The Arthurdale School: Cultural Intervention Through Rural Folklife Education in a Progressive New Deal Setting 3031456254, 9783031456251

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The Arthurdale School Cultural Intervention Through Rural Folklife Education in a Progressive New Deal Setting Jan Rosenberg With Contributions by Loretta Brockmeier

The Arthurdale School

Jan Rosenberg

The Arthurdale School Cultural Intervention Through Rural Folklife Education in a Progressive New Deal Setting

With Contrib. by Loretta Brockmeier

Jan Rosenberg Heritage Education Resources Bloomington, IN, USA With Contrib. by Loretta Brockmeier Random Lake WI, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-45625-1    ISBN 978-3-031-45626-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45626-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

This work is lovingly dedicated to my mother, Naomi Carolyn, who loved going to school.

Prelude

During the week of October 6, 2019, excitement filled the air in Morgantown, West Virginia. It was Homecoming Week, and thousands were expected to join the celebration which would culminate in a football game between the West Virginia University Mountaineers and the University of Texas Longhorns. In anticipation, celebrants loaded hotels way in advance. My visit to the area had nothing to do with Homecoming. As a result, I ended up staying at the Super 8 motel, some 35 miles outside of the hub-bub of celebration’s crowds. The road to Morgantown was off 1-79 and I needed to go on Hwy 7 East to reach my actual destination, Arthurdale. Before I got to Arthurdale, its director warned me to obey the speed limits because in one town, there was a ticket-happy sheriff who must be spending his days with a speed gun in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, while the ticket book sat comfortably within reach. I paid attention, and I drove a narrow highway where the leaves obscured the sky, and with road work going on, drivers ended up in long lines, waiting for an all clear so the other lane could have its turn to wait.

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A Note on Orthography

Throughout this book I have chosen to present names that reflect person and place in a manner somewhat different from the other works on Arthurdale and the School. I want to place power squarely with people and place. Scotts Run is often called Scott’s Run or Scotts Run. I call it the latter, identifying it as a place name with no ownership. Lest the Arthurdale project is called Reedsville, Reedsville is Arthurdale. Arthurdale is Arthurdale is capitalized Arthurdale and the homestead is Homestead. Instead of homesteaders I call the people of Arthurdale “homesteaders.” Instead of referring to the school as the school, I call it the School as it is an overall place with numerous components which I detail in the history, cultural, and ecological arrangement of the learning environment.

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Preface

It is in this matter of the recognition of a need, and in the joint endeavor to meet it, that community education lies. (Clapp 1939, 123)

Jan Rosenberg was the most courageous fieldworker I have ever known. The projects she took on were ones which gave voice to the voiceless, gave unflinching expression to searing grief, and revealed the life lived by those who worked with their hands and made their living literally by the sweat of their brow. She had a deep interest in and great curiosity about people and how they thought about things. Above all, she respected them and they knew that and responded in kind. Jan wrote several books which demonstrate the wide ranging topics which occupied her brilliant mind through the years, and undertook other projects that brought forth the essential humanity of those she interviewed, worked with, and presented to the world. These projects included interviewing those affected by a school shooting, including the imprisoned young shooter; documenting the stories of women who had suffered abuse and interviewing surviving family members of those killed in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The topic which held her in its grip more than any other, though, was education: both folklore-in-education and the history of Progressive Education. Out of these interests came this book, which represents, in a way, the essential summary of a life’s work. Most of the work on this book had been completed when Jan passed away in January 2023. As someone who had known Jan for many years, shared her professional and personal interests in the world of folklore, and xi

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had looked under rocks for things that would be useful in telling the story of Progressive Education in Arthurdale, it made sense to me to do what I could to assure completion of the project. My journey in folklore has included receiving a master’s degree in folk and intercultural studies from Western Kentucky University, fieldwork projects with traditional communities in Florida, teaching folklore to fourth graders in Hillsborough County, Florida, and directing the Ethnic and Folk Arts Program for the Illinois Arts Council. With the support of Palgrave Macmillan, and especially of Linda Braus, I was able to bring this work to completion. This included a bit of restructuring of the strong material Jan left, but mostly making sure that her voice and her vision were honored, and that, to the extent possible, the book you hold is what you would have held if Jan had been able to see the project through to completion. I would be remiss not to mention also the contribution of effort to this project by my husband, Matthew Brockmeier, who, while not a professional folklorist, has become a fellow-traveler on this journey. Random Lake, WI

Loretta Brockmeier

Acknowledgements

This work has benefitted from the support and counsel of friends and advisors from many fields. To start, Loretta and Matthew Brockmeier fed me with historical and cultural information on the Arthurdale School based on their love of history and understanding of folklife education based on years of experience in community and classroom. Sylvia Ann Grider, PhD, mentor, and friend, kept me on the straight and narrow when it came to the use of historical resources in folklife research. Jeanne Goodman, archivist at Arthurdale Heritage, Inc., and Jane LaBarbara were generous with their primary source of information on the Homestead. Arthurdale’s historians, Stephen Haid, C.J.  Maloney, and Sam Stack, Jr., provided much to think about regarding the Homestead and its educational history. Barbara Howe of the West Virginia University Public History Program was very helpful in exploring the Homestead’s application for National Registry. David Rotenstein, folklorist and public historian, helped me negotiate the waters of historic preservation, and Cody Strayler of the West Virginia State Historic Preservation office provided many primary materials associated with the Arthurdale plan. Francis Collins, M.D., and Mary Ellen Brown offered first-person insights on the works of Fletcher and Margaret Collins, stars of Arthurdale and the multi-layered experience of folklife. Sally Peterson shaped my thinking on personal experience and ethnography. Diane Goldstein pulled me back into the experiential life of Arthurdale students. Sherril Bounnell, Jane Moulding, and Rhona Carlton-Foss were encouraging regarding their thoughts on Progressive Education during xiii

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and beyond the John French years at the Cambridge School of Weston. Lynne Hamer gave me small chunks of her time to talk folklife education and the schooling experience. Mary Catherine Reynolds patiently listened to my thinking aloud, as did Ginger McGovern. Cindy Kallet listened too, and she and her friend Lucy Hull sleuthed information on Clapp’s getaway home of Robin Hood, Maine. Back on Earth, I was kept afloat, thanks to a numerous few. Fresenius, Gentry, Tom Doyle, DeWayne and Kendra Cole, Don, and Daryl kept me on the road. Ray Jordan of Eclipse Web Services revived a crashed computer. Special guides, Sarah Bullock, Cathleen Weber, Maria Viterisi, and Katherine Bittner, gave me huge chunks of their time. Elaine Thatcher, Libby Tucker, Deb Boykin stayed with me in thought. Wendy Nelson put chapters into place to submit this manuscript to Palgrave. Writing in this pandemic in a word has been weird but it hasn’t put a halt on the work, which has been a joy. As Sylvia Grider says, onward and upward. With all of this support I say, all thanks, no blame.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 References 11 2 Approaches 13 2.1 From Here to There: How I Met Elsie Ripley Clapp and the Arthurdale School 14 2.2 Historical Ethnography 17 2.3 Ecological Psychology 19 2.4 Folklore/Folklife 20 2.4.1 Education/Progressive Education 23 2.5 Folklife Education 27 References 30 3 Elsie  Ripley Clapp: From Woman of Valor to Progressive Education Leader 33 References 45 4 The Arthurdale School 47 References 56 5 Life  as It Was at the Arthurdale School and the Discovery of Folklife 57 References 70

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Contents

6 Collision and Demise 73 References 85 7 The  Arthurdale School under Elsie Ripley Clapp and Folklife Education: Where Transdisciplinary Curriculum and Social-­Emotional Learning Meet with STEAM 87 7.1 Barbara Allen, A Personal Story 92 References 94 8 Conclusion:  Individuals and Community Redux 97 References101 9 Epilogue:  The Force of Community—Protecting the Heritage of Arthurdale in the 1980s103 References108  Appendix A: Executive Order 7027 Establishing the Resettlement Administration109 Appendix B: Jan Rosenberg’s Educational Formation111 Index115

Abbreviations

AFSC AHI BB CSA CSW ECS ER ERC FE FERA NEA PEA SEL

American Friends Service Committee Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. Bernard Baruch Community Schools in Action (Elsie Clapp Book) Cambridge School of Weston (Massachusetts) Education, Culture and Society Eleanor Roosevelt Elsie Ripley Clapp Folklife Education Federal Emergency Relief Administration National Endowment for the Arts Progressive Education Association Social-Emotional Learning

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Progressive Education Association party line: adaptation to the school53 Table 5.1 Activities of first and second grades 59 Table 5.2 Arthurdale School approach to transdisciplinary education 66 Table 6.1 Synopsis and timeline of correspondence 75 Table 7.1 Transdisciplinarity across the board 92

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A man sitting outside was staring dumbly at twenty-one cents held out in his hand—his whole earnings for the week. —Clapp (1939, 82)

A good story has a good context. We folklorists are students of heritage and tradition in the lives of communities and individuals. We recognize a variety of beginnings that pull readers or audiences into a story. For example, “Once upon a time there was…” is the most familiar beginning of folk tales to English-speaking people. And so, the story of Arthurdale begins with the introduction of a dream. This dream was a hope for decent homes, sufficient food, rewarding work, clean water, decent clothing, and a good, welcoming School for people whose lives had descended into hell. This dream was set in motion by President Roosevelt and New Deal administrators, with a passion to make a better life for as many Americans as they could. With this goal in mind, “Executive Order 7027, Establishing the Resettlement Administration,” was issued on May 1, 1935 (see Appendix A).1 Through this Presidential Order, approximately one hundred communities were built by the Roosevelt Administration under several New Deal agencies (National New Deal Preservation Association, website: “New Deal Legacy.org”). Arthurdale was the first New Deal resettlement community.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Rosenberg, The Arthurdale School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45626-8_1

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Other actors in this story went, observed, and reported to the people who could make a difference. The key person who made a difference was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose driving passion in life during the Great Depression was to relieve the suffering of the American people. Eleanor Roosevelt approached seemingly insoluble problems from local to national scales, with a will of iron and a network of experts. Arthurdale, the first iteration of this dream, included a Progressive School. The School and community in Preston County, West Virginia, were created from the inspiration of Eleanor Roosevelt and the expertise and passion of Progressive educator, Elsie Ripley Clapp. The Arthurdale School was literally built by, for, and within what became the community of Arthurdale. This effort brought to life, in service to this intentional community, the principles and methods of Progressive Education. The people came from Scotts Run, a place in West Virginia, composed of several settlements of former coal miners and their families who had been out of work between three and seven years when this New Deal project began (Hoffman 2001). People whose heritage was grounded in farms and the rich cultural heritage of the Appalachian Mountains, they had been drawn to the cash pay of the coal mines. However, with the coming of the Depression and the diminished demand for coal, the company closed the mines, turned off the electricity and water, and abandoned the people (Clapp 1939, 82). This is the story, the dream of assisting people who were experiencing some of the most squalid and dehumanizing conditions in America during the Depression, to get decent housing, decent work, and a School that would bring children from hopelessness and apathy to a love of learning, a belief in self, a pride in heritage, and a trust in inspired teachers who worked tirelessly to bring them to a life worth living. West Virginia, the only state that is completely bounded by the Appalachian Mountain range, is nestled between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Mountains. The personality of the people and geography gave rise to the state’s motto: “Motani Semper Liberi,” “Mountaineers Are Always Free,” which first appeared on the new state’s flag in 1863.2 West Virginia, an anti-slavery region, was admitted to the Union after Virginia joined the Confederacy. This slogan graces the state flag and the state seal and features images of the state’s major occupational pursuits of that era— agriculture and industry. West Virginia is best known today for tourism and the coal industry (Hoffman, ibid.). The miners of Scotts Run represented some nineteen nationalities, with 60% foreign born, 20% native white, and 20% African American (Hoffman,

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ibid.). Reduced economic activity due to the depressed coal market of the late 1920s and union strikes for better pay and conditions led to the closing of the mines and the stranding of the people of Scotts Run. Conditions deteriorated quickly with no means of self-sufficiency within reach. With the loss of electricity and water, there was a sore need for relief. This need for aid was first identified by the Herbert Hoover administration, which called on assistance from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC, or the Quakers). AFSC supplied nutrition stations and a clothing pantry with resources provided by President Hoover from aid funds left over from World War I (Pickett 1953; Brooks 1935). For those who had rudimentary gardens in the poor local soil, Bushrod Grimes with the West Virginia University agricultural station experimented with food crop development. Mary Behner, Presbyterian social worker, set up a home mission that served the people of Scotts Run from 1928 until 1937. Her efforts included educational and social activities for children and “The Shack,” a former company store that provided space for a community center.3 Access to Scotts Run was possible because of the roads and railroad line that had been previously constructed to serve the mines. William Brooks, in his article in a 1935 edition of “The Atlantic,” quotes a visitor to Scotts Run, who said, “Scotts Run was the damnedest cesspool of human misery I have ever seen in America” (Brooks 1935; Lewis n.d.). The stream was the only available source of water for drinking, cooking, dishwashing, laundry, and hygiene. In some communities the outhouses were placed over the stream prior to it reaching the other communities. Cholera was epidemic. Everyone was hungry; all were emotionally and physically distressed. Lorena Hickock (1893–1968) left the Associated Press in 1933 to work as a key reporter for Harry Hopkins, the first New Deal administrator of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). He instructed Hickock (1962) to “Tell me what you see and hear. All of it. Don’t ever pull any punches” (Lowitt and Beasley 1981). Hickok often shared her FERA reports with her friend, Mrs. Roosevelt. Her visit to and her writing about Scotts Run was one of those reports: “Scotts Run, a coal mining community, not far from Morgantown, was the worst place I’d ever seen. In a gutter, along the main street through the town, there was stagnant, filthy water, which the inhabitants used for drinking, cooking, washing and everything else imaginable. On the other side of the street were ramshackle houses, black with coal dust, which most Americans would not have considered fit for pigs. And in those houses every night children went

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to sleep hungry, on piles of bug-infested rags, spread out on the floor…” (Hickok in Lowitt and Beasley 1981, 142–52). In 1933 Hickock provided a torch to Eleanor Roosevelt to light by imploring her to visit Scotts Run. Roosevelt was shocked over the conditions of the people of the Run. With the coordinated efforts of Clarence Pickett, Bushrod Grimes, and the Roosevelts’ aide Louis Howe and Franklin Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt grabbed that torch, lit it, and ran with it to ultimately set a fire called Arthurdale. But where to situate this dream? Fourteen miles from Scotts Run was a 1200-acre property owned by Richard Arthur, an entrepreneur who retired to West Virginia from Pittsburgh and became a gentleman farmer. He eventually purchased 1200 acres. He raised cattle, chickens, and gamecocks and grew crops of buckwheat, oats, and wheat (Penix 2007, 26–26). A symbol of Arthur’s prosperity was his Victorian mansion, consisting of 23 rooms, steam heat, running water, and indoor plumbing. By 1920, Arthur was losing money on his farm and mansion, and he leased the land to sharecroppers (Penix, 27). By the early 1930s, he had amassed a debt in state taxes he could not pay. Bushrod Grimes with the West Virginia University Cooperative Extension, hearing of Arthur’s problem, negotiated the sale of the Arthurdale property for $35,000 from New Deal funds (Penix, 27). Now Mrs. Roosevelt’s dream of a social experiment had a place. What would it consist of? Houses would be outfitted with copper roofs, indoor plumbing, heat and insulation, kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms. Each house would have between two and five acres for gardens and farm animals. There would be a community center, an inn, and a School. Industry was an important consideration from the beginning, including a place for the Mountaineer Craft Cooperative whose workers (Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. n.d.-a), under the direction of Mrs. Roosevelt’s friend Nancy Cook (2000), would build a majority of the furniture for the homes. The new Homestead would be called Arthurdale in honor of Richard Arthur, the former owner. Funding for Arthurdale was created out of Section 208 of Title II of the National Recovery Act. The Act’s purpose was “[to] …provide for aiding in the redistribution of the overbalance of population in industrial centers $25,000,000 is hereby made available to the President to be used by him through such agencies … for making loans for and otherwise aiding in the purchase of subsistence homesteads. The money collected as

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repayment of said loans shall constitute a revolving fund to be administered as directed by the President for the purposes of this section.”4 What about education? Since Arthurdale was to be a social experiment, a School should also be an experiment. The work of Progressive Education, spearheaded by John Dewey (Dewey 1897, 1902), was popular in urban, well-to-do areas, and codified in part by the Progressive Education Association (PEA) in 1919. The American Friends Service Committee promoted enlightened and community-based education and to Clarence Pickett, this was a perfect opportunity to design an educational experience that was child-centered and community-based. To this end, Pickett suggested to Mrs. Roosevelt that Elsie Ripley Clapp, a protege of John Dewey’s and chair of the PEA’s rural School committee and who had designed a similar School outside of Louisville, Kentucky, would be a perfect fit in creating and directing a School (Pickett 1953; Graham 1967). Mrs. Roosevelt met with Clapp and approved of her ideas for a Progressive School at Arthurdale that would be child-centered and community-based. After negotiating a series of bureaucratic hoops, she hired Clapp at a salary of $6000 from her personal account. And now, we travel into The Arthurdale School: Cultural Intervention Through Rural Folklife Education in a Progressive New Deal Setting. The chapters of this book navigate a complicated venture of culture, folklife, New Deal politics, economics, and dreams. They are organized as follows. Chapter 1 here serves as an overview of the unique history and heritage of the Mountain State, zeroing in on the abject poverty of Scotts Run and the decision to intervene and relocate the unemployed, depressed, and downtrodden of Scotts Run through the Subsistence Homestead Act. Chapter 2 introduces Approaches to the Arthurdale School as a product embedded in the creation of the Arthurdale Homestead as an integral part of homesteaders’ lives. It will be explored through an assemblage of basic concerns to be fleshed out in the chapters to come. 1. Historical Ethnography: The use of the historical record of the Great Depression and the New Deal (Boyer, Schlesinger) and life in a coal mining community that led to the discovery of abject conditions and a plan to intervene and relocate people for a better life. This is an application of the concepts of cultural intervention and strategic relocation (Whisnant 1983; Skousen 2011; Also known as Euthenics).

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2. Education History and Progressive Education: An exploration of traditional education and the tenets of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) and its connection to the thought of John Dewey’s philosophy of education and their use in community development and democracy (Graham 1967; Dewey 1897). 3. Ecological Psychology: Exploring the question of how Arthurdale homesteaders at home and in School interacted with the construction of the built space, place, and use of the Homestead, based on the basic work of J.J. Gibson (1966) and Roger Barker (1968). 4. Folklore and Folklife: A look at cultural expression through tradition. 5. Folklife Education: Folklife consists of a critical response to the world using expressions that have withstood the tests of time, including story, song, craft, belief, and art. I discuss how Folklife Education came to be and how it involves identifying such expressions among adults and children, and, in the case of Arthurdale, how folklife was identified and utilized as a means of enhancing cultural stability. Chapter 3, Elsie Ripley Clapp: From Woman of Valor to Progressive Education Leader, explores Elsie Clapp’s childhood, education, and her single-minded ideals and attention to interaction between the educative and the community of Arthurdale being built before everyone’s eyes. Clapp’s thesis was straightforward: a Progressive PEA School could survive in a rural environment. This chapter and Chap. 4 describe Clapp’s personal exploration of Scotts Run and her engagement of the Preston County School district, homesteaders, and the West Virginia Department of Education (Clapp 1939, 1952) in allowing her a three-year timeframe in executing the School as an independent, but public School, 1934–1937. In planning the School, Clapp engaged the counsel of Progressive Education pioneers Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Jessie Stanton to create a corps of educators drawn from the Preston County School district, in addition to engaging healthcare professionals and parents to supply the health and nutrition needs of the students (Clapp ibid.). Chapter 4 documents the hiring of Elsie Ripley Clapp to direct the School and to serve as adviser for community affairs. She defines the connection between the community School and community, the architecture of the School in light of ecological psychology and childhood development as presented by the Progressive Education Association (Graham 1967). Prior to her hiring, she was presented with a Manifesto prepared by

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the homesteaders covering their idea of what a School should be and what a curriculum should do. For context, the Arthurdale houses between 1933 and 1937 were created out of three types, the prefabricated houses ordered by Louis Howe from the E.F.  Hodgson Company of Dover, Massachusetts, the refined versions of the Hodgson houses by architects Eric Gugler and Steward Wagner, and stone homes crafted from locally quarried stone (Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. n.d.-b). The floorplans of the houses, based on Mrs. Roosevelt’s desires, were formulaic with the kitchen, dining area, and restrooms on the first floor and sleeping quarters on the second floor. Each home had electricity and refrigerators. Stoves and boilers were coal fired and had a fireplace. The Wagner houses also had basements. Accompanying each house was a farm plot of 1.5 to 5 acres. On these plots a homesteader might include an acre of wheat, several types of fruit trees, and a grape arbor. Any remaining acreage would have been planted in forage crops for the livestock being raised. Arthurdale Heritage Archivist Jeanne Goodman supplies a description of the Wagner Houses: Wagners only have one fireplace—one on the right wall as you are looking at the standard picture, midway between the two side windows which are in the living room. The coal furnace is in the small central hallway when you enter the side/back door, which is on the left wall. So, each chimney is above the fireplace and furnace. Entering through the French doors, you would be in the living room which runs the depth of the house, so looking straight ahead, you would see the back yard through a window. Outside, you can see our small plaque on the wall, then a window, which is where the dining table is, beyond which arc the stairs with a landing lo go to the 2nd floor. The second window to the left is over the kitchen sink, with a wall between the dining area and the kitchen. Some Wagners had the kitchen wall further into the living room with the dining area in the kitchen, rather than in the living room. If you step through the side door, immediately on the right is the furnace in a short hall leading to the living room. There is a small coal room immediately on the left, then a door into the laundry room with a window. On the right is the doorway into the kitchen. Besides the window you can see in the photo, there is another kitchen window on the right side of the house, near the side door. As you go upstairs, there is a smaller window on the landing. You then enter a hallway, passing 4 doors which are the bedrooms and walking straight

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into the very large bathroom. In the photo, the right-hand window on the gable is the bathroom. The other two are the parents’ bedroom, which has a small area in front of them where we keep a crib. The two windows on the right wall—the first is the parents’ room, the other is the first room on the left as you come up the stairs. There are two other windows on the unseen side that belong to the 2 other bedrooms. Each bedroom has 2 windows (parents 3), one on each exterior wall. The tractor picture shows some of the left side and the side/back door that is on it. l found one shot of the rear. The Wagners were not identical and the layouts varied, according to the lay of the land. Some had much smaller bathrooms and a hall linen closet. Placement of stairs varied. Six had a central chimney because they had a basement with a furnace. The School, designed by Wagner and Clapp were open, providing a maximum of space and sunlight for the children. Additionally, space was created for mothers to prepare hot lunches, using foods from home gardens. Instead of the kinds of furniture found in the houses, the school was outfitted with items identified from the PEA schools, including building blocks and art supplies, and room for cots that were used for mid-day naps. The School complex was completed in late 1935. In 1934–35, the School operated in the old Arthur mansion. (Clapp 1939, 1952)

Chapter 5 is devoted to the life in the Arthurdale School, a combination of Folklife Education and Progressive principles. The Arthurdale School was the result of a combination of Eleanor Roosevelt’s dream of a great social experiment carried out through Elsie Clapp’s plan based on her experience as a professional Progressive educator. This chapter describes Clapp’s plan and work, placing it in parallel with the PEA’s principles for Progressive-style learning, exemplified by Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s Bureau of Educational Experiments (Mitchell 1953). This chapter shares the lives of students in the course of their School days, using a Transdisciplinary curriculum with a social/emotional/learning support system for students and staff. Using descriptions by Clapp, fellow students, and staff, they introduce the use of fieldtrips to explore students’ first-hand experiences of Arthurdale’s growth, and how their experiences were expressed in what I call childlife ethnographies, an exercise from the playbooks of anthropologists, folklorists, and sociologists who work in educational environments. In the Arthurdale School the children used their folk cultural expressions to describe their experiences with building blocks, art, and writing which parallels Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s concept of intake and out-go (Mitchell 1953, 276). I expand on community health

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care and the participation of parents in School life, including the provision of hot lunches prepared by the mothers, daughters, and their friends using ingredients from the School and family gardens. In developing and executing the School, the rich, regional folklife was an essential component to curriculum preparation and execution. Without a recognition and acknowledgement of folklife before the move to Arthurdale and the presence of traditional expression, at home and in School, a major component to cultural respect would have been buried alive and the Homestead would have been rendered meaningless. One teacher in particular, Fletcher Collins, who was initially hired to teach English and drama, found a wellspring of expressive traditional knowledge in the families through their music, including ballads and play-­ party songs, instrumental music, and dance which he and his wife Margaret documented (Collins 1996) and used in the curriculum. For example, when a student expressed an interest in building fiddles, Collins located a traditional luthier living nearby to teach the students. From all of this, Collins was able to develop rapport and an enhanced community feeling through the documentation process, and its inclusion into the curriculum, as well as the production of folk festivals featuring the traditions of the people of Arthurdale and surrounding communities. The folk festival resulted in a trip to the White House in May of 1936 to perform for disabled veterans (Charleston Daily Mail 1936). Chapter 6 documents the delight and demise of the Arthurdale School. Funded with philanthropic energy, contributors saw that Eleanor Roosevelt’s attempts at initiating factories to provide Arthurdale residents a sustainable income were failing. This affected the School which relied on private contributions and success in the institution of the factories. The relationship between Roosevelt and Clapp became a flurry of correspondence between Roosevelt, Clapp, and financier Bernard Baruch, whose business acumen and wealth supported the School between 1935 and 1936. When it appeared that funding was threatened, Clapp applied for outside support (Haid 1975), but it was not forthcoming. Out of a June 1936 meeting with long-time advisers, Roosevelt, parents, the county School district, and the West Virginia Department of Education, a decision was made to dissolve Clapp’s progressive program and transition the School into the traditional Preston County School system. The Nursery School would remain, in addition to adult education through the National Youth Administration. In August, 1936, Clapp

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wrote Mrs. Roosevelt from Maine, tendering her departure from the Arthurdale School (Clapp personal communication to Roosevelt). Chapter 7 concludes the story of the Arthurdale School as a Progressive Education experiment and contrasts its work with current trends in Folklife Education (FE), first providing a historical basis for this field. History will show that FE closely aligns itself with Clapp’s curriculum through her transdisciplinary student-centered and community-based approach and its correspondence with STEAM pedagogy—science, technology, engineering, art, and math that folklorists in FE work with today, in concert with classroom teachers (Deafenbaugh 2017). FE uses childlife ethnography and community interaction to forge positive relationships, which includes empathy and a mindfulness of education and culture as a living organism like what Clapp hoped to achieve. Chapter 8, Individuals and Community, the concluding chapter, explores the distinction between a self-described private School and the Arthurdale School in action, where the main difference is in the acceptance and use of folklife. Epilogue, The Force of Community, features the 1980s establishment of Arthurdale Heritage (n.d.-c) as a 501 (c) (3) non-profit and the application to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today, it is an historic district and a shrine to its patron saint, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Notes 1. Woolley, John and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, University of California—Santa Barbara https://www.presidency. ucsb.edu/documents/executive-­o rder-­7 027-establishment-­t he-­ resettlement-­administration. 2. Allen, Bernard L.  Joseph H.  Diss Debar. e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. 16 October 2012. Web. 30 April 2022 and State of West Virginia website (http://www.wvlegislature.gov/educational/kids_ page/5.html). 3. The Shack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheShackNeighborhoodHouse (Accessed September 2019). 4. Section 208 of Title II of the National Recovery Act.

