick,” Boston Globe, p. 68.

Katz, Frances. (January 11, 1994). “Funeral Coverage Earns Tip of the Hat,” Boston Herald, p. 6.

Kranish, Michael. (January 7, 1994). “A Neighborhood Tips Its Cap to O’Neill,” Boston Globe, pp. 1, 20.

“Leaders Mourn o”Neill,” (January 11, 1994). Boston Globe, p. 1.

Matthews, Chris. (January 7, 1994). “Why the Speaker of the House Will Go Down as the Speaker of the Century,” Boston Globe, p. 15.

McGrory, Brian. (January 9, 1994). “Farewell to an Old Friend: O’Neill Honored by All: Celebrities, Constituents Line Up to Pay Their Final Respects,” Boston Sunday Globe, pp. 1, 10.

McGrory, Brian. (January 11, 1994). “Final Words for the Speaker. The Mighty and the Meek Gather at Rites for O’Neill,” Boston Globe, pp. 17-18.

McLaughlin, Jeff. (January 9, 1994). “Cape Cod: Tip’s Generosity: His Cape Legacy: Former Speaker Left Tradition of Giving to Help Area’s Needy,” Boston Sunday Globe, pp. 30, 32.

McNamara, Eileen. (January 7, 1994). “A Reporter’s Reunion with a Local Hero,” Boston Globe, p. 10.

“Memorials for O’Neill,” (January 7, 1994), Boston Globe, p. 21.
Miga, Andrew. (January 6, 1994). “So Long, Mister Speaker. Legendary Pol ‘Tip’ O’Neill Dead at 81,” Boston Herald, pp. 1-3.

Miga, Andrew. (January 9, 1994). “Off-the-Record: Pols Recall Moments of Vintage O’Neill,” Boston Sunday Herald, pp. 18-21.

Miga, Andrew, Ed Cafasso, and Joe Battenfeld. (January 6, 1994). “So Long, Mister Speaker. He Never Forgot Where He Came From. Pols Mourn Loss of a ‘Giant’,” Boston Herald, p. 5.

Nolan, Martin F. (January 6, 1994). “Ex-Speaker O’Neill Dies: Took Local View to National Stage,” Boston Globe, pp. 1, 18.

Nyhan, David. (January 9, 1994). “Focus on Politics: Who’ll Sit at the Head of the Table?” Boston Sunday Globe, p. 73.

O’Connor, Edwin.(1956). The Last Hurrah. Boston: Atlantic Monthly.

Oliphant, Thomas. (January 9, 1994). “O’Neill Was Much More Than a Great Politician; He Was a Great Leader,” Boston Sunday Globe, p. 75.

“O’Neill, Thomas P(hilip), Jr.” (1974). Current Biography. New York: H.W. Wilson Co., pp. 293-295.

“O’Neill, Thomas P(hilip), Jr.” (March 1994) [Obituary]. Current Biography. New York: H.W. Wilson Co.

O’Neill, Thomas P., Jr., with Gary Hymel. (1994). All Politics is Local and Other Rules of the Game. New York: Times Books.

O’Neill, Thomas P., Jr., with William Novak. (1987). Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O’Neill. New York: Random House.

O’Neill, Thomas, 3rd. (February 1994). “A Son Remembers His Father; Excerpts from the Eulogy,” Boston Irish Reporter, Vol. 5, No. 2, p. 30.

“R.I.P., Tip.” (January 7, 1994), Boston Globe, p. 14.

Roberts, Steven V. (January 17, 1994). “Outlook: A Parting Cheer for the Wisdom of Elders,” U.S. News and World Report, Vol. 116, No. 2, p. 6.

Sennott, Charles M., and David Arnold. (January 11, 1994). “Mourning a Friend’s Warmth, Hundreds Brave Cold,” Boston Globe, p. 18.

Shribman, David. (January 7, 1994). “Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. 1912-1994: National Perspective: Amid Upstarts a Steady Old Oak,” Boston Globe, p. 20.

“So Long, Mister Speaker. Massachusetts Loses a Beloved Institution–’Tip’ O’Neill Dies,” (January 6, 1994). Boston Herald, p. l.

Sullivan, Paul. (January 7, 1994). “So Long, Mister Speaker: Cambridge Boy Never Forgot His Hometown Roots,” Boston Herald, p. 6.

“Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., R I P.” (February 7, 1994) National Review, Vol. 46, pp. 22-23.

Tolchin, Martin. (January 6, 1994). “Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Dies at 81; A Power in the House for Decades.” New York Times, pp. Al, D18.

Woodlief, Wayne. (January 6, 1994). “O’Neill Not Shy About Speaking His Mind.” Boston Herald, p. 4.

Woodlief, Wayne. (January 7, 1994). “Speaker Tipped Many Scales: During 50-Year Career, He Changed History,” Boston Herald, p. 5.

Woodlief, Wayne. (January 11, 1994). “So Long, Mr. Speaker. Family and Friends Say Final Farewells to Tip,” Boston Herald, pp. 4-5.

Woodlief, Wayne, and Joe Battenfeld. (January 7, 1994). “Friends and Foes of ‘Tip’ Mourn the Loss of a Legend,” Boston Herald, pp. 1, 4.

Woodlief, Wayne, and Joe Heany. (January 9, 1994). “Mass. Says So Long to Beloved Tip,” Boston Sunday Herald, pp. 1,4.

Woodlief, Wayne, and Jules Crittenden. (January 11, 1994). “Admiration for the Speaker Broke Party Lines,” Boston Herald, p. 6.

End.

For google.com blog entries on—bfparker, Thomas Philip (Tip) O’Neill, Jr. (1912-94)–access:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bfparker%2C+Thomas+Philip+%28Tip%29+O%92Neill%2C+Jr.+%281912-94%29%2C+&btnG=Google+Search

End.

“Peabody Education Fund In Tennessee, 1867-1914.”

By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net(Added to from Franklin and Betty J. Parker, “Peabody Education Fund in Tennessee,” in The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture. Ed. by Carrroll Van West. Nashville, TN: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998, pp. 725-726, URL: http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=P013Shocked by reports and letters he received about the South’s Civil War devastation, George Peabody (1795-1869) founded the $2 million Peabody Education Fund (PEF, 1867-69) to aid public education in eleven former Confederate states plus West Virginia added because of its poverty. Born in Massachusetts, left at age 17 to become a merchant in the South, Peabody became an international banker in London (during 1837-69) and the best known philanthropist of his time. The war-devastated South lacked the means or will to establish public schools. First PEF general agent Barnas Sears, distinguished New England educator, used the fund’s limited resources as a lever to help achieve tax-supported public schools. PEF aided schools had to meet ten months a year and have at least one teacher per fifty pupils. PEF grants required that local citizens more than match PEF funds and that state laws for tax-supported public schools be enacted. Sears urged a state normal school (for teacher training) in Nashville as a model for the South. But state normal school legislation continually failed in the Tennessee legislature over the next six years. Rather than lose Nashville as a normal school site, Sears said that if the University of Nashville trustees gave land and buildings for a normal school, the PEF would contribute $6,000 annually. The Tennessee legislature amended the University of Nashville’s charter, and the new State Normal School, financed by PEF’s annual grant of $6,000, opened December 1, 1875, and was renamed Peabody Normal College (1889-1909). Disappointed when the legislature refused to subsidize Peabody Normal College in 1877 and 1879, Sears considered moving Peabody Normal College to Georgia. This threat prompted Nashville citizens in April 1880 to guarantee $6,000 annually. From 1881 to 1905 the general assembly’s appropriations for Peabody Normal College totaled $429,000. In contrast, the Peabody Education Fund trustees gave $555,730 from 1875 to 1909. In its first thirty years (1868 through 1897) the PEF gave the eleven former Confederate states and West Virginia a total of $2,478,000 to advance public schools, teacher institutes, and normal schools. Tennessee received about 9 percent of this total, second highest after Virginia. Additionally, the PEF enriched Tennessee with Peabody Normal College (and its successor institutions to the present Peabody College of Vanderbilt University). Besides its regular tuition-paying students, Peabody Normal College enrolled 3,645 higher qualified teacher candidates through PEF-financed Peabody Scholarships (1877-1904), which brought the college and Tennessee an additional $398,690.88. Educators trained at Peabody Normal College became educational leaders throughout the South and gave Peabody Normal College in Tennessee a national reputation. Allowed to disband after thirty years, the PEF gave $1.5 million to transform Peabody Normal College into George Peabody College for Teachers. Former Governor James D. Porter (1828-1912), who had been Peabody Normal College’s third president (1901-9), helped raise PEF-required matching funds from Nashville, Davidson County, and other Tennessee sources. The new George Peabody College for Teachers was built opposite Vanderbilt University. In 1979 it became Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. Amid post-Civil War chaos, the PEF financially encouraged state efforts in advancing public schools. By creating in Nashville a model professional teachers college, it helped produce educational leaders who became college and university presidents, deans, scholars, educational writers, and master teachers for Tennessee, the South, and the nation. End. For google.com blogs of above article under—bfparker, Peabody Education Fund in Tennessee—try accessing: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bfparker%2C+Peabody+Education+Fund+in+Tennessee&btnG=Google+Search

“May Cravath Wharton, M.D. (1873-1959), Founder of Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, Tennessee, USA.”

By Franklin Parker & Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernetnet

Adapted from Franklin & Betty J. Parker, “Wharton, May Cravath (1873-1959), Tennessee Encyclopedia & Culture.  Ed. By Carroll Van West, et al. Nashville: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998, pp. 1050-1051.

She was Dr. May to friends, doctor woman of the Cumberland’s to others. Babies she delivered were called Dr. May babies. By foot, horseback, tin lizzie, on poor roads, in all weather, she made calls to remote cabins on the Cumberland Plateau, middle Tennessee. Her dream of a hospital in Pleasant Hill became Cumberland Medical Center, Crossville. The May Cravath Wharton Nursing Home and Uplands Retirement Community, both in Pleasant Hill, are her dreams come true.

