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Article Excerpt
In the spring of 1868, sixty-eight students gathered to become the first matriculants of the Illinois Industrial University. They had responded to a summons by the state legislature to engage in a bold new mission of publicly funded mechanical and industrial education, a move which would, Illinoisans hoped, bring lavish prosperity to their fellow citizens and themselves. Like other colleges of the period, utilitarian and democratic rationales motivated the I. I. U. leadership to establish their school. (2) Quoting their commission by the Morrill Act, the trustees said the university's "chief aim" was to educate "the industrial classes" by teaching "such branches of learning as are related to Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, and Military Tactics, without excluding other scientific and classical studies." (3) And yet, there was an even more radical and compelling vision among the I. I. U. faithful, one which was distinctively theological: "The hope of the Trustees and Faculty," they said, "is that the Institution will produce ... men of Christian culture ... able and willing to lend a helping hand in all the great practical enterprises of this most practical age." (4)
What sort of enterprises did they have in mind? One of their goals was nothing less than reversing the curse of Adam as found in Genesis 3:17-19. Humankind, they believed, had toiled miserably for their sustenance since time immemorial. But now, by God's grace, the divinely ordained dignity of farming as covenantal co-laboring with God would be restored. Empirical science would enable humankind to feed themselves and their neighbors more efficiently, while granting them intellectual stimulation, physical exercise, and spiritual benefit at the same time. By putting their hands to the plow of agricultural education, they believed, the Lord would usher in nothing less than a "Millennium of Labor," liberating, the I. I. U. trustees said, "the toiling millions of mankind" who "must still, by the stern but beneficent ordination of Heaven, 'eat their bread in the sweat of their brows.'" (5)
I. THE MOVEMENT'S PROPHET
The phrase "Millennium of Labor" was invented by Rev. Jonathan Baldwin Turner, the movement's most influential and visionary theologian. (6) Born and raised a Connecticut Congregationalist, Turner earned a B.A. from Yale's Classics department and pastored two churches before heeding the call of his fellow Yankees to become a missionary to the West. Arriving at Illinois College in Jacksonville--where he was "Professor of Belles Lettres, Latin, and Greek" and a popular Sunday school teacher for a decade and a half--Turner wrote to his fiance Rhodophia Kibbe in Connecticut that Illinois was "indeed a land 'flowing with milk and honey.'" But, over time, the initial promise turned sour. Turner's outspokenness, abolitionism, and increasingly liberal theology eventually got him into trouble with the Presbyterian Synod of Illinois, which, in 1844, questioned the doctrinal orthodoxy of the faculty. By 1848, at the age of forty-five, Turner would resign his post at the college, "more feeble and broken in health," he would later write, than he was "at ninety-one years of age." (7)
As Turner's teaching career began to plummet, he spent an increasing amount of time gardening around his house in Jacksonville. Working in his extensive beds and groves--including some "cedars of Lebanon," which he had imported from Palestine--Turner eventually began engaging in horticultural experiments. It was not long before he began advocating for agricultural education, and the word spread quickly. Jonathan Blanchard, President of Knox College, wrote "Brother" Turner in October of 1848, expressing his desire that a Mr. Kingsbury would endow Knox with "a Professorship of Agriculture, Horticulture, and Pomology" for Turner in Galesburg, "'or at least pay [him] for a course of lectures." Turner liked the idea, saying "I pine for a professorship of the blessed green earth." But the dream would have to wait, as neither the churches nor the legislature were ready to pay for something that, they believed, could be learned down on the farm. (8)
