City and State excerpt March 30, 1899, p. 212 - 213

City and State, March 30, 1899, pp. 212-213, 1899.45029

DR. FRAZER AND THE EDUCATIONAL HOME

We give space elsewhere to a letter from the pen of our excellent friend, Dr. Persifor Frazer, in which he takes exception to our strictures upon the past and present management of the Educational Home. To the main points of our correspondent’s objections we herewith reply.

Dr. Frazer speaks of discrepancy in the account of Superintendent. Given and that of Mr. Matthew K. Sniffen concerning the visit of the latter, which was made in company with David Peake (a former pupil of the Home) last December. The implication of Dr. Frazer’s remark is that Mr. Sniffen’s statement is untrue. We reply that it is strictly accurate. Peake was first threatened with assault by Colonel Given. Later Given struck Peake a violent blow in the face, with no reasonable provocation. Peake then knocked Given down with one blow. The confirmation of the truth of this statement does not rest alone on the word of Mr. Sniffen, but on the fact that when the affair occurred there were other witnesses present. These, if Mr. Sniffen’s statement were false, would have been summoned by Colonel Given to show that it was so. Further than this, the chairman of the committee of the Indian Rights Association appointed to investigate the general question of the Home, referred to the fact later in the presence of Mrs. Cox, Colonel Given, and a large body of ladies of the Board of Management. No one - not even Colonel Given himself - challenged the accuracy of Mr. Sniffen’s statement, nor could any so have done successfully. We declare unhesitatingly that a man with so little command of himself as Colonel Given showed on this occasion is unfit to superintend a large school of boys. In the words of the report of the committee of the Indian Rights Association, the present superintendent is, in our opinion, not “qualified by either education, training, or temperament to fill the place.”

Our correspondent charges vagueness in our allusions to Mr. Sniffen’s report. It complained specifically of untidiness in some parts of the school, actual filth in others, and of lounging, idle boys found in a supposedly industrial institution at 10 o’clock of a Friday morning. Complaints similar to these have been made many times, as we have already shown, in official reports rendered of this institution within the last fourteen years. We have published extracts from these reports on former issues. Dr. Frazer complains that Mr. Sniffen -

“Put himself in a false position by entering an institution without the knowledge of the superintendent who was responsible for its direction.”

Mr. Sniffen asked for Colonel Given upon entering, and he was told that he was not in the building. What would Dr. Frazer have done under these conditions if he were the agent of a society having good reason to suspect bad management in an institution which had been complained of time and time again, and which his duty called him to investigate? If he desired to know the truth, and not to make a white-washing or purely superficial report, he would have entered and used his honest eyes and honest tongue, as Messrs. Sniffen and Turner did theirs. What well-managed school would exhibit the fear of an unheralded visit that the Educational Home has displayed? The present Superintendent of Indian Schools has informed us that when she wishes to know the truth about a school she goes unannounced, and so finds it. We wanted the truth, our agent so went, and got it.

Dr. Frazer complains that Peake was “guilty of assault and battery.” Not so - only of self-defense. What would our correspondent have said in answer to a stinging, unprovoked blow on the side of the face? If the assault was made by Peake, why did not Given have him arrested for the same? He dared not, knowing himself to be the aggressor. Dr. Frazer asks:

“Why did you not include your own observations of a visit made ... in company with Mrs. Cox?”

The visit referred to was made by the secretary of the Indian Rights Association, in company with Mrs. Cox, in 1889. It is quite true the secretary expressed great satisfaction with what he saw on that occasion. But the visit was made under precisely those conditions when this institution always appears well to a superficial observer. It was a visit paid when abundant time was afforded for preparation and after the constantly recurring admonitions of the State Board of Charities had brought about temporarily greatly improved conditions. Mr. Sniffen’s investigations produced just such renovations before the visit of the Indian Rights Association committee. We distinctly admitted that in several instances when a visit was anticipated by the management of the Home the visitor was pleased by what he saw, and confessed himself to that effect.

