John Swett and the politics of public education in frontier California

John Swett and class from Girls' High School, San Francisco, 1876.
This photo and photo of Sweet further below on page, courtesy of Bancroft Library.

In 1862, Sarah Bunker, a young teacher in Nantucket, Massachusetts, came to California at the urging of her sister, who had settled in Martinez with her husband. Her sister expected her to “take a school” there, but almost from the day Sarah arrived, she wanted a job in San Francisco, a much livelier place. She learned that the president of the school board in San Francisco was a dentist, so she went to him to have her teeth looked after. During the visit, she told him about herself and her hope of teaching in the city. In a letter to her family, she reported that he said she had the “right snap,” and she commented, “There is a knowing how to come round people.1 It was a few years before she managed to get the job she wanted, but her effort illustrates a newcomer’s reaching for an opportunity on a frontier where ways of doing so had not yet been fixed.

The new state of California seems in retrospect to have been an ideal place for establishment of a free and comprehensive school system like the ones that educators were building in some of the eastern states by the mid-19th century. The money for public schools was there — California was rich in gold and potentially rich in other resources — it had only to be made available. The idea, the will and the skills for schools were there; as an apparently rich frontier, California attracted teachers and would-be teachers among its newcomers, and standards for instruction had only to be set and met.

Free schools, however, required dependable long-term financing that local communities could not assure. Localities would have to depend on the state government. The state government in turn would provide a framework for instruction for the schools. Thus, political maneuvering on the state level quickly became a factor in the funding and operation of public schools, and educators who professed to abhor partisan politics found themselves caught up in them.

California’s first constitution in 1849 called simply for a “system of common schools” — the term in use at the time for free elementary schools supported by public money — and an elected state superintendent. The delegates at the constitutional convention set the school term at three months because they thought it would be easier to fund the shorter term than a longer one. But they did not write funding procedures or guidelines into the constitution.

The resolutions of the first political party conventions in California in 1849 and 1850 (Democratic and Whig) made no reference to education, although the parties nominated candidates for superintendent. In addition there were eight independent candidates. One of them, John G. Marvin, won the election but then sought Democratic Party support. Also silent about education was the first governor, Peter Burnett. It is not surprising that the first legislature did not pass a school bill. Committees on education, which were haphazardly put together, recommended that the establishment of a public school system be postponed because taxes for other purposes were already burdensome. Committee members considered education to be a private or a local matter. The legislature had other work to do.

The new state government had to be financed. United States senators had to be selected. A location for the state capitol had to be established. Legislators had to get acquainted with one another.2
The first school law, passed in 1851, referred to state financing from the school fund, the income from sections of the public land given to the states by Congress,3 but made no provision for taxation, although expectation of getting money from the state had already stimulated some settlers to organize school districts. In urban places, preeminently San Francisco, voters imposed their own taxes for primary schools, intermediate schools, grammar schools and eventually high schools. People in small towns and rural areas subscribed for the support of ungraded schools or primary schools in someone’s house or in a church, lodge hall or whatever the local residents could find or build. To finance these efforts, they adopted a means that was common, although unpopular, in other states: a “rate bill,” an assessment on the parents of children enrolled in a school. With it, in 1853 only 3314 of California’s 17,821 white school-aged children were enrolled in a school.

Editors of The Pacific, a publication of the Congregational Church, called repeatedly for a state tax to increase the number of schools that children could attend without cost. The legislature was not providing the means, they wrote, and the state superintendent was unable to get it to do so. At the end of the decade, Superintendent Andrew Jackson Moulder reported that the state was paying three times as much for support of criminals in prisons as it was for children in schools. The average daily attendance in the public schools that year was only 11, 183 from a school-aged population of 40,530. “If…we do not take instant and effective means to remedy it,” he wrote, “these 29, 347 neglected children will grow up into 29,347 benighted men and women; a number nearly sufficient, at ordinary times, to control the vote of the State, and, in consequence, to shape its legislation and its destiny.”4

The 1851 school law provided for elected local “Superintending School Committees” to examine teacher candidates annually and give them teaching certificates. It also gave church schools a share in the school fund. Religious denominations and local churches had begun offering elementary and secondary school instruction, and their congregations assumed they would continue to do so. Some legislators and educators objected to sharing the school fund with private schools.

