A PRIMARY SOURCE FOR EVERETT DEAN
MARTIN'S
AGENDA FOR ADULT
EDUCATION
Michael J. Day
Everett Dean Martin (1880-1941) is a problematic figure to examine. Though
admired by many of his peers for his work in the area of adult education,
Martin is often ignored or dismissed by theorists today. While the views
of one of his contemporaries, Eduard Lindeman, take on a
certain sacredness in the adult education literature, Martin's thought
is often regarded with contempt. Either directly or indirectly adult education
theorists frequently treat Martin as an embarrassment.
To date, examinations of Martin's beliefs regarding adult education are overly
simplistic and overly personal. At times he is dismissed as a smug elitist
who was fixated on classical studies for adults. This was not Martin's primary
focus. Instead, Martin stressed self-reliance, discipline, and the examined
life as the most important objectives of adult education. And, by emphasizing
the formulation of personal values, Martin continued a strain of thought
popularized by individuals such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James.
But Martin was not sympathetic toward an agenda for adult education which
solely stressed the immediate needs of learners. This paper describes Martin's
treatment in the literature, provides a biographical sketch, emphasizing
his years as a minister, and discusses his agenda for adult education as
it directly related to his years as a minister.
TREATMENT IN THE LITERATURE
When Martin died in 1941 the American Association for Adult Education (AAAE)
lost one of its more eloquent voices. By the 1940s Martin was viewed by some
members of the AAAE as the principal architect of the association and author
of its constitution.(1) Echoing these sentiments, Morse Cartwright, Executive
Director of the AAAE from 1926 to 1949, considered Martin to be the "spiritual
father" of the Association.(2) Martin was a prolific writer and lecturer
and one of the major contributors to the Journal of Adult
Education--mouthpiece of the AAAE.(3) Primarily due to his association
with the AAAE, his guidance of the People's Institute in New York City, and
his numerous publications, Martin was acknowledged by a number of individuals
as a major spokesman for the emerging field of adult education in the United
States.
Webster Cotton, in 1968, referred to Martin as "one of that small band of adult educators who effectively articulated the case for adult education in the period between the two world wars."(4) When Martin's The Meaning of a Liberal Education appeared in 1926, the President of the Carnegie Corporation proclaimed it as "the most important contribution to the understanding of adult education. . . thus far made in the United States." In comparing The Meaning of a Liberal Education with Lindeman's The Meaning of Adult Education, also published in 1926, Evans Clark, in a piece for The New York Times Book Review, considered Martin's work, by far, the more brilliant of the two. According to Clark, Martin "painted one of the most attractive portraits of the educated man in the gallery of modern literature."(6) Yet today, while the influence of Lindeman is ever present in the writings of the field of adult education, few authors take notice of Martin.
In an attempt to identify "those figures in adult education who had made a significant contribution to the field," Morris Okun and L. J. Pristo (1979) surveyed members of the Commission of Professors of Adult Education.(7) The researchers reported that Lindeman ranked 11th among the twenty-five highest ranked contributors. Martin's name did not appear. The next year a study conducted by Michael Day and Bill McDermott examined the familiarity of advanced adult education graduate students with specific historic writings.(8) The 1926 publications by Martin and Lindeman, referred to earlier, were included in the study. While 65% of the 245 students queried were familiar with Lindeman's work, only 17% were familiar with Martin's, and a small 4% had read The Meaning of a Liberal Education. Martin was not even mentioned in the popular textbook on adult education authored by Gordon Darkenwald and Sharan Merriam in 1982.(9) Even historians of adult education such as C. Hartley Grattan and Malcolm Knowles hardly referred to Martin in their writings.(10)
At the 1987 Adult Education Research Conference in Laramie, Wyoming, Michael
Day and Donald Seckinger criticized adult education theorists for their disregard
of Martin.(11) The authors noted that Martin continued
to be neglected by researchers, though he had clearly articulated a position
regarding adult education during the 1920s and 1930s. Since the Laramie
conference, two additional treatments of Martin have been published, one
by David Stewart and the other by Harold Stubblefield. In Adult Learning
in America: Eduard Lindeman and His Agenda for Lifelong Education, Stewart
represented Martin as a rival with whom Lindeman had to
contend.(12) In the few paragraphs devoted to Martin,
Stewart dismissed the man as an annoying elitist.(13) But Stewart provided
a more sympathetic view of Martin in his review of Stubblefield's book,
Towards a History of Adult Education in America.(14) In the review,
Stewart presented Martin as a paradoxical figure who "was a forceful and
cogent speaker, having the ability to translate difficult subject matter
into manageable and interesting forms."(15) Stewart also credited Stubblefield
with helping to clarify Martin's relationship with
Lindeman.(16)
Stubblefield's treatment of Martin was much more lengthy and certainly more thorough than Stewart's.(17) Though Martin was once again criticized for professing a narrow view of the purpose of adult education, Stubblefield recognized some of Martin's contributions to the area of adult education: his lifelong commitment to liberal education, his work as the Director of the People's Institute, and his emphasis on mental maturity.
