SYMHC Classics: Boatload of Knowledge

This 2019 episode covers work of William Maclure, who was tasked by Robert Owen with running the education system in Owens’s utopia. Maclure brought many great minds with him, and their boat was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Last Saturday's Classic mentioned the Boatload of Knowledge
that was brought to New Harmony, Indiana to create its
educational system, so we thought, why not go ahead and
run our episode on that as a classic too. This
one originally came out on August fifth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy

(00:24):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So if you listened
to our recent episode on the New Harmony utopian societies,
you may recall that we referenced a group of scientists

(00:47):
and educators that were recruited for the second of those
communities that was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge. And I
have not been able to stop thinking about the Boatload
of Knowledge, so much so that even though I've actually
been working on research and writing for a completely different
topic that I was planning to have us talk about
this week, I moved over to reading about the boatloaders,

(01:09):
and then I was like, uh, oh, so now it's
just an episode about the boatload I'll get back to
that other one and I'll have a head start on it.
But I just you know, sometimes the brain obsesses over
a thing. So for basic framing, just in case you
did not listen to the live show that I just referenced.

(01:29):
When Robert Owen founded his Owenite community in New Harmony
in eighteen twenty five, and that was in Indiana, he
wanted to have the best minds that he could find
running the education system there, and for that he recruited
William McClure, who also gave a substantial financial contribution to
the community and also in turn brought many great minds

(01:50):
with him, and the boat that brought them to the
community was nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge. We'll talk about
how I got that nickname, and it's journey to New
Harmony with pretty fascinating. So today we're kind of tying
about things and maybe an odd order. We're going to
talk about the boat load itself and its journey, and
then we'll start talking about individual people, including getting into

(02:11):
a little bit of detail on McClure, and we'll name
a few of the other intellectuals that were involved in
this trip and in this project, although they won't get
as much detail. And then finally we're going to talk
a little bit about how the school that they designed
worked and what the group's legacy was. So the keelboat
that carried all these luminarias of Intellect left from the
harbor at Pittsburgh at two pm on December eighteen twenty five.

(02:35):
There were just over forty people aboard, and that included
a crew of eleven and the conveyance the Philanthropists that
was with a T not a thch was eighty five
feet long that's about twenty six meters by fourteen feet
wide that's four point two meters, and the group was
supposed to travel by steamer, but the Ohio River was
too low at the time for a steamer to make

(02:56):
the trip. The Philanthropist had four sections. The front area
was for the crew, the next was for the men,
the third was for the women, and the fourth was
for the children. And they were all kind of set
up like dormitory style, with like group living. This was
definitely a downgrade from the original plan, and a lot
of the passengers were pretty dismayed by these arrangements. Robert

(03:17):
Dale Owen, the son of the Robert Owen who had
catalyzed this whole project, wrote that quote, some of the
ladies of our party appear already quite impatient and dissatisfied,
the more so since they almost cannot do anything for themselves.
He was worried that there would be an uprising, that
the passengers would force the boat to turn around and
go back to Philadelphia. Some were driven to the breaking

(03:40):
point and they just cried openly. And this might sound really,
really silly, but I want you to keep in mind
that these people were expecting to participate in a well
funded utopian experiment, and already at this point their first
interaction with the project was well below expectations based on
what they had been told that they could anticipate, So

(04:00):
this probably shook their confidence in the whole thing. They
were moving away from their homes to this new community,
and it was from the onset completely not what they
had been told to expect. But once everyone got used
to these alternate, sort of last minute arrangements on the
keel boat, which were going to be their home for
a month and a half that it took to make

(04:21):
the journeyal that they didn't know it would be quite
that long. They did settle in, and by most reports,
they even managed to have quite a bit of fun.
Just a few days into the trip, though the philanthropist
ran aground. That happened just sixteen miles down the Ohio.
They could not get the boat free. And coincidentally, this
happened just seven miles away from Economy, Pennsylvania, and that

(04:43):
was the new town that had been established by the
Rapite community that had built New Harmony. Initially, McClure, owen
Son and the two other men made the track on
land to ask if the rat Bites could help them.
Six men were sent out from Economy. They managed to
get the boat free. And what's even funnier is that
in Robert Dale Owen's assessment of these rescuers, he didn't

