Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[H]ow does a great mind become great? Part of the answer is of course nature; DNA is surely part of the equation. But what about nurture?
Take John Dewey, for instance. What made him one of America’s most influential thinkers during his lifetime? Was there something about his upbringing in Burlington that set him on the path to greatness? Was it something about his parents, or perhaps the brother he never met?
Dewey isn’t talked about today nearly as much as he was during his own life. Historian Henry Steele Commager wrote in 1950 that “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for a generation no major issue was clarified until Dewey had spoken.” Though Dewey was 91 at the time that Commager commented, he was still working, still thinking big thoughts. “Dewey has been to our age what Aristotle was to the later Middle Ages, not a philosopher, but the philosopher,” noted historian Hilda Neatby.
The philosopher was born in Burlington just before the outbreak of the Civil War. He began his education in local public schools before moving on to the University of Vermont, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He then taught two years at a high school in Oil City, Pennsylvania, and for one at a middle school in Charlotte, Vermont. He returned to his studies, earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago. He later moved east to teach at Columbia University.
During his career, Dewey served as president of both the American Philosophical Association and the American Psychological Association. He supported women’s suffrage and played a minor role in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His first wife, Alice Chipman, hosted meetings of African-American women to discuss the suffrage issue at their New York City apartment.
Dewey spread his beliefs by publishing more than two dozen books and 700 academic journal articles in the fields of education, philosophy, psychology, religion, logic, politics, ethics and art.
Dewey’s writings were pivotal to the country’s educational reforms during the early 20th century. He opposed the authoritarian structure and rote learning inherent in most schools, arguing that students must be invested in their schoolwork to learn. Dewey wanted schools to be run along democratic lines to prepare students to be active citizens.
Schools, he wrote, must offer “an embryonic community life, active with types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society and permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history and science. When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious.”
Where did this brilliant and energetic mind come from?
One important influence was his mother. Lucina Artemisia Rich Dewey had grown up on a prosperous farm in Shoreham. From her, Dewey gained his admiration for rural life. Dewey thought children in urban areas should be taught about the productivity and independence that could be experienced in a farming family.
His mother’s family also provided role models of leadership. Dewey’s maternal grandfather was a member of the state Legislature and his mother’s cousin was president of UVM. Lucina pushed her sons to follow in those footsteps.
Lucina also tried to get her sons to adopt her evangelical Protestant faith. Dewey often recalled his mother asking whether he was a sinner or was he “right with Jesus.” But the pastor of Dewey’s childhood church, the First Congregational Church, Lewis Brastow, was of a more liberal bent than Lucina had grown up with. He downplayed the value of personal piety, instead encouraging respect for intelligence and social action.
If Brastow influenced Dewey’s later activism, he also had an effect on Lucina’s. She worked with charitable organizations, in her words, to make Burlington a “temperate and moral city…a city of virtuous and happy homes.” She also worked to supplement the education Dewey and his brothers were getting at Burlington’s public schools and to get them ready for college.
Dewey found his mother’s constant attention difficult to take. One biographer suggests that his mother’s smothering attentiveness motivated him to exert his independence and find a career outside the narrow confines of Vermont.
If his mother represented the religious side of American life, his father represented the commercial. Though raised on a farm in Fairfax, Archibald Dewey was a born salesman. He thrived in the hurly-burly world of retail. He spent most of his adult life as a grocer. Archibald was remembered for his humorous advertisements. One offered “Hams and cigars, smoked and unsmoked.” Of one cigar brand, he wrote, “a good excuse for a bad habit.” Though he had a limited formal education, Archibald was well-read and could be heard reciting Milton and Shakespeare while walking to work.
Archibald, however, was absent for some of Dewey’s formative years. When the Civil War erupted, Archibald enlisted in the First Vermont Cavalry, though he was 50 and could have stayed home. Dewey was less than 2 at the time. He would see little of his father for the next three years. When Dewey was about 5, his mother moved the family to Virginia to be nearer Archibald. The devastation wrought by war that the young Dewey saw may have informed his later opposition to violence.
The family moved back to Burlington in 1867, but father and son never became close. Years later, in a belated birthday note to his son, Archibald wrote that the actual day had been too fine to take time to write a note. But Archibald swore he hadn’t forgotten the date of “your burglarious entrance into the family circle.”
Poorly chosen words to say the least. How was Dewey to interpret them other than to think his father believed he had no rightful place in the family?
John Dewey was something of a replacement child to his parents. He was the second John Dewey born to them. The first John Dewey, whose middle name was Archibald, was born in Burlington in 1856. One January day in 1859, when he was only two and a half years old, the boy fell backward into a bucket of hot water and was scalded. His parents treated the wounds themselves, using the folk remedy of applying sweet oil and wrapping him in bandages. This being winter, the boy was left near the fire to stay warm. The fire’s heat ignited the oil-soaked bandages.
“The last mishap added to the pain of the little sufferer, as well as to this parents’ distress,” wrote the Burlington Free Press the next morning. The paper assured readers that the scalding was the main cause of death, but who can really say?
Nine months after John Archibald Dewey’s death, Lucina gave birth to another boy. This one they named simply John Dewey, dropping the middle name.
Maybe this accident of birth was the spark that lit the fire inside John Dewey. Perhaps, then, it makes sense that he was one of two John Deweys. After all, he accomplished enough for two lifetimes.
Note: John Dewey’s ashes are buried beside Ira Allen Chapel at UVM, where he earned his undergraduate degree.