But there remained a number of shortcomings in the depiction of Martin provided
by Stubblefield. Like Stewart, he relied primarily on readily available writings
and secondary sources for his interpretation of Martin's life and ideas.
The sources cited in Stubblefield's section on Martin included five of Martin's
books and a few of his essays. For his discussion of Martin's involvement
with the People's Institute in New York City, Stubblefield depended heavily
on the work of Robert Fisher.(18) A second shortcoming in his treatment of
Martin was biographical. In Stubblefield's brief biographical sketch of Martin's
life there were some mistakes, such as the year Martin departed the
ministry.(19) Lastly, Stubblefield made some suggestions
about Martin's life which were not supported. Without providing evidence
to buttress his observations,
Stubblefield implied that Martin's career in adult education began with
the People's Institute;(20) he stated that Martin
"first presented his theory of humanistic education for adults in
1920,"(21) and that in the thirties, Martin began to concentrate on
"the problem of belief in the modern world."(22)
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Fortunately, materials regarding Martin's life are available. Collections
are located at Cooper Union and the New York Public Library in New York City,
and at Scripps College in Claremont, California. The collections in New York
City primarily cover Martin's work at the People's Institute (1917-1934).
Accessible at Scripps College are a number of Martin's earlier papers and
some files containing correspondence. Among the papers are some drafts of
sermons and lectures given by Martin during his years as a minister,
1906-1915, as well as material from his years as a professor of social
philosophy at Scripps. Also at Scripps, there is a rather interesting collection
of letters written during the Fall of 1915--the
period in which Martin formally left the ministry. An unpublished manuscript
by Martin, believed to be his last, is also located in Claremont.(23) In
addition to these collections, and Martin's numerous books and articles,
researchers have access to nearly 150 works which Martin wrote while he was
a featured columnist for the Des Moines Register and Leader during
the years 1914-1915. A number of Martin's sermons and lectures were also
featured in this newspaper.
Unfortunately, even after consulting all the above sources, the researcher
is presented with little information on Martin prior to 1906. Martin was
born in Jacksonville, Illinois, on July 5, 1880. He was the oldest of at
least six children. Martin's mother (Mollie), it seems, corresponded with
him quite frequently; his father (Bunker E.) was a tobacconist who died of
tuberculosis sometime before 1915. At the age of twenty-four Martin graduated
“Cum Laude” from Illinois College, in Jacksonville, where he also
delivered the Salutatory Address, "College Responsibility."(24) Shortly
thereafter he attended the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. In
1907 he married Esther W. Kirk, also from Jacksonville, and they had three
daughters: Mary, Margaret, and Elizabeth. From 1906 to 1915 Martin served
as a minister in Illinois and Iowa; 1906-08, First Congregational Church,
Lombard, Ill.; 1908-10, People's Church, Dixon, Ill.; 1911-15, the First
Unitarian Church, Des Moines, Iowa. While serving as a minister, Martin gained
a regional and national reputation as a thinker and orator; in 1914 he also
began writing columns for the Des Moines Register and Leader. Then
the threads of success began to unravel.
