When Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his first lecture on North American colonization in 1891, he was embarking on something that was unique. That Turner, a recent recipient of the Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University and a young professor at the University of Wisconsin, was on his way to becoming famous for his frontier thesis did not make his lecture unusual. Nor did his topic on North American history immediately suggest anything out of the ordinary. What made this course interesting was that Turner was not teaching in his seminar room at the university, and his students certainly were not the traditional undergraduates and graduates he taught in Madison. Instead, Turner was lecturing to adults—men and women from working class and professional backgrounds—who were participating in the university’s burgeoning extension program. In the 1890s, Turner and his extension students were unique. Extension programs that offered courses in the humanities, arts, and sciences, and often for university credit, were new in this country, and the University of Wisconsin was in the forefront of such efforts.

This essay considers Turner’s role in this new movement and his efforts to couple history and extension as a way of promoting intellectual regeneration and fostering citizenship. Turner believed that if people understood the past they then would have a greater comprehension of the present and would be able to use that knowledge to think critically about issues confronting society. As such, extension had the power to contribute to the development of good citizenship. Before considering Turner’s views on the role of extension and history in society, this essay looks at the growth of the extension movement in Wisconsin and its roots in the English model of extension at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. The essay then considers how Turner’s participation in building an extension program and his belief in the power of history illuminate the factors that contributed to the growth of outreach programs at American universities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Finally, the essay ends with an analysis of the problems inherent in sustaining extension work.

Turner is an intriguing and helpful person to use as a guide for understanding university extension programs. A native of Wisconsin, he received his bachelor’s degree at the state university in Madison. After earning his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, he returned to Wisconsin as a professor in history from 1889 until he left to teach at Harvard in 1910. While at Wisconsin, he was instrumental in launching extension in the 1890s, was one of the first lecturers in the program, and was a champion of extension until he left for Harvard. In 1906 he served on a committee that encouraged the president to maintain an invigorated program of extension and outreach, and Charles Van Hise, the influential president of the university from 1903 to 1918, eventually folded the extension program into the Wisconsin Idea. This now-legendary idea promoted teaching, research, and outreach or service to the state as the responsibilities of a state university. Turner had been in the forefront of efforts to build the extension program that became a part of this idea. ¹

Simultaneously, he established a scholarly reputation as an historian. Turner perhaps is most well known for an idea that historians debate yet today. His frontier thesis—the argument that the frontier and the continued availability of land drove the evolution of democracy in America—was a powerful one, and Turner helped to shape the historical research that followed the first public airing of this thesis in 1893. In important ways, Turner also pushed the discipline of history toward a more social and economic orientation. He was one of the first historians to encourage other scholars to deal with the real problems of common people, rather than to continue to deal solely with the work and times of great political leaders and influential men. Turner connected this conception of history to his extension work, and he discussed his views on both in a provocative address to a meeting of Wisconsin’s teachers in 1890. His argument to this group—subsequently printed as “The Significance of History”—and his prominence as an extension lecturer provide a basis for exploring extension programs in the 1890s. ²

Turner was an influential historian and a pivotal figure in the early extension program, but he was not alone in promoting extension at the university. Thomas Chamberlin was president of the university in 1891 when, at the urging of the faculty, he implemented a formal program of extension courses. Charles Adams, as Chamberlin’s successor in 1893, continued to promote the university’s extension efforts. What Turner, Chamberlin, Adams, and other faculty developed was a fairly complex program of courses and credits that took knowledge to the state’s citizens. Professors traveled throughout Wisconsin to offer courses that consisted of six lectures over a period of six weeks. Optional discussion classes followed each lecture and provided opportunities for in-depth discussion of relevant issues. Students electing to attend the lectures and classes, finish weekly reading assignments, and complete an examination earned credit toward classwork at the University of Wisconsin. The university offered extension courses in the arts, humanities, and sciences, and on such varied topics as bacteriology and political economics, English literature and plant physiology, landscape geology and Scandinavian literature. Turner developed four courses on North American colonization, American politics, American development, and the West and Revolution. ³

