In February 1903, Harvard student Phillips Endecott Osgood ’04 made headlines when he took to the pulpit and called East Cambridge “the most neglected district within a radius of 10 miles of Boston.”Footnote 1 He also jeopardized the tenuous relationship between Catholic neighborhood leaders and Protestant social reformers in Boston and Cambridge, where Harvard students were joining progressive reformers in settlement house work. Preaching on a Sunday at the Park Street Congregational Church in Boston, Osgood reportedly said, “East Cambridge was once a decent residential part of Cambridge, but the people are moving out of there, simply because they say: ‘It is the wrong sort of a place—we can't stand that any longer.’”Footnote 2
Osgood was describing the “philanthropic work” of his Harvard peers at Harvard House, a social settlement in the working-class eastern section of Cambridge, where, he said, his fellow student Christian Association members sought to put faith into action. The Boston Herald ran away with the story, headlining its report, “A Whitechapel Town.” As if this reference to the infamous poor and crime-plagued neighborhood of London—once home to Jack the Ripper but also the site of Toynbee Hall, the social settlement that inspired a generation of American reformers—were not enough, the Herald summed up, “What A Harvard Man Says East Cambridge May Be. /The Prosperous People are All Moving Elsewhere. /Harvard is Working Hard to Save the Neighborhood.”Footnote 3 This interpretation, portraying the university as a white knight swooping in to save a declining neighborhood, inspired fierce responses from the East Cambridge community and religious leaders who saw their neighborhood as anything but passive and declining, and Harvard students as not much in the way of saviors.
Within a week, the East Cambridge Catholic parish leadership responded with a pamphlet titled “Is East Cambridge a ‘Whitechapel Town’?” The pamphlet summed up the events, excerpting Osgood's speech, the Herald story, the letter from the parish's Father John O’ Brien to the Herald, Osgood's letter of apology, and O'Brien's reply to Osgood, in which he called for ending “all Harvard student work in East Cambridge.”Footnote 4 Critics sarcastically dismissed Osgood: “this sage authority, whom nobody had ever heard of before,” and suggested that “vice” was more likely to be found at Harvard than in East Cambridge. One called Osgood an “innocent lambkin,” while another suggested most student service was “shallow, misinformed and absurd.”Footnote 5 The ensuing controversy simmered for weeks, with the Boston Sacred Heart Review, the paper of the Boston archdiocese, publishing frequent updates, local papers weighing in, and East Cambridge religious leaders mobilizing to defend their community from the libel they perceived.
Clearly, Osgood touched a nerve. But why did the words of a twenty-year-old college student speaking at a church across the river from East Cambridge on a February Sunday generate such a response? The answer lies less in what Osgood actually said and more in what he represented. Not merely an earnest young man at a pulpit, he symbolized the class and religious tensions that characterized interactions between the university, its student volunteers, and the local community. In an era when Harvard students joined the larger Progressive Era social reform movement, volunteering by the hundreds at city settlement houses and other organizations, Osgood stood in for all these students and their motivations. The Osgood incident, as some locals called it, reveals the class and religious tensions that complicated student voluntarism and the many approaches that college students, their advocates, and community leaders took to social reform.
When Osgood spoke at the Park Street Church, he was at once student and teacher, reformer and preacher. But neighborhood religious leaders did not welcome these self-appointed roles. As his negative reception by East Cambridge leaders made clear, Osgood represented a host of offenses perpetrated by middle-class social reformers blind to the cultural particularities of working-class neighborhoods and committed to furthering their own religious and even elitist agendas. To O'Brien and other parish leaders, Osgood must have seemed only the latest in a wave of incursions by Protestant reformers in Catholic neighborhoods.Footnote 6 Osgood's sermon underlined both the philosophical differences between Protestant and Catholic reform and the Catholic Church's larger anxieties about Protestant influences on neighborhood and family life.Footnote 7
The Osgood incident forms one strand in the larger story of Harvard students' turn-of-the-twentieth-century voluntarism. Osgood's speech reflected on his fellow students who volunteered through the student Christian Association (CA), the university's branch of the Young Men's Christian Association, which had established chapters on college campuses across the country in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 8 Harvard students also organized the university's Social Service Committee and the Prospect Union night school. These groups, recently united in the new Phillips Brooks House (PBH), were about to form the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), which institutionalized student social service efforts at Harvard.Footnote 9 Set against this larger effort, the Osgood incident illustrates the challenges for student volunteers who idealistically crossed town-gown boundaries to fight urban poverty. In the years following Osgood's speech, PBHA leaders debated their mission, the place of Protestant Christianity in their organization, and the best means to train responsible volunteers. While Osgood's speech suggests that students wandered blithely into city neighborhoods without thinking about the implications, the efforts PBHA leaders took to build their institution show otherwise. Examining the Osgood incident in relation to the larger universe of Harvard student voluntarism in this period reveals a multifaceted student service movement that sometimes fell short in the ways Osgood's critics charged, but other times soared, promising to transcend lines of class and faith and forge what one volunteer called “a more perfect sympathy” with the poor and working-class people of Boston and Cambridge.Footnote 10
Osgood and his Harvard peers were neither the first nor only college students to answer a call to service. In the Progressive Era, college students became crucial practitioners of the voluntarism sweeping the nation.Footnote 11 They ran reading rooms, led boys and girls clubs, volunteered at settlement houses and city missions, and taught English to their own college maids.Footnote 12 Their work helped redefine their identities as educated women and men as well as the role of colleges and universities in responding to the challenges of modernization. As Steven J. Diner has described, universities in this period established extension schools, settlement houses, and other means of community outreach.Footnote 13 Students themselves performed the day-to-day work. Caught up in the national effort to make universities relevant to contemporary social challenges, student service advocates promoted collegians' special suitability for service emphasizing that service would transform the students themselves.Footnote 14 Yet in the copious scholarship on Progressive Era social reform, the role college students played as volunteers, and the ways that work shaped their sense of self, their institutions, and the relationships between town and gown, has gone largely unexamined.Footnote 15
