A History of the First Hundred Years of the
Classical Association of New England[1]
or
A Visit to the Domus[2] of
CANE
Vosque veraces cecinisse, Parcae,
Quod semel dictum stabilisque rerum
Terminus servet, bona iam peractis
Iungite fata.[3]
Part I
A Congenial Community of Classicists
Caritate enim benevolentiaque sublata,
omnis est e vita sublata iucunditas.[4]
Idem velle atque idem nolle, ea demum firma amicitia est.[5]
The
quality of collegiality is the trait that most peculiarly and deservedly
characterizes CANE. It is also something
peculiarly hard to document; nonetheless, that is what this section will try to
do. If this section can not muster an
adequate documentation of this trait, then I hope that the anecdotes included
in this centennial history will supply what is needed. When we think of CANE’s convivial
congeniality, our minds immediately turn to the Annual Meeting, its banquet,
and the CANE Summer Institute.[6] The tradition of a spring-time Annual Meeting
started at the beginning, perhaps following the old Roman calendar;
nonetheless, the time and the arrangement of the Annual Meeting grew as a
continuous tradition. The Annual Meeting
was a moveable feast from the start, meeting at a different New England school
or college, and it was held during spring break, so the attendees could stay
very inexpensively in the dormitories.
That practice changed in the late1960s. The meeting was arranged to
allow the maximum socializing based around a series of talks that encompassed
the interests of both schools and universities.
The high point of the socializing was the banquet on Friday night, again
a tradition that goes back to the beginning.
As time passed, both the meeting and the banquet acquired accretions,
but the main goal remained the same, to facilitate the shared experience of
schools and colleges with both Latin and Greek across all six New England
states.
Our effort in this part of the inquiry must to
be to discover how these fora of congenial collegiality and their
traditions came into being and developed.
There had to be some center of continuity that instituted these fora and
fostered their gradual development with many miniscule accretions of tradition.
The Constitution is one source, which
was approved in the first meeting of the Association and remained unchanged for
some 40 years. It provided a general
framework for the Association in its Article I, section 2, by setting the
objective of association: “(a) to improve Classical teaching in school and
college by free discussion of its scope and methods and (b) to provide
opportunities for better acquaintance and cooperation among Classical teachers
through meetings and discussions.” It
also specified an Annual Meeting in its Article IV, section 1.
The framework mandated by the Constitution
provides the some of setting and circumstances, but not the substance and
living tissue of collegiality across the states, the levels of school and
college, the genders, and the specialties.
How did the banquet become a traditional part of the Meeting and how did
it become a moveable feast? How did
close comradeship of school and college occur?
And how did this all become a continuous tradition? The officers and boardmembers do not seem a
likely source, since the former were elected for only one year terms and the
latter for only two year terms. However,
here CANE and its members took a page out of Athenian history and adopted the
tradition of re-electing the Secretary-Treasurer for multiple incumbencies:
George Howes (Williams) 1906-1920 (Wetmore is ST
in 1918-9 while Howes is
President.)
Monroe Wetmore (Williams) 1920-1934
John Stearns (Dartmouth) 1934-1937
John Spaeth (Wesleyan) 1937-1947
Van Johnson (Tufts) 1947-1949
F. Stuart Crawford (BU) 1949-1953
Claude Barlow (Mt. Holyoke) 1953-1963
Norman Doenges (Dartmouth) 1963-1968
Z.Philip Ambrose (UVM) 1968-1972
Gloria Duclos (USM) 1972-1977
.. interregnum of 3 different STs for
one year only
Gil Lawall (UMassAmherst)
1980-1987
In
1985 the Long Range Planning Committee recommended to the Executive Committee a
split of the office of Secretary-Treasurer into the two offices of Executive
Secretary and Treasurer, each for a period of five years. Though the membership
never voted on this, it was included in the next Constitution published in the
1988 Annual Bulletin. Up until
that time the multiple incumbencies of the Secretary-Treasurer was merely a
tradition, and from then until now the Secretary-Treasurer or the Executive
Secretary and Treasurer have been the living embodiment of institutional memory
and propagated all the traditions, but especially the tradition of
collegiality. For instance, both George
Howes and Monroe Wetmore had taught school for a number of years before
teaching in college, and both had studied and taught in various states, and
George Howes was professor of both Greek and Latin, a point that Prof. Seymour
made in appointing him chair of the first meeting of CANE.[7]
In essence then it was this succession of eleven
secretary-treasurers, and a few other Principes Societatis, such as Allen
Benner, John Kirtland, Cornelia Coulter, Goodwin Beach, Nate Dane, Matt
Wiencke, Gloria Duclos et al., who provided the continuity, set the
tone, and engendered the spirit of CANE for the first eighty years of its
existence. I will try to paint a picture of that spirit and those times by
giving an interconnected series of short biographies of these raisers of CANE.
