ABSTRACT
What does it mean to do curriculum history at this particular juncture?Petra Munro (1998, 263) Born in Massachusetts on October 9, 1881, the eldest daughter of a Protestant minister, Laura Bragg spent a year of her childhood in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the birthplace of Ida B. Wells, elementary-school teacher, journalist and, most famously, anti-lynching activist. When Bragg lived in Holly Springs (1890), Wells had already moved to Memphis and was no longer a teacher but a journalist, soon to be mobilized into activism by the lynching of one of her friends (Pinar 2001, 464). After briefly (the Bragg family remained in Mississippi for two years: Allen 2002, 180) teaching mathematics at Rust University (where Ida B. Wells had studied), a black school in Holly Springs founded in 1866 by the Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (still in session today), the Reverend Lyman Bragg returned to New England, where Laura Bragg would study first in her father’s library1-as did Jane Addams (Knight 2005, 50)—and then at Simmons College, where she studied the liberal arts and became a librarian. Bragg worked as librarian after her graduation in 1906, first on Orr’s Island off the coast of Maine, then in Charleston, South Carolina, where she also taught science, both at the Museum and at a local private girls’ school.2 At the Museum, she created traveling school exhibits-later known as Bragg’s Boxes-that became the major focus of the Museum’s educational program. They were a key element of her responsibilities3 (Allen 2001, 36).In 1920, Laura Bragg was appointed director of the Charleston Museum, the first woman so appointed. After serving 11 years, Bragg took up the directorship of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts Museum, where she introduced to the often artistically conservative local patrons not only the avant-garde-among them the sculptor Alexander Calder (1898-1976)—but socially progressive exhibits focused on contemporary social problems. Bragg retired after one such exhibit-the “World of Today,” staged in 1939 (see note15)—and returned to Charleston, where she lived a long life, still teaching not only classes but informally at her evening salons, held nearly every night before her illness and death (Allen 2001, 201). Outliving all of her immediate family
and her closest friends, Bragg was almost 97 when she died on May 16, 1978 (Allen 2001, 212; 199).These are only the main points in the life of Laura Bragg, points discussed in detail in Louise Anderson Allen’s (2001) fine biography. Here I focus on what I take to be the educational expression of Bragg’s homoeroticism through her progressive pedagogical politics, specifically materialized in the traveling school exhibits. Informing my sense of the interrelatedness of her private desire and public pedagogy is the poetic political sense of American democracy expressed by Walt Whitman, whose work Harold Bloom (1994; Tröhler 2006, 94) declared as central to the American canon of literature and poetry. In one of his later dedicatory poems, “Staring From Paumanok,” Whitman wrote:
My comrade! For you to share with me two greatnesses, and a third one rising inclusive and more resplendent, The greatnesses of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion (1881, 23; quoted in Tröhler 2006, 95). Like other progressives (Tröhler 2006) but no disciple (Anderson 2008), John Dewey was taken with Whitman’s democratic vision.4 These three interconnected “greatnesses”—love, democracy, and religion-are materialized, I suggest, in Laura Bragg’s Boxes. Protestantism and Progressivism
Bragg was always the teacher. Louise A. Allen (2001, 202) Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Daniel Tröhler (2006, 92) explains, liberal movements in U.S. theology encouraged “worldly redemption,” translating Christianity5 into a “secular religion.” Protestantism, Tröhler (2006, 99) argues, comprised “a fundamental part of the American mentality” during the Progressive Era (1890-1920). Tröhler stresses the non-dogmatic character of this religious understanding, not specific to any denomination or church; it is best understood, he suggests, as an “all-encompassing certainty rather than as a sect” (2006, 99). Reacting to modernization (especially industrialization) and inspired by Protestantism, early progressives committed themselves to building-through education-the kingdom of God on earth. To personify the point, Tröhler (2006, 105) quotes Dewey: “I believe that in this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.” For progressives, then, democracy was social redemption (Tröhler 2006, 102), an idea not entirely unique to the nineteenth century, as McKnight (2003) makes clear. As Freud appreciated, the distinction between earthly and heavenly fathers often blurs in the psychic lives of children. Laura Bragg was never
especially devoted to her heavenly father (Allen 2001, 48). Like Jane Addams, it was her earthly father who was the primary male figure in her life, Bragg’s confidant until his death in April 1927. Allen (2001, 12) points out that Bragg’s intimacy with her father mirrors other early twentieth-century progressive women’s relationships with their fathers, recalling Grumet’s (1988) argument that late nineteenth-century women teachers were rejecting enforced domesticity when they embraced the independence and worldliness associated with public school teaching. While hardly a prerequisite for public service, did the rejection of women’s (and some men’s, as Kevin Murphy points out, as we see later) traditional gender and sex roles prove helpful to these fin de siècle activists in appreciating the plight of “others”? Like her minister father, Laura Bragg moved to the American South “to do missionary work” (Allen 2001, 26). Allen (2001, 35) characterizes Bragg as “a self-proclaimed social missionary and reformer” who saw in museums institutional opportunities for self-improvement and social reconstruction. Though Allen says “self ” and not “social,” the two were interrelated, if not conflated. If wealth was the sign of salvation in certain strands of Protestantism, a life of public service was the secular sign of self-improvement. Like a supplicant, Bragg was, Allen (2001, 205) tells us, “always learning, studying intensely.” For Bragg, learning was a “continuous process” (Allen 2001, 205). For Bragg, “life was always under construction,” Allen (2001, 205) continues, “and so was understanding.” This constructed character of Bragg’s understanding was materialized in her traveling school exhibits. Bragg’s Boxes
