A Leadership for Peace: How Edwin Ginn Tried to Change the World 9781503626133

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A Leadership for Peace

A Leadership for Peace HOW EDWIN GINN TRIED TO CHANGE THE WORLD

Robert I. Rotberg

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

2007

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2007 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stan ford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rotberg, Robert I. A leadership for peace; how Edwin Ginn tried to change the world I Robert I. Rotberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. rssN-13: 978-o-8047-5455-2 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Ginn, Edwin, 1838-1914. 2. Pacifists-United States-Biography. 3· Peace movements-United States-History-2oth century. 4· World Peace Foundation. 5· Peace. I. Title. JZ5540.2.G56R68 2007 303.6'6-dc22 2oo6o25311

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10 h 3 Palatino

For RICHARD H. ULLMAN

friend, colleague and leader of intellectual integrity

Contents

Preface ix 1.

2.

Educating a Young Yankee

1

In the Beginning was the Book

19

3· The Essentials of Civic Engagement 40 4· The Quest for Reason under Law 67 5· A Foundation for World Peace

93

6. The Angel Song of Universal Peace

122

7· Creating a League of Nations 154 8. "The Most Peaceable Man in the World" 182

A Note on the Sources and Methods: Together with Acknowledgments 199 Notes 205 Bibliography 229 Index 235

Illustrations

Edwin Ginn, c. 1868-1870

14

Edwin Ginn, c. 1908

95

100

David Starr Jordan, c. 1891 Abbott Lawrence Lowell, c.

1910

Preface

The Nuclear Freeze Movement and the legions of peaceniks who sought stridently to "ban the bomb" in the 1960s and afterwards descended despite their very different modes of protest from the pacifists and rationalists who endeavored before World War I to banish war, limit armaments, and create durable instruments of peace. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nuclear and napalm devastation was unimagined and even the extraordinary calamities of trench warfare unexpected. Yet, for legions of thinkers and doers in Europe and America, and even for a few statesmen, making war was abhorrent. For them, and their followers, it was clear that the settling of disputes between nations by resort to violence was wasteful, foolish, and unnecessary on logical more than on moral grounds. These men and women of affairs established peace societies in the early nineteenth century, experienced the horrors of the mini-European war in the Crimea and the American Civil War, and, toward the end of the century and thereafter, redoubled their efforts to forestall the rush to bigger battleships and field cannon, the manufacture of aggressively deployable gas and chemicals, and the recruitment of new hordes of soldiers and sailors. They learned to lobby their political leaders. But most of all, they tried to appeal to what passed for "public opinion"; they tried to persuade a class of "thinking" progressive workers and professionals that the actions of war-mongering politicians and profiteering arms merchants were obstacles to social advance for everyman. Mutual deterrence was wrong-headed when the application of rea-

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son and common sense showed decisively that war was ruinously expensive in human and physical resources and an obstacle to the betterment of humankind. Arguments between nations could be settled peaceably. Disagreements could be arbitrated or mediated. Hard core controversies could be put before an adjudicating tribunal for decision, and an internationally composed and controlled police force could enforce the conclusions of such a protean world court. Moreover, even before disagreements could rise to the level of conflagration, they could be discussed in a world forum-a parliament of man or a league of nations. Thus was born what we know in the twenty-first century as the backbone of the international organizational structure. Despite the imperfections of today's United Nations, the weaknesses of the World Court and ancillary judicial operations, and the lamentable absence of a fully legitimated global policing capacity, those instruments of world order mark giant advances on pre-World War I disarray. They conform, mostly, to the idealistic designs of the pre-World War I campaigners for peace-the articulate and ambitious anti-war advocates on whose energetic and optimistic endeavors this book is focused. Edwin Ginn, a somber Yankee publisher and educator, was a key leader of those women and men who-like the much later and much more radicalized "ban the bomb" squads-sought every which way in the years between 1900 and 1914 to avert all-out combat, and the need to go to battle at all. Thinkers like Leo Tolstoy; educators like Fanny Fern Phillips Andrews, Nicholas Murray Butler, David Starr Jordan, and A. Lawrence Lowell; writers like Baroness Bertha von Suttner and Norman Angell; lawyers like Elihu Root and President William Howard Taft; pacifists like Benjamin Franklin Trueblood and Edwin and Lucia Mead; clerics and reverends like Edward Everett Hale; editors like Hamilton Holt and James Macdonald; and industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Billings Capen, and Ginn were in the vanguard of this pursuit of lofty principle. All cared fervently and foresaw a perfected world blessed by reduced mayhem. Each, in her and his way, argued valiantly for a common cause. No campaigner was more single-minded, more devoted, or more committed than Ginn. He, along with Carnegie, expended sizable sums-a third of his fortune-to achieve that noble objective. This book is about that multifaceted crusade, and about Ginn's profound contribution to a project only dashed and derailed by the outbreak of war in the Balkans in 1914.

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Of all the modern visionaries of world peace-of a world disarmed, without contesting nations, and observant of codified methods of conflict resolution-none is as unlikely as the poor boy from Maine who founded a greatly successful publishing house and, ultimately, used his wealth and his undoubted talents as a master salesman to promote a warless world. Ginn is an anomaly among nineteenth- and twentieth-century movers for peace: a strait-laced, frugal, cautious member of the Boston establishment, he came late in life to believe, fervently, in the perfectibility of humankind. He affirmed the power of reason, and believed in the ability of peace advocates to persuade thinking persons (and governments) to lay down their arms and eschew war. Yet Ginn was no naive fuddy-duddy, no starry-eyed peace reformer. He was a hard-headed businessman who prided himself and his prosperous company on efficiency and practicality. Ginn's restless attempt to educate Americans and Europeans about the waste of war, and his willingness to spend to achieve peace, are two reasons for a book about an unusual man-a dedicated campaigner for a world where disputes between nations could be settled without recourse to violence. Ginn tried heroically to change the world. Neither Ginn nor his publishing house is now a household word. In their day, however, the textbooks of Ginn & Co. educated seven or more generations of Americans, almost from cradle to graduate school. He and it altered how decades of American young people learned, and what they learned. Across a breadth of subjects, from Greek and Latin to mathematical fundamentals, chemistry, American history, civics, conservation, and music, Ginn's books were essential for beginners as well as advanced learners. From his successful publishing base, Ginn himself was known to a generation of Bostonian social reformers, and farther away in New York and Washington, as a practical philanthropist and, ultimately, as an articulate advocate for world peace. Carnegie, a contemporary of Ginn with much greater monetary resources, was also an advocate of disarmament and the international rule of law. His Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Ginn's World Peace Foundation were established in the same year (1910), and from similar motives and inspirations. But Ginn's primary avocation was the pursuit of peace; Carnegie sought to use his wealth for many additional worthwhile objectives, and operated (as he hinted to Ginn) across a broader and much more complicated philanthropic plain. Ginn's quest for peace began in the late nineteenth century, after his

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publishing house had established itself as a premier purveyor of high school and college textbooks in the United States. The armaments race in Europe at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century aroused Ginn; the pre-existing American peace movement introduced him to issues that hitherto had escaped his concern. But, once alarmed by the prospect of unnecessary war, and slowly convinced that better and more intelligent alternatives existed, Ginn decided in his characteristically measured manner to devote considerable energies and organizing abilities to securing a more stable world. Ginn joined the peace movement as a mature corporate leader after many adult decades without demonstrated social or political impulses. He was an unexpected convert to progressive causes, much less the crusade for peace. Very little about Ginn's personality hinted at the social reformer and leader for peace that he was to become. What chain of internal or external events, what new crises of concern or conscience, compelled or persuaded Ginn to dedicate his energies and his fortune to a rather quixotic attempt to change the world and fundamentally recalibrate the usual rhythms of human endeavor? That is the beguiling conundrum that this biography investigates. Much of this concern for the future of the world emerged when Ginn was in his fifties, a bearded widower suddenly remarried to a woman musician of German descent twenty-five years younger. Whether rejuvenated by a lively second marriage, or inspired by his new partner, Ginn became a staunch advocate of the peaceful settlement of international disputes, an international police force, a world court, and a league of nations, and for a host of ancillary good causes. He also became an enthusiastic vegetarian, a campaigner against martial toys, and a force for all manner of municipal reform in Boston and its suburbs. From the mid-189os, Ginn was at the active center of the American peace movement during the most robust and influential decades of its existence. Ginn was a pragmatic mobilizer of cooperating partners in a cause. He reached out to those who either knew more or were more experienced. Then he formulated plans, harnessed collaborators, and set about influencing opinion makers and fellow citizens. Austere and brimming with rectitude, as Mainers were wont to be, Ginn advanced his position through vigorous speeches, artful campaigning in the press and in widely distributed pamphlets, and, ultimately, by establishing an organization "to advance the cause of world peace through study,

Preface

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analysis, and the advocacy of wise action." He believed that the world was susceptible to rational discourse, and could improve. Enlightenment was possible, even likely. Ginn's energetic pursuit of peace and publishing talents thrust him together with a host of Bostonian policy entrepreneurs, university administrators, and scholars. His coming of activist age is a tale very much set in Boston, Cambridge, and Winchester, Massachusetts, but also in Pasadena and Palo Alto, California, and in Washington, D.C. This book is thus equally about the influence and efforts for peace of the Meads; the Revs. Hale and Edward Cummings; Jordan, first president of Stanford University; Holt and Macdonald, crusading editors of New York and Toronto; Presidents Lowell, of Harvard University, and Butler, of Columbia University; Secretary of War and Secretary of State Elihu Root; and Andrews and Rose Tillotson Hemenway, educators and philanthropists for peace. It is about the impact for good that the efforts of Ginn and all of these other luminaries exerted on the administrations of Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. It is lastly about the two global peace conferences at The Hague, about the many other notable peace conclaves in the early years of the twentieth century, and about the origins of and battle for the League of Nations. Ginn's legacy lives on through the World Peace Foundation that he created, but the man and his works are set in and reflect the age of progressive reform during which a remarkable, self-taught, rough-hewn Yankee responded to the rolling drums of war in a manner that uplifted and energized his peers and some of his countrymen. This is a biography of man and an analysis of an impulse of significant altruism. Ginn was an authentic leader and change agent, despite world order's remaining imperfections. R.LR.

Silver Lake, New Hampshire and Cambridge, Massachusetts August 2oo6

A Leadership for Peace

CHAPTER ONE

Educating a Young Yankee

The powerfully creative visions of Edwin Ginn, publisher and peace promoter, somehow emerged out of a strongly independent, free-thinking, hardscrabble childhood in northern Maine; a liberal Christian background and upbringing; a family tradition of seafaring, shipbuilding, and lumbering; a compelling zest for education and self-improvement; and a determination to improve the lives of fellow New Englanders. Ginn reached well beyond his origins. Yet, he constantly harked back to his early Maine days. They provided the compass by which he oriented his commercial and international aspirations. The lessons learned in those hard years guided his growth in wealth and wisdom. They inspired his civic conscience and provided the moral lodestar by which he explained his motives and his goals. Ginn always ascribed his accomplishments and his acquisition of wealth to the rock-like discipline and strict principles of his youth; for him, the tough soils of Maine were the sure foundation of every subsequent personal advance and progressive initiative. Edwin Ginn was born on Feb. 14, 1838, in North Orland, Maine, ten miles east of Bucksport. James and Sarah Blood Ginn, his parents, farmed, but his father also lumbered and constructed small sailing vessels. Farther back, the Ginns (or Genns), with their Welsh name (meaning white) sailed from Plymouth, England, in the late seventeenth century, to Virginia. There James Ginn (or Genn) grew tobacco in North Umberland County, in the northeastern corner of the Northern Neck peninsula. An owner of extensive land in several counties-at least 1,ooo acres-he was also a prominent and esteemed surveyor. He in-

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structed the young George Washington in surveying, not least during a 1748 expedition to the South Branch of the Potomac River. 1 A grandson of James Ginn, also James, was born in Orangetown, Virginia, in 1745. He is the James Ginn, great-grandfather of Edwin, who moved from Virginia, where he and his two brothers had begun building ships, to Gloucester, Massachusetts. There, in 1768, he married Ann Riggs, daughter of Joshua Riggs and Experience Stanwood and the great granddaughter of the first settler and first teacher in Gloucester. They lived there until1776, and then sailed to Brewer, Maine, across from Bangor on the Penobscot River. In Brewer, in 1787, James was commissioned by John Hancock, governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to be captain and commander of the rst Company, sth Regiment, 2nd Brigade, of the Commonwealth's militia. 2 He also was Lincoln (Maine, but then still part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) County's only slave-owner (with a single slave). 3 In 1797, Captain James Ginn, his wife and children, and one slave sailed down the Penobscot River to Orland, today a pleasant, tiny, valley village 2.5 miles from Bucksport, where he ran the local mill and continued to construct ships. In Bucksport (Buckstown until it changed its name in 1817), to which location on the Penobscot they moved in 18oo, James Ginn built a wharf, a store, and the town's largest house, and then began to construct larger and larger ships. Indeed, he transferred to Bucksport primarily in order to have access to the deeper reaches of the lower Penobscot River, where he could best launch seagoing vessels, a livelihood that two of his sons continued until 1883. During that period, they constructed eighteen ships, including three schooners, nine barks, three brigs, and two barkentines. The Ginns constructed the largest ship ever built in Bucksport, a 1400 ton square rigged vessel, 200 feet in length, that was lost on an early voyage from Rangoon to Liverpool with a cargo of rice. Some of the Ginn-built schooners were used in the fishing and coastal trades, faster ones being employed to carry passengers and freight to Portland, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Several sailed to the Caribbean or Europe, and many foundered at sea. 4 Captain Ginn was reputed to have been the first trader to import foreign goods into Bucksport. James and Ann Ginn had six sons and six daughters, one of whom was William Riggs Ginn, also a successful shipbuilder, who stayed in Bucksport. Another was Abraham, born in 1773 and listed as a leading man in Orland. He married Hannah Downes in 1794.5 Together,