In the early 1850s, Turner began to actively work toward establishing a public industrial university. (9) Concurrently, be was involved in the advent of state farmers' conventions that would meet throughout the decade, resulting in the founding of the Illinois State Agricultural Society. The day was finally at hand for Turner to preach his manifesto for the movement: a stirring 1853 speech called "Industrial Universities for the People," in which he argued that society consisted of two social classes, one being a professional caste of only 5 percent, and the other being industrial, the 95 percent who truly do the labor. (10) Turner believed that the churches had only provided for the education of the professional class--doing a poor job at that--since the old, clerical-style classical and literary education, he said, produced "mushrooms and monks, rather than manhood and men." (11) Instead, he argued, Illinoisans should overthrow this "aristocracy of pedantry" by "redeeming higher education from the odium of puny forms and pallid faces," since "the end of all education should be the development of a TRUE MANHOOD," that is, physically, mentally, and spiritually robust men and, in the I. I. U.'s case, women, since the trustees voted to become coeducational in early 1870. (12) How could the I. I. U. help usher in a Millennium of Labor if it only perpetuated the existing colleges' folly of "growing into a nation of intellect to the default of will, energy, muscle, and power"? (13)
So the state, Turner proposed, should establish a university for the toiling majority of its population. (14) This controversial idea prompted a barrage of mud slinging in the press, with the churches crying foul to Caesar's meddling with impressionable young minds and souls, and the agriculturists--including Turner--countering that nonsectarianism should prevail. Public opinion increasingly sided with Turner. In 1858, he further solidified his status, being elected the first president of the Illinois State Natural History Society. As the movement gained speed, the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862 aided its cause. Although the church-related colleges repeatedly appealed to the state to grant Morrill funding to them, Turner's vision of nonsectarian public education eventually prevailed, contributing to the University's founding in 1867. (15)
In September of 1872, at the cornerstone laying ceremony for the I. I. U.'s new University Hall, Rev. Jonathan Baldwin Turner triumphantly told the crowd that the Lord's purposes had been accomplished, since the "sons of our farmers and our friends" would now become "true sons of the Republic and true sons of God." They would be educated "in institutions which are in no sense conventional, partisan, or sectarian, but in all their methods, ends and aims truly, grandly, and broadly industrial, natural, scientific, and American, and therefore christian [sic]." (16) But Turner, the movement's theologian, spoke that day only as an invited guest. (17) The trustees selected a man perhaps even more fit for the job: Rev. John Milton Gregory, L.L.D.
II. THE MOVEMENT'S PASTOR
In 1853, Jonathan Baldwin Turner had expressed an interesting hermeneutic regarding labor's simultaneously condemning and salvific affect on the human condition. He said
God, himself, made the first Adam a gardener or farmer, and kept him so till [sic] he fell from his high state. The second Adam, sent to repair the ruin of his fall, he made a poor mechanic called "the son of a carpenter," who chose all his personal followers from the same humble class. Deity has pronounced his opinion on the dignity and value of these pursuits, by the repeated acts of his wisdom and grace, as well as by the inflexible laws of his providence compelling industrial labor as the only means of preserving health of body, vigor, purity of mind and even life itself. (18)
In Turner's Christology here, Jesus functions not as a crucified atoner, but instead as a hard-working example of labor's redemptive qualities. (19) John Milton Gregory, the I. I. U.'s first Regent, expressed a similar theological perspective during a Monday morning I. I. U. chapel talk on November 23, 1874. "Labor gives health," he said. As "both the Bible and Nature" say: "'work if you will live.'" (20) Gregory told the I. I. U. faculty and students that God designed the earth for people to cooperate by laboring. God, he said, did not curse humanity by establishing work, because "Labor is Honorable.... Has God made the daily doom of so many of His intelligent creatures low in its nature and necessarily degrading? ... How mean and how unchristian the thought!" Labor itself was not the problem, Gregory said; sin was the problem. The world's prior history of toiling serfs and leisured nobles was a diabolical corruption of God's intended laboring order for humankind, because labor "transforms the world itself from the savage wild to the fruitful Eden." (21)
It was exactly this type of leader the I. I. U. founders needed: someone with the gentility of a scholar, the golden tongue of a preacher, and the chameleon-like adaptability of a diplomat. How did Regent Gregory arrive at this point, where he could so skillfully commingle evangelical theology with public practice, and communicate it in such a way that all parties--secularist and sectarian alike--could be satisfied?
