Intellectual Development

 

Although it is thought Jo had no more than a very rudimentary formal education, he had not only absorbed the basics but wrote letters that could easily pass muster as he entered adulthood. He continued to educate himself throughout his life, and became a proficient writer and editor. In addition, his wife, Sophie, not only encouraged him to write but also served as a mentor in his choice of expression.

As Jo Labadie came of age, the Civil War had ended and the United States was experiencing a hugely expanding economy with transcontinental transportation and the excitement and corruption of the Gilded Age. The disparities between the immense wealth of the new tycoons and the poverty of the workers and immigrants prompted a large variety of suggested remedies, some as benign as the Homestead Act and a few factory protection laws, others as debatable as Greenbackism and the "silver movement." Some of the sweeping revolutionary ideas of socialism and anarchism provoked both hope and horror. Labadie's mind expanded in unconventional and sometimes contradictory ways.

The later nineteenth century was an age of hot intellectual disputation in general. Perhaps the fulmination of preachers against Darwinism helped to make Labadie a lifelong agnostic. Certainly his avid reading of John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer stood behind his developing personal philosophy.