David English Camak: educational statesman

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DAVID ENGLISH CAMAK
EDUCATIONAL STATESMAN
He speaks with the fire and dramatic power that we are wont to associate with the large number of gifted men who have made the annals of South Carolina illustrious in the nation's history; and he has a story to tell that needs no eloquence to garnish it.

E. F. DEMPSEY, D. D.,
Emory University
Georgia



Textile Industrial Institute
One of the significant new departures in education in this country.

—HON. P. P. CLAXTON, United States Commissioner of Education.


Mountain girl spooling her way through high school.  Books—Algebra and Geometry—were not noticed till after picture was made.



This is the story of a horde that swept down from the hills of the South, and of a man who caught a vision of their great need.
—The World's Work.

To find, train, Christianize and place men and women who are to do the thinking for the South's half million cotton mill operatives tomorrow, is the life program of D. E. Camak, who founded and now successfully conducts an educational institution for this purpose.

With a passion to bring to the disadvantaged young Anglo-Saxons of the mills the educational opportunities for which he himself had grimly fought; with an eye of sympathy that pierced the pall of illiteracy and superstition that all but stifled the youth of the Southern mills; with keen understanding of their problems, and their dire need of a community leadership by which to solve them; with a statesman-like conception of the mighty industrial transition through which the South was passing; pulled on by the undertow of a human stream that flowed day and night from the farms to the mills; undaunted by pessimists; unmoved by ugly appellations, such as Fanatic, etc.; disdainful of the modern word career; with a will of iron, the heart of a child, a saving sense of humor, and faith in God and his fellow man, he set himself to the task of loosing the potentialities of half a million Anglo-Saxons.

Beginning with $100 borrowed capital, a mill tenement for a home, and one thirty-three-year-old man as a student-body, his present achievements seem like romance, and his influence is felt throughout the South.  Five Southern cotton manufacturing States are represented in his student-body, and his school, while only five years old, is known around the world.

No small part of his success is due directly to his peculiar force as a public speaker.  With a dramatic power—not studied, but natural—a flash of Irish wit, a deep, mellow sympathy of soul, he unfolds the story of his work and the life stories of his students, leading his audience as it were from peak to peak, and through it all there thrills the soul of a man and the pulse of a noble people.


Coast country boy carding out his education after reaching adult life practically illiterate.


THEY PAY THEIR WAY THROUGH SCHOOL BY WORKING IN THE MILL




David English Camak—Founder
HE BROUGHT THE COTTON MILL AND THE BOARDING SCHOOL TOGETHER


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STUDENT-OPERATIVES WORK AND STUDY WEEK ABOUT
THE STORIES of their actual struggles make the history of the South's greatest transition period since reconstruction.  In traveling from Richmond, Va., to Birmingham, Ala., along the Southern Railway, one is seldom out of sight of a cotton mill smokestack or the sound of a whistle that calls its quota of half a million Anglo-Saxons to their daily toil between the looms.  The hills have flowed down like an avalanche, and the social, industrial, and economic impact of this human landslide reaches down to the very foundations of the national life.  The history of this movement is told in a fresh, wholesome, human way, and story after story out of the speaker's own experience with the people thrills the audience to the last breathless moment.


FOLKS LIKE THESE MOVE IN HIS LECTURES AS LIVING HEROES

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Neither of these young men has ever been to public school.  The one on the reader's left entered the Textile Industrial Institute at the age of twenty-two and began the study of the three R's in the first grade.  The first year he made three and a half grades, while working hard in the mill every other week.  He is an orphan, who jist growed up.  The other young man could scarcely read and write at the age of nineteen, when he entered the institute.  In four and a half years from that time he entered college, having throughout his preparatory course made four times the progress of the average public school pupil.  He writes as follows: I began work in a cotton mill at the age of eight, and have done little else.  In those early days of toil I used to see numbers of boys and girls passing to and from school, and my heart burned with a desire to go.  Then, just as it seemed I was about to have to enter life without even an elementary education, I heard of the Textile Industrial Institute, and my heart leaped with joy that at last I was to have the chance of buying with my own labor those privileges which should have been my childhood heritage.

