Moron pt. II – The Vineland Training School and Menantico Colony

Starting in 1913 the Vineland Training School operated a farm called the Menantico Colony. At the time known as the Vineland Training School for Backward and Feeble-minded Children, the school purchased 530 acres of land that was predominately scrub growth of oak and pine in order to cultivate it into arable land. Utilizing the labor of the institutionalized boys, the school went on to produce an abundance of corn, berries and sweet potatoes among a host of other fruits and vegetables.

It is difficult to ascertain who, exactly, had worked the farms. As mentioned in the above video, many of the institutionalized persons were not mentally handicapped but likely suffered from behavioral and cognitive problems that disupted day-to-day life, of which modern psychologists have come to more formally label. Whether there is an ethical distinction between having mentally challenged children work the farm and having recalcitrant young boys work the farm is uncertain. Where one side, the mentally-challenged children, could not consent, the badly-behaved boys had the mental capacity to do so.

At the time it was largely reported, and it remains to be the matter of record, that the work would be good for the boys. And the suggestion that such work would be good for the boys, character-building, motivational, and potential-unlocking, is hardly debatable. But it raises some ethical questions. Is it ethical or is it exploitative to utilize the unpaid labor of young boys, even if they are not coerced? Even if they had worked the farm under their own free will (which was likely the case), considering their institutionalized status as stipulated by parental consent, were they of fully volitional condition? Or does it count as tacit exploitation on the part of the Training School?

Either way, the Vineland Training School’s method of treatment conformed to the expectations of society in the early 20th Century. Their methods would probably be preferable even today. The children were treated well, for one. Furthermore, the Vineland Training School’s placement of the feeble-minded into farmwork was perhaps the least controversial and most acceptable of options. A 1919 report commissioned to observe the treatment of the feeble-minded in society, The Kallikaks of Kansas, epitomizes the contemporary views of most of society toward the mentally deficient. There was an imperative in place, that they had to be dealt with in some fashion that was perhaps the most humane but most importantly preventative of their integration and cross-fertilization:

“Up to the present time only a very small part of the feeble-minded population in any state has been housed at all, and very few of these in the proper sort of institution. The colony offers a cheap, safe and happy home for these innocents, where they will be kept from pauperism, crime and disease, and from burdening society with their numerous defective offspring […] The clearing of land offered an outlet for the destructive tendencies of the boys, which are very marked when they are closely confined at school and in institutions or are permitted to roam the streets. Instead of breaking windows, stealing and destroying property, or setting fire to haystacks and buildings, these boys are happy to cut down bushes, pull up stumps and bum the brush heaps. What boy ever lived who is not willing to work all day to gather material for a bonfire? […] The happiness of all the boys is notable. Besides they feel that they are doing something really worth while as the results of their labors become more and more evident. They also appreciate that they are making for themselves a home. They speak of ‘our colony,’ ‘our field,’ and ‘my cow,’ or ‘my pig.'”

Mentioned previously in the Moron post which elaborated on the role of Henry Goddard in the Vineland Training School, endeavors to segregate and sterilize the feeble-minded were fully mainstream and also academic. Perhaps the efforts of the Vineland Training School and other similar institutions to keep the children working on farms were bulwarks against less humane alternatives.

A 1920 Chamber of Commerce trade journal stated, “If one is fortunate enough to be escorted by an official in a round of inspection, there is inspiration in the trip. The faces of the inmates light up as they are approached and they call out their greetings with unmistakable pleasure. it is not an official making the rounds, but an elder brother come to visit awhile. This is the enveloping atmosphere at the Training School at Vineland. The home appears to run itself. We remarked this one day to our conductor. She stopped, smiling and musing. ‘And yet,’ she replied, ‘someone always knows where someone is.’ ‘Control without compulsion’ — that is the secret. ‘We believe in happiness first — all else follows,’ is a school truism.”

Whether that is fact or farce, at the very least there was a perception of goodwill inferred by the children on the part of the institution.

Farewell Post: Only a Hiatus

After this week’s blog posts, I’ll be waiting out the rest of 2012. These upcoming posts may very well be the last on this blog, but it’s much more likely that I’ll be returning in some fashion. Some incarnation of this blog will be continued in January 2013, possibly incorporated into another blog.

The narrow focus of chiefly Cumberland County history has been good for discovering oft-overlooked people, places, events and ideas. But I may broaden the scope. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’ll be something more ambitious. That’s a scary word that carries a connotation of –gulp—responsibility. And there is a trend of my oversold and overstated goals floundering completely. So I’ll be keeping it, whatever it turns out to be, simple and tight.