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References Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. n.d.-a Houses. https://arthurdaleheritage.org. ———. n.d.-b Industrial Development. https://arthurdaleheritage.org/. ———. n.d.-c Mountaineer Craftsmen’s Cooperative Furniture. Accessed October 2019. https://arthurdaleheritage.org/. Barker, Roger. 1968. Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behavior. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brooks, William E. 1935. Arthurdale—A New Chance. Atlantic Monthly 155: 199. Charleston Daily Mail (at Newspapers.com). 1936. Arthurdale Musicians to Go to White House. Thursday, May 21, 1936. p.  48. Accessed 20 February 2020. https://www.newspapers.com/image/19998281/?ter ms=Fletche r%2BCollins. Clapp, Elsie Ripley. 1939. Community Schools in Action. NY: The Viking Press. ———. 1952. The Use of Resources in Education. NY: Harper and Brothers. Collins, Margaret. 1996. Wheel and Star: A Quilt. Staunton, VA: DIV. Cook, Blanche Wiesen. 2000. Eleanor Roosevelt. Vols 1, 2. NY: Penguin. Cremin, Lawrence A. 1961. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education 1876–1957. NY: AA Knopf. Deafenbaugh, Linda. 2017. Developing the Capacity for Tolerance through Folklife Education. PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. Accessed 2019. http:// d-­scholarship.pitt.edu/33691. ———. n.d. Folklife Education Overview. Accessed December 2019. [email protected]. Dewey, John. 1897. My Pedagogic Creed. School Journal 54: 77–80. ———. 1902. The School and Society/The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gibson, J. J. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Graham, Patricia Ahlberg. 1967. Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe: A History of the Progressive Education Association. NY: Teachers College Press. Haid, Stephen 1975. Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning, 1933–1947. Unpublished PhD dissertation West Virginia University. Hickock, Lorena. 1962. Eleanor: Reluctant First Lady. NY: Dodd, Mead, and Company. Hoag, Ann, and Todd Harvey 2002. Real People Talking: Conversations with Fletcher Collins. American Folklife Center News Spring 24(3). https://www. eorah.namethe-­state-­ofwest-­virginia. The State of West Virginia. https://www. mapsof.net/preston-­county. Preston County: County in West Virginia, United States. Hoffman, Nancy. 2001. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Arthurdale Experiment. North Haven, CT: Linnet Books.

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Lewis, Ronald L. n.d. Scotts Run: America’s Symbol of the Great Depression in the Coal Fields. Accessed October 2019. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/journal_wvh/wvh53-1.html Lindstrom, Diane. 2001. Great Depression. In The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed. Paul Boyer, 184–185. NY: Oxford University Press. Lowitt, Richard, and M.  Beasley (eds.) 1981. One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. In book jacket. Maloney, C.J. 2011. Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Mitchell, Lucy Sprague. 1953. Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself, 275–276. NY: Simon and Schuster. Nagler, Nancy, and Edna Shapiro. 2007. A Progressive Approach to the Education of Teachers, 3–44. NY: Bank Street College of Education. National Archives. n.d. West Virginia Statehood, June 20, 1863. Accessed 25 December 2021 https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/west-­virginia. Penix, Amanda Griffith. 2007. Images of America: Arthurdale. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Pickett, Clarence G. 1953. Not By Bread Alone: An Autobiographical Account of Twenty-Two Years Work With the American Friends Service Committee. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. 1958. The Coming of the New Deal: The Age of Roosevelt. Boston: Houghton­Mifflin. Skousen, Joel. 2011. Strategic Relocation. Available through Amazon and Abe Books. Stack, Sam F., Jr. 2016. The Arthurdale Community School: Education and Reform in Depression-Era Appalachia. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press. State of West Virginia website. n.d. Accessed August 2023. http://www.wvlegislature.gov/educational/kids_page/5.html. The News Leader. 2005. Fletcher Collins [1906–2005]. The News Leader (Staunton, Virginia) Saturday, 7 May, p. 2. Accessed 19 February 2020. Thompson, Stith. 1938. American Folklore After Fifty Years. Journal of American Folklore 51 (199): 1–9. Whisnant, David E. 1983. All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Zumwalt, Rosemary Levy. 1988. American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana University.

CHAPTER 2

Approaches

In the camps, the mothers said they had feared to have their children “run” and play outside the house. Many of the children had been held back from attending school because of the danger of going there and back. However, at Arthurdale, the school, which they had helped make, the interest and concern of the teachers who came and visited them and looked after their children, whom they have as neighbors, their own share in a life where “things were done decent;” reassured them. They dared to relax and to trust other people and believe in their good fortune. —Clapp (1939, 117)

As a folklorist, working in the history of folklife in educational settings, I apply a variety of approaches to gain insight and answers. Here, I start with a problem: what was the importance of the Arthurdale School as an essential component to the planned Homestead of Arthurdale? This chapter is a reference tool to the approaches I am using to offer one answer to this problem. I start with the concept of history and end with folklife education. But first, I share how I became involved with this project.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Rosenberg, The Arthurdale School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45626-8_2

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2.1   From Here to There: How I Met Elsie Ripley Clapp and the Arthurdale School I became interested in the work of Elsie Ripley Clapp and her Arthurdale work sometime in the mid-1980s. As a fledging folklorist working in education, I was formulating my approach to Folklife Education as a presenter to fourth grade students and as a historian of the field during the Progressive Era (1900–1955). I came across Clapp’s 1939 account of her Progressive Education program, Community Schools in Action, and was captivated by her combination of child-centered and community-based education in a rural environment. I appreciated her foray into the community of Scotts Run to see and hear for herself the impoverished conditions families were faced with, which gave her the idea of how to proceed with the School (Chap. 1). Further, I was struck by her abilities to negotiate with the public and the public school district to establish her School as an independent, but public school for a three-year period (1934–1937), staffed by teachers from the school district in concert with Clapp’s New York colleagues established in Progressive pedagogies (Chap. 1). To execute her plan, Clapp faced four interesting problems: (1) how to create a School in a place that was still under construction; (2) how to create a program that tended to the physical and emotional needs of the children she observed at Scotts Run; (3) how to encourage and sustain parental involvement in the School; and (4) how best to create a corps of teachers who supported the Progressive program she envisioned. Community Schools in Action was a kind of model for me in Folklife Education. Clapp’s descriptions of the work of the School let me see beyond any fault and acknowledge true need in the lives of students, their parents, and this community of Arthurdale in inclusivity. I had a lot to learn. I needed to (1) understand the context of the Great Depression’s grip on the economic, social, and cultural being of the people; (2) gain more information on the Great Depression experience in north-central West Virginia; (3) learn more about Eleanor Roosevelt and her role in the creation of Arthurdale and the School; and most vital, (4) Elsie Clapp—who she was and her pedagogical thought. By 2009 I was permanently established in Bloomington, Indiana. It was here that I began to amass a small personal library on Arthurdale and the School. I was dismayed at how little information was available on Clapp. One biography, Miss Elsie Ripley Clapp (1879–1965}: Her Life and the Community School (Stack 2004), provided a wealth of information on

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Clapp and one of the clearest explanations of the thinking of John Dewey that I had ever read. And I thirsted for more because for the first time I began to see a Progressive Education link to the study of traditional culture. Stack’s references to his biography and his second book, The Arthurdale Community School: Education and Reform in Depression-Era Appalachia (2016), led me in July 2019 to the Clapp papers at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, archived in nine boxes and 22 folders of newspaper clippings and photographs of School activity. My colleagues Loretta and Matthew Brockmeier sent me a photo-documentary book by Penix (2007) that provided me with a visual context of the whole of the Homestead, including the School. Now it became clear that I must visit the Arthurdale site. In preparing for my visit to Arthurdale, I continued collecting information on the site. I learned that a group of Arthurdale supporters formed Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. (AHI), a non-profit devoted to restoring Arthurdale homes and the community center. In 1988, the Arthurdale site was put on the National Register of Historic Places. With the restoration of five houses, the community center, an inn, and a gas station, the site was opened to the public as a historic site. I made my plan to visit Arthurdale in October 2019, prior to the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society in Baltimore. Getting to Arthurdale from Indianapolis begins on the Interstate system and winds into rural roads, dense with homes, liquor stores, a Yuengling Beer distributor, and evidence of coal mining operations. I spoke with AHI Executive Director Darlene Bolyard while on the way, and she advised I stay aware of the speed limit in nearby Reedsville as the sheriff “liked” to give speeding tickets. The narrow, thick road, Highway 92, led into a wide expanse of houses on rolling green. On my right was a large white building festooned with flags announcing “Eleanor’s Little Village.” I had arrived. The AHI office is located in the large white building, once designated as a commerce center and office. Upon entry into the AHI office, I was met by Darlene Bolyard, AmeriCorps worker Meredith Dreistradt, and assistant Torey Siebart. After pleasant chat, I talked about my intent: to explore the School. Meredith gave me a tour of the site, including the house which had been one of the five restored. Interestingly, the lower level of the house was open as a house museum. Meredith lived on the upper level, which was recompense for AmeriCorps workers. I visited the

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actual Museum, whose exhibits of photographs, furniture, and plenty of ephemera devoted to Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were on the walls. After the tour, I met with Archivist Jeanne Goodman. She instructed me on how to use the digitized databases and hard copy files. I was surprised to find very little documentation related to the School and Clapp. Needless to say, I was disappointed. I explored other archive files and hung out with Bolyard and staff to learn more of what they valued about the Homestead. What I came to believe was AHl’s focus lay in the celebration of the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt manifest in the restored buildings and artifacts associated with the Homestead. After all, Mrs. Roosevelt invested heavily, financially, and socially in what she called a great social experiment. In fact, during my visit, every time Bolyard learned of or was  given something related to the community, she would fold her hands in prayer, look to the ceiling, and intone, “Thank you, Mrs. Roosevelt!” After attending the Folklore Meetings, I returned to Bloomington with so many questions! I spent a lot of time thinking about Eleanor Roosevelt, glad that Lorena Hickok demanded Mrs. Roosevelt visit Scotts Run (Chap. 1). Upon receiving Clapp’s 1952 work, The Use of Resources in Education, I was able to see clearly how folklife was applied at Arthurdale School through extended instructor reports. Most exciting was the report from Fletcher Collins who was initially hired in June, 1934, to teach English and drama. He was instrumental in tapping into the traditional culture of the homesteaders, their songs and music. Additionally, I had the opportunity to visit with Mary Ellen Brown, formerly of the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. I was a student of Mary Ellen’s in 1975, and I was able to kindle a new kind of relationship where she was able to discuss with me her concept of historical ethnography, the use of the past in a manner that described the power of culture in a historical framework. I knew she attended Mary Baldwin College where Fletcher Collins taught, and when I asked her if she knew Collins, she enthusiastically responded she did! She also told me that Margaret Collins had published “Wheel and Star: A Quilt” (1996), a memoir of her and “Fletch’s” careers, including Arthurdale. She loaned me the monograph, and I found it so rich with detail about the School. With this, my library, files, and ongoing conversations with Loretta and my long-time mentor Sylvia Ann Grider, my journey took flight. My approaches now follow.

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2.2   Historical Ethnography Historical Ethnography is as much a research method as it is a style of writing. Folklorist Mary Ellen Brown calls herself a “historical ethnographer to emphasize my preoccupation with the past as well as my connection to general ethnographic endeavors. While I cannot observe or ask questions directly, I do, of course ask questions and sift through the information available, such as letters and documentation,] to find answers and draw conclusions” (1981). Daniel Little summarizes the work of historical research as follows: “[h]istorians conceptualize, explain, and interpret events and circumstances of the past. They sketch out ways of representing the complex activities of the past; they explain and interpret significant outcomes; and they base their findings on evidence in the present that bears upon facts about the past. Ultimately, the historian’s task is to shed light on inferences from the evidence of the present” (2020). Michaela Fenske and John Bendix (2007) situates historical ethnography according to scope, micro, macro, and agency: “micro refers to the immediate of small-­scale field of research, while macro refers to the embedding of such immediate fields within larger regional contexts. Agency refers to cultural practices and actors (and their communication) that now stand at the center of disciplinary interest” (Fenske 2019). For my purposes, the micro is Arthurdale and the School. Macro refers to the creation of Arthurdale in the Great Depression of north-central West Virginia. As for agency, I am looking at the people and behaviors that brought Arthurdale to fruition, which includes attitudes, sociological dimensions, and cultural aspects all related to conception, construction, and inhabitance in the Homestead. This is where I learned of the inherent racism employed in the selection of Arthurdale homesteaders. Each applicant had to file an 8-page questionnaire on their health, employment history, education, and work experience. Some of the questions were humorous: “tell which side a cow is milked?” “List in sequence the seed planting of garden crops.” “A bushel of oats weighs more than a bushel of buckwheat, true or false?”1 According to Hoffman (2001), “It became apparent to many that the answers to questionnaires and interviews had less to do with who was approved than the race, ethnic background, and political affiliations.” While Mrs. Roosevelt tolerated the questions, she had a very difficult time with one area, the rejection of African American applicants. The Homesteader Club who navigated Roosevelt’s desire for

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diversity gave three reasons for their decision: “(1) The community in which we are located is thoroughly opposed to Negroes as residents, and we feel that we should not risk the loss of the respect we have gained in the community by admitting Negroes; (2) The admission of Negroes would necessitate the establishment of separate schools and churches, as our state laws forbid both races to attend the same schools; and (3) Without prejudice to the race, and with the feeling that all races should have equal opportunity, we believe that those who are clamoring for admission are not Negroes, but are of mixed blood and far inferior to mix with the white race” (Hoffman, 22–23). However, the decision to include or exclude Negroes was ultimately made by the local administrator, Bushrod Grimes. “(Franklin) Roosevelt had long dreamed of turning poverty-stricken sharecroppers and farm tenants into independent, self-supporting farmers, each on his own homestead … The head of Subsistence Homesteads, M.L. Wilson, was anxious to see Negroes participate in the community program. Yet when more than two hundred Negroes applied for the first project at Arthurdale, West Virginia project manager Bushrod Grimes refused to consider them, announcing that Arthurdale was open only to ‘native white stock.’ Subsistence Homesteads officials later decided that no project should bar anyone on account of race, but they always based family selection on the ‘sociological pattern’ of the [local] community … keeping in mind the success of the project.” This requirement in effect meant segregated Homesteads. Subsistence Homesteads did succeed in creating some all-­ Negro projects, but many were stopped because of local white opposition.2 In addition to issues of race and home nationality, the applicant submissions were scored for applicant ability to participate in the construction of the Homestead. At times, the evaluations seemed arbitrary, capitalizing more on the morals of applicants as determined by the evaluators.3 Historical ethnography research can be likened to a scavenger hunt for source material. For Fensen, her hunt placed her in a large archive and her development of relationships with staff—administrators, archivists, and materials retrievers—as well as amateur patrons of the archive, all of whom she had to establish positive relations to access materials desired, and materials discovered only recently. For folklorists, our work also engages archives and other places: attics, historical societies, buildings, baskets, oral histories, even the physical layout of a community. The sources and resources are endless. We are history’s detectives through our belief in folklore’s never-ending quest for understanding.

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Pulling together all information is the act of assemblage, the assembly of the who, what, where, when, how, and why, in this case the facts and beliefs that led to the creation of Arthurdale and specifically, the Arthurdale School. It is a complicated undertaking because, first of all, the backdrop of the Great Depression and its effects on the place and life in north-­ central West Virginia. Secondly, the reception of the Arthurdale ideal and plan was mixed due to pro and anti-New Deal sentiment. Third, the exorbitant cost associated with the construction of the Homestead was so great. And last, and by no means least, was the concept, construction, and operation of the School as a progressive child-centered, community-based enterprise that challenged certain citizen understanding of what a School should be. In my Introduction, I described primary and secondary sources connected to Arthurdale and its School. Each scholar is a bricoleur, one who organizes his or her assemblage and creates a story from it. I differ somewhat from my colleagues in that, instead of a straightforward and stereotypical historical account, I hope to use historical ethnography to tell a story that lives, breathes, and expands, using the elements of the historical record, accounts of life lived, and connecting these to my interpretation of a situation grounded in the approaches to follow.

2.3  Ecological Psychology Ecological psychology explores the intentional arrangement of places and the perceived behaviors within them. It is the interaction of people with their environment. Developed by J.J. Gibson in 1904–1979 (1966), he asked, “how do animals, including human beings, secure the information from the world about them that is essential to their adaptation to it and survival in it?” (Gibson 1966). He regarded the five senses as “active seeking mechanisms for looking, listening, touching, and the like.” Gibson (Ibid.), as a psychologist, of course, was well aware of the brain, the cognitive, but I think what stood him apart from the cognitive scholars was his employment of the active and diverse human being. Most people have five senses. But how we use our senses is what makes us human (and this could well apply to animals, too). Roger Barker (1903–1990) whose association with the University of Kansas, Lawrence, enabled him to create the Midwest Field Station to study ecological psychology in nearby Oskaloosa (population 725) of which 22.76% would apply to Arthurdale’s 165 residences (Personal

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communication with Rhona Carlton-Foss, 4 January 2022). Like Gibson, Barker was concerned with the use of the five senses in our interactions with the environment. Barker carried Gibson further by identifying the “where” of interaction and how the “what” of went on in the “where” created an acceptable environment. Barker’s biographer, Ariel Sabar, explains that Barker chose Oskaloosa because the town’s size and activity provided a revelatory experience, allowing Barker to do what he wanted, to do what Jane Goodall did with chimpanzees in Tanzania: examine the life of homo-sapiens in a natural habitat (Sabar 2014). This sounds rather sterile, but to do the work, Barker had to immerse himself in the environment. Barker and his family became participant-observers, developing an ethnography of life in Oskaloosa. He identified two main elements of community life which prove universal. The main element was the “activity site,” places where behaviors were situated such as church, School, stores, and barber shop. The second element, nested in the activity site, was the “behavior setting,” in which socioculturally determined action occurred. In Oskaloosa, behavior settings included worship in churches, commerce in stores, educating in Schools, and play on playgrounds, and on the street. While Barker’s work was recognized in psychology circles, it was not fully embraced as a method and theory. It was Allan W. Wicker, a student of Barker’s, who made the work of ecological psychology applicable beyond Oskaloosa. His An Introduction to Ecological Psychology (1979) is a manual explaining activity sites and behavior settings in a less sterile manner, supplying the reader/researcher with exercises allowing him or her to explore these areas in their own places and lives. By doing so, the one supplies meaning to his or her chosen environment. Ecological psychology is one way of explaining the history and creation of the Arthurdale School as an activity site with a variety of behavior settings within the whole of Arthurdale, which had its own activity sites and behavior settings. This field will make clear the intentions and the realities of life planned and life lived in the Homestead.

2.4   Folklore/Folklife To the uninitiated, the word “folklore” conjures images of Hansel and Gretel searching for crumbs in the forest, ghost stories, and more, imagined or no. For those with training, folklore refers to the “stuff” of tradition and the study of that stuff.

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The word “folklore” was coined by the clerk of “Printed Paper Office in the House of Lords,” William John Thoms (1803–1885) (Emrich 1946). Like many of his associates, Thoms had a great interest in what were called “antiquities,” the quaint and curious of peasant culture. He felt that the term “popular antiquities” deserved a new name. Under the pseudonym Ambrose Merton, Thoms wrote to the British literary magazine The Athenaeum, suggesting popular antiquities was “… more a Lore than a Literature, and would be most aptly described by a good Saxon compound Folklore—the lore of the people” (Dundes 1965, 4–5). Thoms’ proposal gained a following, enough to a point that the publication Notes and Queries devoted a column edited by Thoms related to items of folklore, gleaned from literary sources as well as from individuals who learned of folklore in their travels. In 1878 the interest in folklore warranted the organization of The Folklore Society, of which Thoms was a co-founder. The Society’s range of interests included traditional music, song, dance, drama, narrative, custom, belief, popular religion, foodways, lay medical practices, and more. Today the Society publishes the journal Folklore, first published as The Folk-Lore Record. “Across the pond” in the US a similar interest in traditional expression was already underway. It was William Wells Newell in 1887 who sent letters to friends proposing the founding of a Folklore Society in America. In January of 1888, interested parties met at Harvard University to discuss the proposal. On 4 January of that year the American Folklore Society (AFS) and its attending journal the Journal of American Folklore (JAF) was born (Newell 1883; Zumwalt 1988). In volume 1 of the April–June 1888 of the Journal, Newell laid out a plan On the Field and Work of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, inviting scientific scholarship on: 1. The collection of fast-vanishing remains of Folk-Lore in America, namely:

(a) Relics of Old English Folk-Lore (ballads, tales, superstitions, dialect, etc.) (b) Lore of Negroes in the southern states of the Union. (c) Lore of Indian tribes of North America (myths, tales, etc.) (d) Lore of French Canada, Mexico, etc.

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2. For the study of the general subject and publication of the results of special students in this department (1888, 3). Like its European counterpart, AFS and JAF have grown in scope and sequence. The annual meeting of the Society and the publication of the Journal reflect not only the “lore,” but the people and the contexts associated with it. As Zumwalt pointed out (1988), there has been a long-­ standing schism in approaches in the field, the literary and the anthropological. This split is sometimes a bone of contention. But more it is a difference in approaches, based in what comprises oral literature and ethnographic method. These approaches were carefully cataloged in Maria Leach’s The Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (1949/1953) and has expanded manifold. The fact of the literary/anthropology approaches are clear as evidenced in the welcome profusion of journals, including the Journal of Folklore Research, Western Folklore, The Folklore Historian, and New Directions in Folklore, to name a few. Articles in these journals not only shed light on what people have said: they illuminate what people do. Their actions give rise to a study of material culture, called folklife. Folklife is not new. It is recognized through festivals, publications, and museum exhibits devoted to sharing the lore of the people through practices and how we interpret them and their importance in our day to day lives. From architecture to religion, folklife connects us to where we live and work with those who are a part of us, historically and culturally. The word “folklife” has quite a history of its own. Don Yoder (1921–2015) shows us the way (Winick 2015). In his classic 1963 article “The Folklife Studies Movement” ([1963] 1990), Yoder shows how the term “folklife” is an adaptation of the Swedish “folkliv.” He continues, “‘Folklife Studies’ or ‘Folklife Research,’ from the Swedishfolklivsforskining and the German volkskunde is a total scholarly concentration on the folk level of a national or regional culture. In brief, folklife studies involves the analysis of culture in its entirety” (1990, 24–26). The focus on the material (as well as the spiritual) of a culture expands on Thoms’ proposition. From architecture to cooking, from costume to veterinary practices and the ways these traditions are taught, through observation and imitation in the family or community, folklife is all-­ encompassing. It maintains a people’s critical response to the world, using expressions that have withstood the tests of time (Rosenberg 2019).