She was born on a Minnesota farm, a sickly child. Family friend and physician Aunt Addie’s nursing and gift of Home Doctor Book may have inspired May to become a doctor.

She finished high school at Carleton Academy (1889-90), Rochester, Minn., attended Carleton College (1890-93), and the University of North Dakota (1894-95, B.A.), studied in Europe (1897), taught at the University of North Dakota (1898-99), and earned a University of Michigan medical degree (1905).

She applied to the mission board, which then wanted only married missionaries. Disappointed, she practiced medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. There she met and married Edwin R. Wharton (1867-1920). They accepted a call to a Cleveland, Ohio, settlement house, he as director, she as physician (1907-09). Hard work took its toll. She needed rest. They bought a New Hampshire farm. He served small churches. She practiced medicine (1909-17).

In 1917 he became principal of Pleasant Hill Academy, 11 miles west of Crossville, Cumberland County. Its uniqueness went back to 1883 when resident Mrs. Amos Wightman asked the American Missionary Association (AMA, Boston) to send a trained teacher. Mary Santly, who taught a three-month school (spring 1884), said a minister was needed. The AMA sent Maine-born Benjamin F. Dodge (1818-97). He largely built Pleasant Hill Academy (1884-1947), by necessity a boarding school for widely spread community children. He also built and was pastor of First Congregational Church (since 1885).

Tall and shy, May Cravath Wharton taught health courses and was physician to students, faculty, and scattered communities. She worked tirelessly through the 1918 influenza epidemic. She won respect and distinction as the Doctor Woman of the Cumberland’s.

In November 1920 Edwin R. Wharton died suddenly. Dr. May faced a dilemma. Five neighbors came with a letter from 50 families. “The people here want you to stay. We will pay you monthly and help build the hospital. We cannot do without you.”

Dr. May stayed. She was helped in her dream to build a hospital by Massachusetts-born Pleasant Hill Academy art teacher Elizabeth Fletcher (1870-1951), who raised funds, and English-born, Canadian-trained Registered Nurse Alice Adshead (1888-1979). A two-bed Sanatorium Annex (July 2, 1922) was followed by a general hospital (1935) and Van Dyck Annex (1938). Federal, state, and local aid came with the 1947 U.S. Hill-Burton Act that required such aided hospitals to be sited in county seats. Cumberland Medical Center opened in Crossville, 1950. The May Cravath Wharton Nursing Home opened June 21, 1957, Pleasant Hill.

She realized another dream: Uplands Retirement Community. On an early fund-raising trip, visiting her cousin Paul Cravath, a New York City attorney, she was inspired by a poem on his office wall: “•From the lowlands and the mire, •From the mists of earth’s desire, •From the vain pursuit of pelf, •From the attitude of self, Come up higher, Come up higher.”

“Uplands,” she wrote in her autobiography, “That was our name–Uplands!”

Honors came late: Carleton College Alumni Award for “outstanding service…in medicine and…medical care,” June 1953; Tennessee Tuberculosis Association Kranz Memorial Award for “outstanding service in…tuberculosis control,” 1954; Tennessee Medical Association’s “Outstanding General Practitioner of the Year,” 1956; University of Chattanooga honorary Doctor of Laws degree for “many services to the citizens of Tennessee,” 1957; and a Tennessee Bicentennial named marker on the state capitol walkway, 1995.

She ended her autobiography with: “As the shadows of evening fell,…in my dreams I saw the…Uplands of tomorrow.”

She built better than she knew.

May Cravath Wharton, Doctor Woman of the Cumberlands (Pleasant Hill, Tenn. 38578: PO Box 168, 1972 revision, 214 pp., $6.20).

For google.com blog and other entries on– bfparker, May Cravath Wharton, M.D. (1873-1959)—try:

 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bfparker%2C+May+Cravath+Wharton%2C+M.D.+%281873-1959%29&btnG=Google+Search

END.

“Max Rafferty (1917-82), Conservative Educator and California State School Superintendent During 1962-70.”

By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Rafferty, Maxwell Lewis, Jr. (born May 17, 1917; died  June 13, 1982), educator, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Maxwell Lewis Rafferty, an Irish Roman Catholic store owner and auto plant worker, and DeEtta Cox (mother).  In 1921 the family moved to Sioux City, Iowa, and then, in 1931, to Los Angeles, California.  Young Max skipped several grades and graduated at age sixteen from Beverly Hills High School, California, where he was remembered for being studious, quick witted, and much younger than his classmates.

Entering the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he majored in history, managed the football and rugby teams, was president of Sigma Pi fraternity, joined the UCLA Americans (an anti-communist athletic group opposed to leftist students), and received a B.A. in 1938.  He then enrolled in the UCLA School of Education to become a teacher and later claimed to have reluctantly studied John Dewey’s educational philosophy in order to become certified. 

He taught English and history and coached football at Trona High School, in Trona, California, from 1940 to 1948, having been classified physically unfit for the World War II draft because of flat feet.  He married a schoolmate in 1940, was divorced in 1943, and married Frances Louella Longman in 1944.  They had three children.  He earned an M.A. degree from UCLA in 1949 and an Ed.D. degree from the University of Southern California in 1955.

Asked later why he chose to be a teacher and school administrator for twenty-one years in isolated southern California desert towns, Rafferty replied that “they paid better salaries, and advancement was more rapid.”  From Trona, California, where he had risen to be vice principal, he became principal of the high school in Big Bear, California, a resort town in the San Bernardino Mountains, from 1948 to 1951.  He was then school superintend at Saticoy, (1951-1955), Needles (1955-1961), and La Canada, a prosperous northeast Los Angeles suburb (1961-1962), all in California.

Max Rafferty’s speeches to education groups and civic clubs as well as his articles (particularly in Phi Delta Kappan, the journal of the education honor society) and books written during these years expressed his contempt for progressive education and school approaches that stressed “life adjustment.” 

He described leftist students of the 1950s and 1960s as “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs.”  His impassioned speeches and writings soon won him admiration from the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups, many of which had growing memberships in California during these years. 

His 1961 “Passing of the Patriot” speech to the La Canada school board excoriated educators for having been “so busy educating for ‘life adjustment’ that we forgot that the first duty of a nation’s schools is to preserve that nation.”  That speech marked a turning point in his career.  Wide press coverage made Rafferty a hero of not only political right wingers but also of those who yearned more generally for a return to simple and manly virtues.

In 1962, backed by a coalition of conservative forces, Rafferty won election as state superintendent of public instruction; he was reelected in 1966.  He feuded with the liberal state board of education, especially over books that he wanted removed from school libraries and as textbooks in school subjects. 

But his conservative philosophy of education had little real impact because of the checks and balances and local control built into the California school system.  His critics claimed that California’s schools were never as progressive as Rafferty claimed.

Encouraged by conservative Republicans, he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1968, won the nomination over liberal-Republican California Senator Thomas H. Kushell, but lost to Democrat Alan M. Cranston in the general election. He also lost his third reelection bid in 1970 as California’s superintendent of public instruction to Wilson Riles, a black educator whom he had appointed his deputy.  Having been rejected in California, he left in 1971 to become dean of education at Troy State University, in Troy, Alabama.  He died following an automobile accident.

Rafferty presaged the New Right’s ascendancy to political power through the Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and particularly Ronald Reagan.  Many observers believed that Rafferty preached a conservative gospel as a means of self-promotion, rather than out of personal conviction.  Despite his talent for invective, opponents as well as allies found him likable and articulate.

 

References

Rafferty’s best-known books:

 Suffer, Little Children, 1962.

What They Are Doing To Your Children, 1964.

Max Rafferty on Education, 1968.

Classroom Countdown: Education at the Crossroads, 1970. 

 

Rafferty Biographies:

Paul F. Cummins, Max Rafferty: A Study in Simplicity (1968) and

Franklin Parker, “School Critic Max Rafferty (1917-1982) and the New Right,” Review Journal of Philosophy & Social Science, 10, 2 (1985): 129-40. 

 

Rafferty Obituaries:

New York Times, June 15, 1982.

San Diego Union (Calif.), June 14,  1982.

Oakland Tribune (Calif.), June 14 1982.

Los Angeles Times (Calif.), June 14 1982.

San Francisco Examiner (Calif.), June 15, 1982.

Birmingham News (Ala.) , June 16, 1982.

End.

For google.com blogs of above article under—bfparker, Max Rafferty, 1917-82—see URL:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bfparker%2C+Max+Rafferty&btnG=Search

 

End.

“Educational Philanthropist George Peabody (1795-1869) and first U. S. Paleontology Prof. Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-99) at Yale University.”

 

By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
Introduction

 

This article describes the interlocking careers of the following four historical figures:

 

1-how O.C. Marsh became the first U.S. paleontology professor at Yale University through the financial support of his uncle, Massachusetts-born George Peabody;

 

2-George Peabody’s transition from world wide importer of drygoods (and other salable goods), to his founding in 1838 in London of George Peabody & Co., a U.S. securities broker-banking firm,

 

3-to his taking as partner in 1854 New Englander Junius S. Morgan, whose son

4-John Pierpont Morgan began as New York City agent for George Peabody & Co. and later succeeded to head J. S. Morgan & Co. under the name of J.P. Morgan and Co.

 

George Peabody & Co. was thus the root of the international J.P. Morgan banking firm.

 

This article’s main focus, however, is to show how Othniel Charles Marsh, influenced his uncle George Peabody’s gifts to science and science education, particularly his founding of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, on Oct. 8, 1866; the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, Oct. 22, 1866; and to a lesser extent the Peabody Academy of Science, founded Feb. 26, 1867, now the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

 

George Peabody’s Career

 

George Peabody’s parents, Thomas Peabody (1761-1811) and Judith née Dodge Peabody (1770-1830), lived in Danvers (renamed Peabody, 1868), Mass. George Peabody was the third born and second son of their eight children. His father, a farmer and leather worker, was not successful.