The young lady, who entered the institute at twenty-four years of age, writes as follows: Of course, I prayed and believed that God would in some way direct my life, but little dreamed that He would lead me in the paths that He has.  I went to church one morning with an unusually heavy heart.  After the sermon, a young man whom I had known in the mill arose and asked permission to speak.  He told about a school that had been established in Spartanburg, S. C., for the benefit of young men and women who were ambitious enough to work for an education.  He was then a student there, and as he went on to explain the plan on which it was run tears of joy sprang to my eyes.  I knew at once that that was the chance for me. Before he had finished speaking my mind was made up, and in less than two weeks I was a student at the Textile Industrial Institute.






David English Camak—Educational Statesman

What the Magazines Say:

The World's Work:
D. E. Camak was studying for the ministry, and before he graduated … he had dedicated his life to the service of the mill people (of the South).  Immediately after his graduation, he asked to be sent to a pastorate in a cotton mill community.  Here he studied his people at first hand, and discovered the need and thirst of the young people for education.  During the following eight years he held several pastorates in the Methodist Church, but the idea of mission work never left him, and in 1910 he again asked for a pastorate in a mill village.  He was sent to a little church near the Spartan Mills (Spartanburg, S. C.) and there he ministered to the people for a year while opening the way for a broader service.—From an eight-page illustrated article.


The Outlook:
With the realization of the desperate need for adult education in the cotton mills of the South came the question of providing some system by which education might be made attractive and attainable….  With a happy spontaneity there came the project of the Textile Industrial Institute, the idea of a Methodist minister who was conversant with mill conditions. …


Canadian Textile Journal: (Montreal.)
This is a great work—a work that lasts as long as man lasts….  Mr. Camak's system works….  The basis of the work he has built up is sound, and the idea of an institute is thoroughly practical for any district.  It should receive earnest consideration from Canadian mill managers.—Editorial.


Cotton: (Atlanta, Ga.)
In the years to come such schools and their product—improved men and women—will continue as producing monuments to perpetuate the name of the founder, Rev. D. E. Camak, in whose broad vision and humanitarian instincts this conception became a reality.


Christian Advocate: (Nashville, Tenn.)
We may just as well admit it at once: President Camak is an unusual man.  He has not only conceived and wrought out an idea fraught with large meaning for mill operatives in the South; but he knows how to put his theories and practice into Review articles, leaflets, songs, and epigrams, and, with a simple story of trial and triumph and the oratory of a sincere pleader for a great cause, he melts his audiences and wins his way.



What Prominent People Say:
Mr. Camak has done an unusual piece of work in offering the opportunities of an education to more or less mature people who have been by force of circumstances disinherited of their chance.  He has a great idea and is working it out in an unusually satisfactory way.  Moreover, he is a man of exceptional platform ability and his addresses have to a high degree qualities of interest, information and inspiration.—President H. N. Snyder, Wofford College, Spartanburg, S. C.

President D. E. Camak came to New York and spoke in my church at my request.  He is a most interesting speaker, a capital story-teller, and has a personality that is unique and attractive.  He also has a message and knows how to tell it.—Dr. Worth M. Tippy, Pastor Madison Avenue M. E. Church, New York City. (Now Secretary of the Commission on Social Service of the Federal Churches of Christ in America.)

When I heard Mr. Camak speak I was stirred by his message and charmed by his manner.  I immediately made arrangements for him to speak before the students of this college.  They were greatly pleased with his inspiring message.  I endorse him highly.—President M. M. Parks, Georgia Normal and Industrial College, Milledgeville, Ga.

Mr. Camak is a fine speaker, if the effect on his audience is the test.  His simple story of how he came to do the work he is now performing—a glorious work, by the way, which will stir any man with a heart—is far more eloquent than any sermon I ever listened to.—Senator B. R. Tillman.

I was greatly impressed with Mr. Camak's enthusiasm in his work, and I am sure that all who heard his splendid address felt that he was engaged in a great cause he was well equipped to bring to a successful consummation.—Hon. Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy.

If I were asked to name six of the most fascinating speakers I ever heard, Mr. Camak would be one of the number, and not the last named by any means.  His sense of humor is very keen, his delivery attractive, and his diction superb.—John G. Clinkscales, LL. D., Spartanburg, S. C.

Mr. Camak is a born orator.  His subject is a live and a new one and his argument unanswerable.—Hon. Sam J. Nicholls, M. C.




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