Educating a Young Yankee

3

living in North Orland, ten miles from Orland village proper, on land purchased by Captain Ginn, they had sixteen children, the fourth of whom was James (1801-1878), Edwin Ginn's father. There were eight issue from James Ginn's marriage in 1824 to Sarah (Sally) Blood (17991856), a daughter of Dr. Daniel and Esther Rideout Blood, of the Long Pond district of East Bucksport (a village near Dedham and northeast of North Orland). Long Pond lies east of East Bucksport, toward the hamlet of Santiago, under Peaked Mountain. The Bloods were of Puritan stock, descended from settlers in Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The father of Daniel, also Daniel Blood, was born in Croton, Massachusetts in 1749 and killed during the Revolutionary War. Daniel Blood the younger (1777-1850) gained his medical training privately, not at one of the new American nation's four existing medical colleges.6 He also farmed in East Bucksport. In 1796, he married Esther Rideout, also from Hollis, the daughter of a Revolutionary War survivor. She was the fourth of nine children. In addition to Sarah, the third born, she gave birth to seven children. Dr. Blood was the elder brother of Mighill Blood (1777-1852), Bucksport's first permanent Christian minister, whose portrait hangs in the town's Congregational church. Preceded in the 1790s by Abraham Cummings, an eccentric Baptist; Jonathan Sewall; and Abijah Wines, Mighill Blood arrived in 1803 after the town meeting had appropriated $300 ($3,615 in 2002) for his annual stipend. Mighill Blood was a Dartmouth College graduate (in 18oo) who had studied theology privately in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In Bucksport, he first preached in various houses provided by Captain Ginn and others. Then the church members constructed the First Trinitarian Church, where Blood presided until 1840. The first chronicler of Bucksport described him as less than a brilliant preacher, but sound in theology, "strong in argument, wise in council, and highly esteemed by his people." Moreover, "it may truly be said of him," Buck continued, "that he was a man of peace."7 When James Ginn and Sarah Blood married, she was heavy with her first child, who was born four months later. Four years later the second arrived, with others following at close and steady intervals. Edwin was the seventh child and fourth son. 8 In his own slim autobiography, Edwin Ginn mentions only one of his siblings, Frederick, born in 1830. The area of what is now Orland was originally termed Alamoosook, an Abanaki word meaning place of many fish-alewives, shad, and bass; the lake that today defines Orland carries the same name. The

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Educating a Young Yankee

river which flows through Orland was and is called Narramassic, or "hard to find," in the same language. Later, in colonial times, Orland was named Eastern River after the branch of the Penobscot that bounds Orland on the west. Lake Alamoosook and Toddy Pond feed the Narramassic River, which is called the Orland River as it bisects the village and before it runs into the Eastern River. Orland, by whatever name, has thus always been focused on its access both to the tidal salt water lower Penobscot River and to freshwater lakes and streams. Supplies of good water, vast stands of white pine, and a pioneering spirit attracted the first settlers to the region, not necessarily to the acidic soils of the scraggly farms which they carved out of forested land, and on which generations of tough women and men attempted to feed and keep themselves. The first colonial expedition to the area was led by Governor Thomas Pownal of Massachusetts in 1759. He sought to prevent raids from French Canada; Fort Pownal consequently was erected on Cape Jellison on the western side of the river. He and his accompanying soldiers also found the nearby lands enticing. Three years later, the Great and General Court (the legislature) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony issued major land grants for the region. A group of worthy petitioners from Haverhill, Massachusetts, received one of those grants, for the vast forested expanse between the Penobscot and St. Croix Rivers (i.e., to the northern borders of what is today Maine). The captain of the sloop that sailed in 1762 to explore the new lands along the lower reaches of the Penobscot River was Jonathan Buck. He and his co-religionists from Haverhill set out the six townships (originally "plantations") of what today are the towns of Bucksport, Orland, Castine, Sedgwick, Blue Hill, and Surry. By 1763, Buck had begun building his own town in the wilderness, cutting down massive virgin pines and reserving one lot for a parson, one for schools, and one for Harvard College. 9 A year later, Joseph Gross, who had helped build Fort Pownal, settled in Orland, Buck's Plantation #2. Others, including Gross's brother and a handful of well-connected Bostonians, followed, and the village's first road was laid out. Two years later, the town had a sawmill and a gristmill, but a poor harvest in 1775 produced severe difficulties for Orland's twelve families, and the revolutionary war years were not at all comfortable. Buck raised the sth Militia Company of Lincoln County from among

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the local men of all six "plantations." This Company sought to contain a British force that had landed on the Castine Peninsula. The British constructed earthen Fort George, which dominated the commerce of Penobscot River and Bay and the surrounding townships. In 1779, a large fleet of thirty-seven ships and over 2,ooo men from the Massachusetts Bay Colony attempted to relieve the Bucksport and Orland settlers, but the much smaller British force, composed of seven ships and 750 men, administered a major defeat. It was one of the most telling American naval losses before Pearl Harbor. Afterwards, the British burned Bucksport, and Buck and others trekked to Bangor and then laboriously home to distant Haverhill. After the war, the fortunes of Bucksport and Orland revived, and settlers once again began arriving from Massachusetts. Buck and others returned and rebuilt the eponymous settlement, which held its first town meeting in 1792. Within a few years, the inhabitants of Bucksport had begun transforming their towering pines into masts for schooners, barks, and brigantines. Orland was also growing, and throughout the 1790s annual town meeting warrants contained articles seeking a proper name for Plantation #2. "The person who would pay the most money could name the town," stated an article in the 1798 warrant. Received Orland history suggests that Joseph Lee, of the Virginia Lee family, had been making a fortune procuring timber locally for ships' masts, and selling them to the British. One of his ships, a brig built in the town in 1798 by Captain James Ginn, was called the Orland, and Lee, the elected town clerk in 18oo, proceeded to purchase the rights to name the town; Orland was incorporated in that year. 10 It may say something decisive about the character of both Orland and Bucksport that, when Maine voted in 1819 to separate from Massachusetts, all forty-eight male Orland voters (and ninety-three of the 101 voters in Bucksport) cast their ballots against the split. However, Bancock County, in which new jurisdiction both towns were then situated, voted narrowly in favor of secession. Earlier, in 1816, the male heads of households in Orland town meeting voted 13 to 8 against separating from Massachusetts, but there is no record of which side the Ginns favored. In 1840, Orland's population (including persons in North Orland and East Orland) numbered 1,381, including four Ginn families. Bucksport, in 1840, counted 3,015 inhabitants and three families of Ginns.l 1 Maine then had a total population of 501,000. In 188o, when Maine had

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grown to 649,000, Orland was a town of 1,689 citizens and Bucksport had 3,047 persons. In 2000, Orland's census listed 2,134 persons. Ginn himself, the future publisher, describes the isolated, north-facing high hillside farm on which he was born as full of rocks and rocky outcrops. With distant views of Brewer Lake to the north and Bucksport and the Penobscot River to the west, the land must have been purchased for its trees (for shipbuilding), and not for its stunning outlook or the richness of its soil. The farm, Ginn writes, "gave me plenty of exercise in picking the stones from the newly plowed land, in spreading the hay, raking after the cart, cutting the firewood, taking care of the horses, the cows, and the sheep, and in doing other chores .... " Ginn describes his youth as "blessed with poverty." 12 Despite the existence of older brothers and sisters, he reports that he did the responsible work of the large household. When he was seven, he milked two cows morning and night. At nine, a slight young man weighing seventy pounds, he reports being left "entirely alone" during the winter to take care of the animals, cut the firewood, draw the water, and do other tasks. He built the morning fires and hugged the old kitchen stove for warmth. Where were the other children? "I always dreaded" searching for straying cows on a foggy night, Ginn remembered. But from following them and discovering where the cows had gone, and being able to discern them only from atop the highest tree stumps, Ginn learned a practical lesson: "the importance of climbing an eminence that would command the situation, whatever it might be." 13 Another of his favorite aphorisms flowed from being a poor youth. He gathered beechnuts, a very slow process, in one year selling the entire harvest for 50 cents. But he considered himself well paid. He also gathered old pieces of discarded scrap iron, selling them for a half cent a pound. "I shall never forget the few dollars I earned in these ways ... ," he wrote. "We make it altogether too easy for our children to get the things they want." 14 Ginn was proud of his early frugality and self-reliance. "When I wanted playthings I had to make them"-water wheels, sleds, and sawmills. "If every boy and girl could have the benefit of the lessons learned on a farm they would make better men and women," Ginn decided much later. Young persons nowadays, he said in about 1906, "turn away from manuallabor as irksome, and are too young to realize the part it plays in the building up of character." 15 Going to school in Ginn's youth provided welcome relief from farm

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7

chores. In addition, said Ginn, "some of us ... had a real thirst for knowledge, which was not lessened because of the meager opportunities for acquiring it." 16 Ginn was regarded as bookish, a propensity that he inherited from his mother, along with a strong interest in formal education. (His father supposedly contributed a commercial flair and strong business ethics to the emerging character of young Ginn.) Locally, Ginn was known as a smart lad who seemed strange because he preferred reading in the farmhouse rather than playing with the other boys. The school year in his youth was but two months in winter and two in summer, largely devoted to reading, spelling, history, geography, "parsing," and "ciphering," or arithmetic. The village school itself was in North Orland, not far from his home and across from North Orland's "Granite Cemetery." No matter how brief and episodic Ginn's short spells of schooling may have been, they whetted his appetite for a lifetime of further intellectual growth. In 1855, by which time Ginn's local schooling had largely concluded, the town's 741 pupils (half of the town's population) between 4 and 21 were taught by 10 men (in the winter) and 15 women (in the summer) in 9 school houses. These schools were located about two miles apart because the students were "stiller in school and prosecute their studies with more success when required to take active and brisk exercise in the open air.... A 2-mile walk is not too much for a person who is confined 3 hours to hard study." Anyway, children in 1855, said an Orland teacher, were being brought up "too tenderly." 17 The pupils used the inside layers of birch bark for their slates or notebooks, and wrote on them with pens made from goose quills and ink from maple bark. If they failed to apply themselves to their lessons, teachers switched them with cattails. Whispering was punished by putting cayenne pepper on their tongues; mouths were closed with sticking plaster. Attendance was not made mandatory in Maine until1875. Before that time, about 50 to 6o percent of eligible and registered students actually attended school in Orland. However, although most Maine men ended their schooling at 18, in Orland during this period the men stayed in school until age 20. Parents, said an 1868 instructional sheet in Orland, had a "special and primary responsibility in securing the regular and prompt attendance of their children .... " Parents were asked to "manifest an interest in the progress and studies of their children,

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Educating a YcJUng Yankee

encourage them to study and talk about the lessons of the day and those of the morrow ... and show them that their success [was] recognized and appreciated." Parental neglect caused pupils to fall behind. 18 Whether or not these tough-minded but progressive sentiments accurately reflected an enlightened approach to schooling and its merits among Orland' s Yankee leadership and his own parents, Ginn had long left Orland, for good. Although bookish, he, at least, had received a less formally intense education than that to which the youth of Orland were later exposed. Indeed, James Ginn sought to round out young Edwin's character in other ways. Because his health may have been regarded as "tenuous," Ginn's father decided that the boy needed to gain "some ruggedness" for his constitution. 19 Consequently, Ginn was sent at age thirteen by his father to cook for a crew of lumberjacks felling trees in a remote camp. "I enjoyed the work immensely," writes Ginn, who fed the lumbermen on pork and beans, good bread and molasses, salt, and fresh meat. He was also responsible for fetching water from a nearby brook on dark winter evenings, a chore that made him fearful after the lumberjacks had told wild and frightening stories about bears and wolves prowling around the edge of the camp. Such experiences build character, Ginn conceded, but he was willing that his own children should be spared similar bouts of character building by fear. When he was fourteen, as befitted the son of a sometime shipwright, Ginn set sail on a fishing schooner, cooking for a crew bound for the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. He did not see land for four and a half months. Later he well remembered long watches on the deck on calm moonlit nights when the only sounds were a slight creaking of the boom as the ship rolled. Those were times for "deep thought, with no living thing to disturb one's meditation." Ginn acquired a feeling for and knowledge of tides, winds, ocean currents, fogs, and the fishing industry. The lessons for life learned on this voyage were many, Ginn relates, but a key one was "if you want to catch fish, keep your hook well baited."20 For the next five years, Ginn sailed to the Grand Banks each summer. During the rest of the year he helped his parents with the farm and the farm chores. Meanwhile, he also attended secondary school, first at Orland's High School Institute, which had eighty-two scholars studying English and the classics in 1851, and then at the Bucksport Seminary. The Institute had no one to teach Latin well, hence Ginn's shift to the

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Seminary in Bucksport. By this time, Ginn's family had moved off the farm into the very center of the village of Orland, occupying a modest wood frame house along the Narramassic River, where the shipyards were. It now is the manse of the local Methodist church. Ginn walked 2.5 miles each day to the seminary in Bucksport, and 2.5 miles home. That seminary was unable to satisfy Ginn's educational aspirations. As a boarder, aged sixteen, Ginn therefore went to the Universalist Church's Westbrook Seminary, in southern Maine, then near Portland, now a part of the city. His elder brother Daniel preceded him and his young sister Harriet also attended the Seminary and its allied Female College with Edwin, although he mentioned neither sibling in his slim account of his time there. Edwin Ginn entered Westbrook in 1854 and graduated in 1858, studying arithmetic, grammar, and Latin in the autumn term of 1855, and Latin, bookkeeping, arithmetic, natural history, and rhetoric in the spring term of 1856. (The course listings for his other terms-three each year-are not available.) All classes were held in a two-story, square, Federal-style, brick building with tower and cupola, now called Alumni Hall. Ginn was elected in 1855 to the school's prestigious Eromathian Adelphi Society, its premier debating club, so clearly he was popular. Ginn was one of about 193 students in those years, 71 of whom were girls. Tuition costs varied, from $1 per term for penmanship to $5 for basic English instruction and $7 for "highest" English tutoring. Individual music lessons cost $6 per term. Students also paid $2-40 a week if they lived and took their meals in the Seminary's gentleman's boarding house, or privately. 21 At some point during these years of secondary schooling, Ginn felt that he lacked the power of concentration. This supposed deficiency turned him to the game of chess, which he found "a great help . . . in learning to put my mind upon the great thing in hand .... " 22 Westbrook Seminary, a coeducational boarding school founded in 1831 (but opened in 1834) by the Kennebec Association of Universalists to promote piety and morality, was much more secular than denominational. Yet, the Seminary was established so that Universalist young people could be educated in an environment that would not conflict with or refute their religious beliefs. They also were compelled to attend the Universalist church on the Seminary's grounds. The Seminary was self-described as a place unsuited for the idle, the wayward, or