After four years of schooling and four years’ apprenticeship in a Danvers store, George Peabody, age 16, was assistant in his older brother David’s drapery shop in Newburyport, Mass. His father’s death (May 13, 1811) with a mortgaged home and other debts, was followed by a Newburyport fire (May 31, 1811).

Business prospects being ruined, young Peabody left Newburyport with his maternal uncle John Peabody, also bankrupted by the Newburyport fire, to open a drygoods store in Georgetown, D.C. The management of the store, opened May 15, 1812, fell mainly on George Peabody.

Serving in the War of 1812, young Peabody met fellow soldier Elisha Riggs (1779-1853), an older and more experienced merchant. The 35-year-old Riggs took the 19-year-old Peabody as junior partner in Riggs & Peabody (1814-29), a drygoods importing firm.

In 1815 Riggs & Peabody moved from Georgetown to Baltimore, Md. George Peabody became his family’s supporter. He soon restored the Danvers homestead for his mother and siblings living at home, and paid for the schooling of his younger relations.

The firm continued as Peabody, Riggs & Co. (1829-45), with George Peabody as senior European purchasing agent. He lived in London from 1837 to his death in 1869, except for three U.S. visits.

In London, trading on his own in U.S. state and federal bonds, he formed George Peabody & Co. (1838-64), a securities-banking firm. He took as partner in 1854 Boston merchant Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90), whose 19-year-old son John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), began as New York City agent for George Peabody & Co. George Peabody was thus the root of the international banking firm of J.P. Morgan.

O.C. Marsh’s Life and Career

Mary Gaines Peabody (1807-34) was Peabody’s younger sister whose schooling he paid for at Bradford Academy, Bradford, Mass., during 1822-23. In 1826 at age 19 she fell in love with 26-year-old Caleb Marsh (1800-?), who taught school near Bradford, Mass.

The Peabody and Marsh families had been neighbors in Danvers, Mass. The Marshes were more affluent than the Peabodys. Caleb Marsh, about to marry Mary Gaines Peabody, expected financial help from or work with his future brother-in-law George Peabody.

Caleb Marsh wrote to Peabody, busy traveling for Riggs, Peabody & Co., asking help in getting started in the drygoods business. Peabody, aware of pitfalls for beginners, discouraged Caleb Marsh. Caleb Marsh then wrote Peabody asking for a dowry and the conditions for giving it.

Peabody provided a monetary settlement, with safeguards. Inept in several enterprises and considered later by the Peabodys “not to be the best of husbands,” Caleb Marsh turned to farming in Lockport, N. Y.

Mary Gaines (née Peabody) Marsh died of cholera before her 27th birthday after giving birth to her third child, George Marsh (1834-35), who soon also died. She left Caleb Marsh (he later remarried) with two children: a daughter Mary, age five, and a son, Othniel Charles, approaching age three.

O. C. Marsh, called “Othy” as a boy, lived sometimes with aunts and uncles, and with his father and stepmother in Lockport, N.Y., near the recently excavated and fossil-rich Erie Canal.

By one account, in 1841 Othy wondered why fossil fish bones were in shale he found so far from water. A local engineer and fossil hunter named Colonel Ezekiel Jewett befriended the boy and explained about fossils, which they unearthed together.

Although his father thought he was wasting time, this fossil hunting experience with Jewett sparked Marsh’s later passion for paleontology. Otherwise, O. C. Marsh had an erratic schooling and drifted aimlessly until about age 20. Ref. 1.
O. C. Marsh at Phillips Academy and at Yale

The death of his sister Mary Marsh when she was 22 shocked O. C. Marsh into buckling down to hard private study. At age 21, inheriting property from his mother (part of the dowry George Peabody gave to Caleb Marsh), O. C. Marsh enrolled at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.

His fellow students, in their teens, called Marsh, in his early 20s, “Daddy,” and “Captain” (he captained the football team), more in respect than ridicule. He soon became an academic achiever and did some summer fossil hunting. A classmate later recalled that O.C. Marsh made “a clean sweep of all” Phillips Academy honors.

Peabody, in London, pleased by good reports of his nephew O. C. Marsh’s academic progress from his sister Judith Dodge (née Peabody) Russell Daniels (1799-1879), helped pay his expenses at Phillips Academy. Learning that young Marsh wanted to attend Yale College, Peabody agreed to pay for his schooling there.

Marsh studied geology under Yale Prof. James Dwight Dana (1813-95) and chemistry under Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (1816-85). Marsh was eighth in his graduating class of 109 students at Yale in 1860 (B.A. degree).

With Peabody’s approval and support, O. C. Marsh attended Yale’s newly opened (1861) graduate Sheffield Scientific School. In two years he earned the M.A. degree in science (1862), at a cost to Peabody, according to science historian Bernard Jaffe, of $2,200. Ref. 2.

George Peabody as Philanthropist

George Peabody early told intimates, and said publicly in 1850, that he would found an educational institution in each town and city where he had lived and worked.

By the early 1860s when nephew O. C. Marsh began to influence him toward science, George Peabody had founded Peabody Institute libraries (with lecture halls and lecture funds) in both parts of Danvers, Mass.

Danvers was divided north and south in 1852, with the name of South Danvers, his birthplace, changed to Peabody, Mass., April 13, 1868. He had also founded a five-part Peabody Institute of Baltimore, Md. (reference library, lecture hall and lecture fund, conservatory of music, art gallery, and prizes for best Baltimore students).

He founded in London in March 1862, just before becoming more involved with nephew O. C. Marsh, the Peabody Donation Fund to build model apartments for London’s working poor. His other important philanthropies lay ahead.

O. C. Marsh as Budding Scholar

In 1861 Marsh wrote a scientific paper read at a Geological Society of London meeting, published in its Transactions, and reprinted in U.S. and European journals. Ref. 3.

His summer vacation field work on fossils in Nova Scotia, Canada, brought praise from Harvard zoology Prof. Louis Agassiz (1807-73), world authority on fossil fishes. Agassiz wrote to Yale Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Jr.: “A student from your Scientific School, Mr. Marsh, has shown me today two vertebrae…which has excited my interest in the highest degree.” Ref. 4.

Marsh wrote proudly from Georgetown, Mass., to his uncle George Peabody, London, June 9, 1862: “I was so fortunate during one of my vacations as to make a discovery which has already attracted considerable attention among scientific men.”

Poor eyesight kept Marsh from serving in the Civil War. In that same June 9, 1862, letter to Peabody he added: “If the plan for completing my studies in Germany, which you once so kindly approved, still meets with your approbation, I should like to go in September next [1862].” Peabody approved and sent Marsh £200 ($1,000). Ref. 5.

Always anxious to please his uncle, Marsh was upset by an article his father sent him from the Lockport Journal and Courier, reprinted from a Danvers, Mass., newspaper. He wrote his father that he was “sorry that someone had no more discretion than to preface the notice with some statements which are calculated to do me more injury than…good. The published statement that I am expecting a Professorship at Yale would do not a little towards preventing my getting it. So also that my expenses at College were paid by Uncle George and that he intended to make me his heir, were certainly very injudicious remarks.” Ref. 6.

Marsh sailed for Europe in Oct. 1862. Peabody talked to his nephew in London about his [Peabody's] intended gift to Harvard University. Ref. 7.

Marsh described these talks in a letter to his mentor, Yale Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Jr. “I had a long talk with Mr. P. in regard to his future plans and donations…. I will tell you confidentially that Harvard will have her usual good fortune. So many of our family have been educated at Harvard that he naturally felt a greater interest in that institution than in Yale, of which I am the only representative. I can assure you, however, that I did [not] allow the claims of my Alma Mater to be forgotten…and I have strong hopes that she may yet be favored although nothing is as yet definitely arranged.

“The donation to H. [Harvard],” Marsh continued, “is a large one and for a School of Design…. I did not recommend an endowment for a similar object at Yale, partly because I did not feel so much interest in Art as in Science and partly because Mr. P. manifested so much interest in my scientific studies that I thought it not unlikely that he would be more inclined to that department.
“I did not propose any definite plan…,” Marsh concluded, “as I had then none to propose, but shall hope to do so before long as I do not intend to let the matter rest until something definite is decided upon….” Ref. 8.

Peabody’s first gift idea for Harvard in 1861 was an astronomical observatory. He discussed this idea in letters to Francis Peabody of Salem and William Henry Appleton (1814-84) of Boston. Ref. 9.

The Harvard gift idea was also discussed with former Harvard Pres. Edward Everett (1794-1865). Everett thought Harvard needed a “School of Design” [i.e., art] more than an observatory. Peabody’s Harvard gift idea had thus changed from observatory to a School of Design (art) when he spoke to his nephew O. C. Marsh in London in mid-Oct. 1862.

Marsh’s enthusiasm about science influenced Peabody, changing again his Harvard gift idea from observatory to art to science, resulting finally in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, founded Oct. 8, 1866. Ref. 10.

Science at Yale.

O. C. Marsh’s letters from Germany evoked special interest among Yale’s small band of scientists. By one account Prof. Silliman, Sr., had years before sounded out George Peabody about aiding science at Yale, but nothing came of it. Now, with O. C. Marsh as a budding Yale scholar, his Yale teachers had renewed hope of Peabody aiding science at Yale.

Learning that Prof. Silliman, Jr., had worked out with Prof. James Dwight Dana a plan for a possible Peabody Museum at Yale, Marsh wrote on Feb. 16, 1863: “I shall see Mr. P. in the spring or early in the summer, and shall then try to bring the subject before him in a way best suited to ensure its success.”