(05:06):
find them to be particularly smart or engaging, which is
odd given their great success at the very type of
endeavor that he and his father were trying to do,
although they were also achieving commercial success. Yeah, he was like, oh,
they were kind of stupid and not very entertaining, But
I just I want to this is another time where

(05:27):
I want the time travel machine so I can go
back and shake him and go dude. They built a
successful communal living experiment, they just moved on to another PLACESE.
You haven't proven yourself yet, Champion, maybe don't be so judgy.
So the day after the keel boat was shifted into
a better position, the passengers visited Economy. They had been

(05:50):
invited to spend the day there at the invitation of
Rapite leader George Rapp, and they seem to have had
a really lovely time. This was the last time that
Robert Owen, the one who started this whole new community,
spent with the boat passengers. He left from Economy to
travel to Pittsburgh on business. He had some final arrangements

(06:10):
to make in terms of the legalities of taking over
the land, and he left the science and educators, along
with his son Robert Dale, on their own for the
rest of the journey. They didn't get very far though.
As they reached the station called Safe Harbor, which was
just about eight miles from where they had run aground,
they got iced in. The philanthropists stayed there, stuck on

(06:30):
ice for four full weeks. The group didn't extricate the
boat until January ninth, which was twenty eight days after
they had been first iced in, and during that time
there had been just a number of misfortunes, including people
who fell through the ice but survived. One passenger who
fell and hit his head on a log while out hunting,
which caused a delirium and fever. He eventually did recover,

(06:52):
though there were also a number of people who opted
to leave the boat and shelter elsewhere or travel over
land before ultimately regrouping with everyone else. Yeah. I when
I was first researching this and they were saying, like,
some people just left the boat, I was like, uh oh,
but they all managed to hook back up with everybody.
They didn't just wander out into the snowy wilderness and
perish or meets some bad end. This whole thing comes

(07:14):
off as kind of comical because this is a boat
full of smart people that keeps running into problems, But
it's more of an indication of how difficult travel was.
I feel like it was like the the micro cosm
version of how their entire commune played out, because it
just wasn't planned as well as it should have been, right,

(07:37):
and they didn't know enough about traveling by boat down
a river, yeah, to know. Like there are some of
their writings where they're like, we don't know if the
captain is bad at his job or if it's just
really bad situations, And it's like they just had no
idea what they were doing well, and it's just the
wrong time to be taking a steamer down a river

(07:58):
that freezes over well, and they didn't even have a steamer.
They're in a keelboat. Like okay, a steamer may have
wiggled through, but the keelboat was like no, ma'am. While
they were ice bound, though, some passengers sketched and played games,
and they explored the river banks, they had assessed their
situation and agreed that to make everything work, they were

(08:20):
just going to eat two meals a day, both to
stretch their supplies and to prevent someone from having to
take on the load of making three meals a day.
While they were in this odd situation, they also organized
themselves to be able to relieve eight of the crew
members on a rotating schedule. They traveled by land eight
miles south to the town of Beaver from time to

(08:41):
time to get some supplies and socialize. On one of
these occasions, Robert Dale Owen got into a discussion with
a Methodist minister, who, he wrote quote reasoned with quite
good temper and some talent, but has the most incorrect ideas.
Robert Dale Owen, like his father believed that religion was
more of a problem than a source of good. Yeah,

(09:02):
the Owenites whole thing was that religion was useless and
that you just needed to raise people right to make
a better world with good education. But yeah, it's sort
of one of those every time I'm reading anything that
Robert Dale Owen writes, just like he talked about the
Rappites being like not very smart or interesting, I'm like,
you are not. You seem like a person whose intentions

(09:27):
are good and makes a lot of foolish judge hits.
The group also incidentally took on several additional passengers just
a few days before they were able to move on
from the ice, and when the ice started to break,
the sound of it scared them all so much that
they were convinced that the boat was sinking again, kind
of evidence that they maybe weren't fully prepared for this trip.

