A Socrates for All Seasons - Alexander Meiklejohn and Deliberative Democracy

Contents

Preface

Chapter One - The Early Years

Chapter Two - Student Days

Chapter Three - Beginning an Academic Career

Chapter Four - Challenge at Amherst

Chapter Five - Controversy and Defeat

Chapter Six - Experiment at Wisconsin

Chapter Seven - Bridging Between Hutchins and Dewey

Chapter Eight - New Ventures in California

Chapter Nine - War Years and Post-War Planning

Chapter Ten - Taking on the Supreme Court

Chapter Eleven - Communism and Loyalty

Chapter Twelve - Expanding the Theory

Chapter Thirteen – The Venerable Teacher

Chapter Fourteen - Finishing Touches

Epilogue

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Endnotes

To Elaine and Lynn

Preface

Although Alexander Meiklejohn died in 1964 his ideas are still informing the ongoing dialogue about how the United States experiment in democracy is best understood. Back in the post World War II years he articulated a hope for democracy and a view of the Constitution of the United States very similar to the one projected by Barack Obama during his 2006 and 2007 campaign to become a nominee for President of the United States. Also in this century, and even more pointedly, Meiklejohn’s interpretation of the First Amendment to the Constitution is still being supported by some members of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Obama argued in his book, The Audacity of Hope, that the Constitution needs to be understood as a framework for organizing, the way by which we argue about our future. It was designed, he wrote, to force us into a conversation, a ‘deliberative democracy’ in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.¹ It is a view that sees the Constitution, in general, as providing for a civic culture in which public need is given as much attention as individual prerogative and, in particular, as a living document that is responsive to the changing values of an enlightened citizenry.

As he also indicated in The Audacity of Hope, Obama took his cue for this vision from a contemporary jurist, United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who in turn has indicated his indebtedness to Meiklejohn. Breyer wrote in his book, Active Liberty, of his belief that at its origination the United States Constitution created, a governmental structure that reflected the view that sovereign authority originated in the people; that the right to legislate is originally in every member of the community, and that the Constitution thus, sets the stage for that community’s later democratic expansion.² Breyer’s belief is right out of Alexander Meiklejohn, and he cited Meiklejohn as a source for these ideas in Active Liberty and in the first of two early twenty-first century Supreme Court cases that dealt with the financing of campaigns for public office, as well.³

In both cases the Court upheld laws that placed limits on the financing of electoral campaigns. In the earliest case, announced in March, 2000 Breyer wrote a concurring opinion in which he was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In response to protestations that such laws violate citizen’s rights provided by the free speech provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution, Breyer held that there were free speech arguments on both sides of the issue. He said that properly framed regulations limiting monetary contributions could substantially expand the opportunity for freedom of expression rather than limit it. He pointed out that the integrity of the electoral process needs to be maintained since that is the means by which a free society translates political advocacy into concrete political action, and that regulating the financing of political campaigns is integral to that advocacy. In doing so Breyer cited Meiklejohn and Meiklejohn’s interpretation of the First Amendment which gives emphasis to public need rather than individual prerogative.⁴

Arguably at least, the issue in these cases goes to the heart of a discussion about what the United States democracy is, or ought to be, because it relates to both a concern about the nature of public debate on political issues and about how much attention should be given to collective needs as compared with individual ones. Whatever the future may hold for the constitutional views advanced by Breyer, the Supreme Court agreed in 2000 and 2003 that regulations that place limitations on both state and federal election campaigns are constitutional and, in doing so, bolstered the hope that Obama holds, and Meiklejohn held, for America’s future as well.

Interestingly enough, Meiklejohn’s view of the First Amendment came out of a sixty year career as a reform minded philosopher/teacher, debater, and educational innovator rather than from a formal study of law. In the early days of the twentieth century he became a leader in changing the paradigm of liberal education from a traditional knowledge for its own sake orientation to a more naturalistic stance which emphasized the social utility of developing liberally educated people. It was only later in the xenophobic aftermaths of World War I and particularly World War II that he turned his attention from maintaining freedom of thought and expression in the academic world to an interest in civil liberties. He became an active leader in the American Civil Liberties Union which led him in turn to the development of a then unique interpretation of the First Amendment. He believed that its provision for free speech exists not only because people have an individual right to speak but also because there is a public need to hear and debate about political issues.