In 1852 a new school law specified that schools would receive no benefits unless they were “free from all denominational and sectarian bias, control and influence whatsoever.” It also prohibited the use of sectarian books.5 In 1853, however, Superintendent Marvin asked the legislature to repeal these sections of the law. The bishop of Monterey had written to him urging that he use his “influence, towards a pro rata appropriation of the collected public funds” for 579 children in 12 schools maintained by the Catholic Church.6 Protestants reacted angrily. The editor of The Pacific wrote: “As it now stands, it is a blot on the Statute book of a free people. For it robs the American Common School System of its peculiar glory. That glory is, education at public cost, for all the people, free from sectarian influence and prejudice.”7 Marvin was defeated in his bid for reelection, and the school law of 1855 again prohibited the use of sectarian or denominational books and doctrines.8

Through the 1850s, political party involvement in education seems to have been more often a matter of controlling state offices than of taking positions on principles relevant to education. In his study of the struggle for community in frontier California, Harvard professor Josiah Royce found that the legislators spent time not on the development of political and social institutions but on “quarrels and bargains concerning the distribution of offices…The politicians might, indeed, squander public money, or sell offices for votes; but, in general, they might not try, nor even propose, any revolutionary social schemes.”9 The second state superintendent, Paul C. Hubbs, for example, made impassioned but ineffective pleas to the legislature for funds: if not from the school lands as established for the states by Congress, then from taxes; if not from taxes, then from a direct appropriation. “It is purely ridiculous and mean in the individual to say, ‘I will not pay for the education of the children of others.’ You pay for roads over which you never travel, and you pay for prisons which you never inhabit. It is but a part of the social compact of civilized society, to advance the intelligence and to elevate the character for independent thought and action, of the whole people.”10

Increasingly through the 1850s and into the Civil War years, party politics in California reflected the divisive issues of slavery and secession on which national political alignments were breaking down and rebuilding. Campaigns for the superintendency of public instruction reflected the national issues.

In 1862, three parties nominated candidates in California. One was the “Union” or “Union Administration” party, made up of Republicans and Democrats who supported Stephen O. Douglas and his position on “popular sovereignty” with regard to where slavery should be permitted. In June 1862, delegates at its state convention resolved to support President Lincoln’s administration, stating that the only issue now before the nation was union or disunion. They nominated John Swett, a teacher in San Francisco, for superintendent. He had been approached by John Elliot Benton, a Congregationalist minister who, in Swett’s account, “took a lively interest in politics and public schools.” The office of superintendent was the only state office on that ballot. Benton assured Swett that the Union Party would win and implied that this was a preparation for “the main contest” for selection of a United States senator in 1863. “The vote for state school superintendent…would be taken as an index of the relative strength of the three political parties.”11

In July 1862, the state central committee of the second party, the “Union Democratic Party,” nominated Jonathan D. Stevenson for superintendent. He had led a New York regiment of volunteers as an expeditionary force into California at the outset of the war with Mexico. The regiment mustered out in 1849 in California, and he stayed in San Francisco as a businessman. The third party in 1862 was formed by pro-Southern, pro-slavery members of the preexisting Democratic Party; they nominated Oscar Penn Fitzgerald, a Methodist minister from North Carolina.

Historians of California have called John Swett the founder of California’s public school system. He was the fourth of the state’s superintendents of public instruction. His ideals did not differ much from those of his predecessors; most importantly they agreed that the property of the state should be taxed to educate the children of the state.12 Swett, however, was able to work more effectively with the state legislature on bills for schools. He was also the most ardently committed to a principle that politics and education do not mix. California’s voters had adopted this principle the same year Swett was first elected (1862), when they passed a ballot measure to separate the election of the state superintendent and judges from the election for other offices. The voters expected these positions to be nonpartisan.

Swett was originally from New Hampshire. He was born in Pittsfield Township, a rural area with a small village and a cotton mill on the Suncock River. He attended the local grammar school, where, as he wrote admiringly later in his life, one of his teachers “did something more than textbook recitations. He talked, he explained, he illustrated, he even laughed…How genial he was! Arithmetic was made easy, grammar was sweet to the taste, and the whole world seemed delightful.”13 He attended local academies, obtained a teaching certificate at the age of 17 and enrolled in a newly opened teacher training institute, but he had not yet decided on a career in education. Like many others of his generation, he was attracted to the gold fields of California, and in the fall of 1852 he sailed from Boston for San Francisco. He spent a few desultory, unrewarding months working in mines and on farms; then, broke, he applied for a teaching job in San Francisco.