This article addresses that omission by examining Harvard students' contributions to Progressive Era social reform. Historians have understood the period's reformers in various ways. Moving beyond interpreting social reform as a form of social control, recent scholars have emphasized how reform initiatives gave well-meaning middle-and upper-class Americans means to reconcile their own discomfort with poverty and the widening class gap.Footnote 16 For example, Shelton Stromquist argues that Progressive Era reformers, from their various standpoints, “crafted a common language that stressed the paramount need for social reconciliation in the service of democratic renewal” but did not, with some exceptions, question “the fundamental structures of social power and property.”Footnote 17 Stromquist asserts that progressive reformers formed a “movement” committed to resolving class differences while relying on a “universalistic” conception of “the people” that was “broadly conceived and undifferentiated by class interests.”Footnote 18 For Michael McGerr, these reformers wanted to “transform other Americans, to remake the nation's feuding, polyglot population in their own image.”Footnote 19 The students who volunteered in city and rural settlement houses and other charitable organizations, along with the professors and professional social workers who mentored them, fit both understandings. They were not a monolithic group. Even within one university, student reformers had different understandings of reform. At Harvard, student reformers displayed the universalistic idealism of Francis Greenwood Peabody, founder of the Prospect Union, a school for working-class men that predated PBHA and the first waves of CA voluntarism by nearly a decade. But Osgood and the CA also displayed a universalistic approach to religion, elevating their own Protestantism while sublimating the tensions between Catholic and Protestant reformers.
This study also challenges assumptions about men and women's roles in progressive social reform. While scholars have rightly emphasized the major roles middle-class women played in pioneering urban reform organizations, men were by no means absent. They were counted among the movement's major leaders, but they were also counted by the thousands among students who volunteered at settlement houses, reading rooms, boys' clubs, and other charitable sites. This article tells the story of some men—adult educators and reformers and student volunteers—who shaped this movement. Though gender considerations take a backseat in this telling, they were integral to students' understanding of their mission and their approach to working-class men and boys.
Encouraged by educators and social reformers, student volunteers were inspired by faith, altruism, passion for self-improvement, and a desire to bridge the widening class gap in American society. Like many of their mentors, these students believed they had a special responsibility for improving the lives of America's poor.Footnote 20 In practice, they often fell short of these goals, blocked by the very class and educational advantages they believed made them worthy ambassadors across class lines. The Osgood affair represents these challenges. In the early years of Phillips Brooks House, its leaders struggled to articulate their mission and develop an effective strategy for putting ideals into practice. They had good material to work with, building on more than a decade's worth of student voluntarism by the CA, the Social Service Committee, and the Prospect Union.
LAUNCHING HARVARD SERVICE: FROM THE PROSPECT UNION TO PBHA
Before Phillips Brooks House came the Prospect Union. A night school for working-class men founded in 1891 by faculty and students and enduring into the 1910s, the Union established Harvard on the city's social reform landscape. With it, Harvard joined other universities whose administrators were making their mark as social reformers.Footnote 21 In the same era, Northwestern established the University Settlement (1891); the University of Pennsylvania Christian Association began University House (1898); and members of several women's colleges formed the College Settlements Association (1889), to name only a few.Footnote 22 Like those projects, the Prospect Union transported students from their familiar environment. The Union's working-class Cambridgeport neighborhood was close in distance but far in life experience.Footnote 23
Like many Progressive Era social reformers, the Union's founders hoped to cross class boundaries but were too attached to their own worldview to make the journey. David B. Potts argues that the Union had a fundamentally conservative approach to social change, focusing on “self-help.”Footnote 24 However, the Union's rhetoric suggested a more complex set of possibilities, as Union founder and Plummer Professor Francis Greenwood Peabody expressed:
Here was a large body of men in Cambridge who had to work with their hands all day, but who were full of interest in the problems of the day, and saw the advantage of intellectual training; and here on the other hand, was a great University instructing a great number of young men in these same subjects of the intellectual life. Why not bring these two sets of men together? Why not make of the University, not merely a cistern to receive the water of culture, but a stream to convey it to other thirsty minds?Footnote 25
Peabody acknowledged the potential of these men who worked “with their hands,” even as he elevated college students as “culture” bearers to the masses. Four years in, the Union's chroniclers claimed success:
[The working-men's] mental outlook is enlarged, the horizon of their understanding is broadened. … Wrong ideas of things and men are gradually dissipated. Possibilities of usefulness, resources of happiness, healthy ambitions have come to many a man whose life before had been a monotonous routine. Within him have been born a truer sense of the worth of men simply as men, a comprehension of the privileges of manliness and of knowledge, a sense of kinship with the best that men have been and done.Footnote 26
This language revealed a gendered understanding of class identity along with a belief that an educated man had a superior view of the world. Potts describes these goals as the “conversion” of workingmen, which resonates with McGerr's understanding of progressives remaking others in their own image.Footnote 27
However, working men might well have turned this education to their own ends. The Prospect Union's agenda held the potential for more radical transformation. Student volunteers taught history, economics, philosophy, and the natural sciences, along with reading, elocution, mathematics, and penmanship.Footnote 28 Visiting lecturers discussed Socialism, Anarchism, Woman's Suffrage, Trade Unionism, or “sources of happiness.” Labor leader Eugene Debs, women's rights activist Lucy Stone, and social reformer Robert A. Woods made appearances. This curriculum held as much possibility for empowerment as containment. Within a few years, local membership reached 600, and about 60 students had volunteered as teachers.Footnote 29 Class attendance averaged 350 by 1895 and the Union, by then located in Cambridge's Old City Hall, offered more than 50 classes a week.Footnote 30
