New college Habersham, Georgia Community
In 1935, Alexander began planning to open another community in Habersham County, Georgia. The community operated for only a short time under the auspices of New College because of the 1938 notification of the impending closure of the college. Alexander also had plans to renovate an old southern plantation outside of Russellville, Alabama, but it never went beyond the planning stages.
The North Carolina Community had been operational for two full years and had received much coverage in the national news and among the hallways of educational institutions across the South. On December 7, 1935, the Habersham County Board of Education sent a formal proposal to Dr. Alexander offering the free use of the “Old 9th A. and M. School” (Ninth District School of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts) property for educational purposes. The board was given authority to do so by the Regents of the University System of Georgia which operated the school from 1907 until 1933. The proposal was the free and full use of the property, consisting of about 312 acres, all buildings and equipment rent-free for a period of 99 years. It was a very generous offer in a tenuous economy and something that New College had to consider seriously.
The proposal had several very agreeable terms to begin with. This included stipulating that New College could do pretty much whatever it wanted with the property, even giving up mineral rights and timber resource rights. It also allowed New College to open any type of school it wanted, and offered to replace in kind or in value, any equipment, livestock, machinery, and furniture once belonging to the property but recently removed by the State of Georgia. The name of the new institution would be “New College of Clarkesville, Georgia”.
With the business end done, more terms addressing the societal impact of New College in Habersham County were given. It was understood that:
New College will endeavor at all points to run an institution of as high class as it can, to have
well trained persons in charge, to conduct the program with decorum and with due consideration
of the social and moral standards of this county, to meet as soon as possible and in all respects
the standards set for such institutions by the Georgia State Department of Education.
The clause concerning to conduct the program “with decorum and with due consideration of the social and moral standards of this county” could be interpreted as an understanding that even though Habersham County and its inhabitants would benefit educationally from the presence of a university as prestigious as Teachers College, they were after all, from New York. The socio-cultural quality of Southern charm and segregation in Georgia was not up for discussion. Moreover, if that subtle reminder of “separate but equal” was not clear enough, the subsequent term of the proposal made it crystal clear to Dr. Alexander and the powers at Teachers College. The next stipulation was:
That no one of Negro extraction shall come to the proposed institution as either student
or teacher or administrator; although it is understood New College may engage in educational
work for the Negroes of this county.
Not wasting any time, on December 18, 1935, Dr. Alexander sent Dean William F. Russell a letter with an accompanying report outlining the “Community Building Program” of New College citing the work done at Hilltop, North Carolina and work proposed in Georgia. The purpose of the letter was threefold: first, to bring the report to the Teachers College Administrative Board as soon as possible; to get Russell to authorize the negotiations for expansion; and finally to imply that while financial aid from Teachers College was not needed, $5000 to $10,000 “would be a great advantage an initial push to the projects.” It was just like Alexander to strike while the iron was hot but the entreaty to Russell was highly presumptuous. Even to raise the issue this less than two weeks after receipt of the Habersham letter, Alexander must have understood that the proposal from Georgia needed to be reviewed by the university’s lawyers and such things would logically take time.
The proposal was sent out in early January to be evaluated from a legal standpoint by the New York law firm of Delafield, Thorne and Marsh. A lawyer on staff, George H. Porter, was given the task of looking it over. On January 22, 1936, the TC business manager, A. H. Connelly, sent the firm’s opinion to Dr. M.C. Del Manzo, provost of Teachers College presumably to be forwarded to Dean Russell and Alexander.
The letter outlined several points for consideration by Teachers College, including insurance liabilities, taxes, school buses, and property rights. With respect to the proposal regarding African-Americans, Porter wrote, “As to the clause having to do with the exclusion of Negroes, I feel that it is solely one of policy and requires no comment from me.” Whose policy was unclear but it was presumed that New College in Habersham County would have to exist under the “Jim Crow” laws of the State of Georgia. Instead of calling for social justice and a chance for political, economic and social change in the South and a chance to show this within the philosophical framework of New College and its communities, the exclusion of African-Americans was deemed a matter of Georgia state policy which may have absolved New College legally but left it morally in doubt.
If this term of the proposal had any impact on Dr. Alexander it is not known, but he was never considered by his peers and family to be a man who judged by the color of one’s skin or a religious belief. To steer the helm of such a vessel of political, economic and social change that was New College sometimes one had to make a deal with the devil. Alexander was apolitical, spoke his mind and was seemingly oblivious to anything not of academic value. Alexander may have weighed the greater good of the college and knew that to instigate social change it would be easier if done from the inside as an established Georgia college.