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Folklife is an umbrella term that covers (protects?) folklore. The field is necessary to understand the cultural connections between the elite cultures of Eleanor Roosevelt, Elsie Clapp, and their ilk, and the homesteaders of Arthurdale. This will be one of the many running themes throughout this book. 2.4.1   Education/Progressive Education My dissertation, “A Landscape of Enculturation: The Vernacular of Elementary School Buildings and Playgrounds 1840–1930” (University of Pennsylvania, 1984), was an exploration of the built and the used educational environments of Philadelphia, using historical ethnography, ecological psychology, and folklife approaches. I wanted to merge the “ought” of designers and philosophers with the “is” of actual use, drawn from interviews with alumni of the schools and playgrounds and how they and I thought these environments were used, based on descriptions in the literature. I wanted to know how the idea of education and play worked in the idea of a creation of a pliant and informed citizenry. My interest in the folk cultural aspect of public education was encouraged by my chair, Kenny Goldstein (1927–1995) in University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Folklore and Folklife, and stimulated by then historian of education, Michael B. Katz (1939–2014), an influential scholar in Penn’s program in Education, Culture, and Society (ECS) based in the Graduate School of Education who turned me on to the Progressive Education movement. As I tumbled thoughts then, my friend Karen Creuziger told me about a recently demolished school building, the Alice Carey School near the Philadelphia International Airport. This was a golden opportunity to look at a school piece by piece, and I returned to the site many times to think about its layout and construction. I wrote a paper on the Carey School for a class in the ECS program for a professor who I came to believe was biased in revisionist history and could not extend his thinking to the environmental and folk cultural. It affected me greatly, and in designing my dissertation, I realized it was, in part, a rejection of this professor’s rejection of my work. It was an appreciation of a more seasoned Katz and openness of Goldstein and my home department. From them, my work today on the use of folklore in the history of American Education in the Progressive period has become my calling, with my chosen time frame, 1900–1955 when Progressive Schools

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were founded until the informal dissolution of the Progressive Education Association (Graham 1967). For a moment, I turn back to my dissertation. I often spoke to my mother (1927–2008), a child of the traditional public school system beginning for her in 1933. She was a precocious child, having learned to read before first grade, and she related how she would often hang out by the schoolyard fence, dreaming of the time when she could overcome that fence and attend school. When that dream became a reality, Mom was able to skip first grade with the encouragement of one teacher, Eva Pratt. Mom’s schooling was one of her fondest memories. Inside the classroom, a beginning of the school year was marked for her by a ritual when the janitors came into the classroom, wrenches in hand, to adjust the height of the desks that were bolted to the floor. For my mother, this was really cool. Unbeknownst to her, she was reinforcing the pedagogy of the time. What is education? The master historian of the field, Lawrence A. Cremin (1925–1990) devoted his life to documenting and understanding the history of schooling, and he wrote: I have defined education broadly, as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, or sensibilities, as well as any outcome of that effort (Cremin 1961). In many respects this definition coincides with the ways folklife is transmitted. Yet the difference between the public education Cremin describes and folklife’s conveyance is in the replicable formality of Cremin’s documentation and the informality of education in communities and families. Cremin’s education is rigid. Folklife’s is not. Education is formalized through its environment; folklife education is not. A history of education can be located in the use of cuneiforms and their use by the Sumerians as early as 2000 BCE. Yet it wasn’t until a recognition of Socrates (470–379 BCE) and his method of instruction based on the application of answers to questions related to a subject. The Socratic Method, also used by Plato and Aristotle, forces rigorous explications, which are most evident in law school pedagogy. Ancient education was reserved for the upper classes. Later, courses of study were literacy dependent. Learning to read was more of a privilege than a right. One had to learn the alphabet, the formation of words (phonics) and recognizing their placement in a text to convey meaning. In the early centuries of the US, the most recognizable text was the King James Version of the Bible. In the nineteenth century, the earliest texts, in

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addition to the Bible, were William McGuffey’s (1800–1873) Eclectic Primers, published in 1836. These readers, intended for grades 1–6, introduced the alphabet, phonics, and religious messages as a means by which to instill morality, which added a fourth dimension to the focus of education: reading, writing, arithmetic, and religious morals (McGuffey 1997). By 1836, a vigorous call for free, public education came to the fore from Horace Mann of Massachusetts (1796–1859). As Cremin (2022, 1) describes, Mann was “the first great advocate of public education who believed that in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, and reliant on well trained professional teachers.” In 1837, Mann became the first state superintendent of education in Massachusetts, answering to a board by gathering and disseminating information on the Bay State’s Schools. He established The Common School Journal for educators and went on the lecture circuit to promote the cause for free, public education. Cremin identifies Mann’s six-point message on education: 1. “A republic cannot long remain ignorant and free, hence the necessity of universal popular education; 2. “that education must be paid for … by an interested public; 3. “that education be available to children on all religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds; 4. “though moral in character, education be free of sectarian influence; 5. “that education be free of harsh classroom pedagogy (in original); and 6. “such education be conveyed by professional teachers. (Cremin 2022) Mann’s propositions met some resistance from clergy, educators, and politicians, desirous of complete control over who was to be and what was to be taught, Yet Mann’s views prevailed, and in 1852 Massachusetts initiated the first compulsory schooling legislation. “By 1918, all American children were required to attend at least elementary school” (Watson n.d.). As a result, schooling became a universal, top-down enterprise with professionally designed buildings and certified educators, in both rural and urban settings. The idea was to confine and create an informed and moral citizenry, aligned in part with the child saving movement (Cavallo 1981), keeping the child occupied and off the streets (Rosenberg 1984, 2019). In the classroom, knowledge was imparted through what I call “chalk and talk,” lecture and recitation, and homework using textbooks,

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all of which included the memorization and regurgitation of facts and figures, with no seeming synthesis of scope and content (Cuban 1984). This style of educating was the status quo. Alongside it, there were educators and families who grew concerned about the confining nature of the education experience. Education’s philosopher, John Dewey (1859–1952), offered his “My Pedagogic Creed” in the 1897 issue of The School Journal. Laying out his creed in five “Articles,” Dewey defined education as a social experience grounded in sociology and psychology “through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself.” He further states “that the school as a social institution should simplify existing social life … that the school life should grow gradually out of the home life … activities with which the child is already familiar.” Rather than overwhelm the child with special studies, introduce the how of the familiar, cooking, sewing, etc., and explore the dynamics of them, their relation to being in a family and community, contributing to quality of life in the here and now. Some took Dewey’s Creed to mean “children learn by doing,” which was a reduction of what he meant. In reading his further defining texts, The School and Society (1900), The Child and the Curriculum (1902), and what is considered his major opus Democracy and Education (1915), I believe what Dewey was attempting in his own School at the University of Chicago was a form of a statement, that a child, by learning skills already familiar to him or her, was learning to be, which culminated in a form of becoming in society. And with that, the Progressive Education Movement was born. Progressive Schools, taking Dewey into account, were “child-­centered.” Children’s interests were identified, and Schools for them were fitted with items such as blocks and art materials he or she could manipulate to reflect meaning as he or she understood it in their own time, space, and place. Teachers were hired for their ability to engage and guide discovery. For pioneer educators, including Caroline Pratt, discovery came through play, deemed child’s work, and a constant in daily life (Pratt 1948). For all of the action, there was no unifying presence with the schools. Both teachers and parents were restless for something to pull them together in thought and deed. Their concerns were not unnoticed. Educators Stanwood Cobb (1881–1982) and Marietta Johnson (1864–1938) heard the call, and on April 4, 1919, eighty-five teachers and interested parties met in Washington, D.C. to form what came to be called the Progressive Education Association (PEA) (Cremin 1961;

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Graham 1967). Unlike the unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which were visibly teacher-centric, the PEA’s child-centered focus was outlined in seven principles: (1) Freedom to develop naturally; (2) Interest the motive of all work; (3) The teacher a guide, not a task master; (4) Scientific study of pupil development; (5) Greater attention to all that affects the child’s physical development; (6) Cooperation between school and home to meet the needs of child-life; and (7) The Progressive School a leader in educational movements (Cremin 1961, 243–245). The PEA sought to understand the child as a sentient member of society. This was what Clapp promoted at the Arthurdale School, much of which is visible in the work of folklife education.

2.5   Folklife Education Folklife education is a rounded approach that involves students, teachers, principals, administrators, communities, tradition bearers, and folklorists in understanding how cultural expression works in the fabric of society. Using the elements of ethnography, one works from the self, the “me” to the “we,” giving equal weight to history, ecology, folklife, and education as forming forces in personal and public construction that is fluid and everlasting (Rosenberg 2012). The use of folklife in education is by no means novel. Historically, it is not institutionalized, though it is identifiable through such related narratives as Jesus’s teaching in the temple (Luke 2: 40–52). A rabbi is at once a spiritual leader and a teacher. Folk cultural expression has been applied to relate family and community values through storytelling (Kirshenblatt-­ Gimblett 1975). The non-institutional exists side by side with the incipient bureaucratization of a field, played out through the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its affiliates, state and local arts and humanities agencies who receive funding through the Folk Arts Program after submitting to a meticulous application process. Folklife education can be associated with the Progressive Education movement. Everyone has a part to play, emotionally, intellectually, and socially. It is based on the premise that everyone has folklife, and given the right circumstances it can be communicated in a manner that conveys deep, heart-felt meaning.

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That being said, why the institutionalization? In education, prior to the Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), teachers, including Rachel Davis DuBois (1892–1993) and Dorothy Howard (1902–1986), used the folklife of their students and communities to teach social studies and language arts, respectively (Rosenberg 2007, 2012, 2019). While their work demonstrated a sensitivity to the variety of cultures, native and immigrant, the NEA Folk Arts Program was and still is highly attuned to a feeling among culture groups that they are ignored (Ben-Amos and Goldstein 2008). To this end, the NEA Folk Arts Program provides a vehicle for formal recognition that can’t be ignored. This is what happened. Bess Lomax Hawes (1921–2009), daughter of the great song collector John A. Lomax and sister of collector and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, was teaching in the Anthropology program at California State University at Northridge when, in 1976, she received a call from her singing buddy Ralph Rinzler, who was in charge of the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C. Rinzler asked Bess if she could help with the Bicentennial folklife celebration by including the cultures of Californians. Hawes complied, engaging her students in compiling historical and sociological data and identifying traditional expressions and practices, including song and agricultural production. To her benefit and delight, she met ethnomusicologist Dan Sheehy who guided her through the Hispanic cultures alive in the state. All put together, the California component of the Festival was a rousing success, and by the time it was over, Hawes thought she would return to teaching in California. She then received a call from Michael Straight of the National Endowment for the Arts, inquiring about what she had planned for after the Festival. He and Nancy Hanks invited her to take on the Folk Arts Program of the Endowment, and in January 1977 Hawes became the first director of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program of the NEA (Hawes 1977). As a Federal employee, Hawes felt she could make a difference in understanding America’s human fabric through the establishment of folk arts agencies across the country. She would do her own community explorations, as well, and this was where she was exposed to an overriding feeling among people that they were being ignored as contributors to American traditional culture (Ben-Amos and Goldstein 2008). Folk arts programs grew, and Hawes would make a point of letting folk arts program managers know of this issue of inter and intracultural esteem, and how it might be addressed.

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In May of 1977, Hawes was informed of a program in New Jersey that was being carried out through the Endowment’s Artists in the Schools department. She visited the managers of the program, Linda Buki and folklorist Pat Averill, and learned how they coordinated a project focused on the folklife of their region in Trenton, New Jersey, advised, in part, by folklorist Henry Glassie of the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. Hawes visited program work in an elementary and high School and was extremely pleased with how tradition bearers were respected for their contributions and how the programs were coordinated by teachers and tradition bearers alike, with the steady support of the folklorist. Upon her return to Washington, Hawes prepared a nine-page memo to NEA Director Nancy Hanks, detailing her visit, suggesting that such a program as the one she experienced become a part of the Folk Arts Program. Although there is no responding communication, Hanks’ support was evident. And so, folklife education, beginning as Folk Artists in the Schools, became a part of the NEA stable of programs. Since that visit in 1977, the work of folklife in educational settings has taken on several labels, each reflecting an emphasis on construction and execution. Folk Artists in the Schools aims at introducing students to the folk cultural representatives in their communities, controlled by the folklorist who serves as presenter, like one would find at a festival. Folk Arts in Education follows a model whereby the folklorist, teacher, and tradition bearer work together to present programs in classrooms, exposing students to the scope of folklife study with the tradition bearer as a living guide. These culminate in Folklife Education where I believe, everyone is teacher, student, and expert, working together with a developing sense of trust and understanding of the workings and the mutual experience of schooling in public and private settings. It is evident in the creation and inclusive workings of the Arthurdale School (Deafenbaugh 2017). Situated in Progressive Education and Folklife Education are two approaches: Transdisciplinary Learning and Social-Emotional Learning. The former refers to the exploration of relevant concepts, issues, or problems that integrates perceptions of multiple disciplines in order to connect new knowledge and deeper understanding to real-life experience.4 Social-­ Emotional Learning (SEL) is an educational method that aims to foster social and emotional skills within School curricula. In common practice, SEL emphasizes social and emotional skills to the same degree as other

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subjects such as math, science, and reading.5 As methods to support learning communities, they fit well in Progressive Education and Folklife Education to be examined in Chaps. 5 and 8.

Notes 1. Howard B.  Allen, Folders 1–3, accessed April 22, 2020, Photographs, Films, and Papers on the Arthurdale Project, A&M, 1646, West Virginia University and Regional History, WVU Libraries, Morgantown, West Virginia. 2. Donald Holley, “The Negro in the New Deal,” Agricultural History, Vol. 45, No. 3 (July, 1971, pp. 181–182. JSTOR Duke University Press; referred to in John P. Davis, “A Black Inventory of the New Deal,” The Crisis 42 (May 1935): 141–142, 154; and Memorandum, Division of Subsistence Homesteads, 20 March 1935, NA, RG 96, quoted in Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 200. 3. In June of 1935, Clapp presented evidence of the capabilities of applicants who had been rejected by the application board, although they were already living and working on the Homestead. See Chap. 6. 4. Wikipedia Contributors, ‘Transdisciplinarity, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, (accessed April 30, 2022) https://en.wilkipedia.orq/w/ index.php?title=Transdisciplinarity&oldid=1041900305 5. Wikipedia Contributors, Social-emotional learning, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, (accessed April 30, 2022) https://en.wikipedia.orqlw/index. php?title=Social%E2%80%93emotionallearning&oldid=1085186822

References American Folklore Society. 1888. On the Field and Work of a Journal of American Folk-Lore. Journal of American Folklore 1 (1): 3–7. Barker, Roger. 1968. Ecological Psychology. California: Stanford University Press. Ben-Amos, Dan, and Kenneth S. Goldstein, eds. 2008. Hawes, Bess Lomax. Sing It Pretty: A Memoir. Champaign/Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Brown, Mary Ellen. 1981. Statement on Historical Agency. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. n.p. Cavallo, Dominik. 1981. Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform 1880–1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Clapp, Miss Clapp Ripley. 1939 [1971]. Community Schools in Action. NY: Arno. ———. 1952. The Use of Resources in Education. NY: Harper and Brothers. Collins, Margaret. 1996. Wheel and Star: A Quilt. Staunton, VA: DIV.

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Cremin, Lawrence A. (ed.). 1957. The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men. Classics in Education No. 1. NY: Teachers College Press. ———. 1961. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education 1876-1957. NY: AA Knopf. ———. 1964. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education. NY: Vintage. ———. 1977. Traditions in American Education. NY: Basic Books. ———. 2022. Horace Mann. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1–4. Cuban, Larry. 1984. How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms 1890–1980. NY: Longman. Davis, John P. 1935. A Black Inventory of the New Deal. The Crisis 42 (May): 141–142, 154. Deafenbaugh, Linda. 2017. Developing the Capacity for Tolerance Through Folklife Education. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. Dewey, John. 1897. My Pedagogic Creed. The School Journal 54(3) 77–80. http://www.infed.org/archives/e-­texts/e-­dew-­pc.htm. Ace: 12/31/21 ——— 1900 [1990]. Introduction by Philip Jackson. In The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———1902 [1990]. Introduction by Philip Jackson. In The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1916. Democracy and Education. NY: The Free Press. Dewey, John, and Evelyn Dewey. 1915. Schools of To-Morrow. NY: E.P.  Dutton and Company. Dundes, Alan (ed.) 1965. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice Hall. Emrich, Duncan. 1946. Folk-Lore: William John Thoms. California Folklore Quarterly. 5 (4): 355–374. Fenske, Michaela. 2019. Micro, Macro, Agency: Historical Ethnography as Cultural Anthropology Practice. Journal of Folklore Research. 44 (1): 67–99. Fenske, Michaela, and John Bendix. 2007. Micro, Macro, Agency: Historical Ethnography as Cultural Anthropology Practice. Journal of Folklore Research 44 (1): 67–99. Gibson, J. J. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Graham, Patricia A. 1967. Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe. NY: Teachers College Press. Hawes, Bess Lomax. 1977. Memorandum to Nancy Hanks: New Jersey A.LS. Folk Arts Program. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts. Hoffman, Nancy. 2001. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Arthurdale Experiment. North Haven, CT: Linnet Books. Holley, Donald. (1971). The Negro in the New Deal. Agricultural History, 45(3): 181–182. JSTOR Duke University Press.

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Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1975. A Parable in Context: A Social lnteractional Analysis of Storytelling Performance. In Folklore: Performance and Communication, 105–130. The Netherlands: Mouton and Company. Leach, Maria. 1949/1953. The Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. NY: Funk and Wagnalls. Little, Daniel. 2020. Philosophy of History. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanfor d.edu/ar chives/win2020/entries/histor y/ Ace: 1/15/21. Maloney, C.J. 2011. Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. McGuffey, William. 1997. McGuffey’s Eclectic Primer. Revised Edition. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Newell, Williams Wells. 1883. Games and Songs of American Children. NY: Dover. Penix, Amanda. 2007. Arthurdale. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing. Pratt, Caroling. 1948 [1970]. I Learn From Children. NY: Harper and Row. Rosenberg, Jan. 1984. A Landscape of Enculturation: The Vernacular of Elementary School Buildings and Playgrounds, 1840–1930. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation: University of Pennsylvania. ———. 2007–2008. An Eclectic Schoolteacher: Dorothy Howard as Applied Folklorist. Children’s Folklore Review 30: 61–68. ———. 2012. From Me to We: Folklore and Education, Three Early Twentieth-­ Century Educators, and the Evolution of the Field of Folklore and Education. The Folklore Historian. 29: 16–33. ———. 2019. Intercultural Education, Folklore, and the Pedagogical Thought or Rachel Davis DuBois. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Sabar, Ariel. 2014. The Outsider: The Life and Times of Roger Barker. Kindle. Stack, Sam F., Jr. 2004. Miss Clapp Ripley Clapp (1879–1965): Her Life and the Community School. NY: Peter Lang. ———. 2016. The Arthurdale Community School: Education and Reform in Depression-Era Appalachia. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Watson, Stephanie. n.d. The History of Public Schools in America. https:// howstuff-­works.com/publicschoolsl.htm Ace: 1/26/22. Wicker, Allen W. 1979. An Introduction to Ecological Psychology. Monterey, C.A.: Brooks/Cole Publishing. Winick, Steven. 2015. Don Yoder (1921–2015): The Man Who Put the Life in Folklife. Washington, DC: Folklife Today, August 12, 2015. Yoder, Don. 1990. The Folklife Studies Movement. In Don Yoder: Discovering American Folklife, ed. S.J. Bronner, 25–42. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press. Zumwalt, Rosemary Levy. 1988. American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Elsie Ripley Clapp: From Woman of Valor to Progressive Education Leader

Central to the story of the creation of the Arthurdale School is the story of Elsie Clapp, a protégé of progressive education theorist and practitioner John Dewey. Coming of age personally and professionally in the late nineteenth century, Clapp’s background gave her the tools, and the temperament, to take risks in order to move forward her educational ideals. It also represented the rejection of rigid Victorian sensibilities about education. Understanding her background provides a foundation, then, for understanding her willingness to attempt to build a School based on her ideals on the clean slate of Arthurdale. Elsie Ripley Clapp was born on November 13, 1879, on a balmy 61 degree day in Brooklyn Heights,1 the first of three children to William G. Clapp (1853–1914) and Sarah Ripley Clapp (1852–1935), New York. William Clapp was first a bookkeeper for Washington Iron Works, managed by his father George, and then headed his own brokerage firm on Wall Street. Mother Sarah, as were most well to do women of the Victorian era, attempted to inculcate in Young Elsie and sister Marjorie (1884–1937) the standards known as “the cult of womanhood”: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity (Welter 1966). This was a restrictive interpretation of “The Woman of Valor” described by Solomon in the Book of Proverbs 31: 10–31 (KJV) which brother Lawrence (1886–1937) had to respect. David Howe describes “American Victorianism” as a weave of culture and society, where culture is “an evolving system of beliefs, attitudes, and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Rosenberg, The Arthurdale School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45626-8_3

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techniques, transmitted from generation to generation, and finding expression in innumerable activities people learn” such as religion, politics, and child-rearing customs 1975, 509). Society, Howe continues, is “a structure of relationships among people” (ibid.). As a culture grows, social norms can lag behind. Hence there is a dissonance between what might be and what is. Elsie Clapp grew up in the throes of American Victorian culture and society. To understand how this worked, take full advantage of the work of Sam F. Stack, Jr., whose Elsie Ripley Clapp (1879–1965) Her Life and the Community School (2004) is based on his meticulous archival research. I quote Stack’s research, but not his interpretation. Clapp’s memoirs are unpublished. They are referred to as ERCM and page reference and Stack’s reference, his name in italics (Stack). The Clapp family lived in tony Brooklyn Heights, developed by Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont and the Hicks brothers, John and Jacob.2 Accessed by Fulton’s and Brooklyn Steam Ferry Boat Company ferry service which ran regularly between “the Heights” and the mainland of New York City. The community was known for its comfortable distance away from the madding crowds of the city and its proximity to shopping and cultural events which the Clapp family indulged in often. They were a close family, in residence and interaction, with the Ripley and Clapp family living within walking distance of each other on Hicks Street in low-rise brownstone rowhouses with deep stoops. The neighborhood was also known for its abundance of churches and Gothic structures which fascinated Young Elsie and fed her interests in all matters; an historical interest instilled in her by her father and her Aunt Mary Ripley.3 Young Elsie’s experience of the cult of womanhood was full of dissonance. On the one hand, she admired her mother’s sense of beauty and ability to express herself through her piano playing, her ability to analyze classical music, and her performance of social graces and sense of fashion.4 An intense pressure fell on Elsie to be like her mother in fashion and the application of “womanly ways.” She especially felt her physical appearance would never be like her mother’s, and her mother wouldn’t let her forget it. Neither did the servants, one saying, “You ain’t near as goodlookin’ as your sister, are you? But there, they do say the ugliest come out all right in the end.”5 This led to a lack of self-esteem manifest in her work ethic and presentation of self over the years. Young Elsie did enjoy the opulence of life at 176 Hicks Street. Her father’s library was her great solace with its leather-bound books authored

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by the literary greats of the time—Thackeray, Milton, and Dickens (Stack 2004, 15). She also enjoyed spending time with her Grandmother Ripley at 164 Hicks Street with her knitting and on Saturdays as Grandmother Ripley baked pies and cakes. She played with her cousin Anna Ripley, shooting marbles, jumping rope, and negotiating hopscotch (Stack 2004, 17). Life was good on Hicks Street. Families visited, children played, and everyone attended the First Presbyterian Church on Sundays, with its great after church repast. Summers were spent in the Hamptons and Adirondacks, a welcome retreat from the intense city heat (Stack 2004, pp. 5, 17, 18). In 1890, when Elsie was 11, her father took the family overseas on his annual business trip. They started in Edinburgh and ended in London. For the most part, a grand time was had by all, horseback riding and sightseeing. In Edinburgh, nurse Mollie took the children to see the changing of the guard. In London, Young Elsie was entranced by the collections at the Kensington Museum, fortified with stories told by its curator.6 The swirl of society existed on London’s land as well. Its current reinforced the conflict Young Elsie felt regarding her mother: why was this so important? Why couldn’t Mother be a mother, actually caring for her children instead of leaving their care to a nurse? It would have been easy to feel a certain abandonment, and perhaps Young Elsie did feel it. And, it certainly would have contributed to the ways she thought of and dealt with children much later on as an educator of children and for their communities. Upon the family’s return to the States, economic clouds darkened the skies. By 1893, the “Great Panic” was on, curtailing commerce and society; threatening cultural and social balance.7 The losses experienced by Elsie’s immediate family forced them to move into her maternal grandparents’ house. The Ripley and Clapp families were by no means alone. Bank runs, crop debts unpaid, home foreclosures, strikes, soup kitchens, farm and city were all affected. Given the Clapp lifestyle, what they lost affected body and soul. Yet they made do with what they had in a new home with the love of family. They were also able to participate in New York social life seemingly without diminishing their income. When Elsie was 12, she was sent to a School run by a friend of Sarah Clapp. Stack points out that this may have been Young Elsie’s first experience in a formal School setting, and he said that she found it boring. Clapp

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relates that she completed the curriculum in a year; she was becoming proficient in French and was figuring math problems. It was an exercise in academic futility that she may have stored in her memory bank to apply to future studies and pedagogical design. In adolescence, Elsie’s social world began to open. She attended parties with friends whom she believed were of her own standing and became popular enough that she “ceased to worry about, … my lack of good looks, for I had made the intoxicating discovery that popularity did not depend wholly upon t hem.”8 Between 1895 and 1899, Elsie attended the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn Heights. Originally the Brooklyn Female Academy, founded in 1844, the School was intended to be a finishing School where girls were further shaped into the cult of womanhood. On January 1, 1853, the School was gutted by fire. Mrs. William Harriet Packer (1820–1892), whose husband William (1801–1850), a trustee of the Academy, and a fur magnate who retired to Brooklyn, who upon passing left a considerable fortune. Mrs. Packer offered to pay $65,000 to rebuild the School with two stipulations: (1) that the School be renamed for William Packer; and (2) that the curriculum include the study of the higher branches of literature. According to English teacher and Packer historian Marjorie Nickerson, Mrs. Packer wanted to inspire “her girls with a sense of proportion and a sense of the stability of the human spirit” (Nickerson 1945, 42). Nickerson continued, “The aim of Packer has always been to develop fine character and efficient intelligence in its students” (ibid., 111) (Packer Archive Project, Brooklyn Public Library 2022). Nickerson called this “progressive conservatism” (op. cit.). It was a position of moving forward in cultivating intelligence while staying within the bounds of the status quo of the times, appeasing the cult of womanhood approved by students’ parents. Women would always be inferior to men, yet they had minds that would be cultivated to the fullest. Prior to attending Packer, Young Elsie was interviewed by headmaster Dr. Truman J. Backus. He found the prospective student lacking in certain knowledge areas, but reported to Young Elsie’s parents that she would be acceptable.9 Also, practicing in the ways of womanhood, Young Elsie took classes in painting from Eleanor Coleman. Coleman felt her student was a fine artist, requiring guidance. Their relationship continued through Young Elsie’s time at Packer. According to Stack, it was Coleman who convinced

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Sarah Clapp that her daughter needed more than a finishing School that would effectively end at age 14 (Stack 2004, 30). Young Elsie attended Packer from 1895–1899. Under the leadership of Backus, a progressive conservative curriculum was put into practice with a balance of the humanities and the sciences. The program of study included Latin and Greek, literature, geology, physiology, and zoology. It became a preparatory School for those wishing to attend college, either Vassar, Barnard, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, or Bryn Mawr. At Packer a new world opened for Elsie, consisting of her challenging classical course of study, and most of all, a social world of friends outside of those in the aristocratic set she was accustomed to. Along with these friendships, Young Elsie continued to enjoy dances and parties as did her parents. But what Young Elsie did not know was that family finances had been compromised to the point where Young Elsie received financial aid to attend the Collegiate Institute. Elsie was oblivious to her family situation. It is a common ignorance. Children today more often than not have little to no idea of this aspect of family life. Perhaps when events require no cash outlay, there is no need to confide family secrets. After all, with no cash outlay, one is not living beyond one’s means. 1899 was a momentous year for Elsie. As class historian she had to give a graduation day speech. In this year, Young Elsie and her friends Lillian and Lucy decided to apply to Vassar College, which happened to be Sarah Clapp’s family alma mater. Elsie was now 20 years old and was still financially dependent on her parents. It was time for her to learn of her family finances, and it took her by surprise. At the time, her parents sought aid for their daughter, which they found through the Watkins-Etling Scholarship, established by Mattie Etling, a family friend of Aunts Bessie and Edith Clapp. After passing Vassar’s entrance exam, life took on new meanings, leading Young Elsie to the world of Progressive Education, her ultimate calling. Prior to entering Vassar, Young Elsie learned her family’s true financial situation. She found her sister and brother working to ameliorate the social and financial strain. Her father turned to alcohol. Young Elsie’s collegiate years at Vassar (1899–1903), Barnard (1907–1908) and Columbia/Teachers College (1909–1912) were eye-­ opening; personally, intellectually, and professionally. At Vassar and Barnard, she carried a heavy course load.10 She was unable to continue at Vassar due to critical health issues, which resulted in her losing her

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scholarship. It was her relative, Will Chickering, known as Uncle Will, who she sought out for funding. A prominent lawyer specializing in criminal law, he was able to provide Young Elsie all she needed to transfer her Vassar credits to Barnard and ultimately to Columbia to cover college and personal expenses (Stack 2004, 57–61).11 Elsie experienced great guilt, now knowing her family’s situation. By now, the family had moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania, and returned to New York City. While she did as much as she could to keep the infrastructure of family together, she never could meet the mark. Her heart lay closer to the academic world, and her new relationship with John Dewey. John Dewey’s biography is best related by Lagemann (2000). He was born in 1859, the son of Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Rich Dewey, twenty years younger than her husband. Archibald Dewey was a grocer and tobacconist with a spry sense of humor (Lagemann 2000, 43). Lucina, on the other hand, was deeply religious, always asking John and his two brothers if they were right with Jesus (Lagemann, ibid). John and his brothers enjoyed a childhood of tramping in the woods and streams surrounding Burlington. He enjoyed a high School education, and at the age of 15 John enrolled in the University of Vermont where he engaged in an education in the classics, ancient history, analytical geometry, calculus, evolutionary ideas, and philosophy. Upon graduation in 1879, John Dewey taught high School in Oil City, Pennsylvania. Lagemann tells us that in 1882 Dewey engaged in graduate study at Johns Hopkins University (ibid., 44). There he was further exposed to psychology through the teachings of G.  Stanley Hall (op. cit.). Upon graduation from Hopkins, Dewey’s next job was at the University of Michigan. He was 25 years old, apparently shy, and bookish. Encouraged not to be so inward by University President Gilman, Dewey took the advice to heart and tried to emerge from his shell. In the boarding house where he lived, he met Alice Chipman, another resident, who was one of Dewey’s undergraduate philosophy students. Their meeting turned to courtship, and they married in 1886. Though Dewey never completely shed his introversion, his colleagues, including the wife of George Herbert Mead, Helen, exclaimed Alice to be a breath of fresh air (ibid.). A part of Dewey’s university responsibilities was the supervision of student teachers, conducting site visits, and advising. This experience brought Dewey into a quest for an educational theory which would reconcile the demands of education, psychology, and philosophy (Lagemann 2000,

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45). This was the professor’s ongoing mission, which carried into what is understood as his overall development of educational practice. After a decade at Michigan, with a side trip to the University of Minnesota, Dewey was extended a position as chair of the philosophy department at the newly created University of Chicago. This was his chance to put thought to action with a laboratory School where children would apply their knowledge of home life to an understanding of themselves as a growing part of a democracy. This was radical thinking, for sure, since children were perceived through Locke’s idea of the child as tabula rasa, a blank slate onto which life’s actions were inscribed. The Dewey lab School fared well until 1904 when internal struggles between Dewey and the University administration came to a head, and Dewey left to take a position in the philosophy department at Columbia University. And to him came Elsie Clapp, student, assistant, and beloved protege. Clapp’s first encounter with Dewey was intellectual: at Vassar she read My Pedagogic Creed (1897) and was excited by its articles on education as a social endeavor (see Chap. 2). Later, she was further stirred by Dewey’s The School and Society (1900) and The Child and the Curriculum (1902), slender, yet containing powerful insights into the learning process as a natural part of a child’s life. Between 1907 and 1912, Clapp took six classes with Dewey. From 1911 to 1912, she served as his assistant, working with course outlines and commenting on lectures and presentations.12 At this time, she was pursuing a PhD in literature, carrying over from her studies at Barnard, preparing a dissertation on a grammar of English. In 1912 she underwent the PhD examination, which drove her from completing the PhD, when during the examination, two of her examiners got into a fight over an academic issue unrelated to her work. She walked out of the exam, and though her committee encouraged her to retake the exam, she refused and fell ill. She was nursed by her Aunt Edith, a nurse specializing in mental health. She stayed with her Aunt Edith, a skilled psychiatric nurse, until she felt well enough to return to studies. She left the PhD and turned to philosophy and the Progressive Education espoused by Dewey, based in his belief that “education is process over product and that all roads must lead to democracy, a mode of associated living, of cojoint [sic] communicated experience” (191687), and that the philosophy behind it is a method, a way of finding answers as opposed to imposing them (1997).