The Union seemed a promising place for a young reformer seeking common ground with “men simply as men,” its members “black and white; twenty or more different nationalities; Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Agnostics; Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Prohibitionists, Populists,” and Labor Party members. Indeed, most people were admitted, as long as they were male. Women could attend only “ladies' night” every six weeks.Footnote 31 Union leaders claimed this exclusion would make the men more comfortable, as they would “feel … less timidity in exposing their deficiencies” without women present.Footnote 32 For one student, the Union was where “student meets workingman on an equal footing of common manhood.”Footnote 33 Perhaps shared “manhood” could help collegians transcend their differences with Cambridge's working-class men. Many of the period's reformers made shared manhood a tool of reform, from YMCA leaders who hoped to “uplift workingmen” to settlement house workers who drew on an ideal of “social friendship” that eroticized cross-class relationships between reformers and reformed.Footnote 34
Peabody also invoked a common humanity: “It is good for Harvard students to have real friendships with the artisans of Cambridge, to know the problems and tastes of men brought up in other ways than theirs, to learn how other honest men are living,” he wrote.Footnote 35 An ideal of shared manhood and reciprocity defined the Union's mission—very different from the top-down approach Osgood described nearly a decade later. Peabody also hoped the Union would challenge negative views of undergraduates: “It is good for workingmen to learn that Harvard is not a place of mere idleness and dissipation, but abounds in earnest and manly youths.”Footnote 36 Meanwhile, a student volunteer would leave the Union “prepared for the struggle which awaits him” with “an insight into the actual conditions of life.”Footnote 37 Such language was typical of Progressive Era social reformers, particularly settlement house workers who often described their work as “definite” and “practical” responses to the challenges of modern life.Footnote 38 PBHA inherited this mission, but it also inherited the CA's evangelical reform. As Osgood's speech made clear, these methods were not the same. Determining the organization's direction preoccupied PBHA leaders for more than a decade.
Phillips Brooks House, the home of PBHA, opened in 1900 in a secluded corner of Harvard Yard. With its sturdy brick façade and comfortable rooms, the house was solid yet welcoming. Proclaiming “Piety, Charity, Hospitality,” the building housed the CA, the St. Paul's Catholic Club, St. Paul's Episcopal Society, the Social Service Committee, and representatives of the Prospect Union. At its grand opening, Peabody hoped for cooperation between these different groups, asking, “might not … the whole social life of the University might be dignified, chastened, and uplifted by this unconstrained relation with religious faith?”Footnote 39 For Peabody, this moment culminated a career of social activism. In addition to cofounding the Union, he had infused his “social ethics” courses with a scientific approach that combined the “sentiment” of earlier charity ventures with the methodologies of Progressive Era social science.Footnote 40 Peabody founded Harvard's Department of Social Ethics and, in 1907, established the Social Museum to support it.Footnote 41 Museum curators collected social reform photographs from around the globe.Footnote 42 Peabody used this museum to teach his students about social problems.Footnote 43 PBHA, with its CA still furthering an approach more “sentimental” than “scientific,” seemed to be doing the work of two eras.
PBHA founders also drew inspiration from the legendary Episcopal Bishop Phillips Brooks of Boston (1835–1893), a Harvard graduate.Footnote 44 Renowned for his interdenominationalism and personal charisma, Brooks had attracted thousands to his sermons, offering a progressive vision of Christianity and calling for worshippers to make a personal connection to God. In a time marked by increasing secularism, Brooks's “Christian humanism” reassured his followers.Footnote 45
Phillips Brooks House opened in a university sympathetic to social reform. Like many of his fellow university presidents, Harvard's long-time leader, Charles W. Eliot, believed in making the university relevant to social issues.Footnote 46 Eliot envisioned a university that would serve society, though not necessarily a place that would eliminate differences of class, talent, and social position.Footnote 47 Hugh Hawkins writes that for Eliot, “The university … was for the people, but not of them.”Footnote 48 Eliot had his detractors, but over nearly forty years wielded enormous influence in shaping Harvard and, in company with like-minded university presidents, setting the direction for American higher education. Like other leaders of his times, from settlement house heads to Theodore Roosevelt, Eliot adopted an action-oriented language of manhood: “We seek to train doers, achievers, men whose successful careers are much subservient to the public good. We are not interested here in producing languid observers of the world, mere spectators in the game of life, or fastidious critics of other men's labors.”Footnote 49 Eliot was less interested in maintaining the CA's religious mission at PBHA, a stance in step with his ideas about the role of religion in the university. As Julie A. Reuben describes, Eliot supported a nonsectarian, tolerant religiosity as the key to liberal arts learning.Footnote 50
Peabody hoped for “common ground” between the groups that organized officially into the Phillips Brooks House Association in 1904.Footnote 51 But finding common ground was not always easy. The CA had been central in PBHA's founding, and it dominated the organization's mission and leadership for the first two decades.Footnote 52 Meanwhile, the reformist mission of the Union and the loosely organized Social Service Committee helped set the agenda.Footnote 53 The Catholic Club soon became a marginal player in PBHA activities.Footnote 54
Though Osgood was part of PBHA, his main allegiance was to the CA. Adopting the Social Gospel approach that influenced evangelical Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century, the CA vigorously promoted student voluntarism. Like many student Christian Associations across the country, the Harvard group shifted from campus missionizing to community reform.Footnote 55 CA member Arthur Holcombe implored his fellow students to accept social responsibility: “We cannot, we must not, live for ourselves alone; from each according to his ability the world expects, and has a right to expect, contributions toward the common weal. Unless the college man comes to realize this fact … he may easily grow up into a one-sided man … a man who will always be the world's debtor.”Footnote 56 Service was a duty the educated owed to their society. This philosophy was still new to the national YMCA at the turn of the century but was dominating its campus branches.Footnote 57 Harvard Christian Association handbooks issued to all freshmen emphasized the “spirit of service” at the university and catalogued volunteer sites like the Riverside Alliance, where “about forty college men [were] engaged in conducting boys' clubs in chair caning, basket weaving, whittling, wood carving, manual training, basketball, gymnastic drill, dramatics, and in teaching Sunday School classes.”Footnote 58 These handbooks promoted “practical service,” a term that made intuitive the connection between Protestant evangelicalism, student voluntarism, and university life.