In
1905 George Edwin Howes was one of the group of concerned collegiate Hellenists
who met in New York at a meeting of the Managing Committee of the [American]
School at Athens in May and then in Boston with more New England Hellenists in
October. These meetings arranged the
founding of CANE in the spring of the next year at Springfield, MA. Prof. Howes was not only a founder, but also
the chairman of the Committee of Arrangements for Classical Conference in 1906
in Springfield, at which he was elected the first Secretary-Treasurer. The decision had been made that the
Association should be inclusive and so Latinists and school people were all
included in the planning and execution of the first meeting. Prof. Howes was elected Secretary-Treasurer
ten more times, and also President in 1918.
Finally, in addition to all the above, Prof. Howes was the first
chronicler of the Association in a pamphlet published in 1926 which was based
largely on letters received by him or materials from the minutes about CANE
initiatives. These all betokened a
pervasive collegiality, but a couple examples may be instructive. The first is from the letter that Prof.
Thomas Seymour of Yale, the chair of the Boston conference, wrote to Prof.
Howes when he appointed him Chair of Arrangements for the Proposed Classical
Conference in 1906:
[after proposing two collegians and two
schoolmen to serve with Howes as a committee, he wrote:] “This preserves the
equilibrium between Greek and Latin and Greek and gives good representatives to
the schools. I wish I could have brought
in a young woman, but this would have spoiled the symmetry.”
In
another letter from William Collar a format for workshops is set:
“I have hesitated about saying yes
to your kind invitation to open the
discussion of the subject of
“Economy in Classical Teaching.” I think
that I should be very much
interested in hearing the ideas of others on
the subject and learning about their
experience, and so, if you will
allow me to make an informal
opening, will promise to help.”
Among
many other initiatives he mentions the formation of a force of “Minute Men” in
1919 “for active propaganda for the Classics in New England. The group consisted of nine committed
propagandists, several of them women who did not seem to mind being called
“Minute Men.”
The memorial of Prof. Howes in the 1943 Annual Bulletin, p.6 f., gives the particulars of his career and includes the following passage which is pertinent here: “Professor Howes was gifted with extraordinary vitality, a powerful body, and a very active brain. With these qualities he was a keen scholar and an inspiring teacher, and was always a friend and an aid to all who needed help. .. His course in Greek Literature in English translation became famous, and in later years numbered nearly a hundred students.”
Following Prof. Howes as Secretary-Treasurer, also from Williams, and carrying on Howes’ tradition was Monroe Nichols Wetmore, who was a charter member of CANE. It is important to note that both Howes and Wetmore had started their careers teaching at schools. He was Secretary-Treasurer for fifteen years, continuously from 1920-1934, and then President. The following passage from is memorial in the 1955 Annual Bulletin points up his low-key approach and pervasive influence: “Many of the older members of this Association will remember with pleasure his meticulous and amusing records of our annual meetings. During all the years of Mr. Wetmore's active participation in the affairs of the Classical Association of New England, he greatly encouraged the effective cooperation of Classical Scholars throughout New England. As a friend, as a colleague, and as a teacher Mr. Wetmore was held in high esteem by all who were privileged to know him, to work with him, or to study under him. He was modest, unassuming, kindly, and generous to a fault.”
During this same time there were others who were prominent in CANE and were key figures in developing the Graeco-Roman, degree-diploma, male-female six state collegiality. The first figure in this extra-official group was Allen Benner of Phillips Academy, then also called Andover Academy, who was a founder of CANE as a member of the Committee of Arrangements for the first meeting. In 1903 he published his Selections from Homer's Iliad: with an introduction, notes, a short Homeric grammar, and a vocabulary, which is still in use today. He later published a Beginner's Greek book with Herbert Weir Smyth which is no longer in use. In 1938 he left Phillips Academy and Andover, MA and moved to Waldoboro, ME where he lived out the last two years of his life. Strangely there is no CANE memorial nor even a mention of his passing, except for what appears to be an addendum in the In Memoriam section for 1940 in Seventy-Five Years of CANE.