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By 1913, Clapp had fully blossomed under the umbrella of academe. She was now Miss Clapp and she was fully absorbed by the teachings of Dewey. It was time to spread her wings and put her education into practice, a quest to ultimately create a community School. Between 1913 and 1934 Clapp held seven positions in Schools in the Deep South and along the Eastern Seaboard before the Arthurdale School.13 Of the seven Schools, two were public; the others private. In terms of operations, public Schools are tax based and governed by elected boards while private Schools depend on tuition be it from parents, scholarships, and endowments and are guided by a board of trustees and School staff. Between 1924 and 1936, Clapp was well established in Progressive Education circles. She was chair of the National Committee on Rural Education in the Progressive Education Association (PEA), vice president of the PEA, between 1933 and 1934, and served on the Association’s Advisory and Executive Board (1924–1936).14 In 1929 Clapp was head of the elite Rosemary Choate School in Greenwich, Connecticut, when she was asked to apply to a directorship of a new School idea in rural Jefferson County, Kentucky, outside of Louisville. The desire was simple. Instead of creating an elite private School, community leaders wanted a public School where the well-to-do would co-exist with their countryside neighbors. Clapp reports: In 1909, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Ballard gave to the Jefferson County Board of Education a piece of land from their estate and offered to build a School on it. The County Board of Education sold the sites of two one-room Schools nearby and gave the proceeds to the building. Neighbors contributed an equal amount, and Mr. and Mrs. Ballard bore the major part of the building costs. A School building was created with stone from Mrs. Ballard’s estate, and in memory of her little son was called The Roger Clark Ballard Memorial School. The children from the discontinued School, about 35 in number, and the children of Mrs. Ballard’s friends and neighbors attended the new School, perhaps 50 in all.15 The Ballard School represented the beginnings of a dream come true, a squarely centered community School. Dewey wrote in the Foreword to Community Schools in Action that, “… schools function socially only when they function in a community for community purposes, and communities are local, present, and close by... The neighborhood is the prime community... teachers are citizen members of the community.16 Not only do they keep up to date with pedagogy, they must get to know the

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physical, economic, and social needs of students and their families.” In Dewey’s mind, this was best done in a rural setting as country districts provide the greatest opportunity as well as exhibit the most crying need; the most vocal.17 The School was set to open in September of 1929. Clapp had a lot to learn and do. For one thing, she had never established a rural, community-­ centered School. Prior, she worked mostly with elite private Schools. Indeed, she was out of her comfort zone. To create a suitable environment, she had to engage an ethnographic eye and social worker’s approach. Who were the people defined as the Ballard community? What was the socio-landscape, the economics, and the architectural lay of the land? What did people eat? What were the pastimes of the adults and children? What was the overall physical and emotional health of Ballard? Who would be the teachers? Clapp hoped that the staff would be well-­ versed in Progressive Educational practice, but that would not be the case, though the county supported that hope. As a result, the staff was entirely new. Of the three older teachers, two were experienced in progressive work and one in formal work; of the younger teachers, three were from progressive Schools; one from a formal School, and three were fresh from college. Two students were Kentucky girls.18 So much! I can only imagine Clapp rubbing her palms and saying to herself, “Let’s do it!” At Ballard, Clapp had the especial support of the Jefferson County Board of Education and the Ballard Parent-Teacher Association. Prior to the School’s official opening in September 1929, Clapp conducted a complete ethnographic-styled inspection of the community of 123 families from the wellto-do and poverty-stricken residents. Ecologically, these families lived nearby the Ohio River in homes with either well-appointed activity sites and behavior settings for daily living, such as bedrooms, kitchens, and indoor plumbing, or without such amenities, positioned in limited spaces of squalor. To prepare the School, Clapp got rid of the bolted down desks and replaced them with movable desks and chairs. Other supplies were acquired, though she does not list these.19 In applying the ethnographic, one of the first tasks for Clapp at Ballard was the assessment of the overall health and nutrition of the students. For example, she found that those from the well-todo families were accustomed to a light mid-day meal and a heavier supper, and the students from the lesser wealthy families were used to a heavier lunch and a lighter supper. She also felt that the children as a whole were lethargic and showed no initiative.20 The upper-class children needed overall invigoration, while

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the lower-class children, many of whom were from farm families, required opportunity for fun and relaxation. Free-time morning recess periods were established alongside structured afternoon play. Soon, the children were active at play in ball games and other ludic pursuits. Through the County School Board, nurses were hired to administer vaccinations for diphtheria, small pox, and typhoid fever. The children were also able to receive full physical examinations by their family physicians or University of Louisville Medical School students.21 Clapp and her staff activated the School curriculum while health assessments and actions were taking place. It is not clear how the course of study for grades one through nine was determined. But it was clear that it was not identified by the interests of the children until ninth grade. The idea was to engage in study of the environment and connect it to an understanding of life in the present tense. Families contributed mementoes to the School as a means of instilling pride in the past, dealing with it to interpret the present. The course of study was as follows: Grade 1: Grade 2: Grade 3: Grade 4: Grade 5: Grade 6: Grade 7: Grade 8:

Exploring the farm Discovering village communities Identifying Indian culture Reliving pioneer life Transportation; People from overseas English, French, Spanish peoples; Aviation History of Kentucky Introduction of power—steam and electricity; Geology of Kentucky Grade 9: After consulting Louisville Schools, and student request: Ancient history, Latin, English22 At first glance, this course of study appears unforgiving to students. In fact, however, students had plenty of wiggle room to explore these subjects in light of their lives, thereby meeting the first principles, the freedom to develop naturally and according to their interest, the motive of all work identified by the Progressive Education Association,23 especially as the children were gaining in health. Between 1931and 1933, the Ballard School’s community ties tightened. A Women’s Exchange was formed to supply food and seeds. A Health Assembly was staged for the community, sharing hygiene methods

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by the students. A recreation center was established with basketball games and movies, and an Athletic Dinner was given to honor students excelling in sport. The Ballard community established a country fair on the model of the state fair, with exhibitions of foodways and workshops devoted to animal husbandry. The School curriculum expanded its idea of social studies to promote a program of useful study that was socially useful which met the Deweyan thought of a School as a socially functioning institution.24 As the School matured in activity, elements of life were further incorporated into the School’s days. Math, language arts, exploring economic geography, embracing a study of how local geography tied into the state landscape. A study of home and School repairs led to the construction of a log cabin on site that became a museum. On March 28, 1931, the traditional arts were highlighted through a fiddlers’ contest that featured traditional music, song, and dance. The tenth grade produced a community magazine, while the ninth graders executed a School broadside.25 By 1934, Clapp was safe in saying, “There is a great deal said in calling a school a community school. It is a public school and therefore the school of the people of that district.26 As a community school it is a democracy, with teachers figuratively and literally as neighbors, and parents sharing in the work of the School in terms of health, curriculum, and social activity. I need to add into the mix that the students had an active role, shaping the curriculum, engaging in meeting such needs as recreation, and engaging the support of parents, administrators, and each other.” From Clapp’s childhood struggles with the cult of womanhood, she met the challenges head-on to create a path of her own to become an advocate for Progressive Education. Actions were equal to words. And so, in June of 1934, she encountered perhaps the greatest call, that of establishing the Arthurdale School.

Notes 1. NOW Data—NOAA Online Weather Data: https://www.weather.gov/ wrh/Climate?wfp=okx. 2. Brooklyn Heights-Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ BrooklvnHeights#Schools. Accessed 2/4/22. 3. ERCM n.p. as quoted in Stack (2004, 12). 4. ERCM 17,19 as quoted in Stack (2004, 14). 5. ERCM 16 as quoted in Stack (2004), ibid.

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6. ERCM 43 as quoted in Stack (2004, 19). In 1899, the Kensington Museum was renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VictoriaandAlbert Museum. Accessed. 2/1/22. 7. Panic of 1893. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panicof1893. Accessed 11/24/21. 8. ERCM 52 as quoted in Stack (2004, 25). 9. ERCM 51 as quoted in Stack (2004, 28). 10. At Vassar, Young Elsie enrolled in classes in nineteenth century Literature, Textual Criticism of Shakespeare, Anglo Saxon, Latin and Greek, English Composition, Astronomy, Geology, History of Art, Psychology, and Advanced Algebra. At Barnard, she took classes in History of Philosophy, Foundational Problems in Philosophy, Elizabethan Lyric, Philosophy of Education Practicum, Economics, German, Kant, History of Western Europe, and Ethics. 11. Chickering also exposed Young Elsie to the Settlement system and its efforts with the lower and immigrant classes around the country. 12. Classes taken with Dewey: Social Life and the School Curriculum; Practicum and Philosophy of Education; Modern Ethical Ideas and Types of Logical Theory; Psychological Ethics and Logic as Applied to the Problems of Teaching; Philosophy and Education and Kant; Philosophy and Education in Their Historic Relations; and Analysis of Experience and Theories of Experience. Classes assisted with: Social Aspects of School Curriculum and Foundations of Method; and Foundations of Method and Selected Philosophic Problems Academic Records and Academic Correspondence as quoted in Stack (2004, 77). 13. These Schools were: Ashley Hall (Charleston, S.C.) 1913–1914; Jersey City High School 1914–1915; Brooklyn Heights Seminary 1903–1907, 1915–1916; Milton Academy for Girls 1921–1922; City and Country School 1923–1924; Rosemary Junior School 1924–1929; and Ballard School 1929–1934 See: https://education.stateuniversity.com/ pages/1832/Clapp-­YoungElsie-­Ripley-­1879-­1965.html/. 14. See ERC Papers as quoted by Stack in Sadovnik and Semel (2002, 96). 15. CSA 4–5. Young Elsie’s description of the work of the Ballard and Arthurdale Schools is fully documented in her works, Community Schools in Action, 1939 [1971] and The Use of Resources in Education 1952. I cite the former CSA and use the 1971 reissue of the book. The latter will be cited as Resources. 16. CSA, p. viii. 17. CSA, p. ix.

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18. CSA, p. 6. It is hard to say what constituted a formal School. Young Elsie might have been referring to colleges with education programs or Normal Schools that specialized in teacher education. 19. Possible supplies might have included art supplies, pencils, pens, and paper. CSA p. 7. 2° CSA p. 10. 20. CSA pp. 8. 21. This was paid for by the Ballard PTA. CSA p. 44. Results of these exams revealed of the 208 students, 109 had bad posture, 73 were malnourished, 49 had tonsil issues, and 30 possible TB cases. 22. CSA pp. 21–41. 23. See Graham (1967, 29). 24. CSA pp. 41–46. 25. CSA pp. 48–49. 26. CSA p. 61.

References Clapp, Young Elsie Ripley. 1939 [1971]. Community Schools in Action. NY: Viking Press; NY: Arno Press and the New York Times. Dewey, John 1900 [1990]. Introduction by Philip Jackson. In The School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— 1902 [1990]. Introduction by Philip Jackson. In The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1897. My Pedagogic Creed. The School Journal 54(3): 77–80. http:// www.infed.org/archives/e-­texts/e-­dew-­pc.htm Ace: 12/31/21. ———. 1916. Democracy and Education. NY: The Free Press. ———. 1997. How We Think. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Originally published 1910. NY: D.C. Heath. Graham, Patricia A. 1967. Progressive Education: From Arcady to Academe. NY: Teachers College Press. Howe, Daniel Walker. 1975. American Victorianism as a Culture. American Quarterly 27 (5): 507–532. Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. 2000. An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nickerson, Marjorie. 1945. A Long Way Forward: The First Hundred Years of the Packer Collegiate Institute. Brooklyn, NY: Packer Institute. Stack, Sam F., Jr. 2004. Young Elsie Ripley Clapp (1879–1965): Her Life and the Community School. NY: Peter Lang. ———. 2002. Young Elsie Ripley Clapp and the Arthurdale Schools. In Founding Mothers and Others: Women Educational Leaders During the Progressive Era, ed. Alan Sadovnik and Susan Semel, 93–110. NY: Palgrave. Welter, Barbara. 1966. The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860. American Quarterly 18 (2): 151–174.

CHAPTER 4

The Arthurdale School

To these children from the mine camps, all the farm processes were new and fascinating—disking the ground, planting and plowing, threshing, husking the corn, digging potatoes, milking and churning. Equally absorbing were the trucking, the building of houses and barns, the well-digger, and in the spring, the laying of the foundations for the new School buildings. What the children learned about these activities went directly into their lives—their new lives at Arthurdale. —Clapp (1939, 131)

In October 1929, when the New York Stock Market crashed, it was not just the stock market that took a nosedive. In a word, the Great Depression brought people to misery. Hardship, exhaustion, impoverishment, and even shame forced the nation to its knees (Kennedy 1999). Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who was governor of New York at the time, sought the presidency in the next election, in 1932. As he prepared, one of his advisors suggested that a team of knowledgeable men who understood the important issues of the day be assembled to pull together information that FDR could use in his presidential bid. The team was called the “Brains Trust” (Tugwell 1968). Their work, fortified by FDR’s strong presence and personality, helped to bring FDR to the White

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House. Their work had ended, but FDR sometimes sought advice from some of its members.1 On Saturday, March 4, 1933, FDR delivered his first inaugural address. From that address came the now-familiar quote: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’.” In the address he encouraged mutuality in work, not in economics alone. “[Happiness] lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” Work lay not only in making money. FDR wanted people to work together to create a democracy of joyful production, in being American. Once in office he went to work. The famous first hundred days flew by.2 For First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, her experience of the first years in the White House were those of a personal terror. As the governor’s wife, she had an amount of personal autonomy. Once in the White House, she felt stripped of that freedom. She had to figure out what she could do in her new position. Her concerns were social rather than political, and to them she turned. One of many of her concerns that she worked tirelessly on was education. As the nation reeled in its misery, there were few communities that were immune to suffering. At the Ballard School in nearby Louisville, Kentucky, Ballard families and their children were engaged in a Progressive Education program, under the direction of Progressive Educator Elsie Ripley Clapp, who was working to establish what she called a “Community School” which she described as follows: A community school foregoes its separateness. It is influential because it belongs to its people. They share its ideals and work. It takes from them and gives to them. There are no bounds as far as I can see to what it could accomplish in social reconstruction if it had enough wisdom and insight and devotion and energy. It demands all these for changes in living and learning of people are not produced by imparting information about different conditions or by gathering statistical data about what exists, but by creating with people, for people.3

As for “community education,” Clapp elaborated: “A community school is made with the people whose school it is. In the making, teachers lead as fellow-workers. As members themselves of the community, they are citizens as well as teachers, sharing common problems and interests.

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What does a community school do? First of all, it meets as best it can, and with everyone’s help, the urgent needs of the people, for it holds that everything that affects the welfare of the children and their families is its concern. Where does school end and community life begin? There is no distinction between them. A community school is a used place, a place used freely and informally for all the needs of living and learning. It is, in effect, that place where learning and living converge.4

As assistance efforts were underway for residents in the north-central West Virginia communities, thoughts of how to provide progressive educational opportunities came under consideration. Clarence Pickett could possibly identify with this, as Friends Schools were always on the lookout for pedagogy that promoted a spiritual and progressive community (Brinton 1940 [1967]). This kind of progressive outlook was also on the mind of Eleanor Roosevelt. To this end, Pickett may have contacted Clapp, of the Rural Committee of the Progressive Education Association on School and Community Relations, and invited her to meet with him and Mrs. Roosevelt to discuss the possibility of a School for Arthurdale. The two women met over lunch where Mrs. Roosevelt inquired about the Ballard School’s philosophy and operations. They agreed that an Arthurdale School should be a public school, forwarding the philosophy of Clapp’s mentor, John Dewey. By this time, Eleanor Roosevelt had already published her views on a variety of subjects, including education, in popular magazines. In a 1930 issue of The Women’s Journal, she wrote on “An Ideal Education.” She proclaimed “we should strive always to impart two fundamental things: curiosity and vision!” She felt literacy was most important, though there is no record of what she thought children (or adults) should be reading. She also believed in physical education as a contributor to character. This reflected her experience at Allenswood Academy, a private School in London which she attended from 1899 to 1902,5 when her participation in organized sports seemed to have eliminated colds and migraine headaches and improved her appetite. She not only gained health, she gained a sense of strength in herself, at least momentarily.6 Clapp described herself as “fifty-four years old, five feet, six inches tall; weighing 147 pounds” (Hoffman 2001, 55). Hoffman also wrote that Clapp would also be described as a “dynamo in a dress” (Ibid.). Before anything could be decided on her employment, Clapp had to jump through hoops. She had at least four: (1) an ethnographic sampling of

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Scotts Run; (2) meeting with assistance workers based in Morgantown; (3) listening to a description of what a new School should be put together by the West Virginia Advisory Council; and (4) presenting findings to Eleanor Roosevelt. Visiting Scotts Run in the bitter cold of February was shocking and sobering. Clapp’s experience mirrored that of Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt (Chap. 1). Her conversations with the relief workers had a small spark of hope with activities of the men and women of the region. Clapp was struck by the thoughtful and thorough plan for the School, and Eleanor Roosevelt was duly impressed with Clapp’s insights. They were indeed on the same page. Just what was the plan for the School? A West Virginia Advisory Committee prepared a threepoint manifesto covering its philosophy, curriculum, and administration that was read aloud at a community supper and published in the February 10, 1934, issue of the Dominion News. Philosophically, “…democratic procedures will predominate in administrative and instructional activities,” while “real progress with any people results from their own initiative and resourcefulness.” The child was “to be regarded as an individual with unlimited possibilities, ever capable of learning.” “…The school should aim to conserve individuality in pupils as will admit of a harmonious adjustment to community life,” and “at all times and in all school activities the pupils should be living completely and happily.” Regarding the curriculum, the School would contain a nursery School and kindergarten, an elementary School up to grades 8 or 9, and classes for adults with their own curriculum and activities. Additionally, “the curriculum should be adapted to the special needs of the community. It should not be hampered by traditional and formal courses of study, not by standardized grading and grouping of pupils.” The community activities will constitute the laboratory through which the children will get their educative experiences—the grade projects and other agricultural activities—the social activities and civic projects, the care of the home, all will be shared by the school children under the guidance and leadership of the teachers. This means that the real learning experiences of the school will come chiefly through the vocational life of the community. Industrial arts, specimens of living animal life, museums, library, applied art, home economics, music, elementary science, citizenship problems, will

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c­ onstitute the core of all school activities. Lifelike problems will constitute the curriculum material, rather than the conventional school subjects.

Administration revolved around the School as a progressive endeavor in attitude, architecture, staffing, construction, and cost. “The school should be so planned that it may demonstrate a truly progressive and efficient type of educational procedure. The school organization should grow out of pupil and community needs rather than from traditional heritage.” The buildings should be “home-like,” with plenty of air and sun, all at a reasonable cost. There should be playgrounds, gardens, and space for outdoor play. Parents should participate with the children and teachers in the construction of the School. Teachers and principal are to live in the community and be a part of life in it. The ultimate conduct of the School would be up to the principal, who hires faculty and oversees the advising by parents and the School plan.7 Clapp described this encounter after the plan was introduced: “… one of the men got me in a corner and asked me if I were going to run the school. “I haven’t any reason to think so, I said. I have a school in Kentucky, you know.” “You’d better,” he said. “He was right. The people and the enterprise had captured my imagination, and a few weeks later I resigned the principalship of Ballard School to undertake the difficult and challenging job of creating a school on the homestead for the children and families of the Arthurdale community.”8 Given that Clapp had the control over hiring staff, she decided to recruit Ballard teachers to come to Arthurdale. But she had a problem: how to describe the conditions of the people they would be working with once they moved to the Homestead? She spoke honestly about what she called the “cultural milieu” of Scotts Run and the Monongalia region. Now that the mines were no longer in operation, the unemployed were overwhelmed with “suspicion and strife.” Social contacts were no more. Men, who worked as crews in the mines, no longer had camaraderie. Women, grappling with family life, were too busy for any socializing. It wasn’t that, as Clapp explained, the people were “slackers”; they were workers. Everyone wanted their children to have a life, and the prospect of having a Homestead could possibly lift them away from the demons of both physical and psychological suffering.9 On paper, the School looked great. Yet it took months before implementation. Meetings with the State Legislative Education Committee and the State Superintendent of Education were required to make the School

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a public school. By late spring 1934 it was determined the Arthurdale School be a free, independent state school to meet the special needs of the community with basic salaries for West Virginia teachers who were assigned to the School, and with supplementary salary assignments by the county; that provision for the Nursery School be made through FERA; and that salaries of additional teachers in community education work be supplied through private funds.10 Clapp received Washington’s blessing to be Director of the School and Community Relations. Finally, she could proceed with the plan of the people and her dream of creating a Progressive Education School in a rural environment. Clapp sought the assistance of her old college classmate and Nursery School pioneer Jessie Stanton (1887–1976) for assembling the Nursery School. Stanton was well known for her work with Caroline Pratt’s City and Country School and Lucy Sprague Mitchell’s Bureau of Educational Experiments, later known as the Bank Street College. Clapp took Stanton to Scotts Run and the Monongalia region, and her colleague was equally stunned by the conditions of the unemployed and the efforts to alleviate the hardships of all. She agreed to head the Nursery School and went into action acquiring the tried-and-true materials for early childhood education, including building blocks and art supplies. By August, however, the Arthurdale School ran into another road block. Buildings and furnishings were nonexistent. Teachers and families had to wait for word from Washington for permission to proceed. They had to make lemonade from lemons. The Arthur Mansion, the Town Center, and the Assembly Hall were repurposed for classrooms and the School office. The Nursery School and shop were already ready. When the word to begin came from Washington, parents and teachers went into action, making furnishings, unpacking supplies and equipment, and establishing the spaces for students. By the first week of September, to everyone’s joy, the School opened for business. Principles from the Progressive Education Association took shape in the School for the people, by the people, just as John Dewey dreamed.11 An essential program of the School focused on health and nutrition for the students. Clapp sought medical assistance with no immediate success, because physicians worked outside of Arthurdale’s range. She reached out to Clarence Pickett, who suggested a fellow friend (Quaker), Harry Timbres, M.D., who had recently returned from service in the Far East and would possibly be available. He was. Two nurses, Mary Shaffer and Kay Plummer, who were already at work in the region, joined with Timbres

