Frank Parsons and the Progressive Movement

Career Development Quarterly, Sept, 2001 by Donald G. Zytowski

This article recounts the social influences that must have inspired Frank Parsons to create vocational counseling and traces the profession's early development.

Frank Parsons settled in Boston in about 1885, after returning from his hiatus in the Southwest, and lived there until his death in 1908. We cannot know if Parsons would have agreed, but from our contemporary perspective, these 20 or so years must have been an extraordinary time to be alive. Nicknamed the Gilded Age by Mark Twain, it was an era in which Parsons saw astonishing changes. (The broad sweep of the history of this period was well described by Paul Johnson, 1997. Howard Zinn, 1997, offered a good account of the dark side of the Gilded Age, as did F. L. Allen, 1952.)

The United States was transforming itself into an industrial nation. As Zinn (1997) has put it, "steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron. Oil could lubricate machines and light homes, streets and factories" (p. 187). People and farm products could be moved by railroads in larger quantities and more quickly than ever before, and the young sons and daughters from the farms of the Northeast came to the cities to find their fortunes.

Technology, especially from the laboratory of Thomas Edison, produced motion pictures, telegraphy, the phonograph, the safety razor, and the first plastic. Commerce profited from the invention of the typewriter and the adding machine. Parsons could observe near his bachelor quarters the construction of the first subway built in the United States. He might have marveled at the steel-skeleton, curtain-walled skyscrapers, innovated by the Boston-born and educated Louis Sullivan. Before his death, Parsons undoubtedly saw the first of Henry Ford's mass-produced Model T automobiles on Boston's streets, and surely he was thrilled to read in one of Boston's several newspapers about the Wright brothers' successful air flight.

The Gilded Age was an era of trusts and tycoons, and millionaires were regarded then as we presently think of Bill Gates and Warren BuffettA. The railroad and the skyscrapers were built on the productivity of Andrew Carnegie's steel companies. Rockefeller's Standard Oil came to control more than three fourths of the nation's oil production. J. P. Morgan essentially served as the U.S. Treasury Department while imposing order, along with A. J. Harriman, on the nation's network of railways.

Parsons had much to say about railways, as he did about Gould, Armour, DuPont, Huntington, Vanderbilt, Firestone, Swift, Astor, Duke, and others.

Some of our major American art collections and symphony orchestras and our present-day prestigious universities were founded by the generosity of these men. Parsons might have gone to Boston's new opera house to listen to the radical compositions of Charles Ives or to hear Caruso sing had he lived a year or two longer. We do not know if he gave his attention to that new popular craze, ragtime music, whether he saw the first real movie in 1903, The Great Train Robbery, or was in the stands for Boston's first major league baseball game in 1906. Parsons could, if he wanted to, stop in at the newly conceived "department store" in Boston--Filene's--or take advantage of the new mail-order service so successfully begun by William Sears. In Boston, as elsewhere, there was enthusiastic support for vocational education to meet the needs of the new domestic and foreign immigrant workers or, in other observers' cynical view, to meet the needs of burgeoning industry. Schools were organized to instruct in salesmanship and bookkeeping; there was also North Bennett Street School to teach basic crafts, such as sewing, drafting, furniture making, and bookbinding, and the Boston School of Cooking, where Fannie Farmer trained cooking teachers and developed her cookbook advancing the concept of level measurement.

Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill symbolized the coming of age of the United States as an international power. The Spanish American War netted Cuba its independence and the United States the protectorates of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. We became the largest export nation, with the world's strongest navy. Our newfound role as the hemisphere's policeman prompted the beginning of construction on the Panama Canal, America's turn-of-the-century equivalent to the "moon shot." We also celebrated with World Fairs in Buffalo, Chicago, and St. Louis. (Roosevelt, incidentally, was an advocate of simplified spelling, which accounts for the loss of the second "I" from our spelling of counselor.)

In the cities, Parsons was one of the new middle class--doctors, lawyers, architects, journalists, teachers--who were well educated and, most important, conscious of the problems of the new citizens, the less well educated, and the less well-off. How could anything be better?

However, the underside of the Gilded Age was fairly tarnished. The North End of Boston, formerly crammed with Irish refugees of the mid-century potato famine, became the refuge of Eastern Europeans in the 1870s and Italians in the 1880s, just one stream in the flood of immigrants to the U.S. that in several years numbered a million or more people. In Boston, immigrants made up more than 75% of the city's population. They found housing in grimy tenements on narrow streets; whole families lived in a single room without sanitary facilities, working 10 and 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, in sweatshop factories and dangerous building trades. As Parsons emerged from his two rooms in the boarding house on St. James Street to go to the North End, he would encounter the street boys--newsboys, bootblacks, delivery boys, wood- and coalpickers, peddlers, and plain idlers--about 5,000 of them in Boston alone, many orphaned or abandoned by their families.