The year 1915 was cataclysmic for this highly respected minister. Martin
left Des Moines and found work as an editorial writer on the New York
Globe. Complications stemming from the divorce of his first wife caused
Martin to leave the ministry under a cloud of scandal and lose his job on
the globe. While in New York he married Persis E. Rowell and they had a son,
Everett Eastman. The strain of this tumultuous year took its toll, setting
a pattern of ill health which would culminate in his early death.
By the following year calm had returned to Martin's life, and he began an
extremely satisfying and noteworthy relationship with the People's Institute
in New York City. He quickly endeared himself to the Institute through his
lectures on modern psychology. In November 1917 he was appointed Assistant
to the Acting Director and Secretary of the Institute.
As Director of the People's Institute from 1922 to its closing in 1934, Everett
Dean Martin emerged as a major educational figure and social critic. Through
activities such as free public lectures from the podium of the Great Hall
of Cooper Union, Martin preached his secular gospel of adult education, often
before crowds of over 1,000 people. Martin's popular lectures began reaching
even larger audiences in 1920 when The Behavior of Crowds was published.
Within the next fifteen years eight more books appeared, including The
Mystery of Religion (1924), The Meaning of a Liberal Education
(1926), Liberty (1930), The Conflict of the Individual and
the Mass (1932), and Farewell to Revolution (1935). During this
time Martin also established a lasting relationship with Frederick Keppel
of the Carnegie Corporation and became a key figure in the Corporation's
plans for adult education. This success would last for over a decade giving
Martin a well-deserved respite from the preceding years.
Martin's final years were filled with great insecurity precipitated by the
closing of the People's Institute and escalating national and international
unrest and hardship; this insecurity was softened, though, by a third marriage
to Daphne Crane Drake in 1931. In 1936, amidst growing concern over his health
and challenged by an offer from Claremont Colleges in Southern California,
Martin resigned his makeshift position as Director of the Department of Social
Philosophy at Cooper Union and headed west. This venture would fall far short
of expectations though, and with continued failing health, Martin suffered
a fatal heart attack in May, 1941.
Minister and Teacher
A serious omission in earlier treatments of Martin is the complete disregard
of his years as a minister. Martin's views regarding education developed
at the pulpit, not the podium. His interest in the education of adults did
not originate at the People's Institute, as some writers have implied. It
was already well-developed in January of 1911 when Martin accepted the pastoral
position at the First Unitarian Church in Des Moines, Iowa.
One item in the Scripps Collection which attests to Martin's thinking as
far back as 1906, the year he accepted his first ministerial assignment,
is his Bible. On January 9, 1906 Martin inscribed the following thoughts
on the inside leaf of this book:
My creed: I believe in an ever present, imminent God, on whom all things depend from moment to moment. Who working through natural, psychic and moral laws is present in every phenomenon ever working toward perfection in accord with a great plan which I can but half guess, but in which I feel that I as a man have my small part to perform. I am inspired to labor to make this world a little better for my being in it, by Our Jesus, who revealed the ethical or spiritual nature of God in his personality & life & devoutness unto death in service & love to men. I will give my attrition to him and strive to obey him depending upon his example and the personal influence of the God he revealed to keep me in harmony and good will to you & men.(25)
In this inscription Martin provided the foundation for his thought as a minister
and as an adult educator. He believed in a moral and ethical universe and
that specific principles should guide one's life. He also believed that the
life of Jesus embodied these principles and that it should serve as an example
for others to follow.