The contrast with Pittsfield could hardly have been greater. In the census of 1850, the population of Pittsfield Township was less than 2000. All but 125 of its residents had been born in New Hampshire, and of these, almost all came from other parts of New England. Only seven came from outside the United States. The economic base was diversified subsistence farming, with small supporting businesses plus the cotton mill. Wages were low but there were few paupers.14 San Francisco’s population when Swett arrived was about 36,000 and was predominantly a young male population. In the first few years of the state’s gold rush, many of the people in the city at any given time were transients and came from all parts of the world. In 1853, about 34,000 persons landed in San Francisco and 31,000 left.15 There was a more or less stable population, however, of people who had come to make their fortunes not from mining but from being merchants to miners, people who came for the political opportunities a new place might offer, and people who came as ministers, teachers, journalists, builders and craftsmen. There were people who came in families or who soon formed families. So there were schools: seven supported by local taxes and 27 by private tuition.

Rincon Point, San Francisco, 1855.
Photo courtesy of San Francisco Public Library

Swett’s new job was principal (i.e., principal teacher) of a grammar school at Rincon Point, a mostly working class neighborhood south of the commercial district and near the bay.16 He held that position until the election in 1862, overseeing the expansion of the school and a move to a new building as the neighborhood grew. He added gymnastics to the curriculum, included field trips and offered evening classes for working adults. Newspapers drew their readers’ attention to his work. They even quoted his commencement addresses to students and parents.

Addressing teachers, he advocated the establishment of “normal” or teachers’ training schools like the one he had attended in New Hampshire. In a class instituted by the San Francisco school board, he spoke about a need for a teachers’ organization: “Association in some form is the soul of modern progress. We constitute the advance guard on the shores of the Pacific, cut off from the main body of American teachers. Let us organize and work together. Let us make our influence felt in leading public opinion in school affairs.”17 He was developing a belief that would inform and inspire his work for the rest of his life, a belief that teachers should be the responsible agents in all things having to do with education.

His first expression of this belief was in connection with hiring practices. Pursuant to the school law of 1851, elected school boards conducted examinations of teachers and gave them one-year appointments. Teachers then had to take a new examination to be rehired. The examiners’ questions might be simple or they might be complex. Swett later described one that required the applicant to name the bodies of water, cities and countries of the world and to outline the states of the United States, all in one hour.18 Teachers felt humiliated by questions that seemed to be carelessly posed by ignorant examiners, and felt insulted by the lack of attention to their previous work. The solution to these problems would be to put teachers on the hiring committees and to provide teachers with security, or tenure, in their jobs. Such a solution waited for an angry spokesman — Swett — to be in a position to formulate laws that codified respect for teachers.

The opportunity came in 1862. In his campaign to become state superintendent of public instruction, Swett emphasized ideals of professional standards for teachers as well as free schools for all children. He also tied these ideals to Civil War issues, as did Union Party candidates for other offices in California that year. In a speech at a teachers’ institute in San Francisco in the summer of 1862, he said, “Let me call your attention to one great fact which this rebellion places in a most striking light before us, that our public schools have been not only the sources of intelligence and learning, but…the great nurseries of patriotism and devotion to constitutional liberty.”19 Leland Stanford, who was elected governor that fall, agreed that education and national unity were related and said, “Upon the intelligence and education of the masses[,] the hopes of a democratic sentiment can alone find a certain and reliable basis.”20

Swett won the election. Because voters had changed the term of office from two to four years, effective the following year, he had to run for reelection in 1863. The Union Party convention nominated him again, and he won with over 70 percent of the vote.

When he took office, Swett found that California’s educational pattern resembled New York’s, which had developed along two lines: schools provided for by charter in incorporated cities and rural schools under the jurisdiction of county governments. The urban schools supported by local taxes were better than the rural schools where tuition fees or rate bills were the most common sources of funding. His first concern, then, was for legislation that would improve conditions in the areas with the least or poorest funding for schools. Statewide measures would be necessary. In his first superintendent’s report to the legislature, he wrote: “If one State in the Union needs a system of free schools more than any other, that State is California. Her population is drawn from all nations. The next generation will be a composite one, made up of the heterogeneous atoms of all nationalities. Nothing can Americanize these chaotic elements and breathe into them the spirit of our institutions but the public schools.”21

To publicize his concerns and enlist support for his proposals to the legislature, Swett traveled around the state, visiting schools and lecturing about the needs of the schools. He campaigned like a politician, but he acted on the supposition that public opinion could be generated and, once generated, used to achieve goals outside any political parties. A reporter wrote of his presentation to an audience in sparsely settled, rural Contra Costa County in August 1863: “The earnest manner in which he advocated the cause in which he is engaged, together with the cogency of his arguments, evidently made a deep impression on his hearers. We wish every parent could have been there.”22 He had hoped to increase revenues for schools through new state and county taxes right away, but the legislature agreed only to strengthen the law for the collection of rate bills. He had to learn to campaign among the legislators.

