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Weekly UpdatesDuring the 1st decade of the 20th century, many activists and pioneers advanced the vocational guidance movement ignited by Frank Parsons's (1909) book Choosing a Vocation. Meyer Bloomfield, the preeminent leader of the movement, worked for 3 decades to establish organizations, train practitioners, and publish materials. Widely acknowledged by historians of the counseling profession for Bloomfield's contributions to vocational guidance, the breadth of his contributions remains an untold story within the field. Bloomfield did more than propel a movement that concentrated on guiding the vocational choices of youth--he helped shape related specialties including occupational placement, employee selection, and worker supervision. Bloomfield believed that the contributions made by vocational guidance would be "nullified" without close connection to these disciplines. Thus, he worked equally on creating the fields of vocational guidance and personnel management. Today, many career counselors are concerned about the problem that Bloomfield feared, namely that the fields of vocational guidance and personnel management would go their separate ways. In considering this issue, however, Bloomfield's contributions to vocational guidance and personnel management should be examined.
Childhood and Adolescence
Bloomfield was born on February 11, 1878, in Bucharest, Romania. When he was 4 years old, his father, Maurice Bloomfield, and his mother, Bertha Pastmanten, moved the family to Manhattan's Lower East Side. Here, Maurice Bloomfield taught English to immigrants, an activity that his son would in due course take up in Boston. Bloomfield's obituary in the New York Times noted,
As an adult, M. Bloomfield (1915c) fondly recalled a young woman at the University Settlement House's small library. Before lending a book, she took great care to learn about each boy's or girl's ambitions and ideals. Bloomfield believed that she often gave them relevant books about fitting vocations that were previously unknown to them. Bloomfield attended public high school, graduating from the Technical Institute of New York City. He earned an A.B. (artium baccalaureatus degree equivalent to a bachelor of arts degree) from the City College of New York in 1899 and a second A.B. in social work from Harvard University in 1901 (Ingham, 1983). While a student at Harvard, Bloomfield became the first guide for the Jacob Hecht Club for boys, a project of the Hebrew Industrial School (Solomon, 1956).
Civic Service House
In 1901, Pauline Agassiz Shaw, a noted philanthropist, provided funding for a new settlement house to be located in the center of the North End. The Civic Service House was to provide educational opportunities for immigrants and young persons seeking work. Having been impressed by Bloomfield's work with the Hecht boys club, she chose him to head the new Civic Service House. Bloomfield, a newly minted social worker, hired his friend Philip Davis, who also just graduated from Harvard with a degree in social work. Davis and his bride lived on the top floor of the house. The house had 7 other male residents along with 12 male volunteers and 6 female volunteers (Woods & Kennedy, 1911). Civic Service House assisted adults rather than children, especially adults who were ambitious and sought self-improvement and success. Starting in 1901, the staff taught the English language, American history, and other work and socialization skills to the immigrants who lived in the tenements and worked in the garment district and at the fruit, vegetable, and fish markets. In 1906, M. Bloomfield edited A Handbook for the Citizens as a primer for use in the citizenship course at the Civic Service House. With the encouragement of Mary Follett (Tonn, 2003), 2 years later M. Bloomfield (1908) published a Civic Reader for New Americans for use in evening schools around the country. College-type courses were eventually added to the evening courses when, in 1905, Frank Parsons and his confidant Ralph Albertson founded the Breadwinner's Institute at the Civic Service House. Modeled after Davidson's Breadwinners College in New York City, the Institute's 2-year diploma offered "a taste of college" to the working poor.
Three teachers at the Civic Service House later became quite prominent: Therese Weil Filene, Max Perkins, and Walter Lippmann. Filene taught music at the Civic Service House. She was married to Lincoln Filene, who with his brother, Edward A. Filene, ran Filene's Department Store. The death of her mother in 1905 plunged her into a deep depression (Berkely, 1998). A talented violinist, she let Bloomfield, her cousin, convince her to organize a music program for the neighborhood children at the Civic Service House. This worked captured the imagination of the shy 30-year-old who, in 1910, founded the country's first settlement house devoted primarily to music, The South End Music School, and who helped found the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Coincidentally, in 1910, Bloomfield's brother Daniel founded the Boston Music School Settlement at the Civic Service House. These two music school settlements merged in 1968 to become the Community Music School of Boston. Perkins lived in and taught English at the Civic Service House immediately following his graduation from Harvard in June 1907 before moving to New York, where he would go on to be recognized as the 20th century's greatest editor of fiction for his work on novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe (Berg, 1978). Lippmann, who was later recognized as the greatest journalist of his time, also taught English at the Civic Service House while he was an undergraduate student at Harvard.