John C. Kirtland of Phillips Academy, Exeter (also known as Phillips Exeter), a younger colleague of Allen Benner, was also a charter member of CANE and like Benner a respected textbook author; moreover, he was a main mover in several CANE initiatives. One of these was the proposal to promote the formulation of standard college entrance requirement in general but particularly in the Classics. In 1908 Kirtland was the chairman of the committee approved to pursue this, and then in 1909 he was appointed as a CANE delegate to the APA’s Commission of Fifteen to instigate this nationwide. Ultimately this initiative led to the founding of the College Entrance Board and the Advanced Placement Exams. Kirtland was also involved in efforts from 1911 on to arrange a formal union, a Permanent Council, of the various regional associations, an arrangement which the other associations approved, but which CANE rejected in 1913. This stalemate later led, in 1919, to the formation of the American Classical League which did start out with a Council formed of delegates from the regional associations. In the memorial published in 1952 in the Forty-Sixth Annual Bulletin, p. 9, there are some interesting comments: ”John Copeland Kirtland [was] President of this Association for the year 1938-39. … He shared in the founding of the honorary scholastic society, Cum Laude, and was president general and later regent general for many years. … As a person he clothed a rather cherubic countenance with a beard, an ever youthful spirit with a dignified formality of speech. … His intellectual integrity was such that all who worked with him were drawn to the same high level, yet so great was his kindness that I can recall no unfair rebuke or unkind criticism of his to any fellow-worker. To his contemporaries he was one of Plutarch's men, but to youth in his retirement he stood unmasked, like Tennyson's keeper of the ford. Twice since his death I have heard him spoken of by the young with affection but no awe. He loved to tell tall tales, best of all when they were against himself.”
Now we return to the backbone of the Secretary-Treasurers in order to continue to the ‘second generation’ of CANE, those Principes who were not founding nor charter members. After John Stearns of Dartmouth was secretary-treasurer for three years, John Spaeth of Wesleyan was secretary-treasurer for ten years, and immediately succeeding those years he was president following in the same pattern as Prof. Wetmore, his mediate predecessor. Then in the same year that he was elected President of CANE (1949), he also became the Dean of Faculty at Wesleyan until his retirement in 1963. His very brief and factual memorial is in the Sixty-Eighth Annual Bulletin (1973). Towards the end of John Spaeth’s incumbency as Secretary-Treasurer the Association offered a summer scholarship for the American Academy in Rome which was mysteriously funded. This was the start of CANE’s scholarship program. Later it became known that Prof. Coulter had been the anonymous donor, not only in 1947, but for several years thereafter. In 1961, as reported in the Annual Bulletin of that year, “Prof. Claude W. Barlow read the following memorial to Cornelia Catlin Coulter, Past President of the Association:
“Cornelia Catlin Coulter, in many ways the greatest single benefactress that the Classical Association of New England has ever had, died in Newport News, Va., on April 27, 1960.
… Her teaching career began at Bryn Mawr and at St. Agnes School, after which she spent ten years at Vassar and 26 years at Mt. Holyoke, teaching both Greek and Latin. … Miss Coulter had joined the Classical Association of New England in 1927 and became a Life Member in 1953. She was vice-president in 1942-43 and president in 1947-48, as well as president of the American Philological Association. She gave papers to our group on four occasions, the last being at the 50th anniversary of the Association. She served as
vice-chairman of the Committee on the Humanities from 1943-46 and then took up her work as founder and chairman of a special Committee on summer scholarships to the School of Classical Studies of the American Academy in Rome. With the assistance of Miss Edith Plumb and others she personally conducted for over seven years the campaign for funds which laid the solid foundation for an account which is today worth far in excess of its book value of over $10,000. She was, in addition, the largest single contributor to the Rome Scholarship Fund, and for several years she provided anonymously the full amount of the annual awards. In gratitude for this service it is proposed today to name the Rome Scholarship permanently in her memory. In expressing my own personal debt to Miss Coulter both as a friend and as a colleague, I find myself unable to pass the tribute recently prepared by another friend and colleague, Lucy T. Shoe, who has written: ‘Brilliant as was her scholarship, effective and skillful as was her administration, it was perhaps as a teacher that her greatness was most widely and keenly felt, for hers was a life dominated above all by giving to others. To her teaching and to her students, both in and out of class, and to her
colleagues she gave continuously and unstintingly of her own amazing store of knowledge, her penetrating understanding of classical ideas and ideals, her sense of style, and above all her own personality, fearless and determined in her support of the classics and any cause of right and justice, yet gentle, modest, and unselfishly self-effacing to a degree rarely encountered.
“Cornelia, nemini non cara, liberalis, lepida, generosa, ingenio rebusque gestis nobilis, semper in memoria nostra gratissime habebitur.”
