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for the poor man’s children” while Whigs opposed the idea on several grounds. Some complained of the cost. Others suggested that workers lacked the intellectual capacity to absorb higher education or, conversely, that they would absorb it and then become “too proud of their superior education to work either as clerks or mechanics, or to follow any active business except what is termed professional.” After all, as “Plain Truth” argued, “in every organism there must be diversity of members. There will be head, and hands, and—we must venture to say it—feet, too.” Finally there was the blanket ideological objection that the proposed expansion of free public services was really the opening wedge of a “mongrel Fourierism.”

Overriding these plaints, the citizenry passed the Free Academy referendum by 19,305 to 3,409. Architect James Renwick was set to designing a Gothic structure on Lexington and 23rd, and at the formal opening, in January 1849, a speaker hailed the “system of popular education for the common man” as solid evidence of the “growing democratization of American life.” Mike Walsh denied this, predicting that few laboring-class children would ever grace its Gramercy Park precincts, for most could not afford not to work, and the academy, while free, offered no stipends. Walsh’s prediction proved only slightly overstated. Talented sons of laborers, cartmen, craftsmen, and clerks did enter (though few from the ranks of Irish or German immigrants), but most were indeed forced by indigence to drop out and take jobs. The vast majority of graduates were scions of merchants, ministers, lawyers, doctors, brokers, or clergymen, and most were of English, Dutch, or Huguenot descent. Nor were any graduates women, no matter what their ethnic and class credentials, for despite an 1854 legislative grant of authority to extend free higher education to females, raucous opposition within and outside the board blocked formation of the female Normal School (later Hunter College) for another decade and a half.

Peter Cooper set out to do better. Long inspired by the adult education programs offered by lyceums and mechanics’ institutes in the United States and abroad, Cooper, while PSS leader, had helped inaugurate the public schools’ evening classes back in 1848. Now he decided to erect an institute that would offer free education in the mechanical arts and sciences, with an emphasis on practical education, for men and women of the working classes. In 1853, on a plot of land between Astor Place, Third Avenue, Seventh Street, and Fourth Avenue, he laid the cornerstone for Cooper Union; he spent $600,000 completing it over the next five years. Its open-admission night classes were available to all comers, regardless of previous education; those lacking rudimentary knowledge were sent to the public evening schools. Two thousand people responded avidly—clerks, salesmen, bookkeepers, machinists, carpenters, and cabinetmakers predominated—filling every class immediately, though over six hundred soon dropped out. The courses were coed—though 95 percent of the students were male—and Cooper also opened a daytime Women’s School of Design to teach engraving, lithography, drawing, and painting on china. Cooper Union’s program was strictly nonsectarian, despite Cooper’s strong history of opposition to Catholics’ receiving state funds for education, and the school drew high praise from Bishop Hughes. The Great Hall, to the alarm of some, became a place where civic issues were debated from many (including radical) points of view. And its well-stocked reading room—unlike those of the neighboring Astor Library (which opened at 6th and Lafayette in 1854) or the Mercantile Library (now housed in the old Astor Opera House) or the New York Society Library (newly installed on University Place in 1856)—was kept open until ten P.M., making it accessible to working people.

WESTWARD HO! (CHILDREN’S VERSION)

Despite the defects of existing child-saving programs, the Rev. Charles Loring Brace insisted that this was a time for decisive action, not despair. Brace