At the University of Berlin, on advice from his Yale mentors, Marsh specialized in vertebrate paleontology. When he met his uncle Peabody in mid-May 1863 in Hamburg, Germany, Marsh was better able to explain to his uncle the need for an endowed museum which would send out expeditions to find ancient animal and human remains and so reconstruct the antecedents and cultural history of man.

Marsh told his uncle that Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School (founded 1861) had made such a beginning. Ref. 11. He laid out Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Jr.’s, plan for a scientific Peabody museum at Yale. Satisfied that it was a sound idea, Peabody named five trustees: O. C. Marsh, Benjamin Silliman, Sr. and Jr., James Dixon, and James Dwight Dana.

Peabody told Marsh that he would soon add a codicil to his will endowing the Yale museum. Marsh wrote jubilantly from Hamburg to Prof. Silliman, Sr., May 25, 1863: “I take great pleasure in announcing to you that Mr. George Peabody has decided to extend his generosity to Yale College, and will leave a legacy of one hundred thousand dollars to promote the interests of Natural Science in that Institution.”

Marsh added: “Mr. Peabody suggests that the Trustees…decide upon a plan…best adapted to promote the object proposed, and to embody the main features of this plan in a clause to be inserted in his will.” Ref. 12.

Peabody also told Marsh in their May 1863 meeting in Hamburg that although he set the amount to Yale at $100,000, he might raise it and that Yale would receive the gift on his death. As it turned out, Peabody gave the museum gifts to Harvard on Oct. 8, 1866, and to Yale on Oct. 22,1866, during his May 1, 1866, to May 1, 1867, U.S. visit, raising the amounts to $150,000 each.

Prof. Benjamin Silliman, Jr., urged Marsh to collect fossils, books, and scientific papers on paleontology. He explained that doing so would prepare Marsh for a Yale professorship in paleontology and would also make the need for a museum more evident to all. Prof. James Dwight Dana echoed Prof. Silliman, Jr.’s suggestion for Marsh to study further in Germany. Ref. 13.

Unlike the strong U.S. liberal arts tradition, teaching science was new and suspect after Christian fundamentalists denounced the theory of evolution in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). Fundamentalists feared that belief in evolution might supplant belief in divine biblical revelation.

Amidst this conflict between science and religion, Yale’s small band of scientists saw hope for their scientific disciplines in Peabody’s intended museum gifts to Harvard and Yale, and particularly in the Morrill Act of 1862, which provided federal land grants to the states for science and mechanic arts (engineering) in higher education.

The Connecticut legislature in 1863 voted to allocate Morrill Act funds to Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School. Prof. Dana remarked, “The fact is Yale is going to be largely rebuilt, and all at once! The time of her renaissance has come!!” Ref. 14.
In July 1863 Marsh, studying at Heidelberg University, wrote to Peabody: “One…result of your [projected] donation to Yale has been to…realize my highest hopes of a position [there]…. The faculty propose to create a new Professorship of Geology and Paleontology…. This Professorship…corresponds to that held by the great Agassiz at Harvard.”

Marsh explained to his uncle that he needed a library and fossil collection: “Such a library and cabinet…can only be obtained in Europe…. The amount necessary…would be 3 or 4 thousand dollars…. I have felt some hesitation in asking you for this assistance in view of all you have already done for me, but I have thought it much the best way to state the whole case frankly and leave the matter with you.” Ref. 15.

Peabody wrote Marsh from Scotland in Aug. 1863 that he would give him $3,500 to buy a library and fossil specimens. Ref. 16.

O. C. Marsh’s Books and Fossils
Often ill and wanting to retire, Peabody cut his ties with George Peabody & Co. on Oct. 1, 1864. Without children of his own and knowing he could not control the company business after his death, he asked that his name be withdrawn from the firm. Partner Junius Spencer Morgan (1813-90) urged Peabody to postpone retirement.

Peabody wrote J.S. Morgan politely but firmly: “…I can now make no change, for although the continuance of the firm for three or six months, which you suggest, may appear short to you, to me–feeling as I deeply do, the uncertainty of life at the age of seventy–months would appear as years, for I am most anxious before I die to place my worldly affairs in a much more satisfactory state than they are at present.” Ref. 17.

Thus was George Peabody & Co., begun informally as early as 1838 and more formally from 1851, succeeded by J. S. Morgan & Co. (1864-1909), by Morgan Grenfell & Co. (1910-1918), Morgan Grenfell & Co. Ltd., since 1918, and has continued since 1989, owned by Deutsche Bank, Germany. Ref. 18.

O. C. Marsh wrote Peabody from the University of Breslau Oct. 21, 1864: “I saw in the papers the announcement of your retirement…. Before I retire I should like to do for Science as much as you have done for your fellowmen; and if my health continues I shall try hard to do so.” Ref. 19.

Marsh expected his Yale professorship in June 1864, but was disappointed when it was postponed until June 1865. Being already in Germany, he wrote his uncle that he felt he should also study at the University of Breslau (he was the first U.S. student to attend there). Peabody approved and paid his expenses. Ref. 20.

Marsh selected his library of books on geology and paleontology, for which his uncle paid $5,000. Peabody arranged with his agent-friend, Horatio Gates Somerby (1805-72), born in Newburyport, Mass., and a London-based genealogist, to ship Marsh’s effects to the U.S. The books and fossils went through customs two years later weighing 2.5 tons.

Marsh’s fossils were the basis of the collection of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. His books formed the basis of its library collection in geology and paleontology.

In Berlin Marsh met and spoke with Sir Charles Lyell (1795-1875). In Paris he met and spoke with French geologist Phillippe-Edouard Poulletier De Verneuill. In London, when he was not with his uncle, he spent time at the British Museum with the Keeper of Geology, Henry Woodward. Marsh also talked with such famous British scientists as Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95) and Charles Darwin (1809-82). Ref. 21.

Back at Yale in March 1866, teaching Prof. Dana’s classes in geology, Marsh wrote to his cousin Charles W. Chandler, a lawyer in Zanesville, Ohio, that their uncle George Peabody was about to visit the U.S. (May 1, 1866 to May 1, 1867).

Peabody’s Philanthropic Advisor R. C. Winthrop

George Peabody arrived in N. Y. C. on the Scotia, May 3, 1866, for his year’s U.S. visit (May 1, 1866-May 1, 1867). He conferred on May 9 and frequently thereafter with his philanthropic advisor, Robert Charles Winthrop (1809-94).

Winthrop had been highly recommended to Peabody in 1862 in London by Thurlow Weed (1797-1882), the politically powerful N. Y. State editor. Weed was in London in 1862 as Pres. Lincoln’s emissary to keep Britain from siding with the Confederacy in the Civil War. Weed pointed out that Winthrop was uniquely qualified to advise and guide Peabody’s philanthropy. Ref. 22.

Winthrop was the distinguished descendant of first Mass. Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop (1588-1649), a Harvard graduate (1828), trained in Daniel Webster’s law office, a member of the Mass. legislature (1834-39, and its Speaker), member of the U.S. House of Representative (1840-50, its Speaker during 1847-49), was appointed to fill Daniel Webster’s U.S. Senate seat (1851), and had given the main addresses at the Washington Monument cornerstone laying (1848) and at its completion (1885).

Known and respected by the U.S. political and academic power structure, Winthrop agreed to help plan Peabody’s philanthropy after 1866. In 1867 Winthrop helped name the Peabody Education Fund (PEF) trustees, was president of that board, and guided the PEF to his death in 1894.

When Peabody first laid before Winthrop his philanthropic plans (probably on May 9, 1866), Winthrop expressed amazement at its size and scope. Winthrop remembered Peabody’s reply and quoted it in his Feb. 8, 1870, eulogy at Peabody’s burial. Peabody’s words were later cut into the stone marker placed at the temporary grave site in Westminster Abbey, where Peabody’s remains lay in state 30 days (Nov. 11-Dec. 12, 1869). Peabody had replied:

“Why, Mr. Winthrop, this is no new idea to me. From the earliest of my manhood I have contemplated some such disposition of my property; and I have prayed my Heavenly Father, day be day, that I might be enabled before I died, to show my gratitude for the blessings which He has bestowed upon me, by doing some great good for my fellow-men.” Ref. 23.

R. C. Winthrop’s Help on the Peabody Museum of Harvard

Winthrop had a series of meetings on the Peabody Museum of Harvard: with George Peabody on June 1, 1866, at the Tremont House, Boston; on June 4 with Peabody’s nephews, Yale Prof. O. C. Marsh and George Peabody Russell (1834-?, Harvard graduate class of 1856 and a lawyer) at the Massachusetts Historical Society; and on June 17 again with George Peabody, who gave Winthrop permission to consult confidentially with Harvard friends. Winthrop especially sought the advice and approval of Louis Agassiz (1807-73), the leading U. S. scientist and Harvard zoologist.

Winthrop also talked to Harvard’s former Pres. James Walker (1794-1874, Harvard president during 1853-60). Agassiz, Winthrop, and Walker knew that Harvard officials preferred new gifts of money to go to its library and to its Museum of Comparative Zoology rather than for Peabody’s proposed museum.

Pres. Walker said to Winthrop: “…When a generous man like Mr. Peabody proposes a great gift, we…had better take what he offers and take it on his terms, and for the object which he evidently has at heart…. There…will be, as you say, disappointments in some quarters. But the branch of Science, to which this endowment is devoted, is one to which many minds in Europe are now eagerly turning…. This Museum…will be the first of its kind in our country.”

Winthrop communicated his conversation with Pres. Walker to Peabody on July 6, 1866. On Sept. 24, 1866, Winthrop again met with George Peabody and his nephews, Prof. O. C. Marsh and G. P. Russell. On Sept. 28, 1866, Winthrop called the first meeting of the trustees of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. The trustees accepted Peabody’s gift of $150,000.

