Two Other Alcotts: Bronson and May

Louisa was not the only notable Alcott. Her father, Bronson Alcott, made a name for himself as a philosopher and a teacher. And her youngest sister, May Alcott, was an artist, who was really growing in prominence before she died at an early age.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast Country Phoebe Wilson and I'm
Holly Frying. The other day we talked about Louisa May Alcott,
and thanks to Little Women and the other novels that
she wrote, she's probably the most famous person of her

(00:24):
immediate family today, but she was definitely not the only
notable figure among all the Alcotts. In particular, her father,
Bronson Alcott, made a name for himself as a philosopher
and a teacher and like an educational reformer, and her
youngest sister, May Alcott, was an artist who was really
starting to grow in prominence and do some really notable

(00:45):
work when she died at a sadly early age. Um,
we don't really quite know enough about May's life because
it was so short to be able to do a
whole episode just on her. So we're going to talk
about her in the second half of this episode, and
for the first half we're gonna sort of hit the
highlights of Bronson Alcott's life, because he you could do

(01:06):
multiple episodes on him. He had kind of wandering, sometimes
strange existence. But we're gonna like do the most fun
parts of his stuff. These the two of them are
really overshadowed by Luisa May Alcott, but they both have
their own fascinating stories. And when we took our holiday
trip to Orchard House, which I talked about in the

(01:28):
previous episode, when we left, Patrick was like, I really
just want to learn more about May, so today we will,
which granted Patrick uh So. Bronson was born Amos Bronson
Alcott in Connecticut on November twenty nine. He was the
son of flax farmers, and he had no formal education

(01:49):
at all beyond the age of thirteen, and before that
even his schooling had happened, but it had been kind
of spotty because work always took higher priority. But just
the same he became an educational reformer and a philosopher
despite this sort of gap in his education process. He
was an extremely idealistic person with very strong opinions from

(02:11):
a very early age, and when he was seventeen he
left home, traveled south and became a peddler. His intent
had actually been to become a teacher, and at that
point anyone who could read and write could basically become
a teacher. It didn't matter that he had no real
formal education. But uh, he thought it would be a

(02:31):
good idea to hone his teaching skills in the South,
where he supposed people were going to be more ignorant
and therefore easier to learn and practice on than he
might find in the North. Oh Bronson, as you can imagine,
this attitude did not really go over terribly well. And
not only could he not find a teaching job, but

(02:53):
the people that he met considered him to be a
patronizing Yankee interlooper, so nobody wanted to provide him with
lodging either. So he turned to peddling, and he kept
hit this trade for five years, and he started to
think of it in terms of Pilgrim's progress, which had
always been extremely influential to him. He also bolstered this

(03:14):
reversal of fortune with the belief that any profession could
be noble if you approached it with the right attitude.
And not only did he not find that people in
the South were more ignorant than people in the north, uh,
he also because he was visiting these large Southern plantations,
remember this was before the Civil War, he was finding

(03:37):
that these people's homes were like really elegant and were
fined in a way that just did not exist in
his Connecticut hometown. Uh. It was also his first, like
in person exposure to slavery, which later he would become
a very staunch abolitionist, so it had sort of that
darker side. But uh yeah, he was sort of like,

(03:59):
I was wrong out the South in so many ways.
He did eventually go back to Connecticut and finally became
a teacher. In eighteen thirty, he married Abigail May, and
he was an educator and she was a reformer, and
their ideas generally complimented one another quite well. Where Bronson
wanted to reform the way children learned, Abigail wanted to

(04:20):
change the way people were treated. So they were both
very vocal and strident supporters of women's suffrage, of the
abolition of slavery, and other social causes. Along with a
son who died not long after he was born, they
had four daughters, Anna, Luisa, Elizabeth, and May, and Bronson
was really deeply involved in their upbringing. He was a
stern and authoritative figure at home, even to the point

