Cornfed Culture 251 



school, ranging in age from five to eighteen, to sweep out the 

 schoolhouse every day, ring the bell and keep up the fires. 

 The trustees supplied wood for the round-bellied stove, but 

 the splitting of the cordwood sticks into stove lengths was 

 left to the teacher. 



Grandmother taught that school until she married Grand- 

 father Webb. After that she had her own school in her 

 kitchen, at night, to teach the Negro stable man and his boys 

 how to read and write. 



Though reared a Universalist, she offered her services to 

 the Episcopal Academy in the neighborhood and was wel- 

 comed there until the rector came to call on her one day and 

 caught her reading Swedenborg. Grandmother's teaching 

 career ended in disgrace and social ostracism. 



But generally, throughout the country, the district school 

 teacher exerted an incalculable influence on American cul- 

 ture. Her Puritanism acted as a check on the flamboyant 

 rhetoric the local politicians indulged in. She taught Spen- 

 cerian penmanship, spelling, the simple, declarative sentence 

 and an innocent reverence for the classics. She imparted to 

 the youth of the corn belt her own feeling about culture, 

 which was only comparable to what early New England had 

 felt about religion. Her school boys who became lawyers, 

 senators, judges, railroad builders, and oil kings never lost 

 that feeling. Their response to it presented Cincinnati and 

 Chicago with art galleries and conservatories of music. It 

 endowed dozens of schools and universities throughout the 

 midwest. It built grand opera houses and subsidized lecture 

 programs and classes in art and literature and music. It sup- 

 ported the Chautauqua. 



Still later, it inspired many of the foundations dedicated to 

 philanthropy and scientific research. A number of the largest 

 of these spend corn millions. The money in their endowments 

 came literally out of the cornlands. Even the wealth repre- 

 sented by Standard Oil, and administered by the Rockefellers 

 and others in the Standard Oil combine, is mixed with corn. 