THE OSGOOD CONTROVERSY IN THE COMMUNITY
Osgood championed exactly this “practical” work. But he couched it in explicitly Protestant terms, emphasizing the importance of religious mission in social service. No longer were men meeting man-to-man; rather, in East Cambridge, Protestants were meeting Catholics. This distinction fueled the conflict between Osgood and East Cambridge community leaders. Coming just as PBH was establishing itself, the Osgood affair called attention to the challenges student volunteers faced in crossing class, faith, and neighborhood boundaries.
Sensing a story in the words of the Harvard student turned public servant and preacher, The Boston Herald played up the conflict with its sensational headline, “A Whitechapel Town: What A Harvard Man Says East Cambridge May Be.” Juxtaposing the infamous London neighborhood with “A Harvard Man,” the headline highlighted the experiential gulf that separated Harvard students from East Cambridge residents and community leaders. Though Osgood asserted (and the article supports) that he did not say “Whitechapel” in his talk, the damage was done. The East Cambridge portion occupied only two paragraphs of the Herald article. But an incendiary two paragraphs it was. Osgood's description of East Cambridge as “neglected,” and its residents as a different “class of people” from the rest of Cambridge would have read as code to East Cambridge residents and community leaders.
Addressing the importance of religion for the “college man,” Osgood described East Cambridge voluntarism as expressing the “real, true religion in college men.” He began with the 24th Psalm, which identifies those with “clean hands and a pure heart” as destined to receive God's blessing.Footnote 59 He claimed that the qualities the psalm identified could “be found … in those universities where so many young men are banded together for the purpose, we hope, of making other people better for their education.” Echoing other social reformers who saw collegians as natural volunteers, Osgood added, “The terrible earnestness of a college man or any young man is perfectly natural. We have all our lives before us—so little behind.”Footnote 60 Here, Osgood tapped a central theme in YMCA discourse about college leadership, suggesting that college students had a responsibility to turn their “influence” to social good.Footnote 61 Yet this very influence was what Catholic community leaders feared.
Osgood's dismal vision of East Cambridge differed significantly from the reality. Indeed, he had reportedly not been to East Cambridge himself, a charge he did not refute. Osgood's damning two paragraphs sold short the vibrant ethnic communities and local organizations that characterized the busy, industrial neighborhood with its strong Catholic organizations and relatively little serious crime. Built on land once separated from the rest of Cambridge by marshes and canals, the area supported pork packing, woodworking and metal working, sugar refining, and printing, as well as distribution centers for oil and ice, and “eight coal or lumber dealers.”Footnote 62 Originally of English origin, the population was diversifying rapidly as the Irish residents who had dominated since the mid-nineteenth century were joined by Polish immigrants moving through Boston's West End to resettle in East Cambridge.Footnote 63 Land was cheap, and with its water access, the area was convenient for industry, trade, and workers from other neighborhoods.Footnote 64 The majority of the unskilled workers lived in the neighborhood or nearby Cambridgeport and were Irish, Polish, or Portuguese. Skilled workers included “Americans, the older Irish, Swedes, Germans, and a few Portuguese.”Footnote 65 As new immigrant groups arrived, longer-term residents moved on to higher-paying jobs and more upscale neighborhoods.Footnote 66 This pattern was typical of immigrant neighborhoods and did not, as Osgood suggested, demonstrate a flight impulse.