Meanwhile he lobbied among teachers, first by calling for a state teachers’ convention. Held in May 1863, it established the California Educational Society, forerunner of the California Teachers Association. He prepared a petition to the legislature, which the teachers adopted as a resolution and circulated among voters for signatures. With it he got endorsement of a state school tax. Teachers agreed also to establish a journal of education, California Teacher, which Swett co-edited. He hoped to create and maintain communication lines among teachers, and he used the journal to advocate what he believed were the common interests of teachers: curriculum development, professional standards and procedures for certification of teachers, and salaries.23

In 1864 he persuaded the legislature to increase the state’s allocation to the schools, to raise minimum and maximum county tax levels and to require local districts to tax themselves as necessary to keep the public schools open at least five months in the year. He tried to maintain the momentum in 1865 while legislators were calling for budget reductions. He castigated wealthy citizens for crusading against taxes for education as extravagant expenditures. Public schools, he said, require taxation, “and the sooner the common people understand this democratic-republican doctrine [,] the better for the state, the better for property, the better for mankind, the better for the nation.”24 Again he circulated petitions.

In 1866 the legislature authorized payment of expenses for teachers’ institutes from the county school fund, required purchase of school supplies by school districts, provided for school libraries and ordered that city, county and state boards of examination of teachers be composed of professional teachers only. It also passed the revenue bills that Swett proposed, with little opposition. In his second biennial report, he wrote: “The school year ending June 30, 1867, marks the transition period of California from rate-bill common schools to an American free school system. For the first time in the history of the State, every public school was made entirely free for every child to enter.”25

California in fact was still behind the Midwestern states in the proportion of school income that came from public funds, although it was slightly above the national average in the percentage of the school-aged population enrolled in schools.26 During Swett’s superintendency, school funding and school attendance had indeed increased, but in retrospect it is evident that his goals had been approached but not yet reached.

At the 1867 Union Party state convention, the delegates again nominated Swett for state superintendent. The Democratic Party nominated Fitzgerald. At the outset of the campaign, Swett’s supporters assumed that, as a popular incumbent and an advocate of free and nonsectarian schools, he would win easily. As the weeks passed, however, the campaign became rough. Fitzgerald called Swett an infidel because he went to the Unitarian Church, and accused him of not believing in the divinity of Christ. Swett denied the charge and said Fitzgerald was a preacher and not a schoolman and should stay in his own profession.27

Campaigns for the judiciary as well as the superintendency became increasingly rancorous after the general election in early September, in which Democrats won every office. Democrats accused their opponents of campaigning on purely national issues, such as the congressional plan for reconstruction of the South and universal suffrage, and of trying in the coming October election only to convince Easterners that the state had not really gone over to the Democratic Party. The Republican state committee urged unity with the Unionists. All sides worried that the electorate would not bother to vote. Teachers in San Francisco published a circular, “To the Friends of Common Schools,” asking that “party questions” be laid aside. Fitzgerald’s handbill read: “That, in case of my election, I shall have the sympathy and co-operation of the dominant party in our State Legislature, which will enable me to do more in behalf of our Public School interests than can be done by my honorable competitor, who cannot reasonably expect such sympathy and co-operation.”28

Swett’s supporters insisted that he was not a professional politician. The Daily Morning Call, published in San Francisco, told its readers: “Properly speaking, the election to be held in this State next month should be invested with no political importance whatever. The people separated the election of their judges and Superintendent of Public Instruction from that for other officers in order to remove them as far as possible from the influence of partisan politics, and were it not for mad political demagogues, the wishes of the people would be respected.”29

Again voters elected the Democratic ticket, but Fitzgerald got just 51.1 percent of the vote for superintendent, while the margins in almost all the other races were much wider. Swett returned to teaching, this time as principal of Denman Grammar School in San Francisco. He also taught an evening class at the Lincoln Evening School, where he became principal for two years, and he helped develop an adult education program.