(09:48):
But after they evacuated and carted all of their trunks
and luggage ashore, they realized things that were okay and
even good because that meant the ice was breaking up,
and then they had to haul everything back onto the
boat and make preparations to get underway. To that end,
they also cut a pathway in the remaining ice to
get the keel boat moving, and they were soon once

(10:08):
again headed to their new utopia. They made a stop
that first evening in Steubenville, Ohio, and took on another passenger,
which was the son of Judge Benjamin Tappan, who wanted
to have his child educated in New Harmony. They stopped
in other towns along the way, most notably Cincinnati, where
several of the boat loaders toured the Museum of Natural History.

(10:28):
When they got to Louisville, Kentucky, they once again grew
in numbers as Joseph Neefe, who was an educational reformer,
joined up with them along with his wife, and after Louisville,
the Philanthropists made its way to Mount Vernon, Indiana, and
there they made land to start the final leg of
the journey. So most of them at that point traveled
the final fifteen miles to New Harmony by wagon, arriving

(10:49):
on January twenty third, and at that point they had
been in transit for forty seven days. A small handful
of them, however, remained on the keel boat and they
traveled farther south on the Ohio before linking up with
the Wabash River and turning north into it to make
their way to New Harmony. So the origin for the
nickname Boatload of Knowledge came from a speech by Robert Owen.

(11:10):
While the keel boat that the scientists and educators were
on made its way down the Ohio River, Owen had
traveled ahead by land, and he started telling the New
Harmony residents who were setting up their new utopia about
McClure's really fantastic group. He gave a speech to this
new community in which he commented on the vast amount
of knowledge that was contained in this one boat continuing quote,

(11:33):
not Latin and Greek and other languages, but real substantial knowledge.
From that point, people started calling the philanthropist the boatload
of Knowledge. I love that nickname so much. Owen had
called the educators aboard quote, some of the ablest instructors
of use that could be found in the US or
perhaps the world, And all of that knowledge and ability

(11:55):
had been gathered by a man named William McClure, who
is often called Owen's partner in his utopian enterprise. We'll
get into McClure's life after we pause for a quick
sponsor break William McClure was born on October twenty seventh,

(12:17):
seventeen sixty three in Ayr, Scotland. His father was a
merchant and was successful enough that William got a private education.
William first traveled to the US at the age of nineteen,
and after a brief stay, he went to London, where
he started a job with Miller Hart and Company, an
American commerce firm, and while working there he was constantly traveling,

(12:38):
mostly to France and Ireland, but also on occasion to
the US. In seventeen ninety six, McClure moved to the
United States, permanently settling in Philadelphia. He also became a
US citizen. He was already wealthy, but he quickly started
adding to his fortune with business interests in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
By eighteen hundred, he was able to leave work behind

(12:58):
and focus on his other interests, which were science and
education reform, full time, and he felt that the way
that education had been managed up to that point was catastrophic,
writing quote, I had been long in the habit of
considering education one of the greatest abuses our species were
guilty of, and of course one of the reforms most
beneficial to humanity. He saw that society was generally separated

(13:21):
in categories of non productive and productive classes, governors and
the governed, and that the only real thing that kept
the system in place was the education that the upper
classes were receiving. So he wanted to buck against that
age's old arrangement and offer equal knowledge to rich and poor.
He believed that once someone was armed with knowledge, they
could rise up, so the lower classes, if they had education,

(13:44):
could meet the upper class in equality. He also saw
that the young Republic of the United States needed an
educated populace if it was going to survive. He wrote
quote power being in the hands of the people through
the medium of popular governments renders a diffusion of knowledge
necess to the support of freedom. He looked to the
work of Swiss education reformer Johann Heinrich Pestilazzi, who had

(14:07):
built a curriculum plan based on the ideas in Jean
Jacqesrusseau's Emil, which examined the individual in society and the
relationship between the two. McClure visited Pestilazzi's school several times
to observe and it was that model that he sought
to emulate when he planned out New Harmony's education system.
McClure had tried to convince Pestilazzi to move to the US,

(14:31):
and even offered to bankroll a new school for him,
but Pestilazzi turned that offered down. And even as McClure
was studying and promoting the latest ideas in education reform,
he was also engaged in his own scientific work, specifically
in geology. In eighteen oh nine, he offered up a
geological map of the United States to the American Philosophical

