The earliest mention of the school paddle in the USA 57

KKxyz

3,59957

Nov 28, 2014#561

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

The Washington Times (Washington D.C.) 30 March 1917.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ … d-1/seq-4/
ASKS $2,500 FOR SPANKING Got His Deserts, Says Man Who Administered the Paddling

MEDIA, Pa., March 30. Robert C. Fender, general sales agent of the Keystone Plaster Company, asks $2,500 for a spanking administered by Holcombe J. Brown, superintendent of the plant.

News of the altercation was kept quiet until Fender filed a suit, alleging that on January 6, in Chester, Brown “beat, wounded and struck the said Robert C. Fender upon the face and other parts of his body,” the affair constituting, according to Fender, “an atrocious assault and battery.”

Brown denies the “atrocious” part of the averment, but says he gave him “a moderate spanking”. He says Fender made unjust and unfounded accusations against him and used violent, obscene and profane language to his embarrassment and injury, and goes on to say that her told Fender that “if he did not stop using such language he would have to spank him, as he was too small to strike a severe blow.”

When Fender continued to use the language objected to Brown, according to his affidavit of defense, gave him a “slight smack on the face and laid the said plaintiff over the defendant’s knee and spanked and paddled him.” He declares that it was “simply a moderate spanking for the purpose of correcting a man who was using language unbecoming to a gentleman.”

Nov 29, 2014#562

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

Bradford reporter. (Towanda, PA) 26 April 1856. Page 1, col. 6.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ … d-1/seq-1/

Georgian! Georgian! Where is the butter paddle? “Tim’s got in the woodshed spanking Roxy Ann.” To what base uses do butter paddles come at last.

___________________________________

Eaton Weekly Democrat (Ohio) 22 February 1872, page , col. 6.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ … d-1/seq-1/

A Memphis mother, finding her son of sixteen about to engage in a duel with a boy of the same age, gave him a severe spanking with a paddle, and broke up the “affair of honor.”

___________________________________

Evening Star (Washington, DC) 21 February 1878, page 3, col. 6.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ … d-1/seq-3/

A CASE OF “HAZING” AT PRINCETON THAT ENDED IN A FREE FIGHT WITH PISTOLS

A special dispatch from Princeton. N.J.. Feb. 19. says:- A week ago A. H. Atterburv, of Trenton, and J. R. Carter, of Montclair, N. J., members of Princeton College sophomore class, hazed a freshman named Lane, cut his hair, spanked him and committed other indignities that led to a meeting of the freshman class athletes and a decision to resent the insult to their fellow-member. They called to their aid two sophomores, who, with a majority of the freshmen, belonged to the Alpha Sigma Chi Society.

On Monday evening, after a lecture which all the students had attended, Atterbury and Carter went into a saloon, and while they were there the ten freshmen blacked their faces and hid near the room of the two men, on the second floor of the Mansion house, nearly opposite the college campus. About eleven o’clock the two sophomores went to the room. They were seized and gagged, their heads shaved, and they were asked to sign a humble apology for maltreating the freshman, “sign it or it will be worse for you” said the leader. The sophomores refused to do this, and the freshmen again gagged them, daubed their shaved heads with mucilage, stripped them and spanked them with a paddle until Carter well nigh fainted with pain, but do what they might they could extract nothing but defiance from the sophomores, and at length they were forced to leave them, gagged.

The sophomores were released, and getting hastily into their clothing grabbed revolvers and pursued. They discharged a barrel apiece as a signal to the other sophomores, and then went on. They overtook the freshmen at the 1’niversity hotel, and leveling the weapons, called on the freshmen to halt. The order was not obeyed, and Atterbury fired. The freshmen wheeled, and, producing revolvers, returned the fire. From ten to twenty shots were exchanged, and then Atterbury cried to Carter. “I’m shot” and fell. The freshmen scattered in all directions, and were out of sight in a twinkling.