In December of 1909 Martin made his views regarding the Jesus figure and ethical religion quite clear in a draft of a speech delivered in Chicago titled "The Divinity of Christ." Christianity, Martin argued, was not a faith about Christ, it was Christ's faith.(26) Martin rejected arguments which elevated this figure to a godlike state. He considered Christ to be a man, "prophet, martyr reformer, (and) lover of his fellows. . ."(27) For Martin, ethical religion was immediately lost sight of when Christ was considered superhuman. He viewed the moral perfection of this virtuous man as a human virtue, "won out of the struggles of a life like ours, as an inspiring triumphant achievement of the human spirit. . ."(28) He concluded the presentation with the hope "that the center of faith (was) shifting from the person of Jesus to that social idealism which Jesus (shared) with all souls in all times who really (dared) to believe the kingdom of God."(29)
A month later Martin elaborated upon this theme and also
provided a glimpse of how he viewed his own role as a minister. In
"Christianity is Socialism," a draft of a Sunday morning sermon/lecture,
he stressed that "I do not consider myself a priest but a teacher
[emphasis added] and as such it becomes my privilege to acquaint people
with the mightiest movement of modern times. "(30) The movement Martin referred
to was Socialism:
For anyone who can today enjoy his own possessions in peace and shut out
from his feasting the sobs and groans of broken lives all about him, seeing
nothing wrong in the present order of things with its terrible inevitable
inequalities, its commercialism, its concern for property rights to the neglect
of human rights, the strife and confusion and mercilessness of its competition,
its cheap display and empty pretense, its money madness, its juvenile crime,
its wasted child life, its alcoholism, its widespread hunger in the midst
of plenty, if one does not see that all this involves a radical negation
of the ethics of Jesus [emphasis added], he, of course could not be a
socialist, neither has he sufficient moral insight to enable him to be a
Christian.(31)
To support his argument, Martin once more identified the central theme of
the Bible as the kingdom of God on earth, "a society of peace and
brotherhood."(32) Martin suggested that Christ hoped to establish such a
society and that, like Christ, the socialist looked toward a better and more
just world. For Martin, the core of the socialist movement in America was
based on the ethics of Christ and was fundamentally a moral issue.
He concluded that, "every Christian was at heart a Socialist."(33)
Martin was optimistic, during these years, that a better society was possible.
But for this to happen in the twentieth century, Martin believed, a new type
of individual was needed. In his first sermon as the new pastor of the First
Unitarian Church, January 15, 1911, Martin noted that there was a strange
stirring in the hearts of men, "a new and sudden gleam of insight. A new
type of man (had) been produced."(34) He went on to note that "It is the
function of religion to express the loftiest ideals of the highest type of
life in any age. The real religion of this day counts not in the creed men
profess, nor the texts they repeat, but in that subconscious something in
the hearts of the race, that enable men to hope, to believe in the practicability
of the ideal, to state clearly in terms of real experience the moral issue
of life."(35)
By 1911 Martin had clearly identified what he viewed as the role of "real"
religion in the new century. And, by association, he had already begun to
articulate his view on "real" adult education. This became even more pronounced
in his further discussion of liberal Christianity:
It is the place of liberal Christianity to state the supremacy of the everlasting
ends of life over the means of living, of the believer over the thing believed,
the man over the system, the worker over the product. We are not liberals
because we believe less but because we believe more. We dare to believe without
an infallible guarantee of the substance of our faith in a moral issue. It
is not an historical opinion. Liberalism is not a new system of dogma, but
a new point of view. . . . The place of liberal Christianity is to restore
to the modem man his spiritual
integrity.(36)
This would continue to be the dominate theme of Martin's sermons, lectures,
and writings while he was a minister. It seems already difficult to deny
the influence of William James on Martin's thought. Martin's emphasis on
the integrity of the individual in an unfinished world, and on how people
believe, rather than what they believe, is all quite Jamesian; we shall return
to this theme shortly. But, for his prototype for this new person, Martin
was ever drawn to the life of Christ.
Figure 1 is a depiction of a late fifteenth century painting by Hieronymus
Bosch which captures quite effectively both Martin's sense of liberal
Christianity and his emerging thought on liberal adult education. The image
is titled The Crowning With Thorns. In describing
the subject of the painting, the art historian, Charles DeTolnay, commented,
"The figures surround Christ like a pack of wild beasts: they cling to Him,
forcing the crown of thorns on to His head and tearing off His cloak. With
sad, gentle eyes Christ is seeking out those of the spectator and appealing
to his conscience."(37) Martin's view of Christ seemed to echo that of the
Bosch painting. For Martin, as well, the gentle figure of Christ stood in
the midst of his tormentors with dignity and ideals intact, illustrative
of what the human spirit was capable. For those familiar with works such
as The Behavior of Crowds, the Bosch painting may also nicely illustrate
another major theme of Martin's, that of the individual's struggle against
conformity to crowd opinion and behavior.