Breyer is not the first Supreme Court Justice to take an interest in Meiklejohn’s views. In the 1950s, when communism was under attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy and others, Justice Hugo Black cited Meiklejohn in support of his own defense of unpopular political advocacy and adopted a view very similar to Meiklejohn’s—albeit with a different rationale. Justice William O. Douglas was also attentive to Meiklejohn’s perspective as was Justice William Brennan—although Brennan doubted that a majority of the Court would ever adopt it. Meiklejohn’s influence was such that even after his death authors of constitutional text books noted him as the foremost proponent of the political speech interpretation of the First Amendment. In one such text he was listed along with John Milton, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr and Louis Brandeis as having provided the basic theory on freedom of expression.⁵

Meiklejohn was a controversial figure in most things that he did. In an early crisis in his life as President of Amherst College be said somewhat defiantly to an assemblage, I differ from most of you on most of the issues of life and I’m going to keep it up.⁶ So when behavioral scholarship was a trend he advocated normative inquiry, and when specialization and vocationalism were in vogue he developed new programs in the liberal arts. In public affairs when free enterprise capitalism was taken as a verity he called for progressive reforms, and when free speech was seen as a threat to national security he saw it as essential to that security. He devoted a lifetime trying to demonstrate that although these views were not majoritarian they did resonate with latent stirrings in the American consciousness. In the process he became a kind of gadfly who provided a perspective against which popular wisdom had to defend.

He was also a rare personality. This was due in part to the strength of his character but also to the paradoxical nature of his demeanor. Assertive yet genial, he brought animation to whatever he did. He had an unmitigated zest for life and a wide range of interests. Competitive, even combative, in many things he was usually so with a ready touch of humor, and seldom with rancor. He wanted to improve the world and he had ready plans for doing so. A Scotsman by heritage, he possessed a fierce independence in his criticism of those orthodoxies of American life that he thought wrongheaded. Yet, he was ever the patriot, bringing the spirit of loyal opposition to his criticism. He was an extraordinary teacher, an accomplished speech maker, and he reveled in debate. But he was also a doer. He wanted to put his ideas into action and he did so in a long and productive life that spanned some of this country’s most crucially formative years.

He touched a wide variety of people, sophomoric students and eminent professors, political outcasts and pillars of the community, working lawyers and Supreme Court justices. Some were loyal supporters who followed him with disciple-like admiration; to them he was a prophet and crusader. Others extolled his virtues even as they disagreed with him. His most adamant distracters thought of him at worst as promoting totalitarian ideas and at best as hopelessly naive and unrealistic. He was also thought of as a self promoter by some and by others as a man much too impressed with the rectitude of his own ideas. He didn’t always rub people the right way because he could be obstinate and overly intent about carrying out his objectives. Sometimes wanting in tact he didn’t have time for many of the practical details of life and he was by his own admission an unorthodox administrator and manager of money. These traits got him into trouble on a number of occasions in his life but he was nothing but resilient, always bouncing back to take up some new cause.

In his later, more mellow years when he was being recognized for his achievements (among them a Presidential Medal of Freedom) he was characterized in a New York Times article as a gentle iconoclast,⁷ and Time magazine referred to him as a mild mannered maverick⁸ Justice Douglas jokingly called him an old subversive,⁹ which he was not. Perhaps the most interesting characterization came from a younger friend who said of him, he was a Socrates who wore well… a Socrates for all seasons.¹⁰ The comparison is apt, not because Meiklejohn had the dimensions of Socrates as a thinker or as the conscience of a civilization, but because he reflected so well the critical attitude and stubborn independence of that old gadfly, and because he was one of those men who did for twentieth century America what Socrates did for ancient Athens—ask where it was going. Now, early in the twenty first century he would be pleased to know that his ideas may be taking a firmer hold.

