Photoessay #2071 - My two papers

I have these two papers to turn in at my class this evening.

The 1877-8 Devotional Exercise Controversy in New Haven:

Maier Zunder's role

and

Maier Zunder

A Leading Citizen of Nineteenth Century New Haven

The requirement for the class is one 15 page paper (not counting bibliography, appendices, pictures) about an ancestor.  I wrote two papers (because I could), they are both 60 pages long.

Why would I do such a thing?  Write a much bigger paper than I had to and then write *two*.  I had some personal reasons for doing it and it's just the time to try my hand at this kind of academic writing.  I guess I just wanted to see if I could do it.  I didn't start out that way.  I knew I wanted to write about my great great grandfather Maier Zunder (1829-1901).  A very talented industrious man determined to make a difference in his community.  When I went to New Haven last fall, I became aware of the devotional exercise (school prayer) controversy.

The more I read, the more interesting the whole thing sounded; how the arguments and agendas sound so current, this whole thing could be happening RIGHT now.  You wouldn't even have to change many of the sentences, you can practically take it verbatim and insert it into the current news feed.

The climax comes when the eminent committee of clergy present a manual to the Board of Education for devotional exercises designed for Protestant and Catholic students.  Unprecedented that anybody had come up with such a plan.  The 3 member committee to rule on the plan was Maier and 2 new Board members who had been elected to "put the Bible back in the schools".  Maier turned one so that he voted with him against the plan.  Killed the whole darn thing.

When I first read about it, I thought "WhooEEE, Maier you are THE MAN!  How the heck did you DO that?"  That's what the paper is about.

Maier made his position very clear.  He wasn't having any of it.  Not on his watch, nope, not happening.

The other paper is about Maier Zunder, his life.  He lived a very public life.  I have two big binders stuffed with newspaper articles about him or his speeches or activities.  Another big binder filled with newspaper articles about the devotional exercises.l  I was a little worried of writing with the biography kiss-of-death.  He was born, This is where he came from.  He did this. He did that. He had a family.  He died.  The end.  But it is kind of like that.

The reports are not too beautiful.  I want to get the teacher's comments and then I will decide the next step especially regarding presentation.

There are almost no secondary sources about the devotional exercise controversy.  The Board minutes have never been transcribed.  I don't even mention them in the paper but Mary Ann and I looked at them in the fall.  There were two sections of essays written in Catholic Education journals (in 1`937 and 1953) about this 13 month long controversy in New Haven.  They used the same primary sources as I but took chose completely different aspects than I did.  So it's wide open and may be worthy of publication if the quality is high enough.

I just had to do it.