In the program’s initial year, Turner and his peers taught 47 courses in 34 cities and towns. In the first year, the lecturers reached over eight thousand people, and half of these students remained for the discussion classes that followed the lectures. They maintained this energetic pace over the next couple of years, and the number of courses given remained more or less the same until 1897. Although the program began auspiciously with large audiences, it ultimately failed to attract men and women from a variety of social and economic backgrounds. The reality was that students, teachers, and some businessmen and professionals, with women in the majority, made up the usual audience. Even this audience began to decline in the late 1890s.⁴

Those students who attended the extension lectures participated in a program that had a very precise notion of education. This model of university extension, originating in England in 1873, concentrated on cultural knowledge rather than on practical or utilitarian knowledge. Cambridge University, with Oxford soon following, developed an extension program “designed to give a thorough grasp of principles, and a real mental training,” with courses “covering a range of subjects sufficiently wide to give a broad and liberal higher education.” R.D. Roberts, an administrator in the extension program at Cambridge, felt that such an education would be “worthy of University recognition.” The goal was not a few lectures appealing to mass interests, but a comprehensive program of study that was demanding and rigorous in scope. R.G. Moulton, an extension lecturer at Cambridge, stated bluntly, “It is no part of the purpose of the University Extension Movement to make its studies easier than those of the Universities.” ⁵

Cambridge insisted that its courses would not provide vocational or technical training. Roberts emphasized that university extension was not to be a means toward a job, but that it was to promote “knowledge for its own sake.” Roberts and Moulton were clear in what this statement meant. “Knowledge for its own sake” was knowledge as Cambridge University saw and defined it. It was an idea of culture and an ideal of an educated person rooted in the traditional structures and courses of a Cambridge education. “Now, we think that one of the missions of University Extension,” Moulton claimed, is “to call upon everybody who is conscious of an interest in intellectual matters, to feel that this very sense of culture [gained through higher education] is an obligation upon him to go out and help others to be cultured.” Roberts and Moulton may have sought to bring education to the people, but the content of that education and of the lectures given was very much as Cambridge promoted it. ⁶

Chamberlin in Wisconsin agreed with these goals, and he made it clear that he was inaugurating “University Extension of the English type” at Wisconsin. Turner, too, proclaimed that Wisconsin’s new program was “University Extension work of the English type.” Both Chamberlin and Turner saw such an extension program as a way of building on, but being different from, the university’s other outreach programs, including the farmers’ institutes that had existed since 1885. The farmers’ institutes concentrated on the industrial or practical side of life by training farmers in new agricultural techniques. Turner and Chamberlin now sought to advance the cultural and intellectual side of the university’s outreach efforts. When they referred to the cultural work of the university and to cultural knowledge, they generally meant the humanities and the liberal arts. Practical or utilitarian knowledge roughly referred to professional and occupational training—to subjects that had a direct effect on people, rather than to subjects that explored the breadth of civilization. The practical subjects—some of the sciences and agriculture—had a direct effect on daily life through new medicines and farming techniques. The immediate effect on society of studying history or the humanities was not always clear, and teaching and research in these disciplines usually fell in the cultural knowledge category. Mastering new farming techniques could be demanding, but extension lecturers drew a sharp distinction between what they were doing and what their counterparts in the farmers’ institutes were doing. They were not offering vocational or occupational training. The goal was not a few popular lectures appealing to mass interests, but a comprehensive program of study that was demanding and rigorous in scope.⁷

Turner exemplified this approach. He designed courses that asked his extension audiences to think critically about history and to consider the evidence in drawing conclusions. In his course on the colonization of North America, for example, he asked his students to “trace the effects of Spanish discovery and colonization upon the English ideas of America in the sixteenth century.” Additionally, when discussing whether the “Norse voyages to America [had] influenced Columbus,” Turner encouraged his students to weigh the arguments for and against such an influence. Turning to slavery in the United States, he delved into the factors giving rise to slavery and debated with his students the pros and cons “of the justice of excluding slavery from the territories.” Turner did not feed his students an easily digested menu of historical offerings. He demanded the attention and intellectual concentration of those sitting in the lecture halls listening to him. He made it clear that his students needed to read widely from the suggested readings, as well as to know and understand the required course texts. And, he expected his students to engage intellectually with the lectures and readings, and with each other. These lectures may have been for popular audiences, but they demanded thought, consideration, and preparation from those audiences.⁸