(14:51):
Society during a lecture, and this is considered to be
a breakthrough moment in geology. He had put together data
that no one else had assembled, and as his fame
for his scientific work grew, McClure started to spend his
time bouncing from geological tours and surveys to meeting with
education experts and setting up schools. Because he made a

(15:12):
name for himself in the geological sciences, when the Academy
of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia was formed in eighteen twelve,
McClure was invited to become a member. In eighteen seventeen,
he became the organization's president, which was a post he
would hold for more than two decades right up till
the end of his life, and it was the connections
that he made through that organization that really enabled him
to assemble an academic dream team for New Harmony. There

(15:36):
was an Owenite society in Philadelphia by eighteen twenty three,
a year before Robert Owen bought New Harmony. He made
that purchase at the end of eighteen twenty four, and
members of the Academy of Natural Sciences had read Owen's
essays on communal living as early as the eighteen teens
and they were pretty enthralled by his ideas because it
was exciting and new, and some, including McClure, had even

(15:58):
visited Owen's community in New Lanark, Scotland, where Owen had
focused on improving the conditions for the poor working class
that kept his textile mills running. And eventually it was
McClure that Robert Owen entrusted to design and establish the
education system and bo New Harmony Indiana. One of the
people that McClure worked with closely to get New Harmony's
children educated was Maria ducros Fletagiaux, and she was born

(16:22):
in France in seventeen eighty three and had married Joseph
Fletageaux as a young woman, although the exact date of
their marriage is unknown. The couple had a child named Achilles,
a son, but they lived separately, so her husband Joseph
does not seem to have factored very prominently in her
life at all. Marie's first contact with William McClure took

(16:42):
place in eighteen nineteen when he was visiting Paris. Fretijeaux
moved from Paris to Philadelphia in eighteen twenty one to
set up a Pestiluzian school. She helped spread Owen's ideas
when she came to North America. She brought some essays
that had been published in Europe and started circulating that
and discussing it with other members of the Philadelphia science
and education communities. Yeah, in a lot of ways, she

(17:04):
really seeded some of these ideas that Owens had had
by just she was very charming and people really took
a shine to her generally, and so when she was like,
I have this exciting essay that I want you to read,
people read it. It appears that it was actually Freda
Joe that convinced McClure that he should partner with Owen.
Although McClure had written to her after he first visited

(17:26):
New Lanark and he spoke of his time there as
the most pleasant of his life, it was her urging
that really amplified his interest in his desire to invest
in the New Harmony project and to recruit like minded
intellectuals to their cause. She met Robert Owen in November
of eighteen twenty four when he visited Philadelphia and specifically
her school. She later wrote McClure that she and Owen

(17:48):
had immediately hit it off. They were like old friends
from the moment they met. Owen told her that if
they worked on their education ideas in a place where
the various obstacles to those ideas could be removed, a
community like the one he was planning, they could truly
see what a proper education could do for a child's development.
He went on to make the case to Fretajou that
she could keep working at her school in Philadelphia for decades,

(18:12):
but she would never really get to see just how
impactful her work could be there. But if she came
to New Harmony, things would be different because she could
work without societal ills of a large city, ruining and
countering her efforts. Coming up will do a quick rundown
a few of the other people who put so much
work into setting up the education system in New Harmony.
But first we'll have a quick sponsor break. While Marie

(18:44):
Fretajeaux was a cornerstone of the education system in New
Harmony and one of the most important members after Robert
Owen and William McClure, there were, of course plenty of
others that came on that boatload of knowledge, and here
are but a few of them. Thomas Say was born
on June twenty seventh, seventeen eighty seven. He was an
entomologist and a concologist, and someone who McClure had befriended

(19:06):
early on in his time at the Academy of Natural Sciences.
Say was the librarian there. McClure had funded some of
Say's scientific research trips and then asked Say to accompany
him on several of his geological surveys. Say is often
called the father of American descriptive entomology. If you google
him you can find lots of stuff from his entomology work. Yeah,

(19:29):
and just in case you don't know what a concologist is.
It's someone who studies mollusk shells, and he had expertise
in this field. He was one of the leaders in
that area. So when the boatload of knowledge was trapped
in the ice and the passengers started covering shifts to
relieve the crew, it was Say that everyone elected as captain,
and he was apparently really pretty good at managing the crew.