When Claude Barlow gave this memorial, he was in the eighth year of his ten year incumbency as Secretary-Treasurer of CANE, continuing to sustain the living traditions of the Association, prime among them that of congenial collegiality. In fact, he might be called the second founder of CANE. If George Howes was CANE’s Zeno, then Claude Barlow was its Chrysippus: “Professor Claude W. Barlow [was] .. one of our Association's "most devoted and distinguished servants. His official services to CANE covered more than one third its existence [at the time of his death]. ... Professor Barlow had been a member of the CANE for many years and followed its fortunes from afar, so to speak. Now began his intimate and loving care for CANE. As Secretary-Treasurer from 1952 until 1962, the number of fully registered members rose from 300 to l,000 thanks to his dogged, quiet, persistent pursuit of the delinquent and the forgetful. In 1963 he was elected President of CANE and in 1964 he joined the Executive Committee. ... The unobtrusive, low-key sustained services of Claude W. Barlow to all classicists can never be forgotten.” (Ann. Bull. 71, 1976, p. 7). Goodwin Beach joined Claude Barlow in the year of death and in the name of CANE’s award for distinguished service to the Association. He had gone into business after graduation and had done well, but his first love always remained the Latin language and its literature. After he retired from business, he started teaching Latin, and joined CANE. He put his business acumen and experience at the service of the APA and CANE where his help was invaluable in establishing the Endowment Fund, but perhaps his greatest service was to make Latin seem a living language. As John Williams wrote of him in the Seventy-First Annual Bulletin, p. 8: “Latine loquebatur et scribebat quasi sermonem patrium. Ad hoc accedit quod cohortabatur ut Latina universa lingua fieret. … Hic [erat] homo nobilis et litteratus disertusque, qui erat multis modis extra suum aevum.”
Nathan Dane II was an arresting and unique embodiment of the spirit of collegiality; he was about as non-professorial as could be, until it came to his Latin classes. Yet even there relaxed camaraderie prevailed. Coming in at the end of Claude Barlow’s incumbency as Secretary-Treasurer, Nate was president of CANE in 1962 and in that year he wrote the memorial for his colleague Thomas Means, a eulogy that was brief but showed Prof. Means’ influence on Nate: “The passing of Tom Means last June marked the ending of an era in the history of CANE and the teaching of Greek and Latin within the framework of New England traditions, both Prep-School and College. T. Means joined CANE in 1921. His career was one of decades. He had
been Connecticut's Rhodes Scholar in 1911. Joining the faculty of Bowdoin College in 1921, ten years later he served on the Executive Council of CANE. Both he and his wife were Life Members. 1951 saw him embark on the ascent as Vice-President of CANE, and it was in 1953 that he presided over CANE here at Deerfield. His teaching at Hotchkiss and at Bowdoin will long be remembered by Alumni. To us here today his passing means the end of the sight of the jaunty, virile, positive protagonist who dominated our meetings with wit, drive and sense for over thirty
years. ... A solid sympathetic leader, T. Means was a firm unswerving citizen of the world, both ancient and modern.” In 1980 both Nate and Grace Crawford were named recipients of the Barlow Beach Award for Distinguished Service, and the first to receive it posthumously. At the time John Ambrose wrote in the memorial for him: “Nate Dane, a past president of CANE, .. amazing vitality of mind and spirit, a feigned gruffness to hide a sensitive, generous nature, no stuffiness, no pretence, a real Yankee wit. … Implicit in the word "scholar" are a love of and a deep interest in knowledge. How well this characterizes the man! His way was a vital, continuous, and loving study of the Greek and Latin classics. But his learning, his insights into the important lessons that permeate the great works of antiquity, were not so much for publication; they were for his students. … Nate thought of himself first and foremost as a teacher, and he loved the classroom. He taught with a style and vigor that brought excitement to his subject. It was commonplace that his classes should be punctuated by roars of laughter. He was a showman, but isn't there a sense of the stage in all great teachers? By the same token, there was an integrity to his classics program: his standards were high, his language courses tough.” If Nate Dane and Grace Crawford had something in common other than their love of the Classics, it was this trait of putting others before themselves: “Grace always served her many friends and our profession unstintingly. If one needed a place to stay, a congenial location for a committee meeting, a ride to a conference, or help in finding a job, Grace was always happy to oblige. … a faithful member of CANE and a tireless worker for Classics.” (Seventy-Fifth Annual Bulletin p. 16).