Again, in the early months of 1912, Martin optimistically looked to the emergence
of a new type of person "with new ideals and new enthusiasms."(38) The new
person Martin envisioned was perhaps best summarized a few years later in
one of his featured essays for the Des Moines Register and Leader. This
essay, as well, provided an interesting summary of Martin's own beliefs,
since he strongly identified with this new type of individual:
Many men and women of our times are a new type. There
is a constantly increasing number of people in the
world now whose spiritual constitution is a little different from any who
have ever lived before. This new type is gradually becoming conscious of
itself. . . .
We are certainly a new type mentally. We are the heirs of the great scientific
discoverers of the nineteenth century. We are the results of a hundred years
of democratic experiment in government. We are the products of a lot of new
ideas in education.
We are a little more humane, less dogmatic, more restless, less romantic,
more sensitive, less prudish, and we demand more of life than our
ancestors.
We may not be any wiser than the past, but we are more open-minded. We are
more plastic. We are a little less sure of our 'principles' and we care less
about appearances.
But we are earnest. We think we are religious in a little more practical
way. And we, too, are finding the sanctities of living in our own
way.
We feel a little differently about some of the inherited definitions and
customs and social institutions under which our fathers seem to have been
more comfortable than we are.
God knows what we shall do in the world. We mean to make it some better.
But we will gradually make things different; you may be sure of
that.(39)
In addition to the highly ethical life which the Jesus story provided, the
lives and writings of two other individuals strongly influenced Martin's
thinking at this time: William James and Carl Ludwig Nietzsche. Martin considered
James to be the most interesting philosopher that America had
produced.(40) He strongly identified with James.
As suggested earlier, Martin commended the following Jamesian positions:
that both good and evil existed in the world; that the future was open and
not already settled; that with few certainties provided, living was a noble
struggle; and, that the individual will was a major creative force in bettering
the world.(41)
Martin regarded Nietzsche as one of the "most refined, artistic, sensitive,
deeply spiritual souls of the nineteenth century."(42) As in the work of
James, it was the theme of personal struggle and the emphasis on the individual
in Nietzsche's writings which appealed to Martin. Nietzsche's aristocratic
manner also seems to have appealed to Martin. Martin considered Nietzsche
to be a "true aristocratic," i.e., a free spirit, a thinker, a great teacher.(43)
It seems that the works of James and Nietzsche contributed significantly
to Martin's view of the new human type, a new aristocracy whose membership
was to be based on the mental maturity of the individual, not on hereditary,
class, or position. During these formative years Martin already stressed
mental maturity as an agenda for life and for education.
In 1931 editors of the The Nation asked Martin to submit an essay describing his beliefs.(44) In the article Martin noted that how and why people believe was more important than what they believe.(45) This seems to be the same point Martin tried to make during his years as a minister; the new mental type was simply more mature, i.e, sensitive, open-minded and less sure.
The primary method Martin adopted to discuss his secular gospel of maturity was quite similar to that used so effectively at the People's Institute: the lecture series with discussion. In October of 1911 Martin announced a thirty-three session course of lectures titled, "The Jesus Story: In the Light of the Science of Historical Criticism."(46) In his introduction to the series Martin noted, "These lectures are not given in the interests of the dogma of any sect or school, but are designed to acquaint the hearer with the scientific method of bible study as it is applied by recognized biblical scholars of the various churches, and to afford candid discussion of the problems growing out of the origin of the Christian tradition, that we may know the truth about Jesus so far as it may be known at the present time."(47) As in the case of the general lectures at the People's Institute, the public was invited. From 1911 to 1915 he continued the lecture series format. It is interesting to note that in October of 1913 Martin began a sixteen-week series of lectures on "The Meaning of an Education in the Twentieth Century."(48)
MARTIN'S AGENDA FOR ADULT EDUCATION
It seems safe to suggest that Martin primarily viewed himself as a teacher.