How best to tell the story of this compelling man and how his ideas on education were translated into a seminal view about freedom of expression? It seems to me that it can best be told by way of a biography. What follows then is an account of the political socialization of Alexander Meiklejohn, what made him what he came to be and how his ideas are relevant to our times.

Eugene H. Perry—January, 2008.

_______________

¹Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York:Three Rivers Press, 2006), p. 92.

²Stephen Breyer, Active Liberty (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2005), p. 22.

³See Jeremiah Nixon V Shrink Missouri Government et. al., United States Supreme Court Reports, Vol. 145, L Ed. No.7. March 10, 2000, at 886-925, and, McConnell v F.E.C., United States Supreme Court Reports, Vol. 157, L Ed. No.2 December 10, 2003, at 491. In Shrink Missouri the Court upheld the applicability of a precedent setting decision by the Court in Buckley v Valeo with regard to state elections, whereas in McConnell the Court upheld the United States Congress’s Bipartisan Campaign Finance Act in regard to federal elections. In McConnell the Court responded to all the titles of the act but Justice Breyer only wrote the majority’s response to the particulars of Title V, which did not provide an opportunity for him to repeat the argument he provided in Shrink Missouri. In effect, however, the decision in McConnell validated his argument.

⁴In Jeremiah Nixon v. Shrink Missiouri, 528 U.S. 377 (2000), at 401.

⁵Thomas Emerson, David Haber, and Norman Dorson, Political and Civil Rights in the United States, Vol. 1 3rd edition (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1967), pp 1-14.

⁶As reported by the Providence Journal, June 21, 1923, p. 2.

⁷New York Times, June 9, 1957. A clipping of this article is in the Meiklejohn files in the Archives at the Brown University Library.

⁸Time Magazine, June 17, 1957. This clipping is also in the Meiklejohn files at the Brown University Library.

⁹Meiklejohn Papers, The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Box 11, Folder 21. Justice Douglas addressed Meiklejohn with these words in a hand written note that Douglas passed to Meiklejohn in 1961 when Douglas spotted Meiklejohn in the audience at a Supreme Court session. Meiklejohn kept the note in his files.

¹⁰Kalven, Harry, Sports and Law, Rights, Vol. XII, No. 1 & 2, (New York: Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, Feb 1965), p. 14. The allusion, a man for all seasons, was applied to Thomas More, 16th century Lord Chancellor of England who refused to recognize the annulment of King Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon. It was coined by a little known grammarian of that time, Robert Whittenton who wrote, More is a man of angel’s wit and singular learning; I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And as time requireth a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes; and sometimes of sad gravity: a man for all seasons. Robert Bolt used it as the title of his play about More.

Portrait of Alexander Meiklejohn drawn for the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in 1958.

Chapter One -

The Early Years

—the Bible and Bobby Burns

On the twentieth day of May, 1880, the boy wrote in a carefully slanted hand, I sailed from Liverpool, England, for the city of New York. The vessel was the Britannic, the largest and swiftest steamship owned by the White Star line.

The boy was Alexander Meiklejohn and he was writing an essay for his high school English teacher in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Apparently he was responding to an assignment asking him to provide something of an autobiographical nature. His essay is a sensitive yet humorous appraisal of his voyage across the Atlantic to his new home in America. He relates how, after a stop for mail and more passengers, the real voyage began. The winds then began to blow, he reports, and it was with the greatest difficulty that I managed to stay in my berth. [T]he way in which boxes and bundles tried to run races across the deck, regardless of knocking anyone down was alarming in the extreme. On Monday morning when I awoke, he continued,  . . . I believed I was going to die. The worst insult that could have been given to me, was to have offered me something to eat. To be plain, I was seasick.