(19:51):
In eighteen twenty seven, Say married one of the students
that Marie Fretegieaux had brought with her on the trip.
Once the school system of New Harmony was established, it
to say that McClure entrusted with it whenever he was
away from the village. Later on, when the utopian experiment
had ended, Say stayed at New Harmony. He used that
as his primary location from which he conducted his research,

(20:12):
and he wrote for the rest of his life that life,
unfortunately was pretty short. He died in eighteen thirty four.
French naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesieur born in seventeen seventy eight
was another friend from the Academy of Natural Sciences and
in his work in paleontology, archaeology, ixeology, and general zoology.
Lesieur made numerous discoveries of new species while he traveled

(20:34):
the world, particularly Australia, and he served as curator at
the Academy. Like Marie Fretejeaux, Lesur had been into Owen's
idea of a utopian society even before McClure, and was
eager when the chance came along to be part of
New Harmony. During the boat ride down the Ohio River,
he drew one hundred and twenty seven sketches of the

(20:54):
landscapes that they traveled through. Yeah, those are, you know,
kind of the visual record of that entire trip, and
they're really interesting. He was a really, really talented artist,
and while Robert Owen, who founded the second Utopia New Harmony,
left feeling as though McClure's curriculum had been part of
its demise, he recognized Lysier's art skills so much that

(21:15):
he still sent one of his sons, Richard, back to
New Harmony to study with Lysier. In eighteen twenty eight,
after Thomas Say died, Lasour returned to France and he
went on to become the curator at the Muse Distois
Natuelle d Have. Although he served in that prestigious position
for less than a year before he also died in
December of eighteen forty six. Williams. Fiquipal d'arrousement was like Fretagioux,

(21:40):
an educator, and when he traveled in New Harmony, he
actually brought ten students with him. They were boys from
a school that he taught at in Philadelphia. That school
had been established by William McClure, and before working there,
Fiquipal had worked in schools in France which had also
been funded and established by McClure. Fiquipal was the person, incidentally,
who had hit his head on a log during that

(22:01):
ic in on the river and seemed to be in
pretty bad shape for a while. Two of his students
were the first to fall through the ice as well,
so that month they were stuck there. Was just not
particularly kind to him. Yeah. He also kind of had
a reputation for being a little bit of a grouchil Epithecus.
There were some people that claimed that he never fully
recovered and that was why he was so grumpy. Once

(22:23):
the system at New Harmony was in place, Fickopaul taught,
among other things, printing. He left the school in eighteen
thirty and in eighteen thirty one, he married social reformer
France's Right. That marriage ended in divorce in eighteen fifty.
So that's just a sampling of these educators and to
kind of move on to the curriculum and the legacy
of these schools. Though Owen's New Harmony experiment ended just

(22:46):
two years after it began, as we mentioned in our
previous episode on the subject, the educators stayed around. They
kept the school system going. They also started publishing a
regular journal called The Disseminator of Useful Knowledge, which continued
publication until they eighteen forties. Yeah, they really felt like
they had built something worthwhile and they weren't willing to
just abandon it just because the utopian society wasn't going

(23:07):
to work out, and they had people that wanted to
send their children there. The curriculum for New Harmony children
started when they were still toddlers. So children enrolled in
the first school, called the Infant School at the age
of two, and at that point it's obviously just about play,
and the educators were kind of noting the development of
the children, and children stayed in Infant School until they
were five years old. At age five, children moved into

(23:30):
the Higher School. They also boarded away from their families
in a large dormitory. This was intended to keep the
educational plan free from parental influence and also to introduce
the children to the idea of communal living from a
very early age. The Higher School educated children until they
were twelve and included trades training in workshops and textile
mills so that they were contributing to the good of

(23:51):
society from early on. Their academic work included courses in mathematics, mechanics, art, music, language, science,
and writing, with jim nastics for physical exercise. Throughout the
lessons of the Higher School, all the scientists that had
been recruited gave lectures. Yeah, it was basically like having
teachers who were the Krem de la Crem and all

(24:13):
of their fields come and give talks periodically. That aspect
of it is really unique and quite special. After completing
the Higher School, students would move on to the School
of Industry, and that's where real trade instruction took place,
and there students learned a great deal more than that
early training that they had gotten in the Higher School.
So this training did separate pretty solidly though along gender line.

