(ISSN 0043-6534) WISCONSIN MAGAZINE OF HISTORY The State Historical Society of Wi.sconsin • Vol. 66, No. 2 • Winter, 1982-1983 THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN RICHARD A. ERNEY, Director Officers WILLIAM C. KIDD, President WILSON B. THIEDE, Treasurer NEWELL G. MEYER, First Vice-President RICHARD A. ERNEY, Secretary MRS. L. PRENTICE EAGER, JR., Second Vice-President THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN is both a state agency and a private membership organization. Founded in 1846—two years before statehood—and chartered in 1853, it is the oldest American historical society to receive continuous public funding. By statute, it is charged with collecting, advancing, and disseminating knowledge of Wisconsin and of the trans-Mississippi West. The Society serves as the archive of the State of Wisconsin; it collects all manner of books, periodicals, maps, manuscripts, relics, newspapers, and aural and graphic materials as they relate to North America; it maintains a museum, library, and research facility in Madison as well as a statewide system of historic sites, school services, area research centers, and affiliated local societies; it administers a broad program of historic preservation; and publishes a wide variety of historical materials, both scholarly and popular. MEMBERSHIP in the Society is open to the public. Annual membership is |I5, or $12.50 for persons over 65 or members of afhiiated societies. Family membership is $20, or $15 for persons over 65 or members of affiliated societies. Contributing membership is $50; supporting, $100; sustaining, $200-$500;/)a/row, $500 or more. THE SOCIETY is governed by a Board of Curators which includes, ex officio, the Governor, the Secretary of State, the State Treasurer, the President of the University of Wisconsin, the President of the Society's Auxiliary, the President of the Wisconsin History Foundation, Inc., and the Chairman ofthe Administrative Committee ofthe Wisconsin Council for Local History. The other thirty-six members of the Board of Curators are elected by the membership. A complete listing of the Curators appears inside the back The Society is headquartered at 816 State Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, at the juncture of State and Park streets on the University of Wisconsin campus. A partial listing of phone numbers (Area Code 608) follows: General Administration 262-3266 Library circulation desk 262-3421 General information 262-.3271 Maps 262-9558 Affiliated local societies 262-2316 Membership 262-9613 Archives reading room 262-3338 Microforms reading room 262-9621 Contribution of library materials and artifacts 262-0629 Museum tours 262-9567 Editorial offices 262-9603 Newspapers reference 262-9584 Film collections 262-0585 Picture and .sound collections 262-9581 Genealogical and general reference inquiries 262-9590 Public information office 262-9606 Government publications and reference 262-2781 Sales desk 262-3271 Historic preservation 262-1339 School services 262-9567 Historic sites 262-3271 Speakers bureau 262-2704 ON THE COVER: Herbert Hoover was in the waning days of his presidency and the Experimental College was at the end of its tenure at the University of Wisconsin when this photograph was made of commencement exercises in the Field House in June, 1932. [WHi(WBS)19821] Volume 66, Number 2 / Winter, 1982-1983 WISCONSIN MAGAZINE OF HISTORY (ISSN 0043-6534) Published quarterly by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, The Experimental College Revisited 91 816 State Street, Madison, Cynthia Stokes Brown Wisconsin 53706. Distributed to members as part of their dues. (Annual membership, $15, or $12.50 for those over 65 William B. Hesseltine and or members of affiliated the Profession of History: A Retrospective societies; family membership, $20, or $15 for those over 65 or Dutch Uncle to a Profession 106 members of affiliated societies; Robert G. Gunderson contributing, $50; supporting, The Teacher and His Students 111 $100; sustaining, $200-$500; patron, $500 or more.) Single Frank Freidel numbers from Volume 57 The Trainer of Historians 115 forward are $2. Microfilmed Frank L. Byrne copies available through University Microfilms, 300 Recollections of the Man and the Teacher 119 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Richard N. Current Michigan 48106; reprints of Volumes 1 through 20 and most issues of Volumes 21 The Challenge of the Artifact 122 through 56 are available from Kraus Reprint Company, William B. Hesseltine Route 100. Millwood, New York 10546. Communications should be The Paradox of Municipal Reform addressed to the editor. The in the Nineteenth Century 128 Society does not assume David Paul Nord responsibility for statements made by contributors. Second-class postage paid at Madison, Wisconsin, and at McCarthyism Without Tears: A Review Essay 143 additional mailing offices. Richard M. Fried POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Wisconsin Magazine of History, Madison, Wisconsin Book Reviews 147 53706. Copyright © 1982 by