Words Are Meant to Sway – Maria Sanford's Life and Lectures

The Labor Question

Maria Sanford, who was a history professor at Swarthmore at the time, gave this address at the July 24, 1878, session of the Pennsylvania Teachers’ Association meeting.¹ Given the topic, it’s notable that Sanford had previously also taught a Junior course on John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, possibly supplemented with lectures about American Whig economist Henry Carey.²

Labor issues were quite salient in 1878 Pennsylvania. An 1873 financial panic had precipitated a severe recession that struck railroads especially hard. With the growing importance to the economy of permanent wage labor, this downturn became America’s first experience of widespread unemployment.³ Workers’ reaction led to the country’s first major labor action, the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, which was contested with particular bitterness in Pennsylvania.⁴ Coming only a few years after the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, Americans feared the prospect of Marxist-inspired labor violence.

Sanford analyzes the situation, not as an economic question, but through her audience’s perspective as citizens and teachers. She frames the underlying dynamic as a centuries-long struggle between the privileged few and the mass of humanity, which America’s founders had hoped to overcome by giving all a share in government. Republican Rome, however, offers a lesson in how growing wealth inequality can lead the privileged abandon respect for labor and the cultivation of republican virtues in favor of the pursuit of greater wealth. She argues that America could suffer the same fate unless the founders’ principles are adapted to the new conditions, so long as the adaptation does not lead to anarchy and to equality at a degraded level. Sanford briefly addresses the rioting laborers, whom she sees as having followed a small number of agitators, before turning her attention to the wealthy. Although she won’t condemn wealth per se, she is strongly critical of those who disdain labor, pursue idle wealth, and perceive themselves as better than ordinary workers. This group represents a greater threat to American society and its republican government.

The Labor Question

I shall not attempt in this brief hour an exhaustive analysis of the question which may rightly be considered the most important one not only of our politics but of morals and of social life. It is a question demanding the profoundest thought, and the most careful study, not of statesmen alone, but of every citizen, and especially of those whose business it is to form the character, direct the thought and awaken the conscience of the rising generation. It is then in its relation to us as citizens and as teachers that I shall speak this morning of the Labor Question, desiring most of all to bring home to the heart a sense of its importance and of our personal responsibility concerning it. I but give my thought, hoping that in your minds it may awaken a better thought, and each speed on and on until a glorious work shall be accomplished.

Lessons in Manners and Morals

Maria Sanford, who was a history professor at Swarthmore at the time, gave this address at the August 10, 1875, session of the Pennsylvania Teachers’ Association meeting.¹ Whitney reports that she would frequently lecture on this topic at teachers’ institutes.²

Lessons in Manners and Morals

I do not need to prove by labored argument that good manners and good morals are valuable; the fact is conceded by all. Nor is it necessary to show that teaching morals and manners is part of the legitimate work of the school-room. This point has in theory long been admitted; it has been orthodox doctrine from the times of the fathers; and the skepticism of our own day, which has questioned all things and denied the most ancient traditions, has still recognized as sound the theory that children should be taught not only how to think but also how to live. Nor is it an obsolete doctrine, forgotten, crowded out by present, vital issues. The moral bearing of education is constantly kept before us; we are urged to educate the masses that they may make not wiser but better men and women; and the strong argument for compulsory education is the prevention of crime. Where we fail, is in the practical application of the doctrine we profess to believe.

We present the subject at our institutes, discuss it at our conventions, but there, alas! we leave it. Like the Civil Service Reform among the politicians, it is in the platform but not in the practice. ³ I do not deny that some spasmodic attempts at moral culture are made by most of us, but I believe that we all follow too closely the example of the old minister who, firstly, took a text; secondly, departed from his text; and thirdly, kept away from it.

How Can We Elevate Our Public Schools

Maria Sanford gave this lecture in 1869, when she was teaching in the Pennsylvania schools.¹ Transcripts were printed in both a local Chester County newspaper and in the Pennsylvania School Journal.²

Sanford lists the ways that public schools can be improved. First, schools must encourage higher student attendance, hire better-trained teachers, and provide clean, beautiful school houses . Second, schools must educate students in ways that develop their character, stressing respect for authority, thoroughness, and proper manners. She speaks at length about why it is important for schools to educate students about the dignity of labor.

How Can We Elevate Our Public Schools

Every true American loves the public school. It is with us an object of personal, national and historic pride. It nourished the infancy of our free institutions, and by it must the strength of their manhood be sustained. There rests, therefore, upon each and all, the rich and the poor, the obscure and the influential, a binding obligation to widen, strengthen, and elevate its influence. It is a trust committed to us for the generations to come; we cannot evade or resign it, and if we neglect it, we imperil all that we hold most sacred. We are in a measure mindful of the charge; we honor the statesman who lifts up his voice for popular education, and we spurn with indignation any attempt to hamper or restrict it. What we lack is a consciousness of individual responsibility. We complain of and mourn over the general indifference, forgetting that faithfulness is contagious, and that had we performed our whole duty, our friends and neighbors would have been roused to earnestness and activity.

The Greatness of Our Work

Maria Sanford, who was teaching in Parkersville at the time, gave this address at the August 4, 1868, meeting of the Pennsylvania Teachers’ Association.¹ She got the opportunity to give this, her first major public address, when asked to substitute for another teacher.²

Sanford’s main argument is that the human desire for greatness is a God-given incentive to continue to work. The nature of much work is that its significance isn’t immediately apparent, either because a person cannot see how their small part contributes to a greater effort, or because the effect accumulates incrementally over time. This is true of teaching, but it is important to persevere because education is crucial to the maintenance of republican government.

The Greatness of Our Work

The desire to do or be something great is as universal in the human mind as fear or love or hatred.

“The dreams we’ve had of deathless name”³ may be locked in memory’s most secret cloister, and, like the graves of loved ones, visited only with regretful tears, but they are sacred treasures never lost, save in the shipwreck of all faith and honor, and powerful unto death to fire the soul to high resolves, and nerve the arm to manly effort. These hopes and aspirations are not vain fancies of egotism and folly, but given by the kind Father as incentives to earnestness and enthusiasm in our daily toil; are not false guides but waymarks of a real glory, which even in this world awaits those who neither faint nor falter at the difficulties of the path.

The angel went down to Georgia

The first chapter in Whitney’s biography is an “unfinished autobiography,” consisting of a series of Sanford’s sepia-toned reminiscences about her youth. Following a brief account of her illustrious ancestors, she describes her parents and their happy, loving marriage. Shortly before Sanford was born, an incident occurred that would shape Sanford’s childhood and form the basis for her opinions about debt and honor:

Some time in the first seven years of his married life¹, my father went to Georgia and set up a shoe store, and he was successful. But the years of 1836 and 1837 were not only years of financial panic, but also of anti-slavery agitation and of great prejudice in the South against Northern people. Somebody sent my father anti-slavery newspapers. He never saw them. They were taken out of his office and distributed among his customers.² All at once his business fell flat. He could sell nothing, he could collect nothing, for even in the best days Southerners, at that time, paid their bills only once a year. He came home to do the best he could by his business creditors. He sold the place he and my mother loved so well,³ moved his family into part of his father’s house, and when he had thus raised all that he could, there still remained a debt of a thousand dollars, for which he gave his note; and of which, I rejoice to say, he paid every cent. It was a heavy burden for a man with only his hands and courage, and with a delicate wife and little children to care for, but he bore it with unwavering cheerfulness. He might have taken advantage of the bankrupt law, but he said proudly: ‘No man shall ever look me in the face and say I wronged him out of a penny.’⁴