He recovered in two days, however, and began to take notice of how much the passengers ate once the seas had calmed. Of the passengers on board, a Dutch violinist and an Italian concertina player in particular captured his fancy. Later he related passing the Banks of Newfoundland [where] the air became chilly and icebegs [sic] came very near the vessel. The Britannic arrived in New York on the tenth morning after leaving Liverpool on a beautiful day where the view of Governor’s Island was very grand to one who had not seen land for ten days.¹

Alexander Meiklejohn came to the United States when he was eight years old. He came on the crest of what historians have called one of the great waves of migration in human history. In the sixty year period following the Civil War some thirty-three million people migrated to this country from northern, central, and southern Europe, and eight million of them came between 1870 and 1890.² They came to an exuberant and optimistic America—a country of growth, prosperity, and emerging industrial power. The growth was sponsored in part by new technologies of the day. In 1880 Thomas Edison produced the incandescent lamp, and since 1870 he and others had been working to perfect electric street cars. The recently invented telephone promised to replace the telegraph as the instrument of instant communication. Improved steam engines were driving trains and boats ever faster, and experimentation had begun on electric and steam driven horseless carriages.3 These and other inventions were fueling a burgeoning economy.

Of the eight million immigrants who entered the country between 1870 and 1880, the Meiklejohns were among almost two and a half million from England, Scotland, and Ireland.⁴ They settled mainly along the east coast where most of the growing industries were located. As with the rest they came for opportunity; they expected to find work and a chance to build a future for themselves and their children. They brought with them hope and independence of spirit—and some of them brought artisanship as well.

Alec’s father, James Meiklejohn, was from Denny, Stirlingshire, Scotland. He was a textile colorist, a specialist who learned his trade in the mills of Scotland and England. The family had already made one move, from Dunipace, Scotland to Rochdale, England, close by the industrial city of Manchester, to find work that suited his abilities, and to participate in the worker’s cooperative, the Pioneer movement, that was in place there.⁵

But greater opportunity beckoned from across the ocean. James was no doubt impressed by tales of a burgeoning textile industry in New England and of the continuing need for skilled Scotsmen to run the looms in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Scotch and Irish weavers had been coming to New England for almost a hundred years. It was they who had helped Samuel Slater start the first United States cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1770. As with his country-man, Andrew Carnegie who had become so successful, he saw an opportunity to become part of a growing prosperity.

In 1880 color printing was just being introduced in the textile industry of Rhode Island and James Meiklejohn was asked to come to teach others his skills in this regard. After a short stay in Patterson, New Jersey after landing (perhaps with friends who had preceded them) and a stay in Attleboro, Mass., the Meiklejohn family settled in Apponaug, Rhode Island, close by the Sprague Manufacturing Company which, although it had been hurt by the panic of 1872, was still one of the largest producers of the fine calicoes used in ladies dresses of the day. He apparently worked for the Cranston Millworks for three years before an even better opportunity presented itself in nearby Pawtucket. Jacob Dunnell was operating a large printworks on the banks of the Blackstone River, which was part of what had been the original Almy, Brown and Slater Mill, the first in the United States. It had been incorporated in 1853 as the Dunnell Manufacturing Co. It had a bleachery and dyeworks and specialized in calico printing. It was one of a dozen or so large mills in the Providence—Pawtucket area at the head of Narragansett Bay.⁶

Pawtucket, which was not to be incorporated as a city until 1886, was a fast growing town. When the Meiklejohns arrived in 1883 the population was just about 20,000 people.⁷ Four and five miles to the south the cities of Providence and Cranston had a combined population of approximately 75,000.⁸ In 1875 almost fifty percent of the people in the Providence—Pawtucket area were either sons or daughters of immigrants or had just immigrated themselves.⁹

The Meiklejohn family was not a large one by standards of the 1880s. Eight boys had been born to James and his wife Elizabeth France, but two, both christened James, had died in infancy and a third, Matthew, died as a young boy before they came to America.

Alec’s living brothers, Henry (known as Harry), William, John Watt and Andrew had all been born in Dunipace, while Alec, the youngest, had been born in Rochdale, in 1872, eight years before the family’s migration across the Atlantic. His brothers teased him about his English birth saying he was a Johnny Bull. Years later he would tell of how this teasing distressed him and of how he built perhaps his first argument in rebuttal. It was constructed as follows he recollected: You could be born in a stable but that wouldn’t make you a horse."¹¹ He managed to be as thoroughly Scottish as any of them.

