Missionary Man: William Sprague and the First Correspondence Law School

This is a slightly-revised version of a post I published on the wonderful Legal History Blog in 2014 as part of an invited series of reflections I wrote on the teaching of legal history. I reproduce it here for the convenience of readers of Making Lawyers By Mail.

Modern legal education, we are told, is in crisis. Tuition costs and debt loads are rising to unbearable levels. Remunerative law firm jobs are scarce for law school graduates. University administrators and corporate “thought leaders” are extolling the virtues of radical “disruptions” like MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that would leverage the latest internet technology to facilitate large-scale instruction at unprecedentedly low cost. Many observers agree that we cannot continue to educate young lawyers as we have for the last 125 years or so, ever since the national triumph of Harvard’s case method.

Late nineteenth-century legal education faced similar challenges. For a variety of reasons I won’t go into here, apprenticeship was dying as a workable method of professional preparation. Law schools were multiplying and restructuring to take up the slack, but they were financially and physically inaccessible for many. The times seemed to call for a relatively open, flexible and inexpensive method of mass legal instruction that would capitalize on Americans’ legendary personal initiative and (in the great age of the railroads) perhaps even their country’s surging technological prowess.

Enter William C. Sprague, a young and savvy Ohio-born lawyer with a very big idea. Before attending the Cincinnati Law School, Sprague, the son of a Congressman, had graduated from Baptist-run Denison University. At Denison one of his professors was a very young and cherubic William Rainey Harper. Fired by both academic ambition and personal missionary zeal, Harper was already experimenting with teaching Hebrew to non-resident students by mail. The surprisingly successful effort impressed Sprague, who kept in touch with Harper after they both left Denison. Sprague headed to Cincinnati and then west to St. Paul, Minnesota, the headquarters of the then-young West Publishing Company, to practice with an older lawyer before moving back east to Detroit, Michigan. In Detroit Sprague set up his own practice with a small legal publishing enterprise on the side. Harper meanwhile went to Yale, became a leader of the Chautauqua movement, and then ended up being selected by John D. Rockefeller to become the first president of the new University of Chicago in 1891 (included in Harper’s original plans for Chicago was, by the way, a significant “university extension” arm that would teach by correspondence).

Sprague was doing well, but he thought he could do better. He was aware of the limitations of contemporary law office training for lawyers; having already helped a student in another state pass his bar exam, he thought his method could be generalized. In 1889, remembering Harper’s example, he hit upon the notion of organizing a stand-alone correspondence-based law school that would teach law by mail. It would be, as he saw it, the first commercial correspondence school in the world. From his Midwest base in Detroit, high-speed rail links would carry his texts and lessons out, and bring student papers back. He could launch his program as a spin-off of his publishing house; after all, he was already producing legal texts, and the formulation of supplementary materials could not be that hard. If correspondence instruction could work for a subject as obtuse as Hebrew, why not for Contracts?

Sprague was arguably inspired not just by the prospect of monetary gain but also by his own brand of missionary dedication. He was a favorite Detroit Sunday School instructor in an age of great Sunday School instructors, and he seems to have seen law as something of a civilizing and perhaps even unifying social gospel for the masses in the latter years of the somewhat unstable Gilded Age. I think it was no coincidence that when the “Sprague Correspondence School of Law” launched in 1890, its defining symbol, used in virtually all its advertising through its first decade of existence, was a cherub at the shoulder of a man learning the law.

In modern terms Sprague’s experiment was staggering in its audacity. He had chosen to hitch his personal wagon to the most radical pedagogical innovation of his day, one that attempted to bring higher education right to the student’s door, just like the Sear’s catalog (the roots of which notably go back to 1888, two year’s before Sprague’s school opened). He was reaching out to an indeterminate audience of students without the benefit of an overwhelming professional pedigree (Sprague was no Joseph Choate or Elihu Root!) or a recognized university base. But Sprague was energetic, shrewd and careful. While consistently highlighting the failures of apprenticeship, he pointedly chose to position his school not as something “better” than university law school instruction, but as something that could substitute for that if the option was not available. And he worked incredibly hard. He published a special modernized version of Blackstone to serve as a basic text. He formulated “quizzers” to help his students master the material. He hired assistants to mark student tests. He even published the first law student magazine, “The Law Students’ Helper”, to encourage his students and others like them in more traditional academic venues to keep up with their studies.

