The Lexington Civic League: Agent of Reform, 1900 - The Filson ...

1988] Lexington Civic League 345
By the autumn of 1905 the school board indicated it would
consider including some form of manual training in its January
budget. During the fall the Civic League continued to sponsor
lectures on the subject by such experts as Professor Harry G.
Brownell of Flexner University School in Louisville and Chicago
social workers and reformers, Marion Talbott and Dr. Sophon-
isba P. Breckinridge. (The latter, a sister of Desha Breckinridge,
was a professor at the University of Chicago and a pioneer in
the professionalization of social work.) Superintendent M. "A.
Cassidy professed to be a convert to the cause, but when the
school board met in January 1906, it again decided that Lexing-
ton could not afford to institute manual training. The next yea1:,
however, after the League offered to help finance the initial
expenses of the program, the school board appropriated $4000 to
begin manual training in carpentry and domestic science.2°
At the 1906 session of the Kentucky General Assembly, the
Civic League helped to sponsor a juvenile court bill. Drafted by
Bernard Flexner and Albert Brandeis of Louisville, the bill was
introduced in the house on 20 January. It provided for juvenile
courts in first and second-class cities with the county judge as
the presiding magistrate, assisted by a probation officer and one
other appointee. In an effort to promote the cause, the Civic
League sponsored a return visit by Judge Lindsey. On 2 March,
the day he spoke in Lexington, the house passed the bill, and on
21 March the senate did also. Upon his return home Lindsey
Chairman, Committee on Juvenile Courts," Breckinridge Family Papers,
Library of Congress; Ben B. Lindsey to Madeline MeDowell Breckinridge,
7 August 1905, Ben B. Lindsey Papers, Library of Congress.
20 Lexington Herald, 10 September, 24, 27, 29 December 1905, 1, 4
January, 12 February, 5 May, 3 October 1907. Sophonisba Breckinridge's
importance in developing an educational curriculum and philosophy leading
to the professionalization of social work, as well as her close relationship
to Chicago social settlement workers and other Progressives, is amply detailed
in Lela B. Costin, Two Sistvrs /or Social Justice, A Biography o/
Grave and Edith Abbott (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 27,
58-67, 119, 184, 194, 227-28 and also in Klottsr, B 'eckln 'idges o/Kvntueky,
189-90, 201-207.