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Educating a Young Yankee

those who were averse to study. Long after Ginn's time, the Seminary added a women's junior college (1925) and, in 1970, became Westbrook College, once again a co-ed institution. Subsequently, in 1996, it became the Westbrook campus of the University of New England, focusing on preparation for the health professions. Universalism provided a central focus of Ginn's young life. His grand-uncle's pursuit and creed clearly provided one of several crucial compasses during the formative years of his youth. Indeed, it is evident from an examination of Ginn's educational record that his early life was shaped by Universalists and the liberal beliefs and spiritual approaches of Universalism. As late eighteenth-century defectors from orthodox Congregationalism, the early Universalists were uncomfortable with the predestinarianism of the majority of their fellow New England Protestants. They favored the possibility of ultimate, universal, salvation and believed in the universal fatherhood of god and the universal brotherhood of humankind. Universalism challenged its followers to reach out and embrace marginalized members of society; it was the first denomination to ordain women, in 1863. Many of its prominent adherents were abolitionists before the Civil War. Others were prison reformers, and Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. Universalists were optimistic theologically, affirming a benevolent deity. Universalists were truth seekers. They were theologically humane, ethical, democratic, suspicious of aristocratic privilege, and antagonistic to anything that even hinted at theocratic governance. Indeed, the whole notion of creating a "church" was anathema; early adherents preferred to think of themselves as belonging to a society or a meetinghouse, like the Quakers. Their leaders were preachers, not clergy. Thomas Starr King was a Universalist preacher credited with defining the distinction between Unitarians and Universalists. The latter were more evangelical, and Horace Greeley even took Universalism into the West. According to King, Universalists believed "that God is too good to damn people, and ... Unitarians believe that people are too good to be damned by God. " 23 Many of the first converts to Universalism were Baptists, and some were disgruntled or new-thinking Methodists or Congregationalists. The first "church" was established in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1779, and the first general meeting to establish the Universalist Church took place

Educating a Young Yankee

11

in Oxford, Massachusetts, in 1785. There the believers adopted a charter and became a new denomination. Later, Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence and a convert to Universalism, helped to promote a national organization and a "declaration of faith" to which Universalists could subscribe, but most of the then recently developed societies of the denomination preferred to remain locally independent. Until about the time of Ginn's birth, Universalism continued to be regarded as a heretical sect. There may have been a mere fifty Universalist preachers in 1820, and the existing state and other societies of the church were small, scattered, and defensive. Universalists were barred well into the nineteenth century from testifying under oath in court proceedings in several New England states. But by the 184os, Universalists were sufficiently secure and numerous to advocate temperance and oppose slavery. One of their own became an outspoken pacifist and launched an experimental utopian community in western Massachusetts. Others promoted education, chartering a dozen academies or secondary schools for their flock before 1852. By that time, if not a few years before, Universalists would have ceased thinking of themselves as religious outsiders. By mid-century, amid the rapidly moving kaleidoscope of American Christianity, Universalism was regarded as an acceptably mainstream Protestant pursuit, especially in Maine and the remainder of New England. Nearly a century later, in 1942, the Universalist General Convention became the Universalist Church of America. Nineteen years later it merged with the larger American Unitarian Association to become the Unitarian Universalist Association. At seventeen, when Ginn was at Westbrook, he contemplated training for the ministry. Fortunately, as Ginn himself later recalled, he consulted with the Seminary's leader. The principal, President Rev. James Partelow Weston, suggested that Ginn should instead focus on a general preparation for higher learning, with particular emphasis on achieving a broad liberal education. Ginn reported that Weston, 40, was "sympathetic, considerate, a wise counselor, kind to the well-intentioned, and judicious to the erring." Weston, a Bowdoin College graduate, suggested that a liberally educated man would be prepared for all kinds of work, and that Ginn should not rush a decision until after he had graduated from the seminary. That was divine providence at work, Ginn subsequently wrote, for "I would probably have made but a second-rate preacher, whereas I have been able to do pretty good work in ... publishing.... " 24

12

Educating a Young Yankee

In order to pay Westbrook's fees, Ginn, an excellent penman, taught handwriting. Apparently, in 1854 or 1855, Ginn told the benevolent President Weston that he lacked funds sufficient to remain at the Seminary. Weston "recognized the boy's worth and gave him the opportunity to remain at Westbrook by appointing him as assistant penmanship instructor." 25 Ginn also taught school one winter, presumably taking leave from Westbrook. He was still seventeen when he began instructing seventy-five pupils in the only school in an unnamed country district. He was in charge of teaching the very young as well as the fully mature-men older than Ginn himself. Teaching them consisted both of giving instruction and of maintaining discipline; Ginn used a wooden ruler to enforce his regulations, even on young men twice his size. Doing so led to discomfort in at least a section of the district; Ginn was accused of behaving much too arbitrarily. As a result, and after protests by mothers and fathers, he lost his first teaching job and learned another lesson: " ... it is not wise to lay down arbitrary rules in the government of a school." 26 Ginn was twenty in 1858 when he trudged along an old cart path that led from the Somerville (Massachusetts) Powder House up the eastern side of Walnut Hill to the old stone walls that marked the lofty site of Tufts College, which Ginn entered with the class of 1862. The Universalist Church had founded the college five years before atop the barren hill astride the line dividing the cities of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. Although Tufts, like so many institutions of higher learning in pre-Civil War America, developed out of a denominational concern for the training and nurturing of preachers, the establishment of the College also satisfied Universalists who sought a liberal training institute in the arts and sciences. One of the motivating individuals was Hosea Ballou 2nd, who became the College's first president. From the 1830s, Ballou had attempted to convince leaders of the denomination that the advance of Universalism and of Universalist ideals demanded successful and broad-based seminaries and schools, culminating in a capstone college on a hill. By 1847, there were 700,000 Universalists, 700 Universalist clergy, 18 state Universalist conventions, and So other associations. 27 Other Christian sects had founded and operated networks of schools and colleges; defensively, and for the instruction of Universalist youth, Ballou said that Universalism should do the same. Yet, there was an element among the Church opposed to sectarianism; it believed that a proper college

Educating a Young Yankee

13

should focus on general science and liberal learning. Others feared the establishment of an institution too feeble to compete with established collegiate institutions. They preferred that Universalists should go to Harvard College, which was run by Unitarians and therefore was trustworthy. Moreover, Ballou was a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers before he became Tufts' founding president. Ballou was a peacemaker within the denomination and without, a linguist, a scholar rather than a polemicist, a poet, a Universalist preacher, a school teacher, and a leader who by temperament and inclination avoided the kinds of heated theological arguments which were so common in mid-century America. Before assuming control of Tufts, Ballou had been the first secretary of the Boston Association of Universalists, pastor for many years of a Universalist church in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, the editor of a Universalist scholarly theological magazine, and a man so serious and so accomplished that he must have been a role model for the first generation of students at Tufts. To Ginn's ultimate benefit, Ballou almost singlehandedly shaped the curriculum and ethos of Tufts' early years. Indeed, by the time that the College actually opened for instruction in 1854, Ballou had investigated the instructional methods and administrative organization of the established institutions of higher learning in New England; Tufts' teaching in Ginn's time was appropriately derivative. Beginning with six, later nine, students learning Greek and Latin, and mathematics, in 18541855, Ballou's still rural, pastoral college (despite its modern proximity to Boston) soon had thirty students in 1855-1856, one building, and four instructors. Within a few more years, student numbers swelled to fifty-three. Ginn, one of that number, lived in the second or third of the structures to be erected on the hill-dormitories to house the early students in the residential setting that Ballou preferred. Students and faculty were required to attend daily morning prayers in the chapel, and public worship on Sundays and holy days at Tufts or in area churches. Ginn may also have attended biblical exercises each Saturday evening. By Ginn's time, Tufts provided instruction in Greek, Latin, and classical literature; in French and German, in rhetoric, logic, and English literature; in mathematics and natural science (chemistry was taught only from the mid-186os); in intellectual philosophy, moral science, and political economy; and in ancient history and American history. Tufts did not offer religious instruction per se, although students in the

Educating a Young Yankee

Edwin Ginn, c. 1868-1870, from a copy in the Westbrook College History Collection, University of New England

186os were offered natural theology and revealed religion as electives in their final year. Although Ballou begged for books for the nascent library, Ginn would at first have been surrounded by a minimal collection; it grew to 6,ooo volumes in 1861, largely Harvard College library discards. Ginn and the other male students of the era (Tufts, as Jackson Col-

Educating a Young Yankee

lege, enrolled women in 1892) were admitted only if they could produce certificates of good moral character and were able to pass examinations in Greek, Latin, mathematics, and history. Specific texts had to be mastered-among them Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, and Xenophon's Anabasis; and two more modern histories-plus geography, arithmetic, and algebra. Tufts' tuition was $35 ($492 in 2002) a year, plus a surety bond of $200 ($2,810 in 2002). Average expenses for students in the mid-186os were estimated at $187 ($2,627) a year, including room and board, and library fees. Ginn lived first in Hall A, later called Middle Hall, West Hall, and Packard Hall, and shared an upper floor room with Albert Greene Longfellow, of Whitefield, Maine. "My room was very meagerly furnished. I think I could almost count upon my back the number of slats in the bed I slept on, for there was but one husk mattress between them and me, and they were about a foot apart." In his second year, Ginn roomed in Hall B (later Richardson House) with Longfellow. Then they split up, Ginn living during his junior year by himself in newly constructed East Hall. Longfellow moved in with someone else down the corridor in East Hall, which housed a total of fifty students on three floors, plus a ground floor dining area. In his final year, Ginn lived alone in Hall A, now West Hall, once more. West Hall was plain brick, four stories high, and only 37 feet by 57 feet in length and width. Students roomed on the upper floors and dined on the ground floor. A barn was attached to provide toilet facilities and to house Ballou's horse and the farming implements with which the College kept the hill mown and raised root crops and vegetables. The College fed its students with those vegetables, and, according to a poem written by Ballou, frequently on "salt fish." 28 Ginn also reported boarding himself (with a local family, perhaps?) for $1 ($14) a week, but says no more about this formative part of his college experience.29 Whatever Ginn ate, no matter how he slept, and however hard he studied, a photograph from this era or a little later shows a handsome, bearded, young man, with piercing eyes and a slight smile. His dark beard is cropped in the severe style later made popular by President Lincoln. Only as an older man did Ginn become partial to mustaches, along with a flowing, full beard. Tufts, even in its first years and with but a handful of students, had secret societies, the forerunners of fraternities. Then as later, some students were blackballed. "I was not among the favored ones," said Ginn,

16

Educating a Young Yankee

who described himself as having too serious a "turn of mind." "Besides, I had no pennies for that sort of thing." 30 Outside the secret societies, hazing existed between the college classes, and a contemporary recalled a night of fright when sophomores (Ginn would have been among them) were rumored to be preparing to attack freshmen. The writer, later a minister in Boston, slept that night with a hammer in his hand and a hatchet under his pillow. The sophomores, he said, in turn, nailed up their windows and barricaded their doors. 31 What little else we know about Ginn's feelings for his four years at Tufts comes from a very brief published statement: "In the midst of my course my eyes failed me." Professors advised him to give up his schoolwork for a year, but Ginn insisted upon graduating with his class, or "not at all."' 2 He had partial sight, apparently, and Ginn says that his classmates were kind enough to read portions of the required texts to him. His grades, however, may have been affected adversely. In his freshman year, Ginn' s scores were near the mean of his thirteen classmates in history, at the mean in Greek and Latin, and near the very top in mathematics. Overall, nevertheless, by examination across the four subjects, Ginn ranked fifth in his class. At the end of his second year, with trigonometry and rhetoric added to the curriculum, Ginn still ranked fifth, in a class now reduced to twelve. By the end of March in Ginn's junior year, after more Latin and Greek, and courses in French, philosophy, reading, rhetoric, and history, he had slipped to seventh among the twelve students. Yet, he was assigned to prepare an English oration at the junior exhibition ceremonies. After taking required courses in astronomy, intellectual philosophy, mineralogy, rhetoric, German, ethics, and political economy, Ginn improved his class standing in his senior year, graduating sixth in a class of eleven. At the graduation ceremonies on July 9, 1862, he delivered a prescient, foreshadowing dissertation entitled "Apparent Success or Failure Not Always Real." The problems with his sight, whether or not they were responsible for his mixed success in examinations and his rank in class, reputedly changed his life work from being purely "literary" to business, "probably wisely." 33 Ginn graduated with a hard won B.A. and, a few years later, also achieved an M.A., awarded for $5 ($70) to students in good standing and of good moral character. Ginn is silent on the men who influenced him at Tufts, but Ballou, white-haired, ruddy-cheeked, and saintly-a formidable presence in

Educating a Young Yankee

17

the church and in New England higher education-must have provided a role model for the young, prim, bookish, religious son and grandson of Maine shipbuilders. Even some of Ballou's abilities as a conciliator may have appealed to Ginn's temperament and inclinations, and thus to Ginn's eventual advocacy of world peace. When Ginn was in the second half of his final year at Tufts, the course of the Civil War turned from skirmishes to serious, large-scale battles. In April1862, General Henry Wager Halleck won a signal victory for the Union forces at Shiloh, in southern Tennessee, and moved on to Corinth, Mississippi, a major rail junction. Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut swept up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico and took New Orleans. In the next months, about the time of Ginn's graduation ceremony, Union armies charged through Arkansas and New Mexico. Meanwhile, in the east and much closer to Ginn's consciousness, General George McClellan and the great army of the republic advanced slowly on Richmond. The decisive battles of the summer of 1862, and the very threatening Confederate counterattack on the Union troops, were about to follow: Shenandoah and Mechanicsville were Confederate triumphs, and the Union advance was halted. The second battle of Bull Run took place in August, and the bloodiest day of the war, or of any war, took place in September at Antietam; the ultimate victory of the Union was thereafter much in doubt. Ginn may have been ineligible to enlist on the Union side because of his eyesight. Otherwise he might have wished to serve in his greatgrandfather's vaunted Maine regiment, which bore so many losses at Antietam, but the Ginn record is silent about his views of the struggle between North and South, of his attitudes toward the bloody war, and of the nature of that war itself. Ginn's elder brother Frederick fought with distinction as a major in the Maine regiment throughout the war. We have no idea whether Ginn's later anti-war views were at all apparent during the Civil War while he was at Tufts, where sympathies clearly lay with President Lincoln and the Union, or afterwards when Ginn was struggling to earn a livelihood and pay back his debts. When Lincoln was elected president in 186o, Boston held mammoth torchlight parades that could be seen by sympathetic students and professors atop Walnut Hill. When Lincoln was inaugurated president in 1861, Ballou raised the American flag over the main college building, accompanied by much cheering and acclaim from the students. Bal-

Educating a Young Yankee

lou spoke movingly-his last public words-of the importance of the Union. All of the professors echoed his strong sentiments supporting Lincoln's leadership. After shots were fired at Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, to start the war between the states, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers and the Sixth Massachusetts regiment was quickly mustered in Faneuil Hall in Boston. Tufts' closed its doors for the day and sent its students proudly to salute the regimental parade. Later, after a setback to the Union cause at the battle of Baltimore, the Fifth Massachusetts Regiment under General Benjamin Franklin Butler was ordered to the front, and Tufts' students again cheered it on. 34 A benefactor of Tufts was George L. Steams, a wealthy abolitionist, who lived very close to the College in Medford and helped first to finance the underground railroad and John Brown's 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry; but we do not know whether the militant abolitionism of Steams and of so many other Bostonians and their friends ever influenced Ginn. What did Ginn think of President Lincoln's policies during and after the winning of the Civil War? Since his great-grandfather owned a slave, and was a militia officer, did any feelings arise in Ginn, either way? For now, those questions, like so many other imponderables about critical periods in Ginn's life, remain unanswerable.