Peabody’s founding letter of Oct. 8, 1866, ended with these suggestions: “…In view of the gradual obliteration or destruction of the works and remains of the ancient races of this continent, the labor of exploration and collection be commenced at as early…as practicable; and also, that, in the event of the discovery in America of human remains or implements of an earlier geological period than the present, especial attention be given to their study, and their comparison with those found in other countries.” Ref. 24.

Anthropology at Harvard University

Thus, O.C. Marsh, a Yale man, influenced the founding of the first U. S. museum of anthropology in the U. S. at Harvard University. It was endowed by Peabody nine years after the discovery in 1857 in Prussia of the Neanderthal skull, which renewed interest in man’s origins. Ethnological items, long collected but unexamined, were soon donated to the new Peabody Museum at Harvard by New England societies, including the Massachusetts Historical Society.

When the Massachusetts Historical Society’s ethnological items were transferred to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, former Harvard Pres. James Walker said, “For a long time Harvard has exhausted her resources on the traditional liberal arts. The time has come for her to advance scientific knowledge. Mr. Peabody shows great wisdom in facilitating cooperation between the Massachusetts Historical Society and his Museum at Harvard through trustees of the latter who are prominent members of the former.” Ref. 25.

Science historians Charles Franklin Thwing (1853-1937) and Ernest Ingersoll (1852-1946) each wrote that the Peabody Museum at Harvard University began the systematic study of anthropology in U. S. higher education. Pre-Columbian life in North America was largely unexplored; existing collections were slight and fragmentary. Ref. 26.

Many early prominent scientists were officers of the Peabody Museum of Harvard, including Frederic Ward Putnam (1839-1915). He was its curator during 1874-1909 and enhanced its reputation as well as his own. He was called by his peers the “Father of American Anthropology.” While at the Peabody Museum of Harvard, he also found time 1-to help found the Anthropology Department of the American Museum of Natural History, N.Y.C., during 1894-1903; and 2-the Department and Museum of Anthropology, University of California, during 1903-09; and 3-to be secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, during 1873-98.

Famed anthropologist Prof. Franz Boas (1858-1942) wrote that F. W. Putnam pursued the subject of early man in North America with “unconquerable tenacity.” Putnam wrote over 400 anthropological reports, many of them on the culture of the “mound builders,” ancient ancestors of the American Indians. Ref. 27. At its centennial in 1967, Peabody Museum of Harvard Director John O. Brew (1906-88) stated that its personnel had pioneered in studying the unique Mayan culture in Central America and had led a total of 688 expeditions worldwide to study early human life. Ref. 28.

O. C. Marsh’s influence at Yale

O.C. Marsh was a convinced evolutionist when in the early 1860s he visited Charles Darwin at his country home in England. Twenty years later Charles Darwin wrote to Marsh, crediting him with finding fossils that provided the best evidence to prove the theory of evolution.

Marsh also published fossil proof of the North American origin of the horse. Previously scientists believed that the horse originated in Europe and was brought to America with Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors. Darwin’s strongest defender, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), visiting Marsh at Yale in 1876, was so convinced by Marsh’s horse fossil findings that he changed the content of his U. S. lectures, citing Marsh’s proof of the pre-Columbian origin of the horse in North America. Ref. 29.

As Yale Prof. of Paleontology and Director of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, Marsh did not teach or receive a salary until his last years, when his private income (left to him by Peabody) was almost gone. He was an astute organizer of Yale assistants, directing their field work by telegraph and letter, overseeing their collecting and shipping railroad carloads of fossils. At Yale he assembled entire dinosaurs, toothed birds, and other extinct mammals. His enormous collection at Yale was still being catalogued in the 1990s.

Marsh made his major dinosaur fossil finds in the mid 1870s-80s in the Rocky Mountain region; at Comma Bluff in eastern Wyoming; Canyon City, Colorado; and elsewhere in the rugged U. S. West. He used Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History resources, student assistants, and federal funds in his capacity as U.S. Geological Survey paleontologist (1882-92) and honorary curator of vertebrate paleontology at the U.S. National Museum (1887) to find over 1,000 new fossil vertebrates, many of which he classified and described. Ref. 30.

Marsh lived like a Victorian gentleman in his 18-room New Haven, Conn., brownstone, courting and entertaining lavishly U.S. and foreign scientists and politicians. For 12 years he was president of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious U.S. scientific body. He was prominent in national science affairs and wielded influence in government and academic science circles.

Some peers and at least one assistant, Samuel Wendell Williston (1852-1918), who achieved scientific renown after leaving O. C. Marsh’s employ, criticized him for publishing fossil findings of his assistants as his own. Marsh’s last years were marred by lack of money and loss of U.S. government support. Ref. 31.

O. C. Marsh-E. D. Cope Rivalry

Marsh’s chief scientific rival was Philadelphia-born and independently wealthy paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840-97). Cope was the son of a wealthy Quaker ship owner and philanthropist. Like Marsh, Cope’s mother died when he was three-years-old. Unlike Marsh, Cope grew up in a well-ordered household, did well in a Quaker school, and published his first scientific paper at age 18.

Marsh did little until age 20 and published his first paper at age 30. Both studied science in Europe. Cope, with his wife and daughter, lived in Haddonfield, N.J. When his father died (1875), Cope at age 35 inherited a fortune which he used to finance his fossil finds. Cope lived simply. In contrast, Marsh, a bachelor, lived the life of a Victorian gentleman. On frequent trips to N. Y .C. Marsh was often seen in fashionable clubs.

Marsh and Cope met in Berlin in 1862. They met again for a friendly week in the U. S. in 1868. From then on, they competed in a quarter-century race in the rugged West to find and identify new mammal fossils in scientific publications. Cope, of brilliant mind and wider natural history interests than Marsh, had no institutional connections until, financially depleted in his last years, he became a University of Pennsylvania professor. Marsh had the knack of management and made the most of academic and federal government connections.

From this rivalry came a treasure trove of dinosaur fossil findings, 80 new kinds of dinosaurs found and described in publications by Marsh and 56 found and described in publications by Cope. From this rivalry came much of what is now known about dinosaurs. Dinosaur displays attracted visitors, particularly young visitors, made science museums popular, and furthered science education. Ref. 32.

Marsh’s biographers estimate that Peabody gave Yale directly and indirectly through bequests to Marsh close to half a million dollars. The Peabody Museums at Harvard and Yale, their collections, field exploration, exhibits, famous murals (particularly at the Yale Museum), and education programs are eminently the achievements of their directors and staffs. Yet Peabody’s gifts to science education, influenced by nephew O. C. March, made these achievements possible.

George Peabody’s Philanthropy

George Peabody founded 7 Peabody Institute Libraries, each with free circulating library (except the reference library in Baltimore) and lecture halls and lecture funds. Their location, year founded, and total funds are:

1-Peabody Library in (now named) Peabody, Mass., 1852, total $217,600.

 

2-Peabody Institute of Baltimore, 1857, total $1.4 million (noncirculating special reference library for researchers, lecture hall and fund, music conservatory, art gallery, and annual prizes for best Baltimore students).

3-Peabody Library in Danvers, Mass., 1856, $100,000.

4-Peabody Library in Georgetown, Mass., 1868, $30,000.

5-Peabody Library in Newburyport, Mass., 1866, $15,000.

6-Peabody Library in Thetford, Vt., 1866, $10,000.

7-Peabody Library gift in Georgetown, D.C., 1867, $15,000, now part of Washington, D.C., public library.

(Peabody’s earlier library gift was to the Baltimore Athenaeum and Library, 1845, $500). Peabody’s library gifts totaled $1,788,100.

George Peabody’s gifts to science and science education totaled $551,000:

1-Chemistry laboratory and chemistry school, Maryland Institute, Baltimore, 1851, $1,000.

2-Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1866, $150,000.

3-Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, 1866, $150,000.

4-Mathematics and natural science professorship, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., 1866, $25,000.

5-Mathematics and civil engineering professorship, Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, 1866, $25,000.

6-(now named) Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., 1867, $140,000 (maritime museum and Essex County historical documents).

7-Mathematics professorship, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Va. ( Robert E. Lee was then president of Washington College, Va.), 1869, $60,000.

Peabody’s Publication fund gifts to historical societies totaled $40,020:

1-Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1857, $20.

2-Maryland Historical Society, 1866, $20,000.

3-Massachusetts Historical Society, 1866, $20,000.

4-For abstracting Maryland colonial records from English depositories for the Maryland Historical Society, about 1850, amount not known.

 

 

Model housing for London’s working poor, 1862-69, $2.5 million (27,000 Londoners still live in 14,000 Peabody homes in 83 housing areas). London housing gift totaled $2,500,000.

First U.S. Arctic expedition, $10,000 for scientific equipment, Second U.S. Grinnell Expedition, 1852-54, in search for missing British explorer Sir John Franklin (1786-1847), led by U.S. Naval Commander Elisha Kent Kane (1820-57). U.S. Arctic expedition gift totaled $10,000.

Peabody’s gifts to Patriotic causes totaled $71,850:

 

1-Battle of Lexington Monument, [now named] Peabody, Mass., 1835, $300.

 

2-Revolutionary War Monument for General Gideon Foster, 1845, $50.

 

3-Bunker Hill Memorial Monument, 1845, $500.

 

4-State of Maryland (Peabody declined $60,000 commission due him for selling Chesapeake and Ohio Canal part of Md.’s $8 million bonds for
internal improvements, 1837-48).

 

5-Washington Monument, Washington, D.C., 1854, $1,000.

 

6-U.S. Sanitary Commission (Civil War medical care and relief for Union soldiers, sailors, and families), 1864, $10,000.

 

Peabody’s Hospital gifts totaled $19,565:

 

1-City of London Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, 1850-55, $165.

 

2-Mental Hospital, London, 1864, $100.

 

3-Vatican’s San Spirito Charity Hospital, Rome, Italy, 1867, $19,300.