Dr. Wikoff was got out of bed but he refused to probe for the ball by artificial light. Atterbury was taken to his room, and a throng of sympathizing classmates surrounded him. This morning the physician, after careful probing, extracted the ball, which had entered the left groin, and in a slanting course into the hip. Had it been a quarter of an inch to one side it must have severed an artery and resulted fatally. As it is, the wound is very dangerous. His parents were summoned from Trenton. The college faculty held a meeting to-day. President McCosh said afterwards that the guilty ones would be found out and expelled from college.

Nov 29, 2014#563

They really did fall out of favor years before. It is hard to picture a Puritan teaching spanking a pupil with the Our Father. Were hazing paddles common in Europe before the latter part of the 19th century when fraternities started here?

CLICK

Horn-Book

CLICK

Deja Vu All Over Again.

CLICK

CLICK

KKxyz

3,59957

Dec 01, 2014#564

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

Weekly Arizona Journal-Miner (Prescott) 4 March 1908, page 4, col. 3.

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ … d-1/seq-4/

SHALL BAD BOYS BE PADDLED? Parents and school principles never will agree on the question of corporal punishment. Bad children are usually the product of defective home training in ninety-nine cases in a hundred, the bad boy at school is a bad boy at home. And the parent who spares the rod himself will not look kindly upon its use by the exasperated teacher. Even the parent who uses the paddle himself, not always wisely, but perhaps too well – is inclined to regard the child as his own property, and feels that his property rights are infringed upon when another person trounces his unregenerate offspring.

But what are the schools to do with the incorrigibles? The New York board of education will hold a special meeting, March 1, to answer the question, “To spank or not to spank” and, if so, when, and how? A set of question bearing on the subject was recently submitted to four hundred and seventy superintendents and principals of New York city. With these expressions of opinion in hand, a special committee has made a report, which, in part, reads as follows:

This committee is of the opinion that corporal punishment should be permitted in schools in extreme eases only, under strict regulations, and that it should be administered by the principal with the written consent of the parents or else by a parent in the presence of the principal.

Where parents refuse to punish a child themselves in the presence of the principal we believe that the principal should at once report such child to the city superintendent for suspension, and when suspended the child should be sent to a truant school or a school for incorrigibles.

This committee believes that the knowledge on the part of the pupils that there is punishment provided for persistent disorderly conduct will, to a great degree prevent the necessity for its use.

This committee also recommends that the board of superintendents be requested to recommend at once to the board of education a revision of the course of study in ethics so as to place more emphasis on the respect due from children to parents, teachers and others of authority.

But there remains the proper method of applying the paddle or should it be a stout switch? In Portland, Ore., the prosecution of a school principal by the parent of a boy he had punished, moves the Oregonian to say:

If boys must be flogged, the paddle seems to be an almost divinely appointed implement to do it with. That area of the body which it most aptly fits is not very susceptible to mortal wounds; it has merely a sufficiency of nerves to unlock penitential tears by their tingling when temperately flagellated; and the bones which it contains are so abundantly swathed about with muscular tissue that there is no danger of breaking them.

It is fashionable in these degenerate days to deny the hand of Providence in arranging the affairs of the world; but if there is one piece of evidence more convincing that, another that the Almighty actually did fit this and that together and adapt one thing to an other in our mundane sphere, it is the perfect adaptation of this portion of a boy’s body to receive impulsive stimulation from it paddle.

Perhaps our acute contemporary was brought up this way, and speaks with knowledge of the regenerating influence of the paddle when applied to the portion of the anatomy so well described. But empirical knowledge often is misleading. The ways of our fathers were not always the best ways. Although it is swathed so comfortably and providentially “with muscular tissue,” the particular area of the body to which reference is thus delicately made is not a safe place to apply even the household slipper, not to mention the ruder implement, yclept [called] the “paddle.” Nature or Providence put the protecting tissues in this particular place for the very reason that its contiguity to the base of the spine requires it for protection from injury. Paddle, if you must, pedagogue, but don’t paddle there. Los Angeles News.

Jan 05, 2015#565

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

KK here is a question they may arouse your curiosity. When was the first time a paddle called a board of education with playful connotations referred to historically? Boards that hit the seat as opposed to the ones you sit on.