CHAPTER TWO

In the Beginning Was the Book

Ginn amassed his fortune and contributed mightily to peace thanks to the liveliness of his textbooks. Before Ginn began preparing his own textbook contributions, educational publishing in the United States was a stodgy affair, with publishers neither providing nor teachers and pupils demanding written materials capable of holding the attention of young and inquiring minds. There were dozens of publishers, little attention to variety and quality, and very little communication between suppliers and consumers. Ginn changed the entire approach of textbook publishing in the United States; it is to his innovative acquisition and commissioning methods, his far-sighted awareness of how the textbook business would change and grow, his attention to detail and to the art of making books, and his intrinsic ability as a superb marketer, that we must credit the prosperity of Ginn & Co. But Ginn was also blessed with an inclusive, consultative manner that contributed to his early successes as an itinerant seller of books, as an effective publisher, as a promoter of peace, and, throughout, as a leader in the corporate and civic worlds. He developed into a public-spirited citizen who sought a better town, an improved Commonwealth, and a less war-filled world. The conclusion of the Civil War inaugurated a remarkable era of American expansionism, a maturing of America's sense of itself, and an appreciation of the formidable role of education and knowledge accumulation in ensuring the manifest destiny of the re-united nation. Ginn, with a vision of new kinds of texts to serve an expanding population hungry for education, was ready to feed that new market. At first, his

20

In the Beginning Was the Book

focus was on New England, where the post-war economy was strong, but the Union was fast increasing to thirty-seven states, with more to come. Alaska was about to be purchased, and a tide of immigrants from Europe was propelling the population of the United States beyond 36 million. The northeast, in particular, was poised to grow. There would be money for improved schooling materials. Public high schools were increasingly available and broad in their enrollments. Moreover, other states had followed Massachusetts in making education compulsory. The passage of the Morrill Act in 1865 encouraged the building of land grant universities; two years later, the national government established the Federal Bureau of Education. A telegraph line was extended beyond the eastern states, across the Mississippi River en route to the far west. Railways radiated westward from Omaha toward Sacramenta and the Pacific Ocean. It was a fateful globalizing time to create an innovative publishing firm. "In his vision," a publishing successor wrote of Ginn, "he saw millions of children trooping to the elementary schools throughout the land and tens of thousands of earnest students who would be enrolled in the high schools and in the state and private colleges that, he rightfully believed, would soon be rising in all parts of the Union." 1 He also envisaged a publishing house devoted entirely to texts, with but the occasional trade book that reinforced one or another of the main text lines. Ginn may never have written a formal business plan, but he instinctively knew how to sell himself and his wares. Graduating from Tufts in 1862 with no particular profession, few corporate contacts, a love of books, and burdensome borrowings of $1,200 ($23,094 in 2002), Ginn was forced to fend for himself. That incentive and a facile tongue soon turned him into a seller of textbooks. In that approach, Ginn followed his predecessor Alfred Smith Barnes, who established A. S. Barnes & Co. in Hartford in 1838. Before Barnes, the practice of textbook publishers was to sell to agents, not directly to school boards and teachers. But Barnes, who had learned about textbooks when he worked for D. F. Robinson & Co. and Robinson, Pratt & Co. in New York, carried texts in his saddlebags and rode the byways of New England introducing new mathematical and history books directly to teachers and professors. 2 Ginn built on Barnes. He and other traveling agency men visited schools, school boards, and individual high school principals and university leaders to procure the adoption of this or that textbook for all of

In the Beginning Was the Book

21

their standard classes. They worked on commission, like most visiting salesmen, but they won orders by touting the virtues of a standard text or a set of readers and seeking wholesale, multi-year, not individual, occasional, purchases. The quality of the product was ultimately crucial, but a winning personality, and the ability to ingratiate oneself to the persons in charge of class adoption, was equally critical. In Medford, possibly even before he graduated from Tufts, Ginn befriended a historian and cleric who, signally, also was a member of the local school board and was ultimately helpful in persuading the authorities there to give Ginn a very large order for geographies, readers, and arithmetic books. After graduating from Tufts, Ginn worked on commission for Clark, Austin, and Maynard, publishers of John Jacob Anderson's History of the United States (Philadelphia, 1855) and Brainerd Kellogg and Alonzo Reed, Graded Lessons in English. 3 Kellogg, of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and Reed popularized a method of diagramming sentences in order to advance the teaching of English grammar; their version long remained an integral part of the English curriculum in American schools. Ginn persuaded the city of Boston to adopt Anderson, a major coup. Later, Ginn went west to the then untouched Massachusetts towns of Acton and Lancaster, where he lost orders to a competitor. In Lonsdale, Rhode Island, however, he translated his own experience as a penmanship instructor into a large order. In New Haven, Connecticut, he managed after several carefully planned visits to obtain large adoptions of several texts despite the authors of those text series having failed time and again to elicit attention from the local schools. "After that," Ginn crowed, "almost any situation would have been mine for the asking." 4 In distant Pittsburgh, however, he fought a series of hard battles against a local publisher and local authors, going ward by ward to plead the case of his books and their quality as teaching tools. Succeeding, he left Pittsburgh for the east. Within six weeks, the local publisher had persuaded the various ward committees to rescind their actions. Although Ginn refused to specify what he did to recoup his loss, the young salesman nevertheless somehow once again trumped the local publisher, his books remaining on order in Pittsburgh for fifteen more years. Ginn's gloss on this experience presumably speaks to the tactics of his rival, as well to his own Yankee methods and business mores. "If I had wined and dined my books into Pittsburg [sic], think you they would have made a similar record? I am proud to say that throughout

22

In the Beginning Was the Book

my whole career, in whatever position I have been placed, I have never given any man a cigar, a glass of wine, or a dinner, to further my interests. " 5 Osgood and English, the Pittsburgh competitor, recognizing Ginn's talents, especially his ability to sell books of high standard, offered him a responsible and well-paying position in its firm. But, reports Ginn, he did not believe in its books. "I have to work for the things I believe in," he told A. H. English, and they parted friends. In the same year, presumably 1866, Joseph F. Ainsworth, of the publisher Crosby, Nichols & Co., for whom Ginn was then winning orders, asked him to edit its North American Review, a prestigious national weekly. But it was "of no financial value," so Ginn, having already earned enough to have paid off the debts that he had accumulated at Tufts, and making good money on the road, declined this offer as well. 6 The same firm next offered Ginn the opportunity to publish a commanding text-George L. Craik's English of Shakespeare (Boston, 1857). It is not clear why the publisher wanted to sell one of its hot books to its young salesman, or what occasioned this unexpected and golden opportunity, but Ginn said "yes," at once. "I knew that Shakespeare was soon to be a prominent study in high schools and colleges." 7 That was the origin of Ginn & Co. Ginn, it appears, had decided to become a publisher in his own right, and had approached Ainsworth. Ginn believed more strongly in Shakespeare, and in Craik's explications, than did Crosby, Nichols & Co. Craik was a professor of history and English literature in Queen's College, Belfast, and Ainsworth may have been planning an American discussion of Shakespeare. But, by 186g, a year after the book had become Ginn's, Harvard College was officially urging students to prepare themselves for the study of English by mastering Craik or John Milton's Comus (1634). Ginn's career, and that of the new firm, looked promising. Boston already nurtured four prominent publishing enterprises, and about sixteen of niche significance. Ticknor & Fields had begun primarily as a bookseller, printer, and binder in 1832, but within a few years William Davis Ticknor started to publish his own line of medical books. By the end of the 183os, James Thomas Fields was an energetic assistant, and in 1843 he became the junior partner in William D. Ticknor & Co., a firm soon publishing the most important British and American writ-

In the Beginning Was the Book

23

ers, such as John Greenleaf Whither, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Browning, and Charles Dickens. The now prosperous firm was called Ticknor & Fields from 1854, but it faltered in 1868 and soon became Fields & Osgood and James R. Osgood & Co., Osgood having been Fields' junior partner. Osgood's entity then merged with Henry Oscar Houghton's Riverside Press (established in 1852) and Hurd & Houghton (founded in 1864) in 1878 to create Houghton, Osgood & Co. Houghton was a prudent, cautious, provincial, obstinate businessman and Osgood a brilliant, even flamboyant, editor who disliked submitting to Houghton's wilLB Within two years they had parted company, the business taking the names of Houghton and George H. Mifflin (who had joined Hurd & Houghton in 1868) to create Houghton, Mifflin & Co., subsequently Boston's leading house. Charles C. Little (also from Maine) and James Brown began Little, Brown & Co. in 1837 (originally Charles C. Little & Co.) to produce law books, to publish the writings of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and to offer several prominent histories of the United States. Later the firm introduced studies of British poets, in ninety-six volumes. Lee & Shepard [William Lee and Charles A. B. Shepard], both well experienced in the publishing world, started another firm in 1861. It sold photographic albums, children's stories, and the writings of abolitionists. Ginn's efforts were soon to be noticed by Boston's big four, but his publishing efforts at first were lumped with those of the many specialized little firms. Within twenty years, Ginn Brothers (Frederick was a partner from 1868), Ginn & Heath as it became from 1876 to 1885, or Ginn & Co, thereafter, rivaled its esteemed competitors in Boston. The enterprise run by Ginn throughout all of these and subsequent years grew in esteem and wealth largely because of Ginn's eye for authorial talent, his high bookmaking standards, and his awareness of how best to meet the real needs of teaching and learning. From the first, Ginn insisted upon seeking out and nurturing world-class authorities in important fields, often pairing them with experienced textbook writers and secondary school teachers. He also was prepared to publish trade books in fields, like the classics, allied to his main texts, in order to demonstrate his concern for scholarship and support for specialists. Unlike some of his competitors, he published texts across a broad

In the Beginning Was the Book

spectrum, refusing to specialize in only one field of knowledge. This decision led him and the firm into unexpectedly successful areas, like music and foreign language instruction. Esteemed Harvard professor of English literature George Lyman Kittredge remembered that there were many excellent texts in circulation when Ginn began his firm. "But he was not content to peddle out the books that he found in existence, even though he knew that he could make money enough in that way." Instead, reported Kittredge, Ginn had "an abiding faith in scholarship. He believed that knowledge-expert, specialized knowledge-was somehow power." Ginn was able to induce specialists to translate their learning into texts. He understood the difficulty of persuading scholars to place their information before the public in an intelligible fashion. But "he believed that [doing so] was a consummation devoutly to be wished, and that, if he devoted his life to the effort, the thing could be done." Kittredge continued: "Think what it meant to scholars, big and little, to come into contact with ... Ginn, who was not only full of life, but who believed in them, and could persuade them that their learning was no mere private pleasure of their own, but a possession of actual use to the community."9 Ginn in every way refused to be hidebound, inventing special readers-"Classics for Children"-for very young grade school students in fields that had previously employed tedious, starchy texts. Ginn himself began the series with an edited and abridged version of Sir Waiter Scott's Lady of the Lake (1847), to which he added a glossary. Ginn, in a two-page preface, hoped that children as young as nine would read his simplified version of Scott's great poem. For them, he had provided basic and copious explanations of words and included historical sketches about the Scottish Highlands and King James V. Many pupils would never reach high school, so they needed, believed Ginn, to be exposed to Scott's graphic language and charming rhythms in a friendly translation.10 Ginn also organized a version of Plutarch's Lives, from a translation that had been previously published in Boston by Little, Brown & Co. Ginn's contribution was a two-page preface (W. F. Alien supplied the several historical introductions), plus minor abridgements of the original text and a limited number of definitional annotations. In his preface, Ginn suggests that personalities of great men always prove entrancing, and provide a focus around which to group historical events.

