Frye enrolled in a teacher training course led by Colonel Francis W. Parker, a leading pioneer of the progressive school movement in the United States, who would exert a crucial influence on his career. After earning his teaching diploma at Bridgewater Normal School in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and teaching in Quincy for three years, in 1882 Frye was appointed assistant to Parker in supervising the Boston Public Schools. He then accompanied Parker to Chicago, Illinois, and taught geography at the Cook County Normal School where Parker was principal, until 1886. The following year Frye enrolled at Harvard Law School, earning his Bachelor of Laws in 1890. He was sworn to the Massachusetts Bar by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, a future U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Frye’s keen interest in pedagogy led, however, to a career in education, not law. Between 1891 and 1893, he served as a progressive-thinking superintendent of the San Bernardino, California, public schools.

He also wrote extraordinarily popular geography textbooks, which were published in 127 editions by Ginn & Company and sold more than two million copies globally. Reviewers acclaimed their elaborate illustrations and praised Frye’s innovative emphasis on the relatively permanent features of physical geography, like oceans, rivers, and mountains, over the more transient political boundaries of peoples, nations, and empires. Frye’s maps highlighted the rival, shifting colonial powers of that time and they also revealed the era’s dominant academic and popular notions of scientific racism Although a progressive anticolonialist on Cuba, Frye’s geography textbooks exalted “civilized” whites while denigrating black and brown “savages.”

In 1897 Frye earned a Master of Arts degree at Harvard and forged a lasting friendship in Cambridge with the university’s legendary president, Charles W. Eliot. Both shared a vision of renewing American public education. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Leonard Wood, and other Harvard graduates Frye volunteered to serve in the military at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1899, initially to drill Harvard student volunteers in Boston. In October 1899, during the U.S. military occupation of Cuba, however, Charles Eliot recommended that Secretary of War, Elihu Root, appoint Frye superintendent of the island's public schools.
During his tenure in Cuba, more than 3,000 schools, with an enrollment of 130,000 students, were opened.

In February 1900, encouraged by Ernest Lee Conant (a Harvard Law graduate residing in Havana at the time), Frye conceived the remarkably ambitious project of sending Cuban public school teachers to Harvard for a summer school. The plan had the approval of the Military Governor, Leonard Wood, as well as President Eliot and War Secretary Elihu Root. The Harvard summer school for Cuban teachers in 1900 was a stunning success and one of the most productive cultural exchanges in the history of relations between Cuba and the United States: incredibly, more than half of the island’s the public school teachers participated in the 6-week program. Highly attentive to the needs of Cuban educators, Frye earned their respect for giving over his salary to Cuban orphanages. His support for Cuban educational autonomy, however, also led to friction with the US military authorities. On January 9 1901, Frye resigned as superintendent of Cuban schools. 263

Eight days earlier, Frye had married María Teresa Arruebarrena (1878-1973), a teacher from the city of Cárdenas, Cuba, who participated in the Harvard Summer School. He was the only American official in the occupation government who married a Cuban. The couple moved from Boston to Highland, California, in 1905, then to a home in nearby Redlands, in 1911, Villa Cuba.

They raised five children: Pearl Eliot and Charles who died in infancy, Frank, Carmen, and Pearl. Alexis devoted himself to writing textbooks and growing oranges.

He was awarded an honorary law degree from the University of Redlands, a lifetime membership in the American Geographical Society, and the Cuban-American Legion of Honor medal. In 1907, he was elected Honorary President of the Association of Cuban Teachers (the only non-Cuban to achieve that honor). He died in Loma Linda, California, aged 76, but his contributions to American and Cuban education would be recognized and celebrated in Havana on the 50th anniversary of the Harvard Summer School in 1950, and in Cambridge on its centenary in 2000.




Further Reading.

Manuscript records relevant to Frye’s term as Superintendent of Education can be found in the Records of the Military Government of Cuba in the U.S. National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Records of the 1900 Cuban Summer School are held at Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts. An extensive collection of Frye’s papers are in the possession of Edward D. Fitchen, his grandson and biographer.

Boston Globe, July 1, 1900.

Fitchen, Edward D. “Alexis E. Frye and Cuban Education, 1898-1902,” Revista Interamericana.2 (2). 1972

Obituary: New York Times, July 2, 1936. 267