Turner refused to reach his extension students by popularizing history. Unwilling to sacrifice the integrity of the discipline he was helping to shape, he refused to sacrifice history to an engaging story or to simplify essential details and complexities for the sake of easy comprehension. He was not opposed to the compelling narrative or to making history interesting to his audiences, and he worked to include absorbing stories in his lectures. He valued an engaging style of presentation, as he told his audience of teachers in 1890, but he was unwilling to give up truthfulness for a clever story. “An interesting style, even a picturesque manner of presentation, is not to be condemned,” he argued, “provided that truthfulness of substance rather than vivacity of style be the end sought.” His lectures did not gloss over complexities or attempt to distort the truth, as he saw it, for the sake of a compelling narrative.⁹

A central aim of Turner’s courses was to expose students to historical connections across time and to explore how events in one country affected what happened in other regions of the world. In his course syllabi, he provided timelines to enhance visually what he called “the unity and continuity” of history. For instance, in one course, the timeline linked the 800s with the 1760s, and it showed the progression from Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the Seven Years’ War in the mid-eighteenth century. Turner further considered the forces and events in Europe that brought settlers and explorers to Wisconsin and the Northwest. “Every economic change, every political change, every military conscription, every socialistic agitation in Europe,” he said, “has sent us groups of colonists who have passed out on to our prairies to form new self-governing communities, or who have entered the life of our great cities.” The message Turner gave his audiences was that North America and Europe were connected, and that events in one country and in one time did not happen in isolation from events in other countries or centuries. ¹⁰

Turner further argued that “our history is only to be understood as a growth from European history under the new conditions of the New World.” In his extension courses, he helped his students analyze how the natural environment affected colonization and settlement. His students explored how geography and the environment influenced settlers moving from the Old World into the New World. He contrasted the Pacific and Atlantic coasts and discussed the obstacles to migration posed by the Allegheny Mountains. He also introduced the argument, later to become the basis for his frontier thesis, that “the history of America is the development of a democracy in connection with free land.” ¹¹

Turner wanted his students to explore connections across time and continents, but he made it clear that he wanted something more from his students and from historians. He contended that historians needed to move beyond a traditional view of the past that looked only at the great heroes or one that focused solely on religious struggles or the rise of political institutions. Turner argued for a more expansive study of the past—one that addressed the role of “the degraded tillers of the soil,” the slaves of Greece and the serfs of Rome, and “the breadwinners of the nation.” History “is the biography of society in all its departments,” he said. This biography included “the great mass of the people,” not just the heroes or statesmen. Such a focus on the great masses reflected Turner’s belief that average people had influenced the development of nations. The economic growth and social conditions of common people, ownership of property, and distribution of wealth in society, Turner argued, had “been the secret of the nation’s rise or fall.” The history of these common people needed to be a part of the biography and “self-consciousness” of society, and Turner wanted his extension students to recognize the contributions of these breadwinners. ¹²

When Turner talked about the biography of society and connected events across time and oceans, he was not ignoring the role of statesmen and rulers. Popes, Kings, and Presidents figured prominently in Turner’s lectures. Columbus and Magellan made appearances, as did Washington and Jefferson. Martin Luther and the Reformation were present and most certainly was George III. These were pivotal figures and events in the past. Ignoring them would have been as problematic as overlooking the common people who powered the economic growth of nations and societies, but Turner did not concentrate on them to the exclusion of the breadwinners. In his extension lectures, he addressed the role of the “tillers of the soil,” the fur traders who explored Wisconsin, and the slaves in the southern regions of this country. His lectures included discussions of Indian civilizations and the architecture of the pueblo cliff dwellings, the intertribal trade among Indians, and their interactions with early European settlers. When lecturing on the colonization of New England, Turner focused on the social distinctions of the original, “almost purely English” settlers. He discussed their schools and economic life, and he provided vignettes from various books, including official Massachusetts records, to highlight life in an early New England community. Additionally, as part of his lecture on westward expansion and settlement, Turner considered the importance of the Scotch-Irish frontiersmen to expansion. ¹³

