The First Correspondence Law School Advertisements
In my initial post on Making Lawyers By Mail I mentioned the Sprague Correspondence School of Law, the first for-profit correspondence law school in the United States established by William Sprague in 1890. Sprague was a university-educated lawyer from Ohio who went west to St. Paul Minnesota for a few years before coming back east and setting himself up as a legal publisher in the then-booming city of Detroit, Michigan.
Sprague was not the very first person to teach American law by mail to far-flung students. That distinction actually belongs to a few university-based law professors at Yale and Columbia law schools who briefly experimented with correspondence-based legal education in the 1870s and 1880s. I’m currently writing an article on those professors’ fascinating early efforts, so stay tuned for sectioned pre-prints of that, issued seriatim.
It’s not clear whether or how much Sprague actually knew of what the law professors had attempted, but he was certainly aware of other contemporary American experiments in correspondence instruction. In particular he was familiar with two correspondence initiatives associated with biblical scholar and future University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper, a fellow-Ohioan whom Sprague had encountered when the two overlapped at Denison College, a Baptist academy in Ohio that Sprague attended and where Harper taught. At one point prior to his graduation in 1881, Sprague was actually one of Harper’s students. In the early 1880s Harper pioneered the teaching of Hebrew by correspondence(!) and was so successful that he was called upon by the new Chautauqua Institute in New York to head its own correspondence education initiative. Reinforced by the example of his former teacher, and seeing the field of legal education by mail was clear, Sprague launched the eponymous Sprague Correspondence School of Law in 1890; when formally incorporated in 1891, it had a reported capital base of $10,000, a not-insignificant sum that would be worth almost $300,000 today.
This was hardly a shot in the dark by some kind of greedy commercial gambler. Sprague took himself seriously as a lawyer and he always had an interest in public instruction, reflected most prosaically in his longtime commitment to teaching Sunday School at his local church in Detroit. He was shrewd, however, and he understood there was money to be made in correspondence education if it were undertaken properly. His time spent in law practice in St. Paul, coincidentally the headquarters of the West Publishing Company since 1870, had introduced him to the remunerative potential of legal publishing, and he appreciated that if others could make money printing cases, he could make money printing courses! Of course to do that he had to have a worthwhile instructional product. Even more importantly without a traditional institutional or reputational base, he had to be able to market it.
As a marketer, Sprague was nothing if not methodical. Soon after he established his school he set about running ads for it in newspapers and periodicals across the country. For decades this strategy had been embraced by regular residential law schools seeking students from their local areas and beyond. Soon the tiny classified advertisement reproduced at the top of this post was running in newspapers published in small towns in Pennsylvania and Vermont far removed from law schools; Sprague later pushed the same ad to newspapers in rural North Carolina as he tentatively reached south for students.
The ad invited viewers to “Read Law AT HOME, if you can’t attend Law College.” The “Read Law” terminology drew on the still-current practice of legal apprenticeship, where law students might literally still read the law books of their lawyer-preceptors while helping with office work for whatever period was required before bar admission. So this opening gambit adopted an overtly professional frame of reference.
The Sunday punch of the ad was, of course, the specification that law reading could be done “AT HOME” through Sprague’s school. Obviously this was new, and warranted stress by capitalization. But Sprague didn’t stop there, adding the specification “if you can’t attend Law College”. Sprague himself was a law school graduate, having attended the University of Cincinnati Law School in the early 1880s after leaving Denison College. Pointedly listing himself as “Wm. C. Sprague, L.L.B” made it abundantly clear that he believed in the value of formal legal education more than he believed in the value of apprenticeship, a professional path he himself had not taken. At the same time, Sprague didn’t want to claim that the instruction in law he could offer by correspondence was any kind of equivalent to law school education, and he wanted to make it clear that if a student could go to law school, he (or she, at least theoretically at this juncture) should. He was also concerned that if he didn’t say this he would open himself up to criticism from law schools and law professors that could compromise the credibility of his program and would put correspondence education in general in a negative light as being slight at best, or fraudulent at worst.
The last element in Sprague’s first advertisement was his address: “Whitney Block, Detroit.” It may have looked unremarkable at first, but Sprague had gone to the trouble and expense of locating his operation in one of Detroit’s finest business blocks near heavily traveled Woodward Avenue, a recognized location that carried social and economic weight not only in the city, but outside in greater Michigan and beyond.
Did all this work? Absolutely it did. Sprague’s school soon attracted hundreds of curious and ambitious students from across the US and even, in a few instances, from outside. With the students came income, which even at this early stage was recycled into more and better advertising as well as instructional support. By late 1891, Sprague had retired his original advertisement and had created another one that was different in several important ways. It looked like this:
Although still a “classified ad”, Sprague’s second advertisement stood out of the proverbial crowd thanks to its use of a basic graphic, featuring a well-dressed middle-class youngish-looking man accepting a small, conveniently-portable book of law offered to him by, of all things, an angel! The iconography suggests that Sprague wished to depict law as something of a divine gift, which was perhaps not out of keeping with his own personal missionary zeal as a Baptist-educated Christian, not to mention his enthusiasm for spreading the word of law by correspondence.
Other changes were evident in the ad’s text. Sprague still identified himself as a law school graduate, but he was no longer limiting his constituency to only those who couldn’t go to law school, suggesting either that he was less worried about appearing to compete against regular law schools, or that he had come to understand that his courses might be of interest to more than just aspiring law students. Perhaps he hoped to appeal to enrolled law school students seeking refresher materials, or perhaps he hoped to engage individuals who had no interest in formal law school education at all. Perhaps consistent with the latter possibility, Sprague stepped out of the older legal-professional frame by inviting viewers of this advertisement to “study law” as opposed to “read” it at home, and to follow a specialized course, suggesting some degree of academicization leveraging the contemporary mania for taking courses of all sorts (witness the success of Chautauqua) as a path to personal growth and fulfillment. Sprague’s 1891 ad also showed he was in a position to ask potential students to cover his mailing costs by sending in stamps, no small thing when you consider that 10 cents at the time would be worth almost $3 in today’s money. Had Sprague not done this, he would likely have gone bankrupt quickly as public interest in receiving his materials grew.
Versions of this ad, altered slightly in 1892 to include an explicit reference to Sprague’s school being “Incorporated” (and therefore not fly-by-night), ran for years in an even wider range of newspapers than had the first. Now Sprague was aiming at midwestern and western states like Wisconsin, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Montana in addition to his traditional eastern and southern targets. In some papers his pitch now ran for weeks at a time, reflecting the bigger investment Sprague was able to make in his campaigns.
Meanwhile the students kept coming forward: farmers, shopkeepers, store clerks, school students, and businessmen and more. Some came from middle class backgrounds and above; some were lower-class workers. Many were native born; a few were immigrants (language difficulties likely reduced the number of immigrants able to take a correspondence law course by mail). An overwhelming majority were men, but some were women. Most came from small towns, reflecting the community newspapers Sprague had targeted. As Lawrence Friedman noted somewhat incredulously in that footnote I discussed in my first blog post in Making Lawyers By Mail on correspondence legal education, by 1893 Sprague claimed he had enrolled 1472 students. The Sprague Correspondence School of Law was already a marketing triumph. What was more, its students were starting to pass the bar.