(04:43):
of seeming just rigidly inflexible, but at the same time
he encouraged his daughters to be creative and self reliant
and independent. And in a way, he also saw his
children as projects. He believed that children were perfect beings,
having recently arrived on Earth from a celestial realm, but

(05:03):
by the time children were old enough to go to school,
they were already moving away from that most perfect state.
So he made detailed written observations of his daughters while
they were babies and as they grew, tested them as
people in an almost experimental way of trying to get
them to continually perfect themselves. And he also taught them

(05:23):
either at home or in the schools where he taught,
using his own educational methods. He would he would do
things like he would leave apples out around which the
girls weren't supposed to eat, to see whether they would
eat them, and then if ah, if if asked about it,
whether they would tell the truth. Um, there's a whole

(05:44):
story where it was it was Luisa's birthday and he
invited another child at the last minute, so there wasn't
enough cake. And there's some speculation about where this whether
this was a test to see whether Luisa would be
generous and give her guests the last piece of cake
or take it for herself because it was her birthday,
so yeah, it was. It's like a little social experiment

(06:04):
happening in the home. I think that were I Bronson's child,
I would be a grave disappointment. So we talked a
little about Bronson's educational philosophies in our episode about his
second daughter, and here's how Louisa herself described it. My
father taught in the wise way, which unfolds what lies

(06:26):
in the child's nature as a flower blooms, rather than
crammed it like a Strasbourg goose with more than it
could digest. And he asked his children questions rather than
just giving lectures. And he led them an exercise, took
them on field trips, and added music, art, and nature
study to their coursework. Students also voted on decisions, and

(06:47):
they elected class officers. A lot of this would be
taken for granted today. It sounds just like school right
like that this is sort of how education happens in
America for most, but at the time it was all
completely revolutionary, and in many of the schools where he
was trying to teach, parents strongly strongly objected to him

(07:09):
approaching classes this way. He lost teaching jobs over and over,
or the schools where he was trying to teach what
shut down, and so the Alcott family wound up moving
again and again and again, both in search of work
and to escape the failure at work that had just happened.
In eighteen thirty four, Bronson opened a school in the
Masonic Temple in Boston, which became known as the Temple School.

(07:33):
His entire purpose with the school was to put his
theories of education into practice, and he also transformed the
school into a place of beauty. It was full of artwork,
had comfortable furnishings, and it was loaded with books. Margaret
Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody both had teaching posts there, and
these women were both early in their careers, and they
would of course become quite well known as a journalist

(07:56):
and an educator. But unfortunately, the Temple School did not
last for very long. People didn't like how physically affectionate
Bronson was with the children. Boston as a city was
also extremely religiously conservative, and people did not like that.
Bronson's discussions included really progressive discussions of religion with the

(08:17):
children and also pretty frank discussions of sex. He published
a book called conversations with children, and which he related
these conversations that he had had with kids about the
Four Gospels, and some of these conversation conversations ran pretty
contrary to religious doctrine. People even thought that they were sacrilege.
So outraged, horrified parents started to withdraw their children from

(08:41):
his school. Elizabeth Peabody actually left the school after a
series of disagreements with Bronson, among them that he had
read her private letters the same as he and Abigail
did with all their children. And after she left, he
lost more students, and the last of them besides his
own children, left when he integrated the school in eighteen

(09:02):
thirty nine. Just let that years think in on the
integration situation. Even though slavery had already been abolished in
most of the North and Boston was home to a
huge abolitionist movement, that did not mean white people were
comfortable or wanted their children in an integrated school. So
when the Temple School failed, not only had his this

(09:23):
labor of love project that he was deeply attached to, failed,
he was really hugely in debt. That was a very
expensive endeavor, especially given all the expensive furnishing furnishings in
art and all of that that had gone into it.
So we're going to talk about what happened after the
school closed after a brief word from a sponsor stupendous

(09:44):
to return to Bronson Alcott. A lot of Bronson's theories
about education had roots in Transcendentalist philosophy, and the Transcendentalist
movement flourished in New England in the mid to late
eighteen hundreds. It had literary, religious, and philosophical elements, and
they were all tied together by the idea that people
have an intuitive ability to seek out spiritual truths for themselves.