Bragg boxes were unique. Louise A. Allen (2001, 171) Upon Bragg’s arrival in Charleston, the Museum’s educational program included one traveling school exhibit. It was, Allen (2001, 41) tells us, an “unimaginative exhibit of loose items.” In addition to increasing the number of exhibits-by the close of 1914, under Bragg’s leadership, the Museum’s Department of Public Instruction had constructed 63 traveling school exhibits-Bragg added stories for teachers to read to students. Housed in green wooden boxes with handles and hinged doors, when opened the exhibits displayed staged scenes affording children glimpses, for example, of the wildlife within their region or of the people and their customs in other countries.Rather than waiting for requests, Bragg shipped the exhibits automatically, enabling more of the exhibits to be in circulation. Beginning in 1913, Bragg sent the exhibits to both white and black schools (Allen 2002, 185). Providing the same educational services to both black and white children during the second decade of the twentieth century in Charleston, South Carolina was “both fearless and brazen” (Allen 2001, 42). Allen (2001, 50)
suggests that Bragg recognized that the ignorance and apathy of Charleston’s population followed from the political and social stranglehold conservatives who controlled the city and state maintained. Rather than confront this state apparatus directly, Bragg focused on teaching, realizing, as many social progressives did, that “it is absurd to expect the public … to rise above the intellectual level of its average constituents” (Dewey 1991 [1927], 60).Tireless (she fell ill regularly, evidently owing to overwork), Bragg taught nature study courses for first-, second-, and third-grade public school teachers. Later (Allen 2001, 56), Bragg taught summer school for teachers at the Museum, offering courses on geography, nature study, and local history. Bragg’s classroom teaching was extended through the traveling school exhibits. The natural history exhibits were regularly used in the elementary grades while the industrial exhibits were typically used in the sixth and seventh grades. There were several public schools, however, wherein the principals directed that the exhibits be used in all the grades. Fourteen private schools in Charleston borrowed them (Allen 2001, 50). Not only Bragg appreciated the exhibits’ “drawing power” (Allen 2001, 50). The Museum’s work with the public schools so impressed the Board of Public School Commissioners, Allen (2001, 50) reports, that they passed a special resolution on January 26, 1914 requesting extension of the Museum’s work with the city schools and seeking formal affiliation with the Museum. By 1916, every primary teacher was directed to use Bragg’s nature study curriculum. The traveling school exhibits were aligned with Bragg’s curriculum; teachers also brought their students to the Museum for classes. At the Museum, Bragg taught summer school for teachers on subjects, with credit given as if the course had been provided by a normal school or a university summer school (Allen 2002, 184).By the fall of 1919 (Allen 2001, 57), Bragg had increased the circulation of the traveling school exhibits to all the white schools in the county, with the parcel post costs assumed by the county school commissioners. Seven of the city’s public schools (both black and white) received the exhibits, as did 10 of the private schools. Additionally, the Museum was shipping the exhibits to more distanct places across the state, among them the Greenville Woman’s College, where they were employed as a demonstration of grammar-school teaching methods.During the period 1925-1930, every school in the city was involved in the educational program at the Museum to some degree (Allen 2001, 118). In 1926, for instance (Allen 2001, 120), Bragg was shipping 147 exhibits to 30 city and county public schools and nine private schools. Accompanying the exhibits were 100 traveling school libraries. By 1927, Bragg’s traveling school exhibits were being shipped to all the schools in the city and the county and, for the first time, they were systematically circulated to the county’s black schools as well. In 1928, Bragg worked to become directly involved with the black community by securing books for use in black schools (Allen 2001, 122). By 1928 (Allen 2001, 123), there were 160 traveling exhibits