He continued to speak and write his mind. He became known among educators across the country in 1872, when an address he delivered at a teachers’ convention inspired a teacher tenure law.30

In California, public discussion of educational issues was shifting to questions of textbook adoption. Fitzgerald hoped for statewide uniformity of textbooks, an idea which had first been proposed by Superintendent Marvin in 1851. Swett was not convinced that statewide uniformity was desirable. He was convinced only that educational standards had to be raised and that the adoption of books by the state board of education might help raise them. He thought that changes in the state list of accepted books should be implemented gradually, that books being used in one part of the state should continue to be used, without additional cost to parents, while the state board adopted new ones. After Fitzgerald’s election, the legislature put all textbook adoptions in the hands of the state board of education. Then, as the new superintendent, Fitzgerald proposed a new list of books to the board, which included the nationally known McGuffey’s Readers. Swett published a comparison of the costs of the existing and the new book lists to show that parents would pay thousands of dollars for the change in books, and he charged that book companies had lobbied the legislature and the board of education. “The passage of the amendment enlarging the authority of the State Board was urged by agents of several Eastern book houses, who spent some months in this State preparing the way for introducing their own publications in place of others,” he wrote. He did not believe teachers were in agreement about the change of books, so “it should not have been made, and we presume would not have been[,] had not the book agents busied themselves in urging it — and it seems they have more influence in deciding questions of this sort than the most experienced officers or teachers, who look only to the interest of schools and parents, not to those of greedy publishers.”31

Denman Grammar School
Photo courtesy of Society of California Pioneers

When Fitzgerald ran for reelection in 1871, he declared that politics should be ignored in the election of the superintendent. However, an editorial in the San Francisco Bulletin opposing his candidacy called several of his acts as superintendent “political” in fact, and said of the book controversy, by way of example: “The sweeping change of text-books — was there no political feeling at the bottom of it? Did the fact that the Harpers-published Willson’s Readers have nothing to do with the change for McGuffey’s — a series in which there is not a national idea nor a patriotic sentiment?”32 Swett wrote that Fitzgerald had tried to expurgate information about the Civil War and had “cost the people hundreds of thousands by a change of books in the schools that should hide from the young the enormous crime that he and his sort [as representative of the Southern Confederacy] perpetrated in plunging the country into a monster rebellion…He has put into the hands of the youth of the State a set of school books that wipe out all distinction between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, the men who suffered in Southern prison pens and the monsters that inflicted the suffering.” In short, “his claims for re-election are based on sectional prejudices, and Democratic partisanship altogether.”33

During the term of Fitzgerald’s successful Republican opponent, Henry Bolander, the legislature passed two bills that Swett had hoped for. One mandated school attendance by all children between the ages of eight and 14 unless they had an exemption.34 The other made women “eligible to all educational offices within the State.”35

In 1875, Ezra Slocum Carr won the election for superintendent.36 Supported by farmers and mechanics organizations, he was the only Republican candidate for state office to win in the elections that year, gathering 57.5 percent of the vote while Democrats won the other state offices with margins of almost two to one. The legislature, still trying to settle arguments about the choice of textbooks but not yet prepared to provide free books, acted when Carr took office to prevent state and local boards of education from changing the list of accepted books. This issue reappeared in 1877, when an election was called for a second state constitutional convention, although it was minor in comparison to other ills that were troubling Californians: economic depression, racial and ethnic conflict, and scandals in political offices.

At the convention,³⁷ of the nine members of an education committee, only two were associated with education. They were both on the Board of Regents of the University of California. Other educators sought to influence the committee independently. John Swett was one of them. He submitted sections for a new education article through a county superintendent of education who had been elected as a delegate, and he began a campaign for the sections he wanted by presenting them at a state teachers’ association meeting.

One of his sections affirmed the nonsectarian position: “No public money shall ever be appropriated for the support of any sectarian or denominational school, or any school not under the exclusive control of the officers of the public schools…” The delegates passed it. They also voted for a minimum school term of six months.

Both the teachers in their teachers’ association meeting and the delegates at the convention debated a section that would have funded high schools and technical schools along with primary and grammar schools. At that time there were 16 high schools in the state, but taxpayers were reluctant to finance them with public money. Convention delegate W.F. White’s statement is an example of an opinion current at the time: “Let us first secure a common school education to every child…When our State becomes rich, let us alter our Constitution if we choose.” Several delegates made speeches about the costliness of high schools which would teach “every kind of language that is now on the face of the globe.” One of them thought “a very large portion” of the people wanted the public fund to be used for education only up to a certain point, “usually termed the common English branches,” although he himself believed it was in the interest of the state to furnish instruction on all levels to all who wanted it. In the education article as finally adopted, the public school system included primary and grammar schools, high schools, evening schools, normal schools and technical schools, but funding was limited to primary and grammar schools. Thus a special, local tax would be required for high schools. Some of the existing ones had to close, and it took a constitutional amendment (1902) to authorize a state tax for the support of high schools and technical schools.