(10:06):
And I had a hard time working out like a
very straightforward basic definition of Transcendentalism, because at the heart
of the movement was a rejection of dogma, so it's
kind of hard to describe it as any one thing.
A lot of the most well known American writers and
thinkers of the nineteenth century were Transcendentalists, and the Alcots
were friends and colleagues with many of them, including Ralph

(10:28):
Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thurreau. And after the failure
of the Temple School, the Alcotts spent some time back
and conquered where Bronson tried to support the family through farming.
They had food, but little else because the farm was
enough to subsist but not enough to purchase things like
fuel to heat their cottage. When Ralph Waldo Emerson came

(10:49):
by to visit, he'd often accidentally air quotes leave money
squirreled somewhere around the house, like under a cushion or
a candlestick, to try to help out. After a while,
Bronson took a trip to Europe, which was also funded
by Emerson, to visit some friends, some of whom had
actually named a school after him, and when he came home,
English reformer Charles Lane returned to Massachusetts with him. Uh.

(11:13):
One of the pursuits that the two of them embarked
upon together was the attempt to create a transcendtionalist community
called fruit Lends in Harvard, Massachusetts. So if you've listened
to our episode on the Brook Farm community, which Bronson
actually wanted to join but he couldn't afford to, you
already have a sense of some of the pitfalls of
trying to start a utopian commune. Although Bronson didn't know

(11:36):
how to farm, there were a lot of other obstacles
to what they were planning for one thing, it was
going to be a strictly vegan commune. Nothing they wore
or used could have been produced through any association with
slavery as well, so they could not wear cotton clothes,
and they also couldn't well wear wool clothes because that
subjugated sheep. Animals also could not be used for labor,

(11:58):
so they could not use any kind plow animals or
beasts of burden. And they had timed this whole endeavor
kind of badly. They all moved out to fruitlands in
June of eighteen forty three, late in the season for
planting most crops, plus Bronson and Charles went out to
try to recruit more people in the autumn, which meant

(12:18):
there weren't enough hands to bring in what could be harvested.
Charles Lane also caused a pretty big rift within the
Alcott family. The Alcots valued family and their family unit
above their own individual selves, and Charles, on the other hand,
felt that while family and air quotes as in like

(12:38):
your community shows in a group of people that you
are living with was critical, uh that family ties through
blood and marriage were actually destructive. So Charles Lane thought
that Abigail and the children were weighing Bronson down, so
after he started advocating for the residents of Fruitlands to
separate men and women in the style of the Shakers, Abigail,

(13:02):
feeling that this was the last straw, threatened to take
the children and all of her furniture and leave. There
is also some debate, and you may have already had
this question work pop up over your head listening to this,
about whether Bronson and Charles actually had a physical relationship,
adding another element to this triad. Abigail definitely did not

(13:23):
like Charles at all and didn't like the way his
philosophies were meant to drive a wedge through the family,
and this was not the only time that his presence
drove her out of their home. So regardless of exactly
what was going on and in that situation, Fruitlan's did
not succeed in attracting new members, and everyone who had

(13:44):
originally joined left by January of eighteen forty four, so
this whole endeavor only lasted a few months. Bronson and
Charles each blamed the other for the failure, and the
Alcotts moved to Still River, Massachusetts for several months, and
this was basically a recovery period of the whole family. Finally,
the Alcots made their way back to Conquered and settled

(14:05):
in the now famous Orchard House. Bronson served as the
superintendent of Schools and Conquered from eighteen fifty nine through
eighteen sixty four, and as Luis's writing became more well known,
he became a sought after speaker on religion, philosophy, and education.
He had a whole speaking tour, especially in the West,