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to serve Arthurdale’s adults and children. At first, they were met with distrust since the miners, especially, experienced negative treatment when they were working in the mines. But Timbres, Shaffer, and Plummer saw the humanity in their charges and treated everyone with the greatest of respect. These were victims of a cruelty not of their making and were in sore need of attention. Together they could work to eradicate illness and promote a health that would contribute to a meaningful, productive quality of life. Upon inspection, this medical team identified infections, malnutrition, and a general malaise among the adults and children. Basic hygiene needed to be taught. Tonsilitis was present in the children, as was impetigo. Arrangements were made to treat both. The children needed sustainable nutrition. This was supplied by hot lunches prepared by the mothers who provided canned foods, and there were vegetables from the School garden. A meal consisted of vegetables, bread, potatoes, and milk, a common meal plan in the Appalachian south (Personal correspondence with Lucy M.  Long, 22 January 2022). By 1935 there was marked improvement, nutritionally, accompanied by rest periods. These were documented by the medical team and School staff. The Progressive Education Association promoted principles, but its members did not dictate how those principles were to be carried out. As a result, the way the PEA did what it did followed the party line of principles Table 4.1  Progressive Education Association party line: adaptation to the school PEA party line Freedom to develop naturally

Arthurdale adaptation of PEA party lineI

Blurring of grade levels which proved problematic over time Interest the motive of work Use of community and landscape for study The teacher is a guide, not a Teacher guided key aspects in each activity, letting task-master the child do what he or she wanted to explore Attention to physical development Medical and nutrition attention Co-operation between school and Regular visits to homes and keeping School open home to meet the needs of child-life to all who were interested in the work taking place there Scientific study of pupil Study of child’s comprehension latitudinally and development longitudinally The Progressive School a leader in Attention to older children and adult education in educational movements addition to childhood practice

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but not of action. For Clapp, her staff, and community, they shaped the work of the School accordingly in Table 4.1. Clapp was methodical in her planning. The next component of the School plan was the creation of the buildings to serve the children, their families, and the public. Originally, Clapp worked with Homestead architect Eric Gugler to select a site and build on it. Gugler was called away from Arthurdale, and AIA (American Institute of Architects) architect Steward Wagner was brought in to complete the project. Unlike Gugler, the homesteaders felt comfortable with Wagner, sensing he understood the structural and the personal needs of the homesteaders who had a vested interest in their dwellings. This extended to the School, and after the third of three drafts of building plans that met the approval of Washington budgeteers, design and work began in summer of 1935. Wagner’s (1938) article “School Buildings: Arthurdale, West Virginia” provides detailed information on the construction of the School complex, a cluster of six behavior settings: recreation center, elementary, primary school, high school, school center, and nursery school.12 Wagner wrote: “the dimensions and arrangements of each classroom and their relations to the whole were determined by the educational needs of the children at each grade level….” (1938, 304–316). The buildings were to be physically arranged to reflect their proximity to the Homestead’s main road and their function. There is not an aerial photo to show this (Personal communication with Jeanne Goodman, 10 March 2022). The Recreation Center was the most public facility, as it housed space for athletic competitions and public entertainments. The high school was next, and the primary and elementary school settings followed. A School Center would hold the administrative heartbeat of the School, and furthest away was the nursery school. School exteriors were early farmhouse type, to conform with the houses previously erected on the Homestead. Rooms were created using drywall, and each building had its own system for heat and air. The Schools’ interiors were to be outfitted with furnishings and spaces for action. The interiors made up the School’s activity sites. The Recreation Center consisted of a gymnasium, a space for theatrical and social entertainments, dressing rooms, construction rooms, and equipment storage. The high School, grades nine through twelve, were located on the first floor, which was also used by grades seven through eight, and studies in English, drama, and music. Below the first floor, the space was large enough for wagon repair, and sciences, with a greenhouse surrounded by

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windows on three sides. A smaller room would be established for science experiments. Upstairs, a School and community library, printing room and bindery, editorial, pottery, and art room would accommodate all high School students and staff. The School Center acted as a heartbeat for a “little village.” The basement was to be devoted to cooking and community canning; food demonstrations, serving, storage, and boiler room. On the first floor, a kitchen, cafeteria, director’s office, doctor’s office, a bank, and a bookstore would be featured. The primary and elementary schools would be identical in structure and positioned side by side. Designed for 180 students (for each school), the structures were one story, with five sunny classrooms. The buildings were to be joined by a corridor framed in glass, and each classroom had its own sink and restroom. The nursery school was to be long and low, a one-­ story frame structure. Six classrooms were designed to lead individually on to its own playground and contained restrooms, a director’s office, and an “isolation room” with a shower. Ancillary to the nursery School were three porches devoted to rest periods and play time. As the School was built on a slope, the porches extended over the playgrounds, offering protection in hot or rainy weather. The hope was to have the School complex completed before the beginning of the 1935–1936 school year. That was not the case. Yet with the repurposed Mansion and Town Center, along with a functional nursery school, the School opened, and Clapp’s progressive program began.13

Notes 1. A few of the members of the original Brains Trust included James A. Farley of the Democratic National Committee, banker Henry Morganthau, Jr., Louis Howe, and R.G. Tugwell. See Tugwell (1968, xii). 2. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20thcentury/froost.osp Acc. 3/1/22. 3. Clapp, Miss Clapp Ripley. 1930. A Rural School in Kentucky Progressive Education 10. P. 128. 4. CSA p.89. 5. Wikipedia Contributors, “Eleanor Roosevelt,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (accessed 13 August 2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Eleanor_Roosevelt. 6. Roosevelt, Eleanor. 1930 An Ideal Education. The Women’s Journal 15, pp.  8–10, 36. Reprinted in Allida M.  Black (ed). 1995. What I Hope to Leave Behind: The Essential Essays of Eleanor Roosevelt. Pp. 295–298. Miss

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Clapp had much in common, personally. They both were subject to the strict life of the cult of womanhood and wealth up to 1893 and the Great Panic. They were educated in elite Schools, and each experienced issues with self-esteem and self-presentation. 7. Clapp, Elsie Ripley. The Use of Resources in Education. N.Y.: Harper and Brothers, 1952. Part 2, pp. 9–10. 8. Resources, pt. 2 p. 10. 9. CSA Arthurdale: p.  76. The FERA, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration was the same organization headed by Harry Hopkins that sent Lorena Hickok into the field to document depressed US areas, including Scotts Run. 10. Resources, pt. 2 p. 10. 11. Resources, pt. 2 p. 13. 12. Wagner, Steward, 1938. School Buildings: Arthurdale, West Virginia. Progressive Education 15 (4): 304–316. 13. Clapp, Miss Clapp Ripley. 1939 [1971]. Community Schools in Action. NY: Arno.

References Ambler, Charles M. 1951. A History of Education in West Virginia. Huntington, West Virginia: Standard Printing and Publishing Company. Black, Allida M., ed. 1995. What I Hope to Leave Behind: The Essential Essays of Eleanor Roosevelt. NY: Carlson Publishing. Brinton, Howard W. 1940 [1967]. Quaker Education in Theory and Practice. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Pamphlet #9. Clapp, Miss Clapp Ripley. 1939 [1971]. Community Schools in Action. NY: Arno. ———. 1952. The Use of Resources in Education. NY: Harper Brothers. Hoffman, Nancy. 2001. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Arthurdale Experiment. North Haven, CT: Linnet Books. Kennedy, David. 1999. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. NY: Oxford. Pickett, Clarence E. 1953. For More Than Bread: An Autobiographical Account of Twenty-Two Years’ Work With the American Friends Service Committee. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. Stack, Sam F. 2002. Miss Clapp and the Arthurdale Schools. In Founding Mothers and Others: Women Educational Leaders During the Progressive Era, ed. Alan Sadovnik and Susan Semel, 93–110. NY: Palgrave. Stack, Sam F., Jr. 2004. Miss Clapp Ripley Clapp (1879–1965): Her Life and the Community School. NY: Peter Lang. Tugwell, R.G. 1968. The Brains Trust. NY: Viking. Wagner, Steward. 1938. School Buildings: Arthurdale, West Virginia. Progressive Education 15 (4): 304–316.

CHAPTER 5

Life as It Was at the Arthurdale School and the Discovery of Folklife

[Before supplies arrived] [w]e looked around for what we could use. John Masters got clay from his creek. We collected corn and ground it between rocks, went over to Stearns’ on a husking bee, visited flax threshing—everything we could think of that needed no books or materials. —Clapp (1939, 129)

On September 6, 1934, Arthurdale parents received a memo from Arthurdale manager Bushrod Grimes: “To the parents of Homesteaders’ Children: “Miss Clapp, Director of the Reedsville Community School, has asked me to get this notice to all of the parents: “The School will open at 8:30 A.M. on Monday September 10, for grades one to eight, and for all four years of high school. All students will report on the first floor of the mansion at this hour. The nursery school will open at the same hour Monday, September 17. After the students report, they will go to their class rooms as assigned. On Monday, September 10, the session will be from 8:30 to 10:30. “The balance of the week the sessions will be from 8:30 to 11:30.” Grimes continued: “The equipment for the school has not yet arrived, but it is on the way, and parents should understand that for the time being school will go on. The equipment will be placed as it arrives. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Rosenberg, The Arthurdale School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45626-8_5

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“Miss Clapp will attend the homesteaders’ meeting Wednesday evening, September 12, in the Community Center at 7:00 P.M.  I am calling the meeting one-half hour early as Miss Clapp would like as many of the wives to come as possible. “Please keep this meeting in mind and try to make arrangements to be on hand, as this will be the first opportunity for many parents to meet Miss Clapp.”1

Even though the School building complex was not completed until August 1935, the School curriculum was put into place, thanks to the skills of the teachers and the Manifesto for the School placed in 1933. The Arthurdale School was in its environment as well as in the interests of the children who witnessed the creation of the community through its construction. This chapter describes the work of the School, based on teacher diaries published in Clapp’s The Use of Resources in Education (1952, referred here as Resources), commentary on the School and community amassed by teacher Fletcher Collins, Collins’ wife Margaret (1996), and alumni reminiscences. I hope to illustrate how School work started with the particular and moved into a more broad-brush endeavor that moved into specific areas of life including history and tradition that was always a part of the lives of the homesteaders. This first required coaxing and then a total embrace. In exploring activity, the teachers’ diaries listed dates for action. I have gone a step further by generating calendars for the years 1934, 1935, and 1936 so I could match dates with days identified in Resources. I found this to be very useful as I was provided with a better sense of time as well as activity, though activity is not recorded through the School year.2 In Resources the teachers are named. In some of their entries, students are also named. On the whole, students are at once individuals and groups. Their activities reflect the folklife of the Arthurdale School, which I defined in Chap. 2 as a critical response of a people to the world using expressions that have withstood the tests of time, and the description of what the School is to do, as established in the Manifesto (Chap. 4). As School activity went along, there were still issues of health and wellness to conquer among the students. Worn out, ill-fitting clothes, malnourishment, skin infections, and malaise were common. As teachers and medical professionals met the situations head-on, Clapp felt free to report that “… with good food and care, country living out of doors, and

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freedom from strain, these … disturbances gradually lessened and finally disappeared” (Resources, 34–35). Here is a sampling of the School life for the first and second-grade students. I present these as the diary entries of their leaders, Miss Carlisle and Miss Jones, in Table 5.1. I include what days of the week activity occurred. Throughout the School hours, students and their teachers used the construction of the Homestead as their experiential text. Students observed and were able to talk with builders of roads and homes, farmers, and others about what they were doing and why. Back in the classroom, discussion of experience and expression was encouraged, amounting to childlife ethnographies, descriptions of activities using means available to the interests of the child. For example, Carlisle’s note which she wrote on 27 April reflects the bind of School work and land work: “As we had been talking about the new school buildings being started, we went down to the meadow to see what was going on. The steam shovel was Table 5.1  Activities of first and second grades First grade

Second grade

9/20/34

9/10/35 T:

Th: Observation of and discussion on threshing buckwheat 10/3/34 W: Discussion of preparing ground for planting wheat 10/8/34 M: Bringing lunch to School; blocks arrive 10/17/34 W: Mamie Drewson describes architect Wagner’s visit 11/8/34 Th: Discussion of barns and farm animals 1/4/35: 1/16/35

F: W:

1/22/35

T:

Talk about houses Activity—Churning butter and making sandwiches Activity—Making cheese

9/11/35 W:

Question: What do you want to do? Answer: Build houses Beginning to write

9/12/35 Th: There’s more than houses. What else is there? 9/16/35 M: Selecting a build site.

9/19/35 Th: Students bring tools from home to use for building; students start exploring books 9/28/35 Lumber brought in 10/1/35 M: Field trip to D road— Discussion on how to build a road 10/2/35 T Talk about prepping food for winter

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there working, and when we got back the children wrote a story about it. It shows I think that the children see more now and are becoming accustomed to putting into words what they see (Resources). “We went to see the steam shovel. “The steam shovel has big teeth in it so it can dig dirt. The steam shovel was filling trucks with dirt. “The trucks were dumping the dirt in a big hole. One truck was blue and the other was black. “One truck held four shovelfuls of dirt, and the other held three. A man ran the steam shovel. “It had big belts on it. “It had a derrick on its way up in the air. “The derrick pulls the shovel up in the air and lets it down.”

Students from the first were making connections between what they saw and were encouraged to express themselves. At first, the teacher as guide was teacher as scribe and encourager. The activities of the second and third graders built from the first grade. The talk about where they live was great, exploring it was exciting, and the decision to create a Homestead of their own was an example of great ingenuity. Perhaps with the new sense of what they’ve experienced and created, advancing to a study of West Virginia in Grade 4 was not going to be foreign. Again, an awareness of behavior settings and activity sites came together to shape a culture and its attending activities constituting folklife. Lest there had been any concern over the curriculum that involved fieldtrips to the Homestead in-progress, block play, and art, the first-grade staff offered their response: “We spend each day on reading, writing, and number work. We do large manuscript writing and the children now form their letters and space their words quite well … In number work the children have learned to count and do a few simple problems in addition. They have also learned about a dozen, a half-dozen, an acre, and some pieces of money. We have done a little measuring, and they know about inches, feet, and yards, and about cups, pints, and quarts” (Resources). If the School was not a rural, public, and independent School, this concern would be unnecessary. It was operating in the same manner as its urban, private contemporaries, the City and Country School (Pratt 1948), and the Bureau of Educational Experiments (Mitchell 1921) where blocks, neighborhood exploration, group conversation, writing, and art were a main staple of the curriculum. Children were makers and narrators of their experiences. Their expressions were their own, their childlife ethnographies

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detailing the world of their growing and their knowing. This was different from their parents who attended the confined Schools with their defined curriculum. From grade four on, students recognized and connected history on the large scale to history of the micro: the Homestead. They found the micro in an abandoned log cabin on the Arthurdale property. Seeing its place in history, the students cleared out and cleaned the cabin, outfitting it with furnishings and features associated with pioneer life. This was learning by doing and learning by doing for living. Forms of all kinds were studied for function. Elders contributed items and information though demonstration and anecdote. With student interest, teacher guidance, and elder contribution, the School as a community School shone in possibility.3 Play was a part of the curriculum, viewed on two fronts, organized/ competitive and free. Carleton Saunders was hired by Clapp to develop a program devoted to athletics which focused on organized and competitive games, putting aside the spontaneous. Saunders’ job was to create a “full athletics program … out of our realization that people needed to learn to play, and to play themselves, not merely watching others play … We found not only that it was necessary to have it possible for these people to have relaxation, but that their inertia and lack of familiarity with games and of any habit of playing had to be overcome, and that individuals had to be inducted into the enjoyment of sports” (CSA, 108–109). Saunders appeared to have his own view of what constituted play and games. He spoke to the enjoyment children experienced with large group free play, especially in the nursery School, including playing horseshoes, kickball, dodgeball, and mushball.4 He leaves no record of smaller, interactive play such as jacks, hopscotch, and marbles. This doesn’t say that this was an absent part of childlife. Children, from time immemorial, have shaped the environment so they could play. Put another way, play is a natural form of expression, as Johan Huizinga (1955) says, homo ludens. Man, including the child, is a player.5 On the appointed day of the School’s initial opening, only 87 out of 167 children showed up for School (CSA, 289). Why this was the case is speculative. Staff went into the community for possible answers. Some reasons were plain to see: lack of suitable clothing, malnourishment, and basic health bedeviled the children. It is also possible that in spite of the many efforts to assure parents of the quality education planned for the children, there remained an unyielding skepticism of how “hands-on” and

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“brains-on” could actually work with the students with teacher guidance. Other possibilities include families who were simply not accustomed to sending their children to School especially in an unfamiliar environment. This reduction may have had a positive effect on this day, because of a lack in staff. As Clapp pointed out: “By state law, the allotment of teachers in West Virginia is based on the daily attendance of pupils in the county during the last three months of the preceding year. As only eighty-seven of families on the homestead … had attended Preston County schools in 1933–34 only three teachers could be assigned the school at Arthurdale that first year” (Resources, fn. 16). This said, the School was always short-­ staffed as the student population grew. At the end of the 1934–1935 year, there were 246 students, including those in the nursery School. The 1935–1936 year saw 317 students enrolled (CSA, 389). Margaret Collins, in her memoir “Wheel and Star: A Quilt” (Collins 1996), wrote of her husband, Fletcher, in 1934.6 “Fletch has accepted the job at the New Deal community, Arthurdale. The School will teach anything, and one of the progressive education principles is that you can’t teach anything until a student is interested … We have to feel that the School is the center of the community as the cathedral was in the medieval community. There wasn’t any other center. There is no church here. No political entity. We are the government as much as anything. Miss Clapp has to be principal, superintendent, mayor. She has to be practical and tough” (Collins 1996, 24). Margaret Collins, holding Clapp in high esteem, wondered: “Miss Clapp has a clear idea of what she wants. But do the Homesteaders have any idea of the type of school they want? They have just gotten out of the ‘fuckin’’ coal camps. They don’t care what happens. This is the worst. Trying to get them to care” (Ibid.). Margaret Collins underestimated homesteader sentiment regarding the School. As pointed out in the Manifesto on what the School was to do, homesteaders had a role in its composition. As a School in action, combined with a community in progress, aspects related to quality of life had to be forged anew. Both Collinses were forming their first impressions, sight unseen. It took time for them to understand how people cared. Once they got that, they could observe, act, and reflect in a respectful and, ultimately, useful manner.7 What do I mean by saying the homesteaders needed to be treated with respect, mindfulness, and usefulness? The Homesteaders bore the weight of the stereotype of uneducated “hicks,” even though their applications to

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live in Arthurdale demonstrated an aptitude for participating in a “normal” life. They were not “hicks.” They were real people with real attitudes that represented a desire to live, whose lives had been shattered by their experience of the mines. Clapp had to acknowledge this, but in Community Schools in Action and The Use of Resources in Education she does not. Her concern was a fear that emotional distress will obstruct progress in the construction of the Homestead. It must have been difficult to balance the priorities of the School and of the community. Who was Fletcher Collins, and what made him an asset to the School during his tenure 1934–1936? Sam Stack (2016) shows great value in his methods with his presentation of “Fletcher Collins, Jr. (1906–2004): Appalachian Teacher and Folklorist” to the annual meeting of the Appalachian Studies Association, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, March 19, 2016. As a trained folklorist, I maintain Collins was not a folklorist. He had no professional training in the field, but he was enamored with what he called the “transcendent beauty” of traditional song that required “several exposures to show its dimensions, its shapeliness, … it’s mysterious relation to the hearer’s psyche” (Collins 1995, 27) and his “persistent search for those songs where they have slept for centuries in remote manuscripts and in equally private sources where families still sang the old songs for pleasure and comfort” (ibid.). Fletcher Collins was born on November 11, 1906, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his PhD in English at Yale, where he nurtured an interest in the interconnection of poetry and melody. Under the influence of his Yale professor Carl Young, Collins collected and studied drama monographs from the medieval period. If he was a folklorist, Collins would study the contexts of these monographs, the people who created and transmitted them in family and community. At Arthurdale he did take these into account as a means of understanding the intersection of culture and community. Collins taught at Montclair State Teachers College, when, according to his wife Margaret, he accepted the position at Arthurdale, which he probably heard about from his friend and colleague George Beecher, in 1934. Collins was assigned to teach 7th and 8th grades at the Arthurdale School. He had no training in education. The work of the students was not text based. Rather, the first task was the creation of a huge wall map, which the class “is making.” Not a map as you’d usually think of, but one

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that shows fields, trees, ponds in color with a bright border of all sorts of fruits and vegetables grown at Arthurdale (M. Collins). This map represented the “me” of the students. It led them to visualizing and understanding the formation of their region, geographically, historically, and socially. Through the map, students participated in lessons on spelling, math, drawing to scale, and making an elaborate compass for the map. They worked together, realizing they could reach out from the self to the group. While Fletcher Collins was assigned to teach English and Drama, his approach was transdisciplinary. From his descriptions of classwork, he did not dip into a subject and jump out of it to address another lesson. Rather, he moved along a scale of sorts with notes played along a stream of subjects where one did not interrupt the other.

United States Resettlement Administration, Illustrated map by children in the School at Arthurdale, West Virginia, Ben Shahn, 1898–1969, photographer. (Public Domain)

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Map making and subjects were reinforced by a number of activities. “Most of the teaching [was] done by class discussion and group projects like the map, supplemented by reading source material rather than a text book. Also, lots of field trips such as tramping over [the] two miles of Arthurdale [took place]. [It was] always a mixture of the familiar and the unknown so new information [could] be linked and better remembered” (M. Collins, ibid.). Fletcher Collins did what he was hired to do. In addition to explorations, students were exposed to proper speech habits (no “ain’t”; no “hain’t”), poetry, and prose. The students took a great interest in Scotts Run and the move to Arthurdale, and they wrote and produced plays for the Homestead on the subject. The plays, opened to the public, were well received, and it encouraged more in line with reading and writing, although state education tests deemed the students below grade level. This did not seem to faze Fletcher Collins. As Margaret Collins wrote, “Fletch’s idea is the preservation of Appalachian culture it seems to be a genuine thing for these people. They aren’t ready for the Great Books. Most of them are not readers, and while we urge them to be literate, it’s on an elementary level. They were farmers before they were coal miners, and they have a skinful [sic] of songs” (M. Collins). Fletcher Collins worked hard to bring the classical literary and the culture of the students together. He created a library of literature and resource materials from his personal collection. During discussions, students explored geology and science. The class did choral recitations and wrote their own poetry to share with one another and create an anthology. Collins often sang to the students from his memories of songs sung to him as a child and from a repertoire of songs learned over the years. But “it was through the children that we were first made aware of the homesteaders’ repertory of traditional ballads. Early in the year, a girl in the Sixth Grade sang to the class the old English or Scottish ballad of Barbara Allen.” Asked where she learned that song, the singer, who in Collins’ estimation, sang a thorough variant of the ballad said her aunt often sang it. Collins felt it would be a fine study in what today could be seen as a transdisciplinary approach in a literary humanities framework. Viewed side-by-side, this might be what the Arthurdale and Folklife Education would look like in transdisciplinary method (Table 5.2). “At nearly the same time, two boys in the Fifth Grade volunteered a ballad called Scotty’s Last Flight, a vivid narrative of an airplane disaster which in content and spirit was closely parallel to the ancient ballad of Sir

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Table 5.2  Arthurdale School approach to transdisciplinary education Commonalities

Teacher & student active learner

Yes. Teacher and student explore together

Aim

To solve a problem using content knowledge and skills.

Yes: To flesh out the history and culture of the song based on what the students and teachers heard.

Arthurdale School: Folklife education Literary & historical Aim To solve a problem using content, knowledge, and skills Starting point Questioning in order to indicate the problem— Student life—experience and world actualities Results Innovative solutions by developing content and tools of different disciplines Decisions

Which skills and content can help to solve the problem

Connections

All disciplines have particular sense in life content How my learning helped resolve the problem Student-teacher/ student-student/ mutual cooperation of all community

Feedback Cooperation

Transdisciplinary School: Folklife, ethnographical, historical Yes: To flesh out the history and culture of the song based on what the students and teachers heard Yes: Using standard who, what, where, when, and why questions based on personal experience, work together to explore components of the ballad Yes: Explore the Homestead for singers of ballads and songs and learn their interpretations of the songs using starting points and additional information Yes: Identify what subject areas help in learning the story: fieldwork (results; library research on the ballad, its history and library composition) Yes: What fields are best suited in meeting the aim? Yes: A subjective evaluation of one’s part in the exploration Yes: Evaluation of all parties’ role in discovery

Patrick Spens (Child# 58}; others in the class added that they had seen the disaster happen near Morgantown a few years before, and that everyone knew Scotty” (Resources, 53–54). “Their parents’ reaction to the singing of ballads in the classroom was first one of astonishment that the world still cared about these old ‘ballits’ … the students were amazed to find that some of these ballads—Barbara Allen (Child 1860, #84), for

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instance—were at least five hundred years old and that in their own families every generation until their own had cherished these songs” (Resources, 54).8 Clapp recognized these and other traditional pastimes for the homesteaders, including the weekly square dancing and fiddling which Fletcher Collins pulled together with a new square dance orchestra made up of homesteaders (Resources, 55). She noted how students wanted to make fiddles of their own, and how Collins and another teacher put this into action in late March 1935 when Collins brought to School Ben Nicholson, “a craftsman with a real talent for violin making” (Resources, 55). Nicholson came to Arthurdale School and taught the 7th and 8th graders how to build fiddles using “wellseasoned spruce and maple using the main tools of chisel, handsaw, and a penknife” (Resources, ibid.). Photographs from the Southern Illinois University archive show boys watching Nicholson, the braces used to put together a fiddle, and a boy carving the scroll of the neck. There is no sound attached, so we don’t know how the fiddles sounded. But student confidence in their work was registered by Collins and shop teacher Carlson (Resources, op. cit.). Assessing Fletcher Collins’ contribution to the School, Clapp wrote: “It is, I think quite clear that one of the services which Mr. Collins rendered these seventh and eighth graders was to make accessible to them musical, literary, and dramatic expression. The first was their heritage from their Scotts-Irish ancestry; the second was this this group’s native gift; the third they enthusiastically made their own. In science and mathematics, work in Shop and their regional studies also served their development, and by the end of the year it was evident that these youngsters, who in September seemed immature and somewhat wayward though enterprising, had gained enough competence to qualify them as the High School’s junior members” (Resources, 55). The students’ interest in folk song meshed with Fletcher Collins’, which had been nurtured during his graduate School studies at Yale. Margaret Collins notes that in June 1935, he teamed up with Louis W. Chappell (1880–1981), professor of English at West Virginia University who was best known for his study of the ballad John Henry, and had been collecting songs throughout West Virginia. Chappell needed someone to transcribe the tunes to the songs, and tapped Collins to do the job, although it was a new task for him. Collins took on the job, and in addition to the songs Chappell had collected, the two also documented song traditions in the Arthurdale area.9 The songs and musicality gave Fletcher Collins the

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idea of producing folk festivals at Arthurdale that would be open to the surrounding communities (see Chap. 6). These festivals were more like community reunions for people who had not seen each other for some time. The festivals featured performances and varying talents and contests in ballad singing, jig dancing, and fiddling, to name a few. For the 1936 festival, ethnomusicologist and filmmaker Charles Seeger of the WPA Music Unit, Special Skills Division was invited to film the festival.10 The School year ended on a positive note, becoming, along with the whole Homestead, a curiosity which drew the public, some of whom apparently left their manners at home. While this might have been a good thing for Clapp, the School staff, and other Arthurdale staff, it was often a bone of contention for homesteaders, as one expressed, “Got so a man couldn’t sit down to his sow belly and turnip greens without some stranger peeking in at the window or walking in to ask fool questions.” Cultural intervention? Perhaps the goodwill of the Arthurdale plan sometimes crossed a boundary of personal space. Back at the School, the 1935–1936 year seemed to be going well. Students were in better health, they were inquisitive about their surroundings, and the history and science around them. They were learning, and the Homestead and their personal experiences were their text book. Table 5.1 illustrated the parallels between the School and the Progressive Education Association. Recall that the principles of the PEA did not require sequential adhesion. How did students feel about their School? Annabelle Urbas Mayor recalled “You didn’t want to miss a day because it you did someone would know to do something you didn’t know how to do. We learned to weave and plan meals. The first year I took electric shop and we made radios and telegraph sets and sent messages back and forth between buildings. In science class we made a surveyor and in math we surveyed where Route 92 is now.”11 Edna and Robert Day also experienced a positive Progressive education. Edna Day related that “We really had a lot of advantages … We would study West Virginia history and we’d go across the creek behind the school when it had Indian teepees and we had an old log cabin….” Mr. Day had his own opinion: “Progressive Schools are good, but here I don’t think we had enough technical type of education, ‘cause here it was a problem for anybody to go to college.”12 Joseph Roscoe expressed his view and a feeling possibly shared with his classmates: “The program was known as progressive education. In other words, learn by doing I wrote an essay. … I don’t know whether it was my

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idea or whether the other boys and girls complained, couldn’t tell whether they were juniors or seniors, or freshmen or sophomores. I wrote an essay concerning that.”13 This did not seem to bother Jetti Eble. When asked if she attended the School, she enthused that, “…everything was new and the teachers were real exceptional. They really were because they knew that a lot of us that were coming in from the communities like we had come from had not had opportunity like some children had had … To read out of a book and take a test that’s great. But when you get to have a hands-on project or you see the thing or are involved in doing it, it’s more exciting I think and it stimulates you more. I think you remember better and you’re really involved in projects pertaining to subjects.”14 Christmas came with great to-do. The decorations of baubles brought by Jessie Stanton and the stringed popcorn gave the Center the feel of a real holiday in a real home (see Chap. 6). Students and homesteaders from the very beginning sent colorful canned goods to Eleanor Roosevelt to which she automatically responded, as she did on November 27, 1935: “My dear Miss Clapp: Many thanks for the jars of fruit and vegetables from Arthurdale. I know I shall enjoy them very much indeed and it was more than kind of you all to think of me. Very sincerely yours….”15 Mrs. Roosevelt made it a point to give each child a Christmas gift. And when she could, she would attend square dances, knitting on the sidelines or dancing to her favorite figure, the “Virginia Reel.”16 The fate of the Progressive School depended, at least in part, on the financial strength of the community. The failure of the jobs creation programs, the cooperative and the factory, left the School dependent on outside funding sources, which was also dwindling. If the cooperative and factory brought nothing to the Homestead, it would bring nothing to the School. Change, then, was afoot. And this meant the School as a Progressive program would suffer as a result, and it would break Clapp’s heart.

