Professor Samuel Johnson and the “Johnson Affair”

Samuel Johnson (1839–1916) was born at Springfield, New York, the son of Squire Johnson and Adelia (Hotchkin) Johnson. He attended Cazenovia Seminary in New York, receiving an M.S. degree. In September 1864, Johnson married Eliza A. Clark and they moved to Dowagiac, where he taught school. Around that time, he purchased a roughly hundred-acre plot of land northeast of the village and named it “Wilderness Farm.” Johnson was a township officer from 1864 to 1870, and county superintendent of schools from 1871 to 1874.^{† 1}

Eliza died in 1874. Samuel remarried to Sarah B. Hall in June 1876. Johnson had five children: Alice Adelia (born 1865, M.A.C. ’84, one of the Twenty-One), Clara (1870), Henry H. (1877), Philip Sidney (1880) and Emily (1881). Alice and Clara were Eliza’s children; Henry, Philip, and Emily were Sarah’s. Philip and Emily were both born on campus during Johnson’s tenure as professor.

Johnson was elected to the state legislature in 1877, and served until 1880. He was known as a “friendly legislator” to the Michigan Agricultural College, implying that he voted in favor of—and perhaps even sponsored—appropriations.

In 1879, Johnson was appointed as Professor of Practical Agriculture and Superintendent of the Farm, positions he held for ten years. Unexpectedly, given his strong background in agriculture, his tenure at M.A.C. was marked with controversy and upheaval—a prolonged period of conflict that resulted in three professors’ resignations, numerous student suspensions (and a few expulsions), and ultimately came to be known as the “Samuel Johnson affair.”

Some background may be helpful here. The Professorship of Practical Agriculture was established in 1865 and was first held by Manly Miles, who designed the course of study as “one in science applied to agriculture.” After Miles’ abrupt dismissal in 1875, his successors—Alfred Buck Gulley (1875–1876) and Charles Lee Ingersoll (M.A.C. ’74, M.S. 1877, 1876–1879)—followed in that same mold. Yet these professors were reproached by the Board for being impractical in their management of the farm, an attitude that was in line with most public opinion. When Ingersoll resigned in 1879 to become the first Professor of Agriculture and Horticulture at Purdue University, the Board approached Edward M. Shelton (M.A.C. ’71, M.S. 1874), Professor of Agriculture at Kansas State Agricultural College, to replace him. Shelton declined the invitation, and the Board turned to Samuel Johnson instead.²

Johnson “came with a mandate from the Board to operate an efficient and orderly farm,” and he was a logical choice: his experience running Wilderness Farm enabled him to quickly set the college farm on a path toward profitability. According to Kuhn,

The farm was neat and the fields productive. He built a thrifty herd of pedigreed shorthorns and offered the surplus at annual sales attended by some of Michigan’s wealthier farmers. His work with silos and stock feeding received generous praise in the farm journals. His talks at winter institutes were practical and popular.

Kuhn, p. 173.

Student opinion, on the other hand, was far less appreciative. There were two major reasons for this.

The first had to do with a policy that had been in place since the College opened: each student was required to perform three hours of manual labor daily. Under Miles and Ingersoll, who viewed the farm as an outdoor laboratory, this work extended the theories taught in class and was valued by students as educational. Under Johnson, who preferred to leave the scientific studies to other professors and saw student labor only as an expensive subsidy for those who might not otherwise be able to afford college, the effort was pure labor. This issue sharpened after the engineering course began in 1885: engineering students accrued their labor hours in the engineering shops, building tools and machinery, and “acquired skills that hoeing corn could not develop.”³

Agricultural students soon resorted to mild sabotage:

A group sent to work in a distant field might seek a shady place, posting one of its number to warn his sleeping comrades if a foreman should approach. An alumnus wrote that “one honest freshman did as much work in a day as two sophomores, three juniors, or five seniors.” To restrain such dereliction, Johnson docked wages and thereby aroused personal hostilities.

Kuhn, p. 174.

The second, and more substantial, complaint against Johnson had to do with his abilities in the classroom. While a highly capable farmer and an effective superintendent of the farm, he was a poor lecturer and—by his own admission—not a scientist. Students, bored by his uninspiring lectures, began to act out.

Starting around 1886, pranks disrupted the class. Some were relatively benign—such as stacking the classroom furniture, plugging the entrance door’s keyhole with plaster, or tying a Shropshire ram to the rostrum. Others were more malicious, such as the deliberate contamination of the classroom stove with hydrogen sulfide, filling the room with noxious gas. This last stunt prompted an investigation by the Board, and a student who refused to identify the culprit(s) was expelled. In response to the expulsion, “Eighteen seniors of ’86 protested and were suspended for a year.”⁴

Students also asked questions in class designed to expose Johnson’s lack of scientific knowledge, delighting in the sometimes-absurd answers. In one well-known example, “when asked whether there was any hydrogen in the campus wells, Johnson had answered that Dr. Kedzie’s analyses showed them to be completely free of any such contamination.” Clearly, the “dihydrogen monoxide” joke has been around a long time.⁵

As student dissatisfaction increased, the public began to take notice. Professor Johnson’s loudest proponent was the Michigan Farmer, a weekly journal, whose editorials consistently backed him. Letters supporting Johnson (from M.A.C. alumni and from unaffiliated farmers across the state) appeared regularly; those against him received spirited editorial rebuttals that focused less on the writers’ points than on their logical flaws or faulty comparisons.⁶

Other newspapers were more forthright about the situation:

The Journal sincerely regrets the trouble which has arisen between Prof. Samuel Johnson and the students at the Agricultural College. We have always regarded the professor as an honest and conscientious man, possessing a thorough, practical knowledge of the subject of agriculture, but lacking in comprehensive, technical, and scientific equipment for his duties, and deficient in the ability to interest and instruct the bright young members of his classes. But we most respectfully submit that the Agricultural College is not conducted to provide professorships for good and well-meaning men. Its chief mission is to educate young men. It is as an educator that Prof. Johnson lamentably fails. […] As manager of the farm, Prof. Johnson is a success, and he is entitled to much credit for his record in this respect. He should be retained as manager, but not as an instructor because he can’t instruct. At least, this is the unanimous verdict of the students, and we think they ought to know something about it.