In 1997 Matthew Immanuel Wiencke, the sixteenth secretary of CANE, the second executive secretary, succumbed to cancer after a long battle, during which he continued to give his all to lead CANE. His association with CANE was a long one; in 1983 he was one of the founders of the CANE Summer Institute along with Gloria Duclos, Edward Bradley, and others; from 1989-1993 he was the Executive Secretary of CANE who was instrumental in consolidating the many changes that had occurred over the last decade and a half. At the Summer Institute at Dartmouth in 1996 Edward Bradley had this to say, quoting from letters and notes he had received from participants at the Institute: “he made clear everywhere by his ‘gentle kindness,’ by his ‘infectious joie de vivre’ and his ‘sweet, grave courtesy to every student’ that he was an infinitely ‘warm and generous man who cared about people.’” Professor Bradley ended by mentioning Gloria Duclos and John Williams, “who, by incarnating so many of Matt Wiencke’s finest qualities, keep his legacy wonderfully alive.” The next year Gloria Duclos was also gone, and that was the end of another era. For if George Howes was the first founder and Claude Barlow the second founder, then Professor Gloria Shaw Duclos (Secretary-Treasurer 1972-1977, President 1982, and Barlow Beach honoree 1987) presided over the period of greatest change and institutional development of CANE. In the modified words of Cicero: profecto, quoniam illum qui hanc societatem condidit ad deos imortales benevolentia famaque sustulimus, esse apud nos posterosque nostros in honore debebit ea quae eandem hanc societatem bis conditam amplificavit. More than that Gloria Duclos typified CANE’s warm, unassuming, but inclusive collegiality for her generation. As Phyllis Katz said in her memorial (Ninety-Third Annual Bulletin (1998) pp.15-6): “her teaching style was warm, supportive, encouraging, inspiring, … Gloria Duclos maintained a life-long devotion to the works of Vergil; she found in the Aeneid an endless source of inspiration and of comfort. In many ways, her own life was a model of the pietas which Vergil attributes to Aeneas and of dignitas in the finest sense of that word.”
Since we have now finished viewing some of the imagines of the maiores of Centennial CANE, as we stand in her atrium, we must now move towards the tablinum to study the res gestae of CANE.
Part II
Development of the Association
Artes doctoresque cano qui primi ab inerte
Gente recenteque ludo servabant classica regna
Foedere firmo et amico quo magis officia usus
Et nos, reliquias veterum, defenderet audax:
Tantae molis erat studia ambo antiqua tueri.[8]
At the beginning of the last century the Greek and Latin teachers of New England created an institution to deal with the crisis that faced them. The classics were plummeting from their prominent dominance in academia, earlier here in America than in Europe; enrolments were waning; Greek and Latin classical requirements for college entrance and graduation were being dropped. The classical tradition of education was in trouble in 1906 when the Classical Association of New England was founded “to promote the interests of Classical studies.”[9] Throughout the first century of its life, CANE has continued to promote those interests and to deal with recurrent crises which the classical tradition has faced, as all classical requirements were dropped in most schools and colleges, and then many whole programs were also terminated. For the classicist the curricular changes sweeping across the country were not inevitable evolutionary progress, but the clash of two very different philosophies of education and two different sets of cultural ideals. The Association tried to stem the tide of change in two ways: first like any good teacher it assumed some guilt and tried to improve itself and its pedagogy, and then secondly like any good teacher it realized that society played a role in its problem, and so CANE tried to reach out and promote the ideals of its educational vision in the public arena. This is the story of that institution and its efforts.
In 1933, at the Annual Meeting of CANE, Claude Allen of Deerfield Academy gave a paper entitled "The Position of the Classics in College Admission Requirements from 1642 to 1900." In it he claimed that "the requirements for Greek and Latin did not noticeably lapse"[10] in the period from 1800 to 1900. The matriculant was expected to be able to read both; "Toward the close of the century, there was a tendency to require ability to translate at sight." When Columbia moved from its midtown location to its new campus on Morningside Heights (1897), it eliminated the Greek admission requirement and reduced the Latin requirement from two years to one. Beginning with the 1916-17 academic year, the Latin requirement was eliminated altogether.[11] Harvard under Charles Eliot had started to undercut classical education even earlier[12] and also eliminated the Latin entrance requirement in 1916. The position of the Classics in the American educational climate had remained fairly strong until around 1900, but then things began to change rapidly and not so favorably for the Classics.