Alexander’s son, Richard, recalls a time when his father told him that in 1937 they had a problem with enrollment and subsequently the budget. Because of his time in Nashville at Peabody, Dr. Alexander had developed a large network of educational contacts throughout the South. On a trip through Mississippi, he was approached by an institution of higher learning who wished to enter into a cooperative program by which selected students would take extension classes at New College for one or two years as part of their program. He went to Teachers College with the proposal, which in his mind would help with admission numbers for New College and develop an unprecedented collaborative effort in progressive education. Initially, he did not identify the college and in typical Alexander manner, at the last minute he asked if it mattered much that the students were “colored”. It was not a situation where Alexander was trying to be deceptive or pull a fast one, but he never thought it to be an issue. They were students, period. However, it must have mattered to the Trustees of Teachers College because the proposal never saw the light of day.
This was the strange duality of social reconstruction at New College that proposed a new society of community collaboration with clarity of action on one hand and on the other experienced a silent difficulty in defining its own relationship with issues of race. However, it was not just New College alone that looked the other way. As earlier stated, progressive education was, and still is, a complex and often indefinable concept and, depending upon which lens you look through, the problems of race and ethnicity in American society expose the paradox inherent of the time. In pointing out the basic progressive educational conflicts between individualism and community, Goodenow (1975) indicates that child-centeredness and social reconstruction are reflected by paternalistic progressives with missionary zeal who held the unspoken view that African-Americans and the foreign born have neither the education or the experience to act on their own behalf . To whatever extent tolerance was taught at schools, racial and ethnic differences and their related problems were deemed secondary to continuing the status quo in order to effect large-scale socio-economic change. William Heard Kilpatrick, a Georgian by birth, argued that African-Americans must seek justice slowly so as not to arouse Southern white passion and in seeking out educational answers to racial and ethnic problems voting for social change was the democratic solution. If only the poor, the disenfranchised and the foreign born were educated enough to act intelligently and vote on their own, and not lend themselves to be exploited and manipulated by the current hegemony, then real social change could be achieved was the overall thinking for many progressive educators. Even George S. Counts, the guiding voice of the New College inaugural bulletin and one of the most outspoken progressives on racism, argued in his book, The Prospects of American Democracy (1938) that race was a highly emotional issue which could distract fearful Americans from fundamental forms of reconstruction.
In late March 1936, Dr. Morris R. Mitchell returned from a trip visiting the Georgia community excited about the possibility of mining Kyanite, which was in abundance on the proposed college’s land. Kyanite is a blue silicate mineral that had commercial value in electronics. He saw it as an immediate cash opportunity that could be capitalized by a little elbow grease. The idea was sound, but the lack of available students might have been the reason this revenue stream wasn’t explored fully. Had it been successful, Alexander would have been in the unenviable position of having students make a curricular choice of working in the fields of North Carolina or in the mines of Georgia! By 1937 it was evident that Habersham was not going to be a reality for New College due to the financial reasons. Dr. Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Alexander to the Georgia community, held a belief that rural poverty was the South’s number one economic problem, and by extension the nation’s. Instead of pulling up stakes and heading back to New York Dr. Mitchell stayed on and founded the Macedonia Cooperative Community.
The idea of community, in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, was still the focus of Alexander’s intentions. According to Dr. Agnes Snyder (1936) in her report Area No. 14, A Study of an Urban Area, since its very beginning, the New College philosophy placed an emphasis on community development based upon the four assumptions that:
First, no fundamental social or economic change can be satisfactorily effected unless a majority of the people appreciate the need for such a change; second, that the appreciation of the need for a fundamental social or economic change on the part of the individual depends upon his understanding of how the change will affect him; third, the understanding of how a fundamental social or economic change will affect the individual is developed best for most people through first hand experience on a comparatively small scale with the practices involved in such change; and fourth, small-scale experimentation with the problems of social and economic change has a contribution to make to large-scale planning and practice. Because of this emphasis, the community became a real focal point with which to promulgate social and economic change. The task of the teachers in training was to know how to combine their social vision with the reality of everyday living in an uncertain world to better prepare themselves for careers in a wider variety of locations. In order to promote this philosophical spirit of the New College curriculum, Alexander knew he needed not just a lab school, but a lab community experience in both rural and urban settings. The New College Community in North Carolina and Habersham County Community in Georgia were components in rural community building. In the bustling metropolis of New York, Area No. 14 and Hilltop was its urban counterpart.
