The manual labor movement generally has been regarded as a failed attempt to improve the educational prospects of the antebellum laboring class by enabling students to pay tuition in cash or kind. This dissertation argues that between 1820 and 1860, the movement accomplished a rather different objective on behalf of learned, not laboring, Americans. By inviting indigent youths to exchange work for education, manual laborism subordinated a portion of the laboring class’s productive power to learned-class interests. Steered by a graduate clergy who associated economic dependency with intellectual servitude, the movement constructed a national network of private academies that afforded the antebellum learned class a degree of freedom from market prerogatives. Many of these colleges remain in operation, forming laborism’s most durable legacy: a mechanism for endorsing the learned class’s rational autonomy from market constraints and thereby regulating access to moral and intellectual authority in a capitalist economy.
Earlier studies of manual laborism have struggled to account for the movement’s concurrent popularity among abolitionists, slavers, evangelicals, religious traditionalists, trade unionists, merchant capitalists, and utopian reformers. Some scholars have regarded manual laborism as a democratizing movement that was infiltrated by reactionary forces, while others have seen in it a social control program that was undermined by egalitarian insurgents. By contrast, “In Cash or Kind” anchors manual laborism in the relatively stable interests of a geographically diffuse, ideologically diverse, but materially unified learned class. In so doing, this project traces important continuities between seemingly antagonistic reform movements, political persuasions, and religious traditions.
Situated at the confluence of intellectual and labor history, “In Cash or Kind” presents an institutional account of learned-class formation in the antebellum period. It compares manual laborites’ memoirs, manifestoes, and school constitutions with student demographics and college financial reports to interrogate the gap between the movement’s stated agenda and its eventual outcomes. In that gap, “In Cash or Kind” locates the material origins of an American learned establishment that continues to stand in a vexed relationship with working people.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/44811 |
| Date | 27 June 2022 |
| Creators | Stokum, Christopher J. |
| Contributors | Roberts, Jon H., Robichaud, Andrew A. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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