Extract from The Indian Rights Association - the Herbert Welsh Years, 1882 - 1904¹

Pages 206 - 208

Equally difficult for Welsh, and more embarassing, was the action which the association found necessary to take against the Educational Home in Philadelphia. Since 1883 this boarding school, the boys' division of the Lincoln Institution, had accepted Indians for a training program presumably comparable to that of Carlisle and Hampton. The head of the Lincoln Institution was Mary McHenry Cox, who had joined Welsh in the periodic battles with congressmen determined to reduce appropriations for eastern boarding schools. Further complications were that the Lincoln Institution had ties with Welsh's own church, and Episcopalian Bishop O. W. Whitaker was not only the nominal head of the Educational Home but vice-president of the IRA.

The nasty affair dragged on for three years, beginning early in 1897 when a member of the home's board came to Welsh with stories of cruelty to students. The IRA informed Dr. Hailmann of the charges but did not press the matter at that time. Welsh obviously was reluctant to tangle to tangle with Mrs. Cox, who had a fearsome reputation. He once described her as having an "extraordinary combination of undesirable qualities," but also "power of will and such vigor that General [S. C.] Armstrong used to say it was utterly impossible for any man to oppose her successfully." It also would be awkward to press charges against an individual with whom he had been allied so often in the past.

Nearly two years after the abuses had been brought to Welsh's attention, the IRA finally created a committee to investigate the school. Ten weeks later the group was ready to report, and meanwhile, Matthew Sniffen had visited the home on his own and had seen his young Indian guide physically assaulted by the superintendent, a former Philadelphia police chief. Such direct methods were traditional at the Educational Home, one of whose earlier superintendents had specialized in flogging, explained as a carryover from his days in the British navy, from which he had been dismissed. In its troubled history the school had been investigated by a state board and by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

The committee's report charged not only that students were physically abused but that they were not getting the industrial training promised. Copies of the document were sent in February 1899 to local papers and the congressional Indian committees. Unfortunately its impact was nullified by a telegram from Bishop Whitaker to the conference committee considering the appropriation for the Educational Home. The bishop endorsed Mrs. Cox's operation, and the committee members, claiming to be confused by the contradiction of an IRA report by its own vice-president, voted the appropriation.

Welsh's reaction was to blame Mrs. Cox, whose "powers of persuation, coercion, and mystification of the truth are such that it is a very difficult thing to contend with her." If he had any doubt of these powers, she made him a believer by threatening the IRA with legal action. But Welsh was not one to back down, and he had his own weapons, as well as friends in high places. City and State was read in the homes of hundreds of influential Philadelphians, and it carried several articles on the scandalous conditions at the school. Earlier Welsh had briefed Commissioner of Indian Affairs Jones on the Educational Home's problems, and in the summer of 1899 Brosius persuaded Jones to send a school inspector. After being thoroughly briefed on arrival by Sniffen, the inspector spent three weeks in Philadelphia. The report of his investigation upheld all that the IRA had said, and Mrs. Cox recognized that it was futile to continue the fight. In October 1899, nearly three years after Welsh first brought the matter to the attention of Dr. Hailmann, she decided not to apply for government funding for the next fiscal year.

Notes

1. General Armstrong was the founder of the Hampton School.
2. Samuel Brosius was the IRA staff member in Washington D. C. He succeeded Francis Leupp.
3. Dr. Hailmann was superintendent of the Indian Schools.
4. Matthew Sniffen was in charge of the IRA Philadelphia office and later took on a larger role in the IRA.

References

1. The Indian Rights Association - The Herbert Welsh Years, 1882 - 1904, by William T. Hagan (University of Arizona Press, 1985). A lot of the material for the extracted section comes from the IRA Archives at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Document History

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