My first “greatest hit” is The First Pioneer Artist of Glasstown Speaks. I most enjoy watching the Dennis Tawes video, for he is a creative spirit. It didn’t take any prodding from me (nor much post-production editing) for him to weave together a coherent story from his disparate ruminations on art. My second greatest hit, and the post I most enjoyed writing was last week’s on The Tea Burning of 1774. It’s an event with a number of elements I find appealing: early American history, rebellion & social unrest, economics and even a little maritime activity. My third and fourth greatest hits are An Insight Into Glass and A Brief Comment on Glass Art. Glass is so central to South Jersey, especially Cumberland County. Glass, as an industry, commodity and artform, is so interwoven with the history of the area that it deserved three posts. David Iams is also very informative. My fifth greatest hit, and the post that got the most attention and feedback was the Moron post. A little low on the content side, I thought, but that will be fixed very soon. Very soon.

Thanks. After Monday, check back in January for updates.

The Tea Burning of 1774

There is perhaps no event more seared into the nation’s mythos as the defining image of the Revolution than the Boston Tea Party. An incident of less renown but one that similarly captures the agitative spirit of the war of American independence occurred in 1774 in Greenwich, NJ. The actions of the British inspired the war-hastening vandalism of the Boston Tea Party which in turn inspired the copycat tea burning at Cumberland County a year later.

Greenwich still exists and is the location of the former and current Cumberland County Historical Society headquarters, the Wood Mansion and the Gibbon House respectively. At the time, however, Greenwich was a small farming community. A ship called the Greyhound, carrying a cargo of tea from the East India Tea Company set out through the Delaware Bay with Philadelphia as the destination. Given that Philadelphia was the intellectual epicenter of the revolutionary movement, in order to avoid encountering hostilities from the radically-minded, the Greyhound did not dock there directly. They made their way through the Cohansey River to Greenwich and stored the cargo at the cellar belonging to the loyalist Daniel Bowen for safekeeping.

The county’s inhabitants formed an impromptu, locum tenens committee of five citizens to secure the tea. On December 22, a more formal assembly was convened in Bridgeton, attended by representatives of the various townships of Cumberland County. Due to the mysteriousness of the circumstances, from the arrival to the identity of the importer, the assembly agreed to store the tea pending investigation.

The importer was, of course, the East India Tea Company. The East India Tea Company was a joint-stock company chartered by Britain that by 1774 was substantially controlled and administered by the Crown. The Tea Act of 1773 incited a great pathos among the Colonial Americans, and a great anger. The Act was a protectionist measure by Britain, an effort to outmaneuver independent tea merchants by selling directly to consumers in the American colonies at lower prices than the merchants could match. Covertly, it was an attempt to get Americans to consent to the notorious “taxation without representation” laterally through the direct purchasing of British goods.

The morning following the assembly, the committee discovered that the tea chests had been seized, stolen, and destroyed. The perpetrators were reputedly disguised as Boston Mohawks but it is difficult to discern what’s fact and what’s legend of an era in which the reliability of the historical records is hampered by the communicative limitations of rurality. The tea burners are believed to have been members of the Admonishing Society in Bridgeton, another of the type of clubs of young men that met in coffeehouses and discussed politics, a staple of the intelligentsia throughout Europe and America since the Age of Enlightenment. It was members of the closely-knit network of friends and families that were the Elmers, Ewings, Fithians, Newcombs, Piersons, Howells, Hunts and Seelys, who were tried for the crime. Having the sympathy of much of the county’s residents, no one was ever indicted. The May 1775 trial had a jury stacked in the favor of the radicals and the September 1775 trial had a jury stacked with Tories but both resulted in the same: the tea burners had garnered garnered enough public support to avoid prosecution, or at the very least the people of the county had vindicated the tea burners because they implicitly agreed with their actions.

Reference material

Gerlach, Larry R. Prologue to Independence: New Jersey in the Coming of the American Revolution. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1976. Print.

The First Pioneer Artist of Glasstown Speaks

Fourteen years ago the city of Millville sought to establish a hub of economic and cultural activity. The efforts to renovate High Street into a centerpiece of the local community led to the creation of the Glasstown Arts District. What is ostensibly six blocks of stores and galleries has courted artists from across the country to reside there. The Pioneer Artist program offers loans of up to $5,000 at 0% interest to artists relocating there from elsewhere. The first Pioneer artist was Dennis Tawes from Jacksonville, who operates the Amethyst Gallery, a small cottage in a series of cottages located at 212 North High Street. His style is primarily that of wildly vibrant expressionism. The walls of his gallery are adorned with paintings, some of them naturalist, some of them abstract, all of them somewhat quirky. In the video below he goes into some of the detail of his process and reveals what he thinks art is.

Some of his work is available at his website. Or his work can be seen on the Third Fridays of every month.

The Seldom Mentioned History of Jewish Settlements in South Jersey

The era of “New Immigration” in the 1880s saw an emergence of immigrants from places like Russia that until then hadn’t typically been places immigrants emerged from. Within Russia was a multitude of Jewish citizens who existed in strife with the rest. The facets of Russian Nationalism, Tsardom and the Orthodox Church constituted the majoritarian will under which Jews subsisted. Though it could be suggested that the prima facie majoritarian will was really reflective of authoritarianism, the rule of Tsar Alexander III ensconced in “reactionary nationalism in the name of Slavophile ideals” ¹ A much more probable paradigm of populism would take shape during the February Revolution of 1917 and undermine (and shortly thereafter kill) the Romanov dynasty.

