Southern Patriot,
September-October, 2006

LOST SOUTHERN HISTORY RECOVERED
By E. Ray Moore, Jr., Th.M.

New York playwright and author John Chodes has written a significant book that uncovers the neglected history surrounding the rise of state-sponsored education in the South during Reconstruction and the years following. Chodes, a longtime friend of the South and of the limited Constitutional government that the South represents, has written on this history before in periodicals such as Chronicles. The Freeman, The New York Tribune and The Southern Partisan. This book, however, may now be the definitive work on this topic to date. It joins the growing number of quality books on the history of the harm caused by state-sponsored public schools by notables such as 1991 New York Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto in Underground History of American Education (2001) and Dr. Andrew Couslon's Market Education (1999). Also, Dr Bruce Shortt published The Harsh Truth About Public Schools in 2004, and the late Marlin Maddoux, a Christian talk show host, wrote Public Education Against America, published posthumously in 2006, both of which are primarily for the church audience.
Chodes relates the tragic story of the rise of state-sponsored public education and what he called the "nationalizing" of the South's mostly private or religious schools. He parallels these events with the life story and contributions of Jabez Curry. A Confederate officer who rode with General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Curry served as a member of the US and Confederate Congresses, as a Baptist minister. a lawyer, an author, the President of the Baptist Richmond College in Virginia. and as US ambassador to Spain. In the period of time from the War Between the States until the 20`j' Century, Jabez Curry may have been considered one of the South's most important personalities. Although not a household name in the South today, Cum deserves to be remembered for his success as well as for the role he played in converting the South's mostly private-school system into public or state-funded schools. While the Unitarian. Horace Mann. of Massachusetts is rightly called the "Father of K-1? public education in America," Jabez Curry played a similar role as "The Horace Mann of the South."
Chodes organized Destroying the Republic chronologically around Curry's life from the 1850's 0's until the turn of the 20th Century. Though not a full biography of Curry, the book, nevertheless, exposes Curry's role as the principal advocate and organizer of state-sponsored public education in the South. This story portrays how anyone can surrender prior principles and convictions which results in capitulating to ideals once believed to be inimical to faith, family and freedom. Curry was, before and during the war, a strong proponent of the ideals of the South and the Old Republic.
Chodes book divides into two sections. Chapters 1-9 explore Curry's early life story, his origins and his service in the Confederate Congress and Army. It provides fascinating reading as one rides in and out of the lives of great personalities of the period
such as President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Confederate Congress. Curry witnessed or participated in many of the important events and battles of the War years. Chapters 10-17 constitute the case for Curry's role in the rise of state-sponsored public education in the South during and after Reconstruction. The core of Chodes' book will for many recover a portion of lost Southern history.
Chapter 7 entitled "Southern Preaching as Guerrilla War" discusses two of Curry's scholarly works, Establishment and Disestablishment and Struggles and Triumphs of Virginia Baptists, written after the War, in which Curry traced the history of Christendom through the centuries and argued for the historic separation of Church and State position common to Baptist heritage. Chodes claims that Curry wrote these books indirectly to argue for the superiority of the Southern cause at a time when Federal Reconstruction prohibited open, aggressive advocacy of the Southern cause.
Chapter 8, "Reconstruction as Re-education," reveals a post-war "reconstruction" that overtook the South socially, culturally and religiously as violent as Marxian revolutions in the modern era. Society today has either forgotten or does not appreciate the enormity of this change. Most history ignores this era or only describes the period in terms of the experiences and changes for former Southern slaves.
The book's second section, Chapter 11, entitled "Jabez Curry and the Peabody Education Fund," exposes Curry as a catalyst in the conversion of the Southern private and religious school system into tax-funded, state and federally controlled public schools. Beginning with gifts of several million dollars in 1867, George Peabody founded the first major US philanthropy with the purpose of helping the defeated South recover by setting up state-sponsored schools while converting the dominant Southern system of private and religious schools into state-schools, adopting the Northern Unitarian education model. Jabez Curry became the second General Agent in 1881 following the tenure of Barnas Sears, who successfully assured that no ex-Confederate state could re-enter the Union without a clause in the new state constitution demanding state-controlled, tax-supported schools. Sears died in 1880, but he had set the stage well. The policy begun by Sears of giving matching grants from the Peabody Education Fund to Southern cities or counties for establishing a tax-funded state system would continue under Curry.