The Classical Association of New England or CANE came into being as part of a general movement to create regional classical associations. The times were changing. From the time of the foundation of the American Philological Association in 1869[13] there had been a continuous cascade of scientific discoveries and technological inventions: Maxwell's electro-magnetic field 1873, telephone 1875, phonograph 1877, light bulb 1879, electric transformer 1883, gas engine 1885, motion picture camera 1888, radio signals 1895, discovery of the electron 1897, and then the year 1903 saw the Wright's flight, electric appliances, and Ford Motor Company. In 1905 while Einstein was mapping the new world view of relativity and particle physics, the Classical Association of the Middle West and South was formed to stress the study of antiquity; in 1906 in the same month that San Francisco watched the loss of most of its downtown to an earthquake (April 18), Springfield witnessed the first meeting of the Classical Association of New England (April 6-7), convoked to consider the loss of Greek requirements and enrollment; and in 1907 while Lumiere invented color photography and Rosling developed the theory of television, the Classical Association of the Atlantic States met to try to preserve the vision of the past. The task undertaken by the regional associations was formidable; preserving the heritage of the classical civilization in the face of cumulatively accelerating innovation was a monumental job even in a conservative educational system.
There was also another historical force at play that brought about the emergence of the regional classical associations and other groups. Besides the rise of a new educational model based on science and technology, there was the growing awareness of the power of such groups as labor unions, a growing expectation for government involvement and the gradual expansion of federal regulations. In 1913 two years after the founding of the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest the 13th Amendment made federal income tax the law of the land, and in 1919 two more constitutional amendments introduced female suffrage and prohibition. That same year the American Classical League was founded "for the purpose of fostering the study of classical languages". There was a perceived need to supplement the research interests of the APA with the an organization that would stress pedagogy and the schools, as Dean Andrew West of Princeton University made clear at the annual meeting of CANE in 1919 in his talk[14]: "If capable American boys and girls are not provided with good opportunities for classical training, they are thus deprived of a very important part of their just chance for the best liberal education. .. Therefore to improve and extend our classical education ... is the object for which the American Classical League is being formed."
Although at the national level the forces of group advocacy, specialization, and institutional expansion were already at work, those forces did not affect CANE for quite a while. Indeed, in many areas CANE has successfully resisted the centripetal forces of specialization in many crucial areas: it remains today the same homogeneous unspecialized association that it was founded to be. CANE started quickly and leanly with a succinct Constitution of six articles that was less than two pages long. It had three officers elected annually and four additional members of the Executive Committee of whom two were elected each year for a term of two years. That arrangement continued for 68 years until 1974. During this same period there were on average 13 papers per year at the annual meeting, with a high of 18 and a low of 4 (1907). The first meeting was in early April and the annual meetings continued every year (except for 1945) on a Friday and Saturday in late March or early April until now. Although the concerned parties in 1905 who initiated the foundation of CANE were Greek teachers, it was clear from the beginning that the association’s scope was to include Latin and Greek, schools and colleges, male and female, and teachers from all six New England states offering papers on research and pedagogy and matters of interest to classicists. In the first seventy-five years it met in every New England state except Vermont (first in 1985). Another tradition that finally became statute was the tenure of the secretary-treasurer. Although elected each year, this officer usually served longer than a year; the average term for the fourteen secretary-treasurers was 5.8 years. The term now is five years, but there has been discussion about reducing it to four years. Another thing that remained quite constant was the cost of dues, remaining at $2.00 for over 40 years. A constitutional amendment adopted in 1948 raised dues to $2.50.
About the only major things that did not remain constant in the first 65 to 70 years of CANE were the endowment funds and the number of members. The endowment fund started at $500 in 1940 and in 2003 the funds totaled $647,593.97. The membership, starting at 97 in 1906, grew fairly quickly to 375 by 1914 and to 400 in 1922. In 1926 there was a big burst of growth to 545, another in 1930 to 675. The number then went down a bit and did not rise again until it reached 700 in 1958. By 1961 it had reached 930, and it remained between 973 and 903 for this decade (counting active, sustaining, life, emeriti, honorary members et al.). During the 70's there was a decline, falling to 606 in 1980. Then in the decade of the 80's by renewed membership drives and by including those outside of New England who subscribed to the New England Classical Newsletter as subscribing members the number of members rose again to 1103 (including 264 subscribing members) in 1987. The last published figures for the end of the last decade show a stable membership number at 855. The current membership, including all the varieties of members stands at about 825[15].