circulating regularly in the city schools (white, black, and private) and in the country schools.Despite white resistance, Bragg continued to press against the color line: In 1917, the Museum’s trustees agreed to allow classes of black students to visit the Museum when accompanied by a teacher. (They disallowed admission to black adults, however, even to black maids accompanying white children under the age of five [Allen 2001, 63]). During her first year as director, however, with the mayor’s support, Bragg succeeded in opening the Museum to black patrons, if only on Saturday afternoons.6 “Crossing the color line was beyond the pale,” Allen (2001, 80) comments, “and her conduct provoked many Charlestonians.” African Americans were not the only minority in whom Bragg took an interest.7 For a time, Bragg became interested in Indians native to South Carolina and, specifically, to the “low country.” She participated in excavating various Indian mounds around the area and planned to publish a survey of them (Allen 2001, 99). American archeology is sometimes credited as starting with Thomas Jefferson’s sponsorship of excavations of Indian mounds (Conn 2004, 9); through much of the nineteenth century, American archaeology and mounds were “virtually cotermininous” (Conn 2004, 120).As noted, Bragg also took an interest in Chinese culture and religion through her “China Boy” (quoted Allen 2001, 111). Despite the patronizing phrase, Chia Mei became important to Bragg.8 In the fall of 1927, just after the arrival of the other five Chinese students, it was rumored that Bragg had applied for Poetry Society membership for all her “babies” (Allen 2001, 113). Unsurprisingly, there was resistance among whites. In response, Bragg formed the Ta T’ung Club. When Bragg invited “respectable young ladies” to meet the Chinese cadets at her home or at picnics, she “set many tongues wagging.” Whites in Charleston considering the Chinese “colored” (Allen 2001, 114).9The traveling school exhibits did not rely on visuality alone. Perhaps sensitized by her own deafness (Allen 2001, 123), Bragg appreciated the significance of touch as “a real asset in teaching.” In an interview conducted many years later, Bragg spoke of the importance of children touching, even handling, the items in the exhibits. Birds and other animals had to be replaced regularly in the exhibits as they were “petted to death” (Allen 2001, 123). Her work was recognized by the Rosenwald Fund,10 which granted Bragg $5,000 for the traveling school exhibits (Allen 2001, 126). Bragg also focused on exhibits at the Museum. During 1915, Bragg planned for a history of man exhibit, illustrating the “development of civilization from the most primitive peoples through the Egyptians and Assyrians to modern times” (quoted in Allen 2001, 59), including large casts of Egyptian and Assyrian sculpture. Though the scheme seemed to echo the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair-in which the summit of civilization (The White City) was located at the opposite end of the fairway from those exhibitions of presumably primitive societies (Pinar 2001, 487 ff.)—Bragg, as Allen (2001,
94) points out, held “no brief for the Nordic race theory.” Indeed, Bragg felt that culture museums can “change our supercilious attitude toward the rest of the world” (quoted in Allen, 2001, 95).After moving to Pittsfield in 1931, Bragg continued this educational work. Though Bragg’s educational labor did not prove controversial in Pittsfield, her art exhibitions did. Despite favorable publicity in The New Yorker and Art News, many local patrons found the modern art Bragg exhibited distasteful, even objectionable (Allen 2001, 167). In 1933 (Allen 2001, 177), Bragg exhibited the work of Alexander Calder, his first exhibit in the United States. The first American museum director to recognize Calder’s genius, Bragg purchased for the Museum two motorized sculptures, The Arc and the Quadrant and Dancing Torpedo Shape. In 1934, Gertrude Stein lectured at the Museum during her two-and-a-half-month tour of the United States. Stein praised Picasso and dismissed Thomas Hart, Diego Rivera, and James Whistler. Local patrons admired Hart and Whistler, and Stein’s dismissal of them was not well received (Allen 2001, 184). Demonstrating that her progressive vision for the Berkshire Museum extended beyond challenging exhibits, Bragg invited Richard Lull, professor of paleontology at Yale, to lecture on evolution (Allen 2001, 182). The lectures and the exhibits would lead to intensifying controversy over Bragg and her leadership (Allen 2001, 184).It was in Pittsfield, Allen (2001, 171) reports, that the traveling school exhibits became known as Bragg’s Boxes. Built in boxes, the exhibits opened “like stage sets” (Allen 2001, 171). Now on display were objects and scenes representing various subjects in the curriculum, among them cultural history, geography, and natural history as well as industrial subjects and topics specific to Berkshire County. Exhibits included pictures (often from a government bulletin or an issue of National Geographic) as well as other items related to the topic of the exhibit (such as stamps or post cards: Allen 2002, 185). As in Charleston, each exhibit included a teacher’s story and items for students to touch.For children who rarely came to the Museum, Bragg’s Boxes represented “windows on the world” (Allen’s phrase: 2001, 171). They functioned as well to socialize rural and immigrant families to the “prevailing American values,” Allen (2001, 171) suggests. Given that Bragg was invited to speak to the national Progressive Education Association meeting in Baltimore in February 1932, it seems the American values to which Bragg’s Boxes socialized students were values associated with social reconstruction rather than those associated with social efficiency.11 Traveling school exhibits were the major focus of the Museum’s educational activities during this period, as indicated in Bragg’s 1934 report (Allen 2001, 173). In 1936, The New York Times reported on the boxes, citing Bragg’s conviction that if the people cannot come to the museum, the museum must go to the people. Adopted by museums in several sections of the country, Bragg boxes were now nationally known.