Perhaps most importantly, Sprague advertised. Not being institutionally-connected or having the name of a great university behind him, he had to. He poured thousands of dollars into his marketing efforts at the outset of his enterprise and for its duration. He started slowly and tentatively with classified ads in small-town newspapers in close-by states like Pennsylvania and Vermont, but he soon reached for larger and sophisticated advertisements in major newspapers and national magazines like McClure’s. Sprague eventually hired the new J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency to run a full-scale professional marketing campaign, presiding over the effort at that point from his expansive corporate headquarters on one of the top floors of the Majestic Building, the tallest skyscraper in Detroit.

The advertising attracted students and the students helped support the advertising, which in turn attracted more students. They came to Sprague’s mail-order law school from the mid-west, the north, the south, the west and the east. They enrolled from the US, from Canada, and from American possessions and embassies abroad. In 1893 the school listed more than 1400 registered students. Many were from lower middle class or even working class backgrounds. Many wanted to become lawyers, but some just wanted to learn enough law to help them advance their careers, or do better in business or labor negotiations (two “celebrities” of the rising labor movement, former Knights of Labor president Terence Powderly and Western Federation of Miners chief Bill Haywood, took Sprague’s law courses at various points). Sprague pointedly enrolled women, and encouraged their enrollment in his magazine; the first woman to be called to the bar in Indiana was a Sprague graduate. He also welcomed African-American students, many of whom came to him after he advertised in Southern newspapers.

Most amazing of all (at least to those of us acculturated to believe that all correspondence schools are fraudulent, law correspondence schools especially) Sprague’s students succeeded. In the first ten years of his school’s existence, virtually all of the students from his full course who sat the bar in their various states passed. It was a remarkable record. Sprague’s success bred commercial imitation. Soon a bevy of copycat correspondence law schools emerged, some serious like Sprague’s with substantial capital behind them, others being much more limited efforts by practitioners down on their luck or perhaps looking for a way to make a fast buck. The best of the second wave of correspondence schools were located in Chicago; the city was the hub of the national rail (and hence mail) network that the schools depended on, and in Chicago the schools also had the advantage of being near the benign influence of Harper’s university, still struggling with its own correspondence program. Ads for the new schools (some of which quoted Harper’s musings on correspondence education, much to his personal chagrin) multiplied along with Sprague’s in the magazines and newspapers of the late 1890s and the early 1900s. A legal education counterculture — a somewhat hidden empire of popular legal education — was rapidly emerging.

While Sprague’s school had, by itself, initially drawn little academic attention or professional criticism (indeed in its early years it drew occasional praise), the proliferation of correspondence law schools and the intensification of competition between them prompted some lawyers and university-based law professors to speak out against them publicly. Several correspondence law schools were beginning to offer actual degrees, a step which Sprague himself had not been willing to take.

A turning point seems to have been reached in 1904, when Sprague ran an unusual ad highlighting the possibility of making “A Fortune in a Fee.” The cherub was finally gone, replaced by the figure of a lawyer at his desk with the opening words “A little while ago a man, through a little knowledge of the law, was able to earn a fee of $500,000 for a few days’ work.” The editorial page of the Central Law Journal erupted in indignation, calling Sprague a “hustler”. Practitioners and academics alike bemoaned “diploma mills” bestowing law degrees on “policemen, farmer boys, engineers, firemen, barbers, bakers, tailors, butlers, conductors, motormen, carpenters, clerks” and other ne’er-do-wells. In 1907 the ABA’s Section on Legal Education formally condemned degree-granting by correspondence law schools.

By this point Sprague was on the defensive. He and his staff tried to counter criticism of correspondence education with a careful article in the mainstream American Law School Review, but the academic nay-sayers would have none of it. Especially after the Panic of 1907 had impacted law school enrollments and finances, they smelled blood. The Harvard-trained deans of some of the major traditional law schools, such as Harry Richards at Wisconsin and James Parker Hall at (of all places) Chicago, led the charge. Hall’s critique was particularly telling, especially as it followed the unexpected death in 1906 of correspondence education’s (and Sprague’s) own patron saint, William Rainey Harper.