This expansive conception of history motivated Turner’s work with extension. Recognizing the influence of kings and breadwinners and the effect of past events and the natural environment, he believed, was essential to living constructively in the present. The university, therefore, could play a pivotal role in fostering citizenship by introducing people to history and cultural knowledge. Turner argued that the university could not limit its work to the practical side of life as it extended its reach throughout the state. Nor did he want the practical training offered by the farmers’ institutes, for example, to be the central focus of the university’s outreach efforts. Turner wanted a role for the cultural side of the university, for the intellectual engagement of ideas, and for the challenging work of wrestling with the past.

Factors Contributing to the Growth of Extension

Turner tells us a lot about the issues and contexts connected to the emergence of extension. His focus on history as essential to citizenship reflected larger debates about the role of public universities in society and whether those institutions should focus on utilitarian and practical knowledge of benefit to the state. Turner’s enthusiasm for extension work also reflected a growing progressive tendency to make education and knowledge democratically available. Connected to the growth of utilitarian knowledge and the goal of spreading that knowledge widely, then, is another factor fueling the expansion of extension. Turner believed that he had knowledge to share. As he shaped his conception of the discipline, he understood his role as the expert researcher who uncovered the past and then had an obligation to share that knowledge with others. Turner argued that history had value for enriching people’s lives and fostering strong citizenship. This belief—especially as industrialization and the growth of cities challenged society at the turn of the century—lent his extension efforts an almost evangelical zeal. Such zeal reflected both another guiding factor for extension and the ultimate culmination of utility, democracy, and expertise.

Like all people in history, Turner was constrained by his context. He knew that the utilitarian side of education—the focus on practical knowledge, professional training and occupational skills—had immediate value for people’s lives and their work. The pressure on universities to concentrate on practical education and to make this education widely available increased in the late 1800s, especially in the Midwest and the West. This view of utility—of teaching and learning judged by its usefulness to real life, rather than an idea of knowledge for its own sake—carried great weight with Wisconsin’s public, legislators, and regents. Wisconsin’s regents increasingly questioned the role of knowledge, and they sharpened their focus on the practical aspects of the university in the following years. Such utilitarian leanings contributed to the emergence of Wisconsin’s outreach programs, including the farmers’ institutes and the summer courses for teachers. ¹⁴

The extension program that Turner helped to build emerged in this same utilitarian context, but also as a counter to it. As the university moved to develop practical outreach programs, Turner sought to balance such efforts with an extension program dedicated to cultural knowledge. Cambridge and Oxford Universities in England similarly had extension programs dedicated to “knowledge for its own sake.” Turner constructed courses where students had to debate ideas, think critically, and draw their own conclusions. The intellectual concentration and agility he demanded from his audiences were essential if they were to grasp the cultural knowledge that he had to share. Turner was not teaching his students how to work harder or farm better. Regardless of how beneficial such education could be, Turner’s focus was elsewhere.¹⁵ Tempering the trend toward practical knowledge, however, did not mean that Turner opposed utilitarian work. He opposed that being the only function of the university’s outreach work. Turner and his colleagues wanted to advance the cultural and intellectual side of living, in part, as a way to offset the forces pushing the university more and more toward offering immediately useful courses. ¹⁶