Notes 1. Folder 1, Misc. papers A&M 2178, West Virginia University and Regional History, WVU libraries, Morgantown, West Virginia. Acc. 16 March 2022. 2. Print-­a-­calendar.com. 3. It is interesting to note that state studies units are a continuing part of state social studies curricula.

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4. Mushball is a form of softball, using a larger and softer ball, without the use of gloves. 5. Children’s solitary and group play is universal and timeless, evidenced in art and psychosocial examination. Large group competitive play, with its rules, may require education, but a child’s curiosity is not to be challenged. It is not fair to call in lethargy to a group, when, in fact, there might not be a desire for engagement. 6. Fletcher Collins was affectionately known as “Fletch” to friends and colleagues. 7. Margaret Collins (1903–2008) was an astute observer of the events at the School and the Homestead on the whole. Her memoir is a blunt testimony to the homesteaders once she got a feel for who they were beyond the stereotype of hicks, and her and Mr. Collins’s approach to the Progressive education enterprise espoused by their friend, Miss Clapp. 8. The Child Ballads are a compilation of ballads (stories in song) collected by Harvard professor Francis James Child (1825–1896). The collection consists of 305 ballads from England and Scotland with their American variants, published in five volumes as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 9. See the Fletcher Collins Jr. Collection, 1935–1944, housed in the American Folklife Center, AFC 1939/003, Catalog Record https://lccn.loc. gov/2004659978. Prepared by Todd Harvey. 10. Unfortunately, this film is not to be located, either at Arthurdale, the West Virginia archives, or the Library of Congress. 11. Interview with Karen Miller April–May 1991: C433,R 727 West Virginia Regional History Archive (WVRHA). 12. Interview with Robert and Edna Day April–May 1991: C433,R719 WVRHA. 13. Interview with Joseph Roscoe 23 April 1991: C433,R716 WVRHA. 14. Interview Karen Miller-Jetti Eble April–May 1991. C433.R724. 15. Letter, Eleanor Roosevelt to Miss Clapp Ripley Clapp, November 27, 1935. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 16. See photograph of Mrs. Roosevelt at an Arthurdale square dance. https:// www.arthurdaleheritage.org/ahi/er-

References Child, Francis James. 1860 [1965]. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 5 vols. New York: Dover Publications. Clapp, Miss Clapp Ripley. 1939 [1971]. Community Schools in Action. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times. ———. 1952. The Use of Resources in Education. New York: Harper and Brothers.

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Collins, Fletcher. 1995 [1998]. Episodes: A Shirt-Tail-Full From Mr. Collins. Public Lecture, Francis Auditorium, Mary Baldwin College, October 10, 1995. Collins, Margaret. 1996. Wheel and Star: A Quilt. DIY: Staunton, VA. Haid, Stephen E. 1975. Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning: 1933–1947. PhD Dissertation, West Virginia University. Huizinga, Johan. 1955. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press. Mitchell, Lucy Sprague. 1921. The Here and Now Story Book. London: J.M. Dent. Pratt, Caroline. 1948. I Learn From Children. New York: Harper and Row. Stack, Sam F., Jr. 2016. Fletcher Collins (1906–2004): Appalachian Teacher and Folklorist. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Appalachian Studies Association, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, March 19, 2016.

CHAPTER 6

Collision and Demise

“This is the end. We are stunned. We didn’t know it could be so sudden. Arthurdale has finally wound up in a three-cornered fight between Franklin and Eleanor and Tugwell….” Eleanor was told there wasn’t going to be any more Arthurdale prospect, and so Elsie is back from Washington. Two or three months and we taper off. “Publicly we want to protect Eleanor and not have it look like defeat for her. It’s important for her to come and talk to the homesteaders as they become aware that support for the School is being withdrawn. The county will take over. Some homesteaders will be pleased. Others know that something good will be leaving Eleanor has told the homesteaders she regrets the changes that have to be made, but she thinks Arthurdale will go on as their community. She asks them to stay with it. (Collins 1996).

By August 1935 the School was physically in place. It seemed like halcyon days were ahead. Classes ran according to Miss Clapp’s (1939 [1971]) Progressive Plan, covering all subject areas from elementary math, literature, and social studies to high school thermodynamics. Visitors to the School were welcome to observe a living organism, ever-growing, always challenging according to the interests of the students and the skill of their teachers in guiding their explorations and encouraging their expressions in art, drama, music, and literature (CSA 399–415). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Rosenberg, The Arthurdale School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45626-8_6

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This was the internal view. But from the outside looking in one saw a School facing numerous issues in administration. Between January 1935 and August 1936 numerous letters addressing issues were exchanged between Eleanor Roosevelt, Clapp, and key individuals, the key topics of which are listed in Table 6.1. They range everywhere from the need for a school bus in January 1935, the delay of payroll to the homestead construction team throughout late 1935 and finally, the decision to dissolve the School as Progressive Plan and absorb it into the Preston County School District in July 1936. These letters could be brief and typed, or handwritten and long. The salutations, “My Dear Mrs. Roosevelt” or “My Dear Miss Clapp,” were standard fare, and the discussions in the bodies of the letters were straightforward but not terse. They were all business. They also reveal Clapp’s status as both director of the School and of Community Affairs. In addition, certain dates are at times confused. All correspondence has been digitized and is available from the FDR library under ER Correspondence. One administrative letter exemplifies a tone for alarm. On September 11, 1935, Clapp received a letter from Wendell Lund, Chief of the Family Selection Section, which he forwarded to C.W.  Anner, Chief of the Stranded Group Section of the Settlement Administration. He informed Clapp that five men (and their families) who had applied for homestead residency were rejected on moral and financial grounds. 1 Clapp went to their defense, responding that these families were already long-standing homesteaders, with the men being on the construction teams since the beginning of the homestead. In another letter from Mrs. Vansickle who had fallen from the School transportation truck in January 1935 appealed directly to Mrs. Roosevelt on September 2, 1935, to get her job back as nursery school teacher.2 Clapp responded to Mrs. Roosevelt’s request for an opinion,3 informing her that Mrs. Vansickle was not well enough to handle the physical demands of the young students, her medical bills were being handled by the AFSC, and she was also seeking employment with the County district.4 A looming concern for Clapp was with the progress of homestead construction and its dynamic effect on the emotional state of the construction teams. It revealed just how fragile the plan was, and when certain issues surfaced, Clapp feared for the future of the homestead. Clapp had to write Mrs. Roosevelt to inform her that payroll was not being met.5 In her mind Clapp noted a slump in workers’ attitudes and an uptick in their suspicion of one another. It drew them closer to a rabbit hole of depression, a fact

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Table 6.1  Synopsis and timeline of correspondence Year

Date

Topic

1935 Jan-35

Budgets current and projected for 1934–1935 and 1935–1936 School year Need for school bus Homesteader reaction to negative news articles Activities—President’s Ball, Full program of music, plays, and programs for adults, orchestra forming, singing group enlarged from 30 to 10; plays planned for February and early March, Education forum? Feb-35 Physician hired; Emergency fund exhausted Mar-35 AFSC Advance for school bus, 41.41 to repair, 4.5 days needed for repairs. Homesteaders will pay for the bus. Apr-35 AFSC to pay for Mrs. VanSickle’s medical bills from her fall off school transport in January. Baruch will help, Baruch support of School Jun-35 Continued confidence in School Sketch of early cooperatives and individual enterprises Invitation to summer music festival RSVP before 17 July Jul-35 On employment essentials, continued sketch of cooperatives and individual enterprises Aug-35 ERC visit to Dept. of Treasury. Payroll, invitation to Dewey, need for Home Ec teacher, decrease in rents, on relations with Tugwell Sep-35 Mrs. VS’s letter to ER about re-employment; 5 Homestead families rejected for residence who have been working on Sep-35 the Homestead since the beginning on visitors to forge & gift shop (Cont’d) when they were closed Oct-35 Forming a permanent advisory committee for School Thanks for gift; grateful for Baruch visit; pulling info, or GEB (General Education Board); Cooperatives and businesses underway starting with vacuum cleaner factory 1935 Oct-35 $50 gift to social worker Alice Davis who is taking on a new position. Nov-35 Raimey Foundation? NYA (National Youth Administration) project ideas for young adults; thanks for canned fruits and vegetables; Tugwell better understands homestead concept and function Dec-35 Donation of piano; on women’s garden club—winter house plants; donation of stuff from Mrs. Freed 1936 Jan-36 Lucy Sprague Mitchell tenders her resignation from sponsoring School Committee for the School ERC notes unequal wage for AD workers from WPA (continued)

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Table 6.1 (continued) Year

Date

Mar-36 Apr-36

Jun-36

Jul-36

Aug-36

Topic Recreation bldg. dedicated with basketball games between AD and Terra Alta high School; ER asks LS Mitchell to continue with Sponsoring School Comm. Raimey Foundation writes Dewey with doubts over its support of School; Flynn (Homestead) unsure funding for Homestead forthcoming; materials for houses and factories on their way; Baruch to ERC School a model; need to reduce rents on homes Cooperatives and businesses under study ERC-ER rundown on activities outside of classes; School graduation scheduled for 17 June@ 4 PM, music festival to follow at 7:30. Could Baruch come too? Collins and musicians visit White House; men in charge of vacuum cleaner factory on Homestead. Festival entries cause F. Collins to divide festival to 6–23/ 6–24; possible topics for graduation speech: value of education or on School itself; meeting planned with Tugwell, and maybe Pickett to discuss transfer of School to county; costs for teachers, high school and health: Min: $10,850/max: $16,000 Meetings scheduled with WV School advisory comm to discuss transfer of School to county Homesteaders and wives informed of decision to transfer school to county ERC leaves School and homestead

that the trauma triggered by their experiences in the mines and Scotts Run never had disappeared. When funds came available, work continued, and time off was well spent in song, music, dance, and a small calming maybe in time for the beginning of the next week. In a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt dated January 10, 1936, Clapp explained that she found the inequalities in pay between the WPA workers and the Arthurdale workers prevented the latter in meeting their financial obligations or opportunities, “had produced all kinds of discontents and feelings of insecurity … The men reminisce always about their first days on the project when they were all paid an equal sum for whatever work they did and deplore the fact that times changed so that they are now paid different amounts.” Clapp continued: “I found when I got back that the community’s feeling of insecurity had suddenly been located in the school. The fact that

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that the high school has not yet been classified by the state as an accredited school emerged as a cause of panic. I saw the County Superintendent of Schools….” “He told me to tell the people that Arthurdale had applied for classification and would undoubtably receive it just as soon as it met the various points on which classification rests.” “I think that this is simply another instance of their [the Homesteaders] fears and pressures. They are in the frame of mind just now where they resent everything and everybody including each other.”6 This was a lesson for Clapp, and it was taught to her by the homesteaders. It should have been one for Eleanor Roosevelt as well and everyone else who was associated with the homestead enterprise. Maybe it just was not believed to be true. While the homestead depended on government funding, the School depended mostly on philanthropy. The main contributor to the School was Bernard Baruch (1870–1965) who amassed his first fortune on the Wall Street Stock Exchange. Prior to the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Baruch did not fall into the stock trap and so amassed a second fortune. His adroit management of his funds gained the attention of President Woodrow Wilson, who selected Baruch to manage the War Industries Board. With the installment of FDR in 1932, he came into the sights of Eleanor Roosevelt as a donor and adviser to Arthurdale.7 Between August 14, 1935, and July 12, 1936, Mrs. Roosevelt and Baruch communicated on numerous occasions on the future of the School. Mrs. Roosevelt relied heavily on Baruch’s business acumen as the homestead and School glided down a slippery slope. After a number of failed attempts, Baruch finally visited the School and homestead in late 1935. In a private letter to Clapp dated January 15, 1936, he wrote: “You are always so wise in what you say and in what you do to meet the circumstances and conditions that arises [sic]. I wish there were more of you or that you would be listened to more. You seem so practically idealistic. As compared to so many in this project who have good ideas but apparently do not know how to carry the ideas with effect. The school is a model. Even I could see that. Evidently your work there is carrying along the whole enterprise but it looks to me that they are all

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l­eaning on it. But it is good work and can carry long many but not all of the mistakes agriculture and economic they planned so badly there “You and your work have my hearty approval and good wishes.” “Sincerely, [signed] Bernard Baruch.”8

Given Baruch’s donation of $40,000 for teacher salaries and School supplies between 1934 and 1936, this letter was a boost for Clapp. Her works were recognized outside of Dewey’s and Roosevelt’s sphere. Even Mrs. Roosevelt did not express such support for Clapp until the day she left Arthurdale in August 1936. Baruch was a source and adviser—he was a rock between shores, although some of the correspondence between he and Mrs. Roosevelt touched on personal details in his life—never hers. Mrs. Roosevelt had her worries with Arthurdale. As the homestead settled as a community, she became concerned with middle-class values now achieved among the homesteaders the homestead was still bound tight by the red tape of government, and as much as the homesteaders wanted to work their way through governmental restrictions, they found it best to approach Mrs. Roosevelt and have her go to bat for them. This concerned Mrs. Roosevelt because she wanted the homesteader families to rely on themselves. But how? Baruch wrote, “It will do no good helping people unless they can help themselves. Placing people in homes or in circumstances in which they cannot carry on would be tragedy. The blame would rest entirely on our shoulders. That is one thing I fear in connection with many of the things we are trying to do for people—that they may be left in circumstances where we have not helped them but have hurt them.”9 Such actions could have become “teachable moments” for the homesteaders, Clapp, Roosevelt, Baruch, and other administrators. Why not instruct, using personal experience, homestead families in particular, to address issues and deal with red tape? Would that not have given homestead families the means to stand on their own as best as possible? Would it not bolster the idea of community? What would be the harm in instruction in the workings of governmental bureaucracy and the options for confronting and dealing with it? “The one bright spot in this is Miss Clapp’s school.” Baruch wrote Mrs. Roosevelt, “It is the one thing the government had nothing to do with, and is the one bright shining spot. Some arrangements will have to be made for its future continuance, and even then it will not be of value

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unless Arthurdale, or some place [sic] nearby, will have the pupils to send to it.” There are several things that are very important—Above all, these people should not be disappointed. That the people who are doing these things shall not continue to make mistakes and expect someone else to shoulder the burden of the attacks and explanations.10

Margaret Collins, Fletcher Collins, and Clapp documented six traditions: square dancing, hog butchering, egg output, Christmas, music festivals, and music performances at home and at the Roosevelt White House. Margaret Collins notes on December 4, 1935, “Mrs. R. [Roosevelt] was here. At the square dance, she brings her knitting, visits the people, joins the dancing. Mrs. DeGollier tells me the homesteaders have been butchering hogs. Seven families went together to get all theirs done in a day. They got a truck to haul the meat to individual homes. She said they had 600 pounds from their two hogs. And her hens are laying ‘real good, six eggs a day’” (M. Collins). Mrs. DeGollier continues her report quoted by Mrs. Collins: “Now that the Recreation building is finished, homestead committees are planning for a Christmas Eve party with trees and carols. Santa Claus will really come this year. Wives are making candlewick spreads, husbands are making furniture at the Shop” (M. Collins). Homesteaders and Fletcher Collins continued honing their musical skills, instrumentally and vocally. In July of 1935 Fletcher Collins organized a music festival “to consist of contests in fiddling, ballad singing, dance, jig-dancing, mouth-harping, and a square dance. Accompanied by Charles Stearns, one of the homesteaders who had lived in the region before his coal-mining days and knew many of the people there, Mr. Collins drove many miles over back-country roads for a month or more before the Festival [sic]. They called on the musicians Stearns knew and saw others whom these people suggested.” “Participation was limited to amateurs who were stimulated to enter by the announcement of contests … No cash prizes were offered; awards for places in each contest were blue, red, and white ribbons.” The festival was advertised by word of mouth, “talked up as an opportunity to get together with one’s neighbors, have some fun, and see who could sing the best ballad or dance the best jig” (Resources, 79). As for judges, three were selected for their fair-mindedness: a cashier of the Reedsville Bank, a piano-tuner

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from Kingswood, and a “grand old patriarch and former singing-school master from back in the country near Cheat River” (Resources, 79). Fletcher Collins also noted that special invitations were extended to Eleanor Roosevelt and guests from Washington “in order to give credence to the contests” (Resources, op. cit.). This was a wise, polite, and political move. At festival’s end, Fletcher Collins assessed: “Educationally, the Festival accomplished what it set out to do. The musical culture [of] the people of Arthurdale and the region was encouraged and dignified by the emphasis of the Festival. The music and dancing were the people’s own, and they knew it” (my emphasis) (Resources, ibid). It was enough of a success that the festival was held in June of the next year, and because of the many entries, it was held over a two-day period, June 23 and 24. For organizations to survive, revenue is required. The Arthurdale School needed funds for supplies, teacher salaries, and upkeep. Eleanor Roosevelt hoped the establishment of factories would supply homesteaders with a living wage that would contribute to the School, but factory interest waned when employment was limited. In 1936 only one factory, a vacuum cleaner plant, was established, but it did not last long. Other employment ventures were sought and tried, but ultimately did not succeed. Cooperatives and private enterprises such as a general store, barber shop, and a gas station provided some income which could go to the School. But it was not enough, and the School began to suffer. Financial assistance from outside individual contributions was required. The School applied for funding through the General Education Board (GEB n.d.). This organization was founded in 1902 as a means for “raising educational standards and widening educational opportunities.” At first it was formed as the Southern Education Board. In January 1902, board member John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated $1,000,000, first to support advanced education, medical schools, rural white and black schools, and the modernization of farming practices in the South. Through an Act of Congress on January 12, 1903, the GEB was incorporated. Its stated object was “the promotion of education within the United States of America without distinction of race, sex, or creed.” As of 1934 it was making grants of $5.5 million in total a year. By 1964, funds were depleted and the GEB closed.11 Clarence Pickett and Clapp made an application to the GEB in support of the School in February of 1936. On February 26, 1936, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote Baruch to say, “[t]he General Education Board is considering the high school part of the whole school down at Arthurdale, as they thought there was a better chance by doing that than if they considered the whole

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school. Miss Clapp has an appointment on March 2nd with someone at the Rosenwald Fund to consider the primary part of the education.” The Rosenwald Fund was established by Sears Company magnate Julius Rosenwald (n.d.) to support its mission as the elevation of quality of life, primarily in the Southern states. Like other philanthropic enterprises, Rosenwald funding did not last in perpetuity. Funds had to be spent within a determined time frame. The Rosenwald Fund is best known for its use in the construction of School buildings for African American students. Given Arthurdale’s restriction against African Americans, applying for funds did not make much sense. So, it is easy to surmise funds from Rosenwald were not sought after for the School.12 It seemed that Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to forge ahead as quickly as possible on the homestead and School, and Baruch was the constant messenger to slow down and take matters in stock. He posed many questions about Arthurdale including whether or not the homesteaders could pay a reasonable rent, if they could grow enough produce for home and market, and if the enterprises were bringing in some income. As a social experiment it had to be squarely situated in real space and time. Baruch acted as a kind of fulcrum, balancing Eleanor Roosevelt’s desires on one end, using his funds and business sense to create a balance of what was and what was to come with Clapp’s (1952) vision of a Progressive community School on the other end. Recall: What does a community school do? First of all, it meets as best it can, and with everyone’s help, the urgent needs of the people, for it holds that everything that affects the welfare of the children and their families is its concern. Where does school end and community life begin? There is no distinction between them. A community school is a used place, a place used freely and informally for all the needs of living and learning. It is, in effect, that place where learning and living converge.13 Clapp achieved her vision and goal to a point. She created a Progressive School in an impoverished rural community. But given its infrastructure, the School would not last the three-year time frame agreed upon on the state and local levels as an independent public school. In establishing the School, Clapp applied historical ethnography to learn about Scotts Run and its people.

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Understanding ecology and architecture, the School buildings were created to be “child-accessible and friendly.” Through the work of teacher Fletcher Collins, the folklife of the community and students created a perfect weave that gave homesteaders and their children a sense of meaning in their lives and ample opportunity to apply their traditions in and out of school to enhance quality of life. While the definition of traditional education as the conveyance of information, skills, and attitudes was strict, the ideas of the Progressive Education Association and the philosophy of John Dewey relaxed the traditional methods and practices of historic American education. The child was a curious member in a community democracy where the School was a community’s social center and the location of its heart beat. All of this used the folk culture(s) in the educational environment. It demanded team work and individual occupation, play, curiosity, and respect for others. Between April and July 1936, Clapp kept close watch over the homestead and the School. Eleanor Roosevelt asked for an accounting of homestead and School operations. Homestead manager J.O. Walker provided an estimate of $38,400.00 to cover all expenses including $20.00 taxes for the 165 homes ($3300) and $20,000 for education. He claimed them to be exceedingly modest and projected a cost if the homes were to be taxed. Such details made the importance of outside funding abundantly clear. Yet it did not dampen all of the homestead spirit. In May 1936, Mrs. Roosevelt attended a concert of traditional music and dance at Arthurdale. She felt such a performance could be repeated for disabled veterans visiting the White House. She asked Fletcher Collins to coordinate the event, and on May 28th Collins assembled twenty-two men and their instruments, along with square dancers. They trundled off to D.C. in five cars to perform, have a light lunch, and a tour of the White House. Most of them had never been outside of the Monongalia/Preston County area and met the experience with glee from the word “go.” Fletcher Collins describes: “Oh, they had such a good time. I don’t think anybody had been quite so rowdy in the White House since Andrew Jackson’s day, though their boots weren’t muddy. They had to tune up to play in this square dance … They had to tune up in the house [White House], and they were used to putting one foot on the chair to hold your guitar while you tuned it up, and of course the major domos who were in charge of all of these arrangements would look in the door horrified and look at me, ‘Can’t you do something?’ They’d go out horrified, and I’m

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sure they complained all the way up on the line. But it was something that was new to DC in those days. It was quite an occasion” (quoted in M. Collins). New to DC? Extremely so for this band whose traditions were transformed into performance art. Once back at Arthurdale, all was back to routine. Behind the scenes, Baruch, Clapp, and Roosevelt were constantly on the prowl for revenue. They never found it. Neither did the High School receive accreditation. On June 27, Roosevelt planned for a July 2, 1936, meeting; arranged for those involved with the School to meet and discuss its future. The meeting attendees, including Clarence Pickett, Rex Tugwell, and a Dr. Peterson, would consider asking Baruch for a donation of $10,000 to carry on with health programs and the nursery School, until a decision was made on what to do with the rest of the School. By now, the National Youth Administration program (NYA) (another project initiated by Eleanor Roosevelt) was at work with classes for men and women beyond Grade 12. Their classes were vocational in nature, meeting a personally expressed need for training for wage-earning employment. This letter in particular expresses a rare, affectionate side to Eleanor Roosevelt’s visits to Arthurdale and her experience with Clapp: “I enjoyed my visit much as always, and I think you are doing a wonderful job. No matter what happens your work has not been wasted.”14 By July 26, 1936, the die was cast. Roosevelt reported to Baruch that she met with Clapp and that, “She agreed with you that the future condition at Arthurdale did not seem to justify our continuing an educational experiment there.” Clapp wanted to continue the Progressive School work if Roosevelt could find another community, and Roosevelt supported the idea. But Roosevelt could not finance it. Clapp would have to reach out to Baruch for financial support. “I think all we can do is to hope for the sake of the people there [Arthurdale] will be able to carry through their plans and bring into the community the needed income.”15 In meeting with the West Virginia advisers and the homesteaders, Roosevelt put forward the plan for the School to be absorbed into the Preston County School system. By August, Clapp informed Roosevelt that she and her School staff had left Arthurdale and were in retreat at Robinhood, Maine, an artists’ colony near Camden (personal communication, Lucy Hull and Cindy Kallet, 28 April 2022). She informed Roosevelt that the homesteaders had filed a petition for her and the teachers to stay on in the new system, but nothing that she knew of came of it.