In 1909, the ABA’s Section on Legal Education launched a frontal assault on Sprague and correspondence instruction at its annual meeting on Sprague’s own home turf in Detroit. The result of the meeting was a recommendation to limit bar admission standards to some combination of law school and office training, effectively eliminating correspondence legal education as a springboard to the bar. Of course not all states adopted the recommendation, but Sprague had already seen the writing on the wall. Exhausted by overwork and doubtless disillusioned, he turned administration of his school over to deputies and refocused himself on writing children’s novels and publishing a new magazine for youth that proved enormously popular, The American Boy. Eventually in 1915 the Sprague Correspondence School of Law, by then a shadow of its former self, was sold to a competing correspondence law school in Chicago. William Sprague died of influenza seven years later in 1922. He was only 62. When he passed he was hailed for his publishing achievements and for his professional legal work with the Commercial Law League, but some 25 years later an article about him did not even mention his law school.

After Sprague’s withdrawal and passing, correspondence legal education in the United States died a slow death. There were a few more interesting experiments, but with bar admission increasingly off the table for most correspondence law school graduates, they and their law schools had literally no place to go. Most of the surviving schools failed in the 1920s or during the Depression of the 1930s. One survived into the late 1970s. Ironically the school that bought out Sprague (the Blackstone Institute) hung on in reinvented form as a paralegal training center and continues to this day, with the seal on its website still featuring “1890”, the year of Sprague’s original foundation.

So were correspondence law schools a failure? They were, to say the least, remarkable institutions. They were fueled by the most visionary educational theories of their time, and staffed by some remarkably dedicated lawyers and law teachers. They appealed to contemporary notions of the “self-made man” and at least in theory they offered legal education to the masses regardless of gender, race or economic status. At the end of the day, however, they arguably bit off more than they could chew. Their pedagogical reach exceeded their grasp and under the impetus of hyper-competition with each other after 1900 they made political mistakes and ended up putting more emphasis on marketing than instruction. Even so, they might have hung on and even prospered had it not been for intervention from the legal and academic establishment. Pedagogical and technological innovation was no match for power and prestige, and the late nineteenth-century “disruption” that was correspondence legal education suffered (and died) as a result.

But even in failure the correspondence law schools left a legacy that would be taken up by others. As democratizing agents, the correspondence law schools would be succeeded (at least for a while) by the night schools. Their marketing techniques would echo in the efforts of other would-be mass legal educators like Gleason Archer at Suffolk Law School, who started his evening program in 1906, just as the correspondence programs had passed their apogee. Some of their simple pedagogical devices would be picked up again by the bar review companies that proliferated from the 1970s.

Even some of their students lingered, with noticeable effect. In 1963, when correspondence legal education in the United States was only hanging on in dark corners by a thread, a former correspondence school lawyer from an unremarkable background but with a strong sense of public duty took a court appointment for an indigent young man named Ernesto Miranda who had been arrested under suspicion of kidnapping and rape. By then Alvin Moore was 73, but he took the case and navigated it to the US Supreme Court, at which point younger men took over in a proceeding that resulted in recognition that an accused person had to be advised of his right to counsel (a “Miranda warning”) before interrogation testimony could be used against him. Given Moore’s experience as American correspondence lawyers were literally dying off, one wonders what might have happened had their schools been allowed to survive, and had the number of their students and “graduates” actually multiplied. Would lawyers coming from all races and regions and economic strata who perhaps had greater empathy for the vulnerability of their clients have helped propel American law in a more equitable and progressive direction decades before it actually took that turn under the impetus of other circumstances? We will never know, but one does wonder.

And what of William Sprague? What about his legacy? As a dedicated, innovative legal educator he arguably deserves much more recognition than he has received. We all know that history is written by the victors, and the great victors in the battle for dominance of modern American legal education were Christopher Columbus Langdell and the university-based law schools and law professors that took up his case method. We know them well. We know what they did. Their victory has been so complete, however, and their brainwashing of contemporary lawyers (and historians) so thorough that very few people even know that another ambitious and equally plausible vision of American legal education — Sprague’s vision — even existed at the same time. But it did. And that vision was much more bold, much more breathtaking, much more potentially pathbreaking and in many respects much more intrinsically American than anything Langdell ever conceived of. Correspondence legal education had its flaws and its limitations, its profiteers and its fly-by-nighters, but at its outset as a truly going concern it had a remarkably sincere and (at least for a time) successful prophet and champion in William Sprague. The missionary man was a true believer.