The home which nurtured Alec was preeminently a Scottish one, steeped in the traditions and sentiments of the auld country, and this had a great deal to do with what he was to become. It is said that the Scotch have as much feeling for their ain folk as any people in any time, with a deep love of their country and culture.¹² Scotsmen are also well steeped in the Protestant tradition of John Knox, and Meiklejohn was to recall in later years that his family was brought up on the Bible and Bobby Burns with, if anything, he said, a greater emphasis on the latter.¹³

Burns epitomizes the Scotch ethos. His poems are word pictures of Scotland and the Scots. They are full of color and passion, and what was particularly important to an impressionable young boy, Burns wrote with great feeling about human equality and the dignity of the individual—especially as it pertained to those from the humblest of backgrounds. The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor, Is king o’ men for a’ that,¹⁴ Burns wrote, and Alec took this as an article of faith.

The Scottish church also had a strong democratic tradition. For almost two centuries the members of the kirks had been electing their own ministers, elders, and deacons. The Meiklejohns attended the Presbyterian church in Pawtucket and young Alec was properly steeped in formal religion. Years later he was to write of the awe in which he held the minister and the large influence that the Rev. Alexander MacGregor had on his youth.¹⁵

There are also elements of paradox in his Scottish heritage. Scots are a frugal people who can be generous, and although often considered close and clannish they are also known for their hospitality. Similarly, Scots are also thought of as dour and serious yet they can give themselves fully to play and sporting activity; and while they are held to be sometimes brooding and withdrawn they are also known to do what ever they do, to what ever end, with all their might.

One can only speculate as to how many of these qualities were reflected in James and Elizabeth Meiklejohn. What they certainly conveyed were the middle class values of the Victorian period of which all English speaking people were a part. They had a strong sense of right and wrong and of the value of hard work and independent effort. The family and its enterprises were paramount and the Meiklejohn boys were made to help around the house. One of Meiklejohn’s earliest recollections of his mother was of standing by her side as she did the washing. When she came to the socks Alec helped turn them for her. She also taught him how to make tapioca cream, a boyhood favorite. When he was trying to do something but not having much success, she would encourage independent effort by saying, What ye canna do, nobody else need try, a saying he in turn would use with others later in life.¹⁶ James was described as one who had an amazing combination of great sweetness and quiet strength, and Elizabeth as a woman with a gentle quality, together with a bit of spicy humor.¹⁷ All in all Alec had a happy and secure childhood which contributed greatly to the sense of confidence and optimism that he would carry with him all his life.

As a working man’s son Alec was educated in the public schools. When the family first settled in Pawtucket he went to the Grove Street School and from there to Pawtucket High School. Such an education was of good quality in the 1880s but not too many children of the working class went beyond grade school then. A Truant and Compulsory Education Act had been passed by the state legislature in 1883 and later a Factory Inspection Act, both of which were designed to extend the benefits of education to every child… .¹⁸ Even so, because so many children were employed in the factories, Rhode Island had a larger percentage of illiteracy than her neighboring states.¹⁹ The Meiklejohns were comparatively well off so the Meiklejohn boys avoided the ranks of the illiterate by remaining in school.

Sport and athletic endeavor also played a big role in the development of Alec and his brothers. James was a cricketer and he taught his love for that sport to his sons. In a time when baseball was still in its infancy cricket was the major summer game in the strongly Scotch and English community that Pawtucket was in the 1880s and ‘90s. The Pawtucket club played their games on the grounds of the driving park (which later became the Narragansett Race Track) and the four Meiklejohn boys became the backbone of the Y.M.C.A. sponsored team. Alec was particularly adept as a bowler, while his brothers had special batting skills. Together they attained considerable local fame.²⁰