(14:26):
which like the blanket region of the United States, which
is a lot of it wasn't States yet, but uh.
He became increasingly successful as a speaker, as as Luisa
May Alcott's books became more and more widely sold. He
also opened a school of philosophy in Conquered in eighteen
seventy nine at the age of eighty. It had been

(14:48):
a lifelong dream of his to open a school like this,
and a year later it moved into a building that
still sits adjacent to Orchard House. This is a school
that taught summer classes for adults for nine years. In
the fall of eighteen eighty two, Bronson had a stroke
and from that point he was unable to write or
to work, and he needed to be cared for. He

(15:10):
died on March fourth, eight. The School of Philosophy closed
the following July. So that's sort of the the highlights
of Bronson Alcott's life. We will move on to talking
about his daughter May after another brief word from a sponsor.
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focus to Abigail May Alcott. She was the youngest of
Bronson Alcott's daughters, born on in July, and she went
by a number of other nicknames before settling on going
by her middle name of May, and perhaps because was

(17:00):
the baby of the family, the rest of the Alcots
absolutely doated on her. The whole family had a huge
focus on not being materialistic, but they would forego their
own necessities to buy little presents for May, like pretty
ribbons for her hair. As she became more interested in art,
she was allowed to draw and paint anywhere she wanted
and as often as she wanted, and once the family

(17:22):
moved into Orchard house. One of those places was on
the walls of her room, so her wall drawings are
still there in the house and are preserved on the
walls of the house. And in addition to the walls
of her bedroom, she had an actual studio in the
front of the house and her work is still on
the walls there today as well. A lot of the
things that she view on the walls were sort of

(17:43):
like doodles and practice and that kind of stuff, but
she would also sometimes create a an intentional work of
art on a wall. There's an owl painted on the
mantle in Louise's room, which May painted there while her
sister was ill because she wanted to make her sister
feel better. And until Louise's writing career took off, the
Alcott family was extremely poor. However, thanks to the generosity

(18:07):
of friends and other family, May was able to study
art in Boston. She spent three winters studying at the
Boston School of Design, and she also studied with William
Morris Hunt and Dr William Rimmer, who were two of
the most respected art teachers in Boston at the time.
A number of Hunt's paintings are in the collection at
the Smithsonian, and Dr Rimmer was especially known for his sculpture.

(18:31):
Daniel Chester French, who became one of the most prominent
sculptors in the United States in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, also studied with Hunt and Rimmer, and
he became one of May's art students. Like the Alcots,
his own family was very poor and he was trying
to hone his craft as a sculptor by working on
things like scraps of wood and root vegetables. During the

(18:53):
winter of eighteen sixty eight to eighteen sixty nine, May
shared her sculpting tools and materials with him and he
undertook his formal study of sculpture. He later credited May
as his first teacher. French became famous for sculpting monuments,
the Minuteman Statue in Minuteman National Historic Park, the bronze
doors at the Boston Public Library, and the seated statue

(19:16):
of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. What May really
wanted to do they was to go to Europe to
study art, but of course that was well well beyond
the family's means for a long time, so instead she
worked as an art teacher in the United States. This
included at an institution for disabled children in New York
and at other schools and conquered. In addition to her

(19:39):
original work, she also became a very skilled copyist of
other people's work. Finally, after the publication of Little Women
in eighteen sixty nine, May got to follow her dream
of studying in Europe. Thanks to her older sister Louisa.
She made three trips to Europe, where she studied in
England and France, and the third trip, which she made

(19:59):
in a six was for good. In eighteen seventy seven,
she submitted a still life of fruit, a bottle and
a jug to the Paris Salon. The Salon was the
official exhibition of the Academy de Beaux Art in Paris,
and it was the most prestigious art exhibition in the
Western world in the latter half of the eighteenth and

(20:21):
nearly all of the nineteenth centuries. That year, hers was
one of forty American works and two thousand total works
to be chosen out of eight thousand, five hundred entries.
Placements at the Paris Salon were hung by their perceived worth,
and may Still life was close to eye level. Yeah.
Basically the entire walls of the whole salon space where