The Catholic Church provided social services and community organization as well as religious leadership. Irish immigrants established the neighborhood's first Catholic church in 1841, and the second, and larger, opened under the leadership of Father John O'Brien in 1876. Polish and Italian immigrants joined the Portuguese residents, further increasing the Catholic population.Footnote 67 In 1902, the Portuguese population organized its own church.Footnote 68 An Armenian community held services in the Sacred Heart space.Footnote 69 Osgood's two paragraphs dismissed all this Catholic activism, noting only the “four Protestant churches in East Cambridge,” that “have all they can do to take care of themselves.”Footnote 70
In contrast to Osgood's account, contemporary researchers Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy described a strong community. Though they presented recent immigrants as “neither city-bred nor sophisticated,” they also noted vibrant family and community connections that brought people together for Sunday celebrations of weddings, christenings, or funerals, along with abstinence organizations, a literary society, and political groups.Footnote 71 Though Osgood described neglect and “250 minor arrests” of youth, Woods and Kennedy reported the most common crimes as public drunkenness, gambling, and disorderly conduct, concluding, “East Cambridge is a remarkably safe and law-abiding place.” The biggest problem was “the pervading atmosphere of drab mediocrity and inertia … At best, life here is constricted and unbeautiful.”Footnote 72 Though certainly not positive, this depiction was far from Osgood's, and given Woods's and Kennedy's status as researchers and social reformers, offers a more accurate picture.
For Catholic neighborhood leaders, Osgood's easy public dismissal of their leadership was insulting and threatening. This Protestant student, member of an educational elite, speaking at a storied Boston Protestant church, reiterated the long-time anti-Catholic prejudice that animated evangelical Protestants.Footnote 73 Tensions between Protestant reformers and Catholic neighborhood leaders had a history in Boston. At Boston's Denison House settlement, founding resident Helen Cheever reported testy encounters with a local priest soon after the house opened in 1892. Billings expressed anxiety about local children being separated from their homes. Together, reformer and priest negotiated limits for children's settlement activities. Billings realized that the settlement workers—despite hoping, as Cheever said, only to “increase home life,” also threatened the role of the Catholic Church. Like East Cambridge Catholic leaders a decade on, Billings eventually repudiated the reformers, warning Catholic children away from the house altogether.Footnote 74 It was no surprise that Catholic leaders in Boston and Cambridge similarly responded in force to Osgood's two paragraphs.
Osgood made the students' missionizing intentions clear. Before even mentioning East Cambridge, he praised activist religion, noting that more than 500 students did volunteer work.Footnote 75 In East Cambridge, being active meant missionizing, particularly among youth. At Harvard House, 200 boys attended “26 boy's clubs in various kinds of industrial work, athletics, debating, chemistry, physics and astronomy” staffed by 100 student volunteers. These projects gave the Protestant CA members an entrée into this predominantly Catholic community.Footnote 76
Quickly perceiving the furor he had caused, Osgood attempted damage control. Only two days after the Herald article, he wrote Father O'Brien with an apology at once contrite and defensive: “The article was a reporter's transparent attempt at sensationalism. The headlines were wholly fiction … In … a thirty-five minute speech, only about four minutes were given to the discussion of the work in East Cambridge … I should be the last to question the efficiency of the work of your church in East Cambridge.” He denied that Harvard students sought to replace existing social service organizations: “I have repeatedly been assured by them that they hope only to assist and supplement agencies already at work there.”Footnote 77 When this communication went public, the Boston Herald protested and the reporter wrote Osgood directly, asserting he had accurately summarized the speech.Footnote 78 Meanwhile, Osgood futilely reiterated that he had never used the words “white chapel.”Footnote 79 Given the context of Osgood's talk, however—the Catholic-Protestant tensions, the discriminatory attitudes of Protestant reformers—it seems likely that, despite the sensational headline, the Herald reporter got the most important news exactly right.
Osgood concluded his letter to O'Brien with hope his words would not hurt the “efforts” of the volunteers or “bring them into your disfavor.”Footnote 80 But it was too late for that. O'Brien launched a public war of words on Osgood and his Harvard cohort, rallying support from the community and area clergy. Ten days later, he dismissively included part of Osgood's apology in a special section of the Sacred Heart Review that protested Osgood's depictions of the neighborhood and the very purpose of student service in East Cambridge. Though O'Brien had the reputation of wanting to foster “better relations … between Catholics and Protestants,” he saw no room for discussion on Harvard student service.Footnote 81
The section, “Is East Cambridge a ‘Whitechapel’ Town?” was “distributed in thousands.”Footnote 82 Included was O'Brien's sarcastic response to the Herald: “The context of Mr. Osgood's address makes it plain that he means to say the religious interests of the Catholic people of East Cambridge are neglected. As pastor of these people during the last thirty years, I wish to assure Mr. Osgood and the rest of the 100 Harvard students who, he says, are working and praying for us all, that our religious interests are very fully cared for.” He enumerated the six clergymen in the parish, the thousands who attended the seven Masses celebrated on Sundays, religious meetings throughout the week, and the St. Vincent de Paul Society's work for the poor.Footnote 83
Other Catholic leaders, newspapers, and community members chimed in weeks later. These supporters offered a positive view of East Cambridge, and they challenged the legitimacy of Harvard student voluntarism. Local defenders scornfully called Osgood a “sage authority, whom nobody had ever heard of before,” and suggested he “temper his youth with modesty and his zeal with common sense.” One writer emphasized that poverty did not equate to lack of moral character (a distinction the era's social reformers often overlooked) and turned the tables on Harvard:
There are, it is true, poor people in East Cambridge, but nobody but a prig or an ignoramus would confound honest, hardworking poverty with infamy and vice. We venture to say that the stranger visiting the University City would seek otherwhere for vice than among the honest folk of East Cambridge. We venture to say further that he would be more likely to find it even in the classic precincts of Harvard, itself.….Footnote 84
Another critic noted “the patronizing airs of those callow Harvard students who wish to pose as [East Cambridge people's] teachers, helpers or organizers of philanthropic works,” calling their efforts “simply an impertinence and an insult.”Footnote 85 Another writer described Osgood as an “innocent lambkin.” The Sacred Heart Review editors said Osgood was committing a “gross calumny on an orderly, virtuous, and Christian community.”Footnote 86 It was no accident that these writers reclaimed the word “Christian” for these East Cambridge Catholics, whom Osgood and his self-identified “Christian” Protestant cohort had ignored. One writer condemned the whole of student service:
A great many of the amateur philanthropists who condescend to notice the poor, through college settlement work and other such schemes, are shallow, misinformed and absurd. Mr. Osgood is not any more so than the rest of the so-called sociological students. He is typical of the whole crowd. They think they have a mission to the poor, particularly the Catholic poor, who know more about true religion in a minute than the most supercilious settlement worker may ever hope to know, except through a miracle of God's grace.Footnote 87
These criticisms provide quite a contrast to college students' own assessment of their duty to others and Francis Peabody's lofty claims for student voluntarism. Though this writer lumped together varied impulses for service—Osgood's was a religious mission, not the sociological approach that guided many student volunteers at schools like Northwestern, for example—the writer clearly identified the challenges of crossing class, religious, and ethnic boundaries. These criticisms suggested that student volunteers might not be taken seriously at all. The East Cambridge clergy concluded, “Harvard students, outside of college bounds, whether on a lark in the city or playing reformer in East Cambridge, are a nuisance and a menace to peace and order.”Footnote 88 These writers neatly reversed the usual claims of disorder that reformers made about urban neighborhoods, equating student service to the student mischief associated with Progressive Era college life.Footnote 89
The Cambridge papers also sided with the neighborhood. The Cambridge Chronicle observed, “No Protestant clergyman could care for the thousands to which the church of the Sacred Heart ministers, or would attempt it, but the Catholic Church is accustomed to do this, and its powerful influence for good must be recognized.” The Cambridge Press described Osgood as “a young Harvard religious enthusiast who seems to be showing more zeal than good taste and good judgment,” noting that the transition occurring in East Cambridge as older residents moved out and newer immigrants moved in “is precisely the same change that has taken place in all large cities the world over.”Footnote 90 The Review noted, “The Protestant people of East Cambridge are at one with their Catholic neighbors in denouncing ‘The Harvard House as a nuisance.’”Footnote 91 Suddenly, the issue was not only one of Protestant and Catholic, but of town and gown. The reputations of Phillips Brooks House and of student volunteers across the country were on the line.
Not everyone sided with the neighborhood. PBHA member Raymond Oveson wrote a course paper on Harvard philanthropy, noting a decrease in volunteer numbers that he attributed to the “temporary suspension of the work at the Harvard House.” Oveson blamed the newspapers: “the Catholic priest … was aroused and too furious to listen to truth or reason and forbade every family under his charge allowing their children to go to Harvard House. Since the whole neighborhood, practically, are Catholic, nothing could be done by our men. The boys wished to come, but of course a priest has almost dictatorial power over his flock so the boys were obliged to remain away from Harvard House.” Oveson said some of the clubs “were so fond of their respective leaders that they slipped away and met for a few times in the Student Leader's room in College.”Footnote 92 This interpretation highlighted the Catholic-Protestant tensions at play in this conflict. Words like “aroused” and “dictatorial” reasserted stereotypes of Catholic priests as domineering and irrational, thus referencing deeply held American Protestant anxieties about the role of Catholics, and Catholic schools, in a democracy.Footnote 93 Oveson's choice of topic also suggests that the controversy and its consequences generated discussion on campus as well as in local media.
O'Brien ultimately won his battle against the Harvard volunteers. Harvard House had suspended its work by 1904, and later Harvard service listings did not include the East Cambridge settlement. Nor does it appear in the 1911 edition of Woods's and Kennedy's exhaustive Handbook of Settlements.Footnote 94 The Church of the Sacred Heart at 6th and Thorndike Streets, on the other hand, still stands today.
PBHA'S STRUGGLE TO DEFINE MISSION AND METHOD
Osgood's rhetorical missteps came at a pivotal time for PBHA. In its early years, student leaders and their mentors struggled over the organization's purpose. Would it be based in the evangelical methods of the CA? Or the secular goals of the Union? Or would they be influenced by the quantitative methods of social scientists? Like other university-affiliated social reform projects, PBHA promised to make higher education relevant to social problems. PBHA volunteers embodied shifting conceptions of higher education as professors and administrators balanced secular and religious claims. Educators, as Reuben argues, “hoped to create new institutional forms that would embody their belief that truth incorporated all knowledge and was morally relevant, and also provide the basis for scholarly progress.”Footnote 95 PBHA could be such an institution. However, as the Osgood affair revealed, these student servants were under scrutiny and their success was by no means assured.