The changes that did occur were in the area of institutional expansion and complexity. Some changes started quite early. Although the vast majority of speakers at the Annual Meeting have been New England residents, there were people from away early on, especially reporting on archaeology (from 1909) and reports on College Entrance exams (N. McCrea of Columbia from 1915). The first scholarly paper by a person not from New England was delivered by Gilbert Murray of Oxford University in 1912. Originally the Annual Meeting started Friday afternoon and went through Saturday afternoon. In 1915 the Meetings started Friday morning and went through Saturday afternoon. Finally in 1946 the meetings went from Friday morning to Saturday noon. The first quasi panel was in 1913; the panelists were from college and school and discussed pedagogy. The first real series of panels started in 1954 and occurred almost yearly thereafter. In the mid 1980s the practice began of having a single theme for the annual meeting. This practice continued until the mid 90s. Early on the host school would have the meeting during their spring break and let the attendees stay in dorm rooms for a minimal fee for the two nights, also lunches and suppers were supplied at minimal fees. For instance, in 1939 at Connecticut College the cost for a dorm room for two nights was $1 per person[16]; in 1940 breakfast was $.50 and lunch $.65 and annual dinner $1; hotels were $2 to $5 for a single. The Friday night banquet started from the beginning but without all the ceremony that now attends it. The private schools stopped providing dorm rooms after 1966 and colleges provided such only sporadically from 1963 to 1972 and not thereafter. The practice of concurrent sessions began only in the 1990's.
In period of 1910 the average salary for American teachers was $485[17]; the average teaching salary in New England was surely somewhat higher[18], and the statistics for 1922 show that all the teaching salaries improved dramatically during this period[19]. The average teacher’s salary now is $42,949, almost a factor of ten greater[20]. Then the cost of membership in CANE (including Classical Journal) was $2.00 ($1 for the journal and $1 for membership). Now the cost of membership with the Classical Journal is $58.00, and most of that cost came after 1970 when the dues including CJ was still only $7 (though that had doubled since 1960). In the interval the value or purchasing power of the 1906 dollar had grown to about $19.80. This figure suggests that there seems to have been an increase in the average salary ($42,949 instead of $9,603 [= $485 * $19.80]); likewise the cost of CANE has gone up ($58 instead of $39.60 [=$2 * $19.80]). This is to say nothing of the costs of attending the Annual Meeting: hotel rates grew from $3.50 in 1940 to $90 in 2006, and the price of the banquet from $1 to $20 or more. And the rise of the cost of registration from $0 in 1906 to $6 in 1984 to $50 in 2000; and the annual budget of the Association went from $500 in 1906 to circa $56,000 in 2000. When one remembers Prof. Seymour’s comment in the 1906 meeting that $5.00[21] would buy a library of Greek and Latin texts sufficient to keep a classicist fully occupied for a year, one realizes that the living standard of learning has decreased, or to phrase it positively, the cost of learning has increased significantly over the last 100 years, even for Classical Studies which has always been and remains about the least expensive disciplines financially, if one of the most demanding intellectually.
Perhaps the best way to get an overview of the institutional development of CANE is to review the history of the Executive Committee. In the beginning the Executive Committee consisted of 7 members (President, Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer and 4 at-large members) who changed annually or biennially. Constitutionally, there was very little carry-over or institutional memory, but by tradition the Secretary-Treasurer was re-elected for long periods. During the year business was conducted by mail, then later by mail and telephone, and in the late 1980s by mail, phone, and increasingly by email. Still more face-to-face meetings were needed and in 1979 a Fall meeting was instituted, and then in 1992 a Winter meeting was added which was originally dedicated just to budget planning.
What follows is a chart that shows the original constitution of the Executive Committee and then the dates of the accretions:
Executive Committee[22]
President 1906
Vice President 1906
President Elect 1974
Immediate Past President 1974
Secretary-Treasurer 1906
Executive Secretary 1987
Treasurer 1987
Curator of Funds 1972 (in Bylaws 1975)
Endowment Fund 1940, named 1941
Scholarship Fund 1948, named Coulter Fund 1961
(Additional) Members (4) 1906
At large members(3) 1974
State Representatives 1974
Editor NECN 1973 supplanting the Fall Newsletter
1956-1973
NECN&J 1990 (89)
NECJ 1997
Editor of CANEns (CANE Newsletter) 2000
Coordinator Educational Programs 1987
1906 CANE: concern re Gk.
1935-6 G. Beach: value of the Classics
1978 Public Information Committee
1979 PIC initiates Essay Contest
Director CANE Summer Institute 1992
Editor, CANE Instruct. Materials 1993 (created 1987)
Classics in Crisis Coordinator 1994 renamed 1999 Classics in Curriculum
1974 President Elect = crisis manager
Chairmen of Standing Committees 1992 (usually invited from 1990)
Membership standing 1994
1958-70 General chairman of the (state) Membership Committees
who reports directly to the Exec. Comm.