Churches and charity gifts totaled $70,930:

 

1-South Congregational Church [now named] Peabody, Mass., 1843 or ‘44, $250.

 

2-London Refuge for the Destitute, 1858-60, $115.

 

3-Church, Barnstead, N.H., 1866, $450.

 

4-Memorial Church (in his mother’s hometown), Georgetown, Mass., 1866, $70,000.

 

5-Robert E. Lee’s Episcopal Church, Lexington, Va., Aug. 1869, $100. English Charity, $15.

 

Education gifts totaled, $2,004,700:

 

1-Best scholars’ medals, Peabody High School [now Peabody], Mass., 1854-67, $2,600.

 

2-Best scholars’ medals, Holton High School, Danvers, Mass., 1867, $2,000.

 

3-London school, 1864, $100.

 

4-Peabody Education Fund (PEF), 11 former Confederate states plus W. Va., 1867-69, $2 million (GP actually gave the PEF trustees $3,484,000 in securities, but Miss. did not honor its $1.1 million bonds or Fla. its $384,00 bonds; so that PEF funds are usually given as $2 million.

 

George Peabody’s known philanthropic gifts totaled $7,056,165.

Peabody’s Last Will

George Peabody’s last will, Sept. 9, 1869, left to former clerks at George Peabody & Co., London, $11,000 to Henry West, and $5,000 to Thomas Perman. $25,000 each to his two British estate executors, Sir Curtis Miranda Lampson (1806-85) and Sir Charles Reed (1819-81). $5,000 each to his three U. S. estate executors, nephews George Peabody Russell (1834-?) and Robert Singleton Peabody (1837-1904) and nephew-in-law Charles W. Chandler. To the Family Trust Fund (one brother, one sister, and fourteen nieces and nephews), he left (variously estimated) $1.5 million to $4 million.

Peabody’s Philanthropic Influence

George Peabody’s philanthropy directly influenced:

 

1-Johns Hopkins’ (1795-1873) $8 million bequest for the Johns Hopkins University, Hospital, and Medical School, Baltimore. He indirectly influenced

 

2-Enoch Pratt (1808-96), who served as Peabody Institute of Baltimore trustee and treasurer, to found the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore’s public library.

 

Peabody indirectly influenced the gifts of these PEF trustees:

 

3-Anthony Joseph Drexel (1826-93) to found Drexel University, Philadelphia, 1891; and

 

4-Paul Tulane (1801-87) to found Tulane University, New Orleans, 1884.

 

5-Peabody’s example indirectly influenced Alexander Turney Stewart (1803-76) to build his planned Garden City, N.Y., community on the plan of the Peabody Homes of London.

Peabody’s Honors in Life

George Peabody was the

 

1-first American to receive the Freedom of the City of London, July 10, 1862 (also given to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1945). He was granted honorary memberships in the ancient guilds of the

 

2-Clothworkers’ Company of London, July 2, 1862; and the

 

3-Fishmongers’ Company of London, April 19, 1866.

 

4-Queen Victoria sent him a letter of thanks and her miniature portrait (estimated cost, $70,000), delivered by the British ambassador to Peabody, then in the U.S., March 1867.

 

5-He had private audiences with Pope Pius IX and with French Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie, in 1868.

 

6-Sculptor William Wetmore Story’s seated GP statue was erected near the Royal Exchange, Threadneedle Street, London, paid for by popular subscription, and unveiled by the Prince of Wales, July 23, 1869 (a replica was erected in front of the Peabody Institute of Baltimore, 1890. (London has monuments to only four Americans: George Peabody, 1869; Abraham Lincoln, 1920; George Washington,1821; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1948).

 

7-U.S. Congress unanimously passed a resolution of praise and awarded a gold medal to George Peabody, March 1867, in national appreciation for the 1867 Peabody Education Fund.

 

8-His birthplace, South Danvers, Mass., was renamed Peabody, Mass., April 13, 1868.

 

9-He was granted an honorary Doctor of Law degree, Harvard University, July 17, 1867 (for the Peabody Museum of Harvard University); and an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree, Oxford University, June 26, 1867, for the Peabody Homes of London.

 

10-George Peabody was considered but declined appointment as U.S. Treasury Secretary in President Andrew Johnson’s Cabinet, Feb. 1867.

Peabody’s Honors after Death

11-A funeral service (Nov. 5) was held in Westminster Abbey, London. A floor marker, refurbished in 1995, designates his temporary burial there for 30 days, Nov. 5-Dec. 11, 1869.

 

12-Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone’s cabinet decided on Nov. 10, 1869, to return Peabody’s remains to the U.S. aboard HMS Monarch, then Britain’s newest, largest warship.

 

13-Pres. U.S. Grant ordered the USS Plymouth from Marseilles, France, to accompany the Monarch to the U. S.

 

14-Pres. Grant ordered Admiral David Farragut to command a U. S. naval reception in Portland harbor, Maine.

 

15-Lying-in-state honors were held in Portland, Maine, and in Peabody, Mass.

 

16-Final burial was in Harmony Grove Cemetery, Salem, Mass., Feb. 8, 1870, attended by Queen Victoria’s third son, Prince Arthur, then on a Canadian tour.

 

17-GP was elected to the New York University Hall of Fame, 1900, with a bust by sculptor Hans Schuler unveiled, May 12, 1926.

 

18-Virginia and South Carolina legislators proposed (unsuccessfully) a George Peabody statue in Statuary Hall, U. S. Capitol, 1896.

 

19-Artist Louis Amateis designed (1904-08) two bronze doors for the west entrance, U. S. Capitol Building, with transom panel tableau called “Apotheosis of America,” symbolizing U. S. intellectual development, featuring images of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Peabody, Johns Hopkins, and Horace Mann.

 

20-Tennesseans in 1941 proposed, unsuccessfully, a commemorative George Peabody U. S. postage stamp (a similar unsuccessful proposal was made in 1993 by Massachusetts citizens for a commemorative George Peabody U. S. postage stamp for the bicentennial of his birth in 1995).

 

21-An international George Peabody traveling exhibit was organized for the bicentennial of his birth by the Peabody Institute of Baltimore, shown at the Peabody Trust in London, Feb. 18, 1995, and shown at U. S. Peabody institutions through 1995-96. Ref. 33.

References

1. The O. C. Marsh family documents are in the George Peabody Papers and the O. C. Marsh Papers at Yale University Library Archives, used in Charles Schuchert and Clara Mae LeVene, O. C. Marsh, Pioneer in Paleontology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), hereafter referred to as Schuchert and LeVene.

2. (Marsh’s cost at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, 1861-62): Bernard Jaffe, “Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899),” Men of Science in America: The Role of Science in the Growth of Our Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), pp. 279-306, 565.

3. (Marsh’s 1861 scientific paper): O. C. Marsh to George Peabody, June 9, 1862, in George Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., and in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 45.

4. (Louis Agassiz on Marsh’s 1861 paper): Louis Agassiz to Benjamin Silliman, Dec. 23, 1861, quoted in American Journal of Science , Vol. 33 (May 1862), p. 138.

5. (Marsh’s study in Germany): O. C. Marsh to Peabody, June 9, 1862, in Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum., quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 48.
6. (O. C. Marsh to his father, Caleb Marsh, Aug. 1862): Schuchert and LeVene, p. 47.

7. (Marsh’s Oct. 1862 talk with Peabody): O. C. Marsh, Liverpool, to George Peabody, London, Oct. 10, 1862, in Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

8. (O. C. Marsh to Silliman, Jr. about talks with George Peabody): Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 75-76.

9. (George Peabody’s early thoughts on Harvard observatory and school of design): Francis Peabody, Salem, to George Peabody, Oct. 8, 1861, Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

10. (O. C. Marsh influenced George Peabody toward Harvard science museum gift): Schuchert and LeVene, p. 74, note 4.

11. (Marsh presented Silliman, Jr.’s Yale museum plan to Peabody): O. C. Marsh, Berlin, to Silliman, Jr., Feb. 16, 1863, Marsh Papers, Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 77-78.

12 (Peabody decides on Yale museum): O. C. Marsh, Hamburg, to Silliman, Sr., May 25, 1863, Marsh Papers, Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 78.

13. (Silliman, Jr., and Dana urge Marsh to study further in Germany): Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 52, 80-81.

14. (Dana on Yale to be rebuilt): Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 82-83.

15. (O. C. Marsh asked Peabody for library and fossil rock specimens): O.C. Marsh, Heidelberg, to George Peabody, July 12, 1863, Marsh Papers, Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 54.

16. (Peabody paid for Marsh’s books and specimens): George Peabody, Scotland, to O. C. Marsh, Aug 22, 1863, Marsh Papers, Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, p. 55.

17. (Peabody to retire): George Peabody, Scotland, to J. S. Morgan, Aug. 13, 1864, Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

18. (History of George Peabody & Co.): [Morgan Grenfell & Co. Ltd.]. Kathleen Burk, Morgan Grenfell 1838-1988: The Biography of a Merchant Bank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Vincent P. Carosso, The Morgans, Private International Bankers, 1854-1913. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). Steven Prokesch,
 “Germans to Buy Morgan Grenfell,” New York Times, Nov. 28, 1989, p. 29, continued under title, “Deutsche Bank to Acquire Morgan Grenfell, ” p. 42.

19. (O. C. Marsh on George Peabody’s retirement): O. C. Marsh, University of Breslau, German, to George Peabody, Oct. 21, 1864, in Peabody Papers, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.

20. (O. C. Marsh at the University Breslau): O. C. Marsh, Berlin, to George Peabody, June 13, 1864, Marsh Papers,. Yale, quoted in Schuchert and LeVene, pp. 59-60.

21. (Marsh’s books and fossils arrived from Europe weighing 2.5 tons): Schuchert and LeVene, p. 67.

22. (On Thurlow Weed): Weed Collection, University of Rochester Library Archives. Thurlow Weed Barnes. Memoir of Thurlow Weed by his Grandson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884). Thurlow Weed. Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, ed. by Harriet A. Weed. 2 Vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1884).