In the Beginning Was the Book

Further, he reports having chosen to limit his own comments to "a few brief notes." They are, as advertised, extremely brief. Ginn explained: Otherwise, "in looking up special information on any point, one is apt to get too much interested in the matter, and so annotate much more fully than is necessary for an understanding of the text." Notes can prove more harmful than helpful, he continued, "as they tend to draw the pupil's attention from the proper subject of study"-the narrative itself. Ginn goes on churlishly to complain that the study of history in American schools too often compelled schoolchildren to learn dates instead of impressing on them "a few great facts." 11 Surpisingly, too, Ginn Brothers published a remarkable number of scholarly and educational journals. Titles such as the Political Science Quarterly, the Yale Review, the Philosophical Review, the Classical Review, the Zoological Bulletin, and the American Naturalist were in their stable, a function of Ginn's recognition of the importance of forging strong bonds to the world's best academic minds. In the early years, before his firm was well established, Ginn sought the advice of recognized academic figures at Harvard College, and sometimes at Yale, Cornell, and Columbia colleges, regarding the kinds of new books that were desired at the university level and in the secondary schools. In that manner, Ginn soon made the acquaintance of future Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, the great Harvard scholar Charles Eliot Norton, and Edward Everett Hale, Boston's stirring Protestant preacher. Ginn cultivated intellectuals, especially the men who dominated their chosen subjects and could presumably prepare authoritative texts. In order to sell the results, Ginn (unlike his competitors) preferred to employ high school principals or teachers as his traveling agents; their knowledge and acquaintance with the classroom being persuasive. He favored young college graduates, too, "taken on because of their integrity, honesty, and alertness." 12 He valued the advice of elementary school teachers, and commissioned texts from the ones whom he respected. Lewis Parkhurst, for example, in 1886 was the principal of Winchester (Massachusetts) High School, where Ginn's children were students and in which town Ginn was to become politically active. When Ginn heard that Parkhurst was about to leave Winchester to become principal of Fitchburg (Massachusetts) High School, with a large increase of salary (from $1,500 to $2,000 [$28,843 to $38t457] a year, and the promise of substantial future raises), and/or was contemplating

In the Beginning Was the Book

becoming a banker in Kansas, Ginn quickly asked Parkhurst to join the publishing firm. Parkhurst asked Ginn if he were "serious." When Ginn affirmed that he was, Parkhurst immediately resigned from Winchester in the middle of a school year, and left teaching forever to spend the next forty-six years as a valued employee of Ginn & Co. Parkhurst claimed that the two men never discussed rates of pay, Parkhurst expecting that an inexperienced bookman like himself would have to start at the bottom. Ginn said, however, that he "would not want a man to work for him for any less than he could earn elsewhere," and Parkhurst thus began in Ginn's employment as a traveling agent at $2,000 a year, "with good spirits." 13 Ginn was quick to recognize the value of new pedagogical breakthroughs. Other publishers had rejected Luther Whiting Mason's passion for music in the elementary schools, and his fully graded series of progressive instructional manuals, but when Mason explained his approach, Ginn immediately understood how imaginative and effective it would be. Mason was superintendent of music in Cincinnati. The Mason method became one of Ginn's most profitable successes. Whether Ginn supplied what eastern schools were beginning to want, or whether he guided their tastes and elevated the quality of their adopted texts, and therefore the body of learning of new generations of Americans, in its first ten years his young publishing business produced fourteen Latin texts, primers, and grammars; ten books on the Greek language; ten for music teachers, including the Mason Music Course; two on geography; and twenty on a variety of other subjects, one of which became the standard geometry text for generations. His passion for Shakespeare, and a partnership with a leading scholar, led to a three-volume complete Shakespeare and then to a long-in-print twenty-three volume set of plays, and a variety of commentaries. From its opening days, Ginn Brothers cornered the classical market. An early Latin grammar went through five editions in its first year. Ginn then asked Joseph H. Alien, the brother of its author, to produce what became a very successful Latin primer. Both books, and their successors (with titles such as Latin for Today or Elements of Latin), became widely employed; generations of young people cut their Latin teeth on Ginn texts and on Ginn editions of Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, et al. So it was for Greek and Sanskrit. Ginn chose Professor William Watson Goodwin, an authority at Harvard, to write the firm's first concise Greek Grammar. Another Harvard colleague produced Greek Les-

In the Beginning Was the Book

sons and a book for beginners. Others edited versions of the writings of most of the important authors from Homer onward. Ginn was proud of these books, but also of the clear and advanced Greek typeface that the Ginn Brothers imported from Britain and employed to give a distinctive look to each of its editions. It is not evident how much call there was for Sanskrit, but Ginn Brothers offered several grammars, a primer, and a reader. It also published Chaucer in the original, and an Anglo-Saxon grammar and reader, all under the guidance of a worthy Harvard professor. For geometry, George A. Wentworth of Phillips Exeter Academy created the first of a series of mathematics books with clear diagrams in place of wordy explanations; theorems were demonstrated by symbols, and placed on the same page so that students could see all of the relevant information together. Wentworth's book was the first to encourage students to do their own original exercises alongside the theorems. The author, according to one of his students, "believed that you learn to do by doing and was a great advocate of insisting on the fundamental principles being drilled into a boy and then giving him plenty of problems." 14 The publisher was understandably excited when this new presentation swept the secondary schools of the country, and remained a best-selling text until World War I. Wentworth and Ginn also joined to produce a remarkable series of forty-one books on elementary school and high school arithmetic, analytical geometry, and so on. Parkhurst was very pleased with himself when he persuaded Yale College to adopt Wentworth' s analytical geometry as a standard text; Wentworth had attended Harvard. 15 The arithmetic texts broke with tradition by introducing decimal fractions before common fractions, and did so early in the sequence of instructional endeavors. The Wentworths, the Stickney Readers in English, the Knox-Heath language series, and the Blaisdell physiologies were the mainstays of Ginn's publishing operations, and the underpinnings of his fortune. The Stickney Readers were created by Jenny H. Stickney, principal of the Boston Training School for Teachers, for elementary schools. She also prepared a supplementary set of nature books. They taught children to be observant and be kind to animals and birds. In addition to the Stickney set, Ginn & Co. produced the Cyr Readers, by Ellen Cyr of Cambridge, Massachusetts, to arouse a love of literature. L. H. Jones' readers were adopted for exclusive use in Texas, and in Chicago. The Beacon Readers were organized by James Fassett, superintendent of

In tlze Beginning Was the Book

the Nashua, New Hampshire, schools. They used a "scientific" system of phonetics. In one year, the Beacon Readers sold 5oo,ooo copies. The Blaisdell books well met the legal requirements in most states during the second half of the nineteenth century for strenuous teaching about the dangers of the consumption of alcohol and narcotics. Without such a chapter, preaching temperance, many states would have refused to purchase the Blaisdells. Ginn, a strict Yankee teetotaler, doubtless supported the temperance crusade, and would have had no qualms about distibuting such a text. In the fields of geography and natural history, Ginn sponsored a remarkable series of books by a sometime Quincy, Massachusetts, elementary school principal (later superintendent of schools in San Bernardino, Calif., and superintendent of education in Cuba, under the U.S. occupation). The series included titles such as The Child and Nature and Brooks and Brook Basins, the latter to encourage young students to engage with their natural surroundings. All of the books in the series had clear maps suitable to beginners, and many woodcuts. Another of Ginn's successful lines was a series of six- and twelve-inch world globes; every classroom deserved a globe and, at one point in the late 1870s, Ginn' s company was making more money from the sale of globes than from books. The Montgomery histories included Leading Facts of English History and Leading Facts of American History. Vividly written, both became standard school texts adopted throughout the country, the one on American history selling 295,000 copies in fifteen months. Less successful, but among Ginn's favorite history texts, were an ancient history and a medieval and modern history, both by Philip Van Ness Myers of the University of Cincinnati. They were succeeded by James Harvey Robinson's college texts: An Introduction to the History of Western Europe (1902) and Medieval and Modern History (1916). Both introduced students to original sources. Robinson and Charles A. Beard, both of Columbia, wrote the Development of Modern Europe (1907). Shortly afterwards, Ginn persuaded James H. Breasted, of Chicago, one of the world's foremost Egyptologists, to prepare Ancient Times (1916), based on his lecture notes. Ginn also sponsored one of the first civics texts for high schools, Jesse Macy's Our Government: How it Grew, What it Does, and How it Does It (1886). Macy taught at Iowa College. Ginn & Co. came late to the preparation of books for the instruction of modern English in the schools, probably because the schools them-

In the Beginning Was the Book

selves had been slow to teach it. Ginn commissioned William Dwight Whitney of Yale to produce a grammar, which won high praise in the New York press, and at Harvard. Whitney said that he wrote the grammar in order to prevent students of English, like his own at Yale, from blundering. "I examine the students in English who come to Yale College," he told George Arthur Plimpton, "and if they had had the training from [my] ... book ... they would never have made the blunders they have made." 16 Whitney later supervised the preparation of a great dictionary. At the turn of the century, Ginn & Co. created what it called the Mother Tongue instructional series, edited and run by Kittredge of Harvard and Sarah L. Arnold of the Boston public schools, later dean of Simmons College. It is evident that Ginn had a deft publishing hand. Although he wrote little about his methods, and the history of the firm is remarkably reticent about the founder's genius, from his first days Ginn favored writers of great talent, even if the school and college markets might not have been ready for the innovative writings which his firm would prepare. He and his authors were also the first to simplify, but not write down to their readers. Whereas earlier textbooks were complete and thoroughly didactic, Ginn pioneered a genre that took instruction back to basics in a livelier way. It broke with tradition and was very well received in the schools, and by students. Earlier books were geared to rote learning; Ginn & Co. catered more to students who wanted to know why, where, or how, and its books raised questions about the material-the history or the Shakespearean commentary-being presented. Ginn, in contrast to his competitors, also favored lavish illustrations and attractive covers and bindings, which made his products stand out. Ginn' s bookmaking and business creed was "strict adherence to principle, punctuality, and the improvement of every moment." Idleness was abhorred, in true Puritan fashion. Doing one's duty was expected. "The policy of this house," he wrote, "has been along strict, arbitrary lines." His aim had always been "to swerve neither to the right nor to the left," and never to deviate from the straight and narrow way. "The life of a house depends ... upon the principles which guide its conduct." Financial success follows "the lines of uprightness." Good, he wrote, prevails in the end. Decay begins "the very moment the tiniest seed of corruption is sown." Furthermore, the road to wealth was always "actuated by principle." To be honorable at all times was es-

30

In the Beginning Was the Book

sential; "lost fortunes can be retrieved, lost character never." The "true business of this world," the very successful corporate leader concluded his explanation of the firm's success, "is to make men, not money." 17 But make money Ginn Brothers, Ginn & Heath, and Ginn & Co. certainly did. Backed initially by Samuel Dennis Warren, the founder of the great S. D. Warren paper company of Maine, from whom Ginn purchased all of his paper, and by several banks, Ginn soon could pay off his initial supporters and overtake all but the five oldest and largest American publishers in the competitive sale of books of all kinds. R. G. Dun & Co., the forerunner of Dun & Bradstreet, was initially very cautious in rating Ginn's prospects. In 1870 and 1871, Dun reported that the young firm's means were not large (probably $12,000 to $15,000 [$164,043 to $205,054]), but that it paid its bills "fairly" and was "considered safe for moderate credit." Ginn Brothers seemed "to be doing fairly and working up a good little business." In 1873, Dun praised the Ginns, if faintly: "Their books are selling well and it is thought they will do a very successful business if they don't try to carry too much sail." By the next year Ginn's business was worth about $4o,ooo ($577A14), in 1875, $5o,ooo ($764,584). Dun's reports commended the firm, but in 1876, he noted sharply, Ginn seemed to borrow freely. The owners were "shrewd and sharp but are pushed for ready means." In a few instances, they had to renew their outstanding notes. A year later, Dun wondered if Ginn & Heath lacked financial ability, notwithstanding the fact that Ginn himself was enterprising and believed that the firm was making a steady profit of $25,000 ($405,886) a year. Dun was skeptical, especially toward the end of that decade, and said that the firm's credit was not so strong. (Throughout the decade, Boston's assessors had valued the firm's real estate at between $5,000 and $25,000, for tax purposes. Ginn himself paid the usual $2 annual poll tax from 1870 through 1872.) In 1881, the assets of Ginn & Heath were nearly $150,000 ($2,685,905), with a reputed $9o,ooo ($1,611,543) annual profit. The Boston assessors valued the firm at $2o,ooo. Three years later, Ginn claimed that the business was worth $16o,ooo ($2,965,802); local banks told Dun & Co., that the firm was much less "troublesome" than previously, and was no longer asking for frequent loan renewals. "The firm keeps several bank accounts and use[d] its discount privileges to its limit." Dun reckoned that Ginn, Heath, & Co. was worth about $75,000, somewhat less than Ginn himself claimed. 18 The Boston tax assessment in 1884 was $35,ooo (or $647,000 in 2002 dollars).

In the Beginning Was the Book

}1

That $75,000 was worth the equivalent of $1,363,000 in 2002 dollars. 19 If Ginn's own personal fortune was, say, half of that in 1884, he was already well on the road to wealth, if not a commanding fortune. At the time, he owned a very large house in Winchester, Massachusetts, that was valued at $5o,ooo (in 2002 dollars about $909,ooo), and had a mortgage on it of $14,500 ($269,000). Those were substantial amounts, particularly for someone of frugal character. But many men of Boston, and several publishers, had substantially greater assets. One testament to the firm's success was the number of branch offices that were soon opened in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Columbus, St. Louis, Dallas, and Atlanta, the better to persuade purchasing authorities to adopt Ginn readers, grammars, primers, histories, and so on. In 1887, Ginn even established an office in London to sell books in Britain and to the overseas imperial market. Ginn texts were also available in Japan and the Ottoman Empire before the end of the nineteenth century. When the U.S. conquered Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, Ginn & Co., despite Edwin Ginn's aversion to war, was on hand to supply translated texts to the first administrators and their charges. The firm even opened an office in Manila. George Arthur Plimpton (1855-1936), later a noted bibliophile with a vast collection of rare textbooks and medieval manuscripts, ran the New York office of the firm, commuting from the family farmstead in Walpole, Massachusetts He was descended from a Deerfield, Massachusetts, sergeant who had been captured by Indians during the French and Indian wars and been burned at the stake. He was the grandson of a noted agricultural tool manufacturer and also a grandson of an early shovel maker (Oliver Ames) whose sons financed the Union Pacific Railroad's crossing of the United States. Plimpton's father had expanded from the manufacture of hoes to axle springs, but died tragically in a mill accident. George Arthur attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Amherst College, where he later presided over the board of trustees from 1907 to 1936; his son Calvin, a physician, was president of the College from 1960 to 1971. In Walpole, George Arthur eventually reassembled and extended the family properties that his mother had been forced to sell after his father's death, establishing a working farm using traditional colonial methods and tools. It included a large dairy and flour mill; he grazed enough sheep to supply the wool for his own suits. Plimpton was one of the founding trustees of the World Peace Foundation. Plimpton's association with Edwin Ginn occurred serendipitously.