At the same time Turner was doing something else. He championed cultural knowledge, but he went beyond such arguments to justify the place of history at a public university. Perhaps sensing that arguing for cultural knowledge on its own terms would fail to gain the support of the regents or the public, Turner argued that history and other cultural knowledge really did have practical value. “Perhaps [history’s] most practical utility to us, as public school teachers,” he said in 1890, “is its service in fostering good citizenship.” This “training for good citizenship” justified the place of history in the public schools, and it also justified the very existence of those schools. “Doubtless good citizenship is the end for which the public schools exist,” and here Turner included the University of Wisconsin. “Were it otherwise there might be difficulty in justifying the support of them at public expense.” ¹⁷

Turner expanded on the role that history could play in developing citizenship. Believing that history “has a unity and a continuity,” he argued that the present becomes more comprehensible when viewed in light of past events and changes. He made it clear that the point of history “is to know the elements of the present by understanding what came into the present from the past” and that history is “humanity’s effort to understand itself through the study of its past.” Understanding the continuity of time, he continued, expands “our ideas regarding the dignity of the present” and gives people “new thoughts and feelings, new aspirations and energies.” He believed that if people wrestled with the relationship of the past to the present and appreciated the role that people—kings and commoners—played in shaping events, they would be better citizens and lead richer lives. For Turner, then, history had practical value, not because it helped one farm or teach better or because it led to new medicines, but because it furthered citizenship by demanding that people wade through complex historical events and consider their connection to the past and to the present. ¹⁸

Turner was arguing that recognizing history’s continuities was essential to strengthening citizenship and to leading rich, full lives. He was eloquent in his defense of history. “To enable us to behold our own time and place as a part of the stupendous progress of the ages. . .; to enable us to realize the richness of our inheritance, the possibility of our lives, the grandeur of the present—these are some of the priceless services of history.” Turner was hoping to give his students new energies and aspirations by helping them uncover this richly textured past of people, events, and ideas. ¹⁹

If Turner failed to convince people to advance cultural knowledge through extension, he had another argument that he advanced simultaneously. He did not argue that history should be a part of extension simply because it was cultural knowledge. He argued that it had merit for enhancing people’s lives and strengthening citizenship. In that case, it had merit for its practical value. History and the public schools, Turner believed, could be a dynamic force for generating intellectual renewal and citizenship. History, with extension as a vehicle for taking it throughout the state, was both cultural and utilitarian knowledge. The irony is that Turner attempted to counter purely practical knowledge by arguing for the utilitarian aspects of cultural knowledge. Turner fused cultural and utilitarian knowledge and argued that cultural knowledge—in this case, history—had value in part because of its utilitarian benefits.

History and its ability to inspire good citizenship would be useless, however, if the teachers and research and work of the university were not widely and readily available to people. Extension sought to take the knowledge of the university throughout the state for the benefit of the state’s citizens. Turner and the other extension lecturers were committed to doing just this, to spreading the wealth of the university beyond the walls of the campus. Turner approved of that “social impulse which has led university men to bring the fruits of their study home to the people.” ²⁰

His mission was in line with a growing progressive push to democratize education, to make it widely available to everyone, rather than simply to those willing or able to come to the university. Charles Adams stated that the object of university extension “is to carry something of the advantages of the university to such of the people of the state as for one reason or another are unable to come to the university for instruction.” Lyman Powell, a part-time lecturer and secretary for the extension program, agreed with these goals. Extension, Powell believed, would democratize education by making the knowledge of the university available to the masses. “At last, the universities,” Powell declared, are “extending as many of their benefits as possible to those who cannot come up for all of them.” ²¹

Extension was a part of enhancing democracy, not just in the way that Turner hoped to use knowledge to further citizenship. It also expanded democracy in the sense that the goal was to make university knowledge accessible to all. The university possessed the knowledge key to citizenship, in Turner’s view, and, as such, it had the responsibility to spread that knowledge widely. Turner and his colleagues threw open the gates of knowledge—if not the actual gates of the university—to everyone in the state.