23. (On Robert C. Winthrop): Robert Charles Winthrop. Eulogy, Pronounced at the Funeral of George Peabody, at Peabody, Massachusetts, 8 February, 1870 (Boston: John Wilson & Son, 1870), pp. 3-11. Robert Charles Winthrop. Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1879), II, pp. 312-315. Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry. A Brief Sketch of George Peabody and a History of the Peabody Education Fund Through Thirty Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1898. Reprinted New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), p. 18.

24. (Oct. 8, 1866, founding letter): Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Archives, Harvard University. Harvard University. Endowment Funds of Harvard University, June 30, 1947 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), pp. 363-365. Boston Daily Advertiser, Oct. 19, 1866, p. 2, c. 3-4. Theodore Hall. “A Harvard Garner, the Peabody Museum,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 149 (March 1932), pp. 276-297. Roland B. Dixon. “Anthropology, 1866-1929,” The Development of Harvard University Since the Inauguration of President Eliot 1869-1929. Ed. by Samuel Eliot Morrison (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1930), Chap. X, pp. 202-215. (R.C. Winthrop on Peabody Museum of Harvard): “R. C. Winthrop Papers,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. (R.C. Winthrop consults Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz): Robert Charles Winthrop. Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1879), II, pp. 312-315.

25. (James Walker on value of Peabody Museum of Harvard): Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings. Vol. 9 (1866-1867), pp. 359-367.

26. (Thwing, Ingersoll, and Willoughby on the historical importance of the Peabody Museum of Harvard): Charles Franklin Thwing. “Peabody Museum of Archaeology, Cambridge, Massachusetts,” Harpers New Weekly Magazine, Vol. 63 (Oct. 1881), pp. 670-677. Ernest Ingersoll. “The Peabody Museum of American Archaeology,” Lippincott’s Magazine, Vol. 10 (Nov. 1885), pp. 474-487. Charles G. Willoughby. “The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 124 (June 1923), pp. 495-503.

27. (On F. W. Putnam’s historical importance): Frederic Ward Putnam. The Archaeological Reports of Frederic Ward Putnam: Selected from the Annual Reports of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University 1875-1903 (New York: AMS Press, 1973, reprint), IX-XIII.

28. (Brew on the historical importance of anthropology at the Peabody Museum of Harvard): John O. Brew, ed. One Hundred Years of Anthropology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968).

29. (O. C. Marsh’s proof of pre-Columbian American origin of the horse): Cyril Bibby. Scientist Extraordinary: The Life and Scientific Work of Thomas Henry Huxley, 1825-1895 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1972). Martin J.S. Rudwick. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. 2nd ed. (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1976), pp. 252-255. Bruce J. MacFadden. Fossil Horses: Systematics, Paleobiology, and Evolution of the Family Equidae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 29-33.

30. (O. C. Marsh’s contributions at Yale): O.C. Marsh Papers, Yale University Archives. Schuchert and LeVene. Ernest Willoughby. “The Peabody Museum at New Haven,” Science, Vol. 5, No. 103 (Jan. 23, 1885), pp. 67-72. Mark J. McCarren. The Scientific Contributions of Othniel Charles Marsh: Birds, Bones, and Brontotheres (New Haven: Peabody Museum of Natural History, 1993). Robert M. Schoch. “The Paleontological Collections of the Peabody Museum of Natural History,” Fossils Quarterly (Fall/Winter 1984-1985), pp. 4-14. Carl O. Dunbar. “Recollections on the Renaissance of Peabody Museum Exhibits, 1939-1959,” Discovery, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall 1976), pp. 17-35. Hugh S. McIntosh “Marsh and the Dinosaurs,” Discovery, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1965), pp. 31-37. Robert Plate. The Dinosaur Hunters (New York: David McKay Co., 1964). “Dedication of the Peabody Museum: Simple Exercises Mark the Laying of the Cornerstone of New Home for Notable Collections,” Yale Alumni Weekly (July 6, 1923), pp. 1249-1250. Ellen T. Drake, “Some Notes on the Beginnings of Peabody Museum,” Discovery, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Fall 1966), pp. 33-35. “Carl O. Dunbar 1891-1979: An Appreciation,” Discovery, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1979), p. 44.

31. (S.W. Williston critical of O. C. Marsh): Elizabeth Noble Shor. Fossils and Flies: The Life of a Compleat Scientist Samuel Wendell Williston (1851-1918) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), pp. 3-7, 22-23, 64-71, 96-98, 117-123.

32. (Marsh-Cope rivalry): Robert T. Bakker. The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction (New York: William Morrow, 1986), pp. 37-41, 164-165, 206-213, 298-305, 365-369. Peter J. Bowler. Fossils and Press: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976), pp. 130-141. Edwin Harris Colbert. Dinosaurs: Their Discovery and Their World (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1961), pp. 28-37, 70-71, 86-87, 118-119, 146-149, 277. Edwin Harris Colbert. Men and Dinosaurs: The Search in Field and Laboratory (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 55, 66-97, 144-145. Edwin Harris Colbert. The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries (New York: Dover Publications, 1984). Edwin Harris Colbert. Dinosaurs: An Illustrated History (Maplewood, N.J.: Hammond, 1985), pp. 24-27. Adrian J. Desmond. The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs: A Revolution in Paleontology (New York: Dial Press, 1976), pp. 30-37, 106-117, 138-139, 174-177. Diagram Group, A Field Guide to Dinosaurs (New York: Avon, 1983), pp. 52-53, 146-147, 210-211, 218-223, 246-249. Thomas F. Glick, ed. Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1972), pp. 192-213. Stephen Jay Gould. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), pp. 86-93, 139, 160-163, 170-177, 416-433. Robert West Howard. The Dawnseekers: The First History of American Paleontology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). Bernard Jaffe. “Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899),” Men of Science in America: The Role of Science in the Growth of Our Country (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), pp. 279-306, 565 , pp. 279-306, 565. Url Lanham. The Bone Hunters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. ix-xi, 79-164, 182-183, 218-267. Bruce J. MacFadden. Fossil Horses: Systematics, Paleobiology, and Evolution of the Family Equidae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 29-33. John H. Ostrom, and John S. McIntosh. Marsh’s Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. v-vi, 6-11, 28-43. Nathan Reingold, ed. Science in Nineteenth-Century America: A Documentary History (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 236-241. Martin J.S. Rudwick. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. 2nd ed. (New York: Neale Watson Academic Publications, 1976), pp. 252-255. Elizabeth Noble Shor. Fossils and Flies: The Life of a Compleat Scientist Samuel Wendell Williston (1851-1918) (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), pp. 3-7, 22-23, 64-71, 96-98, 117-123. George Gaylord Simpson. George Gaylord Simpson: Concession to the Improbable, An Unconventional Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 16-17, 40-41, 130-131, 270-271. Time-Life Books. Emergence of Man: Life Before Man (New York: Time-Life Books, 1972), pp. 75-83.

33. (Research on George Peabody since 1953): Franklin Parker. “George Peabody, Founder of Modern Philanthropy” (Ed.D., George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, 1956), 3 vols. Franklin Parker. George Peabody, a Biography (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995 rev. and update of 1971 ed.). Franklin Parker, issue author. “The Legacy of George Peabody: Special Bicentenary Issue,” Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Fall 1994), 210 pp. (Reprint of author’s 22 articles on George Peabody, with annotations in Current Index to Journals in Education, Vol. 70, No. 1 [July 1995], pp. 149-151).

END.

For google.com blogs of above title access following URLs under–bfparker, Peabody …Marsh…:
http://clearblogs.com/bfparker/
and:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bfparker%2C+Peabody+…Marsh…&btnG=Search

 

End. Send corrections, comments to: bfparkr@frontiernet.net

 “Max Rafferty (1917-82), Conservative Educator and California State School Superintendent During 1962-70By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

Rafferty, Maxwell Lewis, Jr. (born May 17, 1917; died  June 13, 1982), educator, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Maxwell Lewis Rafferty, an Irish Roman Catholic store owner and auto plant worker, and DeEtta Cox (mother). 

In 1921 the family moved to Sioux City, Iowa, and then, in 1931, to Los Angeles, California.  Young Max skipped several grades and graduated at age sixteen from Beverly Hills High School, California, where he was remembered for being studious, quick witted, and much younger than his classmates.

Entering the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he majored in history, managed the football and rugby teams, was president of Sigma Pi fraternity, joined the UCLA Americans (an anti-communist athletic group opposed to leftist students), and received a B.A. in 1938.  He then enrolled in the UCLA School of Education to become a teacher and later claimed to have reluctantly studied John Dewey’s educational philosophy in order to become certified. 

He taught English and history and coached football at Trona High School, in Trona, California, from 1940 to 1948, having been classified physically unfit for the World War II draft because of flat feet.  He married a schoolmate in 1940, was divorced in 1943, and married Frances Louella Longman in 1944.  They had three children.  He earned an M.A. degree from UCLA in 1949 and an Ed.D. degree from the University of Southern California in 1955.

Asked later why he chose to be a teacher and school administrator for twenty-one years in isolated southern California desert towns, Rafferty replied that “they paid better salaries, and advancement was more rapid.”  From Trona, California, where he had risen to be vice principal, he became principal of the high school in Big Bear, California, a resort town in the San Bernardino Mountains, from 1948 to 1951.  He was then school superintend at Saticoy, (1951-1955), Needles (1955-1961), and La Canada, a prosperous northeast Los Angeles suburb (1961-1962), all in California.

Max Rafferty’s speeches to education groups and civic clubs as well as his articles (particularly in Phi Delta Kappan, the journal of the education honor society) and books written during these years expressed his contempt for progressive education and school approaches that stressed “life adjustment.” 