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It was, for all intents and purposes, an amicable parting of the ways on the homestead. Yet Roosevelt and Clapp did not lose contact. The deed was done. It was time to move on.16 Note ER: Eleanor Roosevelt ERC: Elsie Ripley Clapp BB: Bernard Baruch

Notes 1. Letter, ERC to C.W.  Anner. September 13, 1935. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 2. Letter, VanSickle to Eleanor Roosevelt, September 2, 1935. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 3. Letter, ERC to Eleanor Roosevelt, September 12, 1935. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 4. Letter, ER to ERC, September 16, 1935. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 5. Letter, ERC to Eleanor Roosevelt, August 6, 1935. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 6. Letter, ERC to ER, January 10, 1936. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 7. Bernard Baruch, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Bernard_Baruch (accessed April 22, 2022). 8. Letter, BB to ERC, August 15, 1935. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 9. Letter, BB to ER, August 14, 1935. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 10. Letter, BB to ER, January 27, 1936. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 11. Wikipedia contributors, General Education Board, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Education_Board (accessed April 21, 2022). 12. Wikipedia contributors, Julius Rosenwald, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Rosenwald (accessed April 21, 2022). 13. CSA p.89. 14. Letter, ER to ERC, June 27, 1936. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.

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15. Letter, ER to BB July 27, 1936; Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 16. Letter, ERC to ER, August 16, 1936. Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.

References Clapp, Elsie Ripley. 1939 [1971]. Community Schools in Action. New York: Arno, New York Times. ———. 1952. The Use of Resources in Education. New  York: Harper and Brothers. Collins. Collins, Margaret. 1996. Wheel and Star: A Quilt. Staunton, VA: DIV. Wikipedia Contributors, Bernard Baruch. 1870–1965. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 22, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index. php?title=BemardBaruch8,oldid=1073300596. Wikipedia Contributors, General Education Board. n.d. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 21, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ General_Education_Board. Wikipedia Contributors, Julius Rosenwald. n.d. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 21, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Rosenwald.

CHAPTER 7

The Arthurdale School under Elsie Ripley Clapp and Folklife Education: Where Transdisciplinary Curriculum and Social-­Emotional Learning Meet with STEAM [Community Education] … becomes less impervious and predetermined and more penetrated by realities. Community Education subserves needs. They alter its approach, condition its content. Its scope is widened, necessarily; its basic responsibilities become imperative. —Clapp (1939, 124)

In the preceding pages I have laid out the Progressive plan for the Arthurdale School as conceived and applied by Elsie Clapp; a program that tied together the academic and physical health of the young homesteaders on their Homestead. In Chaps. 5 and 6 specifically, the traditional expressions of the young and elder homesteaders, their folklife, were pronounced due to the respect, care, encouragement, and attention primarily by teacher, Fletcher Collins. In this chapter I want to explore how the Arthurdale School, using a Progressive curriculum under Clapp between 1934 and 1936, relates to Folklife Education work today, using two current sub-approaches to education: Transdisciplinary Learning and Social-Emotional Learning (SEL).

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These two approaches are designed to create learning communities steeped in the STEAM program which focuses on Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math in the standard public School curriculum and in the School program. As a case study, I will look at the ballad “Barbara Allen” which was studied at the School and examine how the ballad traversed but was not trapped in sonic, geographic, historical, literary, and visual cultures. I will then propose a transdisciplinary approach using the ballad and its use of SEL for STEAM compared in Folklife Education as a form of Applied Folklore. The Arthurdale School staff worked with these methods, parts of which developed into the present-day practices known as Social Emotional Learning and STEAM. They were ways of doing School as child-centered and community-based. I hope I have illustrated how it was done. A Transdisciplinary Curriculum refers to the “exploration of relevant concepts, issues, or problems that integrates perceptions of multiple disciplines in order to connect new knowledge and deeper understanding to real life experience.”1 Social Emotional Learning (SEL) “is an educational method that aims to foster social and emotional skills within school curricula … In common practice, SEL emphasizes social and emotional skills to the same degree as other subjects such as math, science, and reading.”2 As methods to support learning communities, they bring together Progressive Education and the discovery of Folklife Education as described in Chaps. 5 and 6. A transdisciplinary approach is similar in the syntagmatic and paradigmatic demands of structuralism. It is a strategy for problem solving that is both emic and etic that addresses a problem to create logical solutions. It differs from the structural in that it is not procedural—1,23. For students this means, in the course of identifying a problem, searching for elements that may address it requires reflection using the senses, along with ancillary queries regarding context and interpretation. It has no right or wrong answers. It is a perpetual construction process where angles of approach are endless. Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is formed and forwarded in the transdisciplinary. Its main focus is in the creation and sustenance of “learning communities,” classes of students and educators, and in the creation of tools for a group to learn and work together. It is a form of character formation and how it is perceived by teachers, folklorists, families, and students. It refers to the identification and encouragement of working together, respect for others and the self. Students experience themselves as

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individual contributors to the life of their group and they have the opportunity to believe in how as a group they aid in the understanding of and participating in the creation of a “place at the table,” enacting in a working democracy, the keystone of a Deweyan education3 supported in Progressive Education, of which Folklife Education is a part today. At the Arthurdale School, the transdisciplinary approach would not have been laid out willy-nilly. As child-centered and community-based, the School was a calculated experience where the roles of teacher and student were conflated in definition and approach. Using a problem, be it in examining a ballad such as “Barbara Allen” or the Homestead as a whole, through child-life ethnographies, angles of interpretation were amassed, and it was discovered that these angles were inexhaustible, and in the working group, SEL reinforced a power in the ability to say it was so through learning with and from one another, student and teacher. Folklife Education is often a public School endeavor. As a form of applied folklore, it presents its own set of problems with transdisciplinary and Social Emotional Learning, as it needs application that poses no conflict with public School district, state, and national mandates. Its implementation requires a point of entry, what grades to start with, and the intellectual and emotional make-up of the students. Folklife Education can be self-contained like the K-6 classroom. In grades 7–12 students are in transit from subject to subject and from teacher to teacher. In this transition situation teachers must work together to create a curriculum that addresses singular problems using the teacher’s expertise. Historically, this is not new. The basic structure of the public teaching profession is relatively unchanged (Cuban 1984). Coming from an interest in working with children, a fledgling teacher undergoes a collegiate course of study on the methods and theories of the profession and then serves as an apprentice; a student teacher in a School where he or she practices what was learned in college. Eventually, the student teacher is further immersed in the culture of teaching, based on the rules of engagement of the School he or she is working in, and the informally shared wisdom of classroom colleagues in the teachers’ lounge and outside the actual classroom. It is, to paraphrase the definition of applied folklorist David Hufford, the application and presentation of folklore’s methods and theories to solve practical and complicated problems presented in other fields. The folklorist working in education has a creative view of the transdisciplinary and use of SEL from a humanistic perspective where the cultures

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of communities and students are held at a premium. Folklorists in education often work closely with teachers and tradition bearers to identify specific problems a teacher wants to approach and determine how to meet and ameliorate them before going into the classroom. The idea is to establish positive relations. Yes, there are some horror stories of units backfiring. But they are few (Loretta Brockmeier, personal communication 9 May 2022). In order to create a public School learning environment that embraces the works of folklorists and educators, each needs to understand the identities of the other, reinforcing each other’s approaches in increasing cultural understanding. With the creation of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, Folklife Education found a home. Since the 1970s, there have been what Margaret Collins (1996) called a “skinful” of folklife education materials. These materials are guides that not only provide teachers with lessons immersing students in the identification and study of folklife, they also reach out to educate the teacher on the field of folklore as a legitimate means for exploring culture(s). Standing alone, resource materials can be used by the teacher without the assistance of the folklorist as presenter. The best scenario is the collaborative experience of teacher and folklorist. STEAM is a twenty-first century notion born from the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) movement in education. STEAM, without the acronym, was a Progressive approach that Clapp freely applied to elementary and high School situations. Before hitting the halls of government, the approach morphed into bureaucratic policy starting with President Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary School Act of 1965 (P.L. 89–10), which was an essential component of his War on Poverty. The Act consisted of six titles: (1) to close the distance in reading, writing, and math between low-income and middle-class students; (2) to support textbook development and enhance School libraries; (3) to create programs to further educational services, broaden special education, with a focus on rural Schools and communities; (4) to encourage research and training; (5) provide funding for state governments; and (6) articulate definitions and restrictions to the Law. Prior to the Act, governmental intervention was not seen as vital to public education, especially in dealing with the fallout of the Great Depression.4 Since this Act, there have been many governmental iterations of education policy, the most notorious being the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB P.L.107–110), signed into law by President George W. Bush in

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2002. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA P.L.14–95) was signed by President Barack Obama in 2015 and eliminated many of the problems of NCLB. With the NCLB, Schools and teachers were held accountable by federal standards for student achievement in reading and math through standardized testing. If a School fared poorly on the tests, it affected School funding and teacher appraisal. The ESSA is more flexible, holding states accountable for student achievement. Penny Ann Armstrong (2008) in What Teachers Expect in Reform: Making Their Voices Heard interviewed over 100 teachers in the northeast, Midwest, and South and found a current of dissatisfaction with and a fear of NCLB. The demands of the Act forced them to teach for the tests and drew them away from the preparation they needed for lessons and deprived them of opportunities to tend to students’ individual needs. They were being turned into academic robots running the risk of being dismantled, discarded. The Every Student Succeeds Act brought some freedom to the teaching craft. States were required to integrate more than test scores. Academics in reading and math, English-language proficiency, and high School graduation rates were still to be taken into account, but each state was allowed to choose an academic measure for elementary and middle Schools (The Understood Team 2014–2022). This was more in alignment with what Clapp tried to achieve as the Arthurdale School, while it was independent of the Preston County Schools, was still required to test and evaluate students’ academic progress. This is a good place to include the “A” in STEAM, which is not necessarily confined to the Arts. It “acknowledges other parts of human existence. .. equally as important and valuable as the domains covered by STEM.” It refers to aesthetics in all spheres of life. Sometimes the “A” is considered a kind of catch-all to supplement STEM to sustain all kinds of curiosity. Looked at historically, STEAM is a visible and malleable part of the Progressive Education movement. In Folklife Education it also dwells in the relationships that are formed between educators and folklorists. In Table  7.1, general aspects of the transdisciplinary and Social Emotional Learning are outlined for the Arthurdale School teacher and the teacher and folklorist working in education.

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Table 7.1  Transdisciplinarity across the board Commonalities Teacher & student active learner

Arthurdale Yes: Folklife Conflated Education Separated

SEL Yes

Aim

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes/no: More teacher specific Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Starting point Results

Decisions Connections Feedback Cooperation

To solve a problem using content knowledge and skills To solve a problem using content knowledge and skills Innovative solutions by developing content and tools of different disciplines Which skills and content can help to solve the problem? All disciplines have particular sense in life content. How my learning helped resolve the problem Student-teacher/student-­ student/mutual cooperation of all community

Yes

Adapted from Helmane, lneta and llze Briska. 2007. “What is developing Integrated or Interdisciplinary or Multidisciplinary or Transdisciplinary Education in School?” DeGruyter Open Access, Signum Temporis. 2017, 9(1): 7–15, p. 13

This is not to be followed “chapter and verse.” Rather, it is a series of touchstones to be chosen in the course of a developed curriculum, which I will show in the ballad of Barbara Allen.

7.1   Barbara Allen, A Personal Story Growing up in suburban Massachusetts, my father would often bring home for supper his colleague Jim Butler. I remember Mr. Butler as an easy-going guy who had a special gift: he played guitar and sang folksongs, some, like “Go Tell Aunt Rhoady” and “The Eddystone Light,” were familiar as singalongs with my mother. After a meal we’d ask Mr. Butler to take up my sister’s guitar and sing some of his favorites. It was probably from him I first heard Barbara Allen. I don’t remember much except his voice was sonorous and comforting. My mother and I didn’t want him to stop! In fact, I think maybe the three of us were the only ones listening. And here I am, many years later, staring the song in the face wondering what to make of it.

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1. “In Scarlet Town where I was born There was a fair maid dwelling Made every youth cry ‘Well-away’ Her name was Barbara Allen. 2. “All in the merry month of June When all things were a-blooming Sweet William on his death bed lay For the love of Barbara Allen 3. “He sent his servant to the town Where Barbara was a-dwelling ‘My master is sick and sent for you If your name is Barbara Allen.’ 4. “And death is printed on his face, And o’er his heart is stealing, 0 hasten away, go comfort him, 0 loving Barbara Allen. 5. “Slowly, slowly, she got up, And slowly she drew nigh him; The only words that she would say ‘Young man, I think you’re dying.’ 6. “O yes, I’m sick and very sick, And death is on me dwelling No better, no better I never will be   If I can’t have Barbara Allen.” (CSA, 227–228)

In the rest of the ballad, Barbara Allen turns William away and he dies. On her way home, birds call out to her “Hard-hearted Barbara Allen,” and she begins to mourn. She passes away due to newfound sorrow. She is buried next to William, where on his grave grows a red rose and on hers a green briar. Together they grow to meet as a “true lover’s knot, the red rose and the green brier” (ibid., p. 229). The singer of the song in Fletcher Collins’ class was a sixth-grade girl, who, in Collins’ estimation, sang a complete variant of the ballad. He asked her where she learned the song and she said her aunt often sang it. Collins felt it would be a fine study in what today could be seen as a transdisciplinary approach in a literary humanities framework. In team-work, other questions might arise. Who was Barbara Allen? Was she a real person? Where is Scarlet Town? What is its geographical location, and what was it like meteorologically in the month of June? Why was William called “Sweet William?” Why did he ask for Barbara Allen,

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and why was she “cold hearted” toward him? How was it that the birds convinced Barbara Allen to basically “turn the other cheek” and mourn the loss of William? One can see the endlessness of the questions where generating them was more important than actual answers to questions. These approaches are not cast in stone, nor do they interrupt any part, performance, or exploration of Barbara Allen. They do, however, seek out pervasiveness in community expression and how this is so. They affirm Fletcher Collins’ statement that “the music … were the people’s own, and they knew it” (Resources 79). It is one area where Social Emotional Learning takes a prominent role in developing relations and encouraging community. Viewed side-by-side, this might be what the Arthurdale and Folklife Education would look like in transdisciplinary method.

Notes 1. Wikipedia contributors, Transdisciplinarity, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transdisciplin arity&oldid=l041900305 (accessed April 30, 2022). 2. Wikipedia contributors, Social-emotional learning, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social%E2%80%93emotional_ learning (accessed May 5, 2022). 3. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. N.Y.: The Free Press. 1916. 4. Paul, C.  A. (2016). Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved from https://socialwelfare.library. vcu.edu/programs/education/elementary-­and-­secondary-­education-­act-­ of-­1965/.

References Armstrong, Penny Ann. 2008. What Teachers Expect in Reform: Making Their Voices Heard. Lanham, MD.: Rowman Littlefield. Clapp, Elsie Ripley. 1939 [1970]. Community Schools in Action. NY: Arno, the New York Times. ———. 1952. The Use of Resources in Education. New York: Harper Brothers. Collins, Margaret. 1996. Wheel and Star: A Quilt. Staunton, VA: DIV. Cuban, Larry. 1984. How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms 1890–1980/ NY. London: Longman. Deafenbaugh, Linda. 2015. Folklife Education: A Warm Welcome Schools Extend to Communities. Journal of Folklore and Education 2: 76–83.

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Dewey, John. 1915. Democracy and Education. Boston: Beacon. Dundes, Alan, ed. 1965. The Study of Folklore. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Hamer, Lynne, and Paddy Bowman, eds. 2011. Through The Schoolhouse Door: Folklore. Community, Curriculum. Logan: Utah State University Press. Herranen, Jaana. 2021. Promoting STEAM in Education. LUMAT: International Journal on Math, Science and Technology Education, University of Helsinki, Finland. Jones, Michael Owen. 1994. Putting Folklore to Use. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Lloyd, Timothy, ed. 2021. What Folklorists Do: Professional Possibilities in Folklore Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. MacDowell, Marsha (ed.) 1976. Folk Arts in Education: A Resource Handbook. ERIC 390743. Peabody Journal of Education. 2004. A Nation at Risk: A 20 Year Reappraisal 79(4). Rudy, Jill Terry. 2006. The Marrow of Human Experience: Essays on Folklore. Logan: Utah State University Press. Social-Emotional Learning. n.d. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index. php?title=Social%E2%emotionaillearning&oldid=1085920635 The Understood Team. 2014–2022. The Difference Between the Every Student Succeeds Act and No Child Left Behind. https://understood.org/en/articles. Transdisciplinary. n.d. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Transdisciplinarity Yakman, Georgette. 2019. STEAM: An Educational Framework to Relate Things to Each Other and Reality. K12 Digest n.p.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Individuals and Community Redux

Community education is, from the point of view of the people working in it, primarily, education of themselves in facing new problems, in working with others on these, and in guiding work upon them. It is here that learning is not only shared, but mutual. —Clapp (1939, 169)

A community school forgoes its separateness. It is influential because it belongs to its people. They share its ideals and work. It takes from them and gives to them. There are no boundaries as far as I can see to what it could accomplish in social reconstruction if it had enough wisdom and insight and devotion and energy. It demands all these for changes in living and learning of people. These changes are not produced by imparting information about different conditions or by gathering statistical data about what exists, but by creating with people, for people.1 I have delineated the Arthurdale School with a multivocal historiography tied to chronology, topic, biography, culture, environment, economics, and politics. As an experiment in cultural intervention through strategic relocation, the experiment of Arthurdale overall had an ecological element through architecture and an expectation of how the buildings—the School, homes, and community center specifically—were to be positioned and what they were to contain. Arthurdale was a program in euthenics, the creation of a better place physically, socially, educationally, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Rosenberg, The Arthurdale School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45626-8_8

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and economically. However, the people who chose to remain, to make Arthurdale their home, created a place where memories caused certain parts of the dream to live on. A major part of the dream was the School, shepherded by Elsie Ripley Clapp, who proved a Progressive, child-centered, community-based School could (be run) in a rural impoverished community. Driven by Deweyan philosophy as a “school socially functioning”, the Arthurdale School was environmentally, as well as socially and intellectually driven, with a faith in students. If they were well nourished, clad, and medically cared for, they would thrive, along with their parents whose participation was considered essential to their children’s well-being. Their folklife was respected as a significant and natural part of life, and it was celebrated through teaching, documentation, and programming by Homestead and School star, Fletcher Collins. Stephen Haid (1975) believes the School was one of Arthurdale’s more successful programs because it was the least tied up in New Deal red tape. Its only governmental funding was in the construction of the buildings, the support of the Nursery School, and later the financing of vocational education through the National Youth Administration. Because the School was not a completely New Deal funded school, it still required outside financing arranged through philanthropy that was spearheaded by Bernard Baruch. Yet with the failure of factories on site intended to provide homesteaders with a living wage, outside support faded, and as per agreement between Clapp and the County School system, the School was absorbed by the County and its progressive program disappeared. “Eleanor’s Baby” (Lash 1971) lost its dreamlike quality. And Clapp moved on, publishing her guides to Arthurdale, Community Schools in Action (1939) and The Use of Resources in Education (1952), and editing the journal Progressive Education (1936–1939). The Arthurdale School embodied John Dewey’s belief that the community was the heart of democracy and that the progressive school was the heart of such a community. For a short time, Elsie Clapp, the team of teachers, the parents, and other members of this community proved this principle. As Dewey stated in the forward to Clapp’s “Community Schools in Action, 1939”: “The report is a demonstration in practice of the place of education in building a democratic life.” The Arthurdale School benefitted from the efforts of people capable of building skills and others like Bernard Baruch who were willing to take a risk and invest huge amounts of money into the School. Yet there had to

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be some return, factory employment as I mention above. When that return was not available, the experiment, as agreed, came to an end. With World War II, the School buildings were repurposed for the war effort, the Nursery School and NYA training. By the end of the War, the School was a pleasant memory (Hoffman 2001; Maloney 2011; Wuenstel 2002). As agreed, the School was to act as an independent public school in Preston County. It was not an elite enterprise. It belonged to the homesteaders. In 1936, when Clapp applied for school accreditation from Preston County, the School did not receive it. Parents were disappointed, but Clapp seemed to have taken it in stride as it only affected three students who wished to attend college. In 1938, after the School was absorbed into the Preston County system, it was automatically accredited and graduates who wanted to moved on to a university program. As a public, independent school under Clapp, the School was entrenched in Deweyan philosophy and Lawrence A. Cremin’s definition of education as the instilling of knowledge, attitudes, and morals. Its teachers, selected by Clapp and approved by the Preston County School Board, were a combination of state-certified educators and enthusiastic individuals who shared a passion for working with children and communities. As passionate instructors they were trained in Dewey’s philosophy combined with the traditional chalk and talk pedagogy to be used in an appropriate manner. Thus, a fieldtrip to explore road building would end in both childlife ethnography and instructors’ guided discussions about the science and geology of road building, along with a class poem on construction, or the singing of a traditional ballad could be explored in light of literature or history. While the Preston County School Board did not keep complete records on the Arthurdale students during its time under the direction of Clapp. She and her colleagues applied the schema of the Progressive Education Association (see Table 4.1). Documentation not only demonstrated the School in action according to what it did, it was able to demonstrate, in its short life, its standing as a showpiece to the outside world. In action, the School was a model progressive school, based in Clapp’s understanding of her experience with Dewey and recognition of folklife. Because of the agreement that the School would become a part of the county school district, its operation stood on the cusp of the private and public. The School was incorporated into the Preston County public school system in late summer 1936, rather than in 1937, as originally planned.

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How did students react to their new situation? Sam Stack feels that the older students had little to adjust to, while it was harder on the younger children (personal correspondence, 21 July 2022). The transition from the Homestead to the town brought on a homesickness for which there was no cure. Cremin (1961) points out there were several efforts by Progressive and Progressive-thinking educators who applied progressive styled programs to public schools. For example, a number fit in, like a frame surrounding Clapp’s vision without mentioning her: (1) the Dalton Plan, devised in 1920 by Helen Parkhurst as a way of organizing instruction consistent with Maria Montessori’s and John Dewey’s ideas of individualizing all academic work and building School community.2 The core of the Plan was students making contracts with their teachers to study and learn content and skills (Cuban 2021); (2) Rachel Davis DuBois (1892–1993) whose creation of Intercultural Education, in order to increase cultural tolerance primarily in high school students by exposing them to different culture groups in their communities, exploring their contributions to culture and community, and having said students create programs of their own for other students (Rosenberg 2019); (3) Dorothy Howard (1902–1996) who utilized the lore of her students in language arts classes (Howard 1977); and (4) Leonard Covello (1887–1982) a child of southern Italy who was able to engage language (Italian, Spanish, and French) into high school and adult education and community programs which culminated in the creation of Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem which served the community as a whole (Covello 1958). Clapp, accompanied by strong teachers like Fletcher Collins, were the visionaries behind the Arthurdale School: it was effectively hers until it was time to relinquish it in toto, leaving the Dalton approach behind one reason being it was based on individualized course of study; and (2) did not rely on community folklife to support study. The progressive school teaches the child to think for himself instead of passively accepting stereotyped or rote ideas. It initiates interest in learning with elements familiar to children in their everyday lives. It utilizes the traditional culture of the families of the students to encourage strengthening heritage. It always keeps in mind the fact that each child is different from the other, and what makes him interesting, what makes him an individual, is not his references to other people but his differences.1 Clapp, on the other hand, once she explored conditions at Scotts Run, received the blessings of Arthurdale residents and School advisory

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committee through its Manifesto, the approval of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the powers that be in D.C. and was able to build a School from the bottom up of students and buildings. She was given carte blanche to do what she wanted. Instead of School government, she relied on the wisdom of the Arthurdale Homestead Men’s and Women’s Clubs. Clapp saw things differently, especially a rural community school. Writing on the Arthurdale School experience, she wrote: “In rural communities it is the school that introduces what is called culture. … The school is, moreover, potentially a cultural center of its region. Recognition of the cultural heritage of the region, which is to be found in the people and their folk ways, their arts, and their historical tradition, is one of the services a rural school may render its community. … In it lie the group’s basic opportunities for expression and enjoyment” (CSA 217). Although School students were observed and measured individually according to the PEA scheme (Table 4.1), it was the community whose traditions were alive, well, treated as essential to the Homestead and its existence. To further this, it was Fletcher Collins whose first-hand knowledge of the traditional songs, music, and crafts proved Clapp’s point of view in the classroom and in the folk festivals in June 1935 and July of 1936. Curriculum was abundant, gauged to student development. Parental involvement was positively employed in many ways, including mothers preparing hot lunches and fathers building furniture. This was community at its best.

Notes 1. Elsie Ripley Clapp. 1933. A Rural School in Kentucky. Progressive Education 10, p. 128. 2. The Dalton Plan was devised by Helen Parkhurst (1886–1973) who viewed the student not just as a learner, but as an experimenter whose classroom experience was designed to give the student all the time and space possible to explore a subject of his or her own choosing, and the teacher acted as a corroborator to finish the contract.

References Clapp, Elsie Ripley. 1939 [1971]. Community Schools in Action. New York: Arno/ New York Times. ———. 1952. The Use of Resources in Education. New York: Harper Brothers.

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Covello, Leonard with Guido D’Agostino. 1958. The Heart is the Teacher. New York: McGraw-Hill. Cremin, Lawrence. 1961. The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957. New York: Vintage. Cuban, Larry. 2021. Whatever Happened to the Dalton Plan? N.p. March 26, 2021. Haid, Stephen. 1975. Arthurdale: An Experiment in Community Planning 1933–1947. PhD Dissertation, West Virginia University. Hoffman, Nancy. 2001. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Arthurdale Experiment. North Haven: Linnet Press. Howard, Dorothy. 1977. Dorothy’s World: Childhood in the Sabine Bottom. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lash, Joseph P. 1971. Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship Based on Eleanor’s Private Papers. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Maloney, C.J. 2011. Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Rosenberg, Jan. 2019. Intercultural Education, Folklore, and the Pedagogical Thought of Rachel Davis DuBois. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, Palgrave Macmillan. Wuenstel, M. 2002. Participants in the Arthurdale Community Schools’ Experiment in Progressive Education from the Years 1934–1938 Recount Their Experiences. Education 122 (4): 759–769.