On June 22, 1902, Bloomfield married Sylvia "Sadie" Palmer, an opera singer who grew up in Brooklyn. Together, they had three children: Catherine Pauline, Joyce Therese, and Lincoln Palmer. As a newlywed, Bloomfield studied law at Boston University, including a course taught by Parsons; Parsons taught law because the Economics Department denied him an appointment because he was considered too radical (Jacoby, 2004). During his law school years, Bloomfield helped to found several different unions. For example, in November 1903, the Women's Trade Union League was organized by Mary O'Sullivan at the Civic Service House. The Women's Trade Union League immediately began to organize the women working in Boston's garment industry. In 1905, Bloomfield was admitted to the bar (Lynch, 1970).
In 1906, Bloomfield accepted an invitation from the Economic Club of Boston to have lunch and listen to Parsons speak about "The Ideal City" (Picchioni & Bonk, 1983). Parsons had given this talk many times before, including to the League of American Municipalities in New York City on October 10, 1903. In the speech, Parsons predicted that cities of the future would provide free transportation, including underground trains running at 200 miles per hour between major cities. He foresaw that automobile patents would expire so people would not be using gasoline engines. There would be no saloons, no gambling, and no stock exchanges. "Physicians will be paid to keep people well. ... Lawyers will disappear 'with the other parasitic classes' " ("The Ideal City," 1903, p. 6). Most important to Bloomfield, Parsons repeated his long-standing call for a scientific industrialism that included vocational education and guidance. As early as 1894, Parsons had urged a systematic approach to matching people and positions when he wrote,
So, Parsons's ideal city of the future would assist youth to choose a vocation not just to hunt for a job. Bloomfield liked the idea of helping youth to choose a vocation, so on behalf of the Civic Service House, he asked Parsons to meet with 60 boys who were about to graduate from evening high schools in Boston.
Bloomfield hosted a reception on the roof garden of the Civic Service House where the boys talked with Parsons about their plans. Bloomfield later wrote that many of the boys were uninformed about the requirements of their choices (M. Bloomfield, 1911, p. 29). A third of the boys hoped to become lawyers and another third hoped to become doctors, with a dozen more planning to go to college. Bloomfield believed that these boys were worse off than were boys with no vocational plans because their boys were would lead to wasted effort and disappointment. Parsons's talk was quite well received, so much so that several of the students asked for a personal interview. Noting this demand, Bloomfield pressured Parsons to draft a plan for an organization that would provide vocational assistance to youth. When Parsons finally completed the plan in late 1907, Bloomfield secured funds from Shaw to implement it. As a result, on January 13, 1908, the Vocation Guidance Bureau (VGB) was established as a new department in the Civic Service House, with Parsons as its director. The VGB was part of the social work of the Civic Service House, in cooperation with the YMCA, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, and the Economic Club. The VGB had offices at each of these places, with the executive office being at the Civic Service House.
Having barely begun the work of modern vocational guidance, Parsons died on September 26, 1908, leaving the future of the VGB in doubt. As the board considered the VGB's future, it received from Stratton D. Brooks, superintendent of the Boston Public Schools, a request for assistance in helping students select high school vocational courses. In consultation with the Boston Public Schools and local executives, including Lincoln Filene, the board decided in May 1909 to hire a full-time vocational director to organize counseling for the graduates of the Boston Public Schools (M. Bloomfield, 1912). Charles Zueblin, a member of the Economic Club of Boston, recommended as director David Stone Wheeler, a progressive educator from Lexington, Massachusetts (Picchioni & Bonk, 1983). Zueblin's recommendation carried weight because he had founded Northwestern University's Settlement House in 1891 and then became one of America's first sociologists, working as chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago from 1902 to 1908. Zueblin moved to Boston in 1908 after a conflict concerning his criticism of John D. Rockefeller. On Zueblin's urging, community leaders including Filene recruited Wheeler to succeed Parsons commencing June 19, 1909. Wheeler used his experience as a teacher to strengthen relations between the VGB and the public schools. One means by which he did so was to establish closer ties with the schools in the form of the Committee on Vocational Direction of the Boston Board of Education. However, in November of that same year, Wheeler left the VGB to enter training as a Methodist minister.
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