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Updated: June 23, 2025
Visitors who come from boys' preparatory schools where the children of the rich are trained for college are amazed to find these sons of the working people so far ahead of the young aristocrats. The Mooseheart boys as a group have the others beaten in all the qualities that go to make a young man excellent. We have prepared them for life. And so the great dream of my life has been realized.
"Preparation for life" is the one aim of Mooseheart. Therefore at Mooseheart the boy or girl will encounter every problem that he will encounter in his struggle in the wider world. Nothing is done for him that he can do for himself. He is taught no false theories. But every fact of life is placed before him in due time.
Mooseheart is at once a farm, a school and a town. The boys help handle the crops and herds under the guidance of the experts who teach the classes in agriculture. For extra work in the fields the boys receive pay. They save their money to buy the tools of their trade. The bandsmen when they graduate go out with fine instruments bought with their own earnings during their school years.
This truth was taught at Mooseheart long before the Russians saw the point and awarded us their picture gallery. What I want to emphasize is that we are not opposed to art and literature. All men want them; need them. We teach how to get them. The majority of the Moose are men in the mechanical trades. But the primary trade, the one on which all others rest, is agriculture.
He faces every fact that he will face in life, and by the time he is eighteen his judgment is as ripe as that of the much older average man. The Mooseheart boys are not selected students. They come from the humblest families, from homes that have been wiped out early.
We are preparing them for a free life, and the only place they use the goose-step is in the penitentiary. Mooseheart is a town instead of an institution. All "institutionalism" is cast away. In each cottage is a group of boys or a group of girls living under family conditions. They are not all of the same age; some are big and some are little, and the big ones look after the little ones.
The first lesson in Mooseheart is to till the soil. But in addition to being a farm, Mooseheart is a town. The young folk live in cottages and do their own cooking and house-keeping. There are no great dormitories where hundreds sleep, and no vast dining-room where they march in to the goose-step.
I have heard how "the rights of small peoples" have been destroyed by capitalism; and if the right to sleep five in a bed was prized by the little folks, this privilege has certainly been taken away from them. At the Mooseheart School we are pinched for sleeping room for our fast-growing attendance.
Having passed the hundred thousand mark it swept on to the half million goal. The "Mooseheart idea," as we called it, had caught the imagination of the men.
To-day the city of Mooseheart in the Fox River Valley, thirty-seven miles west of Chicago, is the home of more than a thousand fatherless children and one hundred and fifteen mothers who are there with their children, and several old men whose working days are over. The dream of the Moose has come true.
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