Finance 1949 standing, again 1994
CANE Scholarships 1949 standing
Rome Scholarship 1947 = Coulter 1961
Endowment Scholarship 1983 proposed 1982
Classical Computing 1990
As can be seen in this chart and from this general historical overview, CANE began for the purpose of addressing a specific crisis. CANE has through the years continued to address aspects of the same crisis, a relative decline in classical education. There were many reasons for this decline; in the introduction I tried to outline some of the larger, underlying causes, such as
the somewhat abrupt change of direction for education at the turn of the twentieth century as the vision of a classically based, liberal arts education gave way to that of a practical employment-oriented, technically based education. Perhaps as a result of the rise of science and technology there was a loss of faith in those who used to be in positions of leadership (bankers, lawyers, ministers, teachers, politicians, etc.) that classical learning is useful. This loss of faith in a classical education was also taking away many of the brightest students, who would have studied the classics in earlier times.
Secondly, as the chart in particular shows, CANE’s attempt to deal with the crisis gradually became more continuous and more invested with resources, as the association grew and as enrolment in and administrative support for the classics withered. In a few institutions the enrolment remained more or less constant, but the percentage of students enrolled in the classics dropped in all schools at all levels, and the quality suffered accordingly. Over the years the Association began to identify institutionally the various aspects of the overall crisis: the struggle to keep membership and provide mutual support, public perception of the classics, teacher placement services in various states, and specific problems of dropping enrolments and dropped programs. The Association went from membership drives and scholarships to ad hoc committees to publicize the classics, until at about the 50 year mark it started to make some of the attempts to bolster the classics permanent. First the general chairman of membership was appointed to represent all the state committees on the Executive Committee. Next in 1974 the role of the President Elect was redefined to include crisis management, and finally in 1978 the chairman of the Public Information Committee became the President Elect. In 1913 CANE established a Teacher Agency, and in 1981 CANE re-established a Teacher Placement service. These official functions became the predecessors for the current three officers concerned with dealing with aspects of the defense of the classics. At the same time the roles and responsibilities of the officers were becoming so complex that in 1982 the Manual explaining them was expanded, and in 1992 the obligation of the Executive Committee to review and update the Manual every year was included in the Bylaws. As a final step in its institutional evolution CANE became incorporated in the State of Vermont in 1990, and the Executive Committee also became a Board of Directors.
The efforts of CANE to protect and serve its constituency and its profession fell into two main undertakings, first to bring more classicists into the fold and help them, and secondly to reach out to the public. The efforts of the district or state membership committees served the first undertaking, and became increasingly centralized as time went on. Likewise, the efforts at crisis management started locally and became more centralized. Also in the service of this first undertaking awards were given to both students and teachers in an effort to improve pedagogy and the common goals. Here is a chronology of this venture:
1947 Rome Scholarship - becomes the Coulter Scholarship in 1961
1976 Barlow-Beach Award for Distinguished Service
1979 Essay Contest Award, now the Writing Contest Award
1983 Discretionary Grants (approved 1982 to be granted by a committee chaired by the Secretary-Treasurer, later chaired by the Immediate Past
President)
1983 Endowment Scholarship for summer study abroad
1994 Renata Poggioli Summer Scholarship (biennial, approved and awarded 1994)
1997 Matthew Wiencke Teaching Award (awarded 1998)
1998 Edward Phinney Fellowship Program (awarded 1999-2000)
1998 Scholarship for Certification (awarded 1999)
Most of these are awarded to individuals to recognize their contributions or to help them become more informed, but the Phinney fellowship program undertakes every third year to give an award to an individual and a school or school system to begin the study of Greek in that secondary school. It is quite a munificent program that pays part of the teacher’s salary for the two initial years of the program. The second initiative, to mould public opinion and advertise the classics, also had a long history. It was a concern from the beginning, but here are a few of the highlights. It started out within the academic community as CANE formed committees to try to influence standardized college entrance requirements and also standardized testing, and then expanded outward.
1908-16 & 1926 Committee for uniform college entrance requirements, the
members of which were inducted into the National Committee of Fifteen.
1917-8 Committee on Questionnaire: published report on the responses of
153 schools on the teaching of Latin and Greek.
1919 CANE approves the “Minute Men”, a group to promote the Classics in NE.
1935-6 G. Beach: promotes the value of the Classics.
1969 poll of NE colleges & universities about foreign language
requirements and preferences for classical vs. modern.