The North Carolina Community had been operational for two full years and had received much coverage in the national news and among the hallways of educational institutions across the South. On December 7, 1935, the Habersham County Board of Education sent a formal proposal to Dr. Alexander offering the free use of the “Old 9th A. and M. School” (Ninth District School of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts) property for educational purposes. The board was given authority to do so by the Regents of the University System of Georgia which operated the school from 1907 until 1933. The proposal was the free and full use of the property, consisting of about 312 acres, all buildings and equipment rent-free for a period of 99 years. It was a very generous offer in a tenuous economy and something that New College had to consider seriously.
The proposal had several very agreeable terms to begin with. This included stipulating that New College could do pretty much whatever it wanted with the property, even giving up mineral rights and timber resource rights. It also allowed New College to open any type of school it wanted, and offered to replace in kind or in value, any equipment, livestock, machinery, and furniture once belonging to the property but recently removed by the State of Georgia. The name of the new institution would be “New College of Clarkesville, Georgia”.
With the business end done, more terms addressing the societal impact of New College in Habersham County were given. It was understood that:
New College will endeavor at all points to run an institution of as high class as it can, to have
well trained persons in charge, to conduct the program with decorum and with due consideration
of the social and moral standards of this county, to meet as soon as possible and in all respects
the standards set for such institutions by the Georgia State Department of Education.
The clause concerning to conduct the program “with decorum and with due consideration of the social and moral standards of this county” could be interpreted as an understanding that even though Habersham County and its inhabitants would benefit educationally from the presence of a university as prestigious as Teachers College, they were after all, from New York. The socio-cultural quality of Southern charm and segregation in Georgia was not up for discussion. Moreover, if that subtle reminder of “separate but equal” was not clear enough, the subsequent term of the proposal made it crystal clear to Dr. Alexander and the powers at Teachers College. The next stipulation was:
That no one of Negro extraction shall come to the proposed institution as either student
or teacher or administrator; although it is understood New College may engage in educational
work for the Negroes of this county.
Not wasting any time, on December 18, 1935, Dr. Alexander sent Dean William F. Russell a letter with an accompanying report outlining the “Community Building Program” of New College citing the work done at Hilltop, North Carolina and work proposed in Georgia. The purpose of the letter was threefold: first, to bring the report to the Teachers College Administrative Board as soon as possible; to get Russell to authorize the negotiations for expansion; and finally to imply that while financial aid from Teachers College was not needed, $5000 to $10,000 “would be a great advantage an initial push to the projects.” It was just like Alexander to strike while the iron was hot but the entreaty to Russell was highly presumptuous. Even to raise the issue this less than two weeks after receipt of the Habersham letter, Alexander must have understood that the proposal from Georgia needed to be reviewed by the university’s lawyers and such things would logically take time.
The proposal was sent out in early January to be evaluated from a legal standpoint by the New York law firm of Delafield, Thorne and Marsh. A lawyer on staff, George H. Porter, was given the task of looking it over. On January 22, 1936, the TC business manager, A. H. Connelly, sent the firm’s opinion to Dr. M.C. Del Manzo, provost of Teachers College presumably to be forwarded to Dean Russell and Alexander.
The letter outlined several points for consideration by Teachers College, including insurance liabilities, taxes, school buses, and property rights. With respect to the proposal regarding African-Americans, Porter wrote, “As to the clause having to do with the exclusion of Negroes, I feel that it is solely one of policy and requires no comment from me.” Whose policy was unclear but it was presumed that New College in Habersham County would have to exist under the “Jim Crow” laws of the State of Georgia. Instead of calling for social justice and a chance for political, economic and social change in the South and a chance to show this within the philosophical framework of New College and its communities, the exclusion of African-Americans was deemed a matter of Georgia state policy which may have absolved New College legally but left it morally in doubt.
If this term of the proposal had any impact on Dr. Alexander it is not known, but he was never considered by his peers and family to be a man who judged by the color of one’s skin or a religious belief. To steer the helm of such a vessel of political, economic and social change that was New College sometimes one had to make a deal with the devil. Alexander was apolitical, spoke his mind and was seemingly oblivious to anything not of academic value. Alexander may have weighed the greater good of the college and knew that to instigate social change it would be easier if done from the inside as an established Georgia college.