Another of Alec’s school boy essays is revealing of his meticulous approach to the game—and of a bit of British chauvinism as well. In comparing English and American sports he made a case for holding that, far more science is shown by the British in their games than by the Americans. For illustration he compared pitching in baseball and bowling in cricket. In baseball, he wrote, that pitcher, if he can throw straight is the most successful who can throw the swiftest ball, while in cricket, the bowling is, among the best players, slow and scientific. Also, he pointed out, In cricket the ball strikes the ground before it reaches the batter, and the force of the ball is stopped, while in baseball the ball comes, at any height from the knee to the shoulder, and it is impossible to tell in what direction it may curve, so that both batters and catchers are often seriously injured while in cricket accidents are few and far between.²¹

In winter the dominant sport was ice polo, a precursor of the collegiate game of ice hockey that Meiklejohn was to help pioneer a few years later.²² The boys played it outdoors on the frozen winter ponds, but a similar game was at that time being played in a more organized way in indoor rinks on roller skates. The indoor game drew large crowds of spectators because of its emphasis on fast attack and body contact. In comparing English and American sports young Alec also held that, although polo is the national winter game of America it is not played nearly as well in this country as in England. This is acknowledged since the Americans received such a beating in Newport last year.²³

Hammond’s Pond, on the outskirts of the city, was the place for a boy to go on a winter afternoon. Winters were severe in the eighties and one can imagine that Alec got in a lot of ice time. In 1888 the great blizzard may even have closed off the skating with all the snow. As an adult Meiklejohn was to write of these days, Some of the happiest hours of my youth were spent in playing polo on Hammond’s Pond in Pawtucket, on Railroad Pond in Providence. and at Roger Williams Park.²⁴

But young Meiklejohn’s attention was not entirely on sports. He was, during his high school years, developing a social consciousness which would mark all his future activities. Again his family life contributed greatly to this. While in Rochdale, James Meiklejohn had participated in the consumer cooperative and he and his family had come to believe in cooperative ownership and in worker initiatives in matters that affected their lives. In Pawtucket James became a foreman at the Dunnell plant and began to exert a role of leadership among his fellow workers. He was making a good living and was able to have a house built at 118 Prospect Street close by the plant. In the absence of strong union influence²⁵ it was necessary to work out informal means by which grievances could be expressed, and the Meiklejohn home became a focus for such activity. On Saturday mornings the Meiklejohns received the Dunnell workers in their home for the airing of complaints and the resolving of problems.²⁶ Alec would say later in life that the textile workers were my people. I rebelled against their wrongs. The sense of the injustice done them has never left me.²⁷

National political events very likely also contributed to Alec’s sensitivity to the cause of laboring people. Industrial workers had very little to say about their own lives and little was being done about it in the early 1880’s. Just four months after his inauguration, President James A. Garfield was shot by a disappointed office seeker. He died in September of 1881 and was succeeded by Chester A. Arthur. Neither Garfield nor Arthur showed much sensitivity to the plight of workers (or farmers) as against growing corporate influences both inside and outside of government. The laissez-faire attitudes of the day allowed corporate wealth to grow unchecked. In 1882 the first trust, in the modern sense, was established when John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and its subsidiaries put all their properties in the hands of a board of trustees.²⁸ Others soon followed and the dynasties of the Goulds, the Fisks, and the Morgans were established.

In response workers were beginning to close ranks. The Knights of Labor developed a centrally directed organization and, although the union had not been successful in Rhode Island,²⁹ it was beginning to flourish elsewhere. The Knights of Labor’s efforts were enhanced by the founding of the American Federation of Labor in 1882, which until then had been only a loosely organized craft union. Given James Meiklejohn’s activities with localized attempts at organization there must have been discussions in the Meiklejohn household about the relative merits and tactics of national versus company unions.