(20:43):
floor to ceiling, every inch covered up with artwork, and
so where your artwork was had to do with how
good they thought it was, and close to eye level
was pretty awesome. Later that year her work started to
go on display at other galleries and exhibitions and England
and France, and she also became friends with painter Mary Cassette,

(21:04):
who you might know her from the painting Breakfast in
Bed or the Voting Party. She did lots of paintings
of mothers and their children. In the spring of eighteen
seventy eight, May met and fell in love with a
Swiss businessman named Ernest Naker. In addition to his tobacco business,
he was also a violinist. She was thirty eight at
the time and he was twenty two when they married.

(21:27):
Another of her paintings, called Negress, was selected for the
Paris Salon in eighteen seventy nine. This one was a
portrait and we don't know exactly who the subject was.
It's a black woman wearing a one shouldered white top
and an orange hair scarf. The same year, she published
a book called Studying Art Abroad and How To do

(21:47):
it cheaply, which I find to be extremely charming, and
once I discovered it, I kind of just wanted to
throw this whole episode out the window and instead have
a dramatic reading of studying art abroad and how to
do it, she Lee. And the good news is that
you can read that book for free on the internet.
As Tracy said, she loves it. It is aimed at
lady artists who want to spend a year abroad studying

(22:10):
and it starts quote art is so overtalked and overwritten
at the present time, charmingly to be sure, but still
overdone that even were a student's opinion on the subject
of any value, I have no intention of adding my
name to the list of those who, from critics like
Ruskin in Hambleton's down to the multitude of newspaper correspondence

(22:30):
keep America on courn with European painters, pictures and gossip.
Among her practical advice, pack plenty of old undergarments, because
London grime and French laundry acids are going to just
destroy anything that's quote delicate or nicely trend. Also, your
old underwear is going to be useful for paint rags

(22:52):
once it becomes too thin to wear. That's just good
sensible thinking recycling. It talks about which cities are the
best for which media. The lady hopes to study, London
being best for watercolor, Paris for oils, Roam for sculpture.
It also discusses how to get around, what to expect

(23:13):
in all of these different countries, how to address yourself nicely,
but chiefly when it's part way through your tour and
you realize your wardrobe is in need of attention. And
she lists out the names and directions of teachers, boarding
and lodging houses, shops and the like, and among other things,
she advises ladies to shop at civil service stores or
Army and Navy shops, which require a card from a

(23:35):
subscriber to shop there. Sadly, not long after the eighteen
seventy nine salon or the publication of this book, May
died just a few weeks after giving birth to her daughter,
Luisa May. It's not totally clear whether her death was
related to having given birth or not. May had previously

(23:55):
said that she wanted her sister Luisa to look after
her child if something should happen to her, and that
was in part because her husband's business involved a lot
of travel. So little Louisa May, who was also known
as Lulu, arrived in Conquered Massachusetts escorted by her father
and her aunt when she was ten months old, and
she went on to live with Luisa May Alcott until

(24:16):
Louisa was no longer physically able to care for her
because of her own health. After her deaths, she went
back to Europe with her father. Uh. Really, the based
on the sort of the strides that that May's work
was taking before her death, she probably would be somebody

(24:37):
that we would associate with like painters of that era,
had she had a longer life and been able to
do more work. Do you have a spot of listener
mail for us? Now? I do. Our listener mail is
zipping back to our episode about special education in the
United States and others from Sarah, who says, Hi, Holly

(24:57):
and Tracy, I love your show. It's one of the
podcasts I must listen to as soon as it comes out.
I'm a special education teacher. I just sat down to
suggest the history of special education and looked at my
phone to see it downloading. I had also suggested how
an I E P works to Josh and Chuck, and
she now talks about a thing that we brought up

(25:18):
an episode and mentioned that it was not really a
standard that's so much used anymore. So she continues, instead
of mental age, we now have developmental ages, and it
can be different for every domain, social, cognitive, motor, et cetera.
They're in depth diagnostic assessments for each of these, and
a significant developmental delay generally means they're eligible for special