Book Review Index 162 the State flistorical Society of Wisconsin. Wisconsin History Checklist 163 The Wisconsin Magazine of Accessions 165 History is indexed annually by Contributors 168 the editors; cumulative indexes are assembled decennially. In addition, articles are abstracted and indexed in America: History Editor and Life, Historical Abstracts, Index to Literature on the American PAUL tf. EIASS Indian, and the Combined Associate Editors Retrospective Index to Journals in History, 1838-1974. WILLIAM C. MARTEN JOHN O. HIOLZHUETER MARILYN GRANT tk i I VVHi{D487)6831 B)i 7927, /Ac western fringes ofthe University of Wisconsin campus, including portions ofthe Ag School farm, had been convened to intramural athletic fields. The original caption accompanyiyig this photo had the bull complaining, "My pasture is gone!" 90 The Experimental College Revisited By Cynthia Stokes Brown N 1929, while Alexander Meikle- Alexander Meiklejohn came to the Univer­ I john was chairman of the Experi­ sity of Wisconsin in 1926 at the age of fifty- mental College at the University of Wisconsitt, four, ffe already had considerable experience he received a letter addressed to "The Profes­ as a college teacher and administrator— sor of Experiments." It was from an animal fourteen years, from 1897 to 1911, at Brown breeder who wanted to sell him guinea pigs. University, where he taught philosophy and Across the top of the letter Meiklejohn wrote served as dean of men; eleven years, from in his tiny handwriting: "Next class assured."' 1912 to 1923, at Amherst College, where he This story raises some important questions was president. In 1923 the trustees of about the Experimental College, which was Amherst asked him for his resignation, which partof the university from 1927 to 1932. What he tendered. In 1914 they had wanted a presi­ was the purpose of the experiment? Who were dent who could bring the college to life; but the students? Did the college have trouble at­ Meiklejohn had breathed more life and con­ tracting and keeping them? What kind of peo­ troversy into it than they could endure.- ple were "the professor of experiments" and The years from 1923 to 1926 were dark and the teachers he chose? What was the outcome difficult ones for Meiklejohn. He had no as­ ofthe experiment? sured income, a wife who had gone to Italy try­ The purpose of the Experimental College, ing to recover from cancer, and four children. as Meiklejohn conceived it, was to teach all He no longer believed that he could work out kinds of students to think so they would be his vision of what a liberal college should be able to function as free people in a self- within the existing structures of colleges and governing society. These words were not mere universities, and he wanted to found a new rhetoric to Meiklejohn. They expressed the college. Meanwhile, he had to generate some fundamental convictions of his life—that free­ income by lecturing and writing. dom is an extraordinarily difficttlt achieve­ One who sought Meiklejohn's essays was ment, that adults must teach it purposively if Glenn Frank, editor of The (]entury Magazine in students are to have a chance of learning it, New York. Frank published Meiklejohn's es­ and that in a democracy all students, not say, "A New College: Notes on the Next Step merely an elite group, must be taught it. - For the Amherst years, see especially .Alexander EDITORS' NOTE: For this essay Cynthia Stokes Brown has Meiklejohn, The Liberal College (Boston, 1920) and Freedom expanded a section ofthe sketch of Alexander Meiklejohn and the College (New York, 1923); J. Seelye Bixler, "Alex­ that appears in her anthology of his writings: Cynthia ander Meiklejohn and the Making of the Amherst Mind," Stokes Brown, edilor, Alexander Meiklejohn: Teacher of Free­ in Amherst: The College and Its Alumni (Spring, 1973), 1-6; dom (Berkeley, California, 1981). The book is available John Merriman Gaus, "The Issues at Amherst," in The Na­ from the Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute, Box 673, tion, 117: 12 (July 4, 1923); Stanley King, A Histoiy ofthe Berkeley, California 94701 for $15.95, cloth, or $9.95, pa­ Endowment of Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts, per, postage and handling included. 1950); Walter Lippmann, "The Fall of President Meikle­ ' Box 65, folder 12, Alexander Meiklejohn Papers, in john," in the New York WorW, June 24, 1923, editorial sec­ the Archives Division, State Historical Society of Wiscon­ tion, p. 1; and Lucien Price, Prophet Unawares: The Ro­ sin. Cited hereinafter as Meiklejohn Papers. mance oj an Idea (New York, 1924). 91 ever after would be known, in capital letters, as the Experimental College. Both Frank and Meiklejohn were stepping into an institution they did not know and in which they were not known. Frank had been chosen as president by a Board of Regents whose majority was appointed by John J. Blaine, the Progressive governor elected in 1920. The faculty, whose complexion did not change with the triumph ofthe Progressives in 1920, had some cause for resentment.