As General Agents of the Peabody Fund both Sears and Curry carried forward the Horace Mann strategy to create state-controlled teacher training Normal schools. In the 1830's -1840's when Horace Mann and the Unitarian socialists completed their efforts for state takeover of Massachusetts schools, the critical element in that plan was the creation of Normal schools or teacher training colleges. Prior to the post war period the South had no Normal schools. Under Sears' guidance the state of Tennessee was first with the founding of the George Peabody Teachers College. Curry commented on this strategy in A Brief Sketch of George Peabody saying, "It is a concurrent experience in all countries which have established systems of public instruction that they are very incomplete and defective, if they do not embrace professional schools, where the science of education and the art of education are regularly taught."
Chodes describes the long-time friendship beginning in 1867 between Sears and Curry, both Baptist ministers, and how Curry was "transformed to believe in universal, tax-funded common schools." Chapter 11 chronicles the gradual conversion of Jabez Curry to this new position on education, one he once held as contrary to Southern principles. This conversion apparently began when he reversed his position on "universal, tax-funded schools." Had Curry remained true to his beliefs as espoused in his earlier works Establishment and Disestablishment and Triumphs and Struggles of Virgina Baptists, he may have concluded that separation of church and state properly held also applies to separation of school and state.
Curry, an associate and friend of some of the leading figures of the time, had a fascinating history with President Rutherford B. Hayes, also a trustee for the Peabody Fund. Chapter 12 relates Hayes' rise to the Presidency in the contested election of 1876. Republican Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel Tilden, gaining the electoral votes of South Carolina and Louisiana, in a promise to remove Federal troops. This chapter explodes the popular modern myth that federal intervention in the South's local schools is an innovation of the late 20th Century. Hayes participated in the Peabody Fund as had President Grant before him. Hayes, more than any other President, wanted Washington, DC, to control local and state education. This federal control of education, an early Republican position, has continued to this day in such agendas as "No Child Left Behind."
Chapters 14 and 15 explain the pivotal and critical impact of education philosophy on the nationalization of Southern education. Chapter 14 shows the influence of Commissioner John Eaton and the Bureau of Education, which eventually evolved into the large federal agency, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, now divided into Departments of Health and Human Services and Education. Eaton and Curry worked as allies in the process of nationalizing Southern schools. Both Chapters 14, 15 introduce William Torrey Harris, G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey and Edward Thorndike, all major thinkers and educational scholars, who introduced Darwinism as foundational to "the new psychology" and progressive education into American education during the last decades of 19th Century and early 20th Century. These two chapters are among the most significant on the deleterious repercussions of these radical educators whose views so permeate all education including Southern schools today.
Curry left the Peabody Fund in 1885 to become Ambassador to Spain, after which he returned to the Peabody Fund where he would complete two decades of total service. Chodes suggests that Curry had regrets about his participation in the conversion of Southern private and religious schools into state-run public schools. In 1898, however, Curry could still boast, "The South is now in rapid transition from private education to an education prescribed and supported by public authority."
The process of nationalizing Southern schools has come full circle. All the consequences of this error have cast human and social debris upon the shores of not only Southern but all American culture. Libertarians, Conservatives, Christians now question the very idea of state-sponsored public education. For Christians, Scripture clearly and unambiguously assigns the education of children to the family with assistance from the Church; the state or government is the "Great Usurper." One lesson from Curry's life is that the Christian Faith does not immunize from practical error if not consistently applied as a worldview. Not only the Baptist Curry, but Baptists all across the South have supported public education, but that is beginning to change. "Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it," said Santayana.
John Chodes has written a critical book that can help with understanding first the history of the rise of state-sponsored public schools and then its damage; now remedial action can begin. The South, slow to adopt state education and only under coercion, could lead the way by rejecting that system and returning to the ideal model of private, religious and home schools. The South would thus give herself a great gift and one as well as to the American culture and the world.
E. Ray Moore, Jr., Th.M., Blythewood, S.C.,
is an Army Reserve Chaplain
(Lt. Colonel) Ret and veteran of Gulf War I
where he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
____________________________________________________________________________________________