Jews, in an effort to escape the pogroms, forced ghettoization and lack of political franchise in Russia, were among the waves of immigrants in the 1880s. While many would come to reside in New York City, an overlooked amount came to New Jersey. Across the United States, Jewish settlers, contrary to stereotypes of Jews as merchants, shopkeepers and craftsmen that congregated at or near urban centers, instead became farmers. Farming colonies were formed in New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado, Iowa, Texas and Michigan, among other states. However, the farms in New Jersey survived the trials and tribulations that the farms in those other states did not. The colonies in the South and the West faced demise because they could not overcome “poor soil, the climate, malaria or some other disease, prairie fires, lack of water or wood or equipment, floods, crop failures, inadequate markets, high interest rates, [and] burdensome mortgages.” ² The colony on Sicily Island 160 miles northeast of New Orleans and the successor colony in Arkansas could not be saved from “the typical disasters of the region; torrential rainstorms, malaria, yellow fever, floods, heat, and isolation.” ³

The farms in New Jersey mostly survived where the others perished, excelling in spite of the difficulties, primarily due to congregating toward the fertile crescent that is South Jersey. Or whatever shape South Jersey is. In actuality, South Jersey is, or was, not particularly fertile at all: “When the poor, wild soil did not yield what it could not yield, when willing hands failed to find work that would help fill the bread basket, and when the aid of charity had to be invoked; then there was but little sunshine to cheer the dismal gloom. And the colonists had reason to feel discouraged. Theirs was a thin, shifting soil, which ages ago had been sorted and resorted by the waves, and the ocean was chary about leaving it little besides the rounded grains of quartz which compose 98 percent of the soil. Long years of hopeless toil, theirs and their children’s, were before them, and after all that work honestly and conscientiously performed what would they have? Unlike the fertile plains of the northwest, or the Tchernosyem of southern Russia, these South Jersey soils call for the application of manures or of commercial fertilizers, and without them they yield scarcely anything.” ⁴ The farmers persisted and found local markets for their produce and milk which was in great demand. They sold their grape wine in large quantities to New York and Philadelphia, especially to supply the Passover trade; “it is claimed by competent judges that some of the port wine from the South Jersey colonies is superior to that from California.” ⁵

“Three towns marked the roughly triangular area in which the first New Jersey colonies were established: Vineland, Bridgeton, and Millville, all in Cumberland County.” ⁶ There is some synchronicity to the founding of Vineland by Charles K. Landis and the founding of these farming communities; Landis’ acquisition of property was largely motivated by a utopian vision and so too had these Jewish agrarian surveyors been motivated by utopianism. There was the Zionist sort of impulse in continuum with idealistic and ambitious colonization efforts. “While Americans saw in the Russian immigrants an opportunity to disprove ‘the oft-muttered calumny,” young intellectuals and idealists in Russia also wanted to prove to the world that ‘the Jew can live from the produce of mother earth.’ Although they had no experience in farming, they were committed to the idea of cooperative agricultural settlements. In 1881, they formed two groups: Bilu and Am Olam. Bilu prepared for immigration to Erez Israel, Am Olam for farming in America.” ⁷ Whereas the Bilu path is more inveterate in the Zionist imagination for being the impetus for the creation of the modern state of Israel, the Am Olam path sought providence not in the arid Palestine at which movement would be conditional upon the Ottoman residers, but in America. Influenced less by religion than by utopian ideas of emancipation and secular humanism and even at times socialism, the promise of prosperity through merit and enlightenment through labor emblemized by America was most alluring.

The farmers had versatile reasons for choosing their lifestyles. Some cited economic concerns, or religious concerns such as adherence to the Sabbath being easier in a rural rather than urban profession. “Some spoke of an ancient desire to own land of their own, so long denied most of them in the Pale of Settlement. Restless and rootless, the Jewish farmers looked for ‘a better, quiter life’ for themselves and their families. In a very real sense, the land, the farm, was a place which could nurture the fragile shoots of an uprooted family. To become rooted to one place in America was to become rooted to the whole of the new country, to make it a home.” ⁸

1. Brandes, Joseph, and Martin Douglas. Immigrants to Freedom; Jewish Communities in Rural New Jersey since 1882. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1971. 17. Print.

2. Brandes and Douglas. 49.

3. Brandes and Douglas. 47.

4. Bernheimer, Charles S., Ph.D. The Russian Jew in the United States: Studies of Social Conditions in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, with a Description of Rural Settlements. 1905. 376-388.

5. Bernheimer

6. Brandes and Douglas. 50.

7. Dubrovsky, Gertrude Wishnick. The Land Was Theirs: Jewish Farmers in the Garden State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1992. 11. Print.

8. Dubrovsky. 47.