Dr. Frazer treats our charge of the extraordinary and shocking cruelty committed at the Home in 1886 somewhat lightly by saying that it is “understood to be spanking without intervention of clothing” that is alluded to. We thought that the testimony of the agent of the S.P.C.C. [Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children] previously adduced by us was sufficient to prove the propriety of the language used. He declared that “such shocking and revolting inhumanity” he had no knowledge of in any public reformatory institution in Philadelphia. Since further details seem required, we will give them. Four of the young men of the school were confined not less than three days in a small, cheerless room – thew jail – on a meager ration of bread and water three times a day. They were then, when naturally much reduced in strength, taken out, and after having been stripped of every article of clothing were brutally flogged with a double driving-rein by a strong man until great welts were raised on their backs, from which blood was drawn, and they got down on their knees and begged for mercy. It is for the man who inflicted the punishment for trivial offenses that the First Directress pleaded extenuating circumstances, because he had been “in the navy.” Will our correspondent tell us in what navy Jackson learned such discipline, why he was discharged from that navy, and how a management, kind and efficient, such as Dr. Frazer declares the management of this institution to have been, came to select such a man as superintendent for its Indian boys? We think and we believe that our readers will agree that the flippancy of our correspondent’s comments on this case are unsuited to the horrible facts. Nor was this the first and only case in which extreme and unjustifiable punishment was inflicted in this Home.

Dr. Frazer further claims that there is no necessary discrepancy between the statement made in the letter of the First Directress of the Home when she wrote Mr. Sherman in 1899, “No charges this man [Haigh] made were sustained,” and in her letter of September 26, 1896, where she wrote Mr. Crew:

“I did not know that the boys were ever stripped of their clothes. I did not approve of that.”

Haigh was the principal complainant in the cruelty case of 1896. We showed this in our last issue, also that Jackson, the superintendent, admitted that the charge was “substantially true.”

We quoted the letter of Mrs. Cox as being a virtual admission that it was true. We further showed that the whipping, which Mrs. Cox’s letter admitted had taken place, was, with its concomitants, spoken of by Mr. Crew as “shocking and revolting inhumanity.” Whether these two statements are reconcilable or not we leave our readers to judge. As to the cause or motive of the discrepancy, we pass no opinion. It is sufficient to show that on this point Mr. Sherman was kept in ignorance of the real facts regarding the cruelty charge; and in this respect, as we believe in others, had not the information fairly afforded him for a just judgment on the wisdom of continuing the Government’s appropriation to the Home. But all these are points subsidiary to the one great complaint against this Institution: that it is understood by the general public and by the Indian Commissioner to be distinctively an industrial training school, whereas it fails in any real sense to give such training. So completely was this fact demonstrated that Colonel Given was forced to publish this statement recently in the press:

“This school is not an industrial school at all, and the Government does not require that it be conducted as those at Hampton and Carlisle. It is a contract school.”

But the Indian Commissioner writes us

“The status of that school is precisely that of Hampton and other contract schools.”

Will Dr. Frazer inform us which of these statements is to be relied upon? Until the school be made truly industrial it will not fulfil its function. As the Indian Rights Association’s report states:

“The system employed does not secure industrial training to more than a limited number of boys, and can not compare in efficiency with that employed at other institutions where the Government pays exactly the same amount per capita.”

We shall close the article by commending to Dr. Frazer’s attention the opinion expressed in a report made upon this institution by one of its former teachers, Mr. Harry H. Lintner. Mr. Lintner passed three weeks in the Home as a teacher in the night class. Although he had been promised one month’s trial, in which he was fully succeeding, his services were dispensed with on the allegations that the boys were too tired to work at night. After an elaborate statement of facts which justify his opinions, Mr. Lintner concludes:

“It would certainly be a great mistake to consider these boys as of the lower classes of society. The minds of the majority are far above the average found in our public schools. I am sorry to say that the influence of the Home is not on the side of education, for here, in a building which is thus made to belie its name, education is looked upon as of secondary importance.” [Italics ours.]

This closing statement is so extraordinary that some might suppose it proceeded form an incompetent or dismissed employee, were it not that the First Directress has written of Mr. Lintner:

“We found him efficient as a teacher and generally satisfactory, and cordially recommend him for any position of the kind.”

Document History

• Transcribed by HS 2025-08-06