Lansing Journal, 18 Jun 1899, p. 2, emphasis in original.

By 1889, an embattled Johnson was seeing enemies everywhere, including among his fellow faculty. When a committee of state legislators visited campus, Johnson presented his plans for a new agricultural laboratory. According to committee chairman Hezekiah Ranney Dewey, shortly after the presentation Elias MacEwan (Professor of English Literature, 1880–1889) remarked to Dewey, “Ask him if he can tell what he will do with the building, after he gets it.” Dewey also claimed MacEwan “had added something about ‘a ten thousand dollar building for a ten cent professor.’”^{†† 7}

MacEwan flatly denied making these statements, but the Board charged him with “over officiousness and interference with the affairs of other professors” and forced him to resign.⁸

In its article about the dismissal, the Lansing Journal reported:

The majority of the faculty side with Prof. MacEwan in the trouble, as do also the students. In fact, the customary yearly explosion of volcanic wrath over the fact that Prof. Johnson is still a member of the faculty seems to be about due, and is liable to occur at any moment. When Prof. MacEwan appeared in chapel after his resignation was announced, the boys rose en masse and gave him three deafening cheers, and it is said today that a number of the most prominent members of the faculty threaten to follow the professor into his involuntary exile.

Lansing Journal, 8 Jun 1889, p. 3.

Although this mass exodus of the faculty did not occur, another English instructor, Henry R. Pattengill—editor of the Michigan School Moderator and future Superintendent of Public Instruction for the state—published an editorial defending MacEwan and calling the charges “false in every particular.” He, too, was dismissed.⁹

Meanwhile, in protest of the MacEwan dismissal, “students refused to take notes in Johnson’s class, whereupon the professor suggested that his colleagues—Kedzie, Beal, Cook—had incited the rebellion.” The Board held an inquiry with the three professors, found their explanations more credible than Johnson’s accusations, and asked for Johnson’s resignation. He left the College in July 1889.¹⁰

To replace Johnson, the Board selected Eugene Davenport (M.A.C. ’78), who “proved to be a stimulating teacher in the tradition of Manly Miles, who had inspired him.” During his brief two-year stint at the College, Davenport finally achieved a workable balance between scientific experimentation and efficient farm management that the agriculture department had been lacking up to then. He left M.A.C. in 1891 to become the first President of the Escola Agricola de São Paulo, Brazil, the first agricultural college in South America.¹¹

Samuel Johnson returned home to Wilderness Farm and continued to serve his community. He served as secretary of the State Agricultural Society in 1891, and was President of the Farmer’s Mutual Fire Insurance Company of Cass County, 1900–1912. He died at home on March 1, 1916.¹²

Samuel Johnson’s daughters Alice, Clara, and Emily continued to operate Wilderness Farm for several decades. The Johnson farmhouse—said by Emily’s husband George Fox (president of the Cass County Historical Society) to have been built by Justus Gage circa 1861—was later converted into apartments and was destroyed by fire in 1983.¹³

1. MSU Archives – Samuel Johnson Papers ↩︎
2. Minutes, 2 Jun 1875, p. 281; 25 Aug 1875, p. 286; 19 Nov 1877, p. 329; 12 August 1879, p. 351; 16 Sep 1879, p. 355; 18 Nov 1879, p. 357. ↩︎
3. Kuhn, p. 174. ↩︎
4. Kuhn, pp. 174–175. ↩︎
5. Kuhn, p. 174. ↩︎
6. Michigan Farmer and State Journal of Agriculture, 29 Aug 1877. ↩︎
7. Kuhn, p. 175. LJ, 8 Jun 1889, p. 3. ↩︎
8. LJ, 8 Jun 1889, p. 3. 29th AR, p. 19. ↩︎
9. Michigan School Moderator, 9(20), 20 Jun 1889, p. 546; 10(1), 5 Sep 1889, p. 7. ↩︎
10. Kuhn, p. 175. LSR, 3 Jul 1889, p. 1. ↩︎
11. Kuhn, p. 176. Catalog (1900), p.??? ↩︎
12. Niles Daily Star, 2 Mar 1916, p. 1. ↩︎
13. Dowagiac Daily News, 8 Jan 1945, p. 1. Cassopolis Vigilant, 11 Aug 1955, p. 1. Herald-Palladium (Benton Harbor – St. Joseph), 15 Nov 1983, p. 16. ↩︎

1. † The prior owner of the Wilderness Farm property may have been Justus Gage, one of the first members of the Board of Agriculture in 1861.↩︎
2. †† This quote comes from Kuhn; a contemporary article in the Lansing Journal puts those figures at “a thousand dollar building to a fifteen-cent professor,” but in error: the lab’s final cost was $7,700.↩︎