Origins of the Educational Nightmare

by Clyde Wilson

Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry of Alabama (1825%u20131903) was one of those fairly numerous 19th century Americans whose lives of astounding talent and energy put to shame the diminished leaders of the U.S. in the 21st century. Or rather would put them to shame if they had sufficient intelligence to distinguish their own inferior quality.

Learned and articulate, a lawyer, Baptist minister, college president, diplomat, member of the U.S. and Confederate congresses, Confederate combat officer, prolific and eloquent writer and orator, Curry was a significant public figure from the 1850s to the 1890s. (Put beside Curry or any of his contemporary peers, George W. Bush and Teddy Kennedy look like dull-witted adolescents.)

Mr. Chodes's libertarian work on Curry's career is a rich source of understanding of many aspects of 19th century American history. Having the good fortune not to be a "professional historian," the author is able to see many things that the professionals have been socialized not to see. Fine as Mr. Chodes%u2019s work is, however, it leaves me with a serious unanswered question. Shall I put it on the shelf with the DiLorenzo school of revisionist Civil War history? Or with works on the evils of Reconstruction? Or beside John Taylor Gatto%u2019s Underground History Of American Education?

The chapter on "Reconstruction as Re-Education" is alone worth the price of the book. The Marxist class/conflict perspective, with a Gramscian twist, is now "mainstream" American history. All of American history has been distorted but no part more so than Reconstruction. Chodes shows that Reconstruction was more than a horror of military domination and economic exploitation. It was also a program of ideological and ethnic cleansing which continues to damage the American people in our own time.

The many observers who seem to think that militarism and abuse of citizens is an innovation of the Bush administration have evidently not familiarized themselves with President Grant and the Reconstruction Congress.

Those who think that federal control of education was an invention of the Democrats and the Great Society have a lot to learn. It was the Republican President Hayes who declared education to be one of "the rights of man" to be supported by taxation and devoted to inculcating national unity. His successor, the Republican Garfield, devoted his first message to Congress to promotion of federal funding of public schools. "It is the voice of the children of the land," declaimed Garfield , "asking us to give them all the blessings of our civilization."

Legislation to answer the voice of the children was pushed in Congress by New England Republicans in 1882%u201383 and barely failed of passage. This was seven years after the formal end of Reconstruction. The strongest public rationale, but not the only motive, was to alleviate the illiteracy of the freed people of the South. This rationale, like that of all the Reconstruction measures, was based on calculated misrepresentation of conditions in the South. Great strides were being made in education in the Southern states, which were devoting more of their resources to the effort, in proportion to their wealth, than Northern states (as they have ever since). Even greater progress would have been made if the funds Southerners had appropriated out of their poverty in the first years after the war had not been systematically stolen by the same Republicans who decried the South's ignorance. The National Bureau of Education, which from the 1880s was the chief instrument for carrotting and sticking American public schools into conformity with elitist plans, originated lock, stock, barrel, and personnel out of the Reconstruction Freedmen's Bureau which had been to a large extent the irresponsible and coercive de facto government of the South.

The Republican proponents of federal education were clear about their desire to create a system on the statist, militarized models of Europe. No American educational ideas that preceded Horace Mann's Prussian/Massachusetts school system were to be considered. Black voters had to be subsidized enough to vote Republican and to be content where they were, else they might migrate to the North and West. They had to be kept in the South, which was the main theme of Northern politics throughout the 19th century, an even stronger imperative than the desire to loot the productive Southern economy. Further, federally-controlled, "free," universal, compulsory public schools were needed to control the immigrant masses of the northeast.