Gregory was born and raised in Sand Lake, New York, one of twenty-two children in a Baptist family from Connecticut that would yield two university presidents and two pastors. (22) Baptized at thirteen, John showed an early interest in learning, favoring reading in solitude over working in his father's tannery and fields. After teaching at his brother Lewis's school in Gilboa, John attended Union College in Schenectady, where President Eliphalet Nott's influence would shape Gregory's own university leadership. John graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1846, began to study law, but soon abruptly abandoned it--following a significant religious awakening--to become the pastor of the Baptists in Hoosick Falls. Marrying in 1848, John and his second cousin, Julia, turned down a call from the Sand Lake church, leaving New York for the First Baptist Church of Akron, Ohio. By 1852, though, the couple left pastoral ministry so John could launch his career as an educator. Teaching at his brother Uriah's Detroit Commercial College, he founded the Michigan Journal of Education in 1854, editing it until 1859. He served three terms as Michigan's superintendent of public instruction and, from 1859 to 1865, was a member of the Michigan Board of Education, giving him first-hand experience in the establishment and governance of the State Agricultural College of Michigan. (23)
By 1864, Gregory brought all of these prior experiences together, resulting in a theoretical framework that would aid the I. I. U. When he became president of the Michigan Baptists' Kalamazoo College that year, his published inaugural speech, The Right and Duty of Christianity to Educate, provided a public apologetic for understanding state-sponsored education as a form of Christian ministry. Current scholarship finds no evidence demonstrating that Gregory and Turner were corresponding at this point. But the fellow clergymen shared similar thoughts regarding religion and education. Christianity, Gregory said, had the "right" to be foundational in American higher education because it "holds in its keeping some of the most potential agencies of instruction--the grandest and most fruitful ideas that ever enter the human mind, and the most impressive motives that ever influence human action." (24) This classically Protestant understanding of education builds upon a theological assumption regarding God's self-disclosure through Scripture and the church. And because, Gregory said, the church stewarded the Word of God,
Christianity cannot be shut out of the world's great school rooms. To banish it is to banish the only adequate agent for a full and rounded development of human souls.... Mutually co-working with all parties--with the parent, the child and society--welcoming, and cooperating with, the State in all that the State can be permitted to do, prompting the parent to a higher solicitude, and the child to nobler aspirations and to more dilligence [sic], and stimulating society, to a juster regard for public virtue and public intelligence, Christianity yet claims for itself a further and higher field of educational work, a field where it labors peerless and alone.
Only Christianity, he argued, could meet the needs of "the religious nature in man"; the State could not help in that particular area. After all, Jesus was primarily a "Teacher"; that is why the church had established schools in the first place. "Education," Gregory said, "assuredly, cannot be neutral. It must either be Christian, Jewish, or Infidel.... Hence in making such an exclusive selection, the State must enter into alliance with one or the other of those forms." Since most Americans were Christians, he said, it would not be unethical for a public school classroom to teach a Christian world view. In fact, according to Gregory, it would be unethical not to, since Christian education had freed the world from pagan darkness, and Protestantism's plain biblical truths had triumphed over Roman medieval superstitions. Christianity had so shaped western culture, Gregory said, that to jettison it would undermine civilization itself:
The grand elements of modern civilization are found not in the ideas of Plato and Aristotle but in the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth. Human brotherhood--the inalienable and equal rights of mankind--the sole sovereignty of God, and the sole accountability of man to God for his religious opinions--the duty of doing to others as we would be done by,--all these are christian [sic] ideas, and they lie at the very center of our Christian civilization.--Strike these out from the popular mind and heart, and how speedily should we return to the old barbarisms, from which all its science could not save ancient Greece. And how shall these ideas continue current in the nation's life, when they are no longer plainly recognized in the nation's schools, or appear there stripped of the divine sanctions that give them authority and power?
Capping his argument, Gregory said that teaching is the "divinely appointed mission of Christian men," and quoted the "great commission" of Matthew 28 to "go and teach all nations" as his proof text. But here the mission's scope was expanded from specifically religious teaching to the larger acquisition of knowledge. "All sciences," he said, "even the merest physical science, have a divine side; and the true scholars, in every department of learning, as they approach the grand ultimate truths in their studies, find...
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