CHAPTER 9

Epilogue: The Force of Community— Protecting the Heritage of Arthurdale in the 1980s

According to Public Historian Dr. Barbara Howe of the Public History Program at West Virginia University, the homesteaders learned in the 1980s that a federal application had been filed to drill for oil and gas on Arthurdale property (personal communication, 2 July 2022). The permit would allow drilling that would threaten the clay tile drainage system underlying the Homestead. The homesteaders had to act and were informed by the State Historic Preservation Office there were two ways the oil and gas permit could be circumvented. They could either incorporate Arthurdale as a municipality or they could apply for designation as a historic district in the National Register of Historic Places (National Register). The homesteaders and their kin were not enthusiastic about incorporation. Therefore, the National Register application process was spearheaded by the Arthurdale Women’s Club through its President Glenna Williams, who established connections with the SHPO in 1983. Professor Barbara Howe of the West Virginia University Public History Program was tapped in 1984 to craft the application because of her experience with National Register applications, and the SHPO considered her well qualified for the task. Dr. Howe stated that as part of this process; “one of the staff at the (State Historic Preservation Office [SHPO]) visited Arthurdale, and the people ‘…were so proud of what had changed over the years in the community that they did not show him all of the older buildings.’” (Of course, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Rosenberg, The Arthurdale School, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45626-8_9

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the older buildings were what the National Register would have considered most significant. LB) Howe continued, “I was not part of that visit, and I think it occurred … in the fall of 1983 as residents were preparing for the 50th anniversary in 1984. I don’t know why he (the officer) didn’t want to ask more questions, but he went away and told people Arthurdale was not eligible for the National Register because there had been too many changes. The basic story was that Arthurdale was over.…” (Ibid.). The homesteaders went ahead with its 50th anniversary celebration with a reunion supper for homesteaders and their descendants, a conference, and a day of craft demonstrations, tours, sales, and music (Personal Communication, Darlene Bolyard, October 13, 2019). Today the “New Deal Festival” is an example of a “Heritage Festival,” taking place every second Saturday in July since, except during the pandemic. 1 Currently, it is a one-day event, with fiber arts and blacksmithing demonstrations, a crafts market, antique car and truck show, a quilt show, pie eating and watermelon eating contests. Additionally, visitors have an opportunity to meet with Homestead descendants and to explore Homestead life in the 1935 Wagner E-15 house that is now a house museum. The Wagner houses were the second generation of Arthurdale houses and were named for the architect who designed them, Steward Wagner.2 In 1984, the oil and gas permits were due and required federal environmental review. The decision was made to apply for Arthurdale as a National Register Historic District. This was defined as “a geographically definable area— possessing a significant concentration, linkage, or continuity of sites, buildings, structures, or objects united by past events or aesthetically by plan or physical development. A district may also comprise individual elements separated geographically but linked by association or history.” With official status as an Historic District, it would keep the gas and oil drilling away from the Homestead. Although ravaged by time, “Eleanor’s Baby” (Lash 1971) and Elsie Clapp’s “Little Village” (1939) would be saved in the hearts and minds of the homesteaders and their descendants. The application was written largely by Dr. Howe who described “areas of significance” which included: community planning and development; education; politics/government, significant persons, and social history. The significant person named in the application was Eleanor Roosevelt. The period of significance was 1933–1947 and the architect/builders were Eric Gugler and Steward Wagner. In addition, to identify structures

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of significance, an introduction to the Homestead and its social and historical significance was written by Howe. Arthurdale, then, was presented as the first of about 100 resettlement communities built during FDR’s New Deal to relieve desperate Americans in the face of grinding poverty and homelessness. Barbara Howe wrote in 1988 “as a National Register Historic District, Arthurdale is significant because all 165 original houses still exist, as do the Inn, the factories, four of the six School buildings, the pottery, the well house, the cemeteries, most of the community center buildings, and the original road system, including the original parking lot!” “While new houses have been built, they have been built along existing roads so that the original plan of the community, including the original sense of openness, still exists.”3 The application was organized according to building types; the community center, the well house, the houses, those first arranged for by Eleanor Roosevelt’s advisor Louis Howe, and proceeding with those designed by Eric Gugler and Steward Wagner. Arthurdale volunteers Iris Allsopp and Glenna Williams were able to identify the completion of the houses (100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, and 0%) using a windshield survey developed by Barbara Howe and graduate student Elizabeth Nolin. They were able to make photographs of the houses, including aerial photos, according to Barbara Howe that were made in the 1930s and 1980s. These photos revealed the original community plan was still in existence. Road by road descriptions of the houses were created because of the lack of street addresses for the original houses. Dr. Howe included buildings no longer functioning, describing them in the greatest architectural detail. This included the School and demolished buildings. They may had been physically gone, but they were not psychically forgotten by the homesteaders. In the end this would be their application, a concrete desire to be recognized as their home built from the bottom up, reminiscent of Fletcher Collins’ statement that the music of the homesteaders was theirs and they knew it (Resources). Ultimately the National Register application, if approved, insured the Homestead would be free of physical intrusion by gas and oil well drilling. The application included a history of Arthurdale as Eleanor Roosevelt’s social experiment, and how it was designed to serve the unemployed of Scotts Run and other rural citizens displaced by the Great Depression. The history Dr. Howe provided could well have served as a precursor to histories of Arthurdale by Sam Stack (2016) and C.J.  Maloney (2011). She must have relied on Steven Haid’s 1975 West Virginia University

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history dissertation on the Homestead as it was a thorough and well-­ organized monograph. Unlike Stack, Maloney, Haid, and myself, Barbara Howe’s sole task was to inform according to National Register of Historic Places guidelines. It was to provide the National Register with information for its assessment as a historic place that embraced a people’s connection to site and situation. Between 1983 and 1989, Arthurdale Women’s Club President Glenna Williams corresponded with the SHPO. She impressed upon the SHPO staff the historical significance of the site, submitting colorful brochures promoting its value as a historic spot. Williams was an original homesteader, who upon graduation from the School worked there and was very active in homestead life. Her main contact, Rodney Collins at the SHPO, always responded in kind, and Williams kept him apprised of fund raising for the restoration work taking place on the Homestead. Williams took Collins’ advice to join in the establishment of a Preston County Historic Landmarks Committee. In 1984, Barbara Howe, Nolin, and Allsopp began their historical research and property survey work. Rodney Collins was equally supportive of their work. In July 1986, Arthurdale was recognized as a 501 (c) (3) by the Internal Revenue Service. The mission of the non-profit, now known as Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. or AHI stated in its By-Laws, was to: “restore and preserve the cultural heritage of the nation’s first New Deal Homestead Community through education and outreach.” This was to be accomplished through: (l) “Preservation/Restoration of the Homestead’s built environment”; (2) “share information with the public through programs, festivals and tours”; (3) “education through lectures and tours”; (4) “Acquisition and interpretation” of materials as evidence of the Homestead’s continual work”; and (5) “promote national recognition of the Homestead.” While no buildings are emphasized in the By-Laws, buildings set forth by Barbara Howe and experiences of homesteaders documented through oral histories collected in 1991 illustrate a key attachment to place in the School, the community center, and the recreation center. Each of the homes received intensive architectural treatment.4 Nonetheless, in 1986, Rodney Collins at the SHPO informed the AHI that it was still ineligible for National Register recognition. That did not stop Barbara Howe and her team. And on August 31, 1988, they submitted their 36-page application for recognition to the National Register. It paid off. On February 23, 1989, William G.  Farrar, Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer, wrote Dr. Howe and the Preston County

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Commission, notifying them that the Arthurdale Historic District, Preston County, was entered on the National Register of Historic Places. Farrar also asked the Preston County Journal and the Arthurdale Newsletter to announce the registration. The announcement noted that the benefits of the designation by the National Park Service “included, (1) recognition that a property is of significance to the nation, the state, or the community; (2) consideration in the planning for federal or federally assisted projects; (3) eligibility for tax benefits; (4) consideration in the decision to issue a coal mining permit; and (4) qualification for federal assistance for historic preservation, when funds are available.”5 In his letter, Farrar noted, this was a “signal honor” for Arthurdale. Barbara Howe returned to her work at West Virginia University, AHI could now work on preservation efforts restoring the central hall complex and the forge. This designation was the beginning of a tangible demonstration of nostalgia as represented by attachment to place, as many heritage festivals are designed to do. The original homesteaders and their direct descendants found much to connect to as builders, students, fathers, wives, and children that they could easily express their connection through story, song, dance, food, and other elements of folklife. This is that response to the world using expressions that withstand the tests of time. First described as a disease—an emotional disorder in 1688 by Johannes Hoffer (1669–1752)—nostalgia in the twenty-first century has become a concept personally adjusted to meet the means of the lives of people often on their own terms, using it to reconnect to place through narrative, craft, music, and festival, be shared within the group and the outside world (Barcus and Shugatai 2021). Nostalgia is a self-designed tool for making sanity from conditions felt out of control (Routledge et al. 2011). It does not require in-group approval. Rather, it is a tool for the individual’s tool box to be used as one desires.6 At Arthurdale, and expressed especially in the oral histories related to the School, and the creation of craft products made by the Mountaineer Cooperative and sold through AHI, nostalgia was not a lamentation, say like that of Job. It was a recognition of cultural and historical response/ connection in a time when prior to 1933 life was hell actualized.

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Notes 1. See Schedule of New Deal Festival Events for 2022. https://newdealfestival.org/schedule-­2022/ (Accessed 7/1/22). 2. Meredith Dreistadt and Kendyl Bostic on behalf of Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. “E-15 Heinz Wagner House.” Clio: Your Guide to History. March 22, 2023. (Accessed 2 August 2023). https://theclio.com/entry/87347. 3. Barbara Howe. ca. 1988. Introduction to Statement of Significance National Register of Historic Places 2. Wikipedia contributors, Historic districts in the United States, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Historic_districts_in_the_United_States#:~:text=There%20 are%20more%20than%202%2C300,involved%20in%20land%20use%20decisions. (Accessed 14 August 2023). 4. AHI By Laws, updated 2016. 5. Arthurdale Newsletter. Vol 3 (3) Spring 1989. 6. Wikipedia contributors, Nostalgia, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.pho?title=Nostalgia&ol did=1088016563 (accessed July 9, 2022).

References Barcus, Holly R., and Amangul Shugatai. 2021. The Role of Nostalgia in (Re) Creating Place Attachments for a Diasporic Community. Geographic Review 112 (1): 103–124. Interview Karen Miller-Jetti Eble. April–May 1991. C433.R724 WVRHA.  Interview with Robert and Edna Day April–May 1991: C433,R719 W. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Interviews with Karen Miller. April–May, 1991. C433,R 727 West Virginia Regional History Archive (WVRHA). I Interview with Joseph Roscoe 23 April 1991: C433,R716 WVRHA. Lash, Joseph P. 1971. Eleanor and Franklin: Their Relationship Based on the Private Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt. NY: W.W. Norton. Maloney, C.J. 2011. Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning. Routledge, C., et al. 2011. The Past Makes the Present Meaningful: Nostalgia as an Existential Resource. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101: 638–652. Stack, Sam F., Jr. 2016. The Arthurdale Community School: Education and Reform in Depression Era Appalachia. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.



Appendix A: Executive Order 7027 Establishing the Resettlement Administration

May 1st, 1935 By virtue of and pursuant to the authority vested in me under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, approved April 8, 1935 (Public Resolution No. 11, 74th Congress), I hereby establish an agency within the government to be known as the “Resettlement Administration” and appoint Rexford G.  Tugwell, Undersecretary of Agriculture, as Administrator thereof, to serve without additional compensation. I hereby prescribe the following functions and duties of the said Resettlement Administration to be exercised and performed by the Administrator thereof: (a) To administer approved projects involving resettlement of destitute or low-income families from rural and urban areas, including the establishment, maintenance, and operation, in such connection, of communities in rural and suburban areas. (b) To initiate and administer a program of approved projects with respect to soil erosion, stream pollution, seacoast erosion, reforestation, forestation, and flood control. (c) To make loans as authorized under the said Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, to finance, in whole or in part, the

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purchase of farm lands and necessary equipment by farmers, farm tenants, croppers, or farm laborers. In the performance of such duties and functions the Administrator is hereby authorized to employ the services and means mentioned in subdivision (a) of Section 3 of the said Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, to the extent therein provided, and, within the limitations prescribed by said Section, to exercise the authority with respect to personnel conferred by subdivision (b) thereof. To the extent necessary to carry out the provisions of this Executive Order the Administrator is authorized to acquire, by purchase or by the power of eminent domain, any real property or any interest therein and improve, develop, grant, sell, lease (with or without the privilege of purchasing), or otherwise dispose of any such property or interest therein. The acquisition of articles, materials, and supplies for use in carrying out any project authorized by this Executive Order shall be subject to the provisions of Title III of the Treasury and Post Office Appropriation Act, fiscal year 1934 (47 Stat. 1489, 1520). For the administrative expenses of the Resettlement Administration there is hereby allocated to the Administration from the appropriation made by the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 the sum of $250,000. Separate allocations will be made hereafter for each of the authorized activities as may be needed.1

Note 1. Woolley, John, and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, University of California—Santa Barbara. https://www.presidency.ucsb. e d u / d o c u m e n t s / e x e c u t i v e -­o r d e r -­7 0 2 7 -­e s t a b l i s h m e n t -­t h e -­ resettlement-­administration.

Reference Woolley, John, and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, University of California—Santa Barbara. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/ executive-­order-­7027-­establishment-­the-­resettlement-­administration

 Appendix B: Jan Rosenberg’s Educational Formation

To help us better understand her life-long professional interest in Progressive Education and its variants, Jan Rosenberg shared these thoughts about her own experience, teasing out aspects of her School, the Cambridge School of Weston in Massachusetts, and using those as touchstone and counterpoint. “I want to compare the kind of public/independent schooling at Arthurdale with that of a self-described private progressive school established in a bucolic setting in the early 1930s, the Cambridge School of Weston (CSW Massachusetts). I will demonstrate the missions of these schools and how they were progressive at the Arthurdale School, inclusive of folklife, the exploration of culture in its entirety (Yoder 1963). Other schools were progressive-styled and public, using elements of the Progressive Education Association protocol as defined in Chap. 2.” “To reach the Cambridge School of Weston, I need to retrace its steps, beginning as a school for girls established by Arthur and Stella Gillman in 1886. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this school blended study in the arts, humanities, and sciences for girls wishing to attend Radcliffe College, the sister school of Harvard. It was not connected to any religious authority. Its most celebrated student was Helen Keller, for whom Arthur Gillman learned the manual alphabet and read for her for her course of studies.”

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“In 1930, directors of the Cambridge School for Girls saw the students and their educative process in a different light. It was time to climb out of Victoriana and truly see the student as an individual with a curious mind and ability to pursue interests intelligently in a community-based setting headed by educator John French. This community, in French’s mind, would be co-educational, with arrangements for boarding and day students. Students operated on a Dalton-like plan in all areas of study, based on a contractual course of study with an assigned teacher. The Dalton Plan, developed by Helen Parkhurst, is based on the education philosophy of John Dewey, including that each student would shape their program to their own needs, interests, and abilities; that they would grow in independence and dependability and would enhance their social skills and sense of responsibility.1 (The Dalton School, The Dalton Plan, Dalton.org) If something were to happen that required both faculty and student input, then the student population would be involved. Additionally, the school would be relocated some forty miles away from Cambridge to bucolic Weston, Massachusetts, hence the title to the Cambridge School of Weston. Tuition, financial contributions, and property acquisition comprised the construction and repurposing of an administration building, classroom creation, and dorms.” “In actuality, the history of CSW in its first one-hundred years little is known. Social Studies teacher and administrator George (Jim) St. John, Jr. presented Individuals and Community, The Cambridge School: The First Hundred Years (1986), an anecdotal history of CSW beginning with Gillman in 1886 and ending with Robert Sandoe (1973) who brought CSW through tumultuous years, socially and financially to install a curriculum like the Dalton Plan.” “With this history of CSW, it is anecdotal and completely lacking with scholarly references, although they are acknowledged for some fact-­ checking and chronological content. The reader must trust St. John and the veracity of his tale. Then, as the reader begins to trust St. John, the reader must also trust me as I attended CSW (1969–1973) and was inculcated with this history. The school’s motto, ‘truth and gentle deeds’ from the Canterbury Tales2 was a guiding light from the beginning to today. As a student I was not exposed to the Dalton Plan or any other progressive-­ type learning experience, though I was active in technical theater, and had

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a few instructors who took an interest in my ways of thinking about tradition and history.” “Unlike Elsie Clapp who grew up in the dissonance accorded upper class women of the Victorian age, John French grew up male in the idyllic setting of rural Maine. His parents were teachers whose middle-class status encouraged reading and exploring and hunting in the surroundings of his birthplace, Sandy Point. French attended Harvard where he earned the B.A. and M.A. and followed in parental footsteps to serve as Headmaster of Oak Lane Country Day School (founded 1916, in Pennsylvania now closed) and Derby Academy (founded 1784 in Hingham, MA).” “St. John paints a picture of French as a deep thinker who was happy with excursions into the woods with canoe and compass, or in a tweed three-suiter. He was a man of convictions, not strictly a scholar, but he was well-read in education and the progressive education works of the day, Plato, Dewey, and Parkhurst’s Dalton Plan. French extracted the best of each approach to create a co-educational school of students committed to a way of study and willing teachers to bring them to logical conclusions, not wrong or right, but were meaningful to their development as members of a working community practiced in school government and arranged courses of study. French’s claim to fame was the introduction of co-­ education living, a Dalton-styled curriculum, and Town Meeting where the students and teachers met to address a variety of issues such as the athletics program or the school yearbook.” “In the Boston Evening Transcript CSW was touted as an adventure in education with its co-educational boarding and day students, Town Meeting, and class structure in the Dalton-like plan. The Arthurdale School was an adventure of its own as it already was co-educational, with students and teachers living in the Homestead, and the use of the Homestead, its environment, and traditions as curriculum. It was certainly unique, and memorable. What would it have been like had its 1937 deadline either been extended or just allowed to exist on the Arthurdale Homestead? Therein lies a great mystery for us to explore.”

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Notes 1. The Dalton Plan was devised by Helen Parkhurst (1886–1973) who viewed the student not just as a learner, but as an experimenter whose classroom experience was designed to give the student all the time and space possible to explore a subject of his or her own choosing, and the teacher acted as a corroborator to finish the contract. 2. Wikipedia contributors, The Canterbury Tales, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_ Canterbury_Tales&oldid=1097172548 (accessed September 1, 2022).

References Boston Evening Transcript. n.d. The Cambridge School: An Adventure in Education. Cambridge School of Weston Board of Directors. 1948. The Cambridge School: Its Educational Philosophy and History. Unpublished manuscript.

Clapp, Elsie Ripley. 1939. Community Schools in Action. NY: The Viking Press. Cuban, Larry. 2001. Whatever Happened to the Dalton Plan? N.p. March 26, 2021. French, John R.P. 1948. Student Responsibility in School Affairs. Unpublished manuscript. St. John, George, Jr. 1986. Individuals and Community: The Cambridge School the First Hundred Years. Cambridge, MA: The Windflower Press.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 501 (c)(3), 10, 106 A Alice Carey School, 23 Allegheny Mountains, 2 American Federation of Teacher (AFT), 27 American Folklore Society (AFS), 15, 21 American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), 3, 5, 74 Applied folklore, 89 Arthur, Richard, 4, 8 Arthurdale, 1, 13, 33, 51, 57, 73, 94, 97, 103–107 Arthurdale Heritage, Inc. (AHI), 4, 7, 15, 106, 107 Arthurdale School, 2, 5, 8–10, 13–16, 19, 20, 27, 29,

33, 40, 43, 47–55, 57–69, 80, 87–94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 111, 113 Assemblage, 5, 19 The Athenaeum, 21 B Backus, Traman J., 36, 37 Barker, Roger, 6, 19, 20 Behner, Mary, 3 Bernard Baruch (BB), 9, 77, 78, 98 Blue Ridge, 2 Bolyard, Darlene, 15, 16, 104 Brains Trust, 55n1 Bricoleur, 19 Brown, Mary Ellen, 16, 17 Bryn Mawr, 37 Bureau of Educational Experiments, 8, 52, 60

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

C Cambridge School for Girls, 112 Cambridge School of Weston (CSW), 111–113 Chappell, Louis, 67 Chickering, Will, 38, 44n11 The Child and the Curriculum (John Dewey), 26, 39 Christmas, 69, 79 City and Country School, 52, 60 Clapp, Elsie Ripley (ERC), 2, 5, 6, 8–10, 14–16, 23, 27, 33–43, 48–52, 54, 55, 58, 61–63, 67–69, 74, 76–84, 87–94, 98–101, 104, 113 Cobb, Stanwood, 26 Coleman, Eleanor, 36 Collins, Fletcher, 9, 16, 58, 63–65, 67, 70n6, 79, 80, 82, 87, 93, 94, 98, 100, 101, 105 Collins, Fletcher, Jr., 63 Collins, Margaret, 9, 16, 62, 64, 65, 67, 70n7, 73, 79, 83, 90 Covello, Leonard, 100 Cremin, Lawrence, 24, 25, 27, 99, 100 Cuban, Larry, 26, 89, 100 Cultural intervention, 5, 68, 97

Education, Culture, and Society (ECS), 23 Education history, 6 Euthenics, 5, 97

D DeGollier, Mrs., 79 Democracy and Education (John Dewey), 26 Dewey, John, 5, 6, 15, 26, 33, 38–41, 49, 52, 78, 82, 98–100, 112, 113 Dreistadt, Meredith, 108n2

G General Education Board, 80 Gibson, J.J., 6, 19, 20 Goldstein, Kenny, 23 Goodman, Jeanne, 7, 16, 54 Grimes, Bushrod, 3, 4, 18, 57 Gugler, Eric, 7, 54, 104, 105

E Eclectic Primers (McGuffey), 25 Ecological psychology, 6, 19–20, 23

H Haid, Stephen, 9, 98, 105, 106 Hawes, Bess Lomax, 28, 29

F Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), 3, 52, 56n9 Fensen, Michaela, 17, 18 Folk Arts in Education, 29 Folk Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, 27, 28 Folk festival, 9, 68, 101 Folklife, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 16, 20–29, 57–69, 82, 87, 90, 98–100, 107, 111 Folklife Education (FE), 6, 8, 10, 13, 14, 24, 27–30, 65, 87–94 “The Folklife Studies Movement”, 22 Folkliv, 22 Folklore and folklife, 6 The Folk-Lore Record, 21 The Folklore Society (U.S.), 21 Folklorists, xii, 1, 8, 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, 27, 29, 63, 88–91 French, John, 112, 113

 INDEX 

Heritage festival, 104, 107 Hickock, Lorena, 3 Historical ethnography, 5, 16–19, 23, 81 Hodgson house, 7 Homestead, 4, 6, 9, 13, 15–20, 51, 54, 59–63, 65, 68, 69, 70n7, 74, 77–79, 81, 82, 84, 87, 89, 98, 100, 101, 103–106, 113 Howe, Barbara (Ph.D.), 103–107 Hufford, David, 89 I Individuals and community, 10, 97–101 J Johnson, Marietta, 26 Journal of American Folklore (JAF), 21, 22 K Katz, Michael B., 23 L Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, 38 Little, Daniel, 17 M Manifesto, 6, 50, 58, 62, 101 Mann, Horace, 25 Mitchell, Lucy Sprague, 6, 8, 52, 60 Motani Semper Liberi, 2 “Mountaineers Are Always Free,” 2 Mountaineer Craft Cooperative, 4 Mountain State, 5 Mt. Holyoke, 37

117

Music festival (1935), 79 Music festival (1936), 68 “My Pedagogic Creed” (John Dewey), 26, 39 N National Education Association (NEA), 27 National Register of Historic Places (NR), 10, 15, 103, 106, 107 National Youth Administration, 9, 98 New Deal, 1–5, 62, 98, 105 Newell, William Wells, 21 Nostalgia, 107 Nursery School, 9, 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 74, 83, 98, 99 P Packer Collegiate Institute, 36 Pickett, Clarence, 3–5, 49, 52, 80, 83 Plummer, Kay, 52, 53 Pratt, Caroline, 26, 52, 60 Preston County, West Virginia, 2, 62, 82, 99, 107 Progressive Education, xi, xii, 2, 5, 6, 10, 14, 15, 23–27, 29, 30, 33–43, 48, 62, 68, 70n7, 88, 89, 91, 111, 113 Progressive Education Association (PEA), 5, 6, 8, 24, 26, 27, 40, 42, 49, 52, 53, 68, 82, 99, 101, 111 R Roger Clark Ballard Memorial School, 40 Roosevelt, Eleanor (ER), 2–5, 7–10, 14, 16, 17, 23, 48–50, 69, 74, 76–78, 80–84, 101, 104, 105

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INDEX

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR), 1, 4, 16, 18, 47, 48, 74, 77, 105 Rosenwald, Julius, 81 S Sabar, Ariel, 20 Saunders, Carleton, 61 The School, 2, 6, 8, 9, 14–17, 19, 29, 36, 41–43, 50–55, 57–64, 67–69, 70n7, 73, 74, 77, 80–83, 88, 89, 97–99, 105–107 The School and Society (John Dewey), 26, 39 Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM), 88, 90, 91 Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM), 90, 91 Scotts Run, 2–6, 14, 16, 50–52, 65, 76, 81, 100, 105 Section 208 of Title II of the National Recovery Act, 4 Shaffer, Mary, 52, 53 Siebart, Torey, 15 Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, 28 Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), 8, 29, 87–94 Southern Illinois University, 15, 67 St. John, George “Jim”, Jr., 112, 113 Stanton, Jessie, 6, 52, 69 State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), 103, 106 Stearns, Charles, 79

Strategic relocation, 5, 97 Swedishfolklivsforskining, 22 T Thoms, William John, 21, 22 Timbres, Harry, M.D., 52, 53 Transdisciplinary, 10, 64–66, 87–94 Transdisciplinary Learning, 29, 87 Tugwell, Rex, 73, 83 U University of Chicago, 26, 39 V VanSickle, Mrs., 74 Vassar, 37–39 Virginia Reel, 69 Volkskunde, 22 W Wagner House, E-15, 104 Wagner, Steward, 7, 8, 54, 104, 105 Wellesley, 37 West Virginia Department of Education, 6, 9 Wicker, Allan, 20 Williams, Glenna, 103, 105, 106 Y Yoder, Don, 22, 111