The concerns of laboring people received a boost with the election of Grover Cleveland in 1884. Cleveland was a reformer, albeit a cautious one. He did not see government as an agent for change but he was willing to have government mediate between conflicting interests and was personally ready to stand up to special interests that were using government for their own purposes. Cleveland was the first President to send Congress a message dealing exclusively with a labor management dispute—the 1885-86 strikes against Jay Gould’s southwestern railroads. Cleveland’s subsequent efforts at reducing protective tariffs had a particular impact on New England manufacturing and labor concerns. The question of tariffs also divided the Irish as against the Scots and English and these matters were likely also a topics for discussion in the Meiklejohn home.³⁰

The stirrings of reform were evident in Rhode Island politics as well. William Sprague IV, who was the scion of the wealthy and influential mill owning family for whom James Meiklejohn had first come to work, was the Democratic Party’s candidate for Governor in 1884.³¹ Sprague had perpetuated the highly paternalistic character of the family’s operation³² and, given the degree of company control exerted over the workers,³³ was perhaps no real friend of the working man, but he was portrayed as such. Sprague and the Democrats claimed to be the champions of labor as against Republican bossism and protection of vested interests. They adopted an equal rights platform and called for the removal of the property qualifications for voting which were then in place. Sprague wasn’t given much chance, however, because Rhode Island politics had been dominated by the Republicans since the Civil War,³⁴ which was now in the control of boss Charles W. Brayton. August O. Bourne was Brayton’s hand picked candidate.³⁵ He and the Republicans warned against Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion and made the argument that a restricted electorate was the best guarantee against the evils of the Tammany Hall style of government being exerted in New York. The Republicans won the governorship again in 1884 and retained control of the legislature as well.

The Meiklejohn family was perhaps divided in its reaction to the political parties. As people who were loyal to their roots, well established, and God fearing Protestants they might have been expected to align themselves with the Republicans. It is clear that later on when John Watt and William became respected business men in the community they both identified with the Grand Old Party.³⁶ However, with James’ and Elizabeth’s understanding of the plight of working families who were less well off than they, there would have been considerable sympathy for the equal rights cause and for Cleveland’s attempts to confront special interests. In addition, their sense of principle would have caused them to act negatively to Brayton’s blatant bossism.

In New York City a railway worker’s strike prompted the leaders of the American Federation of Labor to call upon its 600,000 members to mount a general strike. In May of 1886, when Alec was fourteen, the Haymarket Riots took place in Chicago as a direct result of a militant push by the union for an eight hour working day.³⁷ Stories of the riots and their aftermath were carried in newspapers across the country.³⁸

That same year the prohibitionist impulse led to the amending of the Rhode Island Constitution to prohibit the sale of alcoholic spirits. The prohibition lasted only three years but it was the subject of much debate and it captured the attention of many young men. Young Alec was one who wrote with feeling on the subject. At least three high school essays on temperance were the product of his conviction. In each he wrote about the evils of alcohol, the depravity of those who traffic in it, and its debilitating effect on the people of America. I think if I were an American citizen, he wrote in one essay I would boast no more of my country and its laws, ’til this evil was driven from the land… ."⁴¹

His high school writings also demonstrate a concern about the organization of government and a skepticism about the more prosaic manifestations of politics. The election of 1888 brought national attention to Rhode Island because of a scandal that developed out of charges that there had been considerable vote buying in Rhode Island by both Republicans and Democrats. (According to Brayton the going rate for a vote was two to five dollars in an ordinary election and fifteen to thirty-five dollars in a hotly contested one.)⁴² In this his senior year in high school, Alec wrote an oration on campaigning in which he maintained that, campaigning consists chiefly in speech making, wirepulling, and parading, each of which is supposed to gain votes for the party by which it is employed. Of these he says, that speech making is by far the most sensible and instructive as it informs citizens and makes them one immense debating society wherein the most intelligent and gifted men of the country act as the leading debaters to instruct the mass of the people. Despite the patronizing tone of these boyhood remarks Meiklejohn is reflecting what, with important refinements, would become a central tenet of both his political and educational philosophy, namely, that rational consideration of public matters is essential to the realization of a successful democracy.