The constitution adopted by the delegates also localized textbook selection and teacher certification, placing them back under the jurisdiction of local boards of education, supervisors and superintendents. Alta California editorialized that this change was made to begin with, and then broadened, because the state board of education had handled the selection of books in a “discreditable way.” And now, “Instead of one school-book scandal, we should then have fifty; with Methodist school-books in one town, Universalist in the next, Catholic in the third, and Darwinism in the fourth. The diversity, stupidity, bigotry and controversy cropping out under this system would degrade the free-school system.”38

On April 12, 1879, San Francisco teachers held a mass meeting in opposition to the new constitution. Swett was one of the speakers. He introduced a resolution asserting that the new constitution would sweep out of existence any uniform standard of professional qualifications for teachers, “preventing any State recognition of teaching as a profession, and practically nullifying all existing diplomas and certificates.” The principal of the Boys’ High School in San Francisco added that it “turns over the control of public schools to politicians.”³⁹ When it was presented to the voters, the new constitution was adopted by a margin of only 10,820 out of 145,088 votes statewide. In San Francisco, it failed to pass by 1592 of a total of 38,034 votes. Over all, there was an urban-rural split in the vote, and with regard to teachers, those in urban areas were more highly organized against the new constitution than those in the countryside. It would take amendments to restore state standards for certification.

Meanwhile, Swett had become a teacher of teachers at the Girls’ High School in San Francisco. He held the position of principal from 1876 until 1889, adding to the curriculum a “classical” course for university preparation and a “normal” course for training elementary school teachers. A majority of the students were in this program while Swett had charge of it.

City politics forced him out of this job. In his own account, Swett wrote that the school had “varied fortunes.” He and school board members disagreed about promotion of students into the high school who had not passed the admission examination, about suspension of a teacher who was opposed by a religious group, and then in 1888, about the board’s adopting a course of study during the summer vacation without consulting him or the teachers. He heard later that “it was hoped that this action would secure my resignation.” He was reluctant to name names, but he did refer to Christopher Buckley who, he wrote, “had secured absolute control of the city government.”40 Buckley was a Democrat, as were most members of the board of education at this time, and Swett wrote that he “had been trained to politics in the city of New York, and he set up in San Francisco a local Tammany Hall.”41 “There was a reign of terror in the school department”; the “political boss” of the board of education (Charles B. Stone) wanted two of Swett’s friends and associates to resign because they were “too old to teach school.” They were hurt and did resign, and the other teachers became alarmed. After his own resignation at age 59, he commented, “It was a pet idea of the ‘boss’ of the board that no man or woman was fit to teach school after forty years of age.”⁴²

It was another problem, however, that led directly to Swett’s resignation in the summer of 1889. According to a member of the school board, Stone had promised Swett’s position to someone else, and the replacement had “political strength,” alluding to a friendship with “a well-known lady here, whose husband occupies a very prominent political position. It was the result of a bargain between this lady and Mr. Stone in return for certain newspaper assistance which her surroundings and circumstances enabled her to command.”⁴³ The lady was Phoebe Apperson Hearst, wife of the owner of the San Francisco Examiner. The editorial page of the Morning Call included an item titled “The Sacrifice of Swett” which described her trading newspaper influence for positions for her friends and concluded: “Mr. Swett can live without the schools, but the question for the public to consider is if the schools can prosper as we hope to see them prosper while under control of political management.”⁴⁴ Another editorial raised the question of job security: “Up to the present time there has been some pretense of observing the law which protects a teacher from dismissal. That law now appears to be a dead letter.” It referred to the “Hearst-Buckley crowd” and asked “if so strong a man as Mr. Swett can be made to resign, what will a comparatively unknown and friendless teacher do when the Hearst-Buckley crowd intimates that her place is wanted?”45

Teachers reacted by persuading Swett to run for the office of city superintendent the following year, and voters responded by electing him with a two-thirds majority. He held that position until he retired in 1895.

He then moved to a fruit ranch that he and a son were developing in Alhambra Valley near Martinez in Contra Costa County. Coincidentally, Sarah Bunker, who had married Marcus Ivory, a farmer and one-time sheriff of Contra Costa County, was one of a circle of friends of Swett’s new neighbors.46

Swett never retired from action as an educator. He and his wife Mary Louise both became trustees in local school districts. He served on a state education commission and as a trustee of the state normal school in San Jose. He traveled to the East Coast for national education association meetings and to maintain contacts with educators and historians of education. He continued to write and publish about educational principles and began to write about his life as an educator.