KKxyz

3,59957

Jan 05, 2015#566

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

American Way,

I have previously looked for early mentions of the “school board” in an effort to determine when the phrase was adopted during my investigations of the origins of the US school paddle. The results were inconclusive. I do not recall what if anything was posted to this forum.

“School board” is clearly a play on words. I had assumed the term “board” related to the committee that governs education in a district, or a school, rather than what students might sit on.

Jan 06, 2015#567

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

1911 The Board of Education. This was posted before I’m sure but upon further reflection humor was the staple of humor that may have not originated that many years before.

CLICK

CLICK

Could he be a teacher in the back of a schoolhouse? He is certainly not dressed like a farmer He looks to old to be his father and too kind to be a grandfather.

CLICK

KKxyz

3,59957

Jan 29, 2015#568

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

Dayton Public Schools [Ohio]

Annual Report of the Board of Education for the School Year Ending August 31, 1892

Source: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435031 … %3Bseq=111

Report of the Superintendent of Instruction

Excerpt page 99:

[. . .] and the number of cases of coporal punishment is 118 less than the corresponding number last year, notwithstanding the enrollment is 463 greater. This item is particularly gratifying, as it shows increased efficiency in one of the most difficult features of school work. The ability to control properly, without resorting to the use of the paddle, gives substantial evidence of great proficiency on the part of the teachers. The results also show that there has been a general effort made by the teachers to reduce the number of cases of corporal punishment to the minimum. [. . .]

Jan 31, 2015#569

<div style=”width:100%;background-image:url(/realm/A_L_123/A_L_trg.gif);”>Hi American Way,

Somewhat off-topic I’m afraid, but nonetheless consequent on an issue raised here. In your January 13 2013, 12:13 PM post above, concerning the barrel stave ‘spanking machine’ instituted by Arthur C. Whitaker, Mayor of Bridgeton, New Jersey, you say of the two press illustrations you link:


Phew! Hot stuff! Certainly a little avant-garde for the early 1920s US press I’d have thought! Especially as one of the publications claims that the event depicted took place in public in front of city hall!

Alas close examination indicates, I think, that my misgivings are well founded One really needs to look at both illustrations, and I can quite understand why the apparent shape of a shoe in one of the illustrations led you to make your observation. Boys don’t normally wear high heels. But then did girls of an age likely to be put through the ‘machine’? And if they did would they have such thick heels?


Consideration of the above extracts from the two illustrations will I think indicate that the miscreant being dealt with is a lad rather than a girl. Further, it appears from the more comprehensive of the two accounts that the punishments took place not in front of the city hall but in a back room thereof. And although it is stated that boys had to take down their trousers ‘in the old-fashioned way’ there is no mention of an equivalent disrobing being required of the ‘several girls’ said to have been subjected to the punishment on the Mayor’s instructions and with the full consent of their parents.</div>

Is this a machine that’s been in use for seven years? Could it be a canard? Is it a resilient myth created to deter?

Follow up.

CLICK

New York.

The evening world., March 01, 1920

CLICK

Philadelphia.

Evening public ledger., March 02, 1920

CLICK

Feb 01, 2015#570

The paddle seems to be very much the preferred implement in USA schools. When did it first come into widespread use? I am particularly interested in early mentions of the school paddle in dated factual or fictional literature, and in official documents.

Have other cultures used the paddle in schools?

The Bridgeton NJ spanking machine? The apparatus seems genuine (first link) but is the application a reality or a myth. I’ll let the reader be the judge.

If the machine had been used since 1913 why would there suddenly be publicity? To stem a crime wave by a threat?

Philadelphia Inquirer, February 29, 1920.

CLICK

In 1920, the year the story broke, and eight years later it is reintroduced? It ended a crime wave in 1920 though in use since 1913? It’s resurrected to end troubles in 1928?

The Phelps Citizen April 16, 1928.

CLICK

Mother’s little helper.

Great Falls Montana Daily Tribune, October 20, 1919

CLICK

Read more posts (321 remaining)
weboy