As early as 1910 when he was pastor of the People's Church in Dixon, Illinois,
Martin stressed this role. Again, towards the end of his life, part of what
attracted him to a faculty position at Scripps was the prospect of "embarking
upon a truly experimental program in teaching."(49) But, though he was a
teacher, Martin was not really an "academic." He was not university trained
for a teaching/research position in higher education. He held only one "formal"
higher education position, at Scripps, and this appointment came when he
was fifty-six years of age. And, after a three-year trial period, he was
not reappointed. Rather, as the brief biographical sketch of Martin illustrates,
he was trained as a minister. Instead of an academic, Martin might best be
viewed as a "cultivated amateur," what he repeatedly encouraged others to
become.
As an educated amateur Martin viewed the proper task of adult education to
be:
Something which will broaden the interests and sympathies of people regardless
of their daily occupation--or along with it--to lift men's thought out of
the monotony and drudgery which are the common lot, to free the mind from
servitude and herd opinion, to train habits of judgment and of appreciation
of value, to carryon the struggle for human excellence in our day and generation,
to temper passion with wisdom, to dispel prejudice by better knowledge of
self, to enlist all men, in the measure that they have capacity for it, in
the achievement of civilization.(50)
In The Meaning of a Liberal Education, Martin wrote, "Many people
think of education as something 'high-brow,' a fastidiousness which belongs
to the elite. There are those who give the impression that education is a
thing of books and schools and formalities; and that there is a recognized
fraternity of the finished products of the system."(51) But, Martin viewed
adult education quite differently. Adult education was "the organization
of knowledge into human excellence."(52) It was "not the mere possession
of knowledge, but the ability to reflect upon it and grow in wisdom."(53)
Thus, adult education was available to all; one only had to desire its pursuit.
Again, he wrote, "One does not 'get' an education anywhere. One becomes an
educated person by virtue of patient study, quiet mediation, intellectual
courage, and a life devoted to the discovery and service of truth."(54) This
was the way of the educated amateur. This was Martin's way. The agenda for
adult education was to foster this spirit and to promote thinking.
The portrait of Martin gleaned from this review is quite illuminating. While
employed as a minister in Illinois and Des Moines, Martin established himself
as both a lecturer and writer. In his lectures he stressed the ethical and
human characteristics of Jesus, and, rather optimistically, looked toward
a more just and enlightened society based upon Christ's example. When his
writings appeared in 1914, Martin vigorously argued for a new type of individual.
Characteristics of this new human type included sensitivity, experimentation,
and open-mindedness. As suggested, Martin strongly identified with this new
type of individual and was heavily influenced in his thinking by the writings
of James and Nietzsche. During his years as a minister, Martin appeared to
have maneuvered, rather adroitly, through a number of ideologies and roles.
He was a minister and a teacher, a democrat and an aristocrat, an idealist
and a pragmatist, a socialist and an individualist. He was successful, and,
on the surface, he appeared to be a rather satisfied and contented individual.
When Martin began his work with the People's Institute a few years later
his agenda for adult education was already well developed.
NOTES
1. Spencer Miller, Jr., James Creese, and Charles E. Rush, "The Clearing
House," Journal of Adult Education 13 (1941): 313.
2. Morse A. Cartwright, "Everett Dean Martin," Journal of Adult Education
13 (1941): 324.
3. Michael Day, "Adult Education as a New Educational Frontier: Review of
the Journal of Adult Education, 1929-1941," (Ph.D. diss., The University
of Michigan, 1981), 126.
4. Webster Cotton, On Behalf of Adult Education: A Historical Examination
of the Supporting Literature (Boston: Center for the Study of
Liberal Education for Adults, Boston University, 1968), 23.
5. Frederick P. Keppel, "Education as a Lively Art," review of The Meaning
of a Liberal Education, by Everett Dean Martin,
The Yale Review 16 (1927):
791.