He described leftist students of the 1950s and 1960s as “booted, side-burned, ducktailed, unwashed, leather-jacketed slobs.”  His impassioned speeches and writings soon won him admiration from the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups, many of which had growing memberships in California during these years. 

His 1961 “Passing of the Patriot” speech to the La Canada school board excoriated educators for having been “so busy educating for ‘life adjustment’ that we forgot that the first duty of a nation’s schools is to preserve that nation.”  That speech marked a turning point in his career.  Wide press coverage made Rafferty a hero of not only political right wingers but also of those who yearned more generally for a return to simple and manly virtues.

In 1962, backed by a coalition of conservative forces, Rafferty won election as state superintendent of public instruction; he was reelected in 1966.  He feuded with the liberal state board of education, especially over books that he wanted removed from school libraries and as textbooks in school subjects. 

But his conservative philosophy of education had little real impact because of the checks and balances and local control built into the California school system.  His critics claimed that California’s schools were never as progressive as Rafferty claimed.

Encouraged by conservative Republicans, he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1968, won the nomination over liberal-Republican California Senator Thomas H. Kushell, but lost to Democrat Alan M. Cranston in the general election.

He also lost his third reelection bid in 1970 as California’s superintendent of public instruction to Wilson Riles, a black educator whom he had appointed his deputy.  Having been rejected in California, he left in 1971 to become dean of education at Troy State University, in Troy, Alabama.  He died following an automobile accident.

Rafferty presaged the New Right’s ascendancy to political power through the Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and particularly Ronald Reagan.  Many observers believed that Rafferty preached a conservative gospel as a means of self-promotion, rather than out of personal conviction.  Despite his talent for invective, opponents as well as allies found him likable and articulate.References

Rafferty’s best-known books:

 Suffer, Little Children, 1962.

What They Are Doing To Your Children, 1964.

Max Rafferty on Education, 1968.

Classroom Countdown: Education at the Crossroads, 1970. 

Rafferty Biographies:

Paul F. Cummins, Max Rafferty: A Study in Simplicity (1968) and

Franklin Parker, “School Critic Max Rafferty (1917-1982) and the New Right,” Review Journal of Philosophy & Social Science, 10, 2 (1985): 129-40. 

Rafferty Obituaries:

New York Times, June 15, 1982.

San Diego Union (Calif.), June 14,  1982.

Oakland Tribune (Calif.), June 14 1982.

Los Angeles Times (Calif.), June 14 1982.

San Francisco Examiner (Calif.), June 15, 1982.

Birmingham News (Ala.) , June 16, 1982.

End.

For google.com blogs of above article under—bfparker, Max Rafferty, 1917-82—see URL:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bfparker%2C+Max+Rafferty&btnG=Search

 End.

“Peabody Education Fund In Tennessee, 1867-1914.”

By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net

(Added to from Franklin and Betty J. Parker, “Peabody Education Fund in Tennessee,” in The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture. Ed. by Carrroll Van West. Nashville, TN: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998, pp. 725-726, URL: http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=P013

Shocked by reports and letters he received about the South’s Civil War devastation, George Peabody (1795-1869) founded the $2 million Peabody Education Fund (PEF, 1867-69) to aid public education in eleven former Confederate states plus West Virginia added because of its poverty.

Born in Massachusetts, Peabody left at age 17 to become a merchant in the South (1812-37). He then founded George Peabody & Co., London, an international banking firm in London (1838-54) dealing mainly in U.S. state and federal bonds, and the best known philanthropist of his time.

The Civil war-devastated South lacked the means or will to establish public schools. First PEF general agent Barnas Sears, distinguished New England educator, used the fund’s limited resources as a lever to help achieve tax-supported public schools. PEF-aided schools had to meet ten months a year and have at least one teacher per fifty pupils. PEF grants required that local citizens more than match PEF funds and that state laws for tax-supported public schools be enacted.

Sears urged a state normal school (for teacher training) in Nashville as a model for the South. But state normal school legislation continually failed in the Tennessee legislature over the next six years. Rather than lose Nashville as a normal school site, Sears said that if the University of Nashville trustees gave land and buildings for a normal school, the PEF would contribute $6,000 annually. The Tennessee legislature amended the University of Nashville’s charter, and the new State Normal School, financed by PEF’s annual grant of $6,000, opened December 1, 1875, and was renamed Peabody Normal College (1889-1909).

Disappointed when the legislature refused to subsidize Peabody Normal College in 1877 and 1879, Sears considered moving Peabody Normal College to Georgia. This threat prompted Nashville citizens in April 1880 to guarantee $6,000 annually. From 1881 to 1905 the general assembly’s appropriations for Peabody Normal College totaled $429,000. In contrast, the Peabody Education Fund trustees gave $555,730 from 1875 to 1909.

In its first thirty years (1868 through 1897) the PEF gave the eleven former Confederate states and West Virginia a total of $2,478,000 to advance public schools, teacher institutes, and normal schools. Tennessee received about 9 percent of this total, second highest after Virginia. Additionally, the PEF enriched Tennessee with Peabody Normal College (and its successor institutions to the present Peabody College of Vanderbilt University).

Besides its regular tuition-paying students, Peabody Normal College enrolled 3,645 higher qualified teacher candidates through PEF-financed Peabody Scholarships (1877-1904), which brought the college and Tennessee an additional $398,690.88. Educators trained at Peabody Normal College became educational leaders throughout the South and gave Peabody Normal College in Tennessee a national reputation.

Allowed to disband after thirty years, the PEF gave $1.5 million to transform Peabody Normal College into George Peabody College for Teachers. Former Governor James D. Porter (1828-1912), who had been Peabody Normal College’s third president (1901-9), helped raise PEF-required matching funds from Nashville, Davidson County, and other Tennessee sources. The new George Peabody College for Teachers was built opposite Vanderbilt University. In 1979 it became Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.

Amid post-Civil War chaos, the PEF financially encouraged state efforts in advancing public schools. By creating in Nashville a model professional teachers college, it helped produce educational leaders who became college and university presidents, deans, scholars, educational writers, and master teachers for Tennessee, the South, and the nation.

End.

For google.com blogs of above article under—bfparker, Peabody Education Fund in Tennessee—try accessing:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bfparker%2C+Peabody+Education+Fund+in+Tennessee&btnG=Google+Search
“Peabody Education Fund In Tennessee,
1867-1914.”
By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, bfparker@frontiernet.net
(Added to from Franklin and Betty J. Parker, “Peabody Education Fund in Tennessee,” in The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture. Ed. by Carrroll Van West. Nashville, TN: Tennessee Historical Society, 1998, pp. 725-726, URL: http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=P013

Shocked by reports and letters he received about the South’s Civil War devastation, George Peabody (1795-1869) founded the $2 million Peabody Education Fund (PEF, 1867-69) to aid public education in eleven former Confederate states plus West Virginia added because of its poverty. Born in Massachusetts, left at age 17 to become a merchant in the South, Peabody became an international banker in London (during 1837-69) and the best known philanthropist of his time.

The war-devastated South lacked the means or will to establish public schools. First PEF general agent Barnas Sears, distinguished New England educator, used the fund’s limited resources as a lever to help achieve tax-supported public schools. PEF-aided schools had to meet ten months a year and have at least one teacher per fifty pupils. PEF grants required that local citizens more than match PEF funds and that state laws for tax-supported public schools be enacted.

Sears urged a state normal school (for teacher training) in Nashville as a model for the South. But state normal school legislation continually failed in the Tennessee legislature over the next six years. Rather than lose Nashville as a normal school site, Sears said that if the University of Nashville trustees gave land and buildings for a normal school, the PEF would contribute $6,000 annually. The Tennessee legislature amended the University of Nashville’s charter, and the new State Normal School, financed by PEF’s annual grant of $6,000, opened December 1, 1875, and was renamed Peabody Normal College (1889-1909).

Disappointed when the legislature refused to subsidize Peabody Normal College in 1877 and 1879, Sears considered moving Peabody Normal College to Georgia. This threat prompted Nashville citizens in April 1880 to guarantee $6,000 annually. From 1881 to 1905 the general assembly’s appropriations for Peabody Normal College totaled $429,000. In contrast, the Peabody Education Fund trustees gave $555,730 from 1875 to 1909.

In its first thirty years (1868 through 1897) the PEF gave the eleven former Confederate states and West Virginia a total of $2,478,000 to advance public schools, teacher institutes, and normal schools. Tennessee received about 9 percent of this total, second highest after Virginia. Additionally, the PEF enriched Tennessee with Peabody Normal College (and its successor institutions to the present Peabody College of Vanderbilt University).

Besides its regular tuition-paying students, Peabody Normal College enrolled 3,645 higher qualified teacher candidates through PEF-financed Peabody Scholarships (1877-1904), which brought the college and Tennessee an additional $398,690.88. Educators trained at Peabody Normal College became educational leaders throughout the South and gave Peabody Normal College in Tennessee a national reputation.

Allowed to disband after thirty years, the PEF gave $1.5 million to transform Peabody Normal College into George Peabody College for Teachers. Former Governor James D. Porter (1828-1912), who had been Peabody Normal College’s third president (1901-9), helped raise PEF-required matching funds from Nashville, Davidson County, and other Tennessee sources. The new George Peabody College for Teachers (GPCFT, 1909-79) was built opposite Vanderbilt University with which it cooperated in programs and a joint university library. In 1979 GPCFT became Peabody College of Vanderbilt University.

Amid post-Civil War chaos, the PEF financially encouraged state efforts in advancing public schools. By creating in Nashville a model professional teachers college, it helped produce educational leaders who became college and university presidents, deans, scholars, educational writers, and master teachers for Tennessee, the South, and the nation.

End.

For google.com blogs of above article under—bfparker, Peabody Education Fund in Tennessee—try accessing:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=bfparker%2C+Peabody+Education+Fund+in+Tennessee&btnG=Google+Search