There is an underlying assumption in Turner’s efforts to make the knowledge of the university widely available. The desire to expand the benefits of education to everyone and to balance cultural and practical knowledge rested on the assumption that the university possessed and, indeed, was the creator of the knowledge that enhanced people’s lives. At the turn of the century, professors increasingly turned their attention to original research and investigations. Using scientific analysis—sifting through evidence, analyzing data, and testing theories—they worked to uncover new truths. As a result of their in-depth research in specialized fields, professors were becoming experts capable of adding to society’s knowledge. Through his mastery of historical scholarship and through his original investigations and research, Turner also was expanding society’s store of knowledge and ideas. He was contributing, he believed, to the knowledge essential to living productively. ²²

Turner shared this knowledge with the state through the extension program, and encouraged other faculty experts to do so, as well. The result was knowledge that flowed from the university through the expertise of the faculty and into the heads of extension students. This was knowledge very much as the University of Wisconsin defined it, as Cambridge and Oxford Universities in England defined it, and as university expertise defined it. As Powell stated, “The mountain cannot go to Mahomet and so that sometimes over-arrogant prophet is repairing to the mountain.” Mahomet may have been arrogant but he possessed all that was right and good and worth knowing. Here, with the “prophet” known as the university, rested the power to “qualify men for American citizenship.” Students rejected such wisdom at their peril. ²³

Utility, democratic conceptions of education, and the idea of the university professor as expert combined powerfully to push the university into extension work. The university—as the holder of knowledge of benefit to society—had a duty to share its expertise widely. Turner was evangelical in his belief in the powers of education and in the importance of history and extension. He argued that politicians and statesmen needed to realize the richness of their inheritance. He insisted that the farmers and dairy herders of Wisconsin needed to see the grandeur of the present. The problem, Turner knew, was that “we do not understand ourselves.” Awakening these toilers and others to history would be a necessary step in creating “an intellectual regeneration of the state” and in fostering citizenship. ²⁴

Turner accepted this obligation, and he was in the academic pulpit and on the lecture circuit to extend the power of the university. The university professor, he argued, needed to “be the apostle of the higher culture to the community in which he is placed.” This educational crusade to take education beyond the university’s walls depended on the extension program and promised lasting change among the state’s citizens. Turner’s sense of obligation for himself and the university fit within a larger progressive belief that education had the power to enrich people’s lives. ²⁵

He saw in both history and university extension the opportunity to help people lead meaningful lives, and he tied the two tightly together into a program to foster intellectual regeneration and citizenship. In a metaphor that likely resonated in the farming communities of Wisconsin, Turner declared that university extension would be a means “for carrying irrigating streams of education in to the arid regions of the State.” Extension gave him the chance to take history—a history that included common people—directly to the people. Turner proclaimed that extension, combined with history, would work “a real revolution in our towns and villages as well as in our great cities.” Extension became the vehicle for taking this revolutionary knowledge—knowledge generated through research—to the people. ²⁶

The Challenges of Extension at Wisconsin Turner climbed the rhetorical heights of intellectual regeneration to support the place of extension and history at a public university, but bringing about the revolution demanded more than grand phrases. He campaigned exhaustively to make extension a statewide institution and, through that program, to take history to the people and awaken in them new ideas, thoughts, and feelings. As a star faculty member, Turner was a compelling and distinguished champion of the university’s extension program. Reality and the pressures of university research and teaching, however, collided with Turner’s evangelical fervor and ultimately dampened his spirit. ²⁷

Even with the energetic support of Turner and successive presidents, the movement never materialized as they had hoped. The lectures and classes failed to attract large numbers of students after the first few years and did not draw citizens from a variety of classes and backgrounds. Moreover, extension work demanded significant time and effort from faculty in preparing courses, traveling to rural communities, and delivering lectures. These tasks drained Turner’s energies and reduced the time he had for his own research, and they sapped his enthusiasm for the program. These difficulties—and Turner was not alone in his sagging enthusiasm—help to explain why this initial venture in university extension met with only partial success. ²⁸