In the years after the Osgood controversy, the CA revisited its own mission, though it is unclear whether this move was related to the public dressing-down its volunteers had received. In 1908, leaders voted to loosen membership rules, weakening the evangelical criteria in an effort to appeal more widely. At stake was whether to preserve the standard national YMCA criteria for college branch membership, which required students to be active in evangelical churches. Harvard's CA entered a fierce national debate about the issue.Footnote 96 Supporters, including most members of the Graduate Advisory Committee that determined PBHA policy, argued that the CA was already accepting students who were not church members, and that open membership would draw more students while streamlining the organization's operations.Footnote 97 Opponents like George Gleason, who represented the International Committee of the national YMCA, believed the change masked an effort to “drive out the evangelical religious society,” and was “unfair to the cosmopolitan spirit of Harvard.”Footnote 98 Gleason warned of withdrawing from “the powerful Young Men's Christian Association of North America and the world,” predicting Harvard would lose influence with YMCA leaders and might even see a decline in evangelical Protestant attendance at Harvard.Footnote 99 Another who weighed in was seminary student Charles W. Gilkey ’03, an influential alumnus who later became minister of the Hyde Park Baptist Church in Chicago and Dean of the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago. Gilkey supported the change, proposing an amendment requiring new members to pledge that this basis was their “personal desire and purpose.” He believed this addition would preserve “vitality” in Harvard's CA and make the change seem “well-considered.”Footnote 100
Early in 1908, change advocates succeeded, and the Harvard Christian Association adopted a policy admitting “all members of Harvard University who desire to be disciples of Jesus Christ in life and service, and to associate their efforts in the extension of His kingdom among young men.”Footnote 101 Gilkey's recommendation was accepted, and new members signed cards affirming the CA's purpose.Footnote 102 Foreseeing a backlash from the national YMCA, Joseph Davis, the graduate secretary of PBHA (a leadership role) wrote a two-and-a-half page letter to John Mott, the legendary director of the YMCA Student Department. Davis appealed, “We shall be extremely sorry if our action should result in cutting us off even nominally from the national [YMCA] movement.”Footnote 103 Mott responded briefly, expressing “regret” but promising to consider his response, having no wish to “sever the relation of the Harvard Association from the Student Movement of North America and of the world.”Footnote 104 Harvard President Eliot showed no ambivalence. Telling a PBHA leader that the change was the “best course,” he added, “In my view, if the Harvard Association should lose all connection with the International Committee, or the International Association, it would be by no means an irreparable misfortune.”Footnote 105 This response fit Eliot's larger view of the role of religion in institutions of higher education, where he believed it should inspire morality without requiring denominational commitments.Footnote 106 The CA's membership debate resonated with larger questions about how universities would balance religious and secular approaches to social change as they transformed their mission for the modern world.Footnote 107
In the following years, PBHA—and its newly inclusive CA—struggled to find direction. Davis believed the organization and its volunteers lacked “a definitely comprehended purpose.” “For some the ‘work’ is its own reward,” he wrote Gilkey. “But too many, as several have confessed to me, find themselves after giving money to the House feeling that no goods have been delivered, so to speak, or after working conscientiously on committees or in Bible Study groups or Social Service work wishing they had spent the time and energy elsewhere.”Footnote 108 He questioned the motto of “Piety, Charity, and Hospitality,” adding, “I am afraid of shooting into the air, and whether we like it or not, that is the disagreeable impression of a good many fellows about a good deal of Brooks House work.”Footnote 109 Gilkey, by then a newly minted pastor on a seminary tour in Scotland, replied sympathetically: “It is the same problem which every organization faces whose task it is to inspire progress toward a ‘flying Goal’ to realize ideals that are only progressively definable to create a spirit and an atmosphere.”Footnote 110 Gilkey argued for a “liberal and powerful” Christianity: “I believe that [the CA] must always be the dynamo, the center of real life and power, in Brooks House.”Footnote 111 Moreover, he said, PBHA was different from other student organizations that “exist primarily for the sake of the participants.” In contrast, PBHA existed for others.Footnote 112 He believed the CA should, as well. Arthur Beane, who became graduate secretary in 1911, took a different approach to recruiting, promising that students themselves would benefit from service: “No experience is equal to that of handling people,” he told a Maine YMCA group. “It will help you in after life when you enter the business world. It strengthens the individual morally and spiritually.”Footnote 113 PBHA leaders and recruiters were acutely aware of outside scrutiny, and with reason, as that scrutiny continued. On PBHA's tenth anniversary, one critic snidely observed that though the organization filled the functions of charity and piety and had admirable leaders, “Should the [House] suddenly be destroyed, the College would not put on mourning,” an assessment based on perceived failures of hospitality.Footnote 114
Preparing students for service was another challenge. PBHA leaders agonized over the proper training of volunteers. They worried not only about alienating local people, Osgood-style, but about working effectively with professional settlement workers, another group occasionally displeased with student workers. When some local settlement leaders reported that their Harvard volunteers lacked preparation, PBHA hosted a conference for volunteers.Footnote 115 “In most cases neither the settlements nor the Harvard volunteers quite understand each other's point of view,” read the invitation. “In hope of remedying this evil, we are holding a ‘Conference of Construction [sic] Criticism of Social Service Work.”Footnote 116 Settlement house workers and faculty mentors would also attend. Only twenty-five volunteers showed up. In 1913, discouraged organizers took a different strategy for the 1913 conference.Footnote 117 Subsequent efforts drew relatively few, suggesting that although as many as 300 students, or more than half the degree-receiving students in any one undergraduate class, signed up as volunteers in a given year, they were less enthusiastic about listening to speeches on “Methods of Training Volunteers,” “What Social Service Does for the Student,” or “What the College Man Owes the Community.”Footnote 118 Conference planners tried to bridge a gap nearly as wide as that between college students and their working-class neighbors—that between college volunteer and professional social worker.