Behind it all, as Chodes shows, was a commanding assumption and necessity. As one New England promoter of federal education put it, "But for ignorance among the nominally free, there would have been no rebellion." If Southerners had not been too ignorant to understand the benefits of patterning themselves after New Englanders, there would have been no bloody war. To prevent decentralization in the future, Southern whites had to be cleansed of their "ignorance," that is of their un-New England thoughts. Federal public schooling was also needed to confront the "hordes coming from beyond the great oceans." It had nothing to do with learning and everything to do with control of the population by their betters.

While the Republican plan for centralized and regimented public schools failed in the House of Representatives and had to wait some years before full implementation, all was not lost. The Morrill Act of the Lincoln administration took a long step toward federalizing higher education. The Lincolnian Department of Agriculture was able to work itself into the public schools by "extension" agents. The philosophy of education that governed the department, as Chodes conclusively shows, was behaviorist, fully anticipating the psychological manipulation of children by the self-appointed wise and good that was the essence of Deweyism and is now entrenched national policy. Again, the barely vanquished Southern demon spurred on the effort. Southern devotion to such immaterial, reactionary ideals as courage and honor had been responsible for rebellion. Future generations must be made into pragmatic American materialists suitable for labor and production.

If the elite wise and good could not get sweeping federal legislation to further the control and conformity of education, they had another string to their bow. This is where the sad paradox of Jabez Curry comes in. This eloquent and indefatigable defender of the South and of the constitutional principles of the old republic spent the last two decades of his long life as head of the Peabody Educational Fund, a northern charity with several millions of dollars to be devoted to the advancement of education in the South. The work of Curry and the other elitists who controlled the great instruments of charitable wealth was devoted entirely to fostering a certain kind of education %u2013 universal, compulsory, "free," tax-supported graded public schooling. Besides relentless propaganda, their chief tool was the "matching" grant. Substantial amounts of cash were available to local and state authorities who would match the gifts out of tax-paid funds.

Thus were established, step by step, universal, compulsory state school systems, whose content and direction were essentially provided by Deweyite "normal schools." It should be noted that indirect control of public policy by institutions of great wealth (accumulated before the income tax) is now a norm of American government. Such leveraging of wealth into elitist political dictation is unconstitutional and undemocratic, but the Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, etc. foundations dictated much of the domestic social legislation and foreign policy of the United States in the 20th century. Their power is nearly as great and even more irresponsible than that of the Supreme Court or the media. And it is never mentioned. George Wallace is the only public figure, to my knowledge, has ever called attention to this unelected power over the people of the United States.

The governing board of the Peabody endowment, supposedly a private charity, met in the White House and also counted the sitting President as a member. The nature of the whole enterprise is perhaps revealed in the fact that Grant, though a civilian, attended the meetings in full military regalia. Part of Peabody's fortune had been accumulated through the manipulation of fraudulent bonds of Southern carpetbagger state legislatures. J.P. Morgan was the manager of the trust. How did the ex-Confederate Curry become an instrument for the undoing of his own principles and his own people? For doing the bidding of rich inveterate South-haters? It was not simply a case of a defeated Confederate making the best of a bad situation. Education is, of course, a good thing. The South was poor and needed money for education. But why did a man like Curry buy the whole hog %u2013 not just education but universal, compulsory, "free," tax-supported schooling on a model dictated by the relentless Bostonian enemies of his blood?

Other articulate Southerners saw what was going on. Possibly Jabez Curry saw it also but refused to acknowledge the truth. John Chodes shows us in revealing context and detail what happened. Why is perhaps one of those mysteries buried deep in the human heart.