(25:39):
education services. There's a lot more that goes into it,
including collecting data on the work they do, but the
diagnostic assessment is a big part of it. The more
I learned about the history of special education, the more
I realize it really is a civil rights issue. Children
with special needs have been slowly gaining more access to education,
but the movement is by no means over Many will

(26:00):
still think the least restrictive environment is optional. I've been
asked why one of my students was in a classroom
by an administrator and told to collect data to prove
the student should be in self contained by a fellow teacher.
I'm a big advocate for students being included as much
as possible. The fact is being with other children as
one of the best ways for many children to learn

(26:21):
appropriate behaviors. Although least restrictive environment is the law, for
students with moderate to severe disabilities, a self contained room
is often the default, even if they could be included
at least some of the day. It's easier for the
teachers and teacher for the school system, but not necessarily
better for the student. I also believe that inclusion benefits

(26:41):
the other students in the class. Students should be aware
that people learn in different ways and have diverse abilities
and strengths. Getting to know students with disabilities on a
personal level creates more tolerant understanding adults. All students with
and without I e p S learned differently. As differentiation
becomes the Norman classrooms, there's no and most students with
disabilities cannot be accommodated by the general education classroom with support.

(27:06):
Sorry for the super long email. It's something by co
workers and I spent a lot of time thinking about U.
And She also concludes with a note about the persistence
of segregation that has come up a couple of times.
She said she's worked in three different schools in Atlanta.
One was over eight percent white, one was black, and
one was Hispanic, So thank you very much, Sarah. UM.

(27:30):
A thing that I was thinking about when I was
working on that episode that I don't think we actually
said in the episode was uh, I did not realize
that the law that all children, regardless of ability, were
entitled education came around in I did say that part
in the episode. Um. I had not known that, but

(27:50):
it made a sort of trend that I have witnessed
make a lot of sense, which is that when I
was in school, which was not long at all after
the passage of that law, the idea of quote mainstreaming
children with disabilities was still extremely controversial. Most of the
specialized classrooms and schools that I went to were like
really secluded from the rest of the school, and so

(28:13):
the children who were in those special classrooms or who
were quote mainstream for part of the day, we're just
met with all kinds of bullying and harassment constantly, and
it was horrible, and I'm sure that still exists in
a lot of places today. But today we also see
the news articles that go viral about UH, students really

(28:33):
coming together to support someone who goes to their school
and has a disability, which in my experience would not
have happened when I was growing up. It was just
not how it worked exactly the same for me. I
mean I remember in elementary school when I was very,
very young, like the special education classroom was like in

(28:56):
the basement of the school, and I mean we whispered
about it like it was a freak dungeon, like we
just did not have the knowledge, especially as children, Like
it would be like, where are those kids going, Oh,
they're going to the special education room, and it's like
is that It was like almost whispered to us by
teachers as though it was a scary place. And now
I think, thankfully we've progressed a little bit. It's still ongoing,

(29:18):
but I imagine there is not a freaky dungeon like
special education classroom in a lot of schools then, I
hope not. So. If you would like to write to
us about this or any other subject, we are at
History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com. Our Facebook is
Facebook dot com slash mist in history, and our Twitter
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(29:39):
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It is at missin history dot spreadshirt dot com. If
you'd like to learn more about what we've talked about today,
you can come to our parent company's website that is
how stuff Works dot com, but the word education in

(30:01):
the search bar, and you will find all kinds of
articles about education and how we learned and how we teach. Uh.
You can also come to our website, which is missed
in History dot com, where we have show notes for
all the episodes that Holly and I have worked on.
We've had lots of questions from folks lately asking how
they can find out what our sources are are Those
are all in those show notes. Uh. We also have

(30:23):
an archive of every single episode ever, lots of other
cool stuff, so you can do all that and lots
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