PBHA leaders had reason for hope. Lincoln House head John D. Adams wrote Arthur Beane: “I should far rather have Lincoln House boys associate in the way they now do with the young men you are sending us, than listen to all the moral platitudes the most finished professional is able to deliver.”Footnote 119 For Adams, the Harvard volunteers were “thoroughly the right sort.”Footnote 120 “Brooks House has come to aid every time I have been in a hole, so am very thankful,” agreed Hull Street headworker George T. Wood, who rated his seven Harvard volunteers on a scale from “fine” to “splendid.”Footnote 121
But critics were numerous. Their problems were different from those of O'Brien and his East Cambridge supporters. Professional settlement house workers catalogued students' lack of preparation, poor behavior, and bad attitudes. PBHA responded by sending student inspectors to service sites. Following such a visit, the investigator for Boston's North End union, Leverett Saltonstall, reported that the Union's heads were “disgusted with men because won't take responsibility—wish Phillips Brooks would size up man before sending down.”Footnote 122 Miss Tyler, a full-time worker at the Cambridge Associated Charities, complained of students' arrogance: “One man had the nerve to go in there and tell her that she was not going at the whole social problem in the proper way and proceeded to tell her all about Economics 1.” On another occasion, Tyler concluded, “Not much success with student visitors,” suggesting that these college students were “exploiting” local boys rather than taking the “responsibility” seriously.Footnote 123 By this point, Harvard was sending nearly 400 students, between 15 and 24 percent of each college class, into the community, most teaching classes or leading boys' clubs at settlement houses. An annual survey listed only thirteen volunteers as “failures.” The majority of these simply stopped showing up.Footnote 124
The association's concern about training volunteers suggests either disproportionate anxiety or a higher rate of unsatisfactory work than these statistics reveal. PBHA published a flurry of pamphlets for volunteers. Rallying them in the hearty language and optimistic tones of the era's self-help manuals (and its YMCA national leaders), such literature exhorted, “Get on the inside of the boy by being a boy yourself,” and “If you think you can bluff a boy you are mistaken.” The writers advised “cheerfulness” (“Remember that no successful project was ever put through without a smile”), “method,” “intimacy,” and “example.”Footnote 125 This last echoed a generation of YMCA teachings that emphasized the importance of face-to-face influence between college students and, in mission work, between these students and local people.Footnote 126
OSGOOD'S LEGACIES ON CAMPUS AND BEYOND
In 1919, almost two decades into its existence, and almost three since Harvard students began community service at the Prospect Union, PBHA invited political, religious, and community leaders to promote its mission. In the shadow of the Great War, their calls to service acquired a patriotic tone. New York reformer William Jay Schieffelin stressed “the vital need … for an increase of the national spirit, a reverence for our country, a determination to help create a prevailing public opinion that will fit her to take the lead among the nations in insuring peace and good will.” Service of all kinds, he said, was the answer. Protestant minister Walter Rauschenbusch urged each college graduate “to connect with his new community through some social service.” Politician and forestry leader Gifford Pinchot opined, “Unless educated men become leaders, the community gets little benefit from their education … the progress of the world comes through the younger men who see the new problems with new eyes.” Pittsburgh business leader Ralph Harbison testified: “Real leadership comes not to him who desires public applause, but to him who has caught a glimpse of humanity's need and desires to invest a portion of his assets of time in actual service to his brother.” Boston settlement leader Robert A. Woods stressed that postwar patriotism demanded service more than ever: “The call for volunteers in the constructive tasks of democracy is becoming morally absolute, because democracy is in peril.”Footnote 127 A decade on, PBHA promotion claimed, “There is need, greater than ever before in history, for the young man or the young woman who has intelligence and courage, who will undertake to step beyond his selfish interests and do something for his neighbors and for his community.”Footnote 128 Not only would service help society, it would help the students.Footnote 129 PBHA's guiding principles—social responsibility, mutual benefit, and the prospect of serving the national good—persisted. These students would serve themselves, their communities, and the nation.
While East Cambridge's Harvard House did not survive the ferocious criticism from community opponents, Osgood did well. He graduated from Harvard in 1904, received his divinity degree from the Episcopal Theological Seminary in 1907, served as rector of St. Mark's Church in Minneapolis, and eventually returned to the city where he began his career as rector of Boston's Emmanuel Church in 1933.Footnote 130 While heading St. Mark's, he was recognized for his support of the eugenics movement, winning a prize for sermon of the year from the American Eugenics Society in 1926. He also lobbied for compulsory sterilization “for feebleminded inmates of state institutions.”Footnote 131 In 1945, Osgood abandoned his long-time Episcopal faith for Unitarianism, asserting, “I am daily more sure that, for me at least, the only course for sincerity is in a creedless church where the individual's right and duty to grow his own faith is the cardinal tenet.”Footnote 132
The Phillips Brooks House Association more than survived the “Whitechapel Affair” and its own growing pains. The Phillips Brooks House in the Harvard Yard, just like the Catholic Church on Thorndike, still stands today, and PBHA remains a signature example of institutionalized student service in American colleges. Its members ignored the bluntest comments from the Osgood days suggesting that students had no business with voluntarism, and they maintained both their idealism and their practical strategy to pursue “definite” work and confront students' shortcomings. Its leaders' self-conscious attention to mission, motives, and method—maintained over the course of decades—suggests how seriously they took their role as ambassadors from gown to town. The history of its early years, however, illustrates that even the most passionate social servants remained intensely aware of the challenges college students faced when they crossed lines of class, ethnicity, and faith to volunteer in the city's poor communities. The “more perfect sympathy” they sought with the poor people of Cambridge and Boston proved an elusive goal.