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In the Beginning Was the Book

After graduating from Amherst in 1876, Plimpton was one day walking near the corners of Beacon and Tremont Streets in Boston when he met Melvil[le] Dewey, a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity brother from Amherst (class of 1874) and later the great librarian and "decimalizer" of Columbia College. While at Amherst, Dewey had become a believer in simplifying the English language through spelling reform, an advocate of the metric system (instead of the English/ American amalgam of weights and measures), a devotee of various then voguish methods of writing shorthand, and an inventor of a new way of classifying books on library shelves, initially at the Amherst College library, where he was employed part-time. After graduating, Dewey stayed on at the library and, in late 1875, was about to become its permanent director when he went to Boston to sell duplicate books. Ginn had somehow heard about Dewey. He wondered if Dewey might like to work for Ginn & Co. Dewey excitedly told Ginn and Ginn's associates about his library cataloguing scheme, about the likely bright future for public libraries, and about his own enthusiasm for the metric system. Instead of pressing Dewey to join the firm, Ginn decided, and Dewey agreed, that they should go into business together: Ginn & Co. would produce all future editions of the decimal system for libraries, and together they would share the proceeds. Ginn also promised to create a department within the firm to provide materials, written by Dewey, for the teaching and use of the metric system. Ginn was uninterested in spelling reform, however. Ginn immediately invested nearly $7,000 with which Dewey intended to manufacture metric devices. Ginn, entranced by Dewey' s own vision, envisaged a vast market for metric reform. After all, the American Metrological Society embraced metrics, and a journal existed in its name to advocate for the new system. Metrics seemed promising, especially after Dewey had established himself in Ginn's offices in early 1876 as the manager of the American Metric Bureau. Others were much more interested in creating modern libraries. Dewey and the editors of the Publishers Weekly decided to create a library journal, in part to forward Dewey's cataloguing notions. Ginn, foolishly from a commercial point of view, agreed to release Dewey from the obligation to let him publish the new American Library Journal. When Dewey moved his operations (and his metric bureau) out of Ginn's offices, Ginn still retained rights to half of all metric proceeds. But it was the library materials and reforms that proved profitable, and

In the Beginning Was the Book

33

pathbreaking. Dewey, 25, was among those, too, who soon created the American Library Association. Ginn would have wanted to be continuously involved in these activities and reforms, but his engagement was soon reduced to that of a passive investor. (In 1909, Ginn also invested in the controversial Lake Placid [New York] Club, which Dewey created.)20 When Dewey and young Plimpton strolled over to Ginn's office on Tremont St., in 1876, Ginn asked Plimpton what he intended to do with his life. Plimpton told Ginn that he planned to go to Harvard Law School in the autumn, but would welcome the opportunity to earn some money over the summer. Ginn immediately made Plimpton, who had been a successful entrepreneur and an average student during his Amherst days, into a textbook salesman. He and Ginn would share the proceeds of all books sold, but Plimpton would have to pay his own costs. Ginn, to make it easy for Plimpton, offered him Walpole and neighboring towns as a sales territory, but Plimpton preferred to try his hand in the then virgin textbook selling area outside of Philadelphia (where the American centennial World Exposition was in progress). 21 Plimpton went to York and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then into the Lehigh Valley coalfields. At Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, he sold the professor of English on Arnold' s English Literature. In the same town, he met with the school board in a saloon, but lost out on the adoption of one of Ginn's geography texts; the opposition bought a round of whiskey for the board. In Phoenixville and Coatsville, however, he managed to sell the geographies. Then he spent two weeks at the Exposition, returning home with a net profit of $150 ($2,}62). After finishing only a year at law school, Plimpton thought seriously about teaching history and political science at the University of Nebraska, for $1,500 ($24,}53) a year. When Ginn heard about Plimpton's intentions, he offered to match that salary at Ginn & Co., and to pay Plimpton's expenses, too. After some hesitation, Plimpton entered the publishing house on a permanent basis. He opened Ginn & Heath's first sales office in New York in 1877 near the Battery and adjacent to Macmillan & Co., the publishers. At the end of a year, Plimpton had done so well that Ginn increased his salary to $2,000 ($32A71). A year afterwards, Plimpton was earning $2,400 ($38,965). By 1881, Plimpton had become a junior partner in Ginn, Heath & Co. Daniel Collamore Heath, originally from Salem, Maine, worked for the firm first in Rochester, from 1874, and came permanently to Boston

34

In the Beginning Was the Book

to become Ginn's partner when Frederick opened the firm's Chicago office in 1876. (Frederick Ginn remained associated with the firm, in Chicago and throughout the western United States, until he retired from active business in 1905. He died in Oakland, Calif., in 1907, aged 77.) Heath (1843-1908), an energetic and well-read graduate of Amherst College, had been a high school principal in Southborough, Massachusetts, and a young superintendent of schools in Farmington, Maine. By 1885, Ginn and Heath were visibly becoming less and less compatible. Even though they had adjoining offices, they spoke little, instead habitually writing each other long letters of complaint. Each copied Plimpton, who appears to have been more loyal to Ginn. Heath's background was similar to Ginn's-as boys, both men performed the varied tasks of farm hand; additionally, Heath's father was a blacksmith, Heath also had helped to make horseshoes and ox-shoes. "This work was clearly wholesome in its influence on my character and habits," Heath wrote, using words that could easily have been those of Ginn. Also, Heath remembered that "I finally got into the habit of reading only books out of which I could get some definite and sure information." Like Ginn, he taught district school at sixteen in Farmington, Maine, and worked his way through the Maine State Seminary (now Bates College), and Amherst. He also went to theological college, in Bangor.22 Conceivably, Heath and Ginn fell out because they were both ambitious men of similar origins, both equally wishing to lead. Or perhaps Ginn felt threatened by someone from his own background who was better educated and equally energetic. In the event, Ginn nurtured a powerful rival. When Heath left the firm in 1885 to begin his own publishing enterprise, he took most of the texts in the sciences and modern languages. "It is the understanding between him and me that when I left him," Heath wrote, "we should steer clear of each other as much as possible .... " 23 Soon D. C. Heath, also of Boston, rivaled Henry Holt' s dominance of the foreign language book trade and created a number of important new scientific texts. Before long, Heath had offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Atlanta, and London, and was almost as influential in the textbook world as Ginn & Co. Heath's departure also meant that Plimpton became a full partner of Ginn & Co., running the New York branch and promoting overseas expansion. He succeeded Ginn as chairman of the firm in 1914. The official history of Ginn & Co. is utterly silent about how profit-

In the Beginning Was the Book

35

able the firm was at any point in its history. Indeed, that history, written by one of Ginn's hand-picked successors, says very little directly about Ginn's personal contribution to the striking success of the business. It is thus difficult to ascertain how much each book or each series contributed to the balance sheet, which books or series were more or less profitable, how much the founder and his associates earned, the firm's expenses, its changing cost structure, and whether Ginn and his colleagues followed a conscious corporate strategy or set of strategies. 24 All we know in detail is the amounts that the city of Boston taxed the Ginn publishing firm-$228 in 1880, rising to $1,280 in 1895 (when the largest assets of Ginn & Co. had been moved to Cambridge). During those years the assessed value of the firm rose from $15,000 to $1oo,ooo (almost $2 million in 2002 dollars). It is thus impossible to do more than to suggest that Ginn & Co. prospered, and prospered because it innovated especially effectively in the areas of marketing, advertising, cost containment, acquisition expenses, and royalty schedules. Was Ginn a much more canny printer, binder, and distributor of books than his rivals? Or did he simply make more pleasing and more informative books, and also market them smartly? It is all very well to be principled, as Ginn sets out so piously, but should we really ascribe Ginn's economic ascendance primarily to his honor rather than to his acumen and his breadth of vision? Was he more foresighted than others, envisaging changes in the demands of teachers and students and finding attractive ways to supply what learners, instructors, superintendents, and boards of education would soon want? Whatever the exact winning combination, Ginn created a powerful force in American education, and grew wealthy and widely respected as Americans became better and more diversely schooled. Few Americans could, by the end of the nineteenth century and well into the middle of the twentieth century, have escaped Ginn's formative influence as a provider of textbook instruction. Ginn operated first out of offices on Mt. Vernon Street, Boston. For a year Ginn Brothers was located on Washington St. near Water St. From 1870 through 1874 it was situated at the beginning of Beacon St. In 1875, Ginn & Heath, as it had become, moved to Tremont Place, abutting the Granary Burying Ground and looking out on God's Acre, a view that the firm shared with the nearby Athenaeum Library. In 1901, the firm relocated to the Gardner Brewer House, on the site of John Hancock's original residence, on Beacon Street, overlooking the Boston

In the Beginning Was the Book

Common. Ginn very much liked that stately mansion, with its great hallway, ornamental ceilings, majestically carved black walnut mantels, bookshelves, and wainscoting. But when the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enlarged its state house in 1917, adding two Vermont marble wings for House and Senate offices, the Brewer House was demolished and Ginn & Co. moved a little distance to Ashburton Place, where it remained until1968, when the Xerox Corporation purchased Ginn & Co. and moved it to Lexington, Massachusetts. Gulf + Western Industries acquired what was left of the Ginn imprint in 1985, although in 1988 the Canada Development Investment Corporation purchased Ginn's Canadian branch. By 1878, after a decade's success and the prospects of continued corporate growth, Ginn realized that he and his firm could continue to expand only if he could produce more books more quickly, especially to meet the sudden demands of large school systems. He controlled the editing, design, marketing, and distribution of his products, but, for the critical manufacturing of his books, he was at the mercy of many independent jobbers. Mechanical composition was done at one location, electroplating at another, presswork at a third, and binding at a fourth. One important series was even manufactured in distant New Hampshire. Ginn told Parkhurst that "it would be impossible for us ever to become a large house unless we did our own manufacturing." 25 In the mid-188os, Ginn, ever looking ahead, therefore leased a very large new building on the corner of Pearl and Purchase streets in Boston with an eye to the expansion of his business. Constructed in 1886, it was long known as the Ginn Building. In 1954, it was demolished to make way for the construction of the elevated central artery (now also defunct). In 1886, Ginn was able to bring all of his manufacturing processes together under the same roof at the leased premises. He purchased a stop-cylinder press, two two-revolution presses, a drum-cylinder press, and two flat-bed presses. A bindery, where much of the folding and stitching was still done by hand, was installed on the top floor of the building; in 1891 the entire structure became Ginn's completely. The composition of Ginn & Co.'s books was done in the leased premises from the next year, by which time Ginn had finally succeeded in the vertical integration of his operations. But the leased building was too small, and by the mid-189os, Ginn & Co.'s operations had spread in a costly and untidy manner to several adjoining properties.

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37

It was time to expand into a larger, dedicated press building. Ginn and Parkhurst, who was in charge of the search, wanted an accessible site that boasted good transportation and lower taxes than they were paying in Boston. Parkhurst looked at suggested locations all over Boston and East Boston, Chelsea, and Maiden, and even went into the distant countryside, but Ginn and Parkhurst finally settled on an area across the Charles River, recently bridged, at the foot of First Street, in Cambridge. The chosen site was then known as Scully's dump. First Street was an ungraded cart path, there were no nearby buildings or sidewalks, and the favored lot-comprising 8o,ooo square feet-was mostly under water. It existed, literally, on or in what was then the Cambridge waterfront. A schooner loaded with lumber was swinging at anchor when Parkhurst first saw the site, and the notion that locomotives would soon pull loaded boxcars away from the place seemed fantasy. Thus was the great Athenaeum Building conceived. The owners of the waterlogged lot, recently recovered from the tides, agreed to fill it in at their expense, and the City of Cambridge, anxious for industrial development in that part of Cambridgeport, promised to pave First Street. When the massive four-story brick structure was completed in 1896, all of Ginn's manufacturing-each day his plant turned 1.5 tons of white paper, 1,200 yards of cloth, and 1.5 tons of board into finished books-took place in what was one of the largest and most complete printing and publishing premises in the United States. Two hundred feet long and seventy feet wide, and constructed on 1,700 wooden piles and 3,ooo tons of granite, the new building occupied a full city block, and incorporated four steam engines with a combined force of 670 horsepower, plus the then latest innovations in ventilation, plumbing, lighting, and fireproofing. The entranceway was arched, in a Romanesque style. A bronze statue of Athena (the goddess of wisdom), cast in Florence, Italy, crowned the cornice on the exterior front. The new Athenaeum Building even had its own team of matched bay horses to dispatch 5 million finished books a year (25,000 a day), until motorized conveyances replaced horses sometime after Ginn's death. Very controversially, the plant was "a free office," that is, all of its 450 employees were "entirely at liberty to be independent of organizations or to belong to any organization that does not interfere with their work." "Neither union nor non-union men are to be subjected to the least annoyance or discrimination as such by employers or fellow

In the Beginning Was the Book

workmen"-read a notice on the walls that infuriated the American trades union movement.26 Ginn's establishment was more paternal and less generous in its wages and pension provisions than Houghton Mifflin's Riverside Press, up the river in Cambridge. When the Cambridge chapter of the International Typographical Union threatened to strike the Boston area presses in 1906, both publishers had to concede an eight-hour day (down from ten). But they successfully resisted calls for a closed union shop. Even before the Athenaeum Building was completed, Ginn controlled about ten percent of the U.S. market for elementary school texts across all subjects, and as much as thirty percent of the secondary school market. Five larger houses vied for ninety percent of the common school market and thirty percent of the high school market. In the era before serious trust busting, despite the enactment in that year of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, when manufacturers in many branches of American commerce attempted to corner their respective markets, and thus elevate prices, the big five in publishing tried to interest Ginn in joining a proposed cartel. But Ginn and his partners replied that American teachers would never accept monopoly. "There could be no monopoly of brains." They would always demand the best textbooks. 27 lvison, Blakeman, Taylor & Co.; A. S. Barnes & Co.; Van Antwerp, Bragg & Co.; and a dozen smaller firms, plus Harper & Brothers' and D. Appleton & Co.'s textbook department, joined forces in 1890 to escape ruinous competition and the "growing unprofitableness of the business." This new cartel, capitalized at $5 million ($96 million), called itself the American Book Co. Ginn & Co. was its main rival and vigorous critic. In the Publishers' Weekly, Ginn complained that the formation of the cartel was a move "in the wrong direction." Because the new firm controlled go percent of the U.S. grammar school text commerce, it "multiplies five-fold the political power, and hence increases five times the danger to our business." 28 In 1893, the American Book Co. claimed that it was earning about $3aoo,ooo ($63,454,000) a year, half of the combined income of all of the schoolbook companies in the country. According to an internal Houghton Mifflin report in 1912, more than twenty firms then competed for a U.S. textbook market worth $17 million ($315 million). The American Book Company controlled about $3,50o,ooo ($64,915,000) of the total. Ginn & Co. was next, with business worth $2,50o,ooo ($46a68,ooo). Macmillan was third, gaining $1,ooo,ooo

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39

($18,s47 1000). Houghton Mifflin was tenth on the list with annual sales worth only $4oo,ooo ($7A18,ooo). 29 By the end of the nineteenth century, it was evident across the breadth of the United States and into its new far-flung possessions that Ginn's driving force-only the best textbooks-still motivated him and his vastly accomplished firm. It was about this time, after thirty years in business and a vigorous second marriage, that Ginn turned his carefully calibrated mind to consider Russia's rearmament, the desirability of preventing conflict by arbitrating disputes between nations, and the possibility of a broad peace in the world. As a publisher, Ginn was well placed to understand the power of rational thought and sober consideration of such issues. He also had the ability to provide printed materials to influence the reading public. Ginn's undoubted triumph as a Boston businessman and a national corporate leader well prepared him to become a tribune of peace.