The limited participation in the discussion classes following the lectures particularly disturbed Turner, since he saw the classes as a way for students to interact with the material in a considered and intellectual manner. Turner reported that even though “in most of the centres the majority of the audience” remained for the classes following the lectures, the number of people actively participating was considerably lower. Unfortunately, he observed, “it has proved impracticable to secure oral responses to questions in class with any freedom.” The lack of participation frustrated Powell, as well. He argued that the classes brought the lecturer into direct contact with the students “for the freest discussion of points of interest.” Only through the interaction with ideas and professors afforded by the classes, he believed, could students develop strong mental skills. ²⁹

If the extension movement failed to bring students actively into the classes, it would fail, as one lecturer put it, to “find a permanent place as a means of education.” ³⁰ Turner felt that changes were needed to make the classes a stronger and more active experience for the students. The problem with strengthening the classes and increasing the number of students attending them, as Turner fully knew, was that it would mean an increase in his work. More students would mean more papers to grade and more questions to answer. Turner believed that such additional efforts would contribute to better education and, in turn, produce a more informed citizenship. They also would take more time away from his own research. ³¹

Of more significant concern to Turner was the program’s struggle to attract a wide breadth of participants from various occupations and social positions. This was not a movement, solely or even principally, for the intellectual class of students or the affluent person. As with Cambridge in England, the University of Wisconsin hoped to reach a variety of citizens and to make the university available to all. The important prerequisite to participation in extension work was an interest in studying and learning, not wealth or prior preparation. Even without the requirement of academic preparation, the movement failed to reach throughout the state and to enter the “homes of the people,” as Chamberlin had hoped it would. ³²

Turner found some mix of people in his lectures, with business and professional men, college students, and local teachers predominating. Overall, the majority of students in his audiences were women, although there was not “so great a disproportion as in the usual church congregation.” Turner had to conclude that “the workingmen have not been well represented.” Thus, what audience there was—and in the early days, at least, there was a sizable audience—generally represented students, teachers, and other professionals. As a result, the movement existed mainly as a series of lectures for a limited group of professionals and students. Turner needed a broader audience. Without such an audience, he never would be able to further his goal of using history to contribute to good citizenship among all classes of people. He believed that breadwinners, cognizant of their history, would help fuel social progress, but the extension program failed to reach this audience in a substantial way. This failure to attract a broad audience limited the effectiveness and force of history as a tool for spreading good citizenship throughout Wisconsin. ³³

Turner could take some consolation in that other extension programs similarly were having trouble attracting a diverse audience. Cambridge achieved only limited success in drawing a working class audience, and one administrator there reluctantly concluded that “there was not that overflowing attendance of working people at these lectures which had been hoped for.”³⁴ Cambridge did have some success in attracting workingmen toward the turn of the century, but this growth was inconsistent. The workingmen, constrained by long hours and night shifts, often lacked the leisure time to attend the extension lectures. ³⁵ Overall, the extension movement there succeeded predominantly in attracting women and older professionals. Turner could not look to them for advice on expanding the reach of extension in Wisconsin. ³⁶

Even if there had been a stable and more representative audience, Turner and the other lecturers would have found it difficult to sustain the movement. The demands of lecturing exceeded the time and energy they could give to it. Turner and the other lecturers also taught at the university, conducted research, and participated in departmental and university meetings. As a result, Turner warned early in 1892 that university professors would “be unable, without assistance, to meet the demands of [the growing extension program] without detriment to their original investigation, if not to actual class-room work.” Cambridge resolved this problem by allowing extension lecturers to work only for the extension program, rather than also assuming duties within the university. ³⁷

The demand on faculty time preoccupied Turner and Chamberlin, and they struggled to deal with it and eliminate the pressures on the faculty. Wisconsin, as Cambridge had done, considered hiring a special force of teachers to concentrate exclusively on extension work. Such a proposal, however, concerned Turner, and he was unsure if special lecturers would be able to maintain the early success of the program. “Will the public continue to give the same hearty support to the work when the well-known members of the faculty begin to retire in favor of the special lecturers,” Turner asked in 1893. “Will these lecturers be able to continue the distinctive University tone of the work, unless they are men equal in equipment to the present body of lecturers and unless they do instructional work in the University itself?” Chamberlin, moreover, doubted that he could find enough special lecturers, since there seemed to be a lack of “unemployed talent at the University to undertake the work.” ³⁸