Alexander’s son, Richard, recalls a time when his father told him that in 1937 they had a problem with enrollment and subsequently the budget. Because of his time in Nashville at Peabody, Dr. Alexander had developed a large network of educational contacts throughout the South. On a trip through Mississippi, he was approached by an institution of higher learning who wished to enter into a cooperative program by which selected students would take extension classes at New College for one or two years as part of their program. He went to Teachers College with the proposal, which in his mind would help with admission numbers for New College and develop an unprecedented collaborative effort in progressive education. Initially, he did not identify the college and in typical Alexander manner, at the last minute he asked if it mattered much that the students were “colored”. It was not a situation where Alexander was trying to be deceptive or pull a fast one, but he never thought it to be an issue. They were students, period. However, it must have mattered to the Trustees of Teachers College because the proposal never saw the light of day.
This was the strange duality of social reconstruction at New College that proposed a new society of community collaboration with clarity of action on one hand and on the other experienced a silent difficulty in defining its own relationship with issues of race. However, it was not just New College alone that looked the other way. As earlier stated, progressive education was, and still is, a complex and often indefinable concept and, depending upon which lens you look through, the problems of race and ethnicity in American society expose the paradox inherent of the time. In pointing out the basic progressive educational conflicts between individualism and community, Goodenow (1975) indicates that child-centeredness and social reconstruction are reflected by paternalistic progressives with missionary zeal who held the unspoken view that African-Americans and the foreign born have neither the education or the experience to act on their own behalf . To whatever extent tolerance was taught at schools, racial and ethnic differences and their related problems were deemed secondary to continuing the status quo in order to effect large-scale socio-economic change. William Heard Kilpatrick, a Georgian by birth, argued that African-Americans must seek justice slowly so as not to arouse Southern white passion and in seeking out educational answers to racial and ethnic problems voting for social change was the democratic solution. If only the poor, the disenfranchised and the foreign born were educated enough to act intelligently and vote on their own, and not lend themselves to be exploited and manipulated by the current hegemony, then real social change could be achieved was the overall thinking for many progressive educators. Even George S. Counts, the guiding voice of the New College inaugural bulletin and one of the most outspoken progressives on racism, argued in his book, The Prospects of American Democracy (1938) that race was a highly emotional issue which could distract fearful Americans from fundamental forms of reconstruction.
In late March 1936, Dr. Morris R. Mitchell returned from a trip visiting the Georgia community excited about the possibility of mining Kyanite, which was in abundance on the proposed college’s land. Kyanite is a blue silicate mineral that had commercial value in electronics. He saw it as an immediate cash opportunity that could be capitalized by a little elbow grease. The idea was sound, but the lack of available students might have been the reason this revenue stream wasn’t explored fully. Had it been successful, Alexander would have been in the unenviable position of having students make a curricular choice of working in the fields of North Carolina or in the mines of Georgia! By 1937 it was evident that Habersham was not going to be a reality for New College due to the financial reasons. Dr. Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Alexander to the Georgia community, held a belief that rural poverty was the South’s number one economic problem, and by extension the nation’s. Instead of pulling up stakes and heading back to New York Dr. Mitchell stayed on and founded the Macedonia Cooperative Community.
The idea of community, in North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia, was still the focus of Alexander’s intentions. According to Dr. Agnes Snyder (1936) in her report Area No. 14, A Study of an Urban Area, since its very beginning, the New College philosophy placed an emphasis on community development based upon the four assumptions that:
First, no fundamental social or economic change can be satisfactorily effected unless a majority of the people appreciate the need for such a change; second, that the appreciation of the need for a fundamental social or economic change on the part of the individual depends upon his understanding of how the change will affect him; third, the understanding of how a fundamental social or economic change will affect the individual is developed best for most people through first hand experience on a comparatively small scale with the practices involved in such change; and fourth, small-scale experimentation with the problems of social and economic change has a contribution to make to large-scale planning and practice. Because of this emphasis, the community became a real focal point with which to promulgate social and economic change. The task of the teachers in training was to know how to combine their social vision with the reality of everyday living in an uncertain world to better prepare themselves for careers in a wider variety of locations. In order to promote this philosophical spirit of the New College curriculum, Alexander knew he needed not just a lab school, but a lab community experience in both rural and urban settings. The New College Community in North Carolina and Habersham County Community in Georgia were components in rural community building. In the bustling metropolis of New York, Area No. 14 and Hilltop was its urban counterpart.