CHAPTER THREE

The Essentials of Civic Engagement

Edwin Ginn was self-made, in the image of Horatio Alger's fictional nineteenth-century corporate successes. Yet, whereas Alger's heroes actually relied for their upward mobility on befriending benefactors and marrying well, Ginn's ascending trajectory resulted from his own diligent efforts, his perseverance in the face of obstacles, such as his faltering eyesight, and a flair for merchandising himself and his products. 1 Ginn wrote that he achieved commendably well because of his Puritan values and because he was an honest supplier of good textbooks. But there was more to him and his firm than the undoubted homespun qualities that he so justly celebrated. Ginn clearly had a knack for ingratiating himself at Westbrook Seminary, at Tufts College, to innumerable school boards and faculties, and to the luminaries of Harvard College. No scholar himself, he cultivated and esteemed the academic authorities of the day. He exhibited an eye for well-connected talent, no less for those such as Parkhurst, who would help grow the firm and remain enduringly loyal. Hardly flamboyant, Ginn, like Henry Houghton, was frugal and canny. Yet, he could throw caution aside when his intuition urged him to act boldly in choosing a text series, such as the Mason music books, or business associates, such as Plimpton, his corporate heir. Ginn's personality was far more complex than his New England reserve, austere demeanor, and pious, published maxims would suggest. Influenced by the liberal creed of Universalism, he was more prepared than many Boston contemporaries to question received wisdom first in corporate matters and later in world affairs. The suspicious R. G. Dun credit reports reflect that refusal to follow stodgy corporate norms; yet,

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no one ever accused Ginn or his firm of being "sharp." Ginn was unusual in Boston publishing, too, for combining editorial talent and business acumen in one person, and for succeeding in an effective manner that was matched locally only by Houghton, Mifflin and Little, Brown. Ginn innovated constantly, as his assiduous introduction of new text lines and steady expansion into American and overseas selling territory shows. The vertical integration of his composition, printing, binding, and distribution operations in a massive plant in Cambridge was ahead of its time. Ginn was an engagingly successful, self-taught businessman. He also thought of himself as an educator. That persona influenced his civic activities in Boston and Winchester, his cultivation of friendships with the leading local preachers of late nineteenth-century Boston, much of the texture of his family life, and his eventual, all-consuming, concern for world peace. This last passion, which dominated the final two decades of his life, gestated for at least the prior three decades, during which time Ginn gradually placed his firm on unassailable and enduring foundations, grew two families, became an active churchman and tentative civic contributor, and expanded his global horizons. Unfortunately, as befits his origins, Ginn was a private man who kept no diaries and whose letters, where they still exist, are mostly terse, business-like, and to the point. Thus, the richness of his personal life and any introspective musings are lost to history. He reports dwelling two or three hours a day with "the great philosophers of the ages." 2 Otherwise, with the exception of his aphorisms and his formative experience in downeast Maine, we hardly know what drove the maturing young publisher, or how he interacted with his times-with the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras at home and, initially, with empire abroad. We know that he hobnobbed with Harvard's thinking classes, and the bright social reformers of Boston, but not precisely how he was influenced, or how he sought to exert the power that he came to wield as a prosperous corporate leader. He was a Republican, reputedly, and favored low tariffs (and no duties at all on educational books) and free trade, but we do not know for whom he voted in presidential elections, whom (other than politicians from Winchester) he supported in Massachusetts politics, and whether he was invariably as careful and conservative in his political and social engagements as he was in his publishing life. Professor George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard was Ginn's friend

The Essentials of Civic Engagement

for thirty years, from the mid-r88os. Kittredge described Ginn as "very much of an individual." Kittredge called him "ardent and somewhat impetuous." Edwin Doak Mead, editor of the New England Magazine and later a close collaborator of the publisher, reported that Ginn was fitful and impulsive, with a "buoyant strength and energy." He was an "impatient idealist." But Ginn was also practical, and it was the combination of idealism and practical wisdom that made Ginn such a remarkable figure. Kittredge also extolled Ginn for believing in scholarship and scholars, and for being able to persuade scholars that their learning could be turned to community value. 3 Bostonians in the last two decades of the nineteenth century adjusted to rapid social change and to the greatly altered place of the United States in the world in either of two ways, "through democratic reform or aristocratic recoil." 4 Ginn never considered himself anything but a hard-working, clear-thinking son of Maine. Nor did he ever recoil or retreat. But he was not instinctively a reformer. He was not brought up to look after others; individualism and self-reliance were components of a creed that came more naturally to someone nurtured on the granite hillsides of Maine. Originally a laissez-faire, free-market believer, Ginn had to be introduced in the heady intellectual ferment of late nineteenth-century Boston and Cambridge to an assertive social gospel of concern. Boston had earlier been the outspoken home of abolitionism, and of new crusades for public schools, prison reform, feminism, temperance, nascent environmentalism, Unitarianism, and Transcendentalism. The older heroes of these struggles were still active and articulate: Wendell Phillips, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Julia Ward Howe, Mary Ashton Livermore, and the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. None was more energetic and more influential in Ginn's era, and on Ginn and the rest of Boston and Cambridge, than Hale. Hale (1822-1909), "enormous," 6 feet 4 inches tall, and burly, "with a stoop which seemed only to accentuate his bulk," and sporting a bushy beard, had an assertive muscular Christian manner to match. From 1856 to 1899 (after teaching at the Boston Latin School, reporting for his father's Boston Daily Advertiser, and ministering at the Church of the Unity in Worcester, Massachusetts), Hale became the anti-slavery-declaiming, peace-preaching, social gospel purveying, decidedly ecumenical, strongly Unitarian minister of South Congregational Church in Boston, originally in Roxbury and later in Back Bay. He was a sermon-

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izer, "with a reverberating voice," and a modern didactic Tractarian, publishing nearly 200 articles on innumerable subjects in weekly and monthly magazines between 1886 and 1897, and hundreds before and after those dates. His writings were the work of a "religious, humanitarian journalist ... much less concerned with minor points of accuracy than with major considerations of meaning." Hale was the incarnation of a special kind of Boston spirit that flowered in an era when Ginn had become prominent and active in civic matters.' Not everything in which Hale believed would have appealed to Ginn, for Hale was an interventionist, espousing a leading role for the state in social reform. But Hale also favored men who had "done something" other than clip coupons from bonds; he looked for new leaders who had created afresh with their own hands or minds and not simply applied capital. 6 Hale believed in and used his sermons and his civic eminence to promote citizenship, education, philanthropy, and international peace and friendship. He chaired the Massachusetts Commission for International Justice. "We called him," said Mead, "the Nestor of our peace cause in America." 7 Mead was a well-connected activist. Of a farming family in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, he was profoundly influenced by Larkin Goldsmith Mead, an uncle who lived across the Connecticut River in Brattleboro, Vermont. Larkin Mead was a successful lawyer married to the sister of John Humphrey Noyes, a notable communitarian socialist. His daughter was married to William Dean Howells, the writer. Larkin Goldsmith Mead's home was a hotbed of intellectual and artistic activity, and much laughter. 8 Accordingly, Edwin Mead was schooled formally in New Hampshire but apprenticed intellectually to his uncle and then to Howells. The latter, impressed with Mead's mind, found him a position in the counting house of Ticknor & Fields, Boston's fledgling publisher. Howells remained young Mead's mentor, guide, philosopher, and friend throughout his nine years at Ticknor & Fields, and for many years after Mead was himself established as a literary figure and passionate reformer in Boston. From 1875 to 188o, Mead lived in Europe, initially studying for the ministry at the University of Cambridge. But his time in Britain coincided with a serious religious rethinking of belief. He read widely in the American Transcendental literature and came to know those in the British Broad Church Movement. In time, he rejected orthodox Anglicanism, ceased his study for the ministry, and spent his last several

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years abroad studying philosophy in the University of Oxford as well as at Cambridge, and in Leipzig University. Two results of this European period were his The Philosophy ofCarlyle (Boston, 1881) and Martin Luther: A Study of the Reformation (Boston, 1884). After returning to Boston, Mead came to the attention of Mary Porter Tileston Hemenway (1820-1894), one of Boston's leading benefactors and social activists. "A queenly woman without affectation or condescension, she combined in her philanthropic work enthusiasm with effectiveness. She sought able helpers," reports her biographer, "and her benefactions were usually the result of careful thought." 9 So it was with Mead. In order to educate and influence the youth of Boston, Hemenway employed Mead to provide lectures and classes at Boston's Old South Meetinghouse (which she had saved from destruction). Her goal was to cultivate patriotic idealism through education in history. Mead, prolific then and later, produced more than 200 Old South Leaflets of edited excerpts from history and literature, and delivered lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Puritanism, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Gospel of Toleration, and so on. Tireless young Mead also became president of the Free Religious Association, and, appalled by poverty and degradation in the cities of the American northeast, he helped to create the Massachusetts Society for Promoting Good Government and the Boston Municipal League. He also began the Twentieth Century Club, where he presided. It lobbied for tenement reform and for job training for the blind. He also belonged to the Men's Woman's Suffrage League. 10 These activities were all part of an elaborate, intensive preparation for Mead's life as activist, pamphleteer, and organizer amid the hectic progressive ferment of late nineteenth-century Boston. In 1889, he joined hands with Hale to revive the then floundering New England Magazine. A year later, Hale left complete oversight of what became a strikingly important publication to Mead, who edited it with his usual energy and flair for liberal ideas through 1901. Mead also became a pacifist and was a devotee of the peace initiatives of Hale. Without Hale's moral stature or compelling way with words, Mead nonetheless became Hale's parh1er in agitating for urban betterment as well as replacing war with dispute resolution. He and Hale influenced Ginn profoundly, from at least 188g. Certainly, Ginn, like so many others, would have warmed to the pa-

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triotic/jingoistic fervor of Hale's famous short story, A Man Without a Country (1863), and been inspired by the starkly simple moral message of Ten Times One is Ten (1871)-everyone should help ten others, each of whom should help ten others, and generosity would multiply exponentially. Ten Times One is Ten led to In His Name (1873), which spawned Lend a Hand: A Record of Progress, a monthly journal (that Hale edited from 1886 to 1897) that acted as a clearinghouse for the benevolent activities of Lend a Hand societies across the nation. Hale also popularized the Lend a Hand motto: "Look up and not down; look forward and not back; look out and not in; lend a hand"-so that "the whole world might be converted at last to the religion of Faith, Hope, and Love." 11 "We professional men must serve the world," declared Hale in 1871. "Our privilege compels us." Hale always emphasized the importance of noblesse oblige, specific words that he employed to exhort his friends and parishioners. His eighteen novels, and a host of stories published in his journal Old and New (1870-1875), expanded on this same theme. This overall message of good works and obligation presumably resonated with Ginn as it did with millions of readers and listeners. It certainly inspired an impressionable young Harvard student in the late 187os-the future rough-rider, jingoist, governor, and imperialist President Theodore Roosevelt. Forever after his university days, where they both belonged to the same club, Roosevelt was Hale's acolyte, admirer, and booster. 12 Yet, Hale, like a gaggle of other prominent Yankee reformers of Boston, was an anti-imperialist and an opponent even as a young man of unjust war. He mused as early as 1838, when he was a student at Harvard College, about a possible "Congress of Nations" as a way to prevent hostilities between nations, but the bloody battles of the U.S. Civil War may have concentrated his mind more completely on peaceful methods of conflict resolution. As a committed Christian, he naturally asserted that a Christian approach should be used "in the daily life of a person as well as in the life of a nation." That attitude would certainly have appealed to Ginn, who consistently advocated positive answers to contemporary problems. Hale was an idealist whose good thoughts outran his ability to convert them into practical results. "He always felt," reported Hale's son, "that it was for him to advise and guide, consult and encourage." 13 So