The proposal for a special corps of lecturers never gained enough support to become reality, and the efforts to sustain the program continued to drain Turner’s energies. Hoping to keep the program going while reducing his commitment to it, Turner suggested that recent graduates could take extension positions before assuming college posts or that graduate students, as he had done at Johns Hopkins, could take on extension responsibilities. This arrangement would keep the movement afloat with quality lecturers, he thought, while alleviating the pressures on the regular faculty. ³⁹

These ideas—never fully implemented—failed to reduce the demand on Turner and his colleagues. The work continued to weigh heavily on him, and Turner eventually contemplated an end to his role as an extension lecturer. “The work is too wearing with my class work in the University,” he reported, “and I shall not do any of it another year if I can possibly escape. I must have some time for intension.”⁴⁰ He completely ceased to lecture as part of the extension program in 1896. That he never found extension work completely comfortable may have increased the pressures he felt. He repeatedly gave extension lectures throughout the state and he increasingly became widely recognized as an important historian, but he found it difficult to reach popular audiences and to inspire in them a sustained discussion of history. Turner apparently had trouble popularizing history without feeling that he had to forsake his commitment to strong historical scholarship. Faced with sacrificing truth as he saw it to a compelling narrative, Turner instead chose to reject a popular lecture style of simplified arguments and easy analyses that would appeal to a mass audience. ⁴¹

Ironically, reaching the popular audience was key to his vision of history as a force for the advancement of citizenship. Turner placed significant hope in the extension program as a means for elevating the historical breadth of the state’s citizens and, thus, their contributions to society. Extension and history were necessary, he felt, to bringing about a revolution of good citizenship and encouraging a thoughtful discussion and consideration of weighty issues confronting the state. Ultimately, Turner failed to reach the non-academic audience and to inspire in that audience an appreciation for history. He had to leave the very real and formidable task of teaching the general public to his colleagues. ⁴²

Conclusion

In the end, there existed limits to the revolutionary effect of the extension movement on the general masses. The inability of the program to draw a diverse crowd, compounded by the limited interest of the students to participate actively in the classes, diminished the impact of overworked lecturers. For an initial few years, Turner’s work had helped to make the program a success, as thousands of people participated in extension courses. Such success must have heartened Turner, since he grafted history to the extension movement and promoted both as a way to foster citizenship. Turner believed passionately that people needed to understand their history and their heritage to live constructive lives in the present. The extension movement, as Turner saw it, had the power to revolutionize society by generating this strong citizenship.

Turner’s revolution, nevertheless, failed. He and his colleagues would have to wait for Charles Van Hise to resurrect their efforts and broaden the intellectual offerings available to the state’s citizens. Van Hise, who became president of the university with Turner’s backing, revived the extension program in the early 1900s and folded it into the popular and now-legendary Wisconsin Idea. This idea—and its promotion of teaching, research, and service as the principal aspects of a state university— overshadows the university’s earlier extension program, and it overshadows the hopes and contributions of people like Turner. However, Turner and the other extension lecturers in the 1890s embodied the three components of the idea by extending their research and teaching throughout the state. Their efforts in building the early extension program helped to prepare the foundations for the Wisconsin Idea. The work of Turner and the university extension program at Wisconsin in the 1890s, then, cannot be seen in isolation. This early extension program resembled aspects of the program in place at Cambridge University in the 1870s, and it became a part of Van Hise’s Wisconsin Idea, an idea that continues into yet another century. In this sense, Turner’s use of history and extension to promote good citizenship did not necessarily end when he stopped lecturing. As Turner once wrote, history “has a unity and a continuity,” indeed. ⁴³

Footnotes

Science.Wisc.Edu Home | UW Home

File last updated: September 15, 2003

Feedback, questions or accessibility issues: kennethsmith@wisc.edu