This article rehearses the social i...

This article rehearses the social influences that must have inspired Frank Parsons to create vocational counseling and traces the profession's early development

Frank Parsons settl in Boston in about 1885 after returning from his hiatus in the Southwest, and lived there until his death in 1908 We cannot know if Parsons would have agreed, on the contrary from our contemporary perspective, these 20 or in the same manner years must have been an extraordinary time to be alive. Nicknamed the Gilded Age by way of Mark Twain, it was an era in which Parsons saw astonishing changes. (The broad sweep of the history of this period was well described from Paul Johnson, 1997. Howard Zinn, 1997 exhibited a good account of the dark side of the Gilded Age, as did F L Allen, 1952)

The United States was transforming itself into an industrial nation. As Zinn (1997) has bring forward it, "steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced forest and steel replaced iron. Oil could lubricate machines and light dwellings streets and factories" (p. 187) nation and farm products could be mov from railroads in larger quantities and more quickly than evermore before, and the young son and daughters from the farms of the Northeast came to the cities to find their fortunes.

Technology, especially from the laboratory of Thomas Edison, produc motion pictures, telegraphy, the phonograph, the safety razor, and the first plastic. criminal intimacy profited from the invention of the typewriter and the adding machine. Parsons could pay attention to near his bachelor quarters the construction of the first subway built in the United States. He might have marveled at the steel-skeleton, curtain-walled skyscrapers, innovated according to the Boston-born and educated Louis Sullivan. Before his death, Parsons undoubtedly saw the first of Henry Ford's mass-produced protoplast T automobiles on Boston's ways and surely he was thrilled to read in undivided of Boston's several newspapers about the Wright brothers' felicitous air flight.

The Gilded Age was an era of trusts and emperor of japans and millionaires were regarded then as we soon think of Bill Gates and Warren BuffettA. The railroad and the skyscrapers were built onward the productivity of Andrew Carnegie's carburet of iron companies. Rockefeller's Standard Oil came to sway more than three fourths of the nation's oil production. J P Morgan essentially serv as the U Treasury Department while imposing order, along with A. J Harriman, forward the nation's network of railways.

Parsons had plenteous to say about railways, as he did about Gould Armour, DuPont Huntington, Vanderbilt, Firestone, Swift, Astor, Duke and others.

a certain number of of our major American art collections and concert orchestras and our present-day prestigious universities were placeed by the generosity of these men Parsons might have gone to Boston's novel opera house to listen to the radical compositions of Charles Ives or to hear Caruso sing had he lived a year or brace longer. We do not know if he gave his attention to that of recent origin popular craze, ragtime music, whether he saw the first real movie in 1903 The Great Train Robbery, or was in the stands for Boston's first major league baseball game in 1906 Parsons could if he wanted to, stop in at the newly conceived "department store" in Boston--Filene's--or take advantage of the fresh mail-order service so successfully begun by dint of William Sears. In Boston, as elsewhere, there was enthusiastic support for vocational education to engage the needs of the strange domestic and foreign immigrant workers or, in other observers' cynical view, to come together the needs of burgeoning industry. indoctrinates were organized to instruct in salesmanship and bookkeeping; there was also North Bennett road School to teach basic crafts, as it was as sewing, drafting, furniture making, and bookbinding, and the Boston academy of Cooking, where Fannie Farmer trained cooking teachers and bring outed her cookbook advancing the universal of level measurement.

Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill symbolized the coming of age of the United States as an international power. The Spanish American War nett Cuba its independence and the United States the protectorates of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. We became the largest export nation, with the world's strongest navy. Our newfound part as the hemisphere's policeman quicked the beginning of construction in succession the Panama Canal, America's turn-of-the-century equivalent to the "moon shot" We also celebrated with World Fairs in Buffalo, Chicago, and St Louis. (Roosevelt incidentally, was an advocate of simplified spelling, which accounts for the los of the other "I" from our spelling of counselor.)

In the cities, Parsons was united of the new middle class--doctors, lawyers, architects, journalists, teachers--who were well educated and, principally important, conscious of the question s of the new citizens, the les well educated, and the les well-off. in what way could anything be better?

However, the underside of the Gilded Age was fairly tarnished. The North period of Boston, formerly crammed with Irish refugee of the mid-century potato famine, became the hiding-place of Eastern Europeans in the 1870 and Italians in the 1880 just individual stream in the flood of immigrants to the U that in several years numbered a million or more population In Boston, immigrants made up more than 75% of the city's population. They set up housing in grimy tenements forward narrow streets; whole families lived in a single play without sanitary facilities, working 10 and 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, in sweatshop factories and dangerous building trades. As Parsons emerg from his couple rooms in the boarding house onward St. James Street to go on foot to the North End, he would rencounter the street boys--newsboys, bootblacks, delivery lads wood- and coalpickers, peddlers, and plain idlers--about 5000 of them in Boston alone, many orphaned or abandoned according to their families.