The Essentials of Civic Engagement

Hale needed someone like Ginn, who could rise to the challenge of organizing solid responses to the ideas advanced by the prolific social gospel preacher from Boston. By the 188os, too, Ginn had transferred his Sunday allegiance to Unitarianism from Universalism, and Hale was prominent among those who had helped to create the National Conference of Unitarian Churches of America in 1865, providing one more reason why Ginn and Hale would have become more than casually acquainted. 14 Ginn, however, usually worshipped in and supported the Unitarian Church in Winchester, Massachusetts, and from 1903 to his death in 1909, Hale served as chaplain of the U.S. Senate. No correspondence between Ginn and Hale survives in the extensive Hale archives in Albany, Cambridge, and Rochester, but the two men may often have conversed in person without leaving any record of their talks. Equally, we do not know that Ginn read the New England Magazine, but many of his subsequent passions-for creating peace and for bettering cities-echo specific remedies and lines of opinion advanced in that journal by Mead and Hale. Although each monthly issue of the publication contained articles and stories on a variety of subjects designed to appeal to sophisticated Brahmin readers in New England, every number also contained Mead's editorials advocating particular kinds of social change. The magazine blended Christianity and socialism, promoted Progressivism ahead of its time, and employed a readerfriendly newspaper style that was unusual in magazines of the era. It sought improvements in the ways in which the nation, states, and cities were governed; Hale and Mead lobbied in the periodical's pages for improved wages, housing, and living conditions for the poor in America's bursting cities, and against civic corruption. They opened their pages to the writings of a host of experts-professors and practitioners, and espoused a scientific approach to problems. One of their contributors argued against overly high taxes, especially on land, in a manner that clearly influenced Ginn. Mead and Hale also advocated government regulation of housing, education, and industry in order to help achieve democratic performance amid poverty. They believed strongly in proactive rather than laissez-faire actions by governments. Mead specifically called upon governments to provide proper housing for the poor; social stability would thereby be enhanced. He favored English style homes with gardens, rather than tenements. Above all, wrote Hale and Mead, wealthy citizens owed a

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civic, Christian duty to help better the lives of unfortunate persons in society. Ginn clearly heard this message of the social gospel.15 Everything that we do know about Ginn from the time that he graduated from Tufts in 1862 until he began thinking seriously about peace in the 189os suggests someone of serious demeanor, possibly even humorless. The impetuousness and impulsiveness to which Kittredge and Mead allude was not readily apparent to his colleagues or employees. No backslapper, he still managed to engage colleagues affably and retain a loyal workforce. At his seventieth birthday party, on Valentine's Day in 1908, the other directors and his family feted him grandly in Winchester, being joined secretly and to his surprise by members of the entire Ginn publishing staff, who came by special train from Boston and serenaded him around a grand piano. Mead had worked in the same building as the publisher and the employees of the publishing house and had observed how thoroughly "he was loved by all." Mead saw "the enthusiasm, devotion, and regard" that pervaded the publishing house and its staff, all motivated by the founder, its leader. 16 A grand, illustrated, rhyming tribute of eighteen stanzas was presented to Ginn on his seventieth birthday; parts of it speak to his character-at least to those parts of his character that its anonymous author or authors chose to celebrate. "With vigorous thought, new hope, and cheerfulness/Unwearied by the turmoil and the stress,/That other men in early life forego,/You seek new opportunities to grow./ Whence comes this quenchless zeal?" Ginn, the author(s) said, had found the means "whereby one's youth is never lost." The tribute went on to congratulate Ginn for having, even as a young man, the ability to inspire other boys to help him-"by making boys think stones were toys/ And do the picking for you." Later, during his secondary school days, he boarded 'round, his "gallant ways" deserving praise: "For womankind can always find/In you a staunch defender." He "hypnotized" honest school committees and created a successful firm. And now, the rhyming ended, "the thought of Peace/Is hovering around you." 17 Ginn met Clara Eaton Glover, daughter of Jesse Jr. and Martha Bartlett Glover, probably in 1866. Her father was a machinist. By 1864, Jesse Glover, Jr., had become superintendent of the rebuilt Pemberton textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and he and his family are listed as living in company-owned housing on the mill's estate for at least the remainder of the 186os. }esse's father had been in charge of the mill's

The Esst?ntials of Civic Engagement

repair shop when the original Pemberton mill collapsed and caught on fire, killing hundreds, early in 186o. He testified twice at the coroner's inquest. An uncle, John Glover, also worked for the mill during the 186os. 18 Clara herself was born in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1845. In 1866, she had been a student at Vassar for year, going there as an accomplished young scholar. Vassar began holding classes in 1865 for its first 353 matriculants, but President John H. Raymond soon appreciated that only a handful of the young scholars was sufficiently well prepared to receive a proper liberal education. He reorganized the classes that they took, separated the able-and many were "unexpectedly intelligent"from the frivolous, and reported to his trustees that Vassar was slowly developing a standard that would serve women, and the nation, well.l 9 Raymond graduated his first set of but four women in 1867. Clara was not among them. It may have been during her first summer vacation that Clara visited a woman friend in a small town in Maine, near Orland. Of medium height, with gray eyes and curly brown hair, Clara was described as "not beautiful" but possessing a "gentle intelligent depth that attracted the attention of all who met her." Ginn, who was also in Orland briefly, was about 5 foot 10 inches tall, with a long beard. Later he clipped it short, but still carried a full beard, making him a "most distinguished man," according to his daughter-in-law. Clara and Edwin made a strong impression on each other, but Clara and her parents insisted that marriage was out of the question until Ginn had created a positive beginning as a book publisher. 20 Meanwhile, after her graduation from Vassar in 1868 with twenty-four other women, Clara taught school in Lawrence. Presumably, Ginn proved himself worthy by 1869, for Edwin and Clara were married in that year in Lawrence, in the congregation of the First Unitarian Society, of which her parents were members. According to her daughter-in-law, writing sometime later, Clara was "very ambitious for her husband and did everything in the world to encourage him to equip himself for ... his ... book business. Every evening, after they were married, she read aloud to him for as long as five hours at a time. This was the result of her determination that he read only the best literature." 21 Van Renesselaer also reported-on what evidence?-that Clara devoted her entire married life to Ginn's business and their children.

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Until 188o, the young Ginn family lived in Boston, first on River Street Place, within walking distance of the publishing house (18701873), then on Maiden Street (between Albany and Tremont Streets, near Blackstone Square [1874-1876]), and finally on Winchester St. (between Charles and Arlington Streets, south of the Boston Common [1877-188o]). There Jessie Bartlett (1872), Maurice Edwin (1875), Herbert (1876, died 1876), and Clara Louise (1879), were born. While the Ginns were living at 4 River Street Place, in February 1874, the doorbell rang. A maid ushered into the parlor a young man dressed in a conservative style, with stiff red hair, red side-whiskers, and a "plenteous" moustache. In the parlor sat Lilla Thomas, small, slender, very young, and a friend of Mrs. Ginn's from Vassar. When Samuel J. Elder, the red-haired young graduate of Yale University and, subsequently, a senior Boston lawyer, entered, Thomas fled upstairs to the Ginns, crying out that one of Ginn's book agents had arrived. "I guess not," Ginn said, knowing that it was probably Elder, on a legal errand. Curiously, Elder had been taught in the Lawrence High School by Mrs. Ginn. After a suitable few years, by which time Elder had courted Thomas assiduously by mail and in person and established himself in the law, Thomas and Elder married. Later, he represented Arlington and Winchester in the U.S. Congress, joined Elihu Root in international arbitration work, and became a trustee of the World Peace Foundation.22 A year after Clara's birth, Ginn moved the family about eight miles northwest to the then seemingly distant village of Winchester, originally part of Charlestown from 1633 and, from 1642, the southern part of Woburn. Winchester had only become a locality on its own, and with that name, in 1850, the Boston and Lowell Railway having traversed the area, and opened it up to settlement, in 1835. When Ginn purchased Captain William H. Kinsman's sixty-acre estate in 1880 in West Winchester, along Bacon St., he was to some degree a pioneer in a still young and not yet fully established town. In 1880, the Kinsman house at 55 Bacon St. into which the Ginns moved was worth $5,500 ($102,029 in 2002), according to the Winchester assessors. An existing barn was assessed at $1,200 ($22,261). The estate also included 3·5 acres of "tillage" ($4,8oo), 11 acres of "mowing" ($g,2oo), and another 11.85 acres of "tillage" ($1,100). Ginn's total assessment was $31,700 ($588,056), on which he paid $614.25 ($n,ooo) in taxes. By 1893, intervening tax lists being missing, Ginn had con-

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structed another small barn, which Winchester valued at $300 ($5,769). The tax list for that year reported that Ginn also owned 6.5 acres on Bacon and Central Streets, 8 acres of land behind his house, 4·5 more acres along Bacon St., and g.65 acres on the corner of Everett Ave. The assessors valued his total land holdings at $44,600 ($857,591). On the overall total of land, house (still $5,500), and barns (the first one was still listed at $1,200) of $51,600, Ginn paid $900 in annual taxes, or $17,}06 in 2002 dollars. 23 Winchester was then a village of about 3,ooo persons, but it was not yet the leafy residential mecca that it was to become. It was a place of prosperous industries: there were three tanneries or leather-working establishments, a felt factory, a machinery-making plant, a piano case maker, a little place that turned out ivory keys for pianos, a maker of watch hands, a knife-fabricating concern, and a lumber mill and bark supplier (to the tanneries). The Aberjona River, which ran down through the village and into the Mystic Lakes and River, provided the power for a series of mills; much later the gentrifying town would do away with the dam and the mills, and with most industry. Ginn and many other prominent former Bostonians propelled that gentrification and the opening up of the western side of the village. By 1890, when the village had become a town and its population exceeded 4,8oo, there had been an influx of distinguished and wealthy lawyers and businessmen like Ginn, and even a clutch of well-known artists. Soon the factories were displaced by large houses and parks, a reservoir was developed in the 187os, with additions in the 188os-to provide the residents with potable water-and in the 189os Winchester built sanitary sewers that were linked to the burgeoning metropolitan sewer system. In 1900, Winchester counted 7,200 citizens. Many of these improvements to Winchester, and, by implication, the very nature of the town itself, were hotly debated in the annual town meeting, where all of the male property owners of the town voted for or against warrant articles that contained appropriations against their collective tax bill. It took years, for example, for town meeting to approve funds for the water supply, and later for important park improvements. Lewis Parkhurst was among the activists of the town and, in addition to his position at Ginn & Co., helped to establish several new banks, and even ran one. But, despite his later espousal of civic responsibility, Ginn himself never involved himself politically in town meeting, open as each annual session was to all voters. Nor was he, unlike many other

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prominent citizens, a member of any of the relevant committees and sub-committees when Winchester celebrated its 250th anniversary in 1890. According to the official history of Winchester, "his multifarious business and philanthropic interests kept him from accepting any leading part in town affairs." 24 Or perhaps Ginn was not terribly interested, even in the 188os, in dealing with the oft-parochial questions that came before the citizens each year for discussion and decision? A decade later, after his second marriage, he seems to have become more anxious to contribute to Winchester's growth and amelioration through various benefactions, and through making his opinions known-but not in town meeting. The Boston and Lowell railway cut across the bottom of Ginn's estate and its main station in the center of Winchester was within easy coaching distance of his house, so Ginn's commute to North Station in Boston, and then on foot to his office, was convenient. Trains to and from Winchester ran more frequently to Boston in that era, so, like most executives of the era, Ginn would have worked a full day and still arrived home in time to dine with his wife and children. But there is only adverse testimony about Ginn's fatherly attributes. Maurice, his first son, reported that his father, a very stubborn man, never showed "the slightest bit of confidence in me." "He has always treated me like a child," Maurice told his wife. She concluded that Ginn, obsessively interested in his publishing business, "made no attempt to set up any kind of interest between himself and his ... son." When Maurice was a student at Harvard University, probably in his second or third year in about 1895, he was supposedly ranked third in his class. But that was not good enough for his father: "'I've no patience with you,'" he is quoted as snapping. '"You should have been first!"' Admittedly, Maurice was not the austere, hard-working pupil of his father's image. He spent his father's money lavishly and was known at Harvard and later in California as a generous man who dressed well and "was always doing little kind things for anyone in need." The senior Ginn regarded Maurice's friends as men who knew only "drink." He seems to have regarded his first son, possibly unfairly, as lazy and too genial, and as unfocused. Indeed, Maurice's high ranking in a class numbering slightly over 300 is fiction. His wife's memoirs, suspiciously fanciful, are the source. In fact, Maurice' s grades were low, all Cs and Ds in his first three years (1893-1894, 1894-1895, and 1895-1896). He performed especially poorly

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in Botany, English, Fine Arts, and History. He dropped out of Harvard College in 1896; he reapplied for admission in 1897 as a special student, hoping to study English and history because "My father thinks they will be of use to me if I enter his business." When asked by a responsible Harvard official why he did not simply return as a regular student, Maurice replied that he was hoping to come back as a special student for health reasons. His doctor had advised him accordingly. 25 Maurice never graduated from Harvard College, unlike his half-brother, Edwin Jr. Maurice had also been particularly close to his mother, being "of her mentality." Thus, it is not unnatural that Maurice should have resented any woman who supplanted his mother. She died suddenly in late 1890 of pulmonary consumption-presumably tuberculosis; his relations with Ginn's second wife were never easy. Indeed, after coming home to Winchester at some point three years after his mother's death and finding "a strange woman living in the house," Maurice felt that he was an unwelcome visitor, and moved into a club in Boston. Later, in 1896, he arrived to find that painters, carpenters, and decorators had completely transformed the old house into something "gorgeously beautiful" but also "strangely formal." 26 He, his sisters, and his mother had, in his eyes, been usurped. Jessie, Maurice's elder sister, had meanwhile moved on from Winchester. She is never mentioned in any of the family reminiscences, and not by her father. All we know is that she attended Swarthmore College as a mature student, possibly only for two years, and graduated as a philosophy major in 1906. She died thirty years later. 27 The refurbished house that disturbed Maurice was designed by the talented but controversial Ernest Flagg of New York. Earlier, the famous firm of [Charles Pollen] McKim, [William R.] Mead & [Stanford] White of New York had prepared eleven drawings, elevations, and perspectives for a new house and new greenhouses, subsequently rejected, to be constructed on the shell of the old. Ginn's second Winchester home was called Terrace of Oaks; it was Flagg's second domestic commission. His first, following a string of successful institutional buildings, was a four-story town house, with a limestone and brick fa