(24:38):
So the boys learned everything from taxidermy to blacksmithing, and
the girls were taught dressmaking, millinery, cooking, and other domestic skills.
The School of Industry also ran its own printing press.
That was part of why Fukuopaul was teaching how to
run the press and students were taught to run it
so that the scholars of the town could have their
own publishing mechanism for their research, which I have to

(25:00):
say is a pretty ingenious setup. Although McClure's educational system
shuddered after his death, the programs that he and his
colleagues instituted were precursors to the public school system and
paved the way for it, even though it would be
decades before such a system was actually in place in Indiana.
That effort was helped along in eighteen fifty one by
Robert Dale Owen, who became very active in government and

(25:22):
public affairs. That year he helped get language providing for
a tax supported, free public education system written into Indiana's
Second Constitution. And the scholars and scientists of New Harmony
had assembled a library that was worthy of any university's envy.
They had brought their book collections with them as they
traveled and all kind of merged those together into one

(25:43):
library and their collections of specimens in their museum that
they set up drew researchers from around the world who
wanted to observe them, as well as meet with the
scientists there to discuss their ideas and kind of use
them as like a sounding board for things that they
were working on. In eighteen twenty eight, year after Owen's
New Harmony experiment was dissolved, William McClure left as well.

(26:05):
He headed to Mexico. Over the next five years, he
and Marie Fretajeaux exchanged almost five hundred letters in which
it became clear that the French teacher had fallen really
in love with the geologist. That didn't appear that McClure
returned her romantic interests, though, but the two of them
did remain close. Fretejoue traveled to Mexico to visit McLure

(26:25):
in eighteen thirty three and died not long after arriving.
McClure stayed in Mexico until the end of his life
in eighteen forty. Throughout all this time in New Harmony
in Mexico, he had remained president of the Academy of
Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Yeah, this is one of those things.
McClure constantly on the road from the time he was young,
so he might have just been good at managing affairs
he was not physically involved in, but he had, you know,

(26:48):
kept things going at the school even though he was
in another country. He was, you know, giving his input
on curriculum. He was kind of keeping it running in
a lot of ways, and financially he was still willing
to put a lot of backing into it. When he died,
McLure left behind two different educational funds. One was part
of the Academy of Sciences and that was clearly described

(27:08):
as funding that should go to making sure educational materials
went into the hands of laborers. The other had the
same goal, but it was a general provision in his
will that offered five hundred dollars to any laborer's group
that established a lecture and reading room with at least
one hundred books in it. There were one hundred and
sixty libraries that were funded as a result of this provision.

(27:29):
That practice of making knowledge accessible for everyone was something
that McClure had put into practice himself. Throughout his life,
but one of the most enduring examples of it is
the New Harmony Workingmen's Institute, which he founded in eighteen
thirty eight, which was two years before he died. The
institute moved from its original location in the church at
New Harmony to a new building in eighteen ninety four

(27:50):
and it remains in operation to this day. Now it's
the oldest continuously operating public library in Indiana. Yeah, it's
also a museum. And even though it is called the
Workingmen's instat it was always intended to be something that
not just men could access, but their entire families would
have access to any of the resources there, which is
a pretty cool h He definitely, I mean, he had

(28:12):
tons of money to work with, but he definitely put
his money where his mouth was in terms of saying like, yes,
I want people of all levels of society to have
educational materials, and then he made it happen. Yeah, it
was not just lip service, which I have to respect.
So that is a little bit more on the boatload
of knowledge, which just charmed me based just on that nickname.
But also there are a lot of really important and

(28:33):
interesting people. There's even more and more and more. You
can get very in the weeds on the boatload of Knowledge.
Oh yeah, all of the work that those people did.
You could do an entire podcast series called Boatload of
Knowledge and talk about each person and all of their
research projects. And if somebody does it, I will listen.

(28:55):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If
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History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.