Over the 42 years when he was directly involved with California’s public schools, he saw the state’s school system develop from hopes without structure to a firm framework for instruction. He saw the change from meager and reluctantly given allowances by the legislature to formulas for taxation. For more than three-quarters of a century after his retirement, California’s public schools ranked among the best in the nation in expenditures per student, enrollment rates, school libraries, school facilities, institutions for teacher training, programs for continued teacher education, teacher participation and teachers’ salaries. All of these were concerns and achievements of Swett and other educators in frontier California.

The state began to lose its preeminent position in public education in 1978, during a period of economic well being when the state treasury seemed to be so overflowing that voters could be persuaded to cut and cap property taxes. The ideal — that the property of the state should be taxed to educate the children of the state — was submerged under the very wealth it helped create.

NOTES

1. Bunker Family papers, MS3040, California Historical Society Library, San Francisco.
2. One of the sons of the second state superintendent described the first session as the “legislature of a thousand drinks” in his “The Life of Col. Paul K. Hubbs,” Manuscript collection, California State Library, Sacramento.
3. Through various enactments, beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of the Continental Congress in 1785, the Congress of the United States based funding of public schools on income from land it granted to the territories and states from the public domain of the United states (as acquired by the treaty with England that ended the War for Independence). Congress granted specific 640-acre sections of land in each surveyed township. Between 1802 and 1847 it gave new states the sections numbered 16 and 36. In addition, in 1841 Congress granted 500,000 acres of public land to new states for the financing of “internal improvements.” But there were problems with identifying the school lands and therefore with realizing income from them, especially where people settled on or preempted land in townships that had not yet been surveyed. In California’s constitutional convention, delegates worried that the school lands would turn out to contain rich deposits of gold. While a few of them seem to have been dedicated supporters of public education and wanted the state’s resources to be used to finance it, others wanted not only to open up the school lands for private development but also to use the additional congressional grant of 1841 for purposes other than education. At the end they voted 26-10 to keep the income for the schools. However, they did not specify how this income would be secured and applied.
4. Eighth Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jan. 3, 1859, p. 6. California State Archives, Sacramento.
5. Statutes of California, 3rd sess., May 3, 1852, Ch. 53, 125. California State Archives, Sacramento.
6. Second Annual Report, April 11, 1853, Appendix. California State Archives, Sacramento.
7. Italics in original. The Pacific, Vol. III, No. 16 (Feb. 10, 1854), 2.
8. Statutes of California, 6th sess., May 3, 1855, Ch. 185, 237. California State Archives, Sacramento. The issue of public support for private schools did not disappear, however. In 1861, Assemblyman Zachariah Montgomery, a San Francisco lawyer who had moved to California from Kentucky, introduced a bill proposing that every school with at least 30 pupils had a right, on application by parents and guardians, to be a public school and that the state school fund should be apportioned according to the number of children attending school. The bill was defeated at least in part through the efforts of John Conness, who was campaigning to be named to the United States Senate the following year (at that time, state senates were selecting United States senators). Conness contended: “Drive home this wedge that is now pointed at your common school system and you will have schools exclusively under the control of sects and parties, as well as persons engaged as educators for profit.” Quoted in Roy W. Cloud, Education in California: Leaders, Organizations, and Accomplishments of the First Hundred Years (Stanford, 1952), 39.
9. California from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco: A Study of American Character (New York, 1888), 387-88.
10. Fourth annual Report, Jan. 15, 1855, 4. California State Archives, Sacramento.
11. John Swett, Public Education in California (New York), 140-41, 144.
12. This idea was mortared into the foundation of statewide public school systems in Massachusetts, New York and the states of the Old Northwest by the time California was admitted to the United States. It first appeared in California in John G. Marvin’s First Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction: “The property of the State shall educate the children of the State” (Appendix, Journal of the Assembly, 3rd sess., 1852, 805). Swett made it a cornerstone of his work. See his Public Education, 184.)
13. Ibid., 44.
14. U.S. Bureau of the Census. Census-taker’s worksheet, Pittsfield Township, New Hampshire, 1850.
15. Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (Berkeley, 1998 facsimile edition [1855]), 484.
16. For a description, see Roger W. Lotchin, San Francisco 1846-1856: From Hamlet to City (New York, 1974).
17. Quotation included in Public Education, 120.
18. He added that the one-year teacher’s certificate determined him, in his own words, “to get out of school teaching as soon as I could see any other way of making a living.” Public Education, 137.
19. Daily Evening Bulletin, Aug. 16, 1862, p. 3, cols. 4-5.
20. Inaugural Address, Jan. 10, 1862.
21. Thirteenth Annual Report, Nov. 1, 1863, 94. When Swett addressed a national conference in 1872, he commented: “My educational notions have changed since I taught school near Boston. Living in a state where people have been gleaned from every other state in the Union, from France, Germany, Italy, England, Australia, and China, new conditions have made new questions to be decided, and new issues to be met.” Proceedings of the National Education Association, Boston, 1872.
22. Contra Costa Gazette, Aug. 22, 1863, p. 2.
23. In an unusual statement for the times, he wrote: “If [wage increase] cannot be effected otherwise, let the teachers in the large counties unite in a ‘Protective Union’ and strike for better pay!” California Teacher, II (Sept. 1864), 86.
24. First Biennial Report, Nov. 1, 1865, 6.
25. Second Biennial Report, Nov. 1, 1867, 5.
26. Figures for the census year 1870 show that the average for the United States was 64.7 percent, while the proportion in California was 56.6. Among states with school incomes of more than $1,000,000, the proportion from public funds was 93.76 percent in Iowa, 89.26 in Minnesota, 70.66 in Missouri and 60.45 in Illinois. California’s ratio of schools to population in the 5-19 age group was a little lower than the national average and much lower than that of the states named here except Missouri. The percentage of persons in this age group who were enrolled in schools was slightly above the national average (55.7 to 52.8) but lower than in all the above states except Iowa. The ratio of teachers to students was below the national average. Calculated from tabulations in Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876 (New York, 1980), 184-85.
27. Summarized in Cloud, Education in California, 43.
28. Swett papers, Bancroft Library.
29. Sept. 13, 1867, 2.
30. Proceedings of the National Education Association, Boston, 1872.
31. “Public School Text Books,” Daily Evening Bulletin, May 18, 1870.
32. Oct. 8, 1871.
33. Undated newspaper clipping in Swett’s scrapbook, Swett papers, Bancroft Library.
34. Statutes of California, 20th sess., March 28, 1874, Chap. 515, 751-53. This legislation had long been a goal of proponents of common schools. See, for example, the study by William M. Landes and Lewis C. Colmon, “Compulsory Schooling Legislation: An Economic Analysis of Law and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, XXXII (1972), 54-91.
35. Statutes of California, 20th sess., March 12, 1874, Chap. 236, 356. During this period, however, women rarely held administrative positions or ran for elective offices in education in California.
36. Ezra and Jeanne Carr were friends of the Swett family, along with John Muir whom they first met at the University of Wisconsin. Ezra Carr had been invited to develop the agricultural program at the new University of California in 1868. The Regents fired him in 1874 over his promotion of “industrial education” as against traditional classical courses of study at universities. Their action roused members of the California Grange and the Mechanics State Council to support his candidacy for state superintendent.
37. For the full account, see Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of California, E.B. Willis and P.K. Stockton, official stenographers, 3 vols. (Sacramento, 1880). Debates on education are in vol. 2, 1086-1124, and vol. 3, 1409-1413 and 1499-1501.
38. Alta California, May 5, 1879.
39. Alta California, Supplement, May 5, 1879.
40. Public Education, 239.
41. Ibid. A news account quoted an unnamed board member: “A Republican Superintendent in a Democratic board has no very great pull” (Morning Call, “Forced to Resign. How Director Stone Got Rid of Principal Swett,” July 11, 1889.
42. Public Education, 240.
43. “Forced to Resign. How Director Stone Got Rid of Principal Swett,” Morning Call, July 18, 1889.
44. “The Sacrifice of Swett,” Morning Call, July 12, 1889.
45. “Mr. Swett’s Successor,” Morning Call, July 13, 1889. In an interview with a Morning Call reporter, Swett said that Stone and the school board took the position that the law protecting teachers from arbitrary dismissal applied only to the primary and grammar school teachers and not to high school teachers and principals; but he thought that Stone had always been hostile to him, and he said, “I felt disinclined to keep up the fight. All I wanted was to bring the Girls’ High School up to the University standard, which would take perhaps a year, and then resign” (July 21, 1889).
46. Louisiana Strentzel, Diary, Strentzel papers, Bancroft Library. John and Louisiana Strentzel were John Muir’s in-laws. Muir had urged Swett to purchase property next to the Strentzel orchards in Alhambra Valley in 1881, shortly after he married the Strentzels’ daughter Louie.