It has long been an accepted article of faith among Americans that education is a good thing. That, indeed, it is a necessity for a free and self-governing people. But when and by whom was it determined that this desirable thing was to be universal, compulsory in attendance and tax support, "free," and devoted to inculcating government-coerced conformity? Destroying the Republic provides much of the answer to this vital question.

January 30, 2006

Dr. Wilson [send him mail] is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.

Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
Clyde Wilson Archives



New York City and the Old South
contributed by Walter D. Kennedy, co-author The South Was Right!

What does a man from New York City, who has written seven off-Broadway plays and authored a biography of the first African-American runner to compete in an Olympic marathon, know about the South? Well, my fellow Southerners, that man is John Chodes, and he knows plenty. In his recently published book. Destroying the Republic: Jabez Curry and the Re-education of the Old South, Chodes demonstrates how the South, after suffering defeat at the close of the War for Southern Independence, was assaulted by advocates of tyrannical big government. In the Greek tragedy "Antigone," a messenger to the king is given a death sentence for bringing bad news to the court. After hearing the king's declaration, the condemned man declares, `How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong!' The same maxim could be written across a photograph of Jabez Curry. Curry was a leader of antebellum Alabama, having served in the Alabama Legislature and the United States Congress. He was a strong advocate of limited government, emphasising the rights of the people of the sovereign States. During this time Curry maintained a strong belief in education but, as he then believed, education must be under the control of the people of each State and not the Federal government. Advocating the rights of the people of the States, Curry saw secession as the ultimate means of protecting the rights of the people from Federal tyranny. When the secession crisis was at its height and subsequently during the War for Southern Independence, Curry never wavered in his dedication to his traditional Southern Rights opinions. Yet, according to Chodes, it was the same Curry who after the War joined the forces of `National' education to re-educate Southern children so that "All the values that had led to secession would be expunged from the next generation of Southern mind."

The aspect of cultural cleansing (more correctly, cultural genocide) carried out against the defeated South after the War and during today's age of political correctness is fully exposed by Mr Chodes in his new book. Chodes fully explains how the worthy objective of education has been turned into the mechanism for transforming the South %u201C...into a weak-souled colony of the United States.%u201D Yes, the South has been transformed into less than the masculine defender of its Rights of yesterday into today's "weak-souled colony of the United States," but Chodes points out an even more succinct fact: America, both the North and South, has been the victim in this struggle. It is American Rights and American Liberties that have suffered because of the deleterious results of Appomattox -- viz. a Federal government that recognizes no limits to its power. John Chodes has done the South and indeed all of America a great service by exposing one more element in the destruction of true American liberty. If we are ever to regain that which has been lost, Southerners and Northerners need to listen to the voice of this man from New York City!

DESTROYING THE REPUBLIC gives us a marvelous insight into irony working in history, the kind of revelation officially denied to academic historians. On one level, a most valuable one, it is a study of the career of a southern aristocrat, both before and after the Civil War, focusing particularly upon his role in helping to bring about a gigantic institution of forced instruction%u2014the familiar "system" of schooling we have with us today, But on a more profound level it is the account of a major turning point in the unique American libertarian experiment, the destruction of an ethic of personal freedom of choice and its replacement by a strong state, Hobbesian organization. That one of the important actors in this transformation was a man deeply committed to liberty and local sovereignty is a profound lesson in the contradictions which beset human nature, now as then and a warning to each of us that our moral certainties, without pitiless and frequent reexamination, stand ready constantly to betray us. Mr.Chodes has done a grand service to all of us who seek to understand the dull nightmare of modern schooling. Chodes%u2019 book gives us insight into irony working in history, something no academic historians would be likely to stress %u2013 with a consequent loss of our understanding of Jabez Cury and his relationship to the schools we suffer under; that they were visited upon us in good measure by a dedicated liberty-loving aristocrat is a profound discovery and a useful warning against judging a book by its cover.

%u2014John Taylor Gatto, former New York State Teacher of the Year; author, The Underground History of American Education