Inventor, industrialist, philanthropist, and presidential candidate Peter Cooper, ca. 1865
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Inventor, industrialist, philanthropist, and presidential candidate Peter Cooper, ca. 1865
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Beard choices were unhinged back then.
Wouldn’t need a scarf on a cold day.
Prior to the Civil War, Cooper was active in the anti-slavery movement and promoted the application of Christian concepts to solve social injustice. He was a strong supporter of the Union cause during the war.
Influenced by the writings of Lydia Maria Child, Cooper became involved in the Indian reform movement, organizing the privately funded United States Indian Commission. This organization was dedicated to the protection and elevation of Native Americans in the United States and the elimination of warfare in the western territories.
Cooper was encouraged to run in the 1876 presidential election for the Greenback Party without any hope of being elected. The election was won by Rutherford Birchard Hayes of the Republican Party.
In 1813, Cooper married Sarah Bedell (1793–1869). Of their six children, only two survived past the age of four years: a son, Edward and a daughter, Sarah Amelia. Edward served as Mayor of New York City, as would the husband of Sarah Amelia, Abram S. Hewitt, a man also heavily involved in inventions and industrialization.
Peter Cooper’s granddaughters, Sarah Cooper Hewitt, Eleanor Garnier Hewitt and Amy Hewitt Green founded the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, then named the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, in 1895. It was originally part of Cooper Union, but since 1967 has been a unit of the Smithsonian Institution.
Cooper was a Unitarian who regularly attended the services of Henry Whitney Bellows at the Church of All Souls (New York), and his views were Universalistic and non-sectarian. In 1873 he wrote:
I look to see the day when the teachers of Christianity will rise above all the cramping powers and conflicting creeds and systems of human device, when they will beseech mankind by all the mercies of God to be reconciled to the government of love, the only government that can ever bring the kingdom of heaven into the hearts of mankind either here or hereafter.
Cooper had for many years held an interest in adult education: he had served as head of the Public School Society, a private organization which ran New York City’s free schools using city money, when it began evening classes in 1848. Cooper conceived of the idea of having a free institute in New York, similar to the École Polytechnique (Polytechnical School) in Paris, which would offer free practical education to adults in the mechanical arts and science, to help prepare young men and women of the working classes for success in business.
In 1853, he broke ground for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a private college in New York, completing the building in 1859 at the cost of $600,000. Cooper Union offered open-admission night classes available to men and women alike, and attracted 2,000 responses to its initial offering, although 600 later dropped out. The classes were non-sectarian, and women were treated equally with men, although 95% of the students were male. Cooper started a Women’s School of Design, which offered daytime courses in engraving, lithography, painting on china and drawing.
The new institution soon became an important part of the community. The Great Hall was a place where the pressing civic controversies of the day could be debated, and, unusually, radical views were not excluded. In addition, the Union’s library, unlike the nearby Astor, Mercantile and New York Society Libraries, was open until 10:00 at night, so that working people could make use of them after work hours.
Today Cooper Union is recognized as one of the leading American colleges in the fields of architecture, engineering, and art. Carrying on Peter Cooper’s belief that college education should be free, the Cooper Union awarded all its students with a full scholarship until fall 2014. The college is currently implementing a plan to restore full-tuition scholarships for all its undergraduate students by 2029.
In 1851, Cooper was one of the founders of Children’s Village, originally an orphanage called “New York Juvenile Asylum”, one of the oldest non-profit organizations in the United States.
Cooper died on April 4, 1883, at the age of 92.
He’s wearing that airplane travel pillow upside-down.