He says further in his oration that there is also a danger connected to debating society politics in that people are often swayed by the more bigoted and are not able to assume as fair a view as they would obtain if they had heard the argument from both sides. Even though demagogues can by their many gymnastic gestures and flow of words… prove to the uneducated mind anything they may wish, he allows, such speech making is an elevating and educating exercise and one which it would be well for more of our Pawtucket High School boys to attend.⁴³

Of wirepulling and parading he takes a dimmer view. By wirepulling he is presumably referring to the practice of getting out the vote by party and union bosses. It is wrong, he writes, because no man has any right to exert undue influence on the vote of his uneducated neighbor… Parading to his mind (and here he perhaps reflects a Scottish reserve as well an intellectual conviction) is one of the most silly and nonsensical things that a political enthusiast can do.⁴⁴ His argument, again forecasting an abiding concern, is that it appeals to the emotional rather than to the intellectual capacities of people. Parades are fine for people to show off, but it is doubtful that campaign committees can justify spending people’s money on such time consuming and wasteful practices.

The high school curriculum at that time was classic in its orientation and geared to the preparation of students for college. A list of courses taught at Pawtucket High School in 1888 included: Latin Grammar, History of Rome, Greek, History of Greece, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, English History, English Literature, and Moral Science. Algebra, Geometry, Botany, and Physical Geography were also included, as well as courses in Civil Government and Political Economy. The only nod to practical skills were Penmanship and Book Keeping.⁴⁵

Alec also made the Greeks and Romans subjects of his high school writing. While he showed interest in the classics he acknowledged the difficulty of those subjects. Virgil, he said, was destined to become both the terror and the delight of modern school boys. And while he appreciated Virgil he again displayed critical capacity in declaring that,

The most objectionable feature of his character was the grovelling flattery of the Julian family which renders parts of his works perfectly nauseous. Yet, not withstanding this failing, Virgil, by the excellence of the Ecologues, Georgics and Aeneid, can fairly claim the first rank among the poets of Rome. His refined language, studied expression, matchless similis (sic), and general good taste all combine to make him a poet who must always be honored as a great and entertaining writer.⁴⁶

Perhaps the sensitivity to refined language and studied expression that Meiklejohn displayed in his adult writing began with his study of Virgil. Similarly, the attention given to oration and the articulation of ideas, which was a large part of formal education before the turn of the century, provided Meiklejohn with the basic skills of public address which he utilized to such good advantage later in life.

The temperance issue was of such importance to him that he chose it as the theme of the oration he delivered on the occasion of his graduation from Pawtucket High School in the spring of 1889. In it he reviewed the arguments of those he called the supporters of license which gave support to their view that the government had no right to limit men’s freedom to drink. No man, he said in refutation, will deny that the dealer by selling and the drinker by drinking inflict untold misery, suffering, and woe upon their poor unfortunate relatives and children.⁴⁷

Behind the rhetoric and youthful priggishness there is an attempt on his part to come to grips with the age old conflict between liberty and law which would play so prominent a part in his adult deliberations. He was beginning to struggle with the terms under which individual prerogatives might be curtailed when the general welfare is at stake. His suggestion, even as a high school student, is that moral principle should prevail and that moral education is the path to enlightenment. He also demonstrates faith that this enlightenment can come to pass because moral good sense will win out in a general referendum. The most leading and intentional falsehood which the anti-prohibitionist perpetrate he says, will be utterly disproven at the next vote.⁴⁸

Also, despite his puritan zeal there is a germ of philosophical sophistication in his moralism in that he wants to distinguish between liberty and license. The anti-prohibitionists are, in his view, purveyors of license, while the prohibitionists are the champions of liberty. Why? Because drink is enslaving whereas temperance involves self-control; an accomplishment that he was to define in his adult years as having a liberating effect. He ended his oration with the following: Therefore, let every true lover of America and liberty come boldly to the front, declare his ideas, unite with the supporters of law enforcement and proper officials and thus earn for himself the proud title of ‘a prohibitionist’.⁴⁹ His sense of rectitude and his crusading spirit was evident even at age seventeen.

Although he apparently did well in the classics and in all his language and literature courses, his accomplishments in algebra and geometry are less clear. In later years he admitted to a bad education in mathematics. His critical temperament may have gotten in the way of a proper appreciation for quantitative matters. Late in life he told a story about himself and his early encounters with algebra which suggests this:

In my high school algebra I remember vividly my first contact with negative numbers, because I flared up in class with the assertion [or question] that there could